Thu, 19 May 2005

Revisitaion Two: All That Is Is Less
original version by c. flink

I was hanging out at the coffee shop downtown, decked out in my “I’m an independent filmmaker — show me your tits” T-shirt, sitting at the piano, trying to remember how to do Schwartz’s second etude when this guy came along and hit a key at the low end, one note, like a misplaced thought. I stopped paying and stared out after him as he walked away, followed by a second guy (more a boy, really) scribbling something down in his notebook, and it suddenly struck me like a rope passed through my body and pulled taut that I had to get the fuck out of Lawrence.

Oh mothers, where have your dumb boys gone?

I awoke this morning from a dream of fleeing. Alone, this is nothing new to me, but the man who pursued me in this dream was armed to his fingertips in cutting tools twisted and bent like they’d spent years at the bottom of a blast furnace. These blades leapt from his fingers, cutting through the shrubbery and fallen branches, tearing through treetrunks and swinging back to his hand, invisible guidewires tied around his wrists. The animals of the forest dropped stones to stop him, slow his progress, landing in my hands so as to carry me down through the river-water, sunk down to the floor where the two rivers become one. The river takes me to be one of the drowned dead and I am allowed to walk to the opposite bank through the shimmering green light lamentations, the splintered remains of bed-caskets all twined in algae and baby dolls. Here there was the skull of Susan Christmas, who I knew from playground tragedies, who lent me a lock of her hair on Saint Valentine’s Day, so young as to not know what it meant. Over yonder the still-whole body of Ehm Whaelk, who taught me the way of the second skin, his arms now mirroring the current. I knew a song for to sing to bring them surface-side, but the water filled my mouth and the air all rushed out and the hunter’s knives had found me too soon.

I awoke knowing just what it meant to dream of walking underwater, and drew the day’s first breath.

The body of Ben I saw there as well, but he hadn’t stopped twitching, and I knew he was hiding, as was I, looking for components to build a method of escape. In the real world Ben kept calling the cops on himself, his contraptions to mutilate and kill oiled and primed, a secret door out of this world. The first time he had built what looked like a large metal pig from the body of a holding tank, a vulvic slit along its belly lined with sharpened gear leading to a crank like a tail out of its far end. The problem with this creation was the inability to work it without at least two people — one to work the crank and one to crawl up inside the tank. Ben had duct-taped himself into its maw, leaving himself a mouth-hole to ask the police to please assist him in his last exit. They confiscated the metal pig and gave him a stern lecture as to bothering the poor people at the junkyard.

One time, not long after, he waited for the storm which brought the flood-rains down on us for so long, then stripped himself to his skin and attached a long metal rod to his penis, apparently inspired by a copy of Crad Kilodney’s underground classic “Lightening Struck My Dick”. He then jumped from rooftop to rooftop around town, like some deranged roof-goblin, searching for the ideal spot to lay down anchor and lift his antenna aloft. Alas, he went through a skylight and landed ass-over-ankles in the middle of a Rerisers Anonymous meeting, skewering the bunt-cake, destroying about six bucks worth of rehab art and prompting several relapses and one conversion to Satanism.

Yet another attempt involved his reading that the fungus which grows in bowling shoes could be fatal if inhaled over extended periods of time. Ben spent the next week at Der Bowlingplatz, stealing dozens of heavily-worn bowling shoes (at a loss of his two dollar shoe deposit each time) in order to build the Black Chamber, which he lined with the innards of the shoes, keeping it perfectly airtight until he finally entered on the fifteenth day, prepared to leave this earth. Alas, Georg Beschmutzer had come to the house to retrieve his missing shoes, deposit or no, as there were currently only three remaining pairs of size tens left in stock. He kicked open the Black Chamber, drug Ben out, and ripped the shoe-remains out in order to try a restitching job. It was at that point Ben decided to try more grandiose methods.

“Every day of his life, Ben has played one note on the piano in the coffee shop downtown. He walks by, and he strikes a single key without pause or break of stride.”

“And you’re writing down the notation, huh.”

“Yeah. I can see the notes he’s played, a glow above the keyboard.”

“Maybe it’s not a song. Maybe it’s a code.”

“Y’think? Like for what?”

“Well, show me whatcha got, up to this point.”

“Okay, fuck, it’s….okay, here.”

“See here? if we loop twenty-six letters three times we get three number-sets, for a total of seventy-eight, with ten keys left over. If we letter the keys we get…here…”

“stoptryingtostealmyshitbenny”

“Well. That’s just curious.”

“Or maybe just an unhappy accident.”

“Maybe.”

My friend gave me the laptop he bought when he went to college. I tried to thank him once for giving me the computer.

“I don’t want it, I don’t want to own it, I don’t want to think about it ever again.”

“Then why did you keep it?”

“In case I needed it again. Which I won’t. But I might.”

I took a look on the hard drive and found dozens of encrypted files without any sort of key. I thought about trying to hunt something up, but I’m beginning to suspect I’d rather not know.

Oh mother, what have your dumb boys done?

I lived, then, in a small apartment block behind a refinery whose owner had decided the profits coming in wouldn’t be sufficient to make continuing business worthwhile. Indeed, the only means of extracting profit from the refinery would be to torch it. The employees, knowing full well what shallow prospects for work Lawrence held for them, actively prevented the owner’s brothers and cousins, who had been promised a cut of the insurance settlement, from burning down the refinery. At night, the employees would take shifts watching the streets for suspicious vans, whose passengers would be pulled out into the street, beaten, and tossed off the North Second Street bridge. For months this went on, and I didn’t get one solid night’s sleep the whole time. I ask you to keep this in mind as I relate who I was, then.

“But if you break the eighty-eight keys down going the other way, you get findnohiddenmessage. How’s about them apples?”

The use of knives and blades, a weak attempt at a joke (it’s ‘violence with a point’, geddit) blurred into horrid puke scenes weaved into halfassed prattling as to “really deep thoughts”. Then again, we’ve always taken a backhanded pride in our violence, our depravity. It’s hard-core, being from here, we tell ourselves, suddenly made important by the increasing transitoriness of life in the here and now. All your years nothing but a smear of black fluid at the bottom of a porcelain bowl. He used to pretend at an awkwardness in order to meet women. It was ideal. A cry for a kind of lifting-up into the light that comes from her body as she sleeps, rumpled and fuzzy, curled beside you. To look down at your body and know the places it has been, the points of contact, to know it is a part of the continuum of physical forms which meet and mate and fall away. A vision of crossed thresholds and calls from somewhere far away from someone who wants more than anything to pull you as close as the skin allows.

Oh mother, what will your dumb boys become?

Nothing: they are this, and nothing more.
(12:11.05.19.2005) [/alpha/revisitations] #