by Paul Curran
21.5.
a) Pull the coat and then the blanket off the mattress.
b) Hear a notebook fall from the blanket onto the floor.
c) Kneel down and steady yourself before picking up the notebook.
d) Skim through the notebook trying to follow the empty lines.
e) Drop the notebook onto the mattress and then fade out.
To stop this novel occurring from this motel room is impossible. I go with a girl. We meet a boy. There is sexual intercourse with glass on the floor in a broken pharmacy. A police officer discovers my dead body in the back of a stolen van. The police officer shoots at my dead body. The girl is driving the van. I want to murder the boy. But I think it would be easier to murder the girl. So I try to murder the girl, even though I am already dead, and the boy throws me onto the road. That is the end of this novel.
* * *
I leave my father’s remains in a glass case at a strip club and catch a flight to London, shouting drunken methods in an Indonesian bar during a layover, or when I get to Europe in a hostel somewhere east of Prague, where the owner says medicine rather than method has been inserted into your writing. It is no remedy, I reply, and orgasmic childhood psychosis is not self-deception, but if stopped and ordered to ask, alcohol is a plausible ruse for coping with life, and anyway this novel is stronger than medicine because of the heart images formed through fictional masturbation. When the owner asks me to pay, I tell him my money to get high will come from the directors of several multinational companies who intentionally republish this novel in its current unrecognizable form.
* * *
London summer is a bone-hot tombstone deceased under where I walk. I arrive as a prostitute accompanied by internet instructions about illegal student immigration. Anyone speaking natural English will confuse the authorities. Language draws up substances lacking actuality, and desire is more easily pursued with confidence when you can blend into the crowd. I work in an ex-curtain factory on Uxbridge Road. I stand in a corner of Shepherd’s Bush Green. A mysterious telephone call on an abrupt slow night possesses enough doubt to deceive what guides me. Her shoes. Her husband. The absence of a pulse. At a sewerage plant, near where they used to make cars, I walk across rusted pipes churning out shit and mulched up paper and enter an abandoned factory converted into apartments now derelict and possibly being used as some kind of theatrical space. I join what appears to be the audience participating in an unrealistic performance of a courtroom situation until my attention implodes and I slink under the floorboards. Other things happen after that. I become another person completely.
* * *
I find a young boy in the afternoon, question him about this novel, and discover raw materials and other things without explanation verified control processes or selective systems. I hit the boy with destructive intensity when he is through the door into this motel room. It is impossible for him to recognize me because I am wearing a ski mask. My voice is calmness maintained in a bubble of everything. He tells me he works at a slaughterhouse and plays drums in a heavy-metal cover band. He thinks he is a traveler of existence. His arms are virtual reality assembled. I sit his senses next to mine and make my arms part of him watching murder masturbation fear movies. I know I need this boy but I do not know why I need him. He is concerned about things without being. I recognize that meaninglessness. I feel that meaninglessness. I laugh at his secrets. This cruel agony is worse than murder. I clamp his wrists and overwhelm him. I tighten a USB cable around his neck and slit his throat. He cries at the sight of his own blood. I think he understands a number of sounds, perhaps four or five, but no more words. I push acid into his beautiful face. His terrestrial body enters into other conditions. I fill him with morphine and do not give him water. He wakes up. He dies. Perhaps he does not do anything. It is late. I stick needles into the boy and then inject myself with his blood and consciousness. The air deviates near the surface as I shake the semen from my penis into his mouth. I enjoy his body. I play with his body until he wakes up. I dig a hole somewhere through him using my tongue as a shovel. Queer words gush through us in feverish waves like atomic ash, small things brimming with sickness and remote psychological pride. I remember his shoulders in the moonlight, and the smell of his hair. I am looking at the Gulf War on a screen at Bangkok airport. I return to Phnom Penh and then Hiroshima. I paddle in a swimming pool and receive some unnamed, but highly contagious, genital infection. A metal dropper extracts infected blood out of my vagina. I am in absolute confusion. I can feel my stump, and my stump can feel me.
* * *
The two columns my stump scratches in the dirt represent extreme internal division and double-letter fascination processing that helps overcome official helplessness. I suspect that I am waiting in some tropical mushroom district with my belt chewed up and my pants falling down, but this might just be the only recognition my senses make possible. Misunderstanding actuality is a conceptual formation disturbance I frequently use for self-protection from other hallucinations. This modification of feelings results in compressed sensitiveness and loss of other things. I am my own specimen under a pin. I want to kidnap twenty-one identical backpackers and turn them into zombies, or convince them they have been turned into zombies, or self-administer and convince myself I have been turned into a zombie. Perhaps I have brain damage, a severe head injury, defective evolution intelligence, or something settling outside chronic differential diagnosis. Maybe everything here is being written while I force cavity sexual intercourse without a condom on a body entirely asleep, on this bed, in this motel room, and a body, entirely asleep, forces cavity sexual intercourse without a condom on my body entirely asleep, on this bed, in this motel room, simultaneously, in a chokehold, for at least three or four years, and this is an escape attempt, from us, from me, from this bed, from this motel room, moving literally from nonexistent template to private document to novel.
* * *
I have not read this novel. I do not read novels. That is neither a defense nor an explanation. The walls of this motel room roll repeatedly. They merge front and back until there is nothing like mysterious disclosure but crude navigation and perplexity. Disjointedness seems to be an extensive internal behavior that is impossible to describe using paragraphs and sentences. Being remotely integrated is an illusion supported by the same economy and social politics that make the left hand a traitor. Perhaps I am dying from gangrene in this motel room after getting my limbs amputated in a cheap clinic in a foreign country. I think I would like to complete this novel before I die. I am trying to rearrange the most important details. The deformed results are guaranteed to bring bankruptcy. I wave my stump at the screens around my bed and confuse the thoughts passing through my brain with the conceptual regurgitation appearing in front of my eyes. I believe I am in a motel room dying from gangrene. I ejaculate excessively.
* * *
My doctor gives me insufficient medicine and no sexual relief. He tells me to take out the stitches quickly in order to ensure that the scars remain. He recommends sleeping on a trampoline in the garden outside this motel room to avoid visibility. I consider his advice for some time but instead decide to install infected foreign objects into my body. I finger the edge of the scars and open the gauze, several years earlier, infected, returning to this motel room. I tell my doctor that power pushed back overtakes time, and your days are numbered. He says this novel clearly demonstrates immature emotionality assimilation and orgiastic self-centeredness. I say each sentence here travels in a straight line and each word in each straight line is a person shunted from a truck into a gas chamber before gathering on the other side of some metaphorical slaughterhouse. He asks to meet my parents. He speaks to them in private before we sit down together. He says there should really be an empty chair in this motel room for my mother’s silent pain.
* * *
In order to feel thought as an abnormal mutation written in the mind of an underage girl, I cut off my voice and drift into agreement
repetition. I turn in circles, blonde hair, and a tight body, trying to control my enthusiasm, hide it, searching through foundation appearance hallucinations. I lower my panties and show my vagina under the stairway outside this motel room. Someone licks my scars. Someone licks my vagina. My clitoris is the size of an egg. My dildo is a large mushroom. I experience transcendence during my first orgasm. The shock to my vagina is fast and strong. There is an explosion. Fire. I know what to do. I set up fake websites to pursue backpackers. The websites generate rape hallucination fantasies and hardcore back-story devices. I use chloroform and make love to the backpackers I find. They have a natural craving for chloroform. They move around with free will, separated from their limbs. I collect profiles of their friends. I obtain IP addresses and passport images. I know they are not truly the people they are trying to be. Most have been infected by forgery, fraud, and sarcasm. My imagination accumulates facts. I make bombs. They explode. I imagine being part of the lunar surface landing and the World Trade Center collision at the same time. My eyes discover a host of plural transcendental beings living excessively in the darkness surrounding the motel room inside this motel room. They appear in order to rearrange the words pouring from these screens before I can read them. Their fingers come away incandescent from the light cast through the slats in these paragraphs, prickling as thick as carpet, images traced to somewhere else, slipping in and out of consciousness.
* * *
Every morning, I come round slowly and want something exciting to do, some morbid thing, some morbid experience. I call a female dancer. She dances for me sexily. We play some functionality games. I lick a little smooth skin and hair. She removes her panties and that magical box gets wet. Something else happens, or develops, or it translates into a first indication without there being words, a meta-image that expresses this moment. Her beauty torments me before having sexual intercourse with her. She tastes gorgeous. We take a shower together. She does not speak English greatly. Because she cannot be a fisherman, her father sold her to a pimp. She went to school in a third-world ex-colonial museum that broke her appearance and convinced her to move into a furniture store with her abusive uncle. She set fire to the furniture store and sent one side of herself to London. She tells me she cannot sleep. She curls up on my pillow. I try to get her to watch at least two screens at the same time. I find it difficult to breathe. I am worried about the blood clotting in my penis. I must be restricted to the night. Her uncle visits the motel room inside this motel room in a schoolgirl uniform. She has not fallen asleep completely. I make her half-eyed awake and tell her about her uncle’s visit. She pushes me away and I punch her in the face. Her body trembles with fear, but it cannot move. She cannot protect herself. I chop her soft leather skin. She is in a white bikini on a beach with her parents. I look at the waves entering and leaving, rolling over her body. She is playing with her sister. I think about tightening a rope around my own neck. I know more trouble will come, guilt and shame, and the insect power of existence, but the ecstasy shock of two virgin bodies rubbing against each other on the same beach as a thousand corpses is the only thing that I can call love.
* * *
A corpse must possess some internal relationship power with the beings who hide inside that dead shell. I believe the sounds coming from my mouth are from a lobotomized girl. Listening to her moan is like feeling crushed sugar and honey in my hands. I look at myself as this young girl in the shower. She has a beautiful gymnast’s body. She comes to the motel room inside this motel room and we have sexual intercourse. I supply her with unlimited medicine. Between literature classes at university, she goes back and forth anywhere. She finds a dog-eared first edition of this novel and gives it to me as a gift. I experiment with writing on her panties and instruct her to film herself reading this novel in front of her boyfriend. I inhale the show from an open window. I strangle her with a USB cable. I have sexual intercourse with her before she dies. I have sexual intercourse with her after she is dead. I handcuff her, transfer my penis to her throat, and push hard. Her organs offer further truths about dialectic appearances, objective real-time hallucinations, and the bonds that mediate our relationships. They tell me depression and suicide are a vision of things to come, and only murder can alleviate the loneliness of a troubled childhood.
* * *
The map of modification and stability in this novel is assembled in the place it is written. Concentric circles pull the map into parallel lines disappearing from the visual adrenal cortex. I kidnap a boy, have sexual intercourse with him, and torment myself with the memory of that act, restricted to this motel room, writing this novel concerning these things. Another obscure boy enters my imagination. I turn around. The boy inserts his penis into my anus, a hand on my hip, and we come simultaneously. I find this boy at Hammersmith bus station. I use chloroform of course. He stumbles to one side. He wobbles and continues to wobble. His hips are in the mud. He looks like a very thin girl who works at Shepherd’s Bush market. I think they are related. My impulses for and against incest are normal. But whenever the victim is a child, the riff to violate this libidinal rejoicing becomes desperately hard to withstand. Several plural transcendental beings follow us to this motel room. Some of them invent pedophilic insults. I disperse the boy’s clothing and torment his formless genitals with medical equipment. I push his knees under his jaw. I feel dissatisfaction. I chop him up. I attack him with a screwdriver that represents my atrophied penis. When I eventually get hard enough to rape him, perhaps as a boy myself, who is broken in part by the disappearance of existence, my thoughts concerning who I am depart from language and enter future abstract spatial concerns. Instead of smashing my leg in a motorcycle collision, I become a dancer. My brother finds me on television. We have been divided since childhood when our parents got divorced. I never meet my father until after he dies of cancer. I burn my father’s body. He possesses beautiful yakuza tattoos.
* * *
My boyfriend wakes up and enters from the bathroom. I stop my jaw from opening. My boyfriend is always jealous. I move to the bed and massage his shoulders. I think this sudden peace brings severe neurosis. I expose all my secrets about this novel to him. I tell him not to push me. I tell him I would like to have sexual intercourse with him, in continuation, substituting his heart for the motel room inside this motel room. I repeatedly hit him in order to stop him from hitting me. He damages me with his anger. He kills me. I drag my suitcase in the snow down Shepherd’s Bush Road to Hammersmith station and take a bus to Heathrow. I stalk a backpacker in the car lot at Terminal 3 and spike her drink at the Bridge Bar. She inquires if I would like to have sexual intercourse. I suggest the restrooms. I pull out her breasts and lick them. She finds a knife in her backpack and slices off my penis. She says my pretentious literary experiments are beyond ridiculous. I tell her this novel is worthy of ridicule. But my limbs and organs are not. She leaves me slumped in a cubicle. I bleed giving birth to a new penis. I eat my placenta. I lose my keys. I lose my teeth. I look at all the backpackers I have executed in the cubicles inside my head. I prepare the opportunity to return their images to a safe place.
* * *
This is the introduction to all future editions of this novel. The other sections of this novel might be more interesting, but this section also refers to the next section, and the next section also refers to this section, and the final section also refers to all the previous sections, alignment being broken perhaps, and I walk along a beach that has been thrown away from some disingenuous game before arriving in a computer hole, and next in a motel room inside this motel room with my own dead body, and then squatting beside a wheelchair on a street corner in Berlin ejaculating death on a spiral-pattern blanket.
* * *
The screens in this motel room display more or less the same words written here. One screen plays the first moon collision. Another plays the World Trade Center landing. Meanwhile the plural transcendental beings I mentioned earlier are on the carpet projecting
murder masturbation fear movies by rubbing together skin, sand, seaweed, paper, rot, and river junk like my father’s ashes. I realize I can never reassemble this novel with the consistent reliability necessary for central mass-consumption distribution. Everything is wrong with this novel, an enclosed infinite space where existence is an open window disintegrating individual subjective characteristic prerequisites. These shifty letters continue to form useless words that become senseless sentences representing intentions spilling from the structural machine of story. As I retype these words, my fingers become excessively tangled. My left hand is already throbbing. I move to the north space of this motel room, between the lips of my scars, where my doctor has attached pornographic images of himself. I enact these images as conceptual murders using chairs, dummies, and prostitutes. I do not know what I am doing. My heart is a schoolgirl who fantasizes about murder and rape and is sent wailing to her room by her mother.
* * *
I remove my jeans and rub my vagina. I photograph my finger in my vagina, photographing the finger, the vagina, and the photograph. Before I orgasm, I separate my limbs from my body using the only method I presently know. I exploit body identity disorder research and theory as an experiment in mind control that stems from the failure to maintain writing this novel. I distort pieces of me, my characteristic history, anecdotal experiences, and my own desires and imagination in order to implode converted memory failure reminiscence records and make this novel a spiral space outside linear achievement. I have sexual intercourse with several boys who suffer from excessive randomness. I order sex dolls and inflate them. I insert medicine into the dolls and reposition them for sexual intercourse. The prostitutes I pay are doubtful concerning my motivation when I insert their medicine. My purpose is to find prostitutes who can move exactly as instructed. Then I must find a real couple. I am possibly getting closer or maybe further away or maybe nowhere at all.