A Greater Monster

by Katzman, David David

  Welcome to the City of Dreams, s/he says. Directed or directionless? Calm or kinetic?

  You fight against paralyzation, struggling to speak, Whu? I don’t … sorry. I’m … I guess … I was looking for a city so I guess I found it. Do you have any food? I think I’m hungry now. Sorry, that’s rude. But I’m starving.

  Food has found ayinay.

  S/he gestures across the room where you notice an open doorway. You walk, and s/he turns and walks beside you.

  What brought ayinay to this door?

  Ayinay? A-in-A? What is Antlers saying?

  Accident. I don’t know. Surviving, you reply.

  Glad A-in-A here. Life richly connects. A ’n A.

  Your footsteps echo, tapping against the hardwood floor the tempo from a half-remembered song. The air is sweet like an overripe peach.

  Looking down at the triskeledelic vines interlaced like Celtic snakes, you notice your feet have pierced your space boots. The suit is frayed, and the claws of your thick olive toes are poking out through the soles. You stop and look at your left boot: the sole has almost entirely separated from the upper. You tear off both boots, hold the floppy dead things in your hands, and look at Antlers. Palms upward, s/he gestures expansively, so you toss them to the floor and continue.

  It is possible that once there were alternations alterations altercations of light and dark. Now it’s the unchanging light of good karma. Sometimes monogenes arrive hungry for revolution convolution convulsion evolution, re-volition, to revolve, rechromed to immaculate being. Or they come in fear and find the opposite. A ’n A make rules unnecessary. A ’n A no progress novolving. Instead A ’n A become evoloving. Words and touch are the plant of happiness.

  Antlers leads you into a dim hallway with the feeling of a cave—a narrow skylight above, walls plastered with the same plant, the leaves a little fuller, your footsteps muffled. S/he plucks a leaf from the wall and then another and hands them to you. Magick. The leaves tremble on your palm like beating hearts. In your mouth—green-apple crisp and jasmine soft. A sensation indescribable … a wash of sunlight.

  The plant. What people find is the green. Perhaps like you. This magick. Needs scant more than a sip of attention. Meager light. Sky-windows strewn throughout an endless plane. The energy passes from one room to the next. The plant blooms generous beyond comprehension.

  You pass through the door at the end of the hall and encounter a series of diverse rooms: small like an elevator, cylindrical like a well, and wide like a city square (with a ceiling low enough that you have to duck to pass through), and in each room the plants get denser and thicker, filling the spaces like weeds. You catch a glimpse of water trickling under a wall.

  And as the foliage gets thicker, the rooms glow brighter.

  A hundred rooms without skylights—such as the one A ’n A are about to enter—can be nursed by one room as long as the doors are open. The plants pass the energy by touch, transmitting and permitting. Hold.

  You stop near a wall. S/he strokes a leaf that looks lighter in color than those near it. She breathes on the leaf as she strokes it, and the color gradually darkens. After a few moments, she leads you farther until you come to another door.

  A ’n A are inside. Would A ’n A like to go first? Or shall A ’n A?

  As you step across the threshold, you’re struck with a powerful scent, a deep scent, the scent of an apple jungle, citrus, and ylang-ylang—the warm embrace of a dark, leafy, living room. Your pupils open wide to a sparkling, transcendent, pale green illumination: the ceiling drifts in slow currents of absinthe; the floor is knee-deep in reeds and rugs of lush, dark satingrass; velveteen leaves shine gently phosphorescent, weightless, carving through sublime candleflames of space. A gesture caresses your cheek—the air lives.

  Plants overrun the stone walls. Individuals lie in the grass, hardly visible. Leaning against walls and pillowed and standing and rubbing each other and holding hands legs paws feet, snouts of tufted fur and studded beaks; leopard pelts and feathers, lemon-rinds and wrinkled faces of coral, bumpy and bright; eyes of wine and ruby, rust and nutmeg. Touching. Everyone touching. All of them pausing, looking at you as if you’re a blue sky.

  Citron juice fills the hookah in the middle of the room. Incandescent droplets of dew ascend the clear tubes leading from the central stack. A marmoset-faced creature with a corona of fur framing his face—hairless and raw like a mole rat everywhere else—is holding the tip of one of the tubes in his mouth, eyes big and glowing bronze.

  Antlers speaks: Welcome. Stay as long as long is. A ’n A are all guests here.

  Each of them, male or female and hard-to-tell, gather around you—ten individuals each in turn take your hands and look you in the eyes and say Welcome and kiss you on the mouth. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome.

  After they have all kissed you, they look you in the eyes again and wait.

  Uh. Thank you?

  Thanks for being. What has brought A ’n A here? Antlers is now sitting among them.

  You look back at all the faces wreathed in flora, a riotous zoo of tusks and bumps, fox ears and seal fat, squirrel tails and dorsal fins, dragonfly wings and owl eyes. Some of them wear remnants of clothing while most wear nothing.

  I … well … I don’t remember much.

  Some of them smile. You close your eyes, concentrate, conjure pictures.

  I can glimpse … things. That might be … I don’t know … figments. Like a female. A female. I can see her with black hair or blond hair. Straight hair. Maybe wavy or curly hair. And amethyst eyes. Or blue or brown. I love her, I think, but I can’t … touch her. And she seems to have wings, and I can’t understand her.

  You tap, tap, tap your hand against your thigh.

  Yeah, so. I remember a red couch. I remember a room like death. Rivets in a steel box. I remember. I remember a dog, a big dog tongue drooling from my nightmare and swallowing me. And I was torn to pieces. There was a … I dreamt of a penis like a bridge. And I … I remember small little people with animal masks that probably now I figure were not … wearing masks … lives are drops of rain, they said, but I haven’t seen any rain … just the opposite … and it seems common to be bound to stones … and there was a … a walking-on-water thing that said it invented or discovered that whatever is out there going on is chemical. But it was angry—I’m sorry, I’m not used to talking to, uhm, animals.

  A susurrus of air plays against your arms.

  What are animals?

  Well, they’re … I don’t know.

  Are animals different from A ’n A?

  Uhm. Probably not.

  Interesting story, says feminine Panda Ears.

  Thank A ’n A for telling it, says masculine Seal Fat.

  Would looove to hear anymore any time, says Koala Face of unknown gender and no nose.

  A penith like a bwidge. Thatth amaything, says Squirrel Paws with tusks filling up his small mouth.

  A ’n A like the sound of A ’n A words, the si-luh-bulls, says Orangutan Face.

  A ’n A liked hearing this story, says a creature you hadn’t noticed off to the side, standing between engaged columns that hold up a blind archway to nowhere. Her head is … translucent? Yes, translucent and familiar. And the shape … like a petite fawn, a deer with a delicate neck of cocoa glass. She stands on two impossibly thin stick-like deer legs and wears no clothing. Through her sepia-tone chest you can see her heart suspended like a bubble in resin. Her feet are sunk below the plant that rises up to her knees.

  You hesitate.

  My … my thick … my skin is thick and strong and scaly but not rough. I think it’s called keratin, which is what reptiles have. Which is confusing but I don’t know why … it’s confusing. I feel like maybe I’m wearing a mask but there is nothing behind it. I want to call myself human, but I don’t know what that means. There was a guy I got this red spacesuit from. But we didn’t speak the same language. Or, we did, but I could only understand his words, not his meaning.

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nbsp; The Glass Fawn, this deer woman, holds out a hand; a leaf is lying on her palm. Somehow you find yourself standing in front of her. The leaf is in your mouth; you bite down—fat and juicy, intimation of honeydew and cucumber. She bends over and cups her hands below the leaves. She trickles cool water over your face.

  It feels wooonderful.

  Twinkling, iridescent stars flicker throughout the roomspace. Atmosphere as silky as cat’s fur. The taste of levitation on your tongue.

  I don’t remember much, you sigh without taking your eyes off of her.

  Your wounds are a passage. The past is bondage, Antlers explains from behind you. Power controls the past. Mythology is metaphor. Every moment, every second you are a shimmering new being. You have the deception of sameness thanks to the trick of memory. How much better to have no memory whatsoever? But here A ’n A are … A ’n A equally know no past. A ’n A have escaped the power of its gravity, the gravity of its power. Deceit erased. The past erased itself until nothing but the endless present was left behind like a jewel in the crown of being.

  You look into Glass Fawn’s amber eyes, transparent and calm. She smiles at you, holding three more leaves. Black lines, scarified basket-weave tattoos, crisscross her arms.

  I like your tattoos, you say.

  Not tattoos. She takes your hand and touches it to the inside of her forearm and draws your fingertips across the markings. Deep grooves. You trace the xylem and phloem of her soul, her unblinking eyes taking you in, looking at you through you through her, through her to the carved pilaster on the wall—an arabesque of soldiers with lances and shields marching through syrup, drowning in her body. The two pilasters twirl with honeysuckle and figures that wind upward, animal figures melting one into the next among Tiki gods with awful faces, stoic and inscrutable.

  Leaves skip across your surface.

  She takes your hand. Tiki gods climbing. There is a myth, may A ’n A tell you?

  Yes, please.

  There is a myth. There was a thing thing.

  A Spirit called Matter.

  And it made a doppelgänger,

  a metaphor,

  a reality-tight representation,

  a modality of multiplicity

  and wrapped it around sapien soul

  enclosing the spirit like a mask, a costume, a crust, a helmet, a symbol,

  a prison.

  Turning one thing into diversity,

  personalized permutations of slavery,

  a mirage was clutched as tightly as silver bars.

  It was a magick spell,

  until

  in the City of Dreams

  the Plant broke it.

  Bliss broke that Spirit,

  and time ended

  so the legend goes.

  A ’n A is welcome here, to stay as long as long is.

  I’m … I don’t understand what’s happened to me, you say. I don’t know what I’ve missed. Could you … could anyone help me?

  Nothing is lost or found. A ’n A have no answers, simply stories. Would you like to hear another tale that wraps existence?

  You nod.

  Upon a once, A ’n A was a full-on hunane. Cruel and selfish—self-hatred infused from the environment. Sickened senses—feelings pulled along by the torrents of culture. Alien. No perspective to see that the avatar is paper-thin—a tissue mask draped over being. A vague passenger on a meaningless journey of habit, isolated and separated from living. Memory paints the illusion of depth—the hunane is even willing to think of itself as bad because then at least incomprehensibility drives it, a secret within, a soul; when in fact, there is no soul, only the present and the past clinging to it like a petulant child.

  With a circular gesture, she continues, Envision it: civilization as a balloon. Expanding. Ready to pop with a prick. The hunane can’t evolve. Hunanity as a dead end would drive life to the place of dead roads. Even so, life adapted. The evolutionary spirit. Replication led to awareness—when it followed eventually, at the end of next and next and after—awareness grew within awareness, consciousness born within consciousness. A simple thing, a bodily realization. Survival bloomed for those immune to the domination of procreation. They cut loose. The building blocks of being, our genes, parted from the body and began to travel like pollen in the wind. Any body could now host the multifarious diverse forms that were once isolated and enclosed. A ’n A have experienced this. And thus a new outside was created but not yet a new inside.

  The hunane was cast out for a violation of hunane code. Where time is imagined as wandering in space. Somehow, some sense of form surviving, changing, and becoming different. And the hunane found the corner of all realities. The Dreamseller: the snorting lama of a jangling concubine; the patent-leather heel of a raven-haired dominatrix; the gasp of air from a flamingo-beaked insectoid; a crystalline pirate licking a sandy beach; vapor consciousness gliding through the lapis light of happiness; viruses dancing in calligraphic coils.

  The hunane found this Dreamseller sitting in the forest. All around was lush bursting fuchsia bougainvillea and enveloping fronds. Air like lotus blossom, sun fluttering in dappled raindrops dropping slow as dandelion seeds. Eyes closed, the Dreamseller sat on a bed of moss, a relaxed smile tarrying. The hunane asked if it could live a dream of meaning. But the hunane had nothing to give as a gift, so it gave the one thing it had which was a Self. It melted into its cells, became a body. Became a senseless dream, no weight, earth, or air. The Dreamseller held up his palm and secreted a milky alchemical oil that the dream-body dipped the tips of its dream-fingers into and licked off. The dream-body sat down and lay back in the grass, which provided no sensation, looked up at the flitting rays of light, closed its eyes, and conceived that connection is not in time but in consciousness. But it hadn’t allowed its consciousness to actually touch anyone or anything.

  Consciousness can experience the present but it rarely does because being is vacillating between memories and projections, yin and yang. Consciousness is a rise and fall. Ebb and flow. If the dream-body could phase its consciousness, pass through the green of the moment with every translation of energy … it’s there, touchable. So the dream-body did: shift into the plant all around the Dreamseller, no longer a hunane, became A ’n A, the plant that sustains us. A ’n A was alive in another place. Here in this place. And A ’n A have never left.

  How … can I find this Dreamseller?

  Consider if you may have already met him.

  She dances up the wall, clicking her hooves hard against the stone, sparks showering down as she lands on her feet next to you.

  She holds out a large leaf for you to see—where the sparks had hit the plant, it has blackened and burned. She pokes out the burnt pieces and balls them up to make a black mass that she kneads, splits in half, and gives you a part. You close your hand around it. You close your hand around it.

  She holds it against her cheek.

  You touch it to your tongue, lick it. Battery-acid burn.

  She places it in her mouth.

  You place it on the tip of your tongue.

  You can see it sitting there on her tongue, her glassy eyes not moving from your face. You feel your lower jaw dropping leaving your body. The black spot in her mouth … it begins to

  travel

  leisurely

  down

  the tube

  of

  her graceful neck.

  Sliding slowly

  spreading

  becoming a filament

  beginning to

  beginning to swirl like cinnamon

  in a

  cinnamon

  brown

  swirl

  crashing ashore

  like an ocean

  of molasses

  a rising tide

  up and over your neck

  encasing your head in gold

  traveling

  juicy

  winding

  down your arms

  and off your fingertips
>
  the black spot

  revolving

  a negative snowflake.

  You look down.

  The suit has fallen from you.

  She lies in the deep blanket of leaves and spreads her jade-smooth legs revealing reddish-brown lips. You kneel down between her legs. She holds up her hand, palm towards you—the runes.

  Touch my hand? See? Feel?

  You touch her palms the grooves are notes on a scale rising up to a crescendo in red red sounds sweet on the tongue the hand your body slides with a click like a clock across the groove.

  A silence falls as deep as a bloodstorm.

  You are carried along by the swell of a wave,

  a thickness of space, the sound of emptiness

  you hover.

  A breath. Space exhales around you.

  You are still and the h​o​r​i​z​o​n​m​o​v​e​s​t​o​w​a​r​d​y​o​u.

  The

  curve

  in space

  rolls

  matter

  toward

  you.

  And what is stillness, m o t i o n. And what is m o t i o n, stillness.

  A sculpture, a formula.

  The shape of consciousness,

  You find yourself passing through room after room, large and small, filled with leaves and incomparable beings. Archways and gateways pass through you.

  Another room.

  All there is is a small thing clinging to the ceiling.

  Like a tree frog

  ringing in your ears

  it refutes all thoughts

  Stubborn

  Irreducible

  It is calm, a question that needs no answer

  It swallows itself with—

  It tesseracts inside itself

  You don’t ever have to leave

  Don’t let me go

  You can find it again

  But I can’t remember

  Beware the other gods they are out there

  A pitch snowflake reels in space the interstices separating unraveling a DNA serpent at the moment of conception claws part tissue from bone unpeel matter from a dream enter a dream unpeeling matter no inside only surface no surface only nothing no nothing only a black snowflake stripped apart gossamer plumes blowing in an undersea breeze breathing water dissolving oxygen as the cool liquid strokes capillaries porous membrane osmotic foreplay a molecule tumbling through pellucid space a phantom frequency a beat clicks past the boundless and