Of course, this is just how college kids talk. Their language is crude and simple, like the language of ancient practitioners of physick, medieval guys, when considered by the scientists at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. College students can't talk about their own feelings. They blunder around or cut themselves off I bet they don't know anything for a good ten years after those best years of their lives. I don't hold it against them. Their feelings might as well be in Aramaic. But I can tell you what college students mean; they mean that grief follows grief like the tides running in and out; they mean that feelings are just a code for the intentions of God; they mean that numbers or letters or decimals can be attributed to feelings; they mean that the words of love and loss are just labials, dentals, or gutturals; they mean that these words are pronounced with the hard palate or aspirated and that the revelations fashioned from them will outlive this sitcom of today. That's what I have to say about feelings.
CONCLUSION:
The New Jerusalem
THEN JUDITH AND I backpedaled, talking about movies, about painters, about the Egyptians. In the middle of this, the fifteen minutes was suddenly past, though we'd said nothing, really. Our meeting was over. Abruptly, Judith took her hands from mine and moved off to cloister herself in the phone booth outside the lounge. I could see her shoulders and the back of her hair.
That was eleven days ago.
After that, after I skirted around the phone booth where she was huddled-protesting and denying to Dodgson-I was on my way back to the dorm when a sudden rain, a freak sun-storm, fell glistening on my face and hands. The cursed pansies pushed up their perditious heads all along the margins of my path. I said, Alleluia! I said, All salvation and glory and honor and power unto the Lord our God! Well, at any rate, I thought this stuff. The completeness of my solitude prevented me, that afternoon, from making a scene.
So: youth is apocalypse.
When the great whore, Babylon, is finally fallen, St. John the Divine enters into the New Jerusalem, into the seventh age, where God and Christ will reign eternal over the faithful. Heaven and earth pass away. God wipes away the tears from the eyes of his flock, announcing that there will be no more death and no more term papers. The foundations of the new city are garnished with gems and the nations that are saved walk in the light of the Lamb. A pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeds out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. There are no more curses and no more night. We're all innocents. Then the Lord says to John, "Blessed is he that keepeth the sayings of the prophecy of this book. If any man shall take away from the words of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book. Surely I come quickly."
This is how the Bible ends. This is its terminus. It's a big ending, a crowd scene. John knows this too. He knows there is a powerful prophetic dimension to endings. And I know that I have come to the end of my education. And to the end of childish longing. This draft will have to do the trick, because the sun has risen over the burned-out frats on the quadrangle, Professor Soren, and I have to get this over to you, to the department office, in less than an hour. Sorry there's no bibliography. That's the least of my concerns. In this afterlife.
SWEETHEARTS
Stacey Levine
You SPLIT THE topside of my leg one night in the summer. Without thought I allowed you my bone. You lifted it away and placed it before you on the floor. You scraped it with your fingers and nails; my bone was not white, but grayish and brown-stained all over; it lay before you as you knelt; indeed, because of this extraction, my wet leg, extending from my body, lay paralyzed, dear, for the nerves had been destroyed. You took my bone and its shreds of wet red muscle; you wanted it, so I had given it to you, adorable one, at great risk to myself and to my detriment, defacement, exhaustion and enslavement, my terrible prostration, my deference, my horror and pleasure, every bit of it my choice, my leisure.
And you asked that I would pierce you in kind, gouge you somehow, find the green stink in your gut and bring it into the air, the light, astound you with this, rip your layers of muscle, make you feel the curious interstices and gradations of pain that arise when wounds are made wider, or deeper, or are hollowed out from beneath.
Angel, monster, I would not do these things to you; I only wanted that you would dig me bloody; I itched; I would not rip you, much to your dismay and frustration, because I loved to see how you begged, and when you did so, in screams, my pleasure increased a hundredfold.
I am certain we met in the past; I am not always certain. This year, huge news has been flooding the world: fevered failures and pinprick successes in economic and foreign policy; I just wanted to be flayed by you, awful darling; I was astounded at having found you; I wanted this always, that you would continue this nightmare as you tore at me daily; I was mustard yellow, green, purple, bluish, all colors, all over; I wanted always to save these colors, to swallow each of your heartstopping blows and see every day how they bloomed beneath my skin.
I am your starveling, your trash; in the morning you wake to the ferrous scent of my blood tricking across your face, and suddenly you are up, beginning to dig at my navel, tearing upward; you howl that I am bad, terrible, that I am always in error, that I should be different; I should destroy you further, spill your blood more, blackest spider; you burn away my sense that I am myself with your abuse; my veins fill with ammonia, naphtha; I am chilled and familiarly paralyzed. You bellow at the brown and red juice foaming in my stomach as you separate with the strength of your hands the two halves of my belly; you dig my gut, ruining my wet gelatine organs; if only this ecstasy were happiness, my demon, sadist, ass.
Long ago, when I was just as lonely, my mother made me in her gut out of warm blood and sugar; I became myself there; I could not change. I fed and grew with the blind diligence of everything alive and became myself; I formed; you cannot change me now, my horror, though I can die; though you have flayed me many times, detested me, pierced my throat until I fainted in astonished pleasure.
And you say you want me any other way, warmonger, simpleton; you say you're going to remake me. That's not possible, but no one can tell you otherwise; I accept your terms, I know only you, your acute, circular unhappiness and nothing else; I revel in our nightmare; I give my organs for you to smash; I refuse to flay you, this being my finest pleasure, second only to receiving your fantastically sustained torture; I will not hurt you; I cannot; you shout in terrible frustration, livid creature, at which point I dissolve in joy.
Before, when I knew only her, I ran crying, running in circles after my lost mother who had thrown me out of her house, who had sent me away, alone. I know you, she said. You're weak. You'll try to stay here forever but you can't. You can't hide here anymore, she said. Go outside, or you'll die from your own weakness and fear. Leave, she said. And don't go grieving for your mother. She hated herself.
After she had thrown me out, I hurled myself in the sand at her, yelling, I hate you, I'm not just weak, there are other things, why can't you see me, I hate you.
Then, after a time, my heart closed, sewed itself beautifully: the work of silkworms. After all, I was young, and my body worked flawlessly. My body was perfect and perfectly self-contained. Then, I stopped howling for her each night. Then, I never dreamed of her again.
But I blamed her for bringing me where I never wanted to go; I woke up one day and I was already formed; it was too late; I was a child belonging to my mother; I wanted that my blood would reverse, return to her, but it was much too late. You, flagrant murderer, were already there reminding me of this, blowing a great heaving wind into my mouth, exploding my sinuses and nose from the inside, bursting my cochlea, my eardrums; you entered my eyes with your fingers; I licked your wrist weakly as you delivered to me your heavenly guerilla blows, and I fainted repeatedly, my creature so absolutely alive, my joy; it was always your astute sense of courtesy, your sensitivity, to wait just long enough before resu
ming your protracted attacks so I could remember who I was, my offending terror, my dearest; I fall this instant, hearing your execrable insults, my ecstasy a monsoon.
In your night dreams, twisted sibling, you are dog, orangutan, starving for my blows, begging for my bite. I act on anger, calculation, and impulse; I tear into you with pain and no warning. You want this; your body splits into fragments of mirror, making you multitudes, unmaking you into many, each hurting distinctly; you become a fly's eye, perceiving the world not in waves of light but in throbs of pain. Throughout, I am starving, my dear, then gorged on your blood, my body ceaselessly moving in relation to your ignorant violence.
This year, the papers say that the national economy is strong, and that there are more high-paying jobs than ever; I am advocate of, accomplice to our nightmare, constantly desiring our wretched delight, unearthing each day some new timbre of agony, employing again and again the few mechanisms I know; you drop your head and seize my body, darling, groaning, fisting my throat, my esophagus, seeking a hemorrhage; light from the window seeps to my eyes as I gag; I wet your arm and bite, scrape it with my canines; I reach and twist at your genitals until tears pool in your eyes and spill; my tubes have burst, your arm stuffs me, your fingers jab at the valve of my stomach; my acid burns you, and you will blister, fester, dearest child; I have lost my body; my body is thin, a mere membrane; I am too thin for organs, then suddenly I balloon; I am hugeous; my body fills the room, the odorous corner I now see before me, darling, the corner I believe is part of you. This cannot continue; it's too much, but it will only continue, my dearest, and if outrage and ecstasy were happiness, it would be mine to give you, in unstoppable proportions. But I can only look at you, my horror, hellcat, hideous queen: I am certain that once, in the past, we met; I am not certain we ever did.
FRAISE, MENTHE,
ET POIVRE 1978
Jared Hohl
NOW THAT WE'RE starving again, all of our stories are about food. Lionel likes to talk about the time he found a cheese cave and cut into one of the wheels with a pocketknife, then shoved his face in there and ate until his lips touched the rind. I tell him about Jake and Walt's diner in Ft. Madison, Iowa, how the tenderloins there were as big as a Frisbee. We don't speak of sweet-tasting things because we've been living off vintage fruit preserves for many months now and the thought of anything sugary makes us want to vomit. We're down to our last jar of jam and I tremble for protein I will never get and some mornings, after I wake up, I keep my eyes shut and my breath shallow and hope that Lionel will smash me in the head with one of his mallets and wrap me in diamonds and throw me into the Seine with the others.
Paris is empty, but we go on daily explorations anyway. Lionel wears laboratory goggles and thick welding gloves. He pulls his mallets from the carpenter's belt around his waist and swings them two-fisted into plate glass storefronts and apartment windows. We almost never find food. Back when we were a group, when Harriet and Claudia and that barbarian Sven Ronsen were still alive, we'd fill duffel bags with wigs and top hats and switchblades and emeralds and take it all back to the Odeon where we lived and where we performed our death plays.
HAMLET OR THE TRAGEDY OF SVEN RONSEN
THE SCENE:
Candlelit room in a 16th-century castle. Hamlet (Sven Ronsen) lies on the ground wrapped in a clean white sheet (he tells us he is too weak for shirts). On his chest rests a human skull. Hamlet/Sven Ronsen is feeble and debilitated, but slowly opens his eyes and, with great effort, achieves focus. He stares into the skull's eyeholes with meaning.
HAMLET
I can be ... to not ... to be. I can be.
A thin line of spittle seeps from Hamlet/Sven Ronsen's withered lips. A cry is heard offstage.
HAMLET
Pfff.
Hamlet/Sven Ronsen's eyes go dull. He has expired.
END.
In the days before Sven Ronsen, we were doomed. After the sun went green the plants died and then the animals began to die. When the bad news came, the French were ecstatic. A well-known TV show mocked the world leaders, portraying them as paranoid weaklings hiding away in hermetically sealed bunkers. Most of Paris was out dancing in the streets. Everyone made light of all the hubbub about conserving food. The city was still in operation and even a week after all that talk of doom, restaurants were serving fat ducks in cream sauce and bottles of red Burgundy. People laughed when the president of the United States appeared on camera eating a cockroach. Then the delivery trucks stopped coming in. When the fighting was at its worst I managed to save a street magician from a cleaver attack. The magician was Lionel. He showed me his stash of breakfast cereal. I met his girlfriend Harriet and her friend Claudia, a beautiful young woman with dark hair and brilliant green eyes.
We were very good at gathering food and managed to avoid the roving street gangs. We were silent at midnight, communicating with hand gestures, able to spot dented cans of tuna half-buried in the rubble, revealing themselves to us in winking flashes of moonlight. We scavenged and we hid. One night, Claudia was slashed by a child. He was vicious, possibly a gang scout. He caught her in the corner of the mouth with the tip of his blade and sliced an inch into her cheek. She looked over at us, her lips parted in shock, the gape of her mouth extended by the wound, blood trickling down her chin and her face distorted, a humanized jack- o'-lantern. I ran at the kid, but he was too fast on his bicycle. Harriet stitched Claudia as best she could. The cruel black thread interrupting her smooth, soft, face. After that incident the four of us holed up in Lionel's apartment. We decided to ration ourselves, to wait it out. We had no real plan. We were growing weak while Gary, Lionel's mynah bird, flew at the ceiling shrieking like a car alarm.
We lived off crackers and mouthfuls of stale water from the stoppered bathtub. Lionel performed tricks to help pass the time. He'd make giant pennies disappear. He'd hold out a cheap wand and Gary would perch on it and cough a lacy garter belt from his beak. Harriet and Claudia would occasionally put on dance performances, old timey vaudevillian numbers choreographed with canes we found in the back of a ransacked grocery. Between acts, we could hear the gangs outside, beating their bass drums madly. Once we peeked through the curtains and saw a doomsday parade, ex-government officials and television newscasters skewered on lances stolen from the Musee de I'Armee, the grand marshal an eighty-year-old woman borne along in the air like Cleopatra, keeping time with a human femur for a baton. Even when we began to starve we knew better than to go outside. We kept track of our last scraps of food in a miserly way. We built a toilet that hung off the window and dumped onto the sidewalk below. As our supplies dwindled, we made our rations smaller.
THE FOOD RAN out. We didn't have enough energy to stand so we attached drinking straws end to end so that we could lie on the floor and suck directly from the tub. We didn't bother with water rations anymore. It was pointless. We'd given up.
Then Gary did a wonderful thing. He flew out the window and returned an hour later with a large chunk of birdseed molded into the shape of a bell. The hard seeds felt like they would crack my teeth, but I ate, grinding them into a fine paste and adding more and more, saving it all on my tongue until I had built up enough to feel it in there, heavy and warm. It was only a teaspoon worth of seed paste, but when I swallowed it was like a fine porridge, a delicious meal, enough to give me the strength to go on. We gave Gary little pieces, but not quite enough and soon he was out the window and back with another huge chunk of seed. Gary saved us, really. We ate birdseed for a month and then one day he returned with an empty beak. Our hunger was stronger than before, more determined.
Lionel said, "We all love you Gary. Please, know that we love you." Then he produced two mallets and swung them again and again, flattening Gary's head against the windowsill. Lionel donned his carpenter's belt and, after a slight meal of bird meat, painted a likeness of Gary onto the rough leather around his waist while the rest of us snapped Gary's bones and sucked out the marrow.
We felt as if we
were sinking into the floorboards. Invaders showed up periodically, but we had prepared for them. When the door was breached, we screamed and threw books at our enemies. Lionel would stand in the middle of the room, using what strength he had left to raise a samurai sword in the air and shake it in a threatening manner. If the invaders persisted, Lionel would light a flash bomb or a smoke grenade from his magician's kit. One day there were no more bombs. Sven Ronsen kicked down the door and stared at us.
"Would you look at you," Sven Ronsen said. He was wearing a chinless yellow motorcycle helmet and a tank top that said Whack-a-doo! "Look at how helpless you all are. Bless you forever. It breaks the heart is what it does."
He picked us up. He was incredibly strong. I could feel his muscles cradling me. I must have weighed no more than eighty pounds. The others looked like dolls with their dull skin and gigantic glistening eyes. I had the feeling that we were being harvested, like livestock, that we were being driven out of the pasture of our apartment and would soon be on our way to some horrible slaughterhouse. Sven Ronsen carried us all downstairs and loaded us into a small wooden cart. He took Lionel's samurai sword and strapped it to his back. He grabbed the cart's rusted ball joint with his bare hands and pulled us down the road.
The streets were filled with trash and bones picked clean. The city smelled like it had died and been taken over by a powerful fungus. Sven Ronsen pulled us into an alleyway, opened a door, and wheeled us down a ramp into the basement of a barricaded health food store. There were half a dozen others inside, organizing shelves and taking inventory.
"Idiot!" someone screamed out. "You cannot bring more people, shithead!"
The Apocalypse Reader Page 4