by Michael Gira
She looked to her right, away from me, back up into the woods, then laughed as if she’d just read some instruction on the leaves. She laid her hand out like a shrunken infant, a writhing discarded curiosity I was supposed to pick up and keep warm. She led me back into the trees, floating. Our bags stayed where they were. She trailed the wine.
Fanged branches clutched at my face and hair, the mud sucked and chewed at my feet, and I fell rather than walked as she led me through the forest. The trees ran with sap, hunched over like emerald-haired mammoths dripping with weight. I drank the air, saturated with bitter dew and the gas rising from the mulch. My clothes bled from my body, drenched with clammy sweat and steam. My shoes were stolen and devoured by the mud. My shirt disintegrated, dripping from my back. My feet were shredded by sharpened sticks and bones concealed in the muck. My nostrils and mouth harbored feeding hives of gnats and mosquitoes. Twisting walls of poison vines rose up like cyclones funneling down from the dense mesh of the forest canopy.
We came to a gully. A shallow river drifted flat and silent through its crease. The banks were wide and smooth. The packed black clay glistened with sweat. Here the light filtered through the ceiling like a vast atrium. The vapors rising from the river gave body to luminous slabs and planes, curling with smoke. She pulled me through a final wall of stinging thorns and weeds and sat me on a rock as she undressed. My body was a strand of lint, rippling in the fermented breeze.
The river flowed in slow motion. The slicked glass surface danced with a low-hanging fog of gnats. Foaming clusters of nicotine-colored froth huddled around the edges of the debris that broke through the reflective skin — a tortured branch fallen from the forest dome above, now draped in greasy curtains of moss; a gas can blackened and caked with silt; an unwinding bale of chicken wire plastered with rotting black leaves and decorated with jellied tails of clinging toilet paper. The paper was everywhere along the river, drooling from anything solid enough to stick onto, seeping garishly with incongruous color — bright yellow, sky blue, pink, bleach white — as if a tribe of excremental ghouls had recently migrated upstream, leaving these glutinous party streamers strung like mucus in their wake, wilting. The river was piss, flecked with drifting specs of disintegrating shit.
She stood naked, glowing like a giant worm against the fluorescent hyper-green backdrop of breathing leaves. Each follicle of her hair radiated out from a core of light compacted in the center of her skull, shooting out from her head like a million charged and squirming tentacles, like creeping filaments of electric red and phosphorescent orange. She signaled me with her eyes up the river, amused.
“There’s a town up there somewhere,” she said. Her voice hung between us in a cloud of inert molecules, then sifted down like talc, soaking moisture from the air.
She laid herself out, a soft mass of white on the hard black silt. Her legs were spread open and bent at the knees, splayed like the rigidifying and distended corpse of an unrepentant nymphomaniac, staring fish-eyed up to heaven at a leering god, inviting him to come down and taste her ripening contempt. Moisture crept to the surface of the clay around the outlines of her body, prismatic with oil, like the polished shadow of an aura. Her vascular system was crimson beneath her transparent skin, a blinding frenetic network of molten streams. Her cunt was shaved bald. The lips were the parted entrance to a buried crucible of light. Her hand stretched out across the distance to where I sat and pulled me to her.
I stood above her now, dissolving. My body was an effigy of my real body, hollow, loosely inflated skin. She peeled my pants away, cradling my genitals in her hand like an animal stolen from its nest, cringing. My cock expanded slightly, hunched over and listless, like a penitent monk. She pulled me down to her, folding me in like a nursing infant, feeding in the limp cord. She pumped mechanically. I sailed her heaving flesh, spineless. The trees bent over us, kneeling, licking my back with their fingers. Mosquitoes nested in my ears, sucking juice from my mind. I opened my eyes and looked at her face. Her mouth was stretched wide, reeking. Her tongue lathered my face. Her teeth were pointed razors. They snared the root of my neck, pulling my head down into her throat. She drank my liquid eyes. My sperm emptied into her.
She pushed me away, laughing. She stood up, looking up the hill at a crest in the woods. Her boyfriend stood there backlit by the sinking sun, holding up my bag like a trophy — “We got fifty dollars! Fifty dollars!”
As she dressed, ignoring me, I tried to grab her. She took a small penknife from her jacket and worked it quickly in between my stomach muscles, then pushed me back. I fell into the river. It was comfortable and warm, like simmering honey. I lay there watching the vines creep down to kiss me. Eventually, I heard a truck engine ignite, then roar. When I finally made it onto the road, they were just a black shape, shrinking. I felt the storm surge, then wrap itself around my naked skin in lashing sheaths of ice.
(1993)
THE YOUNG BOY
Still a young boy, I stood naked in the cell, a gift from heaven carved in alabaster. Girlish and barely pubescent, my skin glowed, pure and creamy, an opal shell lit from inside by the cold light of my unviolated innocence. A silky blond tuft of angel’s hair grew clustered just above my genitals, floating like a holy crown. My body relaxed as if sleeping as I stared down meditating on a secret place on the floor. My long silver hair fell in streams before my eyes with the iridescence of a waterfall. Tears gathered at my feet, drawn together like mercury in a small mirrored pool on the oily black surface of the concrete. A single pale blue eye stared back up at me from the pool. Hypnotized by the eye, my body swayed in the moonlight that entered through the small barred rectangle in the steel door.
Outside, the moon rose above the blackwooded hills and flooded the courtyard of the prison. Arms dangled limply through the openings in the cell doors that surrounded the courtyard. Fingers gathered in the light, as if it were a clear liquid narcotic. I imagined that after being drawn into their cells, this intoxicant was drunk furtively from cupped palms, the prisoners squatting in a dark corner as they sipped.
The prisoners in my cell watched me from their beds, the rough wool blankets pulled up to their chins. The blankets were ripe with years of sweat, musk, and oils, the smell sealed in with the weekly blizzard of DDT the guards inflicted on our stripped bodies, our clothing, our personal effects, and our bedding.
Across the courtyard, a prisoner was being tortured. According to standard practice, his wrists had been tied to his ankles and a pole had been slid in beneath this knot. Lifted in the air by a guard on either side of the pole, his body was spun as he was beaten with a club. In between times, when the guards tired of spinning him, the soles of his feet were burned with cigarettes. The screams, as with most of the new prisoners, were muffled and resigned, subdued, to demonstrate total compliance. The screams were almost never expressive, rarely more than what seemed a cursory acknowledgment of the personal subjugation of the process. It was a ritual that was best endured passively, an initiation into the mute boredom and coming regimentation of institutionalized life.
When they’d finished their work on the victim, I watched as the guards ambled across the courtyard, the moon casting long gesturing black shadows behind them on the white stones. When they entered the door that led into the administration building, the night went silent except for the low residual moans of the tortured man.
I turned from the scene in the courtyard. The prisoners in my cell were hovering around me, closing in. Their blankets shrouded their heads, hanging loose from their shoulders. They looked like leprous savages emerging from the woods, or evil monks drawn to a bloody sacrament. Each one held a weapon — a toothbrush filed to a point, a razor-sharp spoon, torn strips of cloth to be used as a garrote. I backed against the cold metal door and waited.
(1993)
VARIOUS TRAPS, SOME WEAKNESSES, ETC.
(1983 - 1986)
A CONTRACT
I’m in a situation where I can’t resist. I’m not sure if I
want to fight back. The only reason to defend myself would be if I were told to defend myself, in order to amuse or edify one of them.
I have an instinct — a vague desire — to retain a sense of myself. I don’t know if I’ve been manipulated into thinking in this way. I’m trying to imagine that I’m the only thing that ever has or will exist. If I can do that then I can get rid of myself.
I can’t concentrate. When a thought comes into my mind, it warps and stretches out of its initial shape, changes into something else before I have a chance to recognize it as something I’ve made. I presume that I remember things, but I’m not certain. I don’t know if what I’m thinking is random (mine), or what I’m supposed to be thinking, in order to satisfy their desires, to fulfill the prescribed influence of the environment they’ve put me in. I don’t know where they stop and I begin. I don’t want to know, but I persist anyway — probably because it pleases them for me to persist, manipulated.
I’m lying on the bed, thinking nothing, listening to the muted rhythm of their voices through the wall. Occasionally I let my mind focus, notice the sound of their voices forming my name. They’re deciding something, developing a strategy that, depending on the nature of my voluntary/involuntary response to the stimulus they provide, will determine how long I’m allowed to live.
The girl/boy creature comes in, naked. The marks are there from the last time it was in here: deep red open scratches across its chest, leading down to its hairless abdomen, like crimson furrows gouged into white spongy soil; an open sore where the nipple was ripped away from its left breast-pouch; a large brown-blue bruise spreading up from its crotch onto its lower stomach, like a huge ugly hand, so saturated with color as to appear painted onto the skin, separate from the actual flesh.
The thing stands there docile, waiting, looking down at me on the bed, watching as my erection grows.
Looking at the creature, I feel what it’s feeling: a stinging rawness winding up through its intestines, forming a locus of intense, nullifying pain in its solar plexus. This translates into a compressed sphere of concentrated pain in the center of my skull, where my perception of the creature’s physical appearance registers itself. This is what they’d like me to believe is “compassion”, but it’s really a symptom of my mind decomposing, or so I believe, or so they’d like me to believe.
The hardness strains between my legs. The girl/boy is delicate and vulnerable. Its wounds shimmer and change colors like an exotic bird signaling an erotic opportunity. I call up the memory of its body as it was previous to its last encounter with me — I remember, destroying my awareness of myself as I am now: I had beaten its soft flesh slowly, methodically, drugged, my fists feeling nothing. Then, as it groaned and whimpered with what could be mistaken for pain or pleasure, I sodomized it, the sound of my fists clubbing against its back, reverberating in rhythm with each stroke as I pressed my cock into its pliant hole.
After the creature had left, I tried to remember what I’d done, and as the image of what had happened floated across the surface of my memory, I couldn’t remember if it had actually happened, and if it had, what had motivated me. I don’t remember now if I had imagined myself in the scene, or if the pleasure I felt was really a distortion of the real event, wherein I was the object of abuse. It could be a fake memory, created by someone else, to gain pleasure from my suffering.
I don’t remember if I felt pleasure of pain or indifference as I stood looking down at its battered and torn body on the floor. I don’t know if I was ordered to do it and I obeyed, or if I was overcome by the same murderous lust I feel welling up inside me now. I don’t know if the thing manipulated me into beating it and torturing it to satisfy its own lust, or to satisfy the faction of itself that had been shaped by them into a need requiring that it be brutalized. I don’t know if I’ve been conditioned into believing that the event took place, whereas in reality, I may have nothing to do with it, the memory having been planted in my mind, the creature’s entering now serving as a substantiation of my (fictional) involvement in the act.
I have no choice but to assume it actually occurred. I was seduced, goaded into it. It threatened me in some way, then enjoyed the pain I caused it, transforming it to pleasure. It is an absolute slave and can’t differentiate between beaten and being fed.
The last time it was in here it had long blond hair that fell down straight to the base of its spine like fine strands of silk. Now its hair is black and shines with oil. Before I ruined the face, its skin had been clear and polished — the luminous complexion of a child. Now the face has been burned, cut, disfigured. The nose is broken, hanging off to one side. The left eye has been cut out — the empty hole drains a thick yellow fluid. The lips are swollen and cracked, bleeding thin red juice.
The creature holds a knife in its left hand, pretending to sharpen its against its right arm. In the right hand, extended towards me, it holds a small clear glass beaker, half-full with a clear liquid.
The thing moves towards me. I’m not sure how to respond. I get up from the bed and stand facing it, my erection raised up in the empty space between us. The creature strokes it gently with the dull back-edge of the knife. The coldness of the blade numbs me.
It lifts the bottle up to my face, gesturing for me to drink. I feel like I’m now supposed to determine if it’s been sent here to fuck me, manipulate me in some way, kill me, or supplicate itself to me. It could be any or none of these possibilities. I have to figure out the proper response to whatever occurs.
I don’t know how to think. My mind feels slow, as if I’m struggling to imagine myself in a dream. Whatever I do has to be to my advantage, but it can’t appear that way. I have to second-guess myself as well as them (or the “them” I’ve been forced to falsely imagine — the picture of “them” they want me to see), because they could be using me, or the “me” they’ve made, against myself, the “self” they’ve decided to destroy.
If the creature has been sent to kill me, I might try to kill it, or laugh, or talk to it, reason with it, convince it of our mutual interests.
If it’s been sent to talk to me, to soothe me, I might rape it, choking its soft neck. Or I might become submissive, get down on my hands and knees and beg it to help me, licking its feet, pleading with it to show me how to act.
If it’s been sent to fuck me or manipulate me, I might grab the knife away from it and rip my bed into shreds, or I might kiss it gently on the mouth, sucking the blood from its tender lips.
If it’s here to make itself available to me, to be used by me, I have to remember what it is I want from it (I can’t remember), or find out if what I want is actually what I want or is what the creature wants or has been manipulated into “wanting” by them.
I don’t know which course of action would satisfy them or me. Each option seems to have countless ramifications of itself, each one worse or better than the one before or after it.
I have to make a decision. I don't know why. I don’t know what I’ll do next. If I’m being manipulated, I’m not necessary to myself, or them. If I’m not necessary, what’s the use of manipulating me?
The thing is holding out its hand, offering me the liquid. I take it. It’s oddly warm. The creature tells me to drink. Its voice is gentle, the syllables smoothed over with unquestioning love.
My first instinct is to pour the bottle out on the floor.
I drink it. I don’t know why. I wonder if I’ve just drunk poison, or a drug. It could be plain water, used as a neutral placebo, in order to heighten my sense of vulnerability.
Smiling faintly, a smile that seems to convey a conspiracy between us, and at the same time is meant to convey to them, looking through the hole in the wall, its newfound strength and victory over me, the girl/boy walks confidently up to me and wraps its arms around me with the familiarity of a trusted lover. Rising to its toes, it whispers in my ear.
“You’ve just swallowed poison. It will kill you in an hour. If you please me, I’ll give you the antidote
and you’ll live. Take the knife and cut off your right hand. Then I’ll give you the antidote.”
It said this as if it had memorized the words and was simultaneously mocking the speech as it made it, revealing the lie in it to me as it was spoken.
I suck gently on the soft skin of the creature’s neck. My face brushes against its face. A thick fluid — the drainage from the empty eye — clings to my cheek.
With one hand, it gently strokes my erection while the other hand places the knife-handle in my palm, then closes my fingers around it.
I decide to stab the creature in the throat. Instantly it seems to sense this, as if reading my mind, and it steps back.
I sit down on the floor, not sure of what I’m doing, where I am.
I spread my hand out on the floor in front of me. I use the knife, feeling nothing, cutting through the bone and muscle at the wrist. My hand is separate from my body, sitting there, the fingers curled in on themselves, an object like other objects. The blood flows out of my arm onto the floor. I’m standing there above myself watching myself through the girl/boy’s eyes, watching the blood run out of my arm, red on the white linoleum.
The possibility occurs to me that I’ve only drunk water, not poison, that I’ve been manipulated into cutting my off hand uselessly, so they could watch me bleed, just to see how it looked, how I’d react.
Later, I wake up. My wrist is bandaged. My hand is connected to my arm. Only a small gash, already healing, is visible when I remove the bandage. I look down between my legs, feeling empty. My genitals have been cut away, or there was always an emptiness there — I don’t know, I can’t remember.