by Grefe, Jamie
To touch the door.
To regain Golo’s life and maybe there is a way she can salvage the blood like how Golo salvaged the vomit from his last performance. Even if it means casting the shaman in a new form, so be it and let it become. She’s crying, each movement is a mountain and the entire shed shifts to the left, to the right. An imminent collapse.
She touches the door.
The orgone accumulator sucks her arm to its blue heat. And she can neither press nor pull herself away and now, , it’s only a second before the orgone consumes her, sucks her flesh to whatever horrific end Golo must have met. She struggles to force herself in, to pry open the door and explode. Anything to meld herself to whatever reality Golo has died into.
The door explodes outward and Misao loses consciousness like the crack of a whipping stick.
Gone she goes, sliding across the floor, tumbling out into the night.
And the orgone accumulator door bursts, breaks, destroyed from its mollusk-brained hinges, releasing a flow of orgone energy out into the night.
The night a bright blue.
A wall of orgone.
The release is final.
The blue is sucked into the lungs of a giant naked stranger who stalks the outer edge, making her way to the blurry mass of Wilhelm Reich, Misao, and the orgone accumulator.
***
A pale face looming over the hill that borders Golo’s shack. Misao sprouts hairy branches from her ribs, feels the branches drip, pulled to the ground, to the tremoring brain-snow beneath. And unless her vision has dimmed, shifted, she sees the snow as a dull pink as if the octopus brain is flooding, turning liquid or hotter, melting the snow. But a tentacle from the other hill fingers up into the air and crashes down. Reich’s body lunges upward, drops back to its hovering position, still caught in the blue orgone funnel of light.
And the pale face over the hill is Ami.
Misao has seen her pictures in the spellbooks and texts Golo keeps boxed in the closet of his shack’s sleeping room. The top of her head is stained black at the roots, but it’s her. And she’s gigantic. Misao tries to speak, tries once more to reach out a hand, but she can’t move. The branches from her body have driven themselves into the ground and already she feels the pink swelling through the core and soon it will reach her body. Misao does not know the effects, but such a dose directly to the bloodstream is surely fatal.
Ami is transfixed by the spinning Reich. A smile breaks on her face, but she cocks her head to the side, her body stiffening with each step, curious. The hole in her chest is a loosely-skinned patch. It glows red and at the right angle her heart beats smoky and pounds her body to step across the shaking ground. The tentacle whips out less than a mile away, writhing its power, slams down hard enough to elevate Ami off the ground for just a second. The shed cracks. The blue light intensifies.
But another stands puppeted near the shed, the shed aflame with blue orgone energy. And Ami has never felt anything like it in her life. Or death. And now this creature, a presence Ami feels. She feels the creature’s closeness to Golo as if the creature were the cause of her death and the orgone fills Ami with the death of Golo, with his disappearance, fueling her feet, up to her cranium vertex with the lust to end this creature’s life. To meld this monster to her heart if it could only soothe the regret and confusion she feels.
But something from inside the shed breaks. Ami hears the sound and she’s at the door, moving to the table, to look over the plans for the accumulator before the world goes red. Then black. And frozen.
No—this is something else.
A growling wolf-like abomination storms from the shed, shields its eyes from the orgone light and the spinning Reich, from the blast of orgone emanating from the shed, splitting up into the sky. And at that moment, Ami looks dead into the heart of her own killer—Dorje.
***
Dorje senses nothing but bloodlust. Whoever he was, he is not.
He will conquer orgone.
Misao tries wrenching herself from the ground, for whatever evil mess of an animal that has found its way inside Golo’s shack snarls with blood-fever. She shuts her eyes and lets the weight of the branches go where they will. She lets them sink, feels the weight of her pushing cease.
Behind her, the warmth of the shed’s orgone energy hits her back and the pink brain of the mollusk fills her mouth. She’s underground at another black box venue in the city’s southern quadrant. It’s dusk and Golo contorts himself on stage, the head of a latex rooster looking out at the crowd, at the sick and the unwanted. She holds a honey-coated rebar she pounds on the floor and prays to Kala. A circular prayer, thick and loud. Golo throws himself on the ground, his complimentary squawks forming the prayer’s inverse. She feels her head grow hot with nectar, the drip of their mutual meditation. Of their synergy. And suddenly, the venue turns orange light and heat. She thrusts the rebar harder into the ground, cracking the stage as Golo thunders himself in the head, screaming the prayer, until his voice turns rock and wind. This, thinks Misao, is what she needs. That moment of all moments. The connection, a connection even beyond death. There is no death. There is only the continuation of forms. Shells. So she sinks. With the wicked creature charging from the shack to where she stands rooted, she sinks. She cannot fight. A paroxysm of unbecoming. Of wanting to splatter this gory creature in his—
Ami quickly turns to catch Dorje running over the cracked earth to the rooted creature, the creature who feels to Ami like woman and hate, jealousy and a thousand deaths. She sucks the orgone deep inside her, though, and watches the little Reich turn into nothing but a fleshy mass of blue skin churning. So she does what she did when she was alive and smaller. When she, the orgonotic shaman would turn crowds to drooling masses of bliss. She cups her hands and feels the orgone solidify. She draws a breath—two, three, four—for the sky and beyond the universe, overcome with the truth of orgone.
But she fails to see the tentacle that’s snaked its way across the dirt and how the ground is now a bright pink, a pink that seeps into her dead skin, coats the bottom of her feet with a weird numbing hate. The tentacle wraps around her neck and yanks her off her feet.
Dorje lunges toward the hateful creature before him, but mid-air, he catches sight of a mountainous tentacle choking around the neck of the giant naked girl who pulses blue. And the tentacle whips the girl into the air and slams her to the ground.
The shed explodes, sending planks of wood barreling into Dorje’s body. The wood nails the rooted creature, but where is the rooted creature? Dorje is knocked back, pummeled and confused.
And the sound of a woman screaming with lungs the size of the ocean, tearing apart the tentacle that held her tight. Yes, Ami’s snapped off the tentacle and throws it toward the flaming city beyond. She watches the bloody chunk of tentacle rooted to the beast who writhes under her flail and gush a thick purple out its wound. But the shed has exploded in a tornado of blue orgone energy.
But that only does not cause her jaw to open, to hang in hollow wonder.
No, the root of her confusion is the man who stands in the middle of the rubble, enveloped in thick smoke and blue light. A man she knows and loves.
Golo.
All of a sudden, though, the orgone and the mollusk brain coating her feet conjoin within the dead-live Ami, paralyzing her to the seeping shaking ground in a storm of electricity.
***
The last thing Golo recalls is standing over a gored Dorje—the man who slaughtered his wife. In an obsidian blankness. A vignette from elsewhere. And all that came after. The gloves. The static blare from his mouth to the perineum. An arc. A spreading of skin. He dissolved and the tiny speck of who he thought he was cast to the abyss. To a blue sea of flat lines. He became a thinness. Then a line. Then a split edge and out into the fiery spool of an explosion on unsound ground. The quaking and the pink snow. A wind on his eyeballs. Inhale and back. Be present in mist. He steps from the smoke, steps over steel and metal, wooden planks, looks
up to see—
She’s there.
His Ami.
She casts away a chunk of mollusk and the naked sublime, his heart races to his cranium, a wet pulse. The nectar stiffens his back like a broomstick. “We’ve found the way,” he says to himself, but here, there is no Misao. And the blue light from the sky, a light pushing around a ball of flesh emits a trill, a hard pulse, both thick and wet. The tears gush. He grits his teeth, shoves away the pain in his jaw. He steps further over planks and rubble, over shattered tools, racing toward his wife if only for her to hold him close to her heart like it always should have been. Never was.
A mutated hand, more claw than hand, reaches up from the rubble and grabs Golo by the ankle, forcing him down. He topples, his head cracking into a board, spraying his eyes with blood. And the monster rises from the pile, a bloody heap of fur and bubbling skin. The stench of rot. Of shit. Golo tries to move, but a clawed fist slams into his face, angling his vision to his wife in the throes of electrocution. He screams, kicks at the monster, but the beast is upon him. He throws his hands to the thing’s face, trying to keep himself from being consumed and the creature’s mouth opens, revealing row upon row of jagged teeth and that smell. He’s smelled it before. It’s the smell of his wife’s killer. A pungent smell like being inside a body. The waft of men and women in animal masks and the heat of a grope, of claws and fangs. He pushes against the inhuman creature, but he’s weak. And this is it.
Hot teeth sink to ragged skin.
***
A quietude beyond the pain. But the heat on Golo’s skin is not the heat of a death-bite. It is something below him, something earthy encompassing him, twining around his limbs and moving him through the rubble. A hot pink sea to rest in, to be carried away from the snapping of jaws. And snarls.
He touches the root swirling around his body, a coating of skin around his face and the movement through the pink sludge, the quivering ground. He hears destruction, a grinding gloom, but it’s far away and the screams melt to the hum of his own head as the roots coat over his ears.
Golo is lifted through the rubble by arms of wooden skin, turned pink. And hot. The hotness wakes him, lifts him and sends him into the electric arms of his wife. Of Ami.
And she holds him to her breast. Golo opens his mouth to suck the brain out from inside her body. To take all the pain and swallow it forevermore. He sucks harder at the air, those arms holding him, rocking him as if he’s climbed the tallest tree in the forest, and Ami’s face is so close. He feels her breath on his face, inhales and keeps drawing his breath to swallow the pink from her body. To let her know he’s sorry for her death and the pain in not being able to give her his own life. For the chance to look his love in the eye and for a moment, all is well in the world. The screams. The quaking ground of death. The orgone storm. And Ami smiles into his eyes, into the tips of his toes. A radiance. The ultimate shamanic act.
Of love.
“Thank you,” Golo says.
“Good night,” Ami says. “Good night once more.”
But below, Dorje slashes at a struggling Misao. He severs a root, her blood spitting across the pink brain landscape. Enraged, he claws and bites at her spidery fur, at her wooden skin and the branches that hold Golo up to his lover. The animal Dorje wants nothing but to kill, to destroy this other feeling he gets from the performance happening around him. But with each slash and cut, any power that the orgone might have given him, fades. And Misao screams with each cut, but holds Golo, holds him tight in her arms.
“And goodbye,” Ami says, suddenly twisting away from Golo and scooping up the raging beast of Dorje. She holds him in her hand as a mighty gorilla might hold a dandelion. And she brings him close to her face, her non-live mind stripping away the beast within him, knowing his true self—the murderer. And if only she had an axe. If only she had the strength and prowess to strike his skull and split him in two. She looks back at Golo, still hovering before her, lets him see the beast she holds in her hand.
Golo nods. And they both know.
In one quick motion, Ami plucks the beast’s head from his neck like slaughtering a chicken. Such a puny action, a simple gesture. The plucking of a flower. A stroke and a fizzle of blood. The release of the beast’s bowels and she squeezes her hand, feels his waste mush to his skin and fur. She opens and squeezes yet again, balling the beast into nothing more than trash. To make him go away. To grind him to dust. And his mushy head hits the ground. Misao’s unrooted foot rises and stomps on his head like pounding that rebar on the stage. She hears bone mash. It’s harder than stomping fruit, but the stomp is a release and the pink brain sucks his blood into its fold.
And stills.
The world. The mollusk. A sudden breath of Nothing.
Then Ami reaches down once more, her breath warm on Golo’s face and he’s swallowed the pink that consumed her, has become stuffed with whatever pain she had suffered. He doesn’t care. No death. And even so. It no longer matters how much pain he feels and he’s learned this. He would give anything to her. Anything to just know he could hold her, but she’s breaking up once again as if the show has come to an end. Now, she crackles static, little bits of her body floating up off her body as if her skin were peeling away.
From inside her chest Golo hears the ping of a temple bell, but it’s a pleasant ping, something that melts his stomach to flutter.
Suddenly, Ami reaches for Golo, uncurls him from Misao’s loving grip, sets him away from the rubble, near the shack and its inner glow.
Feet touching the ground, Golo fails to notice that the snow has stopped falling, the ground is not shaking. And he pulls his overcoat over his chest, to the crackle of the inferno in the distance. “Let it burn,” he says. “To ashes goes the past.”
But he stares in wonder at the sight of Ami as she gently plucks Misao’s mutated form from the ground, those roots sliding out easy and she lifts Misao, places her to the place where her skin has coated over the wound. And with her gaze on Golo, she purses her lips and inserts Misao into her heart.
The act seems to pain Ami, for her body shakes, her skin still petaling up into the night air. And near her, the bubble of Reich rises, rises higher into the sky, until he turns into a speck, and gone.
“No,” Golo says. “Don’t go—please.”
But he knows she must. He drops to his knees, arms limp at his sides and watches as Ami’s body turns from the blue of orgone energy to a bright sheet and, shaking, she raises her arms, looks down once more at Golo and vanishes in a glaring cloud of neon. A becoming. A farewell, until the light is too bright for him to watch.
He throws his hands over his eyes to quell the tears. To finally feel closure, to let the flutters spew pink from his mouth. And he breathes through his nose, retching out the pain he took from her, watches it seep into snow. Without looking, he reaches up and touches Misao’s hand. The touch of her soft skin is a reverberation within him, a homecoming.
“She did it for you,” Misao whispers.
And Golo smiles yellow teeth and stubble, face weary and beaten. Yes, he smiles.
For Ami.
For the breaking dusk smearing the sky purple and red splatters. Of a brief moment of purification.
It’s what he’d been waiting for.
It’s a wish he dared never speak.
But it’s time for sleep. A bed for two. And two hearts breathing heart to pumping heart—for the coming of nectar.
***
The carnival draws hundreds; those left from the mollusk-quake, those left to rebuild from the ashes of the dead city.
In a brightly-lit black box theatre, a man places a tub of bluish skin petals in the center of the stage. A woman holds the severed tail of seven rattlesnake tails bound in pink clay. She shakes the tails, turns up the volume on a homemade console strung busy with multi-colored wires. A current snapping every six seconds. Another level adjustment cues a deeper tone. An oscillation. A high-pitched squeal. And the man on the stage is not smeared in
pink brain. A contact microphone has been affixed to the top of his jaw. It shoots warm pulses of energy to his cranium, to amplify the nectar drip. And a drum, the field recording of an ancient drum slips, surrounds the crowd from the speakers hanging from the ceiling. An omniscope of aural healing. The man’s eyes are coated blue. A throaty breath unfolding, crisp and consuming. The woman shakes her head to the rhythm, to the warmth of the crowd’s energy as it converges in a visible aura of orgonotic nectar. An ode on how to go on. How to begin and let go.
Golo looks back at Misao and nods.
For there is another level to their performance, a significance of static, the static Misao blends from yet another channel on the mixing board. It is the final piece. A way to reach into the hearts of those who have gathered to participate in the event.
And it begins.
When Golo draws the energy into his lungs, deeper to a place of liquid forgetting, he holds it there and rises, stands tall above the crowd as a man who has breached the Void and lived to turn it into cathartic therapy.
Misao stomps once on the ground, screams her adoration at Golo.
Golo opens his mouth, releases the energy, and vomits orgone all over the crowd, an action of love, clear to the cranium, like swinging an axe into the trunk of a living tree.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jamie Grefe writes within rooms of the darkly comedic, the surreal, and the horrific. His first book, The Mondo Vixen Massacre, was published in 2013 by Eraserhead Press. In 2015, Rooster Republic Press published his surrealistic love letter to Japan, Domo ArigaDIE!!! Grefe is also responsible for the official novelizations of comedians Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington’s Adult Swim webseries Decker: Classified and Decker: Port of Cal l: Hawaii. His short work has appeared in Birkensnake, elimae, LIES/ISLE, New Dead Families and Sein Und Werden among other places. Unfinished Business, a feature length horror film he cowrote, is currently in postproduction. Grefe has also worked with performance artist Rudolf Eber (of Runzelstirn and Gurgelstock) as well as film director and producer Jim Wynorski. Grefe’s website is http://jamiegrefe.com