by Grefe, Jamie
He knows those men see his convulsion.
Golo is mesmerized by the impenetrable psychic force of their distant trudge. They are lumbering toward where the north hill crests to the suctioned slopes beyond—a place of no inhabitance for the four or for anyone who knows better.
And there must be incense, thick bundles. Four trails of tangled smoke-lines. The echo of a low-toned temple bell’s ring still pinging off their gongs as if creating a soundtrack to the discomfort Golo feels now that he knows they are there.
And perhaps this sudden discomfort is the seepage of the brain transforming Golo’s body, how for those trained in the art of psychophysical therapeutics, the brain-smeared body gains entry to the door to become the unconscious’s diamond-breath sensing: carrion projection, the poetry of death, a medicinal lucidity. But a wet force stings Golo’s gut: a crack like a thick blade or a bludgeoning hilt, torn muscle exploding. He struggles not to scream; he grunts, folds over, can’t speak. Pain blots his sight to dots—a glob of fissures stabbing against his chest.
His veins bubble.
Of her, his Ami, so clear is her image, dear Ami.
And Golo wrenches at his body, struggles to straighten, must grip, press palms to his heart lest he tears off the layer of brain-skin, drain dead in the snow, be haunted by his wife’s death once again.
A hum shivers the ears. Must come from the jaw, from the snapping gong. It strikes yet. Harder. Face muscles tighten, hold. He grips his own face by the gums and yanks. Crack—jaw snaps sideways, opens and he can breathe, lets the pain ball on his tongue.
Resist.
And steady, grounded.
The temple bell pings once more.
The piss stench spreads out from the hole behind him, a beckoning. Inhale Misao, he thinks. And summon, don’t waver toward potential danger.
But Golo, as if in the natural order of actions to be acted upon, shuts his mouth and strains to breathe the smoke of the four men’s near distant linger if only to gain what secrets they carry. He blanks, sucks air like an addict, a whistle.
And holds them close.
Can’t place their origin nor purpose, these four.
No signal to speak.
A blocked connection.
And the sense of being exposed from afar—vultures plucking out the eyes of a blind man, guts ripped open. A flash of red revolving, crashes. He squints out the pain.
Who are you? he thinks, and watches them float forward.
And is seen.
Beyond, those four sets of eyes glow through the purpled dark, slinking through the snow, journeying, disappearing with their heads turned toward Golo.
The jaw again. Open it. A constricted omen.
From over the crest, their temple bell pings harder, a sting on the top of his head. Golo shudders confusion, nails pricking skin, and quick, turns, retreats toward the opening in the building lest he loses the mollusk magic brewing over his body.
Lest he admits his weakness in the face of the unknown.
And the shapes and sounds of the four have passed beyond the hill.
All is still. He faces that crest, perhaps to hear more and takes a step. He reaches out, withdraws, bends and hurries to gather his clothes in a heap.
Misao’s soft hand touches his shoulder. He jerks. And how long has she been standing there? She’s always so quiet when not entranced, God’s own blip. “Your time,” she says, thinking him merely wandering the chamber of his mind or some such inner solitude. “The beyond awaits.”
But that smell and that sound, Misao, thinks Golo, his face to the sky, may possibly be the commencement of our glorious future of pain.
***
A wooden chair is placed in the center of the cellar space.
Construction of the dead.
The black box stage with its rubble slats, dirt and concrete stains, surrounded by a barrage of head-bent seekers in ragged coats and boots, resounds with the echoes of their grunts and mumbled-jumbo. A white light illumines the chair.
A candle burns white.
Misao slides a microphone stand into place as a prop. She twists the stand tight, clicks on the mic, and steps to the side. Her piss bubbles and spits, tremors the room with her stink.
Golo enters soundlessly with a penetrating smell from a hole in the wall, still blocking the shrinking pain inside him, and, placing himself in front of the chair, owns the stage, as he should. His smothered body glows, sickening, whiter.
He raises his head, inhales, but does not summon and explode the crowd’s fervor. Instead, with a secret mantra only he perceives, he opens the electric brainwaves of his medicinal art, coated in the doctored slime of octopus meat seeping, and sits.
Preparation for the art.
He sits on the wooden chair, Golo, a naked man of an undeterminable age, scalped, pale, and bearded, doused poetic, with fingers firmly placed on his lap—a vibration to summon lotus light, a lust conjurer, fog eyes a swirl of purple, and thus it begins. And he speaks wires of non-words, a warped mantra, an inhalation, exhalation embodied, churning labored and mumbled and on and in and on. Expunged breath as oscillation. In. An engine mingled with the hum of an active power line. The branch, a whipping switch unbroken, gnarled and in. Whole.
Suck on and in, a mutilated orchestra of moans.
Breathe, Golo, breathe and spread deeper, breathe out and heal to—the sanctum, the pineal, the temple bell, and burn the sea, become form—the periphery unveiled.
A crack.
He stands, already twitching, rooted, contorted, voice strangled like a field of bellowing beasts.
Misao drops her top: twin moons and buttons, arms raised as if to penetrate his current.
Golo’s screams suddenly twist the room.
The onlookers and their heels, their crusty boots and callused feet have taken to epileptic shuffles, stomps, crackled shocks—moans of the sick, bellows of the heavy hearted.
A crack.
Space sinks.
The whipping switch to Misao’s chest, navel, thigh, knees, and heart. Her voice birding dirtward. It trills, flocks flutter, and she prepares for the gush, a rush of poetry.
Prepares for power itself to twist and manifest.
Golo feels the pit of the mollusk conjoin to the messenger. And the crowd, at his command, reels with the snapping of bone-breath, the unshedding of ontological armor. All lips and teeth splintering, melting, flowering.
He wants to obliterate. He wants the mercy of his dance to choke their breath so they may breathe afresh the air of this wretched mountain. A blizzard to sew. Of ether and orgone dreams. Slaughtered love as catharsis.
Push and breathe. The seed births his hands to flutter, splatters waves of air from his pores.
A crack.
The crowd bloats, floating side to side.
Misao is bent. Her entranced screams. Her screams dip, entwine the crowd.
And sudden.
The stench of her mystical piss.
But Golo senses a split—an unnatural welt chewing his body, blocking the flow of energy.
Something grinds inward from the back of his skull.
Turn, pucker the second act. He whips Misao’s feet and up to her ass, drives welts around her spine. Her voice bolts the crowd from the inside out, feeds Golo’s prayer with her feasting screams. The wooden chair rattles. A pulsation of pink matter expanding, sucking dirt from lungs.
The room burns piss, strings of vinegar, the smell of soiled cloth.
Tongues cluck and clack and the crowd clenches fists and stomachs, throats of broken glass. You, the breath. Humanize light—no, the split widens, flattens his tongue, expands. An axe blow from elsewhere—push it away.
This is Golo’s conjuring.
The blow smashes through skin. To bone.
And the pain crashes through Golo’s neck, not what he was expecting.
Is there someone projecting, psychically tapping in the room? Golo strains to see, can’t see.
This shouldn’t be hap
pening. A wrenching screw twisting, sears his throat.
Golo spasms, jerks, his mantra, a sputtering growl.
A crack.
Misao spreads herself and squirts screaming louder, topples the chair.
A man near the front vomits toward the stage as if the crowd, too, can feel his pain.
Golo can breathe, but in spurts, in little bubbles.
The fine sour evaporating under the pain of whatever disruption is occurring.
And Misao hums to Golo, her ritual song, a stopping point. Golo raises the whipping switch. A red beam blurts out his face. The rotten hovering of skin decaying, dropping from faces in clumps.
He drops the switch. Fingers needle, cramp.
Misao kneeling, grabs the switch and cracks it repeatedly on the ground—a snap, snap, snap, snap, snap, snap—and furthers the action to a calming of breath, heaving chest slower, slower drips of air.
But the crowd moans and heaves against her and spits the vomit of their unease all over the floor. A human sea of imagined pain. A transference.
This excruciation is not part of the ritual. Something has gone wrong. Golo struggles to regain control of his mind, block the agony from spreading deeper. A woody smoke melts his mouth. And the hum of electricity melts into the bubbling coo of Misao’s piss—the piss, become the piss. She shrieks louder, yipping—an incantatory scream as if she knows Golo’s exaggerated flails, eyes wide open, are not part of the act. Golo collapses on the ground and this is the struggle:
A pineal prick widening bluer.
An opening of the cranial vertex.
Golo raises his arms, drops, and worms in a circle on the floor on his back.
The droop of his face, the sheer blankness and his mouth wider, jaw popping from bone to scream louder—to become one with the hum of the electricity and the piss.
And the tortured bliss of it all—he sees her. There, he sees her, his love.
A crack.
Brain seeped inside, rushes to blot the intrusion.
A speck of memory. His mirror self at the shack in the icy woods of their love. It’s Ami. Her fingers of love and guidance rest on his shoulders, slide up and down and knead, unknot muscle ropes, tighter. She bends to his ear, is speaking to him of a holy heat in the dark. She releases her grip. Golo’s fingers reach across the table. There is a book lying open—rich paper, ink smudging, splotching.
And suddenly, his memory of the bursting open of the wooden door.
The scream, sudden stench, the wetness of death.
A force slams into skin.
Ami’s hot blood pours from the top of his head, goops life down his face. Her body crushing hot and stolen by a blow, crushing his lungs against the desk. He turns to the glint of an axe head in the moonlit dark—a streak, stained with her gore. He is smattered in Ami’s blood, in her shriek. Slop up. Beyond. And Golo struggles to stand, but his wife’s body is a brick-hued skin broken. His face is mashed into the book on the table from the force of her collapse, tongue caught between his teeth, too quick to act. And the chops sound thrice. And the crack.
If he could open his mouth, he would scream.
But to whom? For the blunt end of the remembered axe strikes him to the ground, thuds him to sleep.
A crack.
Misao’s gash flowers a sweet mist, coats the room.
The crowd is all but a heap of spasming bodies, sweating out the sick and shivering, full of cramps exploding.
The piss has bubbled to a black goop boiling in the vat.
Misao cracks the whipping switch harder, trying to force Golo out of his ethereal misery.
She holds his blank eyes with her prayer as if unchaining him from whatever shackle possesses him.
Golo stands, steps backward left foot directly behind right foot. He’s pressing against himself. To cease the fright. Right foot steps directly aligned with left foot. Eyes crusted, blurry. Can’t make out any interference from the crowd. A shuffling darkness. Focus on the feet. And repeat. To love again. And appear. To the chair. To the chair and sit.
It’s fading.
All dropping.
He slowly, deliberately sits, lips mutter the ending, stress the final syllable—a long o, and lets that vowel stutter.
Become heat.
Quiet.
Stilling.
Misao hands him the whipping switch, not sure of where his mind went or to what extent he still has it at all, but the crowd withers and claps. Some collapse in shouts of thanks, others obviously confused.
Golo places the switch in his lap, picks the branch up off the floor.
The branch has turned burnt black.
He swallows—yes, the pain was real—brain dissolving, chipping off his skin in flakes like sheets of ice.
And cracks the branch in half.
A temple bell pings off Golo’s tongue. He breathes it out, tastes orgone.
Tastes the New.
Meditation—phase one—complete.
***
Memory and pain spawn elevated states. A necessary intrusion, Golo fuck-meditates Misao rough—louder—her spinal nubs curved, body bent over the wooden chair in the black box—to reflect. To detach. Three stragglers from the crowd—their rags waft mold—drool from a sticky dirt corner, grunt and fondle.
The rhythm—like the click of a woodblock—nurtures, nurses the pain of the performance.
If the shapes moving to the horizon meant anything to Golo, they embodied an answer. Like the night of his wife’s slaughter. He’s come to swallow her death in lumps. It was the summoning pen-stroke for them to resign their efforts to utilize the orgone energy believed to be trapped in the octopus brain-dirt of the mountain—orgone, itself: life-element of the lotus and the diamond, yolk and the seed.
A letter followed days later, knived to his door on a frigid night. The script was not of a tongue Golo could read, well read as he is. No footprints marked the way. Enflamed by grief, he burnt the letter in a vat of boar’s blood and bat shit, breathed a divination to Kala, and chose to bury his wife (he had kept her body under a tarp behind the shack for study) on a hill near their home. Schematics stolen, her work gone the way of ash—by way of the axe slaughterer, no doubt—and void of clues, leads, confirmations, or crumbs to suck after, Golo remained alone, brooding until the night of Misao’s occurrence.
She claimed to have fled from a desert commune, a simple ceremonial girl of bruised elbows, half-sewn scars and sorrow, likely to end up gutted or bled out by the blade of whatever surgeon would buy and dissect her. A maiden unleashed. Misao ran to the edge. She had squeezed her skin through layers upon twined layer of barb-wire, glass bits, and the gut-chunked shards that sang of a way out.
Now, as Golo juices her divine form, he suffers a rush of grandeur, a paroxysm, an awakening storm—together, they would rekindle the orgonotic operation in secrecy, resume construction of the accumulator from memory, and melds its mystery to his artistic rituals for the purpose of preserving his dead wife’s life work—his dream-splattered bride would live on.
He pinches himself shut and pulls out, thumb sharp on the hilt and shoots sleet across her back, blotting his thoughts with a trace of orgone. He would study the grace of expulsion, a way to transcendence, scrape revolt from the floors and the brain, more and more, and begin with the effects of whatever fraudulent sorcery those night wanderers had pushed into the depths of his alchemical art.
For Ami.
Bending, Misao strokes, slops him against her teeth.
Golo breathes. “We need a sack for the puke,” he says. “Accumulate—tomorrow, we build.”
She looks away, spits a glob of Golo to the floor. But Golo, already peeling at the brain, does not return home on this terrible night.
***
Coated and booted, the dark paints Golo thickly cold.
Misao’s soft patters, vomit-sack dragging behind her, have since been swallowed by snow and night.
Alone, Golo trudges to the crest, woodblock and whipping switc
h in hand, to follow the prints of the four who came before.
He lets the snow turn pink in his mind, a mind-tunnel to conjure the memory of the shack. Of the infiltration. And it’s the ping of that bell, once again, filling him to trudge. To seek. But no more. No more than a vague brush; Golo’s mind vibrates.
Boots stick in the snow. He rips up on his leg, wipes off the stuck coral matter and staggers to a standstill just as the crest peaks to a most unnatural sight.
A giant naked woman the length of a slender ship, lies toes-extended-upward in the snow as if asleep. Or fallen. Unburied, palms up and perfect nails. Her pale skin shimmers a dull grey, long locks of hair streak outward from her head, snow-whipped, tips frozen and shimmery. All around Golo, a buzz, a snap swarming. Pink brain tissue leaks up around where her body lies. It smells of sage. He cups his ears and smacks his whipping stick in the snow, trying to study the pattern of disruption as prediction.
Nothing, just specks he can’t see and chattering teeth.
The dead energy of the giant woman beckons him near. A woody smell. Of caverns.
And behind, from the ruined city, a booming of brick, muted dull and deep, but that is miles away—hot fire and piles of rot.
It’s on the wind, this night.
Yet, as a professor in the academy, years before, Golo spent an orange autumn studying various forms of the unidentified phantasmagoria of the world, a plateau in his life where he believed himself a witness to haunts, zips, and skittering pirouettes. Sky legions of invisibility. Krakens like monoliths. Perhaps, he thinks, this whale of a woman is a creature—a specimen of sorts, made of art. But who would place such a creature on the outer edge? In the brained snow. An undecorated glimpse.
Of perfection.
Golo moves closer to the giant girl. She lies on her back, arms outstretched, fingers spread spotless, save for two bloody gashes on the side of the girl’s chest, just under her right breast. A hum expanding. The crushed snow. Boot prints. Someone or something has scaled the giant’s chest.
Dig fingers into skin and climb. And he does. Golo scales the woman’s side, up around the breast—an iced nipple beacon—and to the heart, but the heart is a sawn open hole leading down.
Golo listens. Snow sprinkles, falls scattered, melts on the inside of the body.