ENIGMATICI
A Crossing Chaos / Enigmatic Ink
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Copyright Statement
All rights reserved. Except in the case of brief quotations used in critical articles or reviews, No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher. Please contact: Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink, London, Ontario, Canada
Copyright 2009 Crossing Chaos / Enigmatic Ink
Copyright 2009 Forrest Armstrong
www.forrestarmstrong.com www.crossingchaos.com/Asphalt_Flowerhead_by_Forrest_Armstrong www.smashwords.com/books/view/6109
Copyright 2009 Tom Bradley
www.tombradley.org www.crossingchaos.com/Vital_Fluid_by_Tom_Bradley www.smashwords.com/books/view/6174
Copyright 2009 Martin Heavisides http://theevitable.blogspot.com
www.crossingchaos.com/Undermind_by_Martin_Heavisides www.smashwords.com/books/view/6202
Copyright 2009 Mark A. Rayner
www.markarayner.com www.crossingchaos.com/Marvellous_Hairy_by_Mark_A_Rayner www.smashwords.com/books/view/6169
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Contents:
Forrest Armstrong
Short Stories:Transcript at the Close of a Life Cycle, Plant the Seed, Junk-Pure, Liquid Paris
Tom Bradley
The Life and Times of LaFontaine the Mesmerizer
(the book within the book, Vital Fluid)
Martin Heavisides
Undermind extracts:
CityPlanner, MindLight, Things Are Looking Up, Elf Club Impromtu, Root Causes, Language Guide: Proverbs and Helpful Phrases, Via Vita, Grave Ethical Imperative, Will I Eventually Be Everybody?
Mark A. Rayner
Monkeying
Around
Selected short fictions and other dementia.
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FORREST ARMSTRONG
Transcript at the Close of a Life Cycle
The earth is a giant radio – all channels playing simultaneously – every frequency fighting for control on the radio spectrum. In the city these buildings are anesthesia-soft because they are dead. Transmission stations. Frequency casts. The streets are memories, not pulse lines.
I got the call from Marin with the electric sunrise. He’s an old guy, Hispanic – one of the few humans left who had their machinery installed after birth. When I first met Marin he told me that our programming, unaltered, decides absolutely the way we perceive the world. “The Crime Unit’s function is to maintain a comfortable level of order and control,” he said. “They were geared to do this. I don’t hate police officers though they all seem to hate me – this is not their choice. The only decision they ever made was to join the Unit. Everything else is predetermined (we are not talking about fate here but the predictability of software), under their own level of understanding, at the moment they sign the contract and undergo the operation.”
I asked him, once, what it felt like to live un-programmed. “My intention,” he replied, “is to show you.”
So what we are after here is the manipulation of the perception tape in such a way that we can ignore its input. Liz didn’t want to come along. When she was in college she fucked around with drugs – they say that’ll fuzz the tape but it won’t bend it – non-committal, you know – she fucks around with men, too, but always comes home to me. They don’t say anything about the effect of orgasm on the tape, yet.
“I’ll tell you right now what’s going to happen if you do this,” Liz says, standing naked at the window, dawn shadow on her smooth skin. “They’ll take you away and I’ll have to take care of this house myself.”
I walk up behind her and try to hold her. “I’ll always be here to take care of you, love.”
She laughs, breaking contact and turning towards me. “You think it’s about that? Who’s gonna pay this rent? Who’s gonna keep my water running?”
I force a smile and throw on a jacket, walking down the apartment’s spiral staircase to the street.
I take an outbound train – on the ride to the end station, I realize that my impulse for control stems directly from my lack of control over Liz. From my beautiful dreams romantic in which I am no longer chasing her – in the uncomfortable abstract, what feels like a connection –
The snare is her eyes when she first opens them in the morning, in bed beside me, because I’m always convinced I find love behind those panels. They say upon waking feelings are open and exposed – throughout the day you are constantly constructing a mask for yourself. I believe – or want to believe – that in these unguarded moments, I see how much Liz wants to love me, a mad and desolate hunger, even if something internal won’t permit her to let on that she’s interested in anything more than being fucked and paid for.
They don’t call these type of women whores – the kind that’ll fuck for a nice dinner. They call them liberated.
The train comes to the last stop and I get out, meeting the suburbs. The streets feel moist, like villages clung near ocean sands – but there is no ocean here and this damp is not natural. Polluted air – the residue of a constant process of synthesis from the city still visible on the horizon. I call a cab and smoke a cigarette on the subway benches while I wait for it.
A few miles in a cab and I kiss the swirl mechanical goodbye. In the city you’ll never see a single tree or stem of grass – all gray and neon light. Even in the suburbs, a lawn is a beautiful exception. But here, where I’m meeting Marin and the rest of my dataset, a spread of trees still stands intact in a field of dry, bronze grass. Smog sleeps in place of sky, filtered over from the city’s industrial pumps. Distant satellite towers communicate audibly across the landscape. And my dataset stands bleakly haloed in a circle – twelve cosmonauts, including myself. Marin is the thirteenth.
Marin wears a chrome-plated hat that looks like a mushroom head. Blue psilocybin strains digital. “This box is impossible to escape from. Nobody’s ever tried to tear out their wiring and live as a clean organism, and I will not be the brave one to attempt this – I’m confident it would result in death. They have designed the system so that there is no escape. What I will do, essentially, is program you to ignore your programming. If you must wear these chains at least render them useless.”
Marin tells the dataset to lie down on our stomachs and we fade as he lifts the latch to our rear input panels. He cuts the spool to the perception tape and revs us back to life –
A tree’s roots flip over to reveal strings of LED lights on their undersides. An aluminum hole opens in the base like a camera shutter and emits a liquid cyborg – it opens its eyes and scans our entire dataset at once.
The cyborg rests submerged in a tree knot up to its shoulders. Its face sustains a constant equilibrium between inflation and deflation – plasma drips from steel jaws while more is manufactured by a nucleus, glowing ember-red, in the center of the transparent skull.
“Imagine that this one figure,” Marin says, gesturing to the machine, “encapsulates the entire syntho-genetic system.” He traces a plasmatic trail in the machine’s head and removes a spoon from his pocket. “Scraping the surface does nothing even if you leave a dent. We’d have to suck out the heart that lubricates the vein lines.” Marin scoops out a section of gelatinous flesh, then drops the spoon as the plasma swells back to whole. He rests his hand on top of the soft spot in the cyborg’s scalp, balls his fist, and plunges through the skull, grabbing the nucleus in his hand and tearing it clean out. The inflation input ends in the machine’s cycle, its head quickly sinking like a dead balloon. The orb drips molecules like lava beads down Marin’s wrist. “This is impossible. There is no heart.”
“On this frequency the subliminal sound currents of the Crime Unit don’t exist. The spectrum is designed by this system – leave these closets, these prison cells, these vessels – we must storm the city – we must take control of the reality spectrum. When you are surrounded by endless miles of emptiness – no activity – would you speak without screaming?”
I look at Marin and see him for what he is: a man with flesh that has touched the world, and dreams that that flesh harbors. Whatever he did to our hardware cut the information flow. Opening my eyes, face down, the first thing I noticed was how miserably and beatifically flat the soil tone was. I am not a processor but a human who thinks.
The sky as a tarp, being shaken dry – withering, a tree is held in nightmare resonance – transparent figures and fractured projectiles gliding off appendages – more signal pulse from the horizon satellite towers –
There is a quiet; the wind picks up aluminum waste from outside the valley and brings it gracefully to its center.
Blue noise echo breaks the silence and seems to paint the sky siren red. Uniforms flutter into the valley and our entire dataset is placed under arrest. They don’t bother with Marin; upon recognizing his face they fill it with bullets. The blood runs antifreeze blue.
The twelve figures in our dataset are cuffed and put into cruisers, two to a car. I feel my heartbeat flutter. The officer smiles – he knows in killing Marin he has broken a dream. Time passes nebulous, clouds shift. When we reach the city I can’t even tell if we’re moving. The streets swim like conveyer belts until eventually washing us up at the police station.
“What’d these kids do?” asks the Sergeant, inside.
“Found ‘em in the woods fuckin’ around with their hardware. Guess who was frontin’ the ceremony?”
The Sergeant looks at my officer in disbelief. “It wasn’t –”
“That’s right. Marin Tiago.”
“Is he here?” the Sergeant asks, craning his neck to look behind us.
“He’s dead. Figured you’d wanna skip the formalities. What do you wanna do with his boys, though?”
“How many are there?”
“A dozen even.”
“Bring ‘em all in, we can rewire every one of ‘em within a few hours.”
I’m the first on the table. They lead me though hallways cluttered with obscuration pods and surveillance screens. I consider myself lucky as we pass an occupied pod – a junky gets fuzzed out while falling into fetal position – that’s something you don’t recover from, I hear; an hour in one of these and you walk the streets like a drone until your hardware expires. Most narks have been obscured – you can never trust someone with an utter lack of personality in the crime world. In the operation room, they tell me to lie down on my stomach and wait.
The Doctor enters behind me, wearing a lab coat tinted crime-blue. “First thing I do is remove your freewill conductor and install a firewall on the same line,” he explains. “I’ll fit you with an impulse cap. Then comes the fun part – your reality plug.” He emerges in front of me holding a selection of tuning instruments – a screwdriver, tweezers, a wrench… “Your reality plug is a wireless router that connects you to the state’s internal network. You’ll hear more about it when we’re done.”
Walking behind me again, he opens my rear panel, bringing back the same fade out shot I got with Marin.
I wake up to the Doctor patting my back closed. “There,” he says, “that was painless, huh?” Painless? In the immediate sense of the word, yes, but where does this absence –
My officer opens the door to the operating room and tells me to follow him. We walk down a few hallways and reach a room lit up infrared. The Sergeant waits for us and tells me to take a seat as the officer closes the door behind us.
“Did Dr. Groening explain your upgrades to you?”
“A little.”
“The most important thing is the reality plug. I’ll show you how it works.”
On a monitor in the wall, they draw up a screenshot of my perception. The world as seen through my own eyes – this causes the screen to withdraw into infinity.
Under the monitor sits a massive keyboard. “We’ll play you like a video game with this thing, boy,” the Sergeant says. “Your impulse cap will stop you short if you start thinking or acting in the wrong direction – try it, you’ll see. The reality plug lets us override everything and act through you, if we feel it’s necessary.”
“Is this forever?” I ask, shell-shocked.
“That’s up to you,” the officer says. “A year with a clean record and you get your senses back. But remember, we can break the tape for good if it doesn’t seem like you wanna turn things around. Start now, kid. Air is a privilege.”
Alone in this metronomic landscape, an urban sector of the endless prison spinning in space – so vast as to provide the illusion that, within it, we are free –
The force wasn’t bluffing. Every deviant thought or action gets cut short – blackout, film resolves in blinding clarity through which I stand dazed. How many times have I dreamt idly and retreated back to a white expanse running on virtual aesthetics – hollow – sizzling, a static fix –
Buildings through my window scratch the sky but can’t open it. Humans may see each other but the visions are stale – there is no data connection – we are all software, we only imagine we serve ourselves –
This endless string of programs – humans are not meant to be computers –
Liz comes through the door, now, setting down a bag of groceries. Still programmed by the corner store up the block, which claims her from nine to five, everyday.
“What the fuck are you going to do?” she says. “You can’t work like this. You can’t even think.”
“You’re making money, right? Maybe you can help out with the bills for a little while I get back on my feet.”
“How long are you going to be like this?”
“A year, they said.”
“You’re a fucking bore. I’m not gonna sit here waiting for your jump start. I fucking told you what was going to happen if you did this shit, I told you that once those fucking police caught you –”
She’s leaving now, frustrated. I must have fallen back to the empty-white. To free the data sector of imagination –
Liz works overtime because one day she wants to be free. She doesn’t want to need me anymore. She doesn’t want to want me anymore. She grows her bank account while living in my cradle. Liz, is there really such thing as ‘free’? When you can buy your way out of all your associations, will you be free? Or will you simply die alone –
To experience this disconnect – mental physical spiritual – my brain fell back into the box, blanked by my hardware, stalled in the dark neuro-regions of the perception tape –
These scattered frames of life film without context –
This empty hole in cybernetic recordings –
Permeating, the police frequency –
I’ll vacate this place – NOW –
I grab a hammer and tell Liz I don’t care what it does to me: smash the perception tape. Back to elegiac fields as I leave you with my analog –
[Bodyhost 4A0284 overridden by Sector A of Massachusetts Crime Unit –]
Plant the Seed
The café sits on top of a blood-red mountain that spins downward until sinking into the anti-matter pigment of a dream. Herbfire smoke and the scent of wood floorboards. I stare out the window and see a hundred naked gladiators playing rugby, silver bodies with opaque splashes where their skin, glistening with mercury sweat, catches the sun in reflection. A pattern like a dying phoenix faded on their backs.
I wonder if they breathe, or if their vision is fogged under the mercury swell. They run on a silent field – when they slam into each other the only noise is a faint droop like a suction cup incision. Shockwave catalyst in the air like muted crescendos. In the climax of battle they overheat and explode out of their skulls like thermometers. Now the field looks like mashed gears; mad scientist’s lab gone to shit. Blood like lubricant slicks the landscape.
“I’m off, Tony,” I say, finishing my tea.
“You’re leavin’?”
“Yeah, I gotta run to town for something.”
“I know why you’re going there. And I don’t like it. All natural, my friend. See how I make my tea?”
“Yeah, and it works for tea, but that’s about it. Everything is automated nowadays, Tony, get with the times. Look at those slick gladiators on the field. Wouldn’t you like to look like that?”
“A junkyard?”
“Well, before combustion.”
He pauses as if considering. “Nah, it ain’t for me.”
I exit the café through a chamber with darkness spinning through it like tendrils. The town is on the other side of the mountain. Approaching it I already see signs of the mechanical manifestation: men with metal haircuts artificially swaying in the breeze, females with new kinds of breast implants; Accupan, a drug which is injected through the nipple in a quick operation and which expands the glands exponentially throughout the female’s life. I imagine in the future we’ll see women with breasts bigger than themselves but I’m the only one who seems to be troubled by this possibility.
In the marketplace it’s the first thing you hear:
“Steel plate liposuction cheaper than ever before! Takes five minutes and you walk out a new person!” Since it only takes five minutes I stay to watch one of the operations take place. An obese woman is asphyxiated by a flat-faced doctor and a drill is taken to her stomach. A nurse holds a sack under the hole while fat spills out by the gallons. I watch her face drain and shrink until she is thin enough for the doctor to fit a metal corset around her waist. She wobbles away, looking indeed like an entirely new woman.
“Next!”
I
walk on. These doctors don’t have what I’m looking
for. You see, I used to have a lot of trouble with drugs.
Still do. What can I say; I enjoy any state produced by a drug
more than a clear head. This isn’t a problem in my
opinion, but drugs were really starting to drain my funds and I had
to get off. Now I scream for a fix.
Doctors in town have
developed new ways to manipulate DNA strands to include the molecular
make-up of any substance. This means not only can I constantly
trip on mushrooms, I can semi-be a mushroom. Also, as it will
be built into my DNA, I can transfer this gene to my offspring and
them to theirs, consequently saving generations of my family loads of
money. All it takes is the initial cost and I’m in the
anti-clear for good.
Overhead, pixilated vultures cling to the sky like two-dimensional objects. The farther away they fly the lower their resolution falls, as if their structure is coagulating and falling apart in blocks. When they hit the horizon everything melts into bandwidth, a thousand diamond squares; I imagine up close it must look like a glittering mosaic of color, but from here, all I see is a single strip of flushed-out brown.
Been walking through the city for half an hour without finding what I’m looking for. I decide to cool off with a drink. Faded pink cocktail with anchovy hearts still beating at the surface.
I am approached by a beautiful girl with long black hair and a metal fixture over her mouth that looks like a mask. She speaks in articulated buzzes: “I just got some new equipment I’m dying to try out.”
“I’m on the hunt myself.”
With her mask on it’s hard to tell whether or not she’s interested. For that matter, it’s hard to tell if she’s beautiful, but I’m trusting my instincts. Her cool blue pupils stream like running water before my eyes. “Why don’t we go back to my place and see if we can find you what you need?”
‘Going back to her place’ incidentally doesn’t involve turning myself into a fungus strain, but I have no complaints. I’m on top of her thrusting and she’s dead still, which actually works out pretty well because she’s had vibrators “installed in all the holes,” she tells me. It’s a lot different than normal sex. I stare into her eyes and she stares back into mine and again I’m unable to read her thoughts. She breathes through the static screen on her face, occasionally moans, sounds like crinkle of old record transposed up an octave.
When I’m about to come she breathes faster and claws my sides; she starts to move her hips with mine and I’m gone. Sparks fly from her vagina and I pull out fast.
“What the fuck!”
“I don’t know it’s –” Her voice oscillates and trails off like a slinky. I stand over her naked.
“What’s going on? Are you all right?”
She doesn’t answer. I put my clothes on and walk out the front door.
An
hour later, I’m still not a mushroom. As I walk through
the town I feel like a molecule ricocheting around in a gas chamber.
The same species of gladiator I saw up at Tony’s café
stands out in the town square, assembling a phosphorus structure of a
man trapped in a giant diamond ring, curled up like Atlas in
anguish. Their eyes buzz like micro-batteries. I walk up
to one of them and say, “Where’d you get it done?”
“Get what done?” the gladiator responds.
“The operation, baby, the transformation.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“But I’m lookin’, man.”
“You don’t want this.”
“Why not?”
“Look at us. We’re walking time bombs. The other day I was sitting in a bar with my friend… I watched his eyes heat up like coals in a fire, start spinning; they got sucked deep into their sockets, whirlpool effect, you know? His face lit up like carbon paper and as he blew apart all he could do in resistance was sputter a scream that sounded like it was coming through AM radio. Believe me kid, you don’t want this.”
It’s true that I never wanted his particular upgrade in the first place but now he’s got me skeptical about the whole thing. I walk away as they put the finishing touches on their sculpture.
A vulture swoops down from the sky, crowing like a synthesizer. The sun sets and smolders. I decide to abandon my search for the doctor until tomorrow and follow the breathing glitch as he flies off into the woods. Trees stand metallic like deactivated robots. Streams run at regulated modem speeds. The clouds spin in click-whir of thinking hard drive. I cross a thick of vines that crawl over the ground like wires and enter a deeper section of the forest:
Everything is bright and blurred like I’m looking through eyes that won’t clear. I come to a vast opening filled with huts and vultures and pixilated human beings. The sky behind them is lit up like an ignited diamond mine. I look down at myself and realize I’m blurring at the edges.
Junk-Pure
There is a place where the matter in the air alone chokes pedestrian. Buildings run alongside a bleak road that never sees use. A body of water languid green like a dead jungle stands in the center, shattering into receding shards of glass at the first solemn touch.
At night giant embryonic bandages hang suspended from the clouds. Sinners traverse them like a catwalk with the invincibility trance up. Tonight, as I walk under the starlit sky, I see one get cocky and drop to the cement twenty yards below. He pops like a water balloon, latex skin flaring against the impact, blood whiplashing in the air like a fountain waterfall. I throw a lit cigarette into a gas well and watch the whole block ignite.
No one notices. That’s the best part about living in a city that’s in the later stages of decomposition. The city’s falling apart everywhere; a skyscraper comes down here, a street combusts there: What’s the difference?
One sinner lowers a bag of pitch black H on a fishhook with a note attached: “Pure satanic junk, straight from you-know-where: replace on hook with a twenty spot and it’s yours, baby, shoot wisely…” I’ve seen someone try to cheat a dealer by grabbing the bag and taking off with it. The dealer doesn’t usually have much to stick around for so he has no problem taking a swan dive onto the junky and snapping his spine… as long as the punk who tried to cheat him dies it was worth the suicide.
When I step under the catwalk a shadow blocks me out. A star pulsates anti-energy overhead, light spinning into the nucleus like a garbage disposal. Thick smog the color of Satan’s underbelly drapes dense around my ears. I walk through the streets in a haze…
I stand in front of a mirror masturbating to myself masturbating to myself masturbating to myself etc., when my visage disperses and a black face like a bull with horns comes into focus. I jump back in recognition. Quiver-pull up my pants.
“What’s wrong, kid,” Satan says. “You knew I’d come for you eventually. Think you could live on the lip of hell forever and I wouldn’t even notice you?”
“No, no, of course…” I stumble. “Drink? Tea? Anything?”
He steps out of the mirror. He’s even more terrifying when he takes shape, the same sheen of power as a prize-horse. “You never touch junk, eh?”
“Not yet anyways, sir, but at your suggestion I could begin immediately –”
“You don’t think my junk’s any good?”
“I’m sure it’s the best there is, sir, it’s just –”
“It ain’t about the junk. Christ, stop shittin’ your pants, kid, I’m here to talk business. You’re still alive and resting on the razor’s edge. God’s hands and mine stand equally outstretched on either side, so I ain’t here to claim you just yet. Sit down.”
I sit down fast and he continues, “Now listen kid, surely you assumed the Devil’s got his agents, right? I got dealers laced throughout the city but I ain’t omnipotent, you know? I only know what I see, and sometimes it ain’t the whole story. Dealers try and skim off the top, you know what I’m sayin’? And some will go even further. I got guys I supply who think they can compete with me. So it’s your job to weed out these faggots and turn ‘em in. You’re an insider now. You fake dead. You walk the beltway of sinners at night and you get to know these assholes. Then you nark ‘em out.”
He turns and starts to walk away.
“Do I have a choice?” I say.
“No you don’t have a choice, you fuckin’ loser. I’m the Devil.” He walks into the mirror and again I can see my reflection, sheer-white.
“How’d you die, kid?” the junky asks as I walk onto the catwalk. Satan told me to walk through my mirror when the sun set. At dusk I dipped my head into the glass – felt like stepping through dripping sheet of glue – and proceeded through a bright white hallway. When I came to a door at the end I turned a silver knob and stumbled back into the bleak emptiness of my city.
“What?”
“New face, I’m just wonderin’ how you died. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
“I OD’d,” I lie. The junky doubles over laughing, slapping his thighs.
“Off my own shit too, I’m guessin’. Well ain’t that ironic. Satan give you a boss?”
“A boss?”
“He tell you who you’re workin’ with?”
“Oh… no, he didn’t.”
“Then I’ll take you, kid. Come with me.”
I follow him across the catwalk, past junkies sitting on crates holding fishing rods. One’s line vibrates and he pulls it up with a smile – “Got one!” – a twenty dollar bill hanging off the hook like a towel. We reach a house at the end of the clouds and he leads me inside.
As soon as I step through the door he turns and slugs me in the face. I collapse against a wall. He takes a gun out of his pocket and presses it against my forehead and I’m too far past paralyzed to do anything about it.
“Now listen, kid, I ain’t workin’ with just any punk Satan decides is fit for the game. It’s bigger than that. If you’re Satan’s agent you better let me know right now because at no point will I have a problem spilling your fuckin’ brains across the floor. Clear?”
“Perfectly –”
“You work for Satan, or you work for me?”
I swallow hard against the pressure. “I work for you, man.”
“Good,” he says, relaxing the gun. “Then I’m gonna tell you what we’re all about. You ain’t gonna be working up on the Bandage; I’m dispatching you and a couple others to the streets. Get ‘em hooked down there like you was just any other dealer. Don’t give off that you’re dead. Here’s the deal: the money all goes into manufacturing H, using Satan’s pure as base. Our costumers will be shootin’ neuro-transmitters in the bloodstream that collect life force like a cotton swab and through delicate radio signals zap it back to us. Why, you ask?”
I miss my cue at first. “Why?”
“We’re all demons, kid, but with enough of this juice we get a second chance. And you know what? My second time around I plan on staying clean. So you gotta kill a few to build a few; Darwin in action.”
I spent the night on angeldust with the junky, whose name I discovered was Florence. He seemed surprised by my explosive reaction to the substance – he handed me a poorly rolled, purple cigarette and I dragged it hard, aiming for nicotine. When the walls started rippling and crashing like waves overhead I bugged out, shut my eyes; saw astral projections of space-blue and decay-gold on the back of my eyelids, slipped between sleep and trip without ever knowing the difference.
Somewhere in there I must have fallen asleep for good because I wake up now with fresh senses in the middle of a field, surrounded by a crumbled prison. The walls are tinted purple. A hill runs behind me, speckled with thin, dead trees ready to incinerate at the first warm breath blown in their direction. I don’t remember seeing anything like this in the city. With its rotten, archaic soil, its sky the detached shade of black common in dreams – empty, nothing beyond – I feel out of context and yet the faint murmur of explosions can be heard in the distance, the tallest buildings with their heads in the clouds can be seen poking over the hill behind me. I know I’m in the right place. I pat myself down and find a fat bag of junk in my pocket. I see people dotted in the distance like ornaments on a tree.
I approach them with my calculated junky-swagger. “What’s good?” I call. One man wearing seventeenth-century-European attire looks up and says in a garbled dialect, “The sky as it radiates truth unto us.”
“Now listen, man, I’m just here to sell some nice clean H. You game?” He stares unsure and I get the feeling I may be going about this the wrong way. “Nevermind,” I say, walking away.
I approach a younger crowd all wearing suits and top hats. Underneath the gentlemen polish they all look like addicts to me. I edge into their circle, feeling terribly out of place. “What’s good?”
They stop talking and stare at me. “You aren’t from around here, are you?”
“Just over that hill,” I say, gesturing. “I’m a city boy myself. I was just hoping to talk to you guys for a few minutes, get to know you.”
“Alright,” one of them says. He invites me to a party they’re attending at The Ray Bar. Soon we’re sitting on a couch shaped like Mae West’s lips and drinking absinthe by the pint. I feel very much at home with alcohol, the one substance I’m able to stomach.
“We usually don’t let city cats hang around here,” one tells me. “We say to them: ‘If you’re going to blow your whole fucking home apart, do it on your own time and turf.’ We found refuge in this dead place and breathed the life of reason into it.”
“That ain’t me,” I say. “I’m just trying to get by like anyone else.”
“What do you do?”
“Push junk.”
A mischievous smile crosses their lips and they exchange knowing glances. “Junk?”
“Yeah, heroin?”
“Haven’t had that stuff since I used to pass the Bandages at night. How much?”
I smile. “How ‘bout we all try some and you decide?”
They take me to a room above The Ray Bar and we start cooking up. One of them produces several syringes and within half an hour we’re geared for incision.
“You first,” says the one who invited me to the party. I slide the needle in my vein like a pro and release – my body goes numb – haha tongue flaps like warm dead fish – I realize in my absinthe absence I forgot just who’s junk I was dealing – neurotransmitters float my bloodstream like electric minnows – the kids follow suit and soon all of our life forces are draining like a gas tank with a leak –
The kids sit dazed like blissed-out mannequins. We settle on a price and I leave. Walking up the hill I forget the price. Neither junk nor cash in my pockets.
In one hallucinatory ejaculation my flesh spits a visceral projection of me standing haloed in an astral glow… oceans shrivel up like tinfoil with an electric shimmer and drain into the earth’s soil… the planet hangs soggy in space before sagging like a Dali clock and chipping away at the skin – infrastructure apparent like building when glass and metal slip off the frame – matter eats itself; all that’s left in earth’s place a thrashing black hole… my eyes pop out of my head and rush towards the vortex followed by a neon blue stream flowing out of the sockets… I sit outside myself, a bronzed skeleton with life force spilling from the skull, watching the last tendrils drop...
Liquid Paris
In a district of Paris that peels off the Left Bank and drops all signs of French culture:
The air smells like a septic tank. The first thing we see are hundreds of reptilians with gnarled green skin hanging over jagged spinal columns, their eyes as large and vacant as space. Music like drone-trips in India swims across us from invisible musicians. Trees like smooth, featureless corpses stand around the field in neat file, their limbs blowing in the breeze.
I met Kilo while he was waiting tables at Ceci Est un Rêve. He stood in a cold blue glow, surrounded by artifact statues – dream erotica, Mayan death sequences, liquid-bust of Nerval. He explained himself and what it meant to be a reptile – “We’re hollowing out our own realm of consciousness” – I was intrigued by his flesh, so I took the trip.
A week later, I’m standing in a field that rolls like waves under a sky pulsing like an open artery. My friends and I stand looking like skeletons among the fleshed, our beady black eyes spinning nervously in their sockets. I dare not exchange a word with the reptiles around me. In fact, I can do nothing but wonder what dreamy circumstance has brought me here, away from the sedating Paris air and the comfort of a concrete reality. Soon they lead us into a cave and turn on a projector that sends light flickering against the walls. “To empty your head,” one of the reptiles tells me in garbled speech, “before acquiring new vision necessary first to exorcise primary one.”
“New vision?”
“It is what you’ve come for, is it not? I can feel your mind is ripe.”
The lights make my cortex soft and I start to experience mild hallucinations: shades of gray, rusted battleships floating on the ceiling. I stop being able to differentiate between my friends and the reptilians. When consciousness is adequately fragmented and the sun has set outside the cave, the reptilians make a stew that they claim will tune us to their vision. It tastes like battery acid with all the wrong herbs mixed in. After downing the rancid thing, this is what I see:
All males and females reduced to two shapes: protoplasmic rods and fat ectoplasmic spheres. There is a large orb hanging in the center pumping out trillions of the smaller shapes. The whole scene spins like bulbs in a disco lamp and zooms out to a domed, shadowed arena with pink fleshy walls. I zoom out further, fall through an ear canal, and see that I have just been looking at the inside of Max Ernst’s head—no brain, just a non-stop visual sequence. Or maybe the shapes are each individual thought-impulse encapsulated.
Somewhere in the trance, I mutter, “Remember to never be a reptile,” and fall asleep.
And what dreams I have! I am in Les Deux Magots eating jambon on a baguette – A waitress nudges me with a cup of coffee and whispers, “Si tu veux planer, je vais te montrer” – The sky is rotting with spoiled meat for clouds – Parisians wait in dark alleys with flesh dripping off their faces like candle wax. They murmur at me and grab at my clothes like cinema zombies. One of them says, “J’ai de l’asphysie visuel, couper pour injection,” then collapses into the cement – I sit in a small bistro and watch a piano man roll cigarettes of black tobacco with his right hand while keeping a bassline with his left. He lights up and falls into the melody like raindrops in a lake.
I wake up in the bistro of my dreams and find Paris asphyxiated, fragmented like the vision through the reptilian’s flickering lights. The bistro behind me fades into the ground. A man walks by with hot red pupils streaming out of his sockets and the air unravels like a reel of film, spinning in a projector as the movie ends.
I see a liquid Eiffel Tower evaporating in the distance…
§
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TOM BRADLEY
The Life and Times of LaFontaine the Mesmerizer
(the book within the book, Vital Fluid)
"The pointed finger of the stage hypnotist was the same finger used by ancient healers in the Temple of Sleep."
--John-Ivan Palmer
It's 1874, and he is having one of his usual triumphs. Huge and perfect, a demigod with a mountain of shining black curls on his head, he stands on the stage of the freshly built Paris Opera House.
The place is a neo-baroque marvel, with marble statues, jewel-studded arches, crystal chandeliers and gold-leafed pillars gleaming everywhere. The vast dome overhead features a fresco of God in his Heaven, being serenaded by hundreds of plump, rosy angels.
Several princes are in the audience, along with marquises, duchesses, and various other continental glitterati of the time, each dressed more beautifully than the next. It's a capacity crowd, and they're all on their feet, loudly expressing their amazement, and their love, for Monsieur LaFontaine, the greatest of all mesmerizers.
He bows gracefully as red roses rain down on him. He waves massive, white gloved hands through the air like a magician or a priest.
Stretched out before him is a young noblewoman, completely under his power. She looks like an angel in a white satin gown. Her body is suspended between two intricately carved rosewood chairs, which touch only the back of her neck and her ankles.
"You hear only my voice," LaFontaine tells her, and what she hears is magnificent. "Your will is not your own, but has merged with the vital fluid that emanates from my mind..."
* * * *
He stands majestically in the middle of the floor in an opulent Parisian parlor, furnished in the most elaborate style of the day.
It's a soiree of late nineteenth-century Europe's most brilliant intelligentsia, including a poet, a few artists, a couple philosophers, and their aristocratic hangers-on. The host is a fabulously wealthy nouveau riche from the world of international finance, who knows just enough to keep his mouth shut. Also present, of course, are several of the world's most beautiful women. They stare at LaFontaine, enrapt, flushed with spiritual aspirations.
Remaining aloof is Baron Dupotet. Plump and swarthy, with a cruelly sensual mouth and serpent's eyes, he simmers with envy.
"Monsieur LaFontaine!" says one of the philosophers. "I heard you were languishing in a southern prison."
"And so I was. The king of Naples allowed me to roll the stone from the sepulcher and come forth."
A painter says, "Surely you mesmerized his Neapolitan Majesty to gain such clemency."
"He did set one condition," says LaFontaine..
"Which was?"
"That I cease restoring sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf."
"But, Monsieur LaFontaine," says the poet, "why would the king have you behave so uncharitably toward the wretches of this world?"
"A small matter of the all-too-faithful imitation of Christ."
Everyone titters at this near-blasphemous remark, except Baron Dupotet.
"You imitate Christ, LaFontaine?" he bellows. "Bah! Mesmerism's pretensions toward healing were pooh-poohed a hundred years ago by no less a personage than Doctor Guillotine--"
"--who deserved to be consulted on the topic of staying healthy," says a beautiful woman. "Right up till the moment of death."
More titters are heard.
LaFontaine looks at her with chaste appreciation, and she nearly melts under his eyes. He turns to deal with the baron.
"It's a matter, my dear Dupotet, of psychologizing--or 'animal- magnetizing,' as you would inaccurately say--the astral body, which is poised intermediate between the spiritual and physical--"
"I don't require schooling on the rudiments of our art."
"But I'm afraid you do. I wouldn't call it 'our' art, in any case."
Baron Dupotet swells with anger.
The poet looks as though he'll expire like a delicate flower if this conflict escalates any further. He withdraws from the inner circle and approaches a purple couch situated in the corner among exotic potted ferns.
Sitting upon this couch is a seven-foot-tall Punjabi Hindu. Curled up next to him is a Roman Catholic cardinal, capped and robed in red satin, an envoy from the Vatican. He's almost as tall as the Hindu, and is obviously his lover -for tonight, at any rate.
The Hindu wears a vast white turban with a fist-sized ruby pinned at the helm. Wrapped in the serpentine hose of an exquisite jade hookah, he shares slow sips of soup-thick narcotic smoke with the Cardinal. The two of them listen to LaFontaine with a pleased look in their eyes. The poet tries to appropriate some opiated hashish from an alabaster box which the Hindu holds in the palm of one gigantic hand.
"That's soma," says the Hindu. "Or something near enough. It's not intended for profane consumption. Aryans only."
"But," replies the poet, "those two megalomaniacs are going to draw stilettos any moment. It's so unpleasant to have corpses bleeding underfoot at soirees this time of year."
"I'm enjoying their contretemps," yawns the Cardinal
"LaFontaine is quite good."
"But the Baron needs mollification," says the poet.
The poet and the Hindu have a friendly mock battle over the narcotic morsel, slapping one another's hands away. The poet prevails, and comes away in triumph with the prize.
The cardinal calls after him, "Don't mollify our two wonder-workers too much. His Eminence, the Holy Father in Rome, has a very important job for both of them."
The poet lays the hashish on the green marble mantelpiece and proceeds to knead it together with some potent-looking herbs from his waistcoat pocket. The resulting concoction is nestled in golden spoons and passed around on a silver tray.
Baron Dupotet gobbles two helpings, then three. His eyes grow red and aggressive with intoxication.
"So, LaFontaine," he leers, "do you have your way with those lovely young subjects of yours?"
Glancing at Dupotet's plump belly, LaFontaine replies, "I'm not quite so comfortably confined in my coat of flesh as you are in yours, Monsieur le Baron."
Dupotet is enraged by that remark. He snatches a golden spoon of the hashish mixture and brandishes it in LaFontaine's face like a poisoned dagger.
The great mesmerist turns aside in revulsion.
"Unlike yours, Dupotet, my body plays host to no demons that demand nourishment."
* * * *
At the bottom of a hole in a Victorian London graveyard lies a woman. She's dead, as it happens, but is being rousted from her eternal repose by a couple of cockney resurrectionists, whose illegal vocation is to supply the medical community with bodies to dissect.
"Right, Jasper. Be so pleasant as to grab that trotter. Heave-ho."
A dark, plump figure hovers in the shadows behind a nearby gravestone, supervising these two louts--though they are unaware of his existence. Baron Dupotet has not bothered to introduce himself to his subjects.
"Gin and pies tonight, as they say at Buckingham Palace."
The two resurrectionists carry the dead woman through the darkness, discreetly stuffed in a burlap bag. They approach the back door of the Royal College of Surgeons, giving wide berth to a paid-off bobbie who stands in their path, very obviously paying no attention.
A white-coated surgeon admits the resurrectionists with their load, whispering, "Make haste, make haste, you two--er, three."
An entity slides out of the shadows and slips unnoticed into the college on the resurrectionists' heels. Before the door can close, he glances back over his shoulder, revealing himself to be Baron Dupotet.
* * * *
In no time the cadaver's delivered to a dissection room, and a professor goes to work, soberly and respectfully. His interns gather around, paying clinical attention. Few of them ogle her bosom, and none sees Monsieur le Baron creep past the door.
He moves down a corridor softly gas-lit and quiet as a temple, past a series of chambers where macabre but useful studies are being pursued.
Baron Dupotet sneaks into a lecture hall, unseen, and leans against the back wall. He has come to heckle his rival, LaFontaine, who stands at the podium, delivering a formal lecture.
The great mesmerizer has dressed himself a bit more soberly for this occasion than he does for his public performances and soirees. His manner and voice are modulated for the academic circumstances. But he is no less impressive for that.
The lecture hall is full of frowzy old physicians of various specialties. In their outdated frock coats, wire-rim spectacles and bushy gray beards down to their watch-chains, these codgers look as though they wouldn't crack a smile if LaFontaine were to levitate the whole building, or cause elves to materialize.
They listen to him carefully, anyway. It's clear, from the skeptical look in their eyes and the sardonic way they stroke their whiskers, that they want only to dissect his ideas and expose them as unscientific. But LaFontaine seems to be getting through to a number of their younger colleagues, who stand at the back, unaware of the baron's presence among them.
"Gentlemen," LaFontaine is saying, "please be aware that mesmerism entails the conscious or, indeed, unconscious projection of the vital fluid. Certain deluded amateurs insist on describing this process as 'animal-magnetism.'"
He glances at Dupotet, who swells with anger, and screams, "We'll see who's deluded!"
Nobody but LaFontaine heard that.
As if nothing has happened, LaFontaine continues his lecture. "The potency of the vital fluid is determined by the mesmerist's spiritual status and moral condition. Herein lies the danger of the practice. For if the mesmerist is corrupt of heart, foul of mind, and diseased of soul--"
Dupotet bows, as if acknowledging a compliment and accepting applause.
"--the vital fluid which he projects will be tainted. Under such influence, the subject can become morally and spiritually weakened. And this will constitute a grave danger to the subject's life."
LaFontaine is mildly distressed to see the baron vanish.
* * * *
Seven huge, blond, blue-eyed Swiss guards, in elaborate ceremonial armor and helmets, shouldering lethal-looking halberds, march down a splendiferous hallway.
The ceilings are gold-leafed, and burnished bronze statues stand in niches every few yards. The walls are covered with frescoes of magnificent saints, as befits the Vatican's papal residence in the Year of Our Lord, 1882.
At the end of this fabulous hallway is a pair of cast-bronze doors which depict grandiose and grotesque scenes from Dante. Two more colossal Swiss guards stand sentry to the left and right.
An old man, short and stooped, hobbles along in the Swiss guards' midst. Wearing a full-length white satin robe and skull-cap, it's none other than His Eminence, Pope Pius IX. His Grace is an obese old lecher, with puffy lips and swollen lower eyelids, heavily made up. There's an expression perpetually fixed on his face which makes him look as though he just had an orgasm or two.
Pope Pius IX arrives at the big bronze doors, and the guards swing them open to reveal the private papal audience chamber, a mighty room straight from the glory days of Michelangelo. It's full of marble statuary and boasts a coffered mahogany ceiling with a vast chandelier. On an alabaster table is a selection of five different kinds of wine in crystal carafes.
Standing at that table is Baron Dupotet. Seeing the pope, he quickly puts down a glass of gravy-thick burgundy that he's been swilling without permission. He begins to cross himself with great fervency.
Standing nearby, mildly amused, is LaFontaine.
A fat, gore-colored ruby weighs down the flounder-pale forefinger of Pope Pius IX. Baron Dupotet falls promptly on his knees and commences fellating it.
Soon it's LaFontaine's turn. Choosing not to kneel, but only to bend slightly at the waist, LaFontaine brings his lips correctly close to the tasteless bauble, but no closer.
The Holy Father says, "Gentlemen, let us wish and hope that, for the good of humanity, animal-magnetism may soon be generally employed for the benefit of--"
"I prefer the term 'mesmerism,'" says LaFontaine.
Baron Dupotet, still on his knees, pretends to be shocked at his rival's rudeness. The pope reddens, but chooses to ignore the interruption.
"I encourage you, my sons, to continue your magnificent work, in the confidence that it will enhance the spiritual well-being of all Christendom. The blessings of Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, be with you."
"Amen," says the baron. Pope Pius IX pauses for LaFontaine to say, "Amen." It going to be quite a wait, if the look on his face is any indication.
His Eminence fondles a sapphire and emerald rosary that would make Marie Antoinette want to use the bidet. He looks into LaFontaine's eyes.
LaFontaine looks back into his--not hypnotically, not even in defiance, but with disdain. The Amen doesn't seem to be forthcoming.
Five delicious altar boys, all golden curls, sapphire eyes and pudgy pink dimples, suck with pouting lips on almonds and grapes. They lounge languidly on purple velvet cushions strewn about the pearl-encrusted taffeta slippers of Pope Pius IX.
The Holy Father seats himself upon a throne that would make Nero feel like the Whore of Babylon. Baron Dupotet and LaFontaine take up positions before him, the former ogling the altar boys, the latter fastidiously averting his gaze.
His Holiness observes LaFontaine's eyes alighting upon one child who sits apart from the rest.
"Can either of you wonder-workers mesmerize a smile onto that gloomy little wretch? As you have probably guessed, he's the reason I summoned you."
The boy, dark and severe, sits up straight, spine locked. He shrinks from contact with the corrupted altar boys, preferring the hard marble floor to a velvet cushion in their scented midst. Perhaps a tad frail, but handsome, even at his tender age he is revolted by the decadence that surrounds him.
"As you can see," says the pope, "he's a Jew from the countryside. Son of a bailiff. A Christian servant girl baptized him in secret, but left him otherwise untouched."
"Wasteful girl," leers Baron Dupotet.
The pope snickers. LaFontaine does not respond.
"The baptism was performed in a papal state, so, according to church law, he must be raised a Catholic. I've taken him under my wing, so to speak."
The altar boys giggle.
"That's a funny thing to call it."
"I've heard you call it many names, Your Holiness, but never a wing."
"Silence! In the knotted bowels of Christ, I adjure you to hold those pink tongues!"
The Holy Father flings a massive, bejeweled, solid-gold chalice at the smart alecks, braining one of them in a splash of purple wine. This strikes the baron as quite funny. He suppresses laughter. His plump belly jiggles, and he holds one hand over his mouth.
The altar boys watch Dupotet's belly, and giggle some more.
This enrages the Supreme Pontiff further. "You little heathens find this humorous? I'll cause my most colossal guard to skewer all of you at once on his halberd! He'll flick you down to Hell like so many flies--though I know Satan will be angry with me for cluttering up his abode with such pallid trash!"
"Oh, Daddy wouldn't do that," says the plumpest altar boy. He eyes the colossal guard in question, who happens to be standing at attention against the nearest wall.
LaFontaine looks up in surprise, and is appalled to see this giant has precisely the same blue eyes, golden hair and ample pale flesh as the altar boys. It's obvious he's fathered at least three of them.
With pouting lips, on hands and knees like an infant, the plumpest altar boy starts sidling up to his daddy. The colossal guard's sanctified job is to stand like a statue and never move except to shield the pope from assassination or abduction. Now he has broken into a sweat under his nine-pound helmet. He wears an agonized look on his table-sized face, and tries, with frantic eye movements, to tell his creeping brat to shut up and back off.
Caressing Daddy's big boot, the boy murmurs, "You wouldn't be so mean as to poke me with your big pokey thing, would you, Da-a-a-addy?"
He leers at his own reflection in his daddy's standard Vatican-issue shin-bone armor, then slowly gets up on his pudgy little haunches and starts to fondle the poor man's steel knee-spike.
Dupotet can contain himself no longer. Pointing first at the knee-spike, then to the brat who licks and tickles it, he explodes in belly laughs.
"The little... The filthy... Oh, Mother Mary hemorrhaging on a close stool!"
"You are dismissed, Monsieur le Baron," says the pope, icily.
No longer laughing, but quite unhappy, Baron Dupotet is escorted out.
LaFontaine has a brief moment to ponder the little Jewish boy. He is charmed by the lad, in a chaste, fatherly way.
Pope Pius IX says, "Your incontinent colleague--who will remain nameless throughout Christendom till the Day of Reckoning, if I have anything to say about it--once told me that young children are especially easy to, shall we say, put under one's 'animal-magnetic' power. Malleable little souls, and so forth. Can you do anything with this small son of Abraham, Isaac and so forth? I'll make it worth your while, Monsieur LaFontaine."
What little reverence there might have been in LaFontaine's eyes is gone now. With infinite tenderness, and without permission, he gathers up the little Jewish boy from the marble floor.
The latter allows himself to be lifted into LaFontaine's arms. But the stiffness of his posture indicates that it's only because he needs to be rescued, not because he submits to being loved. Not yet, anyway.
LaFontaine turns his back on Pope Pius IX--a grave offense in itself. He could be chopped to bits any moment. Without genuflecting, groveling, or even asking leave, LaFontaine vacates the papal audience chamber, taking the Jewish boy with him.
The colossal guard makes a lunge, as if to cut the mesmerist down in his tracks. But the Holy Father stops him.
"I wouldn't advise you to raise hands against that man."
Stunned by his god-like boss' warning, the colossal guard gasps, "Is he Satan's henchman, Your Eminence?"
"We should be so fucking lucky."
* * * *
LaFontaine exits the Papal apartments, carrying the little Jewish boy. Gently, he deposits the boy in a carriage, says a few words to the driver, and gets in. They rattle off down the sanctified cobble stones of Saint Peter's Square.
* * * *
There's a sea of pale faces at the London Zoological Gardens, including those belonging to Queen Victoria, her Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, her pet poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, and assorted other royalist big-wigs of 1884.
They're all seated comfortably in armchairs under a grand silken pavilion which shades them from the halfhearted English sun. Her Majesty seems to be enchanted, perhaps even mesmerized, by something that is taking place before her eyes in the lion's cage.
Inside the cage, whose bars have been gilded for the occasion and spiraled around with ribbons of red and blue silk, stands LaFontaine. At his feet, an enormous lion lies flat on its back, its four mighty legs sticking straight up in the air.
The Jewish boy is in the cage, too, grown a couple well-nourished and -loved years' worth. He looks much more comfortable in the company of a large carnivore than he was in the pope's.
He has been educated, trained, and splendidly dressed in a red velvet Little Lord Fauntleroy outfit. This young son of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is obviously having the time of his life. He possesses all the stage presence of a professional two or three times his age.
In his grandest manner, LaFontaine says, "The vital fluid fills all space and all beings."
The Jewish boy says, "Gauche!"
On that command, the lion's paws move left, and Queen Victoria murmurs in admiration, as do the members of her entourage.
LaFontaine says, "To control the vital fluid is to control all things, and all beings."
"Droit!" cries the Jewish boy.
The beastly paws move to the right, and Alfred Lord Tennyson begins to applaud, even before his sovereign sets the precedent.
"Will is limitless!" says LaFontaine.
The Jewish boy cries, "Epees mortelles!" causing the lion's huge claws to pop out. Her Majesty gasps, "Jesus Christ! Look at those big sharp cock-suckers!"
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