by Grefe, Jamie
And there beside the hole, a spread of ashes lies faintly smoking. Golo crouches, inhales the perfume to confirm the four strangers who must have already descended.
It’s a heady blank swirl at this proximity.
A hallucination of Ami stands before Golo, her face gashed open from the tip of her head, split through her left eye—a creamed yolk—to the middle of where her nose once was. She’s wearing the dress of her death-date. And behind Ami is the orgone accumulator of his shamanistic vision cast with the faint shadow of Misao’s face from inside the small glass window on the accumulator’s door.
Ami’s head tips back and back, face up to the sky.
And a speckle of snow, just one dancing crystal, hits the smoking ember that Golo inhales like a pig, and snuffs it out.
Snuffs Ami—her trance body ripped, decimated to white fluff and blood vapors. To snow.
But the sound has shifted. Somewhere inside the giant girl’s body, Golo hears the ping of that gong, a throat-song fevered with yip tones and growls—the clicking of a stick. He picks himself up, tugs his hakama up to just below the knees, so as not to slip on the skin, and lowers himself down into the chest of the giant.
And the giant’s iced fingers clench.
***
All Misao has to do is make her way past the abandoned town—or follow the path behind the buildings, the one stoned-snaking through the pinion trees—to where the path and the road become one. One, she should walk, keep walking, keep dragging the sack of puke, and look for the turn-off, the denser wooden walk, and arrive.
The city of death—overrun, a slaughterfest seeping out to the desert, and beyond to the one road carved of octopus flesh.
So Misao crosses behind the town, lifts the sack, and darts down a back path so as not to be spotted by any of the night’s denizens.
And Misao’s chest burns from the whipping switch, but it’s a burn she controls, an empowering stroke, not unlike the island sorcery of her youth. She ducks her head into the snow and darts off into the deepening woods.
The octopus brain tries to stick to her felt boots. She’s light, though, and agile. Misao plucks a brain-bud and weaves around the pinions until she’s sure she’s found the path. A particularly thick stick, hardened white with crust, has been speared into the ground—Golo’s doing, no doubt.
A sign of sorts to mark the way. The staff itself, a resonating instrument in its own right they used for a cemetery performance in the yellow spring. The choking fever of a gaggle of geese—a binaural collage. And the release of the goats. The pigs, how they blended. The possum, too.
Her shaman, the hermit—her Golo—how distraught he was by the death of his wife. And cut his hair. And wash his body in the brain of the beast, so he can be sharp again. His Ami, his all. And the mystery of her murderer and why he did not pursue, not that the police would help, no police to speak of on this messy mesa in the armpit of the world.
But here exists the possibility of an act.
To harness the nectar of the skull-split octopus—to move closer to the mystery of orgone, that was her purpose, as well—what pushed her body to unshackle her maidenhood, to carve and crawl and starve her way over ships and seas and cities and snakes. This mystery was why she listened to the flapper whore in the city who tried to bite, the whore who tried to shank her in the bathroom of brown porcelain and needles, and Misao opened her cracked lips and bit and spit, until the whore’s face shone ragged strips of bloody rivers, unpeeled, incapacitated, frothing on the floor forevermore.
Thus, the revelation of Golo came to her.
Upon Misao’s suggestion, they experimented with the properties of the leviathan’s brain matter. The divine effects of the matter on the skin and the visions of memory and energy walls that followed. A psychophysical scalpel of rejuvenation.
But tonight was different. Golo’s face was not the face of a graceful artist, it was a face of horror. Of violation.
And now Misao passes the last of the pinions and their spice, and, vomit sack still dragging, snow encircling, pushes her way up the stone path to Golo’s shack in the woods.
A light is on and that should not be.
Earlier, Misao was the last one to leave. Golo had gone the long way through the town to spread the word of the performance.
She places the sack in the snow and slowly circles to the side of the shack. She pushes herself closer, fingers on the sill and peers into Golo’s study. A single candle burns on his desk, its red wax bubbling out in a sloppy perimeter around the candle’s base. She cocks her head to the doorway that leads to the main room, but cannot hear anyone or anything.
To the front porch, step by step.
To the locked door and what lies beyond.
The knob is coated in nectar. Misao licks her palm, tastes a sweet remembrance. And opens the door.
It is only a split second as if a still image appearing too quick to register, but registered and stored. A hallucination turned memory. The inability to unthink a happening. And the happening Misao sees and smells before her—chills skitter centipedes up her thighs—is framed in the doorway to Golo’s study, the same study she just peeked into from the window outside.
A hulking man, cloaked in black, axe raised, back turned—basked in blood.
And he turns, looks directly at Misao with the mask of a grinning fox, a mask that resonates the sound of a gong rung, rung—
Misao blinks.
The candle sputters, burns.
She walks to the desk and snuffs the candle between two fingers. The room goes dark. Outside, the snow pattering at the window dizzies Misao, the sky streaking black and purple. She leans over the desk and breathes off the vision. But she’s left the sack of puke outside in the snow.
Off to the east, she hears the caribou call. It starts as one, a trumpeting conjoining with the pastured goats. For a moment she lets herself become their whine, but the trumpeting morphs to a droning wail, a wall of motion. Misao drags the sack to the porch, kicks open the door and heaves it sloshing on the floor. She lights a lamp and another, tiptoeing around their living space to ignite every light in the shack, filled with the nightsong of the beasts. The thought they paint in her mind is of a young woman falling, falling backward to the wooden floor, palms up and empty, but she shuts her eyes.
It’s Ami.
And there is no pain.
There is nothing but animal tongues clicking.
***
Inside the giant naked girl, Golo drops to a fleshy tunnel and it is not pitch dark on this side of the world.
Red illumination. The stench of a freshly opened body consumes him—it drifts, cartoons up his nose in blots. He shakes away the side visions the smell sparks: pigs and boars, frogs and viper’s blood.
He winces—the crackles are near, a screech.
An owl hoots elsewhere down the tunnel—a caribou calls out in the far dark, through the snow.
Misao calls his name. She’s on the shack’s floor.
She calls his name and he is not there to come and help her out of the void.
The hole leading out of the woman sears and bubbles. Golo presses his palm to the fleshy dirt, licks his palm, intones a breath, but the smell, the smell is unlike the smells of his cupboard, his vat, his magic art. He wants more.
A temple bell’s ping rings from the bowels of the giant.
Hands in pockets, Golo bows his head and steadies the fever inside him.
From his pockets, Golo pulls his whipping switch and woodblock.
The temple bell pings. Twice.
Golo rushes forward: to the crackle, the bubble, a mélange of purpling smells, blood-clouds popping across his eyeballs, and sensual moans peaking, dipping and repeat to—
Overpowering chants.
He enters a ritual chamber.
The belly of the giant naked girl, a hollowed out cavern lit round by thick red candles.
And three men in the center of a circle of masked naked women legs crossed in lotus: a
caribou, a goat, a crane, a fox, an ape. The chanting swells from the men. One of them holds a circular gong, another, a temple bell. They strike in unison. And Golo immediately bows, noticed as he is, by the men as they turn to face him, chant their spell within him. But Golo pushes against their tones, careful not to swallow whatever power they have created in their circle.
And more than this, for the image manifesting in Golo’s mind is that of Ami. But the image cracks, his brain crackles, and a force from outside strikes the back of his head.
It’s the fourth of the group, his bear-hands clubbing at Golo’s skull.
And Golo claws, phlegms at the man—cannot hear, for the chants have swollen, the women and their animals—to rip off his face, but the face of the man is the visage of an octopus frowning, face dripping, one eye hanging, unblinking.
Golo swings the woodblock, cracks the mollusk man in that eye, but a meaty hand is already tightening its grip on his throat.
Golo’s woodblock strikes the mollusk man’s head, ever weakening. The beautiful hands of the masked women pull at this hakama and his suspenders, his coat and boot.
Golo struggles to regain control, but the dirt-flesh walls curve about him and the sound of the ritual fades with each grope and rip, the rip slowing as if each thread of his being tears to tiny clicks, miniature universes of holes, crags, gurgles, and he screams, wrenches at the arms that hold him. But Golo thrashes, can’t swim from the pummel, the gropes, fingers tightening.
And Ami’s hand webs to his—fox-faced, a brush of breath.
Somewhere, Misao falling.
The rushing of water freezes his lungs shut, cracks.
To inhale orgone.
The press of other bodies against his own.
Time passes fitfully, in blood.
***
Later.
Mallet to iron.
Oscillates to—
A temple bell pings, rings out through the cavern of the giant naked girl’s innards. Strewn with flowers. The burning of stones to light the passages, little red holy rocks glowing like deformed coals. They pulse. And come to a clearing of legs, to the womb chamber, to the stench of an abattoir—a death call.
Dorje traverses the tube, hunkering and slipping down into the high bloated sphere, fox mask in hand, black cloak swarming around him.
He slips his fingers into the folds of his robe, right hand wraps around a string of black beads and counts the beads.
Until he comes to the makeshift pyre: a clump of mollusk brain hammered flat to a paste, a bell and the blood, a stick of incense, red tip still glowing like those little rocks, holy smoke trailing a line of black swirls of intoxication. All placed within a wooden crate.
But the other brothers and sisters who came from afar, their bodies, are blitzed apart, torn into chunks and gobs, strewn across the sphere, staining the curved walls with splatters and splots.
Just a tick remains. An inner pendulum, steadying Dorje’s trembling mind.
Someone has penetrated the veil, broken the trance.
Yet Kala has spoken and speaks now to the cycle of his desire, his retribution.
And breathe, Dorje—whose skin do you taste?
Channel the rag-dung to ring.
Let it fill, be full.
Dorje sits lotus position in the center of the filth. Spread fingers, palms up for the arcing of light to penetrate. And heal.
Float.
His bearded pale face tenses, slacks to the visage of a dead man, and those black eyes shut to a wall of inner blankness.
His scars glow.
And ticking.
Tick, shrinking frame.
Tick, spirit expanding.
To a fissure in the skull. A light.
Lips trilling the rag-dung.
Hovering.
Hover, night-snow gliding—the tumbling grace of a snowdrop afloat on the wind, ticking.
Tick, to a fleshy dot floating forward.
A choir of women.
Tick, encircle the violent one with the bloody hands. Of brothers.
And be lost—Dorje’s body within girl-body levitating, a lotus in the center.
Right eye—snowing, snow freezing.
Left eye—opening what came before, to the chant and the pull, to the incredible smear of Golo’s fury, his brutal action. The stench, too much for Dorje’s left eye to bear, though he dare not look away lest he lose himself in an illusion. For the bodies of the others have been thrown around him, splattered and split with the flick of Golo’s wrist. Fingers scoop eyeballs. Nails rake guts to threads. This man, now shivering his way to a shack in the woods.
This animal.
And ticking.
A strange box-like structure clouding the right.
The blood fills Dorje’s left eye.
And when Dorje’s body floats back to the ground—left eye blood-holed, gored—the axe is passed to his lap, placed within his hands from without. It rests in his robes.
“Thank you,” Dorje says, and looking out at a point on the skin-walls of this body, he sees the structure hover before him.
Lest Golo enters orgone.
Lest orgone consumes him. Not for what he’s taken tonight.
Yes, let death prevail like the burning city in the distant night.
Or the fire of a physician’s pain.
***
Boots break snow, grind a machinist rhythm. Golo, dirtied, mind weary, clomps sloppy, holds up one arm to shield his face from the blizzard’s spray. He’s a grit-tooth hobbling mantra.
It’s still night, pulsing night.
Exhale woods, skin, blood, and what lurks inside giants over hills with holes in their chests.
Golo is past the abandoned building of the night’s ritual.
The orange ambience of the burning city beyond—a fiery splash of violence and body-slopped streets, a slop Golo knows he must harness, go beyond, for the orgone accumulator hums to him—disks, wires, electrodes, sine, triangle, loop. And even now traversing these vast frozen woods, he forges forward, shivering the thinned air. Taking breaths, he four-counts, repeats, struggles his way home—in, two, three, four, out, two three, four.
Yonder, bleating, haggard cawing as if the cold was a lost beast dying.
Eyes slit, crusting shut, he bats away branches, chops at ice webs, clomps on, breaks hanging blots of snow-mess, frozen leaves.
Just follow the wooden stakes, and the stakes are no one’s fence, but well-built, nonetheless, half-buried in the ground. They serve as a wind-whipped path to Golo’s shack.
And the caribou call, wolves lull among snake slithers.
The ground softens, hardens, brain-muscle shifting.
And the smell—a carrion musk surrounds.
Golo’s mantra grows louder as he loses himself in the repetition of sacred words, swells him onward, palm to fence stake, weak palm to fence stake.
Step over frozen fur, a jetting of bone, pink seepage leaks dot here and there like tiny lights in the snow. A burbling pocket of octopus brain, manna for the sipping. Trembling, freezing, shivering thoughts of the blot he’s suffered at the hands of those lurking within the giant naked girl, Golo wrenches a glob of pink and forces himself to chew enlightenment.
Swallow the flesh.
Chew divinity.
“Aum ramma salo kari,” he says. “Or-gone aum ramma salo kari.” He repeats these words, swallows, chokes and beats his chest, gags on through the snow, until his gags turn to octopus breaths.
Over another hill.
To the end.
Gunshots crackle in the distance.
Screams of the fallen. Or screams adrift on the wind from miles away. Or ancient snow-screams finding their way to the inside as Golo’s ears have sealed shut from the cold.
And now, Golo gleams truth. The blockage was from the others who ambushed him inside the giant girl’s chest. A God Golo was not aware of, symbols and letters he could not read. The clenching in his chest. His jaw. Hands choking his throat. A const
riction. Venom on his tongue.
For in that moment of violence, Golo was overcome with a furious hate—his wife’s killers were among them.
Waiting for him as if destiny were a slice to the throat.
But he bled them out.
Each gory strand of their bodies, a click and a hum—breathe.
The turning of sacrifice.
Shut your eyes and feel the sea—force the feeling to be, he thinks. Breathe snow-stuffed lungs to life. And rise, mollusk. Seep deeper. Breathe in gulps, gulp punishing air.
Golo stumbles on, lips dripping blood.
He’s weaker now. “Don’t collapse,” he says to himself. “Soon, warm . . . and drink.”
Yet the heady swill of Misao’s piss elixir, a balm, a potion, still swishes inside him, bubbles over his mind as if her sacred waste were a trigger to heal him of his dead-Ami obsession.
And the discovery of Misao’s natural medicine had been a blessing, the fruits of one of their psychosexual ritual actions.
The force of her heat had lit his heart to beat harder.
Ami would have been proud—proud of Golo, too, for the live action death-deed inside the giant naked girl.
But the mechanics of Misao’s piss—thinks it may have something to do with Misao’s relationship to the octopus, the elevation, perhaps. He doubts whether she understands.
He dares not ask for fear of knowing.
“Be aware, again.” It’s the rasp of his master, cloaked with the living face of Ami.
They hover before him, disappear before him.
Just a blink.
Golo curses. Misao’s piss is not enough, though a balm, never enough, though a path to the other side, he needs more.
Needs orgone stimulation.
If only the truth were something to spew, chew, regurgitate.
His stomach grumbles.
And imagine—
There were more naked bodies within the girl’s chest than Golo saw, thought he saw, through the smoke, if there was smoke. And he sees the scene now, cloaked in red waves:
Strawberry blonde fingernails to chest, raking blood. He is stripped. Thumbs drumming his neck, esophagus bruised, hollowed, licked—explodes blood. Tongues flickering the gorge. More sap. Sap turns nectar. To spread his body on the floor, pinned down and pummel, scream gurgles, pummel, suck gurgles. Flesh on flesh and wet on wet. Push flesh in folds. Smother. And the threat (whispered in his ear, licking lobes) to spill his guts open with a sharpened stone and smear his shaman blood on the corpse of a levitating pig as some form of curse—open mouth dripping, dipped, mouth pried and yanked, stuffed with pink.