Stories for Chip

by Nisi Shawl

  That fast, slashing, hit-and-run style of the Guerrilla Muralists of L.A. was mine—a direct outgrowth of my rushed, rabid scribblings of monsters from my id that I leave on any available surface. Moe, Desiree, Johnny, Maria, LeRoy, Buck, and Estela were all really quiet artistes at heart. They preferred to work quietly, in air-conditioned, sound-proof studios with neat, meticulously laid-out materials. Just a bunch of nice kids pushed to the edge of a demented society—but I had fallen off that edge long ago. I really believed in our rebellion, and wouldn’t be satisfied with becoming a darling of rich liberals. If any one of them was lowered down into the Great Red Spot, their sensitive, humane, artistic minds would have blown out so fast they’d have sprayed out of the exoskeleton and coated the entire inside of the dirgiscaphe with their gooey remains.

  No, it took a maniac like me.

  They could be comfortable lapping up the regurgitated wealth in the center of the Hollywood Empire, or fly out to the colonies to help create the new official art of the Space Culture Project, while I created splatterpainting, my Freefall Abstract Expressionism, and got my ass kicked out.

  It didn’t bother me. Not me. I had to keep going. Keep wandering. Volunteered to go to Ithaca Base and get lowered through the dangerous radioactive magnetosphere of the Big Planet, down to the Great Red Spot, into the heart of the Sirens’ sphere of influence, let their alien thoughts flow through my skull and survive!

  But I did need her to bring me out of it. Willa Shembe, the pride of the scientific community of Zululand. A girl used to experiencing the universe through other peoples’ minds.

  She keeps showing up in the images, in the paint. Unexpectedly. Automatically.

  Just like the first time she showed up in my life. When I was still lost in the influence of the Sirens. After they locked me into the exoskeleton, into the dirgiscaphe, and lowered me by remote control down into evil, heavy gravity and big, beautiful stormclouds out of Turner’s wetdreams, or Chalchiuhtlicue’s most passionate rituals of whirlpools, violence, growth, and young love.

  “Do you feel anything yet?” Dr. Calvino buzzed into my earphone on that day.

  “If only those bastards could go through this,” I said into the throatmike. “They should all come here and see this planet up close before they call me undisciplined!”

  “What are you talking about?” The doc never understood me.

  “This sight! Jupiter up close! Wagstaff and the rest of those tight-assed idiots at the Space Culture Project should see this. That is what space art should be about. This energy! This power! This freedom! This is what I had in mind when I created splatterpainting.”

  “What about the Sirens? Are you feeling any effects?”

  “In my mind? No. This gravity is a bitch, though. If only I could see these clouds while weightless! If only I could come here and paint! Can’t they build one of these exoskeletons with more freedom of movement?”

  “The one you have on is the state of the art. The instruments show a high concentration of Sirens in the clouds around you. Do you feel anything yet?”

  “Yeah, now that you mention it. The gravity. It’s getting hard to move, breathe…”

  “Should we abort?”

  “No! I’m feeling better now. Lighter. The gravity seems to be going away. I almost feel weightless. It’s really great! Feels like I could peel this exoskeleton right off…”

  “Don’t!”

  “I’m not stupid, Calvino! This is probably an illusion, like what happened to the others. I do plan on surviving this!”

  “Any change in sensations?”

  “It’s like one long rush. Ecstasy—like I’m weightless, painting away like crazy, making a big, juicy mess. I’m getting an erection. The exoskeleton seems to be holding me down.”

  Then I got a strong rotten-eggs whiff of methane. Could the dirgiscaphe be leaking? I was about to say something, but couldn’t move—first I was paralyzed, every muscle locked tight, then it all turned to mush—flesh, bones, exoskeleton, dirgiscaphe, Jupiter, space….

  “Cortez, are you all right?” said Calvino.

  I was getting softer—like a Salvador Dalí watch. Everything was getting softer. Putty. Liquid. Gas. Like those colorful, flowing clouds that were all around.

  “Cortez, are you there?”

  I was a twisting, bubbling cloud—dancing among the gorgeous clouds of Jupiter. Among microscopic creatures I couldn’t see, but could feel—like spirits, like ghosts.

  “Abort! Abort!”

  I felt that I was dissolving. Being absorbed. I panicked.

  Then they had me. Me. Who has never given in to anybody!

  I passed from the realm of Xiuhtecuhtli—the supreme being within space and time, the power of life and fire, the center of all things and spindle of the universe—to Omeyocan, realm of Ometecuhtli, the male/female supreme being, the dual lord, source of all existence, the essential unity in difference. Spacetime was flushed down the toilet—a cute cartoon Einstein offered himself as a blood sacrifice.

  Somewhere I was aware of the dirgiscaphe’s engines burning and the Gs building up so that even the exoskeleton couldn’t save me from harm. Also: I was being born—I was alive and well millions of years ago on Mars—I was back in Hightown having an argument with Wagstaff of the Space Culture Project.

  “You should really be more cooperative, Mr. Cortez,” he said from inside his tight, crisp facade, more acrylic than flesh.

  “Where have I heard that before?” I said, going into a rant. “What you want isn’t art. It’s municipal garbage, state-sponsored bullshit, committee-conceived caca!”

  I heard the big beat of whales and dolphins in perfect sync with songs of sentient stars and the Sirens, that toy robots and nude bettyboopoids joyously danced to in endless halls that were covered with animated hieroglyphs that joined in the Futuro-Afro-PreColumbian-TransSpacetime-Zen-Quantum Musical Comedy!

  “The space hieroglyphics you started out with were interesting, but everything you’ve done since has become more and more unacceptable. Too messy. Dripping all over the place…”

  “All I did was what you asked me to do—come into this new environment and create a new art for it. It developed into splatterpainting, not the middle-class kitsch you lust after!”

  I was thirteen years old and enticing an eleven-year-old girl into letting me pop her cherry in sacrifice to Tlazolteotl—Aztec goddess of filth and depravity—past midnight in an empty high school campus on a hot, Southern California night! I saw the programmed dreams of hibernating seeds traveling near the speed of light through gulfs of interstellar space! I shot bold, colorful graffiti on the walls of gravity-less artificial worlds, asteroids, moons, planets to the timeless tune of a symphony of countless Big Bangs!

  “I’m afraid we can’t waste money on you any longer. We’ll have to send you back to Earth!”

  “No! You don’t understand me, and I’m human—from your world! How do you expect to face the rest of the universe if you can’t deal with me?”

  But I showed them. I volunteered for the Odysseus Project. They didn’t care what kind of pictures I painted, just that I realized that everybody who had contacted the Sirens so far had died.

  But I didn’t die. I survived, because I’m mad enough to see it all without going mad. Because my imagination is powerful enough to face what most people find unthinkable.

  I wallowed in it, dreamed of painting eye-frying pictures of it that would prove my genius to everyone—later, when it was over—but it didn’t end. Just went on and on. Image after goddam image. I was totally delighted. Flow an endless stream of bizarre imagery before my eyes and I’m in paradise. It was like—no, better than that weightless fuck with a sculptress who was disgusted when I got cum all over her work—like when I first discovered the Aztecs as a wee tot, delighted that these bloodthirsty, cannibalistic, colorful monsters were mine, not the property of the light-skinned aliens from “back East”—they were my heritage, it was my blood that stained those py
ramids, my art that survived the campaign of another Cortez centuries ago, so powerful that it took Western art until the Twentieth Century to catch up—like all this was something I dreamed up and was damn proud to have such a fantastic imagination!

  Sure, I was vaguely aware that just outside Jupiter’s magnetosphere, in the hospital section of Ithaca Base, my body was lying there with tubes and wires stuck into it, with a concussion, a ruptured spleen, and assorted broken bones. But somehow it didn’t seem important. Sure, it was Pablo Cortez, but I was so many other places. My body and its suffering were just part of the Sirens’ show: Like pentasexual orgies in sparkling caverns, or sonic wars in oceans that flowed through endless, gigantic tubes, or electronic epic chants of a silicon-crystal disc-jockey!

  “He may not have survived after all,” Calvino said.

  I heard that, in the distance—beyond the parade of idols hewn out of the hearts of neutron stars, hungrily marching through the cosmos to galaxies where entire civilizations were offered as sacrifices, and herds of armored, winged worms devoured planets and shit art and technology!

  Then, like the soft sound of a swishing skirt, the trademark of the umkhovu, the living dead—she trickled into my mind that the Sirens had scattered all over the universe. Willa Shembe, shy and curious, bored with all the human minds she had plugged into, eager to wrap her telepathic tendrils around something different, something alien—the Sirens.

  I was jolted. It was being outside of space and time with Ometecuhtli—then suddenly feeling the presence of Nkulunkulu, the Zulus’ maker of all things. I was being manipulated by an unseen sangoma, a Zulu diviner with cattle gall bladder crown and necklace of herbs—no, rather an abathakathi, an evil wizard whose most important product is misery, killing, illness, and drought—making a diabolical potion out of pieces of a human body—me! I felt a phantom kiss where she bit off the tip of my tongue, and left me animal-eyed, and forever spooked—her umkhovu, a slave to her magic, locked in her spell.

  What was even more shocking was that I didn’t know shit about the Zulus, their mythology, or superstitions—like all the rest of the Sirens’ song, it just flooded my skull, only more intense—the taste of roast chicken and uputhu drowned out that of hot, greasy tacos and the bitter blood of long crunchy caterpillars in my mouth! It was a presence closer to my body than my mind. None of the Sirens’ spacetime short-circuitry. This was here, now. There, then. Before I came out of the Sirens’ spell, lying there with a broken body stuck with tubes and wires with a beautiful Zulu telepath sucking my blown-out mind.

  She relished it. Devoured greedily.

  My memories. The Sirens’ maelstrom of imagery. My fantasies. Alien realities.

  “You’re crazy, Pablo! You got talent, but you’re more a criminal than an artist!” echoed back from an argument I had with the rest of the Guerrilla Muralists at our trial.

  Rainbow-filled skies over effervescent seas—me shedding my own blood so I could have something to paint with at age eight—the joy I felt the first time I was weightless, and decided that gravity was the enemy of true freedom, and decided to splash my paint, and created splatterpainting—a war of radioactive cloud-beings that goes on for millennia across billions of light-years—cartoons I’d draw on my clothes when I got bored—invisible beasts that flex gravity at will and eat black holes!

  She smiled. Then moaned with delight.

  And I received input from her mind—she was strange, like the humanoids who rode see-thru ships to the end of time to observe the aesthetic qualities of the heat death of the universe—other people’s experiences and thoughts were what she lived for. She rarely ate, or moved—was more interested in reading more and more minds than the university’s experiments—she wasted away. They thought she would die.

  Then she found out about the Sirens, and said some of her few words:

  “Take me to them!”

  Soon I could see her clearly through my own eyes, and see me through her eyes, and watch the song of the Sirens with no eyes at all.

  She said a few more words. “Beautiful. I love it!”

  Crack! Something snapped. The deadly intensity in those big, brown eyes clicked off. She dropped on top of me.

  The orderlies grabbed her and after a few skilled, strategic feels, one said, “She’s dead.”

  I laughed. A lovely demonic laugh that took my entire aching body and all my strength. It hurt like hell and was worth it. They all, even Calvino, looked into my crazed eyes.

  “Idiots! Fools! Assholes! She’s…” I screamed.

  “You’re alive!”

  “What happened?”

  “Are you all right?”

  “How do you feel?” some of them asked. The rest just looked scared and perplexed.

  “Shut up!” I said. “There’s so much…I can’t…Let me out of this!”

  “No!” Calvino said. You have several broken bones and internal injuries!”

  It hurt like a bitch, but I didn’t care, gritted my teeth, and slid myself off the bunk. They tried to stop me, but a few throat-rupturing banshee-screams kept them at bay. The floor hit me like a macrocosm of pain. Damn gravity—even the centrifugal force, fake kind!

  After a while they watched me with awe and dread as if I was a rotting corpse that suddenly sprang back to life. Luckily, my right arm was working in a cast, but I could move it at the shoulder, where it counts. I reached under my gown and tore off the hospital diaper.

  I needed something to paint with. Something that would smear and leave a mark. It had been years since I’d painted with my own shit. It’d have to do.

  And it did nicely.

  Before they shot a sedative into my veins, I managed to smear one vision onto the floor.

  When I woke up, I was strapped down, re-tubed and wired, watching that vision in caca come to focus before my face.

  Calvino was holding it. He’d had that section of floor torn out and sealed in acrylic. My work mummified for posterity.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Shit on laminated metal,” I smartassed.

  “No,” he said, being unusually patient. “The subject matter. What is it?”

  “It looks like some kind of soft, lovely tree that is rooted to the ground while it grows, but breaks free and flies around when it’s full-grown.”

  “Where did it come from?”

  “The Sirens. They made me see it. Made me be it.”

  “Was that all?”

  “Hell no! It was a constant flow of images, all at once and all jumbled together. I could see, hear, feel, and taste it all. I wanted to paint it. I could spend my entire life on it!”

  “Notice anything strange about it?”

  “Doc, it was all strange!”

  “Surely your artist’s eyes can see it. Mr. Cortez, you always have been a mystery to me, almost as if you were from another planet, but I did learn to recognize your style.”

  I was stunned. “Yeah. The style! It’s different! Not my usual high-power scribble, it looks…”

  “More detailed, and more alien.”

  “But I couldn’t help it, it just happened.…”

  “Like Willa’s death,” a nurse said, cool as a sip of liquid nitrogen.

  “She’s not dead,” I said.

  “All vital functions stopped. No brain activity,” Calvino said, bringing those fuzzy gray eyebrows together. “She’s dead.”

  “She’s alive,” I insisted. “Maybe not in that cute body, but I can still feel the presence of that insatiable suction-pump of a mind.”

  Calvino smiled, with some effort. “I didn’t suspect you of having any religious beliefs, Mr. Cortez.”

  “Damn right I don’t,” I snapped. “Even the Aztec gods I’m always babbling about are basically a joke to me—I like the way it bothers the hell out of the believers…. I guess the only thing I really believe in is myself.”

  “And that Willa Shembe is alive,” he shot at me.

  “I can feel her. She’s the source o
f the images that still parade through the back of my mind. She went through me to get them. Her mindtracks are permanently etched into my nervous system. I’m always going to receive her signals.

  “…She had this fantasy that she never told anybody. She probably didn’t even want me to know about it, but to get to the Sirens she gave me a grand tour of her mind. She wanted to be invisible and fly through the entire universe, faster than the speed of light, and see and be it all. And that’s what she’s doing.

  “…I couldn’t have done it…I’m an egomaniac. I’m too much in love with being the great Pablo Cortez to ever let go the way she did. I could never give myself totally. I’m hanging on too tight.”

  They all just looked confused.

  “In the name of Tlazolteotl, give me something to paint—or at least draw—with! These images are driving me crazy! If you don’t let me paint, my skull will swell up, pop, and leave you covered with a sticky-slimy masterpiece! These images will open up the cosmos! Transform our way of life!”

  “You’re too weak,” Calvino said, real sincere.

  “Bullshit!” I screamed. “I could paint with the bloody stumps right after my arms and legs were hacked off! The pain is nothing compared to my need! If I were decapitated, I could roll my head around and leave a blood-trail that the world will cherish!”