by Michael Gira
When my wife and I joined our bodies together, I fell into her body and wore her skin like a rubber sheath. She protected me from the outside. Because she’s dead now, I’m certain to be eaten soon. I’m a skinless body, my muscles drying in the sun. I feel myself shrinking.
I used her as a process, a system through which we could blend with matter beyond our selfish thoughts. When her hand stroked my leg, when her mouth wet my skin, the arousal I experienced was the first wave of a current which would ultimately erase us both. I love her more than I need my own identity. Though her body lies here on the table before me, I don’t need to open my eyes to see it in detail, to feel it physically saturate my senses. Love allows microbes and viruses to pass through my body without resistance. In loving her, I lose the will to live. If I eat her body now, I’ll take her back into myself. But with each mouthful I swallow, I’ll remove a commensurate amount of myself.
Her fragrance lifts up shimmering above her in a mist and flavors the air with honey. Her breasts have now begun to slide down the hill of her ribs, rotting, no longer firm with arrogance or inflated with the promise of fertility. The nipples I once took into my mouth and sucked and chewed, stand straight as if in defiance against the retreat of the body of her breast down her side. Gravity is pulling her down into itself like quicksand. Her belly is shifting, emitting obscure demonic incantations from inside its depths as it breeds gas while decomposing. Looking down at her open mouth, I can still remember the taste, the slightly caramel flavor of her saliva, and feel the rubbery resistance of her tongue slipping into my mouth, circling across my teeth, wrapping itself around my tongue. But now, an open cave in her face displays the dead thick leather tongue like the cadaver of a beached sea mammal, crawled into the dark space of her mouth to hide from the sun and the swarming flies. Her lips, which were once a rare fruit I sucked for juice, are now shriveled and cracked like a dried apricot. Her eyes stare back up at me, searing my face with corrosive acid. My tears drain slowly down the corners of my eyes, thick as mineral oil.
Seven days ago, she stood secretly in the doorway of our bedroom watching me, curled in the bed reading, unaware of her presence, until she had silently approached and breathed warm breath against the back of my neck. Now her flesh lies here devoid of gesture or empathy, reduced down to a process, like yeast reacting to water. The molecules that comprise her body are moving, detaching from one another, rearranging and dissipating into the surrounding chemical stew of biology, no longer held together by the adhesive material of her individual will. I feel my own body churning with particles, genetic material, atoms, parasites....
The smell of her sex crawls into the womb inside my brain where it gestates, forming a perfect memory, a hard red core of impossible lust that glows and warms my thoughts. I bend down to her for a last futile kiss. The inside of her mouth excretes a sticky white glue that smells as if it came from a place deep in the earth — a cache of animal compost hidden in a lightless tomb. I take a serrated kitchen knife and remove her fingers carefully, catching the draining fluids on a white bath towel. I eat these possessed fragments of her soul with empirical care, transfixed by her unblinking eyes. I’m intoxicated with the finality of her memory and the transmission of her taste, odor, and texture into my mind and body.
As weeks pass, each day brings the ingestion of another piece of her essence. As the substance of her being enters me, I’m transformed into an entity beyond myself, and beyond her too. This evolution is just the first step in my own slow decomposition, as I blend with the infinite organisms that will in turn feed on me, ultimately mixing me with the atmosphere ...
(1993)
THE ORGY
Watching the performance of the children across the room, the members of the orgy inched forward slightly in their seats and released a sigh of appreciation. The naked boy and girl were kissing, sitting up with straight backs, like two attentive students overcome with sudden passion. The girl was stroking the boy’s erect penis, lightly with the tips of her fingers, as if it were a frightened bird, poised in his lap. The members of the orgy turned up the corners of their mouths in a communal leer as the blood flowed to their own genitals in empathetic response.
As the girl sank to her knees, gently fellating the arching boy, the spectators inhaled fully, drawing in the drifting sexual aroma the children exuded, towards them from across the distance. They could taste the intoxicating juice concealed just beneath the tender surface of the children’s pale clear skin, could see the blood and muscle radiating in pink hues through the smooth milky film. Absorbing the spectacle with the abstracted engagement of an audience hypnotized by the light of a television screen, they moistened their lips, smearing them with an attractive sheen. These glossy strips of meat — plump with collagen injections — now whispered appraisals of the young lovers’ anatomy, detailing possible uses for their innocent bodies as the scene unfolded before them. They massaged each other with scented oils as they watched, more interested in the visual effect of the oil on their skin than the sensations it produced.
Soon the spectators were laminated with a thin coat of sweat and oil like clear vinyl. Their tanned skin gleamed like the shellacked hard outer shells of expensive automobiles. The abdominal walls of the men were as solid as knuckles. The women’s thighs were sleek and tensed with strength and shone like the flanks of straining horses. Arranging their bodies comfortably over the luxurious suede furniture, they spread their hewn limbs out in languorous poses, consciously imitating the idealized models displayed like Greek athletes in the mirrored pages of the upscale consumer magazines through which they now browsed. They sat masturbating lazily as they shifted their eyes from the magazines to the boy and girl, performing for them there on the carpet.
The girl was splayed out on her stomach as the boy thrust deeply in from the rear, kissing and chewing the back of her neck with what appeared to be genuine affection. With each thrust, the girl pressed back towards the boy, as if she were trying to open herself further with each encounter, trying to bring his body inside her entirely. She twisted her face up and around to him, and he locked his open mouth against hers. They seemed to be breathing life into each other as they kissed, their joined bodies writhing in a circle of heat and blood that flowed unfettered between them, like a single creature in the thralls of its metamorphosis, gorging itself on its own nourishing plasma.
The spectators’ arousal spread through their bodies like alcohol burning into the walls of an empty stomach. They curled their toes in the lush abundance of the white mohair carpet as they stroked and fingered between their legs. Their lips pursed silent words, opening like red velvet curtains onto arsenals of bleached polished teeth that stood in even rows like white credit cards, slicked with thick saliva. They rolled the spit in their mouths, building it up — they’d use it later to lubricate the sensitive edges of a torn and abused orifice, or to temporarily soothe the sting of a freshly described wound.
Later, it would please the members of the orgy to imagine the children were enjoying the rigors of their ordeal, which tonight would finally cross the line from extended sexual games to murder and blood. But for now, unaware themselves of the evening’s eventual outcome, they let the moment draw itself out, watching the boy and girl on the floor as they embraced, as if they actually loved each other, and were tragically aware they were holding each other for the last time.
(1994)
THE CONSUMER, ROTTING PIG
It’s 100 degrees in my room. There’s no windows here. The air conditioner’s always on and blows in hot moldy air. I leave it on because the thick ripe quality of the air feels good — it’s alive, creatures breed in it. The mechanical droning and rattling of the machine drown out any sounds that might otherwise infiltrate from the street — out in the sickening yellow sunlight.
I’m in my bed under the covers — the flattened damp quilt, the nappy brown blanket, the mushy sheets infested with crumbs and half-eaten pieces of candy. My smell is trapped and insul
ates my sweating body. My head protrudes from beneath the covers like a severed pig’s head on the pillow. The light is off so the darkness is black and solid, made more physical by the density of the heat and smell. But the television is always on, sending a tunnel of light boring towards me through the darkness, flashing spectral shadows and signaling to me the infinite wonders of the universe. I feel myself communing with everyone from here inside my hole. I’m part of the infinite mind. My huge eyes, like polished black stones set in rubbery pig's flesh, are fixed greedily on the fanfare of images on the screen, none of which I recognize as relating to anything beyond itself, as it exists there, formed by the light. The “face of a man”, for instance, is not the face of a man — it’s a discrete form with its own life emanating and constantly transformed by light. I’m not aware of myself watching it. I’m afraid to move because I don’t want to destroy the balance. I’ve manipulated myself into losing control of myself but I'm also able to remain aware of the loss of control and derive pleasure from it, like an extension of the second just before an orgasm. I can see my soul hovering there in front of me in the flood of light and color, above the dull matter of my body. It’s an animate cloud, a swarm of demon insects, bad breath made visible. It’s sucking into itself like light and matter retreating into the vortex of a black hole. It slips into the drain behind the air, a disgusting blubbery white fetus with insatiable needs.
I’m melting, a mound of fat in the heat. The fat hangs off my body in great slabs, shifting with each breath like the tectonic plates of the earth responding to a subterranean disturbance. My eyes don’t blink. They take everything in but also reflect back out like black mirrors. My breathing is a deliberate act. If I don’t concentrate, I’ll suffocate. I feel everything. The thin layer of sweat that coats my body serves to increase my efficiency in conducting electricity. I’m an amoebic, flabby version of Frankenstein’s monster, laid out on my slab, drawing the howling chaos of the universe into myself, driven forward by its power like a sentient corpse bent on revenge. I’m hungry as a tapeworm in my black and flashing stomach-room.
A shadow figure on the wall is cutting off the head of a little boy. The huge and looming murderer is holding up the head like a Viking showing off a war trophy. He’s swinging the head above him by the hair. Shadow-blood flies through the air in a black swirl. A handful of the boy’s brains land in my face like warm cottage cheese. There’s a fisheye close-up of a terrified eye in the TV screen. An oiled young stud does sit-ups on his Soloflex machine, eviscerates himself with an impossibly honed and gleaming kitchen knife, flings his dangling intestines over his shoulder like a sashaying transvestite in a mink stole and walks straight into a day school room full of naked shit-smeared children, who devour him in a bloody tornado of razor-sharp teeth. They’re led away yapping and screeching like a pack of dogs on a multiple leash by their teacher, who wears a neon yellow leotard, purple high-heeled shoes, and has the slicked hard flesh of someone who obviously works out six hours a day herself...
Tomorrow I have to go outside and buy cleaning materials, disinfectant, rubber gloves. There’s blood and shit everywhere. My bedsores hurt. I stink. I have a neurotic fear of my heart exploding in my chest. My bed is rotted through in the center so that my rear sinks down into a living whirlpool of scum, the arcane entrance to another dimension, wherein everything rots perpetually. I don’t dare look under the bed. What horrible life forms are down there looking up at my filthy white globe?
My bed sits in the center of the room, a steaming sarcophagus in a dim pagan tomb. The television is on a platform at my feet, washing my swaddled and bloated living corpse with ethereal blue light. Looking to the left, the wall is covered with the desiccated shell-bodies of cockroaches. Each time I catch one (and there are thousands, millions living in the walls, under the floor, in the ceiling — I hear them shifting like the waves in the sea in my sleep), I dry it slowly at low temperature in the oven, then I pin it to the wall. The wall glistens in the flickering light with the sheen of their armor. I’ve pinned them in spiraling primitive shapes that map out the cosmos, landscapes, stars, jagged lightning bolts, skulls, knives, fat hermaphroditic fertility symbols. The designs are difficult to discern, due to the fact that everything is the same brown-on-brown color scheme, but they’re there, if you look closely. I watch the wall for hours each day, like a mandala. The dancing shadows of the television give the detailed beadwork of the wall a sense of grandiosity. I pretend I’m in a cave beneath a jungle burial ground examining, awestruck, an ancient African mural I’ve discovered, cool and perfectly preserved beneath the malarial humidity.
Turning my head to the right, I’ve made a wall which registers time. It’s the repository of the evidence of the incremental progress of my tenure here on earth. I expect others to find it someday, to spend years deciphering its code. It also relates in a more mundane fashion to the sexual fantasies that pass through me at random, haphazard confluences of images generated from the television, which I use functionally, like a primer, to set off a chain of chemical reactions inside the jelly-blob of my body. The result is a masterpiece, a wall which consists of hundreds of small glass vials, corked, and each containing an amber jeweled dose of my sperm. Each vial is labeled neatly with a coded typewritten description of the inspiration, and hence the necessary interpretation of, its contents, i.e., “Old lady covered in rags in park feeding pigeons in news magazine show about the homeless . . . I fumble beneath her dank wool dress, sniffing decay,” or, “Cut out heart of shirtless pouting rock-singer with washboard stomach on MTV and use it like an Acujack in my fist,” or, “Pepsi-sucking sex-goddess in skin-tight bathing suit puts out cigarette on my forehead while I kneel weeping and farting in the white-hot sand, naked, my raspberry bedsores like a hundred red eyes on my stretchmarked white baby flesh as the mob of California superhumans mock me from the volleyball court ... ” This wall is an archive, a monument, a sacred treasure, potentially capable of answering any question one puts to it, like the I Ching or the hidden libraries of Babylon. It’s growing, a living crystal relief sculpture, a physical cryptography of an infinitely peering mind. As it grows, it covers the surface of the wall like a glass fungus, reflecting the chaos of lights from the television like distant torches congregated at the dark edge of the earth. Conversely, it sometimes seems to stand out mute and resolute, an austere minimal slab, an implacable testament to the impenetrable phenomenology of time. Milk from my fat body, squeezed from my worm...
Sometimes I’m able to lose myself for days in here, drifting through a universe of disconnected images, shining flesh, brightly colored consumer products, blissfully escalating waves of anxiety. My mind is washed clean with light. I heroically refuse to allow any “real” memories or desires to enter me. I go with the flow, floating through the neon plastic stream, cannibalized and carcinogenic, my veins rushing with toxic chemicals. When I sleep, my dreams mingle with scenes generated from the screen, like sewage discharged into the black sea inside my room. Last night, for instance, in order to revenge the perceived indifference of my lover — a self-composed, confident, and buxom lawyer, as seen on a weekly “gritty and realistic” cop show — I stalked her as she walked a path through the chaparral in the hills of Topanga Canyon dressed in high heels and a power suit, searching for a used condom as evidence in a divorce case turned violent, her architecturally massive hair flowing in the dry baked breeze like the flag of an elite nation of gods. Then she turned, at first in shock at the sight of my glistening slugbody, but then facing me resolutely, mace in hand. But I was quick, and slid the butcher knife into her solar plexus, pushing it deeper with repeated force, grimacing coldly at the pleasure this gave me, and felt my erection growing with each thrust. As the flies gathered, not around her wounds as might be expected, but drawn instead to the sweet stink oozing from the expanding needle holes in my skin, I dug out a shallow recession in the dirt with my flipper-hands and covered her over, leaving the area around her cunt exposed. Then I fucked m
y lover through the dirt, my cock sliding into her mystery hole like a slithering white ferret. Birds chirped behind me. The wind sang in the thistles. A drunken spider crawled across my ankle. Bees sucked on the wildflowers. Worms screwed through the subsoil. A man in a shiny suit and perfect stiff hair licked my ass clean as I ejaculated. I woke up disgusted, lonely, satisfied, and more in love with my lawyer than ever... Another dream mingled with a daytime talk-scandal show. The subject was husbands who have lost their wives to cancer. I snickered at their misery and their whimpering compulsion to air their grief in public, as if seemless happiness was a gleaming product to which each consumer had a right, and it had now been stolen by an unwashed thief. Masturbating, I imagined stabbing each one of them, then fucking the knife holes. As the studio audience, dressed in uniform gold cashmere jogging suits, applauded, I came, washing us all away in a foaming sea of jism. They all drowned, bobbing to the surface, but I surfed the tide like an inflatable sow, racing through time with my cheeks flapping in the wind...
Every possibility can and will be realized, in every possible variation and nuance, subgroupings, opposites, mutations of mutations. The fact that I do or don’t exist exists itself simultaneously in mutual confirmation and negation. This means there’s a parallel world to this one, in all possible aspects and history the same as this one, except that in one instant it does or doesn’t include me. Or I have 20,000 hairs on my head instead of 19,999 etc. A world with creatures that have tongues growing out of their ears, working like the wings of giant birds, lifting them up into the crimson sky, pus shooting out in thick jets from the lubricated and masticating membranes in the backs of their heads. A river of blood in which infants are nurtured, flowing through the burning fields of steel grass, their succulent flesh harvested at the lake by cyclopean fat men with hooks for hands, all of them my identical shape except that they’re nimble and in a state of sustained ecstasy. My hands, suddenly prehensile and fifty-fingered, reach out into this scene from my bed and with a slurping sound, I snatch a pair of identical blond 13 year old twins, a boy and a girl, pulling them squirming into my cave. As they try to escape my gummy grip, I slam them to the bed and force my prelubed fists into their anuses, clutching and choking their guts as they scream in a lovely duet of harmonious agony and pleasure, their mingled arias as sensual and hypnotic as the soundtrack to a commercial for an eerily modern and seductive automobile. As my excitement increases, I’m fellated with savage but gooey fervor by the President of the United States, whom I casually reprimand for not slaughtering enough Germans in the recent race wars by gouging out his eyes as I ejaculate nitric acid into his belly....