by Michael Gira
*
The filthy bitch was my mother. I cut off her head and hung it above my bed, letting the blood drip down onto my pillow, into my mouth. I ate the rest of her corpse for snacks while I watched TV. Every few minutes I’d look up at her head swinging above me and spit bones or gristle at it. Sometimes I hit it, sometimes I didn’t. When my father came home from his business trip, I cut his head off too, but before I ate his corpse I buttfucked it. I hung his head next to my mother’s so that the two could be together, swinging up there, just above my face, looking down at me masturbate, watching the news, picking my teeth. As time passed, I began to form a collection of heads above my head — friends I’d invite over to fuck or give presents to, whatever the lure. Soon my room was crowded with heads. I couldn’t walk through it without brushing aside my former friends and relatives. I passed the time in my bed, watching TV, looking at their heads. I was able to sustain myself permanently on a diet of their flesh.
*
He stayed docile. He didn’t resist. Once his body was correctly arranged, he seemed to resign himself. Possibly he felt at home, relaxed. His hands opened and closed mechanically, apparently detached from any thought process he may or may not have been engaged in. His eyes were fixed straight ahead. He was dreaming, or already dead. I was standing directly in front of him, my face six inches from his face. His breath smelled like the insides of his stomach. He didn’t seem to be looking at me, or at me as I pictured myself. I took his left eyelid between two fingers and pulled gently at first, then harder, almost to the point of removing it from his eye socket. No immediate or extreme reaction, just a faint sign of recognition in his right eye. I wondered if he knew who I was, if he in turn wondered what I was thinking, if he knew what I was doing to him. If he didn’t know, then I’d failed. I wanted my print on his brain. Every object, face, building that crossed his mind had to bear the imprint of this moment. I considered carving it in his chest, but that would have detracted from the initial design. I want what I implant to take seat. It can’t be erased or disfigured. He had to bend, he had to be molded. That was the agreement. Everything has to be carried through to its logical end. The consequences should have been considered. If they weren’t, the end will be the same. I turned the wheel. I planned on doing this slowly, but I was losing patience, so I turned it hard, putting all my strength into it. The pulleys tightened the ropes. His arms and legs stretched out in the shape of an X. His joints began to snap. The features of his face were shifting, remodeling themselves into the shape of my face. My (his) mouth was open, the lips stretched wide. I was looking down my throat, watching the words come up: “You’ll never forget this.”
(1983)
THE CAREGIVER
My grandmother and I live in two rooms. I live in the hot room with the small window that won’t open. The window looks out across the alley onto the bricks of the building next door. The window is coated with yellow dust, car exhaust, filth. The shadows that cross the window look like monsters trying to get in, trying to see me inside, five stories up, sweating in my room. Whatever creatures make the shadows must be huge, as large as a building.
I lie awake at night and wait for their fists to crash through the wall, then to reach in, pluck me from my bed, and crush me as I squirm. I work on this dream, concentrating, certain that if can visualize it clearly enough it will happen. When I feel them looking in at me, I’m alive. I want them to kill me. I want to feel my guts spread out like jelly across one of their palms. I want them to hear the tiny sound I make when I die.
My grandmother lives in a room identical to mine, except that her room doesn’t have a window. She keeps the light on 24 hours a day — a long-tubed fluorescent light fixture she props up against the wall in the corner. It makes her skin look gray-blue, and makes the dust that coats the walls glow. She has two air vents in the floor of the room. They pump in a constant flow of stale, slightly cooled air. The movement of the air in her room makes the fibrous growth of dust that sticks to everything look alive.
I never see her sleep. Whenever I see her, she’s in her chair, staring at the wall as if it were a window, or slumped over, entranced by something in the carpet. The carpet is dirty orange and has long strands, like a field of worms.
When I’m dreaming, I hear her talking across the hall, arguing, laughing, taking revenge on someone. I wake up and move: quietly to her doorway, trying not to be noticed, afraid someone else is in the house. But there’s never anyone there. Eventually she notices me. She looks up and smiles, clicks her tongue three times, as if to gently scold me, then shows her teeth. She wants to eat me. She wants to hold me in her rotting mouth and crunch me like chicken gristle. I turn around. My face is expressionless, knowing that if I show any emotion, the invisible wall in the air between us that protects me from her will shatter and I’ll be drawn into the sucking whirlpool of her mouth.
Back in my bed, the smell of her room drifts across the hall into my room. Her smell mixes with the smell of my body. I inhale her smell into me, holding it in, eating it. I let it shape me from the inside out. I want my world, my body, to consist of her smell. After it has become me, I’ll be held enclosed, like an insect in a huge fist, and crushed.
Twice a day I go out and get the food. When I leave the building and step out onto the street, I keep my head down. I’m afraid I’m going to be attacked, knocked over, kicked, mutilated. I’m defenseless. They sense my weakness. Some day it’s going to happen. There’s nothing I can do about it. Because there’s nothing I can do about it, I crave it. I concentrate, trying to will it into reality. When someone looks at me and smiles, I feel raped.
I have to buy her soft things to eat — processed white bread, cream cheese, chocolate pudding, milk. If her teeth touched anything solid they’d slip out of her gums, and she’d swallow the whole mess down, teeth and all, not noticing the difference. Then she’d bleed into her hand and cry, realizing what had happened, feeling sorry for herself, and I’d want to kill her. But I couldn’t, because I need her. She gives me money. I can’t kill her. I’m helpless. When she dies, I’ll starve to death.
As I walk up the stairs, returning with the food, I hear her voice, leading me up towards her like an invisible leash, as she talks to herself. As I approach the door, the tone changes, as if my increasing nearness affected the shape of the images passing through her mind, changing the tension in her vocal chords. I want to hear what she sounds like when I’m not near her, when she thinks she’s alone.
Once, I took off my shoes and worked my way slowly and silently up the stairs, pausing with each step to listen. Just as I came within hearing distance, I heard a growl, like a dog about to attack. I took another step, and it changed suddenly. She’d heard me. Now her voice was passive, defeated, rambling, exhaling the words so they’d run together randomly. The string of words that leaves her mouth is senseless. When she speaks directly to me, I only understand her subliminally.
I prepare her food by putting the ingredients into the blender and mixing it until nothing has a shape of its own anymore, until it’s soft and whipped. The high-pitched scream of the blender mixes with the cackling she emits in anticipation of being fed.
Often, I stand in the closet-sized kitchen for an hour, letting the whirl of sounds rush through me. With my eyes closed and my body swaying gently to the sound, I picture myself walking up to her, handing her the glass of slime. Then, just as she swallows, I take a knife from behind my back and I slit her throat, cutting and cutting until her head falls to the floor and rests against my foot, looking up at me, the expression hardly changed.
But instead, like a mannequin controlled by her thoughts, I do the opposite. I take the glass into her, sometimes even providing a straw to make drinking the smooth liquid easier for her, and I kneel down obediently beside her, holding the glass for her. Often I’ll pour the liquid gently down her throat as she sits there with her face upturned, her mouth a black hole, like a snake-hole leading down into the belly of the earth.
I’m always careful that she has enough time to swallow. She looks up at me with her black bird-eyes, making me feel as if I were the liquid sliding down into her stomach.
When’s she's finished, she smiles up at me in fake gratitude. I take her ancient hand in mine and rub the loose skin over the brittle bones and joints of her fingers. Then I kiss each finger, licking away any of the liquid she may have spilled.
She is sweet and gentle, so perfect in her old age. I want to be just like her. I want to disappear into her. When I lie awake late at night holding myself, as if my body were both mother and child combined, I imagine myself as her. I whisper secret hates, feeling my rumpled dress stick to the scaly skin of my back. I can feel the neglected cancer hole between my legs rise up and swallow my face, drenching it in sour smells.
I’ll forget I exist. I’ll sit there with my mouth open and stare back up at myself, reading the mind contained in the body I’ve left.
(1983 / 1994)
DAYDREAMS
The tiny light far off at the end of the hall went out suddenly, leaving everything black. I could just barely see the air glowing like a submerged nucleus where the light had just been, but as I walked towards it, the trace faded and before I reached what I assumed was the spot, I’d lost all sense of my relation to it and to everything else around me. Now I was completely lost. I felt my fingertips swelling in anticipation of touching something, reading the contours of a surface. I raised them to my lips. They touched, but felt nothing. They needed something alien, unconnected to my body, to charge their nerves. I spread my arms out and walked with my legs close together, becoming a crucifix. The glowing fog at my feet sent an iconic shadow upward towards heaven, but it stopped at the arching curve of the tunnel above my head and wrapped itself around me as I walked. I felt protected by my holiness.
I hear breathing. Slowly, it’s been building in volume. It’s in perfect time with the rhythm of my own breathing, so I haven’t noticed it until now, but now it’s increased in volume to a level where I can’t deny it’s originated from somewhere outside: my chest. I feel like I’m being mocked. Someone’s been watching me, listening to me, as I stumble through the darkness.
As my breath rate speeds up with fear, the alignment of our breathing slips, becomes louder, cacophonous, a deafening barrage of random wheezes, sucks, hisses of exhalation. My body begins to shake uncontrollably. My arms swing madly like the blades of a propeller, trying to deflect any unseen person or object that might come at me in the dark.
The lights come on. Sudden blue whiteness. I’m standing on top of my desk, looking up into the rapid flashing of the fluorescent tube light above my head, unblinking, the light pouring down into my eyes with such force that the light becomes black. My arms are still stretched out in the shape of a crucifix.
Jennifer is pulling at my pants leg. Her face is contorted as she looks up at me, annoyed — a pig’s face wearing the loose fitting mask of a fashion model. She’s urging me to come down, faking compassion. Her voice bleats out of her nostrils, shrill, nauseating. I lower my arms, defeated, put my hands in my pockets, and step backwards onto my chair, then to the floor. Standing in front of my desk, looking into the green glow of the computer terminal, I’m amazed at the reflection of my face, superimposed over the graphs and figures. Nothing’s changed. It’s still the face I loathe, the face I’ve never been able to accept as my own, the face I’ve always wanted to rip away — live the rest of my life a glare of exposed muscles, nerve endings, veins. But my face is implacable, unchanging, perfectly handsome, unmarred.
Throughout the day, Jennifer watches me, peeking around the corner of her cubicle as she works at her computer, putting just a little tension in her brow to show pity, where honestly she should express contempt, disgust. She asks me occasionally if I’m all right. I tell her yes, of course, keeping my eyes on the screen. Her head disappears back around the dividing wall again, her keyboard popping beneath the onslaught of her nails, sparking off a symphony of high pitched torture inside her machine.
Alone again at my work station, one hand is buried in my crotch as the other types out a game plan for the destruction of my subconsciousness.
(1985)
THREE NURSERY TALES
- 1 -
On the right, the impassable cliff. Its walls rise straight up, pitted with 100 caves that lead deep into the solid rock, snaking beneath the flat plateau above. Two or three killers crouch naked at the mouth of each cave, watching us pass beneath them through the gorge.
On the left, the beginnings of the tropics — a wall of foliage and hissing fog. The low steady growl of the beast hiding behind the trees follows close behind us, rustling through the brush as it tracks us.
As we walk, we’re mocked from both sides. The killers raise their knives, showing blackened dripping teeth, cooing down to us softly, as if we were straying pets that might return to them, drawn to our own murder by the gentleness of their voices.
The beast rushes forward, jutting its hideous head through the brush, wags its purple tongue, laughing like a strangled child, then withdraws suddenly back into the jungle, the brush closing in around it.
Our clothes have long since been torn from our bodies, and our skin is shredded and bleeding. The sun bakes our sores. We’re doomed, but we keep moving, too dazed and too stupid to stop and give ourselves up to be killed.
The fear of being captured by the killers — hung up on hooks forced through the skin at the base of our necks, burned slowly alive above a low fire, our flesh pulled away in slabs from our bodies then eaten before our eyes — moves our legs forward, keeps our eyes half-open.
Inevitably we’ll drift into the jungle where we’ll be eaten by the beast. He’ll drag us to his secret pit and play with us until he’s bored, then devour us.
The thought of its tusks buried in our guts is less terrifying than the knives and fire of the human killers, so we fall into the brush, defeated, waiting to be taken. As we fall into sleep, we hear him breathing at our necks, hot and moist, prodding our bodies with his snout. He talks to us in a human voice, like the innocent voice of a little girl, soothing us, reassuring us, laughing softly to himself beneath his words.
- 2 -
I don’t recognize myself until I commit an act that negates me. Then I’m strong, because I’ve attacked the things I protect, and I’ve cut desire off before it has a chance to grow. I’m a victim. Random invasions of experience enter my mind and transform me. Conversely, while staring at the thing I want to possess, it repulses me, because I want to make it part of my body. My body disgusts me because it’s not mine. When he touches me, pushing me around, crudely inserting himself, I see myself as him, and I hurt myself as I hurt her. I’m unable to erase my desire until he erases it for me. When I’m in his mind, I’m a murderess. I’m going to tie his hand behind her back and tie her hands to his feet. While I’m licking his face, coating her cheeks with my saliva, I’ll hold my cock tight and selfishly fuck my own cunt, avoiding him. After I’ve ejaculated into my cunt, I go into the bathroom and wash it out immediately and thoroughly, feeling infected already. I flush out any trace of him. Then I return to the bedroom, standing over his bound body. I urinate on her while she strains to get free. She enjoys being drenched in her own dead waste. He thinks he owns me, but I’m nothing. He doesn’t exist except to violate my inversion, selfishly manipulated by me.
- 3 -
Chained together, they led us naked down the street. Our bodies were burned red from days exposed to the sun. At night we slept huddled together, under guard, curled up against the monument in the center of the city. We’d learned to hate each other, each other’s smells, faces, the soft hair growing out the back of the neck of the person before us in the procession, more than we hated the guards or the heckling crowds.
The prisoner in front of me was proud. He refused to keep his head down as we were led through the mob. They seized on this as a sign of conceited defiance, and several goons immed
iately began spitting at him. Then some of them reached out and cut him with razors attached to their fingers. I knew that if he fell, he’d pull the rest of us down with him and we’d be torn to pieces. To avoid this, I kicked him hard in the back and he lurched forward, taken by surprise. He looked foolish. The crowd laughed — I’d confirmed the fact that we were harmless idiots, no longer a threat. Later, he told me that one day he’d kill me in my sleep. But the next morning when I woke up, he was dead beside me, his throat cut so deeply that his head hung from a single tendon. Someone else had realized that his pride was a threat to the safety of the group and eliminated him before it was too late.
(1983)
TELEPATHY
I’m on the other side of the wall, listening, seeing. She’s there, I can feel her, lying naked on the slab beneath the thermal lamp. Her skin’s burning slowly. A large bubble of flesh is expanding on her left forearm. I can see a small shadowy creature inside the patch of swelling flesh — now I’ve projected myself from the other side of the wall into the warm lifting blanket of skin. My body’s inside her arm, huddled. I’m pressing my arms and legs against the membrane walls, trying to break out.