by Paul Curran
* * *
My ability to grasp the words coming from these screens brings insecurity, anxiety, agitation, and crisis. As soon as something is nailed down, it disappears or changes into something entirely other. In order to know my own thoughts, if I possess any, it must be possible to see the opposite side of thought. Returning to the motel room inside this motel room is fiction, the place where it first struck, an unidentifiable rocket hurtling through the desert, the craving to write this novel, this person, this motel room, where I die like paper burnt and dispersed. This novel is an impossible language destination on the route of a pilgrimage leaving the body through meditation and tabulation of diagnostic features developed in a series of novels based on being admitted to a mental hospital. My voice controls the speed and direction of revolutions, but the boundaries pull and tear, and soon all control will be abandoned. I pulverize the time space continuum. I go to this novel’s funeral, sit on a hard chair, and observe the casket entering flames.
* * *
A temporary advisor to the subcommittee for the reclassification of this novel emails me to suggest the special language controls used to modify, under exceptional circumstances, the cutting off of healthy sentences, should be abandoned in a novel never believed to exist. I reply with something like this novel is a clear statement of episodes that come from years of craving, and each line drawn up possesses these cravings in order to give legitimate characteristics to this novel, a curious complexity, a clinical practicality, arising from compromises where attempts to verify any information have been removed in accordance with the necessity to maintain the anonymity of the author because the state of any author would be polluted by exposure to this novel.
* * *
All the subcommittee members agree to reconsider an international corrections meeting. I give a presentation on my concerns about this motel room metaphor. They say resistance to self-expression is a denial of actualization and possibly based on unstable convictions about integrated genre systems. They give me a letter to pass on to a friend who has died. I move to Sydney but my brain does not understand sufficiently how to reassemble my feelings. I walk along the Harbour Bridge, climb down to a gravel path, and protect my eyes from reading the words in my hand. I have sufficient interest to clatter these sentences together but it is impossible to represent the psychosis that remains from the mind control experiments I perform on others as well as myself. I speak to my mother on the telephone. I tell her my method for amputating knowledge is a slave game. She suggests writing about an empty chair, a dummy, a prostitute, someone who dies, cutting up my father, but the scenes I imagine appear like traces of other scenes, images dropped from the screens playing in this motel room, perhaps a motel room, perhaps a motel room inside a motel room, perhaps a motel without rooms, perhaps personal projections, or images of seeing a brain cracked open during sexual intercourse and dying on a bed, like my father with all the medicine pumped into him, and ten last words exhaled ardently by mouth, under the hope of a quick death.
* * *
Perhaps I could have paid someone to write this better for me. It would have been funnier and less egocentric. With sexuality and murder, I am more perplexed than anything. Eventually I am led from the motel room inside this motel room in handcuffs, imitation music playing crime poems, existence and absence, sorrow and time given as my defense. There is a bus stop. I think of my mother as a girl in a cheap pornographic film, at the bus stop, searching for a boy. I escape from jail, climb through a window, and rape the boy across a coffee table in the motel room inside this motel room. The boy’s body disappears under the weight of my final pounding. I understand his situation. Similar scenes occur, similar things. We have sexual intercourse in a church confessional and a wooden crate filled with used diapers and dead cats. I tie a rope around his neck and would like to release it but the way his anus contracts around my penis as I tighten the rope sends me into a coma. He rescues me, blue from hard drugs, deceased in a used car lot. He picks me up and returns me to life, to shock, and to this novel.
* * *
Without this novel informing the way I think and feel, my cravings for abnormal play, cutting off, would be hard to explain. I feel enormous jealously towards cutting patients who have been completely removed. I possess these cravings, limb, foot, arm, hand, or finger, unbiased until now, because I am not from this body, and I want to let it go. I enter a girl from behind. I attack a different girl. I destroy this girl. Her body is weak. I think I would like to speak to this girl concerning this novel or perhaps I do not think I would like to speak to her concerning this novel. I rape her again in order to write about rape and ask the voices I hear to forget the things we whisper during the times we speak together. She atrophies on the surface for the second time as a shadow. I wake up several hours later in this motel room with another being, sideways, beside me, damaged, on my chest, reaching between my hands, my feet. The being lying on the bed thinks there is a different entity on the bed. The entity is looking at two separate screens showing the lunar surface landing and the World Trade Center collision.
* * *
I am standing before the bathroom mirror, grasping a camera to my stomach. I have attached a brown jumper to my body. Same jumper, cool morning when I am finishing high school. I inject heroin through the sleeves of the jumper attached to my body. I am angry at the redoubling process mine where my father works tossing people’s limbs and whereabouts into obscurity. He sleeps on the bed, stomach rising, having made preparations, and possibly obtained a boat, five or six bullets, and the approval of a handgun. I know what I have to do. The tiles in the bathroom give way. I make it to the bed, passing out, disintegrating within a haze of anaesthesia. When I wake up, this time my hand is asleep under my son’s head and my hand feels like my father’s hand after he has died. I am riding naked on a children’s bicycle around the trampoline in the garden outside this motel room in the moonlight. From experience, things like this feel enjoyable. I realize I have to travel through the dead, and although the corpses I become are too corrupt for either educational or artistic value, letter after letter leads me to believe that these letters are correct, and the correct destination for them has been found, the message becoming pure form, what is said is said from me, the invitation coming through.
* * *
After sucking my own penis for three or four hours the heat of ejaculation stings my lips. I look at my face in the bathroom mirror and understand the unlimited pleasures I have known. Male and female prostitutes are frozen in sexual poses on the bed while I take photographs with the screens in the background. This time I come out of the bathroom enacting that I have caught the prostitutes having sex. I tell them the method of killing another person is never a powerful substance for a writer in itself, but the procedure of describing humiliation as a compilation of businesslike detail is something I grasp intuitively. I confess that I want to reanimate the dead with mental powers, but my real work is tracking down secret letters from secret lovers, and maybe I have initially come up with this weird art excrement to throw the critics off my trail and play with the medium, but after re-enacting the whole messy narrative through drug-induced hallucinations I have perhaps also brainwashed myself into taking the original premise as truth.
* * *
I buy a ticket from Sydney to Bangkok in order to finish this novel. A taxi driver accompanies me to a whorehouse where I choose a Cambodian girl. She buys some condoms and chewing gum from the convenience store next to this motel. I become ridiculous with her, being moved by thoughts insufficiency clear, bad judgments, and a scarcity of feelings. I eventually make it to Japan where I attempt suicide from a Shinjuku building after quarreling with a yakuza pornography director. I meet my mother for coffee on a freight train at midnight. There is acid rain outside the window. My mother inquires about this novel and I wail out a storm of assertion and denial. I remind her the physical movement of my limbs is separate from what I decide, inside, control. She says all hu
man agency is related to an assemblage of texts read in excessive retrospect. I tell her I think everything is dead and my intestines have been evacuated in a scattered recreation to every thought I have ever had reflecting the system of thought as a mirror of that reflection. She says my function is to distinguish between reality and the devices used in fiction. I tell her I am bleeding to death on the bed in this motel room. I am drunk. I want to abandon the control of these words. This motel room is killing me. My masochistic feelings will live on as my body dies. I draw a zombie display diagram on a napkin to indicate I have disarticulated myself from literature and dispersed all remaining limbs. The shadow of her hand on my shoulder distracts my mind.
* * *
If I remember anything else because the walls stop rolling then whatever it is must be meaningless. This motel room is beyond the back section of my voice. It is the noise coming from investigating where the voices inside the organs are disconnected from the flesh. It is a confession with a solid gold wish based on the acceptance of marginal doubts, cliches, metaphors, theoretical desires, and atonal animal sluggishness. I am being created, drawn up, feeling conscious in these places only for the reader, through processes happening within the reader, through processes mapping the pathways produced in the organs of the reader while reading these words, and through processes recording the pathways produced in the organs of those tracing the map. Any other description would be a contradiction. I have said enough. I am moving inside and running around until I cannot go on any longer. In every city I travel through, troops burn residents who cannot evacuate their buildings or negotiate with the head office. Company managers blow up assembly lines and leave in the middle of the day. Policemen and public officials leak out of jail. Soldiers kill babies with bayonets and drop them in boiling nuclear reactor water. My wife gives birth to a son and we eat him.
* * *
Various subcommittees may continue to deliberate on the structural systems operating at different levels while debating the existence of this novel but my limbs and organs have already departed and been restricted to a box under this motel room, and my torso has become a rusted bicycle wheel outside an internet coffeehouse in a Shibuya basement, where computer program passwords give shape to buildings and writers glance at other writers walking from unit to unit on multiple floors of a super-structure that is a tower within a tower and, as the tower is the function, it also carries the function of that function and so on. Words return to speaking various items insufficiently in order to obscure the clear quality value of communication. My stimulus is doing what cannot be done. Whether or not that is the case with the writing as written in this novel, and although it is possible to give basic geographical and biographical information about myself, the history appearing outside literature, I am not the same person who produces any editions of this novel, and even after having gained incomprehensible confidence with the pain of the last ten years, the necessity for heavy, stainless steel is so deep that without it, disappearance is identical to atrophy, and transportation to another constellation where rape and murder are not defined.
1.1.
a) Hear the beat moving and vibrating down through your intestines.
b) Squint at a glitter ball reflecting racks of colored light.
c) Taste sulfur and sweat that has dried and come back.
d) Watch people talking and laughing crowded around tables and booths.
e) Feel the music circling through your ass and your cunt.
1.2.
a) Notice a man and a woman dancing on a stage.
b) Look at the woman sucking on the man’s soft cock.
c) See yourself in a mirror tied up to a pole.
d) Watch the man trying to fuck the woman from behind.
e) Bite at and chew on the material covering your mouth.
1.3.
a) Watch the man spraying his cock to get it hard.
b) Try to squeeze your hands out of some wrist straps.
c) Look at the woman grabbing and pulling the man’s hair.
d) Clutch onto the pole and try to yank it out.
e) See the man throwing the woman down on her back.
1.4.
a) Twist the wrist straps around until your hands are numb.
b) Look at the man pissing on the woman’s shaved head.
c) See the woman scratching and then punching the man’s face.
d) Watch the man strangle the woman until she goes limp.
e) Look at the man wanking and coming on the woman.
1.5.
a) Choke yourself jerking forward on the strap around your neck.
b) Gag on the vomit backwashed through your mouth and nose.
c) Feel and hear the screams coming out of your throat.
d) Watch people talking and laughing crowded around tables and booths.
e) Close your eyes and fade into the music guiding you.
2.1.
a) Hear the music stop and see the lights go down.
b) Track a spotlight and listen to a voice saying welcome.
c) Feel yourself being lowered into a chair with leg stirrups.
d) Listen to the voice explaining there are only two contestants.
e) Hear the voice saying the first to come inside wins.
2.2.
a) Reach past the spotlight to a crack in the wall.
b) Feel the crack move as the voice introduces the champion.
c) Listen to the champion strutting around the stage and clapping.
d) Look at people trying to order drinks at a bar.
e) See an assistant grabbing and dragging me onto the stage.
2.3.
a) Hear the assistant pinning me down and removing my clothes.
b) See the champion inspecting me through the mirror on stage.
c) Watch the champion wanking his cock and punching my face.
d) Look at the champion picking me up in the air.
e) Feel the champion slapping his cock up against your cunt.
2.4.
a) Listen to me crying as I wank over your reflection.
b) Tell me you want only my cock inside your cunt.
c) Feel the champion’s spit hitting your face and your breasts.
d) Look at your body wasted from drugs in the mirror.
e) Wince each time the champion punches me in the head.
2.5.
a) See the champion laughing and throwing me through the mirror.
b) Listen to me wanking my soft cock on the floor.
c) Feel the champion kicking your stomach and then choking you.
d) Watch me trying to get up but then falling down.
e) Notice your heart throbbing when you see me standing up.
3.1.
a) Hear the champion jump on me and fuck my ass.
b) Feel a gust and realize your left arm has gone.
c) Listen to me wanking my cock covered in your blood.
d) Watch the champion rubbing your cunt secretions on my face.
e) Feel another gust and realize your right arm has gone.
3.2.
a) Taste some morphine and see an assistant slapping your cheeks.
b) Look at the blood spurting out from your left hip.
c) Hear the champion sticking his cock into my droopy mouth.
d) Watch me bite the champion’s cock and swipe his feet.
e) Notice some people below the stage glancing up at us.
3.3.
a) Look at me picking up a piece of broken mirror.
b) Watch me stabbing the champion in the face and neck.
c) Feel the champion’s full weight collapse on top of you.
d) Listen to an assistant dragging the champion behind the stage.
e) See a different assistant inspecting your cunt with his tongue.
3.4.
a) Hear music blasting from speakers and then see lights spinning.
b) Watch me escape from the assistant who was holding me.
> c) Feel my cock throbbing hard as I pump your cunt.
d) Taste the come spurting from my cock into your uterus.
e) Sense the come traveling up inside and around your body.
3.5.
a) Gaze at your headless and amputated torso on the stage.
b) Drift to the rooftop and breathe in the midnight air.
c) Feel the neon warmth of Bangkok Hong Kong Shanghai Tokyo.
d) Hear an airplane taking off and rumbling through the sky.
e) Catch your silhouette looking out from one of the windows.
4.1.
a) Do not look at the cameras or the sound crew.
b) Feel your hips and spine digging into a wooden chair.
c) Reach towards a teacher in front of a giant screen.
d) Notice that everyone in the classroom is wearing sky-blue overalls.
e) Touch the words left hand embroidered next to your zip.
4.2.
a) See the teacher change the screen to a split image.
b) Watch the teacher searching for a reaction from the class.
c) Hear the teacher saying the left field must go right.
d) Read the numbers the teacher types into the right field.
e) Tinker with the zip in the center of your overalls.
4.3.
a) Inspect the cuts and bruises on Billy next to you.
b) Hear yourself asking Billy what happened to his beautiful face.
c) Listen to him telling you to concentrate on the class.
d) Tell him that the bruises on his face look good.
e) Watch him saying bruises on other kids always look good.
4.4.
a) Flick the tab button and go to the next screen.
b) Type the numbers on the left field into the right.
c) Flick the tab button and go to the next screen.