Thu, 19 May 2005

spit sin from the mouth
“If I did it then, like I planned, everyone would have forgotten it by now.”

There’s a farm three miles past the county line where they’ve been building animals, beowulf clusters humming through gene sequences in the basement, machine sheds where faceless buyers for the underground zoos up in Chicago handle and weigh half-chickens, snakefish, deviled children. I was up there with Ana, who knows everybody, asking about the revitalization technicians. A boy with burn marks across the palms of his hands told me that was just a myth spread by Mexican kids selling stolen vaccines. I stared at him, looked for a tell, but it was like his body was only alive when he spoke, the muscles in his face shutting down to conserve energy and hide away the subliminal secrets of his posture. The windows are boarded shut, the room ghosted with flourescent light; they worship the moon. I though I saw an empty dissection table in an unlit back room, but Ana told me that was probably just the kitchen. Ana has recently taken to telling me lies without so much as a blush. She got something from a side-room where I could not follow and walked out of the farmhouse, and I followed her, because that’s all I ever do.

The bar crept like taproots through the maze of abandoned storefronts, storage cubicles, plague-gutted apartments; I swear we walked half a mile before Ana found the table she wanted. The walls were covered with a red moss that devoured cigarette smoke, dark swirls above the booths like permanent shadows. Speakers crookedly nailed into the ceiling oozed some bass-heavy cabaret music. It seemed like my eyesight and my hearing were no longer in sync.

“You should read the book,” she said. As though it was the simplest thing in the world.

“Fuck that. You should read the book.”

“I can’t read the book. I read a little. It cuts too close, I don’t want to know all the details. All the last days. But somebody should read it, and that somebody should be you.”

She said this as though there was some silver thread between the book and my skin, predestined to recieve this pyrrhic gift, but I knew she had asked almost everyone else she knew. She asked Seth and Mark and both Daves, she asked Carolyn and Rissa and even Owen, who was still working on his human catapult act, which shows you his level of maturity. I was last on the list, and we both knew it, and had I any sense of self-worth I would have said no, no, a thousand times no.

“Do you have it here?”

Ana reached into her bag and pulled out a wooden box which rattled as it moved. The top was covered in silver rings, which were bound with red string to weights within the box. Ana showed me the order in which they had to be pulled, until she looked like a puppetmaster with rings on all eight fingers, when the box clicked open.

The first page had flecks of brown blood on it.

“That’s not from then,” she said. “That’s from something else.”

I stared at her, through the thick black air of the bar, and said absolutely nothing, until finally, distracted with bad dreams, she said “Or at least I don’t think it’s from then.”

There was nothing else in my life then, nothing at all, and I have never refused Ana any of her requests. I would read the unreadable book. I would graft myself onto its skeleton, map my thoughts to the narrative arc, set its errata and facts over my eyesight until everything took its shape. Like coral grown atop jettisoned cargo, the stray thoughts would find a form, congeal into clusters by which I could grow a personality, an identity.I realized this was the same logical line which led to fandom, to endless reams of slash fiction and neurotic collections of the smallest scraps of stardom, and I knew that I was currently of a mind prone to such extremes, unmoored from family and friends and employment and the small guides of my prior life, but I was sick for alternatives to the hollow sound of my future, growing increasingly quiet as I unwound into tedium and torpor, the sort of peace so many claim to desire like a collective death wish. I couldn’t do that, I couldn’t just give myself up, I needed a direction, an irritant, a dream-locus. I would read the unreadable book, and claim its nature as my own.

“Okay. I’ll read it.”

Ana smiled, and passed the last work written by head dead ex-boyfriend across the table to me, slipping out of the rings as she got up and walked to bar.
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #