by Grefe, Jamie
Both men watch it go.
Dorje, frozen, hateful, confused and weary, waits for Golo to notice him.
And the door opens. Ami walks into the room, disappears.
The image repeats.
Golo drifts down to the ground and takes in the blackness much like how Dorje did. Dorje steps from the darkness and the stage is two bodies. Two men. And the image of Ami looping in the Void.
“What is this place?” Golo says.
“You’re here to kill me,” Dorje says.
“I must have—a ritual space, I cannot be sure.”
“The death of your wife.”
But Golo cannot hear Dorje. Not yet. So Dorje steps to where the light hits the vignette stage, and speaks a mantra, though now, in this sacred space, this Other space, with Golo present, he cannot hear his own prayers. As he mutters the prayers on the periphery, Golo suddenly realizes the immensity of this space, of this scene. The image of his wife fades into his perception. And he understands.
He understands death. As it happened.
As it must happen. For eternity in the conjoining of these minds.
Her face, so close. She loops back to the door. To the table. And back.
Golo follows her, speaking so quickly even he cannot catch his own words, but they are words of what should have been spoken. A warning of what could have been. Him standing in the doorway. Blocking her with his body. The tears. The shivering and shaking. And Dorje on the edge, yet unseen, a man caught in the throes of his own non-prayers. And to the door. To the table. Back again. Golo statics himself into the hologram, tracing Ami’s movements. A man possessed. Perhaps, he thinks, if only he can step into her fully, if only he can inhabit her fully, he can become her so as to inhabit her.
To bring her back to life.
To bring her back to life, before—
Murder.
To stop the blood rushing from her skull.
To become the man who would die so she could live.
And this final revelation pulses a spurt of blue up through this throat. It coats his tongue in lucidity.
Golo turns to face Dorje, his charged gaze breaking the man from his invisibility.
Breaking him so they both exist in this same space.
In the Void of Death.
To enact a performance of mutual death.
“So it was you,” Golo says. “The man who murdered my wife—I’ll crush your soul.”
“For my brothers and sisters in death,” Dorje says, voice rising. “You’ll be emptiness supreme. For all eternity. I am Dorje, your slayer.”
“I’ll follow you to Hell.”
“This is Hell,” Dorje says, but Golo has already begun to attack.
Through the door.
***
Misao is slammed back from the moment of impact with Reich’s stomach, her body splitting into more branches, sap, bloody veins gushing red splatters over the snow.
And Reich’s body puffs, keeps spinning, emits a shimmering hum.
Misao’s eyes boil. She drops to her knees, trembling at the sight of how the mad scientist’s body balloons outward. But something below her, all around her, feels unstable. It’s the ground. She snorts out a thick breath, teeth grit. She curls her elongated finger-branches inward to form a sloppy fist for the second blow, for in her mind, she believes in the power of slaughter therapy, in the decimation of magick gone wrong.
But a sharp crack—
A wave beneath the brainy earth roars and miles away she hears a building topple. A grand cloud of death-smoke rising.
Reich’s body lunges higher into the air, drops, still hovers almost as high as their shack itself. And his head lobs to the side, tongue extended from his mouth, his face melting from the constant spin. And the ground rumbles again, throws Misao back, to a roll, her monstrous face skidding in the snow. Suddenly, another tremor—more than a tremor, a whip-crack—slaps her body into the air, throws her up and down. She roars, cries out, her memory of Golo erupting in her mind, a phantom. She bites into snow, rolls to a creaking stand.
It has already begun.
Miles below the snow—a stirring. A fleshy heartbeat from Nothing to Life. A bulbous body twisting, synapses firing, spurting pink goop over desolate tracts of snow-drenched land. A road cracks, bubbles pink. Windows shatter. Cold insides heating to a boil. And the sudden recognition of pain, the pain of a lopped-off head. Stringy ropes of non-thought. And frozen in blackened earth, eight tentacles extending. Trapped. And move. Move yourself to the night air of those pink spurts. Constrict and kick as if the water has hardened. As if you could move a mountain, break a mountain.
Shake.
Curl muscles to solidify the skeletal frame and the crusted skin that hangs over the shape of your body. For it is time.
Misao charges Reich as the land bubbles beneath her. A pink geyser of brain-juice spits from near the shed, but she can’t stop. She mustn’t stop now. It’s for Golo, for the death of the only man she’s truly loved. And so she lunges, wobbling, the ground breaking, splintering for the final blow, transfixed on the floating figure. If only she can jump high enough, but that blue light from the sky has thickened like a paste around his body. Her fingers uncurl and she jumps, throws back her arm to kill him.
And Reich’s mouth gushes laughter.
***
Golo’s chest tightens. He can’t breathe right—a thickness, a roping choke. He forces himself to inhale, to taste the same air as his wife’s killer: how the man’s nose arcs to the left of his face, the dark lines below his eyes. The tension in how his fingers shiver. And if this is Hell or one of its incarnations, Golo recognizes the choice to not make things right, but to alter this oblivion in his favor.
To harness the ultimate action as if this were all some kind of staged performance. But there is no crowd, no healing, except to heal the man who stands before him of his life, to take a life that has taken a life. He pushes out another breath, sucks in twice more, until that breathing steadies him, clears his ears to the silence that surrounds them. And Ami. The semblance of her repetitive motion. Like an actress or a robot programmed to repeat. To move from the doorway to the table. Come near and nearer. Be his everything and all.
Breathe.
The satisfaction of wrenching his skin off and smelling just how rotten his heart really is. And Golo plants his feet on the ground, shuts away Ami, the sound of her near end.
Exhale in stutters.
Clack teeth thrice, body rigid.
Become meat.
Still the oscillation to an—
Executioner of love, love as an ending, as the perfect ending to this neophyte scum’s existence. And if this space, this non-place theatre, is just a trick of the imagination, a strange form of ritual enactment that operates as hallucination, then so be it and onward to the culmination, but the image of Ami repeats, repeats from a place that Golo does not recognize. No, this is not a hallucination.
This is destiny unleashed.
Dorje’s fingers form devil horns arcing at his sides like the young days, the desert days of no return, but those days are far gone and this place with its obsidian walls that echo nowhere, the looping wife. This vignette needs a director.
A rumble in the distance—a sharp crack from above.
A violent unbecoming.
A violent performance.
And as Golo arcs and spins, butoh-mimes toward Dorje, a wind swirls, a breathy wind—Golo’s arms in spin, entrancing, clicking momentum, windmilling fists.
Dorje extends his devil-horned hands and prepares for the storm.
It doesn’t come.
The rumble above jitters his head.
He looks up.
And for a moment, there is no Golo, no Ami, just the hum of the inside of his head. A quiet fullness one sinks into. In peace eternal. “I’ll never be sorry,” Dorje whispers, tastes black hair in the back of his throat.
This is when the world goes silent.
This is when Golo�
��s arm blasts through Dorje’s back—skin splitting, orchids of organs disrupted—as Ami moves from the door to the table and bends to Nothing.
“How’s that for art?” Golo whispers in Dorje’s ear, one arm yanking his head to Golo’s lips. “It’s for her ghost.”
The rumble, but Dorje’s knees are weak, shivering. He looks down at Golo’s hand extending out of his chest, the warmth of the man’s body pressing up against him. His breath and a mantra, a new mantra Dorje has never heard bubbling in his ear. Softer.
Softer.
The world cracking above.
The black melting sky.
A vision of murder, bloody flesh.
Golo’s other hand squeezes Dorje’s neck, holding him ragdoll and he yanks his other arm out from the man’s chest, the completion of his own personal Death-Mess performance piece. An ode to vengeance. The sublimity of fisting for life, a vampiric act of transference to end the life of this wife murderer.
And there, watching Dorje crumble to the floor with a fist-sized hole in his chest, that body leaking innards, he hears a shrill cry, something aquatic and beastly.
Something mollusk.
The hum of pink energy.
He remembers the orgone accumulator, the blip before he disappeared, just a foggy moment before his mind cracked.
Breathe.
And Dorje is sucked dry, face to the floor.
The animal mask faces of his brothers and sisters, the ones inside the giant naked dead girl. Hands digging frozen skin, carving a hole to the inside, to the chamber of their conjuration. And the walk to the girl, the walk through the snow. There was a building in the distance. The smell of piss materializing like a trail of smoke, just visible and Dorje had inhaled. He remembered the area, that part of the mesa, the same part where he had slaughtered the orgone woman. The orgone witch. And the sudden force from that piss-reeked building, a form in the dark from afar.
His heart slows, pumping jagged.
The growl of a beast from beyond.
Something inside him raging and—Ukko’s death. The pain of regret. He feels it in his guts, guts beginning to leak outward, spread across the ground, at the feet of his killer. At Golo.
And above them both, the squirming begins.
Eyes blinking at dirt, squealing pain. Suffocation.
And it feels as if the mountains around them, those black curtains, are writhing, stretching outward.
Golo jumps on the table as if doing so would somehow break the trance of his virtual wife, her static visage and the beauty of it all. But she’s slowing down now, her body blinking. Fading.
And even though Golo extends his arm toward her, the same arm he used to eviscerate Dorje, blook-cloaked and shaking, he knows she will not come.
But it’s the final gesture. An act in and of itself.
His way of saying—
What’s coming down from above.
Golo looks up to the blackness, just in time to see the splatter of pink brain descending like a tidal wave.
His fingers go stiff.
And he screams.
***
Tables break. A chair hurled through an already shattered window. Two creeps in jean jackets, bandanas and war paint, wielding uzi machine guns storm the dilapidated restaurant, cackling, spraying the place with bullets. A door kicked off its hinges. A green-lit room blood-painted, rotten stench. Like fish.
A growl, a gurgle from the shadows.
Claws skitter.
“Clean done Swiss-Cheesed this son of a bitch,” one of the thugs says, surveying the seemingly empty establishment.
A plate breaks from near the kitchen.
“What’s that?” the other says.
“Probably a damn stink running up the place—or my next meal, more like.”
“Judging by the green room back there, I’d say someone already beat you to—” but a fiery shot of pain halts his words, chokes the end of the sentence from his tongue. And he looks out and down, his body fish-flopping on the floor, separated at the waist.
His friend jumps back, was just a whirl of blackness, a stench that cut between them and now crashing back into the kitchen. “The shit?!”
But the halved guy is too much of a squealer, bloody mouth gurgling death. His friend shoots him once in the face, mashing his visage to mush. “Sorry . . . ” he says, panting, already spinning behind him to whatever thing in the kitchen rushed in and did this. He crouches, his Uzi pointed toward a fresh clatter of woks and oil bottles, cans crashing to the ground. “Better come out now,” he yells, “cause I’m coming in.”
But he’s not.
And he doesn’t.
It’s hard to charge when you’re gripped by the neck, lifted off the ground. All you can do is piss, and he pisses right down his jeaned leg, over his sneakers. His Uzi clatters to the ground, stomped by whatever abomination holds him airless in the dark. Through the bloody light of that green room behind him, he sees the wretched face in front of him, blurring harder by the second as the beast squeezes, claws breaking skin like choking a banana. And this nameless thug of the desolate city grinds his teeth, stares into the face of the abyss and dies throatless.
He dies moments before the first building in the city topples from the rough rumble of the mollusk monster who causes the streets to crack and the sounds of the dead screaming, the near dead, the heroin addicts, meth punks, speed freaks, rapists, murderers, and all denizens of this worldly hell, shaken to life in the dark by the sudden eruption.
The earth’s yawn.
Blood and snow.
And it’s quick—
Quick death, explosions of timber and concrete, steel and glass embedded in eyeballs, exploding faces, needles snapping off in arms. The slow drift of a junkie’s death. Of a metal band electrocuted on stage in front of their audience of epileptic zombies, the narcoleptic lunatics who stalk the city. The city on fire. The city a scream of swirling death.
Of mollusk scent.
Of eight tentacles shooting up out of the ground—one rising in the middle of the mesa, one in the city center, and others up through houses and brothels, crashing roads and men, women screaming for a life they never knew, crushed by the slime and dirt-drenched suction cups, those writhing arms of the sea beast who rises.
Who lives.
Who gasps air and squeals eardrums to burst.
But across town at that dilapidated restaurant, a monstrous Dorje, now a hairy creature of snarling violence, stands still holding the throat of the dead thug in his hands and squeezes, keeps squeezes even as the walls of the restaurant crumble and crack around him.
He bolts outside, the roof exploding in a fury of steel, wood, and wires. The crackle of electricity. The stench of dead fish. Grains of burnt rice.
And beyond the monstrous Dorje witnesses the leviathan’s wrath through his inhuman eyes and nose, the taste of rust on his tongue, of blood. A thick tentacle flailing, having crashed up through the bloody concrete, twists and smashes into a glass building, thundering down onto the street, smothering a gang of gutterpunks, squashing the scrambling denizens. One holding on, just a speck from Dorje’s beastly view, and the speck is flung, flies off into the night, the scream fading, quieter—
To the night sky shivering under fur.
And a blue beam of light, a tunnel of light in the distance from the place where the beast is drawn. He sees it, breath gravelly and jagged. And he roars gorilla and pig, a braying horse, a bleating sheep. A swell of muscle and fur.
The blue light of his other self—the way.
He lurches off into the snow. The tentacle behind him still raging. The sound of more screaming, jeeps exploding, tires squealing, and another tentacle blasting out through the city, gunshots blaring, heralding—
***
The beginning of a resurrection.
Across the snow, to the north, near the zones of unpredictability, a giant naked girl lies frozen in the snow, a wound under her breast steaming blood vapor, a wound suddenly trem
bling and moving as if the edges of the hole were tiny tendrils. And those tendrils writhe toward each other, skin forming to skin.
And the girl’s fingers curl, a gush of breath surging out from her lungs. She coughs blood, spits bones and smoke from her mouth, terrified.
And alone.
The ground waves beneath her, the snow a sheet from which she casts off and struggles to rise.
The back of her head, the black draining her hair to a yellow sheen, is blood-stained and smashed, but the squirm of so many tendrils sew furiously to heal her wound to health.
Silently, she stands.
A gorgeous giant in the cold among the calling of the wolves and the caribou, the whistling wind and snow.
She sees a tentacle smashing up the city beyond, but it’s too far and she hasn’t been to the city in years. Or a time out of time.
The death inside her.
The blue light in the distance. She knows that light. A warmth spreads through her body and she takes her first step, the ground shaking around her.
Even from here, she feels the orgone.
Her calling.
As if it were coming from her home, her once upon a time home.
***
Misao’s mutated hand strikes hard, blows her back yet again. Reich’s laughter, a staccato chuckling dread, but the ground won’t stop convulsing and wind sears across the mesa. A gust. A tearing of fabric, amplified voltage. Reich’s body like a sick bubble expanding. And Misao roars, her weird hands cupping, scratching against her animal ears. She lurches to the shed, to her Golo’s remains in the orgone accumulator.
She breaks down the door to the shed, disoriented by how its tiny size has expanded to that of a giant warehouse like the torture halls of her island home. But inside the shed, a force pushes against her body, a heaviness. It’s coming from the accumulator. The pressure of water or air. A heady constriction. Misao cannot speak, couldn’t speak even if she wanted to, her tongue a jagged tangle of skin and bark. Arm outstretched, she staggers to the accumulator door, to its bloody window with the sloppy stains of Golo’s blood.
But that force swells. She inhales, shrieks out a cry, her nerves fluttering.
She steps closer, the force rising.
And the closer she gets, the louder she hears Reich’s terrible cackle, becomes more and more aware of her own heart pumping—the blow of an axe to the back of a head, a tumble to the floor—and the blood on the window evaporates to neon blue and smoke seeping from the cracks in the accumulator door. She pushes past the pain, her appendages screaming, cracking, sap spitting out behind her.