The Oeuvre

by Greg James

  We could call it all a machine and I think we will. It has its stages, its developments and it is based on models that glisten with sweat and beads. Those who do not fit in with the machine are ground into mince, feeding the machine, oiling her cogs with blood, making a supply of meat that can be advertised, sold as basic value. Every space is advertising space and crackles with a static of its own, interference gets in everywhere, makes dust, ages us, wears down what is to what was. We must live here, in the now, but we're too busy fingering at murders.

  Blood runs in our hair.

  Welcome to the Machine. PVC-soft pseudo-cultures for the genetically dead. Foundations of deviation and passive-aggressive sadisticisms. Repression breaks loose. Rapes its way around the room. Savaging the innocent bystander sitting in the corner, watching the telly. Minding own business. Borna virus frenzy.

  I asked them once how much longer this could go on. It was a slow meeting and the LCD projector was broken, so someone had to say something. I was told how long have you got, and that's the frightening thing. I could die tonight.

  Worse, I could still be alive tomorrow.

  All I want to do is lie down to sleep with someone warm in my arms, someone who smells nice, not of this rotten place, this dead planet and its people. I don't remember much more than you of how it was when we were younger, but I’m coming to a conclusion. It's a further frightening thing: that the world has always been this way. For some reason, we don't hear it in childhood, when we are asleep, and when we do hear it, we tune it out. Dismiss the world that is trying to get through, seeking out your channel, our frequency. Breaking down the scrambling signals. Still, we ignore it because, by then, we are old and not young enough to fight. We just want to lie down with someone warm in our arms and then, we look and there's no-one left for that and we are soon dead. With these thoughts in my head, I lie down to sleep and dream.

  Contusions of time and place cause me to lose my way. The buildings sink in on themselves. Roads crackle and burn with an isosceles fires. Their psyches whisper about me, waiting to be born, then they carbonise, darken and dance to the taint. Misshapen men and women come crowding out at me, eyes open, holes torn in parchment. Pale progeny crawl, pouring from their bodies, swelling their ranks. I lose focus and they shift around me of their own silent accord and I wonder what it feels like to split the atom with an old carving knife.

  It is the next day, which is much the same as the day before that. The language here is out of synch with the thought behind it. In open-plan office space, we bear witness to meaning’s steady erasure:

  a) Do not ask when you can task.

  b) Do not go ahead when you can be going forward.

  c) Do not understand when you can get a flavour.

  Taste this, there is nothing here. My sleep is vacant and my nights without substance, it all started here, this funeral parlour outlined by the heat signatures from photocopiers and echoing with the sound of such empty-empty talk.

  You can do nothing outside these established, unyielding patterns:

  a) You have an ongoing strategy, not a life.

  b) You have an income, not a wage packet.

  c) You have work colleagues, no friends.

  d) Bury yourself in workloads, varied and conflicting.

  The monitor screen dulls, blinking, and I blink too.

  Did I get up? Did I move? Have I ever left my desk?

  Looking around, I see eyes flickering with an inner data-light, the constant rattling of fingers on keyboard keys. Should I tell them the power has cut out? That everything is dead? Then, somewhere, an inkjet printer whines and I am matching it, humming along, and I get back to work too. I type these words without thinking.

  We Are The Power.

  This is not what you wanted, is it?

  Nope, me neither.

  This is not what you thought. No fantasy future ever found its seed, its bright root, in this numb twilight of desk-pods and office-cells. Nothing shines here, all is badly-lit like low-budget science-fiction.

  How could a nightmare be so poor, so banal and so ill-conceived?

  Scarcity is the issue. Taking all, tearing up, fucking up and leaving all for dead and maimed. Abundance would be for the beta and the female. A quieter flourishing. A steadier blooming. A garden without lions. No place for lambs. No doctrines, no dogma. A change in the niche, all that it takes.

  Going home, I feel it at my back. I’m not feeling brave enough to go into the Underground tunnels tonight. Back down into the dark where the black cancers are. The crowd on the street heaves around me, shoulder to shoulder. We fight the good fight, struggling to get to multiple opposing destinations. Faces jostle to be seen, a blur of masks, desperate to separate themselves from one another. I’m caught amongst them, unable to get out, my ribs crush against my lungs, my legs and arms pinioned by the goliath weight of the people.

  So many, how can there be so many?

  The bus rattles and clunks to a halt, a hollow insect painted a flaking red. I can see the coarse grain of its shell showing through. I board it, holding out my pass for the driver’s inspection. The driver acknowledges me with barely a nod of the head. His eyes are wide and fish-slippery. He looks too still to me, too stiff, as if restricted in some way. Perhaps there’s a straitjacket bonding him to the seat. The sleeves of his summer blue jacket are saggy and weak-looking, his fingers are too thick and fibrous, not fleshy enough for me. There is no-one else on the lower deck of the bus. I don’t feel like sitting down here with that mad man at the wheel, so I climb the steps to the upper deck.

  The city passes through me as I watch, backlit by winter dusk. I feel its masonry canyons and alcoholic depths; cars go by like diving bells, cut loose, lost, driving down abyss after abyss, their wheels settling in with the inkish mire. The people are small, whitebait and minnows, no exit signs show the way in or out of the city beneath its smog sea.

  There is a bronchial cough from the seats at the back.

  Turning, I glimpse him, catching his eye, wishing I hadn’t.

  Every part of the city has a few of them; minor populations with minds way ahead of their bodies. Brains born too early, that’s their problem, rather than the usual mush of backfiring popcorn synapses, these ones have wonderful arthritic Escher designs for frontal lobes, cerebellums like spiral staircases. Their dendrites are stars of chaos, conducting neuron nova orchestras in Dadaist symphonies. The hospitals house many of them, but a few manage to pick the locks and buckles that strain to hold them still.

  His matted hair is home to an assembly of dust and dandruff. He holds out hands that, at first, appear wormy and diseased. Then, I see they are clothed in a child’s mittens. His fingernails are dry things, blood scabs across pink and gnarled ochre. His beard is a patchy growth of flecking wires, clinging to him as if it does not come from him.

  “Got a quid, mate?”

  His eyes are the dying eyes of a starving animal abandoned on a desert plain. Filigrees of cataract make them coarse and striated and, as I watch, the eyes recede. They’re not his, after all. One was bloodshot and one was small, dainty and blue. He took them from others. The sockets they leave behind are damp glory holes cut into the cheap chipboard of a public toilet cubicle.

  Then, they come out. Bundles of feelers grown from the hacked and borrowed meat that makes him up, puckering cyst-sick tissue and raddled, raw knots crawl out of his head and come my way, slithering over torn seating and rust-spawn rails. His lips are twitching, gummed shut by a mottled texture of brownish gick. He heaves himself along with heroin hands, grubbily studded with the weeping holes of old, forgotten injections; the feelers exhale a phlegmy expectorant.

  If you’ve ever walked down a city street, a cack-ridden back alley, then you’ve crossed his path, that reek of rot-fat bananas and day-old jism is his calling card. He’s moving slow as you like towards me, without hurry. The air between us is a glycerine syrup he has conjured from some dream-time, stretching out the seconds, making more suff
ering space for me. It clings to him, leaving him wet and excited. In my pockets, I fumble for my salvation, a scuffed Bic lighter, red faded to pink, cracks and snaps in my fingers as I try to light it. Metal scoots over metal, refusing to catch, to ignite. He is grinning, giggling, licking his chops, tasting airborne spoor of fear, emptiness, despair.

  Flame leaps from my hands. Youching, I chuck it. Bomb it at him and duck, volatile air shrieks and blisters, he bats and slaps at himself, a sudden inferno, billowing, sizzling, flapping feebly as if to fly away from pain. If only. Then, gone, leaving slight soot-stains where he stood, charred ozone stinging my nostrils.

  Inhaling deep, I taste the opiate of his dead dreams.

  Creosote and old spice soak in through the glass. Run down rain that won’t last, hurricanes not due ‘til January. Dried semen opals rattle around my toes, hiding in crushed cans and empty bags of stolen sweets. Suicides hang from railway bridges and high school gates, their homemade gibbets rattle and tear in the screaming breeze. Overcast night, devil bright eyes, crystal tears settle on the silvered lips of mothers widowed from their children. They shuffle in segmented prayer, dripping sorrows down the drains. The sewers are a wailing iron-web calling out to them, its sad, aimless spiders, high on valium, growing cemetery warts. No predatory zeal, no killer instinct, no love required, not when there’s a microwave dinner waiting warmly and there's Goldfinger on the telly.

  The way home is full darkness with bowing street lamps trailing mottled streams of light, spilling their luminous guts, burning through the night. I navigate by them, stepping through icky three-in-the-morning slush. I feel the chitin opening itself, letting loose those unthinkable feelings that do not smooth out over time. I dance from light hole to light hole. Heading on home. The air ripples with a febrile tension because this is their city, not ours. It is merely haunted by us. We are the aberration, parasites scuttling over the body we have poisoned, unhappily hungry, begging to it for wealth and power. We are so petty and small in our whining, they are sick of us, incessant us. They advance on us with shining, sticky hands, dripping with the deposits left by the masturbatory ferocities that grip them in the draughty bus-shelters of the afterlife.

  This city belongs to the dead.

  There’s an atheist in the church and all eyes are on him. He approaches the altar with outstretched, subordinate hands. His eyes downturned. His steps shuffle, mutter then curse. Then he comes to an end.

  There’s a place called The Shop and you can get everything there. Good price. Low price. Cut price. That is, everything you don’t want. Why would you want something you don’t want? That’s what you’re thinking but is that not what we want all our lives long? Things to fall over at home, ever-increasing hoards of rubbish, snapping, splintering, breaking-down clinkered heaps of microchip, beads, plastic, perished rubber and wood.

  So in we go, into The Shop.

  Marching in, we tick the box on the disposable card-strip and stand patiently in line. Our faces serene, unlined and our guts gurgle, our throats are in turmoil, so eager, expectant. We know what’s coming, what the assistants will bring to us, place in our hands, hurriedly. Look at us askance, plead with their eyes for us to take it away. They wipe their hands on their tunics to erase the wet electric sensation of having touched our purchase.

  They try to look away but are drawn back to stare at it. The softly shifting dimensions of it, the out-of-focus outlines, patches of damp. Then, there is the way the vestigial limbs twitch and grow, fingers and toes recede and deform, according to the mood of the purchase. Stinking geriatric fuck-holes open and beg, embarrassingly, in public, to be fingered as we pass by. A slit opens, forming a lizardly eye from yellow putrescent jelly. The eye is soon overcome though, strangled to death by the bloodshot web of its capillaries. It makes such a mess when it pops like an old egg, the dripping remains of it giving birth to a rustling brood of white-haired whining spiders, which scatter to every dark corner.

  Some of the purchases are swathed in used hospital linens whilst others are stuffed into stapled-shut supermarket boxes, bandaged with reams of brown packing tape to keep the amniotic fluids in, as much as is possible. We hurry out. We are ashamed.

  The Shop is an odd place.

  Every city has one.

  Intersections and vivisections. You can cut and peel it how you like. Staple down the open flesh. Admire the naked meat from your favourite position. See it glisten, run with blood and shine under the surgical lamp-light. A scalpel, a rough guide and an idea where to start working on it. Hack work.

  Shit scared and nervous. Insects writhe on hot plates behind my eyes. Popping black popcorns leaking cartilage. I wear the same clothes and skin as ever. Thin and sickly hiding in pretentious heavy black. Passing into the office as an afterthought in the lower ganglion reaches of an unwanted HR assistant. Self-righteous malaria stalks the corridors on high heels with a face that implies deep-seated internal pain. The tap of the heels is the same tap as fingers on keyboard keys, as the rattle of a dismissal interview door handle. A mad monkey, red-eye wild, whoops and bangs on its glass cage.

  I collapse into a thousand shivering neuro-statics. Slip into the deep, dark shit of human existence. In high colour, I’m out. Found out. Seen for what I am. Better out than in. Sad grey eyes follow me and my fear, staring from cemetery cells, redundancy graveyards, butcher’s yards of abattoir-fed fools. Take us with you. Out of this place. This corporate cut-out Hell fermenting in the sulphur of Financial Times hues. Theft and murder are the pandemics uncured by the patient, high-born sodomisers who stride the steel, oil and plastic-made spaces of restructured disaster.

  Sit back, I say, sit back and relax, my friends.

  An ice-cold Coke’s the cure.

  Taste sick dizziness, lose some sleep.

  Give yourself something to worry about.

  The world can wait.

  His throat is hanging open. His belly is trailing its tacky ropes, kindly smiling without teeth. He jiggles and jingles the battered tin cup that he begs with, stroking the dead dog lying across his lap. The dog’s gums are fleeing from its teeth. Eyes hardening into crispy nuggets of black and white. Soon, the vermin will have eaten away the skin and shown a bit more bone. Whatever else remains, the tramp can have a nibble on.

  Them’s the rules, you see.

  The tramp has been dead for about a week. His jaw is loose, his beard is coming off in faminous clumps and the dog died maybe a day or two longer ago than that. I remember seeing him cock his leg and piss thick blood about a month ago. Today, stiff zombie fingers rake and stir through the thinning hound’s fur, a rib tip punctures wasting flesh, a fish-hook end. The tramp runs a coarse finger along it, making music, licking off a clear, corrupt fluid. I nod his way and he smiles at me.

  We look after one another.

  Know what I mean?

  This is my workplace and I am finally accepting that it is my asylum. The air echoing with cries and despair. I sit lower in my cubicle, hoping not to be seen. My fingers work against the keyboard, turning red numbers to black. My workplace is staffed by the living and the dead. The sick and bizarre truth being that the dead are the better workers; they don’t sleep, their brains are dead so you can leave them to work through the night. Grey, speckly masks staring into the flicker of their computer monitor screens, walking away from the building, sometimes, you look back over your shoulder. You see it lit from within by epileptic, high-definition ghosts. They scamper and writhe about as dead bodies go to and then fro, disturbing the flow of artificial light. From desk to photocopier to fax to confidential recycling bin, best workers in the world, you see, because their brains are shot. Gone. Stone dead. They’re not as interesting as the zombies you see in films because if you’re dead, you don’t want to do anything, never mind eat the brains of the living.

  What would be the point?

  No reason to do it. No more than there would be for them to wander about, arms outstretched or to snarl, make a sound at all. No, the
dead are quiet. They smell bad, eggs and old cheese, sometimes they leak and no-one wants to clean the stains up. The dead don’t care what state they’re in.

  Again, why would they?

  No reason to, no more than there would be for them to remember where they lived. Dead means brain dead. Nobody home. It means don’t care, don’t know, don’t want, don’t need. I envy them that despite the emerging fact that they’ll do us all out of work. Sometimes, you look back over your shoulder and see those tell-tale eyes; receding, dried-out apricot pits and the beehive-husk brains behind them looking back, out from the black, at you. Holding your gaze with a mere suggestion of intelligence, recognition, perception. Something’s in there, inside those dead heads, it knows what it’s doing. Someone I work with for a long time, never knew their name, they dropped dead yesterday. I know, terrible thing to happen, right? You know what the first question was? The one that everyone asked?

  “When’ll he be back at work then?”

  Tonight I have tried to become one of the dead. I’ve cleaned all the matter from my fingers and hands. There’s blood everywhere, I can feel the mattress squelching, wet with love. I hold shivering white bones up to the moonlight and try to move them but there's too much pain. It fills every inch of me and everything in my surroundings is in me. It takes the form of hump-backed goblins, their stilted faces splashed with the bleached glee of badly-animated shadows. The angles lean and bite at me with whittled edges, a song escapes me, thin and reedy with melancholy. I whistle its tune, hoping to dissipate the pain, but the melody breaks and so do I.

  This bed, this room, get to the outside, I can’t do a thing with my hands though. I look at the door handle. The key, loose-tongued in the lock. The glistening spaghetti and scraped sticks sting and whimper. I make up a number with the clogging blood, I dab at the emptiness before me. I watch the number I have made hang there, dripping down. A click, a creak and the door opens. The number, mine, dissolves into copper mist.