by Michael Gira
Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
THE CONSUMER (1993-1994) EMPATHY
THE DOG
THE COWARD (II)
WHY I ATE MY WIFE
THE ORGY
THE CONSUMER, ROTTING PIG 1) MY PRESCRIPTION FOR HAPPINESS, BY THE ROTTING PIG
2) HOW I LEARNED TO SPEAK, BY R.P.
3) NOTES ON COITUS, BY R.P.
4) HOMAGE TO MY FORMER SELF, BY R.P.
THE YOUNG MAN THAT HID HIS BODY INSIDE A HORSE, OR, MY VULVIC LOS ANGELES
THE SEX MACHINE
THE MUTE DWARF SINGS
HOW I LOVE HER
THE GREAT ANNIHILATOR, or, FRANCIS BACON’S MOUTH
IF I WERE HIM
A SACRIFICE
DEFLOWERED
THE YOUNG BOY
VARIOUS TRAPS, SOME WEAKNESSES, ETC. (1983 - 1986) A CONTRACT
BLOODSUCKER
A WOMAN
YOU
THE INITIATE
THE IDEAL WORKER
THE WHORE BOY
DEFEATED
A MAN
RAPING A SLAVE
BLIND
THE BOSS
A COWARD
A GRAVE
A TRAP
ANOTHER TRAP
A GAME
MONEY’S FLESH
BASTARD
A SCREW
PUNISHMENT
BAPTIZED
FEEDING THE ANIMAL
HER ONLY LOVE
HIS CHILDISH GAMES
SOME WEAKNESSES
THE CAREGIVER
DAYDREAMS
THREE NURSERY TALES
TELEPATHY
FRIENDS
I’M AN INFANT, I WORSHIP HIM
Dedication Page
About the Author
Praise for The Consumer
Copyright
THE CONSUMER
(1993-1994)
EMPATHY
When my sister was released from the mental hospital, she came to live with me in the tilting and crumbling one-bedroom house I’d bought with the small amount of money I inherited when our parents died. She arrived one afternoon unannounced in a taxi. She must have known instinctively that I’d take her in. I don’t know how or why they released her. Probably due to overcrowding, and they had her scratch her name on a form, then pushed her out the door. Or maybe she just slipped away when no one was looking (who’d notice in a place like that?) — she never did tell me and I didn’t ask her. I was so happy to have her with me again that the last thing I wanted to do was break the spell by letting reality intrude. Ever since they’d dragged her away weeping with laughter and reaching out for me with our parents’ blood still coating her hands with shiny red gloves, I’d felt amputated, like they’d pulled her kicking and screaming and insane out of my guts.
My house sat beside the freeway in a cluster of upright rectangles laid out in an orderly but grimy grid directly beneath the flight path of the LAX. The living quarters formed the upper half of the rectangle, squatting on top of an open-faced garage. As the relentless chorus of rising and falling howls pounded down on the house from above, the garage would resonate with a deep rumble like a kettle drum, rattling the flimsy stucco walls and sending an accordion of low-frequency sound waves surging through the slat wooden floors.
Sometimes, before my sister came to me, I'd stand naked in the center of the floor for hours, dreaming of her and feeling the house rocking and resonating up through my bare feet into my bones, as if my body were a hollow bell, tuned and vibrating in perfect sympathy with the frequencies that coursed through the world outside. My blood hummed with pleasure. She was singing through me, calling out to me over the distance from her cell, forgiving me my secrets and washing my mind clean. But the air inside my house smelled foul, like the inside of my body, as if I’d extruded a growing shell out the pores of my skin and I was now huddled inside it, stinking and rotting and feeling sorry for myself because I couldn’t be near her.
I never went outside anymore, except to buy alcohol and meat. I’d get drunk, loosening my attachment to myself, and I’d eat the meat raw, pretending it was my sister, planting her flesh inside my stomach so she could grow inside me and live through me, like a cancer. When they sentenced her to that place, my own life started to drain out of my body immediately. As I walked away from the courtroom out into the poison sun of Los Angeles, I felt the light shooting straight through my eyes into my skull unfiltered, causing a tumor to grow in the center of my brain. The tumor was shaped like a rose and its petals were as sharp as razorblades. With each new thought, a petal would spiral away from the body of the flower and slice a passageway through the meat of my brain, slowly boring out large sections of my identity.
I hadn’t seen her in three years when she arrived. It was the middle of summer. A constant regurgitation of corrosive yellow soot spilled out over the houses from the elevated freeway, burning my skin and eyes and tinting the neighborhood with a golden pigment that sparkled like sharkskin in the sun. The heat clung to the smog. It was heavy and painful going down into my chest, infesting my body with toxins with each breath. I was mildly drunk, sitting inside the house with the lights off and the curtains closed, sweating. I watched the blank screen of the television reflect the glow of my cigarette and imagined the hovering red ember was me, and I lived in the arid world of tubes and electronics behind the glass.
I heard a horn blaring up from the driveway. I looked out the window and saw her in the back of the cab, sitting up rigid, looking around, confused, uncertain what was supposed to happen next, maybe not even sure she’d come to the right address. She squirmed in her seat as if it were alive and she were trying to escape its grip. She seemed to have forgotten she could simply open the door and get out. Her hair was stringy and matted to her head, so shiny with grease she might have just stepped out of a shower. She yanked at the strands that stuck to her forehead, plucking at them with pinched fingers as if they were long black worms she didn’t want to touch. But she still looked beautiful to me. Her neck extended high and elegant, like a swan, just like our mother’s neck before she cut it open. It presented her face, like a smooth white oval sculpture on a sleek pedestal. It was the face of a superior, chosen being, with eyes so black and flooded with cruelty and remorseless intelligence that when I looked down at her now, I felt like I’d always felt when she was near me, like a cringing, one-dimensional cut-out figure — a second-hand shadow peeled up from the outline she cast on the world.
The driver hit his horn again and looked up annoyed at the parted curtain in the window. But I stood hypnotized, watching her lower lip tremble exactly as I remembered it used to do when we’d lie naked on the cool sheets of her bed, locked inside her room as our parents slept, caressing each others’ electrified skin with the peacock feathers we’d collected from the fields beyond the back yard. Her lip was a shuddering animal then, and she taught me to bite it and play with it and torture it, as if I were a predator and it was my game.
I ran down the stairs, drugged with happiness. The memories of our life together congealed, then broke like an egg in my throat, spreading her helplessness through me and charging me with strength. I fumbled in my pockets as I tried to pay the driver. She got out of the cab, bunching her eyes up defiantly against the sun, as if daring it to try to slap her down with a wave of smog and heat. She stood shaking in her pink institutional bathrobe and slippers. One of her legs was meticulously shaved and polished with cream so that it reflected the sun like pale pink marble. But the other leg looked like something freshly dug up that had been decaying while buried in the dirt. It thrust down into the light from beneath her robe like a simian arm creeping out from a dark damp cave. It was covered in a coarse f
ur that stopped abruptly at the delicate bones of her ankle, as if the blood beneath this tighter skin was too thin to fertilize its growth. The skin beneath the fur was a gangrenous reptilian hide, shedding patches of white scales that adhered to the hairs and flickered in the sun like sprinkled flakes of pearl.
She leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek. Her lips were cold and wet. I felt myself weakening. I smelled something decomposing beneath her robe, like the smell of my own trapped insides. When she pulled away from her kiss, a silver thread of her spit connected us, strung like a fragile translucent nerve between our skins. It moved with the heat that rose up from the white concrete driveway. I felt her love pulsing through the liquid wire into my mind, telling me secrets and injecting me with her loneliness.
Her robe had opened slightly with her shaking. A breast sat matter-of-factly exposed, plump and vulnerable in the sun. The cab driver noticed it but pretended he didn’t see it, and so did I for a second — I could feel the pliant nipple between my teeth, sucking the sweet healing milk into my mouth. I finished paying the slimy bastard and told him to get the hell off my property. I pulled her robe closed and helped her up the stairs.
We stood on the landing just outside the door and leaned on the rotted wooden railing, looking out across the freeway. The haze was a thick veil of brown blood. I held her close to me. The sky was a dull blanket pressing down on us, not leading up into space but defined in-close by the wall of sound and vapors directly above us. The air stuck to our faces like syrup. The bellies of the airplanes passed so close overhead they were like the undersides of giant boats seen from beneath the water. As they glided over us, moaning and shaking the house, we could see the faces of the passengers looking down at us in wonder, as if we were miniature animated mannequins in a sprawling amusement park landscape.
I reached my arm out towards the freeway. She followed it with her eyes. It was raised up to the same height as us, so near I could almost touch the guard rail. But the drivers in their cars, tightly sealed in the air-conditioned environment behind their windows, were traveling in their capsules through another world, completely enclosed, as if the glass walls of an aquarium separated us from them.
She laid her head on my shoulder as we watched. Her tears soaked through my shirt and stung my skin like acid. I kissed her moist forehead and noticed her eyes scanning back and forth with the passing cars. She was trying to make eye-contact with each driver as they scrolled past us. Trolling rays of concentrated hatred shot out from her eyes as she tried to connect with their unguarded minds. If anyone had met her gaze, she would have instantly boiled the grey sponge behind their eyes. But no one would look at us. The world beyond the freeway was invisible.
Inside the house, it was dark. As our eyes adjusted to the absence of light, the details of the room emerged, slowly advancing in the darkness like lost memories approaching through a fog. She stood in the center of the room and spun her body in a circle, reaching her fingers out for the air like a sorceress conjuring up a hidden world, sucking my essence into herself through mouths cut into her fingertips. Gradually my weakness without her revealed itself to both of us. The hollowed husks of the bodies that I’d shed hung from hooks secured in the joists of the ceiling, dripping down in rows throughout the house, melting in the trapped heat and darkness and saturating the air with their rotting, like lilies wilting in a suppurating garden.
My sister let her robe fall to the floor. Her flesh grew up out of the offal and blood iridescent, like a night flower straining towards the moon. She danced nude among the entrails and garbage and beer bottles as if she were wading joyously through a foaming red sea. The scent of her insides seeped out from beneath her skin into the closed air of the room, gradually augmenting and replacing the smell of my misery with the familiar balm of her glands, a perfume so close to the smell of my own body, I was drawn to it like a species of insect honing in on its queen. Her face radiated a submerged glow like a magical orb stealing stored light and heat from its surroundings. I flowed into her. The energy my body contained was sucked through a stream into her eyes. She held out her arms and enfolded me in a kiss that both drained me and simultaneously filled me with a warmth I recognized as her life seeping into me. Her tongue was a velvet slug that burrowed into my mouth, then wound down my throat into my intestines, where it prepared the nest where she would grow.
She loosened my pants, cooing the same song into my ear she’d sung to me when we were children, like a secret greeting-call, long forgotten. My exposed erection burned against the cold oily skin of her stomach. I was hardened by her strength. She’d reached into me and was flexing inside me. As the first spasms of hot white fluid jerked out of me, she cupped me in her hands and guided the flow across her belly, smearing it up onto her breasts and over her neck and face, sealing herself inside a second crust of skin, like a nascent cocoon standing upright in a sunless forest of pendulous flesh.
We nailed the doors of our house closed from the inside. She lives on the meat and blood growing everywhere around us. The sun filters through the closed curtains like urine. She probes and crawls through my guts, mining me. I’m an inert object, but I come alive with her touch. Each time she finishes fucking me, less of me remains in my body. Soon I’ll be emptied — a dead shell of loose skin, like the others. The sounds of the traffic and the airplanes passing overhead beat against the walls and soak the insides of this house with pleasure. We’re coming, lodged in the bowels of the world as it screams. I’m moving into her, so I feel good. I’m vivid and flooded with love, dissolving like a breath steaming in the cold air, hovering. My sister is inhaling me into her body, digesting me.
(1994)
THE DOG
The two boys sat on rocks in the dry streambed that emptied into the wide black mouth of the drainage pipe. The blond boy dug with a stick into the stones and pebbles on the floor of the bed, revealing a greasy damp layer of fine sand mixed with bits of colored plastic and broken glass. The fertile smell of trapped urine and polluted gutter water rose up from the fresh tear in the hardened surface. Giant reeds of wild grass and bamboo formed a meshed jungle wall on either side of the bleached rocks. Woven into the dense latticework of foliage were dried tumble-weeds, yellowing newspapers, the shredded unraveling pink sweater of a child, a rotted bird carcass crucified in the weeds, a torn and faded tennis shoe — all washed or thrown in towards the drainage ditch from the road above. The road crawled with an unbroken chain of traffic that stretched from horizon to horizon and gushed a low-hanging mixture of dust and opaque black exhaust.
The older boy squatted high on his rock like a starved panther. His long black hair gleamed with sweat, smeared and glued to his purple leather cheeks. He sprinkled an industrial solvent from a can onto a rag and covered his face with it. Sucking the fumes deep into his lungs, he held them in as he stared vacantly into the oily blackness of the pipe, unconsciously fanning his face with his hand to keep the growing cloud of gnats from landing on his tear ducts or lips. He passed the can to the blond boy, stood, and spread his wiry body out into an X across the face of the tunnel, just barely able to grab the upper circumference with his fingers as his mind spun and drained into the vibrating patterns that formed in the cool blackness before him. As the younger one inhaled the fumes in an exaggerated show of seriousness, like an asthmatic desperate for breath or a diver coming up for air, the older one wailed nasally into the pipe, like a demented foghorn droning notes that bent from one pitch to another without discernible pattern, echoing with a gradually disappearing springing-sound into the abyss. The younger one collapsed backwards among the rocks, his body sprawled out in incongruously wild angles, like an epileptic frozen in mid-seizure then drugged into a stupor where he lay. He looked up through the permanent curtain of matted and greasy hair that hung across his eyes into the diffusing white sun that seared through the veil of dirt and smog down to his place in the streambed, engulfing him, then spitting him out, cackling gibberish in a burst of numb and blindi
ng flames. He found himself standing, swaying perilously on a large rock, watching his friend disappear down into the blackness like a long-legged spider sinking into its hole.
Following the resonant click of his friend’s bootheels and adding to it the responding clicking of his own, he descended into the pipe, guiding himself with one hand along the cold ridged wall and carrying the rag and can in the other. After just a few feet, the light that sifted in from the entrance was swallowed completely and the darkness around them was total, snubbing out with its sheer weight any possible memory or connection to the outside world. In regular short intervals, they stopped and squatted side-by-side against the curved metal walls, passing the rag and can back and forth. The blackness writhed with hallucinated creatures and phosphorescent rushes of color, swirling and lacing through the enclosed snaking void that ran beneath the endless industrial complexes and the chaos and dust of the ruined city.
After a half hour of descending mindlessly, they came to a joint in the tunnel where another pipe led off emptily to the right at a steep upward angle. They felt it pumping dense hot air down into the main tunnel. At first, they explored this new blackness, but the increasing steepness of the incline and the growing presence of a noxious odor — a mixture of burning plastic, viciously stinging chemicals, and organic human or animal waste — augmented their fear of losing their way and they inched backwards to their original course. Soon after, as they slowly spiraled down, randomly howling and shouting echoes into the dead silence, they heard a distant low rumble building behind them. As it increased in intensity to a roar, the older one barked at the younger one to jump onto his back and hold on. Spread out as a single creature, the younger one clinging like a blind infant sloth to its mother’s back, the older one pressed out with all his strength against the metal spiral. They screamed but heard nothing as the torrent of filth engulfed them up to their necks. A rage of liquid chemicals, mixed with blood and offal, rushed with impossible force against their backs, trying to pull them under. Small chunks of tin, metal shavings, soft clumps of fecal matter, and once the ensnarling full length of a cow’s intestines, washed over them — the regular overflow of waste from the factories and slaughterhouses above.