Thu, 19 May 2005

Revisitaion Six: The Highway Of Mirrors
(original list of ten statements by k. johansen)

One: A woman opens a frozen dinner and finds inside the perfectly preserved hand of a six month old baby.

Frederik Ruysch (1638-1731) was considered by many to be the greatest anatomist of his time. Developing a personal method for the preparation and preservation of anatomical specimens, he was often used as a mortician for Dutch heads of state. The multitalented and just plain weird Peter the Great, who had been a fetishistic collector of strange items since childhood, was assembling the first museum in Russia, the Kunstkammer at St. Petersburg, wherein the European cabinets of wonders (Wunderkammern) collections of strange artifacts of nature were displayed side-by-side with current and classic artworks. These museums, with their bizarre anatomical displays, became the model for the “secret museums” of the next century, the precursors of current pornography collections. Peter invited Ruysch to assemble a collection for the museum’s Round Hall, consisting of his now-famous glass jar prepared infants, decorated in lace and beads, preserved according to his private specifications. Also on display were Ruysch’s tableaux made from the skeletons of deformed infants upon a bed of coral, shells and preserved organs, often posed as moral fables, playing bone-sculpted instruments. None of these still exist, having been destroyed in the siege on St. Petersburg, though drawings of the collections by Adrian Backer and Jan van Neck do still remain. After his death at the incredibly advanced age of 94, Ruysch’s daughter took over his profession, having learned his methods and aesthetics, completing a series of preparations for the King of Poland. Later her work would be passed from museum to museum, wunderkammern to wunderkammern, a piece eventually ending up in the Microsoft of oddity-displays, PT Barnum’s circus. History loses track of the Ruysch lineage at this point, but research I’ve been doing in the third floor at Kara-Bakos leads me to believe the tradition of anatomists in this bloodline continued, doing less publicized work, spending time collecting specimens in the Siberian city of Inkutsk, considered by many historians the most crime and violence-prone city of the past five hundred years. With the advent of recording media, the Ruysch bloodline was able to make temporary displays preserved via modified ferrotype images with a positive image cast on tar-blackened iron sheets. While others in this century would utilize the Ruysch material as inspiration such as Joel-Peter Witkin, Anderes Serrano, and Max Aguilera-Hellweg (as well as false imitators who make infant models from plastics, whose names do not deserve to be mentioned), I believe there has been a secret monitoring of what are now called “dead areas”, places which are no longer inhabitable, with documentation of those who live on the outskirts of such areas collected and shown to private collectors, the ghost-memory of Bhopal, the socketless skulls of those who still live near the “elephant’s foot” of radioactive material at Chernobyl. The outcry of safety and decency which caught up with Damien Hirst’s leaking bisected cow display obviously cancel out legality of work such as this, and so the team of assembler-anatomists must pass materials surrepeticiously, hidden inside packaging. Josef, whose skeletons of unreal animals seems a wan shadow of this work, had been hunting for proof of this thesis for years, up to the day of his death. Alas, he was not the one who recieved the mislabeled hand-part, sent to Susan Hinds, now convinced the fetus she aborted years ago is coming back to her, one piece at a time.

Two: Anna May Coulter, age 19, believes that God has been speaking to her on her cellular telephone. He is telling her that he has great plans for her, and she must listen carefully.

“Resurgat: it will rise again. Nested wheels above the horizon, yurei no zu, an apparition, stray fate, einfall. VISION FINAL death’s head moth [acherontia atropus] elohim [diamond] 24:00:00 corpus incorruptible complete union — love is an engine of unfulfilled desires by which all things continue in motion as opposed to stasis of completion. The state of everlasting frission, conduits, cells, balances.

  1. It is difficult for us to gauge the health and mental state of the Final Goddess, as her steps precede ours, wind-quickened, beyond us;
  2. and we did set out across the city, the electric cable ley-lines, the terror of the little animals in the trees whose frozen postures mark her wake;
  3. and there was the left glimmering of her beauty in the shimmer of shopwindows, and the forgottenfulnessing of the Unknowing, the crack in their thoughts where the missing time gaps;
  4. and we utilized the God Tracking System scanning out into the aether, a tracing of her area, from whence the Spirit manifests its Will through the Final Goddess.

“Cell-digita geistesblitzen. To visit your earth as ten carrier-angels in ten forms of carrier-moths, disguised in plain sight. Sic I tur ad astra: vision first luna moth [actais maenas] zilm [talc] 22:14:03 [a gift of dust-pollen on the front window, pupil follow flightpath wherein transfer-shape imprinting closes inside hinterbrain] within the amass of clouds. Spiralcirclestairway, a tunnel in time. A warning, a kunstwollen, a shrieking of sightless cave-birds.”

  1. Step forward, against the automotive tide, against the mass of the mob and the pox of their Voices, and with a cleansing of one’s sight the traces of her messages will linger, a traceable trail;
  2. and so it will pass that the strata of blood on which this daemonic false earth is fed will open out, and the Light will reach into you;
  3. as you are not a Holy or proper thing for simply possessing skin and breath;
  4. you are a bowl, a scrim, a dish for sifting transmissions;
  5. you are a vessel for the signal.

“Mansur al-Hallaj, “Kitab al-Tawasin”: moth to lamp to retell to others (visions, star-bound incidents/true faith within flame. Caught between sky and earth, vision second new Mexico owl-eyed moth [antheraea polyphemus olivacea] arelim [zinc] 22:21:02 purification of base materials: the pearl, the ambergris, the heart.”

  1. And so it is now that we obtained confirmed Vision of the Final Goddess, at the place where the Fourty-Fifth and the Vojtech streets meet,and did approach with much caution;
  2. as she continued to listen to the Voice, and was informed;
  3. and she saw us, and reached out with her free hand, as to touch,
  4. and through a hole in the firmament there came a storm of roses, and snow, and the circular wing-strategies of a million million moths.

Three: An old man has been waiting patiently to die for three years now, eating nothing, drinking nothing. He does not know that he has died every morning, to be resurrected after dinnertime through the prayers of a Navajo woman he does not know.

There is, in this world, a series of invisible knotted connections between all things, and should one follow any strand long enough, they will come across everything which has ever lived, has ever been formed, has ever held together against decay and time. The character of any single thing is echoed in others, distant in space and intention, connected only by the most hidden of shared traits. The failing of the alchemists comes from a generalization of Platonic forms, of recurring attributes sharing certain celestial energies, and it is only as time staggers forward that we see the reverberations not in standard forms such as the foot, or the datura plant, or the black and yellow humors, but in specific elements which cannot be generalized. This sort of web is so expansive that the encyclopedic notion of the Renaissance is thwarted by a Pataphysical schema of the unrepeatable experiment, of the singularity present in all things, blurring into other forms before our small water-damaged brains have time to hold down the image, the memory. Thus it is only through an appeal to a crystalline intelligence beyond our abilities to do the sort of processing necessary to discover these connections, the scaffold of support around each of us we only sense through what masks as chance. The flat expanses of desert in the American Southwest, a means of accessing information through physical location, the consciousness altered by the shape and sound of the earth, provides a sort of echo-chamber, a method of shifting outwards in order to view processes, spot connections in a paranoiac-critical manner, and attempt to use certain technologies in order to affect secondary objects and therefore affect sympathetically, along these arteries of light-thought, the primary object. In this case, there have been, since the beginning of our presence here, a series of beings who (knowing or not) are designated as barometers of the continuation of life on this planet. There has been rumor of this collective before: the council of the birds and Farid al-Din Attar’s Simurgh mentioned in Lives of the Poets, Balzac’s “Thirteen” mentioned (and then, strangely, dropped) in Histoire des treize, through the increasingly paranoid theories of the masters of the world. This, of course, is all foolishness. There is no direct control, there is only the unknown echo, and the hung corpses of all those who attempted to seize direct control should be cleaned and displayed so the practitioner does not forget. In this desert, amid the white sand and the geologic attention-traps, Parsons’ gates, Oppenheimer’s spiralpsychosis, the skeletons of lost bankrobbers and scrubbed traces of disappeared civilizations and skylights, a woman keeps bringing a small wizened man back from the dead, making him one of the re-rises, the eroded memory, the trap of the spirit between worlds. Each of us is presented, at some point in our lives, with a decision, a choice of actions, and it is this solitary moment which decides our fate, the fate of those we share the connection with, a circuit of sorts. This man’s defining moment has not yet come, three years too late, and with his connection to the earth as a whole comes a necessity for proper action on his part. Years the desert woman has spent attempting to guide him toward the right choice, speeding up the process, but time has moved too slow and his body had been moved to a place where the passage station of heaven has not been able to find him, the infernal doktors who drain the skulls of nursing-home patients hiding their depraved laboratories beneath displacement rooms and secondary curse-prayer generators. It took the Navajo woman so long to find him again, held at the end of his life, bringing him back and trying to whisper consolation into his ears, that the cost will be worth the gift, that soon the bardos will welcome him, and his work will be completed. He hears these words like fractured transmissions, and believes them, but sometimes he forgets, as the brain comes undone, and he is afraid.

Four: She puts her hand into the bathtub, and fourteen thousand tiny black eels burrow into her skin. She smiles, my babies, I love you all.

So get this. Those goth kids who had taken to imitating gargoyles up on the corners of the building, the ones everybody thought were an omen of mass-goth suicide cultism but were actually content to stare at passerby and make goof-scary faces for hours on end, anyway one of the littler ones fell off and landed on my fire escape, breaking his fool leg, so I’m trying to carry him out only he’s wearing this weird fake-leather thing all slick from the rain so I keep dropping him on his arm, which leads to terrible screaming attracting my landlady who starts pounding on the door while I’m trying to drag this stupid kid inside leaving a trail of white base back to the window, and by the time the ambulance showed up it was all I could do not to get arrested, though the crazy landlady is still all like how I fucked up and she should kick me out and how I owe her, now. So she tells me she needs a ride out to the docks by the old prison, and, y’know, whatever, fine. So she’s in the car, and she’s rubbing this salve into her arms, her hands, she says it’s moisturizer, it opens up her pores, and I try to listen to the Homeless Gladiator matches, only there’s some kinda low-end nature broadcast about moths that keeps cutting in, so I fiddle with the knob until she starts screaming “Stop! This is it! My babies want the water!” and runs out of the car, up to the edge of the dock, and starts moaning and carrying on. So I go up to see if she’s throwing up, or whatever, and there’s, okay, there’s eels coming out of her skin, falling down into the river. “Run free, my babies! I will be back for you tomorrow to take you home! I love you forever!” she screams, and I just got back in the car and drove away fast as I could.

I get a call from her again, the next night, and I tell her I don’t want any part of it, but she threatens me with being out on my ass, and being between careers I realize I’m not far off from fighting genetically fortified floam-eating sewer rats and disfigured children with canine teeth, so I go up and visit her in her tiny rooftop room. She asked me to watch the bath drain, making sure things are okay while she goes out to check the stupid goth kid out of the hospital. So I hang around and drink her coffee and talk to a couple of the remaining gargoyle kids, who mostly want to know if I can score them some ibogaine, when the roof-room begins shaking and I run back to see thousands and thousands of eels begin to flood up through the bath drain, up through the toilet, up through the sink. I start bringing in water and pouring it on them so they don’t suffocate, but there’s so many that I yell for the gargoyle kids to help, only they’ve been posing for so long they fall down screaming about pins and needles, while I’m getting out bowls and glasses to put eels in, until they stop, settle, and I dump them all in the bathtub, closing the drain and filling it up near the top, just as she comes storming in, screaming, putting her arms in the water, and the eels crawl back inside her skin, nesting in her organs, and the gargoyle kid she brought back from the hospital and the others from the roof and I just stand there, amazed, while she coos to her babies that it’ll be okay, the bad man is gone, they’re safe now.

I still live in that building, and I still talk to the gargoyle kids who hang out on my porch and buy my drugs, and I’m even starting to get less weirded out with helping my landlady and her eel-babies, now that she’s agreed to pay for my help in bottled water.

Five: While he is moving, he knocks over the urn bearing the ashes of his uncle Ray. When he bends over to clean it up he discovers it is actually full of cocaine and a note with a scribbled telephone number.

(Aspen Colorado, August, 1975)

“You need to get over here, I think I just made us rich, my man.”

“Rich like how rich? Like big score rich or like we can party this weekend rich?”

“Rich like we’ll never have to pay for coke again.”

“I’m hearing you, man. Keep going.”

“So my bitch of a girlfriend threw up all over the back seat of Juliette again, and I’m telling her I’m done taking her home, she can walk for all I care, and I spend half the day scrubbing at the leather, trying to get that fruity-drink bile smell out, but nothing doing, is what I’m saying.”

“Sure man. Puke in the car. I’m with you.”

“So I’m like the motherfuckin’ master chemist though, mixing shit in the garage, some Borax and some turpentine and stuff because all this might really fuck up the leather I thought about later but at the time I’m just super mad, so it’s like anything, right.”

“Sure.”

“And so I spill some of this shit onto my sleeve and when it hits it just eats through, and I move my arm quick, and there on the ground where the goop fell off is this flaky shit. So I’m cleaning it up, and I must have gotten some of it on my fingers or something and wiped off my face, because soon enough I’m good, I’m feeling no pain. If you see what I’m getting at.”

“No. You’re losing me, man.,”

“This shit I made, it’s like some Midas shit, everything it touches turns to primo untouched coke. Snow white, I’m telling you, I’ve got a mound sitting right here.”

“You sample this shit? This fuckin’ homemade synthetic coke?”

“All day, motherfucker! Help your fucking self!”

“So everything it touches, huh. How come the bucket you got it in ain’t turned to coke? Or the floor?”

“Not totally everything, just like organic shit. Like it ate through the cotton shirt I got in Vancouver but those stupid polyester that bitch of a girlfriend got me stopped it cold. So you gotta be, like, superfucking careful with it.”

“Wait, fucking, what if there’s still some of that fucking shit in the coke! It’ll eat at my, oh shit! Shit, man, I can feel it getting, fucking sinuses, Jesus man!”

“I’m sorry, dude. Really for real. But I’m all out of cotton shirts, man.”

Six: A sentient but invisible lifeform, desperate to breed, finds its mate in a 92 year old woman who lives only because her family cannot bring themselves to disconnect her life support.

What do you love, when you love someone from a distance? Is it the way you feel wrong and misfooted and dizzy in your genitals, the sweat on your neck and dripping down your chest, the way all your dreams change course to swirl around your new center, the reefs of beliefs you branch out, convinced they’re like you, they know, they’d love you if only. The sort of structure you first feel when you start a new job, only jittery, unsure, balloons dancing with streetlights. Feeling completed, feeling emptied, feeling the phantom tongue centering spirals across your thighs. Perhaps too effete to spackle semantics atop the want to fuck.

The Immortal, who had been here for three years, stared out the window-frost, off in a place farther than measurements permit, completely outside her comascope, the dim halos of energy spinning in slow-time, and as the memory of her body fades she enters into new forms. In the dreaming place where she lives she had taken on the lupus sickness, running along the hallways, sniffing out the half-forms of the other ward-patients, the tribe-forms of her early dreams, when Ernst called her a paroxysm of beauty, where Aragon wrote feigned-fictional accounts of his obsession over her cunt, where she filled phonographs with the automatic writing of the “spirits” which she acted out, the silly Surrealists only willing to listen to voices clad in subconscious magick. So many years later she’d smile over a pirate-broadcast girl called Strawberry Shortwave, playing her fractured prose-poems, dreams of the return of angels in the form of  a shower of moths, the chain of held hands of women walking out into their strangeness sent forward. She took to teaching, so much wanting to help these self-conscious priggish conservative children, trying so hard, walks across the quad telling them of Dorothea Tanning, of Leonora Carrington, the slight smile of water-flavors apparent to all. Even then, in the cloistered academy, she knew she was a lycanthrope, flows beneath the skin. She ran from nothing in life, and embraced being a wolf-girl as anything else, keeping her secrets into her retirement, into her coma, where she felt the half-life stripped from her, the shock of her senses unbound, the notice of something always unseen but always watching, waiting, observing from a distance, seeing she’s a wolf, a wolverine, a hunter of missing things, following the warmth.

The Immortal hears her sighs, her pants, down the hall. She begs release. He envies her, to be able to step out of this world with just the pull of an iv, the flicking of switches. He walks the hallway, quiet and alone, sidestepping pools of disinfectant and flaking pea-green paint. He knows he hasn’t much time between hall-checks. Her face lit with monitor-light, the metronome and hiss of her extended immune system, the cloud-speech of her guttural growl, so close to something she’s been wanting so long, and he turns back once, looks behind him, almost sees something in the corner, noticing the absence of sound, the complete removal of ambient noise within which it is hidden, and stares, waiting for it to reveal itself.

Seven: Every night, a screenwriter dreams a new movie which, if produced, will be the largest-grossing movie of all time, winning 12 academy awards. Every time he wakes up, the dream slips from his memory.

Like a vision in neon: TITTY NINJAS, the greatest film of all time, haunts his speed-shrunken dreams, elaborate footage of full-frontal kung-fu like a smutified ballet dancing around his cerebellum —

JACQUELINE: No time to ask how robotic assasins got into the showers, girls: it’s time for action! Beware their vibrating finger-attachments!

— an army of sculpted extras writhing in The Grand Inquisitor’s sadistic scented oil trap! Recursion upon recursion as our heroes are embedded in the infinite Porn Shop of Babel! Serious foot action of the likes not seen since Nezami’s Le sette principesse (The seven princesses)!

CHRYSTALLINE: It appears I’ve spilled all of the antidote all over my lap! Thank God that in addition to being a demolitions expert, a supermodel, and an expert in tensor calculus, I’m also a gymnast, and incredibly flexible!

The critically-applauded Zero Gravity Showdown scene! The heart(etc.)touching training sequences, in which the Russian master parallels the development of barkovscina and the spinning-fire school of stick-fighting! The Drunken Fuck Monkeys!

ANGHELLHYNE: How could I forget a four-foot prehensile cock?

Devious CGI-enhanced vagina dentata duels! The whirling pleasure touch of ten thousand fingers! Dr. Hanherholden’s alternate genitalia! The simps at the Vatican will beg for a copy for the Index Expurgatorius, the prissy prudes at the Bibliotheque Nationale’s Collection de l’Enfer will plead for first-run footage, the private case of the British Library will whine and cry for stills, but only the Academy will be gifted with original reels in thanks for their complete sweep of every Oscar category! Just imagine the “Best Musical Number” production! It would…it…

No, he thinks, sitting up from the couch and looking for his pills. That can’t be the way it was in the dream. There’s no way that’d sell. I’d get arrested. I should get back to work on that hospital fire miniseries; I got meds to buy.

Eight: A child is lost in a crowd, carrying a stuffed bear loaded with plastic explosives.

CIA operatives training Afghani rebels to fight Soviet troops in the eighties discovered quickly that the common tactic of car-bombing simply wasn’t effective as there weren’t enough cars to go around. There were, however, a great number of camels, and thus it was that CIA director William Casey can put “inventor of camel-bombing” on his resume. Unfortunately, camels are not indigenous to all areas, although one cannot step out into any corner of this world without tripping over a malnourished whelp looking for a life-purpose. These children would once be utilized by the comprachicos as models for monsters, mutilated and displayed in subbasement freakshows, but that was a barbarous age; we now have global media networks and the skeletal platform of political atrocity from which to display the return of all the sins of the father. She tells the guard she’s visiting her mommy. The guard doesn’t check the list. When she was at The Colony, all her favorite cartoons were about exploding girls. The movies all seamed different than she saw in the city. You’ll come back having owned the city, to stand on your own terms. Say what you want, you stupid idiots, but I own this place and if you want to deny it we’ll see how mart you sound when they’re scraping your scalp out of the rubble. There are colored lines on the floor you’re supposed to follow, green for maternity and blue for rehab and white for ICU, but the lines are hard to read when the power goes out. If you ever think you don’t matter, you should spend the way with plastic explosives in your hands, wondering at the blast radius. She has never known fear, she will weep no more tears. Childhood is not a given. She has to put the bear down to push through the door to the stairwell. The space is as much yours as anyone. Step into it. She talks to her bear in her head, because when she talks to her bear with her voice people look at her, people want to take back her space. No one can do the work for you. She counts down in her head as the room numbers recede. She remembers the people at The Colony taking about The Company, which made her laugh, she had puppets named Colony and Company and she’d do puppet shows for her bear in the closet, Company telling Colony secrets, Colony telling the babies they’d soon have to leave, as things were about to end, but they were not afraid. Why be afraid? She was unsure, when his bed was empty, but she turned to see him enter the room, turned and handed him the bear, the relief in his eyes, skipping out and down the hallway, her mission completed and the whole vast world spread out before her, saying goodbye to the bear, proud of it finishing its time here, the note reading PULL MY STRING pinned to its chest.

Nine: A psychic runs over a man in an intersection with her Cadillac because she sees that he will someday rape and murder her sister.

There was once two sisters, one with the second sight and one with an empty place in her mind where the other children developed the small skirmishes and mimicking of adults in their formative years. Simple, the teachers would parrot to each other, just as the nuns would call her blessed, for the meek and the damaged and the retarded will always have a place in God’s kingdom. Her sister, however, was at war against this world, against the flood of sin and perversion which clawed at her night-dreams, telling her of her insanity, of her sinfulness, of her willful turning away. Years spilled away and the sighted sister ran as far from the cattle and carrion of her tiny snowglobe city as the bus line would take her, while her simple sister made windows in paper with fingerpaint, the vanishing spires of Tir-na-nog lost to her ever since the aide who smelled like rancid aftershave and night-sweats began stealing her underwear. The sighted sister made her living blocking and moving the flow of commerce, routing money by conduits clear to her as the midday sun, watching over her sister back in the ward, the joy of fresh strawberries with meals on Mondays, the annoyances of being forbidden the paints for a week after an incident with the day room walls, the tightening fear of the aide. The sighted sister saw the future, saw what was to be, and abandoned her life of profits and powers for a sleepless drive back east, white-blurred signs counting down the miles, resolving herself to what she must do. On the corner, just after dawn, she split him in three pieces under the wheels of the Cadillac, his severed fingers caught in the axle, the breath emptying from him as the police pulled her from the wheel. From the window of her room, the simple sister can see her sighted sister, whom she loves, having saved her from the Tamlin with her magic powers, keeping her maidenhood safe beneath her white cotton institute gown, and is now trapped by the faeries (having offended the queen) in the dark of the castle across the river, and she knows the only person left to save the sighted sister, which means an escape off the ward floor. What adventure! Sad to tell, however, the guards and nuns were on the strictest of watches, even in the evenings, and the ward door was kept all locked. Who would have thought all this would be thrown into disarray as the sound of something exploding tore through the walls, sending everyone scurrying, up from their beds and demanded the doors open, and the simple sister snuck quick-like into the main hall, down the laundry chute, across the sub-basement (where the whispers of all the dead people clung to her hair, changing their shapes in the corners of her eyes, finally squeezing out the window, across the street, out to the river, and how surprising! to see her sister, eyes rolling in her skull and blood all across her hands, and just barely visible in the spinning light of fire engines and emergency lighting, the sisters returned to the Marrows, Melusine, mer-girls, in the holes of the river, a story as true as its closing is sweet, and I wish nothing but as kind an end for you.

Ten: He has just dropped the last vial of true love in the world on the floor of the men’s room in Grand Central Station.

The vial has shattered and liquid has begun to trickle toward the drain. Many people on this earth are convinced there is one other person who completes them, makes them part of a larger whole, cures them of the dreaded loneliness disease. It’s quite fortunate that for most people, this one other person lives so close to them, or shares the same employer, or the same circle of friends. Some are still left unconvinced, however, certain the other still waits for them. It is for them the vial of true love exists. This is not a love potion in the strictest of senses, as it does not induce love in another; there is no damiana, no mandrake, no witch hazel in its makeup. Nor is this a pheromone derivative, an umwelt stimulant, none of the base powder methylenedioxy-n-methylamphetamine. The vial of true love is a means of focusing on an end-goal to the removal of all other aspects from one’s life, to strip one’s consciousness to a streamlined essence of intent. I was to learn this lesson myself, due to my vanity, my ignorance, and the magicians Abel and Baker.

Amanda had been gone for about a month by this time, time I mostly spent staring blankly at the wall, eating take-out and masturbating. In fact, I was reaching my seventh ejaculation of the day when I heard a knock on the door. Thinking it was her, I rushed to wipe myself off and make myself somewhat presentable, having gone to shit hygienically since she left. Hurdling mounds of trash in the hallway and scattered books across the living room floor, I was out of breath by the time I got to the door, where two men in suits were waiting for me.

“If this is about the water bill, I’ve got the check here, just give me a second to—”

“No. This is something entirely different. May we come in?”

“What do you want?”

“We’re here to help you get Amanda back.”

I was stunned at this, paying little notice as the taller of the two pushed beside me, taking a seat on the couch, while the other stood near the door. The taller one introduced himself as Abel, and his associate as Baker, and they offered me a foolproof method of regaining my girlfriend’s affections, or so he said.

“I assure you, this is no scam. We offer only what we claim, and no more. We simply have material you may find of use.”

“How do you know me?”

“We don’t know you. Your situation, however, is not uncommon.”

“Are you detectives? Or something?”

“Perhaps. Of a sort. Mostly we learn things and try to put that knowledge to use, for a nominal fee and all necessary expenses. This is the proposition we offer you: our fee, our expenses, in exchange for the discovery of your lifelong love, always and forever. We only require that once this contract is agreed upon that you follow our instructions to the letter, without hesitation. If you do not do this, our contract is immediately broken, with the prearranged fee remaining with us. Do you understand?”

“No.”

“Perfect. We’ll start from there.”

I had met Amanda in college, where a friend of hers knew a friend of mine, and eventually the genital-called square dance of intersocial coupling brought her and I together. I was pretending to be an artist at this point, taking Kline’s monochromatic brushwork as my start. I only found the slightest bit of acclaim within the university due to a kind-hearted and overly indulgent professor who spoke well of my thesis project, removing the paint from the earlier canvases with a battery of solvents and exhibiting the scarred, blank canvases; she claimed transformation possessed power exemplified by a return to original form, which was nice, but Amanda though the pieces were shit. She did approve of the process, however, seeing a need for updating what was basically a onanistic version of Rauschenberg’s subtraction piece. Amanda suggested exhibiting not the canvases but the paint, the solvent, in a base of oil and collected in glass vases she was making. The idea left me with questions, unconvinced the new version was significantly different, but the opportunity for long night of discussing the structural balance of the fluid, back and forth, I think you’re right, it’s getting late, maybe you should just stay here tonight…the process seemed more than worthwhile. It’s not like I had any better ideas; I had basically blown my high art load on my first public showing.

The solvent show, as we jokingly called it, never happened, and we both eventually graduated and got grown-up jobs, y’know, just until we could get enough money together to get our gallery plan up and running. Three years later we were married, reveling in every kitchy bourgeois cliché we could remember, giggling together at the head table after eating mescaline in the limo. At some point we had to move into a bigger place out in the upscale suburbs, still close enough to downtown to have coffee shops and hippie grocers, meeting neighbors with noserings and elaborate investment portfolios, our old projects tucked in attic-corners of our secondhand two-story out by the hospital. I laugh about it a little now, how easy it all seemed, but it was wonderful. For the first time in years there was no more feeling scared of the future, no more wondering where I’d be in a year. Everything was set. It was all revealing itself in the slow ebb of time.

I can’t tell you honestly why she left me. I doubt it was that one defining moment like you see in the movies, but maybe it was, I just don’t know. I knew she hadn’t been happy, and I knew I wasn’t as okay as I kept wanting to be, pretending I was, knowing how absurdly lucky I’d been to get to this place and holding on as tightly as I possibly could before it could fall away. I came home on a Wednesday night to find all her stuff was gone. My first thought was a desperate fleeing from this life, from the place, from a solid and certain world where I knew I did not belong. That’s the definition which comes the easiest, that it was all a question of reevaluating priorities and seeing hers lacking, very clever, very guilt-free, equations in a personal calculus. This was the logic I tossed out over margaritas with my coworkers, handed to my family when they’d call, asking over and over if I was okay. An old school friend suggested self-inventorying, a sort of inspection of one’s faults, but after staring at myself in the mirror she and I got from her mother I felt stupid and self-conscious and finally did the sensible thing and started drinking. Part of me still says it’s a senseless tragedy, nothing to be done about it, the sort of strategy I was fond of when I was fucking chunky Linda from Accounting in the back of her Volvo, wondering how many more times I’d have to wipe my cock with her all-cotton panties before my heart would stop being broken. I even started painting again, thinking I could somehow telepathically summon her back through the sophomoric ball-and-cup routine I’d used the first time, only to remember why it was I gave up this idiocy in the first place. I tried driving around all night, hoping highway zen would clear my head. Eventually I stopped trying pretty much everything. That was my state when Abel and Baker came to my door.

I know, poor me, no one understands me. And you’re right. I should have stared at the wall for a few days, taken a shower, and started over again, but that would have been the obvious thing, and there’s no point in telling stories about doing the obvious thing.

By morning they had gone through the house, removing the trash and the broken plates, wiping the windows and mirrors, mopping the stains off the floor. They made me shave and shower and start in again on the habit of being human. Three days of this and I was beginning to feel at home in my skin, the ends of my nerves covered over.

“Perfect,” Abel said. “Now we can begin.”

Baker reached into a duffel bag and pulled out two videotapes, putting the first into the vcr before going to the kitchen to make popcorn.

“The first tape is probably what you expect. You’ve been waiting for this ever since we showed up, so we might as well have at it. This is your ex-wife—”

“Separated. We’re not divorced.”

“Your separated wife? My, isn’t that telling. This is your split wife fucking James. You remember James? You met him at the neighborhood block party once.”

It was a grainy shot, but unmistakable: Amanda and James, Amanda on top doing that weird dog-pant thing she always thought was sexy. Baker came in and took the seat next to me while Abel looked for the remote to turn up the volume.

“You must have thought it would be different. Some sort of outrageous paradigm-shattering sex. All ball gags whip handles, wrists and ankles, needles and enemas. I imagine this is something of a letdown. I mean, even you could do this. Not anything like what you played over and over in your mind while staining your sheets every half-hour.”

“Fuck you.”

“She had plans for girl-girl, like back in college. Changing your life and truly understands and whatever people think when they’re alone. She even wrote an ad, but she just didn’t have it in her to meet someone new, to do the whole introduction process. Fortunately she had her supportive male friend James there to pick up the slack, in a plain-jane vanilla sort of way. And it pretty much goes on like this for another four minutes. Let’s switch over to tape two, where we see…hey, check it out. It’s Amanda and James shopping for furniture. What’s with you people and all that fake Tudor shit? You ever have to move that stuff?”

“How did you get this?”

“And see here? See how she’s watching him? She’s over you. She’s not in love with you, and never will be again. She’s better off. So the question you have to ask yourself is if you’re willing to find the thing you love.”

“The extent of your resolve,” Baker said, the first thing I heard him say.

“How far are you willing to follow, to fall, to fail, to swing out of your orbit to make this discovery?”

As soon as he finished the sentence, Abel pulled out a vial of some strange fluid.

“Yours is a love with a skeleton of comfort. You ended up with Amanda from inertia. It was what was expected, what was easy, what you knew you could handle and control. Only you couldn’t, of course. Your skin splits at the weakest of hungers. I don’t even know why we’re bothering with you."

“There is nothing I would not do.”

“Say that again.”

“There is nothing I would not do.”

“Well then. That’s quite the drastic statement.”

“The boy’s practically a martyr for the cause, Abel.”

“It warms the heart, it truly does.”

Abel and Baker removed the tape from the VCR and left. When they returned with two large bags I was relieved. I thought maybe they could actually help me. I didn’t know any better.

“People find true love in the weirdest of places. We’ve been doing this ever since we left the lab and hit the road, and you’d be amazed.”

“This one poor inhuman fuck fell in love with an old woman. Shit you not.”

“This other woman was in love with the Earth, so she kept this other poor fuck alive against his will, torturing him with consciousness. You know something about that, though, don’t you?”

“This girl was in love with god, so we set her phone to pick up broadcasts, which we figured would solve that, but now there’s this gaggle of people in love with the girl in love with god. They even started a cult called the Colony. But they’re all dead now.”

“That girl’s not dead. She did a good job for us, actually. We’ll have to keep an eye on her in the future.”

“And those sisters! the ones who loved each other and couldn’t love themselves. They’re staring face-down in the river-sludge now.”

“The eel-woman nesting her babies in their skulls.”

“Lots of people love things. That guy who loved coke. He was a fucking liability.”

“Ended up converting his legs, his arms. We eventually dumped his ass in a tub of the solvent. Though chances are whoever goes sniffing at his remains will want to do the same. We left a voice-mail number, just in case.”

“So you think deep on that before you open your mouth and close your eyes, kid. You think about what it is you really want.”

I was fed up with this two-bit sideshow. I wanted it, I wanted to know, and so I picked up the vial, touched it to my tongue. That was three months ago.

[Litany of detestable acts removed for brevity — db]

I hear from Dave, the only person left who will talk to me after the hideous degrading things I’ve done, and apparently Amanda and James are over with; she’s thinking of moving upcoast, changing jobs. I had to sell the house for bail money, and because of my current mental state she had no problem getting an annulment cleared. My friends and family don’t talk about me anymore, not even the tense jokes shared at reunions. My old life is over. I am now horribly in love with the second urinal from the left in men’s bathroom #8 at Grand Central Station. I run my tongue along the inner rim, the cool wet porcelain, the sweet sloping curve of the bowl. Having found the one thing left in this veil of tears which makes me happy, I dropped the rest of the vial on the floor, near the drain. The cops chase me out twice a day, and sometimes kids come in and kick me around, so if you should happen to find the place empty, just lick around the drainpipe and you will find the one thing which your soul truly desires.

I guarantee it.
(12:11.05.19.2005) [/alpha/revisitations] #