Thu, 19 May 2005

the last day of my old life
Dollar store voodoo had caught me, the brain bound by chemicals in the scent of the car that caused me to forget to stop at red lights. I didn’t even see that other car coming. It was two am, and I had time to bury the bodies and dump the other car, but it was clear that my life had taken a turn into bad places, the sort of mistakes I might not soon be able to talk away from, so I called my lawyer and worked out one of those group-divorce settlements. I left all three of my husbands and almost everything I owned and had my name legally changed to Manifeste Destiny. The only things I took from the house was a change of clothes and a bag of my own blood I had “in case of emergency”, but I saw a deer that had been shot by the edge of the highway on my way out of town and poured the blood into its mouth, blowing salt with my mouth on its mouth, and I brought it back to life, watching it scamper into the underbrush and praying my days of bad karma were behind me, but no, no.

Three miles outside of town I was picked up by a man who claimed to have an engine of destruction in his back seat, underneath a brown tarp, and as he started to explain the details over the din of a well-worn Corrosion of Conformity tape I realized he knew what he was talking about, his prototype destruction engine might actually work, and so I stabbed him repeatedly in the neck until the visible Jesus descended from a low-flying cloud and took him to Heaven, which seemed odd to me, so I reached up and tugged on the cloak of Christ, pulling him back to the earth. “This is a man who built an engine of destruction! He is a foul and crawling thing, and must be sent to the hell which bears his name, for his name is Sheol, as printed on the inside of his skin!” I said. “No, he is a servant of divine providence, as are you, and all such agents will go to heaven, where they will be rewarded for their acts,” said Christ. “Even those unaware of their role?” “Particularly those unaware of their role! These are soldiers who require not the crutch of reason, of logic, who simply do what they know to do! The lessons of the heart are legion, and point one like a compass toward the celestial city!” “So you are to say that I am to ascend as well?” “Your tasks are not yet completed. Time will tell.” And in a moment, the visible Christ left this earth, carrying the shriveled soul of the engine-maker over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. I long considered what I had seen, and slept in the back seat of the car, the warmth of the engine of destruction like the warmth of a lover who was not yet planning my death.

It may be the case that in Heaven all one needs is quickly placed beneath the hand, so as to seem constantly available, but here on the earth everything is constantly missing or broken, and my abuse of crack cocaine had done nothing to remedy that fact, having shrunk my field of vision considerably, this being one of the reasons I had left my husbands, as I am convinced they were stealing crack cocaine out of my pants while I slept, and also they were devils. I cleaned the blood out of the driver’s seat and drove down the highway to Gulnac, where homeless people built metal detectors from stolen batteries and Pringles cans to scan graveyards for rings and fillings. At the side of the road just before the city limits there was a small luminous boy in the garb of a preacher. He told me a parable of revenge and loss. He told me a parable of ache and love and how all these hungers will be satisfied. He told me a parable of DNA sequences, of the star-maps along the zodiac, of the misguiding direction of gravity. “Do you believe there is a secret road?” the luminous boy asked. “The road is not secret; I can hear it even when I am asleep.” The luminous boy smiled. “I grant you safe passage into Gulnac, as an envoy of the King. You will need to find a second passage out.” I nodded, and faded, and threw up in the passenger seat, reading the half-digested chunks as an oracle, an oracle that told me to steer clear of the gun shop and the whorehouse. I found two twenties tucked beneath the driver’s seat, and went looking for a street fighting match, which Gulnac used to be famous for, but a wave of malnutrition had washed over the city and now nobody was physically able to sustain the endless feats of cunning and physical endurance that street fighting matches called for. So much for expanding my newfound fortune. I parked the car beside a grain silo and fell asleep, rolling into the vomit-puddle without so much as a wince.

When I awoke, my automobile had been replaced with an invisible hearse, by which I was to transport VIP guests to hell. A man stood by the side of the road with his skull in his hands screaming that he needed instructions and perhaps a ride, and I yelled back there was no way I would let on the secrets I had been gifted with, secrets only just then rising up to the surface of consciousness, and that if he did not walk off into the field and bury himself in a hole that I would see to it that God would seek him out and force upon him endless punishments, at which point he ran into the field, out toward the train tracks. I walked in the other direction, past the grain silo and into a small pumpkin patch, where I washed myself in a creek and stole a suit off a scarecrow. Freshly cleaned and attired, I returned to find the invisible hearse, which I discovered I could see if I squinted just right, climbed inside and set off on Rural Route 120 toward Devlin.

If you can kill it, you can take and wear its skin, and that will be enough to fool the ignorant and inattentive, and as they rule this place it will be enough to pass unseen. A swampish heat came up from the fresh-cut grass, piled thick across the lawns, a vegetative ache in the nostrils, blowing north in waves, like a field of filled dumpsters baking in the noonday sun. Above that, however, you can smell other features, becoming more prominent as summer marches into fall; someone is cooking steaks, somewhere a few blocks over, and perhaps also asparagus. More distant still is the scent of burning leaves, and diesel fumes from the interstate, and the smell no one notices, the smell of the people, shuffling through their lives, not the sharp tang of fresh sweat nor the thicker unwashed grime nor the myriad scents they use to disguise themselves, but a baser smell, more fundamental and permanent, the scent which keeps the deer in the fields and the wolves in the hills, the scent which gives up the whole of each person’s life to anyone willing and able to sift the information from the air, sniffing at genetic packets like a map of the nerves and secrets of every person on this earth. Monday I suckled three wolf cubs at my breast and they became part of my nervous system; through minor cranial surgery I could overclock their parietal lobes and thus pinpoint very distant objects by triangulating the target, which allowed me to catch and kill devils. At night they would run alongside the invisible hearse and scare away deer, until the wolves no longer remembered our bond, and broke left, like a fighter squadron, into the cattails and milkweed lining the road.

At night, the children walked to the top of the hill, where the school looks over the town, and they stack wooden pallets against a drainpipe to climb atop the alcove and leap from there to the main building, and scale to the highest point, where a small metal shed holds cable and antennas. The children checked the orientation of the antennas and made corrections as necessary, guided by starlight, and when they were satisfied they took two and a half foot pipes and began pounding at the walls of the shed, slowly, as though they were mimicking a pulse, as though they were trying to call down something to the city of Devlin. I watched them from the invisible hearse, parked in a graveyard to the south, and fiddled with the scanner, trying to see if I could pick up a return signal, but all I heard was static. The graves there were partially wound with multicolored string, where visitors would tie a loop around the obelisk-like headstones upon each visit, with some so covered it was as if they wore sweaters. I noticed every headstone had at least one loop bound to it, all in the same color string, and I imagined some old man walking the rows every so often, checking for bare headstones. The fields outside the graveyard were not so much a hiding-place as a locus of surrogate light, containing fragmented images from all directions, the breath frozen as luminous things hunted out my time-pulse. Gratitude sprang up and forth once the lights stopped. I had planted my journals out in the fields, not staying long enough to see what sprouted up, struggling for sunlight, new words meshed from the old. Airbourne harvesters sifted the grain, the pages, the clouds, utilizing these components as one of the engineers would, pulling the materials apart for pieces to what the harvester-cult considered a portal to end-of-time, something called the Abaddon Device, diagrams hidden in the steganographic source-text of their holy books. The automated pilots waved, and I waved back. The earth was filled with portals.

Distance between cities is marked by rural touchstones, by the distance of silos and groves of trees, so that those who came here to hide often build mockeries of such standard scenery, farms whose size fools the eye, modified road signs tricking the unwary into following endless emptied creekbeds in search of gas and lodging, the husks of cars with Illinois plates rusting in the later summer sun. Unschooled children with .22s hide in the trees and shoot out tires at unimaginable range, sending half-wolf dogs out to pick through the wreckage like a turtle’s tasty innards. I paid two of them to watch over me as I entered the edge of town, where a partial immortal hid in a jar from the agents of the afterdeath, little more than a head and pieces of chest left of him, speaking advice to the Mayor of Devlin from some future eigenstate. Dampeners in the tiles of the ceiling along the hallways of the Devlin city council building absorbed faith and radiated blistered fear. I was protected, but knew to pay attention to such foul omens. Children smiled at me, unsettlingly, and I whistled short themes they would remember and whistle themselves, in quiet times, for the rest of their lives. Orange voices. At a certain length, tone-sequences began to fold on themselves, algorithms coded in the first few sequences in order to map the unfolding of the entire piece, frequency limiters and repetition hues, cerulean in the light, a milk-white hum as the interoffice spiral tightened and I closed in on this place’s heart, tucked away, stored in a jar of bleach and gooseberries to repel stray dreams. “You, you are a key,” I mumbled, and tucked the jar beneath my coat, and so was caught by weekend vigilantes in homemade police uniforms.

It was then I was marched before a series of judges. Each sat at a long table made of whitewashed pine, nailed together in a slapdash fashion, which suggested trials here were of a very ad hoc nature. The judges were constantly being served various scorched meats on fine china, which they would swallow whole and spit the skins between the table and myself as I waited for questioning to begin. Eventually the judges grew full, and tired, and slow, and asked that I explain the nature of my crime in detail. I had spent the week before watching the trials from atop a silo where I was storing the bodies, and thus knew that the nature of release from custody depended on the quality of my storytelling abilities more so than any set idea of law, so I had made a pair of pornographic puppets out of my undergarments while in my cell, and constantly interjected my tale with reenactments of illicit affairs between the Hum Goddess and myself, which were exaggerated in the extreme, but this was theater, and such is to be expected. Likewise, I offered tales which painted my victims as direct conduits to the dark veins of Hell, which (as I have often mentioned) is everywhere, as it seeps from these carriers of the disease of impropriety and stains the whole of the earth, and as such I was simply keeping the children of this fair city safe from the endless schemes of The Devil. This elicited applause from the cheap seats, only some of which I paid for with whisky and hypnosis recall therapy beforehand, so that soon enough I could feel the swell of public support gather around me and shield me from all misdeeds, and as a politician hates nothing more than to go against public opinion, I was released and given three thousand dollars as a reward for my public service. Having beaten the legal system of this town to a quivering mass, I put on my scarecrow jacket and headed over to the schoolhouseto drink the black syrup, catch a quick nap and return my collection of the Very Important Damned to the nearest enterance to Hell.

The hidden christ appeared at the foot of my bed as a crippled girl with clouds of blood in her eyes. Tendriled flowers in her left hand she brought to her face as if to breathe from. The hidden christ began to sing from a shake of the bones in her chest. She bounced up and down to rub her ribs, a low drone eminating from her, stuck in the bedsheets. She tapped a second cadence with the tips of her fingers on the bedposts. The hidden christ spat teeth and clumps of clotted blood onto my covered legs and feet. “Manifest strictly on-earth, place where all ideals played out, and as one cannot appear twice in same form all is difference and shall continue on and on until all forms have been seen, which is nearly eternal.” She had spun wind in her mouth and blown into the faces of all the flowers, which trembled and twisted. “You would care for tea?” “I would not care for tea. Keep from my bed, hidden christ, in any of your forms.” The hidden christ lifted the lacework of her underskirts and showed me her lower mouth. “Your kingdom is toppled and its bricks make for charnel-houses.” “Thrones and dominions are as nothing to me, all that which is, the thread and threat of your very meat.” The hidden christ spattered the oak of the floor with the small rain and made as if to bless the shivering flowers. She gnawed on her tongue as if it was beyond her control, as if it rushed to escape her throat. “Spread the veils of mary, of salome. The plans you have for this world, for your history, your identity, all come from a hole between your legs.” “God has spoken all and final in the form and function of all things; nothing remains but silence. You and I are the voice of God, not in our meaning or grammar but in our very existence. Your shrunken psychologies mean nothing to me.” Her body hummed like a struck bell. I will never return to sleep. Pools of the thicker blood puddled in the valleys of the bedsheets, between my thighs. “Do you believe in evil? Should evil be destroyed? Are you a culpable and complicant witness to evil? Where were you then, when the matter was made, when the first blow fell?” Now I was awake, at least enough to walk, and the hidden christ walked at my side to a curve in the road where a hole had been dug. “When yours is to kill, you should always dig a grave. By the time the hole is finished you will know the length of your resolve. Those who kill without intention live lives shallow as the base of a bowl, their lives wound down to the end of a rope.” I was so tired I could not raise my arms. The drizzle soaked into my skin and weighed me down. The hidden christ begged I should bed with her at the bottom of the hole. Her arms had been broken in multiple places and she could not lower herself down without my help. Her body followed the curve of mine like the black fluid I had swallowed the night before. The skin around her mouth had been gnawed away by infection and left her a leer she could not put down. The cicadas shivered and filled the air around us with a rattle which brought up spasms in her, pearls trapped in her throat, the wet skin where she had the rings cut from her fingers trembling in the moonlight. Further we went, to a tree whose branches dug into the ground. Eggs grew along the trunk and branches of this tree, some as large as a child’s fist, each containing something which scratched and cried. The hidden christ began filling her lower mouth with mud, so as to feed the child therein. Overhead geese hid in the clouds and tried not to see us. The air was all rotted pumpkins, burning leaves and the shriveling of plants which live atop still waters. Here there were frogs and salamanders who breathe the water and reeds with their hindlegs and tails. There was a mossy growth in her mouth which i could feel as i stuck my fingers inside, a tidal ripple with each swallow, tears on the back of my wrist. There was something stuck to the back of her throat, like a pinecone caught in amber, but I could not reach far enough to keep hold. The mist had bloated my skin, it hurt to curl my fingers or bend my knees. A smell of eaten things. There were statues of young women in veils holding machine guns made of opal, further into the trees. The statues were headless. There were inscriptions on their bases overrun by some sort of white fungus. The hidden christ asked for my second name and all the eggs on all the trees began tapping and clawing in unison. Gel-weapons came out of her pores. The hidden christ had armies gathering on the horizon. We were at the bottom of a well, capturing daylight in a mirror whose binding was woven around her throat. “Doll-twins, you and I. I will birth you innumerable children who can only be seen one at a time, holding the other siblings in its stomach until a hole for hiding and form-transfer can be found. Your uterine prayers are trapped in my body. All heaven dips low to grace your crown.” “You’ve buried belladonna in my blood. There is no hidden christ. Moab descending. Perverse reversions; I am falling into chronal harmonies with my dead siblings, places outside. Please let me sleep.” The hidden christ placed her mouths over my eyes and whispered blessings directly into my brain, and sometime later, much later, I awoke, filled with righteous terror and bathed in the marker-blood of the sow. (ljcomments)
(12:14.05.19.2005) [/ana] #