by Michael Gira
The days ignited forward like phosphorous in his skull, searing hypervivid pictures into the membrane wall behind his eyes. Coruscating ghosts stalked him, circling catatonic, then froze in mid-motion, disintegrating into the air. As the hours flashed, seeping into days, he traced the textured walls with his palms opened like someone blind trying to define the descriptions of their enclosing world. In the negative dark instants of the strobing fixture, he saw shafts of grey-blue light shoot up through the slats in the floor, speckled with glittering dust motes like plankton drifting beneath the sea, the light of the projected film below shifting in his room like searchlights in the Hollywood night. Fragments of images — severed white spider hands, open mouths shaping silent words, ravaging dogs in a swirl of human guts, angel-winged corpses interlocking their tongues while fornicating, hovering like birds — all rose through the columns of light like torn souls escaping up through cracks in the ceiling of some purgatorial chamber. As the heat of the room soaked through his skin, he lay on the floor curled like a child, naked and sweating, his clothes bunched under his head for a pillow, his eyes wandering in and out of focus as the room flashed from dark to light as if the air itself was charged with crackling random explosions of electricity. Tendrils sprouted out from the ulcer in his stomach and attached themselves to the walls with suction cups, listening. A clear plastic freezer-bag full of powdered speed lay open on the floor by his face, overflowing as he scooped out treasures with his pocket knife and sucked them through a straw into his nose, where they exploded against his septum in numbing shots of pain like the solarized birth of a third eye .
*
A thunder at his door draws him out of a foaming pool of ecstasy. He unbolts the door, unaware of his nakedness. The manager and the goon stand snickering like slaughterhouse inspectors examining a hooked, skinned calf. He holds up his last handful of hundreds as a lure and manages to work his jaw into the configurations forming the words requesting a delivery of three cases of malt liquor, a few gallons of milk, and a large carton of toothpicks. They bleed down the stairs like purulence draining from a wound, giggling and conspiring like lepers or thieves at the base of a crucifixion. He stands there limp, unaware of time passing until they return. They slide the delivered goods across the floor, twisting their faces in disgust at the fecal thickness of the air within. The young man gives them the last of his money. The manager notices the rising pile of shit on the floor in the corner but shrugs, then leads the way back down the stairs. The goon and the manager mumble, then laugh as they descend, like hunters who’ve captured their prey after an arduous chase and are now finally cutting the terrified creature’s throat, the blood pumping out over their hands and the lightning flashing against the dense black sky behind them.
When he feels his mind about to diffuse and disappear completely between his fingers, he drinks the beer. When he feels his body melting into delirium, he inhales more speed. The shots of white pain at the center of his head correspond in subliminal rhythms with the bolts of light/dark whipping through the room. He drinks the milk to keep the ulcer from expanding beyond the walls of his stomach, and replacing him like a pregnant woman eaten by her cannibal child from within.
He stands entranced at the mirror above the sink as time stretches through him in jolts of plasmatic light. He digs at his mouth with the toothpicks, sure something is living beneath his gums. He works at a spot above an incisor where the pink flesh has pulled away in a flap. He probes beneath it, scraping and jabbing with the wooden picks. His face is a smeared elastic reflection in the mirror, light then dark, light then dark, as if time were passing here in this room, accelerating day and night like images printed on a deck of cards fanning out before his eyes. The creature between his teeth eludes him. He digs deeper, spearing its tail with a pick, but it escapes, burrowing further beneath the bleeding gum. He serrates and slices the gums away bit by bit, methodically over the days, working tirelessly until eventually his teeth are raw in his mouth and his face is swollen up like an expanding balloon. His lips are inflamed and bruised purple where he’s stretched and abraded them trying to get at the secret caves behind his blood-smeared fangs. The sink fills with piles of gory picks. In the flaring light they look like something come upon suddenly illumined while rounding a corner in a complex of lightless tunnels in a dusted underground tomb.
He lays on his back looking up at the sparking fluorescent tubes. The ropes of dust and nicotine sway with the rising waves of heat. The muscle in his jaw tenses suddenly into a fist, pushing and straining to get out of his face. The sinews and tendons in his neck seize up in sympathy. A clenching rush of paralysis spreads down through his shoulders to his arms and to his fingers until finally he lays there rigid as a corpse, curled on his back like a dead insect. The light surges up through the floor around him, swelling up between the slats in brilliant flecked columns that project his shadow scuttling across the curved pink ceiling like a massive frenetic cockroach, the real silhouette of his soul traced in flashes. Little trickles of music like glass chimes beneath the sea float through the room as if the glittering dust was singing. Then a pounding somewhere shaking the earth beneath him. The earth is flesh as it heaves, punished by a giant fist. It echoes moistly through glinting canyons of flesh. The walls expand and contract, the pink inflated sacks breathing like a thin and translucent giant pink frog’s throat. His body inhabits the room like a parasite, changing shape as he flicks from light to dark, as if the room itself were imagining the variety of shapes his body might take. A trickling stream of yellow matter threaded with red veins runs out his rectum and forms an expanding pool, reflecting flashes on the floor. His throat constricts and a thimble-full of trapped stomach acid spills from his mouth and rests by his cheek in a frothing pink blossom. He presses his ear to the floor and hears a cackling from below, like ravenous ghouls at an orgy-feast of offal. Sheets of light come tumbling through black murk then fade, vaulting into a gorge deep beneath the ocean floor.
His heart cracks with the electricity, snapping through his nervous system, pumping his flesh up with helium until he’s inflated-out and pressed tight against the confining walls. Then pounding on the door, echoing, ascending in pitch, transmuting into a high buzzing, shrill and dry as if the room were a hive of frenzied wasps.
He’s drawn back into his body in a whirlpool of liquid molecules. He hears them at the door, beating their fists like trapped lunatics. “Out! Out! Out! We want you out of here now! Get out!" He hears the goon wheezing in surges of approval in the background.
“I –I -I -I -I -I -I -I -I!” shouts the young man at the dead-bolted door in defiant reply.
He listens as they again disappear down the stairs, threatening, mumbling, threatening then mumbling, fading.
He stuffs his clothes into the crack beneath the door. With his knife, he pries loose a slat from the floor, then another. The work agitates the brown/pink piles of dust that breed between the flesh-floor and the flesh-ceiling. The spongy powder billows up in volumes that engulf him, changing shape in the black-white, black-white of the light, hanging like the aftermath of a desert explosion. Blind and gagging, he props the slats up against the door at an angle beneath the handle to prevent entry. He stumbles to the window and with desperate strength manages to force it open just enough to thrust his head out into the night.
The air is opaque with the smoke of the burning buildings. The city is laid out beneath his window in a diminishing landscape of glowing coals, distant explosions, and spinning red lights. The air outside is only slightly more breathable than the air inside the room. The dust from inside funnels upward out the window and joins the smoke outside. When he breathes in, the smoke claws at the tissue of his lungs.
He sees helicopters swarming over the city in packs, just beneath the overhang of smoke, scanning searchlights over the fires and mobs that flood the streets like lava, advancing in a consuming wave of molten destruction. Watching from his porthole in the theater dome, he lifts up on tiptoe to p
eer over the ledge, like a tapeworm peeking out the throat of the body in which it feeds. He sees a giant inflated pink pig floating above the pandemonium and flames, cut free of its leash at Hollywood and Vine by the mob. It looms and sways, lifted up by the heat and heading west towards the sea. The last stains of sunset boil red at the underside of the smoke-ceiling as the pig’s head rises into the black cloud, its bulbous pink legs dangling as it goes, like a fat infant treading water in a shallow pool. The helicopters drop puffing tear gas bombs on the crowds, herding them across the erupting landscape. A pack of horses, escaped from their stables in the hills, run mad before the mob. Streams of blood gush from their sweating flanks where they’ve been sliced by falling glass or raked by fleeing cars. The crowd seems to be chasing them, as if it wanted to rend them to bits barehanded in slashing tides of stinking blood. The horses rage, charge forward, impelled like locomotives mirrored to infinity, fueled by absolute terror, tongues whipping saliva mixed with blood and steam up into the night.
A few horses spill off and crash into the glass doors of the theater. The young man hears them shrieking in fear and confusion in an onslaught of shattering windows and chaos below, then the hard-bone cracking of hooves on the stairs, the concussive thrash kicking at his door. He removes the slats and flings the door open. The horse is huge, shining, standing in the blasting light and smoke snorting, massive, as if it had just now crashed into being, transported from a distant planet consumed by violence, down into this shrinking cage that flashes with shifting unfathomable shapes.
He stabs at its eyes with his knife. It screams like a child. He grabs handfuls of its oily mane and wrenches it struggling to the floor. Its feet kick out cycling as if it were trying to swim sideways in quicksand. He saws at its throat. As it flails, spraying blood in stop-motion into the strobing smoke of the room, he bolts the door and replaces the slats.
“Now I’ll be safe,” he thinks, as he slices open its stomach. Using his speed-straw as an air tube to breathe through, he crawls into its guts like a snorkeling diver, folding his body inside the ruptured horse, warm, hiding.
(1994)
THE SEX MACHINE
The two women are naked and intertwined on the platform with their heads buried between each other’s legs. Each one recites a muffled prayer to the shining pearl of lust hidden deep inside the womb of the other. Their faces submerge, recede, submerge, then recede. With every rhythmic forward thrust, the features of the face are lost in the damp glove of flesh, like the head of a praying mantis burrowing into the helpless shuddering body of a pinioned victim, devouring its insides.
The room is silent except for the distant fuzz of city traffic entering through the air vent in the ceiling, and the steady mantra of their coupling.
The circular platform is in the center of the room, covered with a cheap orange velour spread. Spotlights shine on their white flesh from each corner of the room. As the platform slowly circles, their skin changes to purple, then yellow, then pink as they work. The spotlights contribute to the close heat of the room, and this heat mixes with the sweet fullness of their sweat, giving the atmosphere in the room an underwater tangibility.
A switch is turned on in the front office. Heavily amplified disco music pounds the air in a monotony of thudding bass frequencies. Their bodies indicate only a vague casual response to the sudden intrusion of the overwhelmingly physical sound. Soon their flesh can be seen moving in subtle variations of the mechanized rhythm, like two eels twisting in the mud of the ocean floor.
Signaled by the disco, the attendant opens the doors to the stalls surrounding the room, and the men enter, positioning themselves in front of their windows. The windows line the walls of the room where the women are on display. If the women looked up from their ritual on the platform, the windows would at first appear to be mirrors. But if they chose to peer through them up close, they could discern the inchoate dark shape of a man in each stall, and the glow of the fluorescent light above his head, behind the smoked reflective surface.
The disco music enters the stalls through a speaker in the ceiling. The enclosed closet-like space acts as a resonating cabinet for bass frequencies, adding to the already claustrophobic confinement of I he stall. The sour metallic smell of semen thickens the air just beneath the more immediately acrid odor of disinfectant. The men take this smell down into their lungs, where it’s diffused and absorbed into their bloodstreams and nervous system, poisoning their perception. The potential for murder and perversion, normally suppressed, is fertilized and intensified. The certainty of anonymity opens the door further. If one of the women were to enter the stall physically, as something more than an image seen through a screen, she’d certainly be disemboweled, cannibalized, mutilated. The men are incapable of self-control. They all have a repressed need to taste blood. When they masturbate, beneath the benign and childish fantasies they conjure up, the real thrill of potential violence is always the true erotic secret.
*
My hands are soft and cool. When I touch the smooth enamel walls of my stall, I feel the warmth of the women pass through the wall and into me. I absorb everything around me. I can taste the bitter luminous gas trapped in the fluorescent tube above my head. I can decipher the single note hum of the light beneath the depth-charge rhythm of the disco. The beat of the music pummels my body and spreads me outwards against the walls of the stall. I’m no longer contained in myself. I’m joined to the walls, part of a living cell. The stall is an organism. The circle of stalls is a circle of malignant cells surrounding a cancer. The women are rotting, sucking each other and transferring their corrosive juices back and forth, sharing their disease. I can smell them, ammoniac and fetid, through the wall.
Cued by a change in the music, the women get up from the platform and dance listlessly around the arena. The lights swirl, saturated and acidic, shifting like tides in the liquid interior of the room. The women move through one color after another, like drilling willless bodies in an amniotic universe. In our cells our arousal is increasing. I’m the first to reach my hands through the rubber-lined hole in the wall into the warm place where the women live.
Responding quickly, multiple hands press into the arena from the surrounding walls. Disembodied feelers, they form the interior nerves of an underwater creature groping for nourishment and stimulus. The fingers gesture, twitch and writhe, trying to attract the attention of the dancers. From the inside, the women see flickering mirrors reflecting the colored lights, and beneath the mirrors they see gummy prehensible pods, swaying frantically in the quickened current After teasing us for a few minutes, they answer our silent call and allow the centrifugal force of their dancing to push their bodies out to the periphery of the arena. As they twirl against the walls, they’re passed from hand to hand, invaded, pinched, molded, penetrated. If my hand had a mouth and teeth, I’d rip the skin open and drink down the thick blood, pumping it directly into my stomach, filling myself up with murder.
She feels like she’s in ecstasy. The pores in the exterior lining of her skin leak out the juices brewed in her insides. My hands are slippery with her liquid, electrified with the sensation of her interior. I squeeze a rubber nipple, run my hands over her smooth stomach, pick at an inflamed scar above her pubic hair. I form my fingers together into a funneled point and press into her womb as she butts against the wall spreading her legs. She looks up with her eyes rolled back in her head, the pupils retreating behind her eyelids. Her tongue lathers her lips, dripping spit down her chin.
We’re unified, from stall to stall, man to woman, hand to body, liquid to solid, animate to inanimate. It doesn’t matter if it’s my hands inside her or someone else’s as she rolls and glides from feeler to feeler. We’re one creature, pulsing with bliss, sight, sound. Our orgasm never ends.
(1993)
THE MUTE DWARF SINGS
High up in the wall of the abandoned building, the mute dwarf sat perched on his tall stool like a buzzard and peered down squint-eyed out the black emp
ty window. Waves of collapsed roof and concrete swept out over the lot beneath him, as if his building had crashed down from the sky and sent a rolling swell of destruction outward on impact. Scattered crusts of snow flashed up at him, signaling like mirrors in the debris, causing flecks of color and transparent spiders to drift across his eyes as his pupils shrank against the light. Behind him in the darkness, his bed was a mountain of crusted blankets and frayed quilts he’d extracted from the trash heaps of the neighborhood and piled in a damp mound in the furthest corner of the room. The bedding was still warm from his night’s burrowing and steamed in the cold, surrounded by a flickering horseshoe of melted candles that trapped it like a dim beast in a magic circle.
He looked down on the fractured landscape, always searching for something shiny and retrievable. His face was a luminous ghoul-face floating in the black window. The cold air brought mucus to his nose. It expanded out from his nostrils like a child’s bubble gum stretched further with each breath and finally rested on his upper lip — fresh larvae generated by an industrious insect. He snarled it in and out in quick repeated jerks as if telegraphing a coded description of his view to a hidden confidant in another abandoned building across the lot. Like a drugged priest holding up a chalice of Christ’s intoxicating blood, he raised up his bottle of codeine-laced cough syrup in both hands and sucked the liquid in, loudly mixing it with air as if it were too hot to pass over his throat uncooled. It crawled down his trachea and sat in his stomach like molasses. He felt warm behind his eyes. He caressed the roof of his mouth with his tongue. The orifice was a sticky cherry red wound gouged out of his pulpy flesh.