by Michael Gira
I sit for hours, as still as she is, connected to her, my thoughts projecting into hers.
As the sun begins to set behind the forest of city towers silhouetted against the purple sky, she grabs without warning the ivory-shelled brush from her desk as if it were trying to escape or leap up at her throat and she tugs it violently through her hair. She pulls out handfuls of blonde hair caught in the bristles and throws the fluff away from her as if it had begun to crawl up her hand. She takes a hairband from the desk, and bunching her hair tightly against her head she loops the elastic ring snug against the crown of her skull, as if the hair were some vile growth to be kept away from her face and body at all costs. I cry out to her that I love her across the chasm between our two buildings but she can’t hear me above the traffic as she takes the razor from the desk and slices her face in a hundred vertical gashes as her mouth contorts in silent paroxysms of ecstasy.
(1994)
THE GREAT ANNIHILATOR, or,
FRANCIS BACON’S MOUTH
Hidden by distance, the darkness behind the stars reached an impenetrable black density. Light, thought, and possibility were sucked helplessly into the inhaling mouth of the dead hole. Inside the hole was the center of the heart of the opposite of space. The future and the past were nullified, backwards and forwards. History rewound, snubbed out before it began. Silence was exterminated.
The earth floated in a sea of black blood, glowing like an ember cupped in the hands of an invisible god. His corrupt breath spread clouds of poison gas, cloaking the continents in a sweet tasting atmosphere. Agitated hoards of reptilian predator birds migrated through the hemispheres in a stone-eyed search for prey, casting shadows on the red dirt like cryptic signals flashed down from the veiled deities that lived behind the sky. Beneath the ground, liquid fire rolled in waves of buried hatred. A mindless howl echoed through the lightless subterranean canyons in a single sustained note of ignorant and savage pain.
*
The steel and glass towers of the city reflect the lights of passing cars, and behind the jagged horizon, the moon stains the clouds red. Steam rises from a crack in the mildewed concrete floor in the basement of an abandoned building. A block away, in a fashionable hotel where the staff are actors and models and the sink in the bathroom in your room is a polished stainless steel funnel, you crouch tied in the corner by the toilet, naked and bruised, the shining white tiles hard and painful against your bare knees, watching yourself in the oval mirror, waiting for the murderer to come in and first pull chunks of your skin away with pliers, then to remove your teeth, then to fuck your warm bloody mouth. You had placed an ad in a porn magazine reading “Attractive Professional Seeks Punishment For Arrogance From An Expert Torturer” with the present disastrous consequences. You’re now certain you’re going to die, and the outcome is irreversible and beyond your control. Your complicated psychology of pleasure and desire is inextricably interwoven with your diseased sense of self-worth. Ecstasy is impossible for you unless your nerves are simultaneously saturated with its opposite. Since you’re addicted to ecstasy as the only effective means of erasing your identity and its attendant self-loathing, you’re also addicted to pain and the elaborate rituals you construct in order to transform it into pleasure. When the shadow of the murderer moves toward you, seen sliding across the mauve bedroom wall through the crystal reflection in the mirror, a warm fullness gathers between your legs. Though terrified, you feel a sense of completeness you never dreamed possible.
(1993)
IF I WERE HIM
If I were him, I’d stand on the edge of the hill looking down the slope, past the uniform tile and stucco houses to the sea. The sun would pass over me and through me with the feel of a shadow, cold and wet on my skin. It would sink slowly into the flat bloody pool of the Pacific, like the polished white globe of a child’s skull, and disappear. The sparrows, coming home for the night, would circle and dive against my hill like bats.
If I were him, my prehuman awareness, perfect in its ability to see past and future simultaneously in a 360 degree arc of sight, would send waves of exaggerated and pure sensation deep into the organs hidden inside my body, and when the warm mouth of silence sucked me in, I’d disappear in its moist folds. Randomly pulled from the comfort of non-being by hunger or the sound of a car hissing on the asphalt road below, I’d slap and rub my face in an effort to concentrate, noting that the whiskers on my cheek had sprouted new growth. Drifting again, I might awaken to the rough tongue of a stray housecat licking my palm. It would be with hatred and shame that I’d feel myself stiffening and heating in response to the cat’s ministrations. If I were him, I’d then dream of my teeth crunching into the soft white flesh at the back of a girl’s legs as she struggles, roughly bound and gagged, the blood filling up my mouth with warm sweetness.
Later, I would have drained myself, and I’d feed the cat some ripened lunch meat from my sack and continue to watch, then fade, watch, then fade, transformed as motion and events moved through me without interference from my will.
I’d drink water from the plastic jug, still hot from the day’s sun, and the plastic fumes would mingle with the water in my mouth. I’d snap sunflower seeds between my teeth, sucking the salt from each one, and spit the shells in a growing pile at my feet. I might wrap myself in my blanket, watching the lights come on in the house below. I’d continue watching as the lights were extinguished and replaced by the switching blue light of the television in the living room. And finally in darkness, the house would lie like a sleeping beast in a field of other beasts, and the stars would be dim and barely visible behind the grey screen of light that would rise up against the night in an aura from the brilliant swarm of Los Angeles, spread out along the coast to the north. As the night grew deeper and the lights of the city faded into sleep, the stars would grow brighter against the dead black of infinity. Lying back on my blanket, I’d relive an LSD ritual from my adolescence: Staring emptily up at the limitless swirl of stars, I’d lose my body and soar upwards in a surge of cosmic bliss, dissolving into emptiness. Hours later, I’d crash violently back down into my leaden body, my erection unbearable and animal. The only way to relieve it would be to feel the pathetic weakness of a creature pleading in my squeezing hands, then to choke until the eyes fog over, disgusting and lifeless ... If I were him, which I’m not.
I might be there hidden on the hill for three days, spying down on the house where I’d lived as a child. The streets would be silent during the dry hot days, with only the occasional mail truck or gardener spoiling the perfect stillness and geometry of the housing subdivision, a meticulously groomed, abstract and idealized tableaux laid out across the plateau beneath my hill and ending abruptly at the cliffs above the ocean. In the late afternoon would be the hum of skateboarding boys gliding over the smooth black streets, gracefully riding the tilted curves and slopes. In the early evenings, the lunatic wind of lawnmowers and hedge trimmers would echo up to me in my place concealed in the low brush and oak trees on the hill.
If I were him, each day I’d watch as the man and wife left my former home in the morning, the wife trailing behind with the crippled daughter, manipulating her braced legs and guiding her broken pubescent body into the chrome BMW waiting in the driveway. In the chilled early morning, the dew would reflect the rising sun on the grass like diamonds as the night’s fog retreated in a wall behind the receding curve of the Pacific, just as when the moon would sink late at night, as I watched, the wall of fog would again advance, silently cloaking the shrubbery and shrouding the street lights in a veil beneath my hill.
If I were him, I’d work my way quietly down the hill, and into the fog, just before the dawn of the fourth day, and I’d hide at the foot of the driveway leading up to the house, in the same overgrown cluster of thorned berry bushes I’d hid in as a child, a secret cave at its center invisible to the outside world. As the sun came up, the steam would rise from my damp clothes and unwashed body as I waited for the sound of the car startin
g and the parents driving past me with the girl. After they’d pulled away, I’d move quickly, dodging from the protection of my cave around to the back of the house, where I’d know I’d be protected from the neighbor’s view by the low-hanging avocado tree, which now after the years completely engulfed the back south corner of the house. From here I might work on the laundry room window, safely hidden inside the dense leaves of the tree. I might know the window to be the type opened by a small hand crank. Pushing hard on the upper right hand corner of the crusted aluminum frame, the crank might inch the frosted window open, just as it would have done when I’d returned from my nightly prowls around the neighborhood, peering in windows, as a boy.
Once inside, I wouldn’t bother to explore, because I’d know the house would have changed irrevocably with the influence of the current owners. Instead, I’d go directly to the small bedroom next to the laundry room, which we had once used as a maid’s room but became my bedroom when we could no longer afford her. The room would have a sequestered, secret feeling to it, at the far end of the house, and would be infused with the dulled ochre of early morning sunlight filtering in through the unfamiliar lace curtains, appropriate for the room of a young girl.
I might ignore the porcelain curios and the jeweled boxes and paperback books on the white lacquered desk, and the computer and the posters of rock singers. I might be relieved to find the bed in the same corner that mine had always been in, opposite the sliding doors of the closet. The bed would be higher and more resilient than the bed I would have slept in throughout my childhood. Crawling into it fully clothed, I’d pull the lilac scented covers over my tangled hair and rough beard and I’d make a funnel with the sheets, leading outward from my eyes. I’d feel safe in the warm darkness of my lair, the funnel providing me with a view of a tiny patch of wall just next to the closet doors, where the plaster is slightly rougher, and with concentration looks like the surface of the moon or a distant planet in an unknown galaxy. I’d reach my finger up carefully through the dark tube, as if my finger were my body drifting outwards into infinity. I might then stare, letting my eyes go out of focus, losing all sense of myself, past and future.
The girl would be floating in the buoyant hot water of her bath, daydreaming, freed from the constant ache in her knees by the therapeutic heat and lack of gravity. She might be grateful for the fact that she’d eventually recover full use of her legs, though the doctors had said the scars would always remain. Even at such a young age, she’d be mature enough to look at this as a blessing after such a terrible accident, her legs crushed by a car when she’d lost control of her bicycle riding down to the beach with her friends. She would be fantasizing, home from school on a state holiday, as she sings a popular song quietly to herself. At first timidly, but then, emboldened by the resonance the steam of the bath provides, she might sing louder, but with the frailty and weakness that only a young girl’s voice could possess. I might then hear her singing, if I were him.
(1993)
A SACRIFICE
The ground is a hard bone shell stretched flat over the desert like petrified hide. The surface is webbed with black hairline cracks leaking cool shadows up from a secret place beneath the earth into the clear white violence of the sun. They work shirtless, like two red ants toiling on a crust of salt, swinging their picks in wide careless arcs in a line that extends out from a fixed point in their stomachs, tethered by the tensed rope of their arms. The polished steel tips of their axes strain like missiles against their trajectory, shooting up from behind their bodies and sweeping over their heads in a parabolic curve that culminates stabbing into the desert with a brutal crunch, releasing a voluptuous suction sound like trapped vapors escaping. Every impact incites an involuntary grunt jerked up from their solar plexus as if they were two pagans drunk with lust, fucking dry holes in the hardened sand. They wouldn’t be surprised if the ground gushed blood with each steel intrusion.
A golden fur of jeweled wasps hovers close to the ground in an electrified field, spread out level across the flats, animated and rustling in the parching wind like sulfurized heather.
As they work, the sweat dries on their skin and leaves rings of salt around their torsos in chalked, rippled strata, tracing time on their flesh. They stop at paced intervals and drink water from an old rusted can that smells like gasoline. Often they squirt wine from a gourd held high above their open fish-mouths, washing down greasy chunks of black opium, then return to their labor refreshed, stupefied and methodical, serenaded by the humming dream-psalms of the wasps rising and falling in intensity in response to the wind.
They pierce the crust in a straight course, gradually dislodging thick jagged slabs of desert like pieces of a giant puzzle they lever out of the path of the ditch with crowbars and pile along its edge as they continue clawing the wasted floor, extending a dark strip like carpet unfurling pointlessly out into the blank white plain. As they work, the wasps congregate in the freshly turned dirt behind them in a solemn procession, sucking the last memories of moisture from the exposed earth. Off in the distance, just above the steaming horizon, a red blotch the size of a point on a sheet of paper flutters with the rising heat. They aim their ditch at this point.
This morning when they were dropped off by the truck, the stars were smeared across the black dome above them in wide swathes like titanium paint spread by the dripping hands of a delirious prisoner in a solitary, lightless cell. The dawn swelled at the edge of the globe, a distant incandescent catastrophe, silhouetting the foreman as he pointed arbitrarily off into the blackness, his eyes squeezed into tight slits and his finger extending out from his arm like a blind man using his body as a compass to locate the source of an echoing sound. Neither of them could see much of anything beyond the white cotton shirts issued them by the contractor and their pale hands gripping the blond wood of the pick-handles before them, but they’d dug toward the general area the foreman had indicated. Then he’d driven off with the rest of the haggard crew, standing, hanging their arms over the wooden railing of the truck looking back at them grimly like prisoners or livestock in some future cannibal world.
The truck disappeared in a carnival of red taillights and cigarettes, levitating on the shimmering blue pool of headlights as it crept silently into the dark towards its multiple destinations of equally mindless and crushing labors. When the sun had risen enough to reveal detail in the emptiness, there sat the surveyor’s flag dead on course exactly where the foreman had pointed. After a while, they removed their shirts and tied them around their waists, the caramel light of the early morning cooling and soothing their backs as they worked.
*
With no place to hide from the increasing intensity of the sun, and the boredom of just standing there intolerable, they advance sweating and groaning unconsciously, hacking and prying at the desert crust. Inching steadily towards the flag, their bodies struggle and grind against gravity and resistance, absorbing the heat without feeling as their insides begin to stew. Their minds pump out waves of ornately detailed sensation, fueled by the opium and the wine and the sun, sending them falling through layers of color and warmth that expand as liquid, withdraw, heat, then spread out through their bodies like the exploratory vines of a sexually omnivorous parasite rooted deep in the base of their stomachs, guiding magma streams of pleasure through arid veins and crackling nerves out into their half-numb extremities and fingers, which then tingle with current as if waking from sleep. Exposing the darker sand beneath the dry shell, they imagine they’re revealing the course of a subterranean river, mirroring their path a hundred miles down, the ditch tracing the last faint breath of its rising humidity, the fresh moisture of the wound turning to powder quickly in the sun, the whiteness seeping into and replacing the darker sand like water soaking in a reversed negative film.
By the time the sun is directly overhead, they’re badly burned but don’t notice. They drink more water, wine, and inevitably ingest more opium to combat their growing fever, unaware that their sk
in is beginning to boil. Even the wasps disappear, hiding from the sun in their networks of tunnels beneath the ground. The silence is broken only by the sensual penetration of their picks sucking into the earth, their shallow breathing — quickened by the building heat — or the random occasional clang of a crowbar against the steel head of a pick, cracking off into the desert then falling to the ground, dull and lilted, defeated by the weight of the sun, the resonance of the sound swallowed up like a handclap in a padded room. Their noses and cheeks erupt with transparent blisters, shiny with crimson light exuded from the raw meat beneath the tender balloons of skin. Pink bubbles expand hugely from their shoulders and necks, wrinkling in complex patterns agitated by the wind. The hide on the backs of their hands rises up and an oily juice drains out where the skin lifts up, tearing away from the flesh. But they continue working shirtless, oblivious.
The Irishman throws down his pick and stands facing off into the desert as if he were bracing himself against an oncoming wave of white dust. His skin was previously like porcelain, totally without pigment, but now gleams viscid and ruby red against the flaring sand. He holds out his arm, sweeping over the barren panorama theatrically. His wiry long blond hair, his solid square jaw and sparkling blue eyes make him look like a scorched Viking about to let loose with a mirthful soliloquy, beached and alone, surveying the wasted shore laid out before him like a continent of nothing. He sings to it, an asthmatic wheeze issuing from his throat that seems to shock him as it hisses from his mouth. The sound is incinerated instantly by the sun.