by Grefe, Jamie
Lek screams, chokes out more life. It’s one of the onlookers. They are spitting all over his face, pushing wet gush into his mouth and over his nose. Blood gushes from his holes and he hurts and he cries. Too much for one man to bear. A wishing well of flies, a throbbing of voices overlapping and oozing into each other.
“Get me out of here!” he yells. His wrist comes untied. Lek throws a fist, hits air. The women undulate wildly. One of them cracks a whip, smacks it across his legs. Argyle burns his feet. He scrambles to the corner, holds his hands in front of him, jittering his fingers as if some faux magic trick would rescue him from the agony. The whip cracks again, stings his pepper-tree and burns up into his skull. He sneezes blood, coughs tiny flies all about the room. He thrashes around and rams into the bodies that surround him. “Where’s Alina?” he cries. The eyes of the onlookers cringe. He hears a man scream. Fingernails crack, rip. The ceiling sags.
Lek lunges forward, out of the room and into the hallway.
The light in the hallway is cold, bright. He hears slop, smells bacon from the living room. And no one follows him into the hall. He leans back, catches his breath. Others drizzle through the walls. An orgy of moans, yelps, curdles. Lek drags forward, across the hall to the other wall. He comes to himself, lets his heart beat seep out from the tip with a deathly shiver.
***
To the heart of a slaughter.
Lek’s scissors splatter skin, sink to chop lungs and extract. He shoves another man aside, tries to look away from Alina. She sobs mercy before him, an angel before him. He slams the scissors against his leg, just beats them there.
“You can get us out of here,” Alina says. “You can do it, Lek. Please.”
But the house is a muscle around them. It is not a beautiful mansion. It is not filled with the men and women of his life. The harder he tries to look at the people around him the more he smells shit and piss and carrion in an abattoir. And the house is not a deserted shack one can burn, forget and flee forever. Lek raises them over his head.
“I’m sorry, Alina, that it’s come to this, things are not as they seem and I want out.”
“Don’t, please—God, no please,” she pleads, holds her beautiful hands up over her beautiful face and Lek spies her eyes through the webs of her fingers and clenches the bloody blades.
One swipe and he could do it.
One swipe and she’d be over and this would be over and he would finally be the man he knows the priest wills him to be.
Lek remains covered in blood. And his nose leaks a steady stream of blood. And he looks down at his cock. It is hard, beyond hard, has never felt it so hard before. It is space itself. It is dirt and rock and mud and animal. And Alina cries a cry like a dying dove. Lek looks down at this precious dove as if he would never harm a bird, but a static version of himself as a skinless bag of flies pushes him to slam the blade into her skull. The blade shines in the dim red light of the living room. Lek smells the bodies of the dead.
“I can,” he says.
“You can,” Alina says. “Mercy, Lek.”
Lek blinks, a form of shutting out. Lek blinks, the past is not really the past and in his blinking he savors the motel room, that monster of his own creation.
“Don’t kill me,” Alina says. “This isn’t you.”
“It’s a way out,” he says.
“We can make this work,” Alina says, but her voice does not come from the voice of the screaming Alina. It is a voice of ugly static as if somehow she has filtered herself through a television set’s tinny speaker. This infuriates Lek. He just wants to hear her say something real, something clear and he focuses on her strawberry-sweet hair, on that point of her head that must be the tip of her skull.
“Nail her, son,” the priest says, the warbling imitation of a man.
Alina shrieks.
Lek turns old blood. “I will not listen to you,” Lek says. And in that moment, he births the death of himself. The skin-shell and genitals of the others melt into air and a new form of static pulses up from his feet, and it’s hot, but not a hot that burns or stings. It is real and timeless. He cracks his neck, ungrits his teeth and trills out a flute-line from his new mouth. “I will never—”
Lek quickly lowers the blade and brings the blade to his meat-rock, to his stiff dick, to the throb. He opens the twin blades of the scissors and places the point where they meet around his penis and now both hands hold the handle.
“Don’t disobey yourself,” the priest says. “I can give this to you, you son of a bitch.”
Alina’s face ruptures a sly smile.
And the birth begins.
Lek grunts, forces the scissor handles shut and the blades grind into his dick, severing skin, but not fully slicing through. Black blood gurgles thick from the wound. He is filled with terror, consumed by the abyss. It is a clarity of static that drains him pale. Lek hears the trumpet call, the death drums. He squeezes again with more strength and saws at the rigid vein-laced skin soup dangling now limp from his groin.
“You ruined everything,” the priest says, but his voice is sinking and wavering to nothing at all.
Lek roars, wrenches at the handle again, sawing and chop, chop, chopping into his own member with hate and crunching blood, snip by snip. Those among the living that surround him are screaming and pleading, moaning and melting. He saws, grinds the blade through the bloody meat and lops off his penis, watches it flop flaccid on the floor.
And this is when man becomes river.
This is when man becomes lover.
***
The house is a bloodbath.
No one moves, except Lek, who towers over Alina. He’s bleeding out from the crotch. Alina scuttles back ever farther. Too much gore and this was not her idea of redemption.
“Oh, Lek,” she says. “What did you do?”
“This is not about me,” he says, digging the scissors further up his mangled midsection and wrenching out a clump of his own insides. More bloody parts of him fall to the floor and he hunches over, tries to look inside himself.
But something bubbles up from Lek’s snipped and mangled middle.
Alina takes pause, covers her mouth, can’t shut her eyes, can’t bear the stench of what lies under Lek’s opening skin.
It begins with his fingers digging into the fleshy hole of his wound. Lek howls, slams the scissors, blades-deep, into that mushy hole and he digs up, tears skin up his stomach like a mad doctor in surgery with himself.
Alina doesn’t know how to comprehend this, or the look on his face, how he shuts his eyes, or the light bubbling within him with each wrenching tear of the scissors.
Slice up.
And the sound of static shatters the room. It’s coming from the veined walls, the sound of blood pulsating. The floor has turned fleshy and the upper levels of the house have vanished, are replaced with the night sky, stars circling and popping to dust.
“This is all,” Lek screams, and inside him there are no more words. Each rip of the blade (through guts, through lungs) is a flash of the priest dissolving in a pile of mush on the floor. Lek squints, grits teeth and feels the force of his priest-father dull and flatten. The old bastard, the old bastard’s words and words and words, too many to bear, too much to swallow.
Lek swallows, spits more blood, but keeps sliding the blade inward, slicing himself open. He is making a passage for Alina to escape.
And Alina is stricken on the floor, sweat-covered, and shivering. She cannot look away.
Lek’s chest splits open.
He throws down the scissors. They land on a pile of mush, a bloody collar destroyed.
Lek stumbles forward a step. His entire chest is an open wound. But, all is not what it seems.
The inside of Lek’s body is a sea of static.
The house rumbles, shakes and a crack splits the floor from behind them. Bodies slip into the vortex.
And he digs his hands inside himself, further splits his chest wide open. A swarm of flies shoo
t from inside him. This is when Alina sees the road.
A monochromatic road stretching out to dark. It’s a television screen inside him.
She crawls forward, pushes herself to her feet and sways. “And what if I don’t?” she says. “What if this is all a lie, Lek? I looked for you . . . ”
“It’s not a lie,” he says, forcing back the blackening of his vision as he strains to hold himself open. “Come inside . . . Please, Alina. Come inside.”
“I can’t,” she says, but her words are buried in a snap of wood and concrete. A gigantic crack severs the ground around her. She falls back against the wall, feels its pull. Fleshy tentacles ensnaring her in goop. She tears herself free. Lek screams, digs his hands even deeper within his body, legs buckling, blood pouring, and gapes himself wide.
And those fleshy walls clot and slime over with static-skin.
Alina screams, splatters head first into Lek’s torn-open hole.
He widens his stance, angles the gap open for her to enter and feels her become him. She pushes her body inside, past the static and the muck and the flesh and the blood.
“Thank you,” Lek says. “Thank you for love.”
***
Ding Dong. Lek opens the door. He’s wearing a green cardigan and khakis, a corncob pipe clenched between his lips. Soft jazz wafts from his living room and behind him several guests mingle around the kitchen and the dining room.
“Here she is,” he says. “Right on time.”
“Sorry, I’m late,” Alina says. “Rush hour.”
“Nonsense, come in. You look wonderful. Let me take your coat.”
Someone taps Alina on the shoulder. It’s Dallas.
“Dallas?” Alina says. “Hey-o, how’s it going?”
“Just got here. Congratulations.”
“Thanks, dear. God, you’re probably the only one who really gets this whole affair.”
“The messier the better,” Dallas says. “You know that. I’m here for you, here for both of you.”
And Lek wraps an arm around Alina. “You never told me you had such interesting friends,” he says. “Dallas, drink?”
“What do you got?”
“Whatever you need.”
Ding Dong. More people are arriving and Lek turns, motions for Dallas to get the door. Behind him, the kitchen is a-buzz with office folks and a host of others Alina has never seen before in her life.
“Dinner’s ready,” a girl yells out. “Serve yourself.”
“Gotta mingle,” Lek says. “I’ll catch up with both of you later.”
Soon, the front door opens. A family of three enter. The music shifts to some kind of Latin groove, bongos, and trumpet trills. The twist. The pony. A guy puts a drink in Alina’s hand. She hears someone scream, catches a glimpse of Lek in the kitchen with a meat cleaver. He’s carving up mutton. Always was a sucker for mutton. Ding Dong. More people pile in. Alina is pushed back to the dining room. Plates clink and clack. She steps on a spoon. Dallas is nowhere to be seen.
“Lek?” she calls, but so many people are now crowding the front room, she can’t manage to get to the kitchen. “Lek, I need to talk to you.”
Someone turns on the television. A wave of static overtakes the Latin groove for a second, but pitters to nothing. More people stumble in. “There a party in here?” “Heard something about meat?”
***
And a feast has been laid out before Lek. It’s a divine spread. He rubs his eyes. Alina sits next to him, pours him a glass of red wine. “This’ll help, dear,” she says.
“Thank you.” But Lek’s head throbs, pulses, crackles.
Dallas whispers something into Alina’s ear. Alina smiles, raises her glass. “Thank you for coming, everyone.” The other dinner guests raise their glasses for a toast. Lek is shaking, but he raises his glass.
From where he sits in the dining room, he can see the living room and it appears someone’s left the television on, but it’s just static.
“To my wonderful Lek,” Alina says. “I know it’s quick, but neither of us believe in using time as our measuring stick, especially when it comes to matters such as these.” She takes a deep breath, huge smile. “To the best man I know. My future husband. I love you.”
And with raised glasses, the dinner guests clink and drink. Lek snaps back to reality, tongues a sip, but the pain is too much. “I’ll be right back,” he says. He stands, kisses Alina on the forehead. He bends down to her ear. “Thank you, dear. It’s wonderful. You’re wonderful.”
Lek walks to the living room. The place is a mess of food scraps, cups, and discarded clothes. He smells shrimp dip and bacon cream. Alina laughs, a cackle through the walls. He smells ash. More glasses clink to laughter.
Lek kneels down by the television and stares at the static as if forced.
He slowly reaches his hand out, trembles fingers down the plasma screen. He catches sight of himself—a monster, a ghost—in the static. Made of static. A split second jolt. In the static, he is blood-covered, chest ripped open, swarming flies.
Alina cackles louder from the dining room. The sound of forks and knives scraping plates, shoveling meat to mouths.
Lek could reach inside that screen and disappear. He touches his face, wanting it to be real.
The static on the television set is a night desert. He wants to sink into it, anonymous, grey. He shuts his eyes and feels selves of himself bubble, fester. He feels his cock stiffen and he breathes harder, faster, harder, harder.
A way to disappear.
Just walk back into the dining room and eat your food.
“No more,” he says, and Lek punches the television as hard as he can, spiderwebbing the plastic plasma into jagged chunks. He punches it again, knocks the television back against the wall. Broken.
Chairs scoot. Grunts. Grumbles. Silverware clatters. Lek trembles. People rush to him.
Suddenly, the dinner guests fill the room. Lek topples, flat on his back, clutching his fist. “I’m sorry,” he says to Alina. “I destroyed . . . it’s—I’m gone.”
Alina, kneeling beside him, scoots in, places his head on her lap. She whispers: “You don’t have to destroy anything.”
Blood pounding in Lek’s chest.
A stirring.
“Maybe I am just a desert,” Lek says.
“My desert,” Alina says. “Tell me what happened.”
“I’ll tell you,” Lek says, tearing up. “I’ll tell you everything.”
The other guests move back and give them space.
The television sits smoking with a fist-sized hole in it.
“Whatever’s haunting you, Lek, it’s over.”
“I know . . . ” he says, sobbing. “Thank you.”
“Close your eyes, close your eyes and sleep.”
“Everything’s going to be okay?” he says, voice slurring and slipping.
Dallas passes Alina a wadded up dish towel. “Your scalpel, doctor,” she says.
Alina nods, carefully unwraps the towel, careful not to damage what lies wrapped within.
She unveils a pair of black-handled scissors, raises them for all to see.
“Take off his pants,” Alina says. “Let’s do this while he’s down.”
ORGONE
A stage, the remnants of a black box theatre—gutted cellar, dirt-brick ceiling and floor grime, the building just a drooping obelisk among toppled roofs, scattered rubble.
Hear boots and bare feet slump down crumbled slats, shuffle unto a clearing of cinder block chunks and crates for seats.
Golo is already there, pacing, fingering shapes in the dark theatre’s dirt.
A bubbling vat near the center, fire-lit, smokes yellow sizzles.
More observers trickle in, shiver and chatter and twitch. Golo slouches to a side room, a tunnel leading back up to the snow; his final preparation for the evening’s spark.
If done right, with precise ferocity, the night’s performance strives to erase grime from the gathered crowd by way of Golo’
s controlled contortions, chants, and whip cracks. The art of ritual cleansing.
He studies the outside terrain. His thoughts of grandeur sink to scattered bruises under the surface—the flittering ache of a showman, a shaman, a sharpened hermit about to step, to dissolve himself in art. To heal.
Outside, the sky is barren, the carrion birds long dead.
His stubbled head bows and he squats, pulls open his coat, dips fingers far into a pooling glob of coral-hued tissue that gurgles jellied pockets of heat, a pool he’s been monitoring for days and the properties the pool takes and gives: a dollop of nectar from a city girl’s finger, a scrap of pinafore, burial dirt, blood red.
A branch beside him. A woodblock. A whipping switch.
The smell of rot rising in the air.
The smell of octopus brain matter.
He scoops the octopus brain into his palms, butters mollusk divinity onto his face, stringing it through his beard, over shut eyelids, down brow and all about the back of his skinny neck, his bony chest and lumped muscles, veins, wrist-bones, to the tip of his head, until his upper body is smothered slick with warm brain.
The pink simmers, burns white, molds hard to his skin.
Golo’s spine shudders.
He strips himself of the thick-threaded hakama dress, black suspenders and boots. Shivering bare, he smothers his whole body in the ancient mass of the leviathan, for the leviathan’s brain stretches for miles upon miles. The entire plain, even the burning city itself, rests upon the lopped-open skull of this ancient frozen beast.
The air drips colder—Golo’s love buried in mountain remnants, trinkets and fire—landscape as inner repetition of loss.
From the cellar stage below, acrid fumes waver from censers. The act’s foundation, Misao’s piss mixture, bubbles in the vat, the stinky crackle of her bottled expulsion to massage, penetrate the crowd’s now fevered chatters, and to cleanse the crowd. Let the process begin.
The mollusk brain has taken effect.
Golo retrieves his garments, winces—a rupturing stab splinters his vision, stabs at his spine—body thrust to focus on a quad of hulking shapes in the outer distance. Four men, he thinks. He stiffens, suddenly seared from the inside out.