Smithereens

by Steve Aylett

  Opening the mike, he began. ‘This is the Nobhead Liberation Army. You’ve heard me say that part of enlightenment is knowing when you’re being ripped off. Regret is a rope at the other end of which is a younger version of you, all full of beans and acting like a moron. It’s not rebellion if they just sold it to you. The opposite of revolution is a script. But when the time comes to realise this, you continue replacing hours with the same hours. You select only from those options presented you by other people and so occupy a lifelong abyss of misdirection. You’ve been shafted, so what the hell are you grinning at?

  ‘If people truly don’t return from the dead, then humanity is constantly passing out of the world and something is being lost - yet there are still bodies and bodies and bodies, moving and talking. Does this explain the increasing blandness, the diminishing thought, the dead eyes? What is passing out of the world, and not returning, is spirit. At what point did street bribes stop paying cops to leave off criminals and begin paying cops to leave off victims? Such trickling transitions are silent as sap. Non-totalitarian governments exist because some populaces are naturally servile or distractible enough not to require a totalitarian one. This one has taken misdirection to intergalactic extremes. Even our tyrants are mostly ornamental. And the headglove is a godsend to this evasion, a mask incapable of anger, doubt, appetite or intelligent scorn, nor the freedom of being an ugly, honest cunt. The new flesh, bright zombie, going one younger. Moods without weather. And the utter sadness of generations not knowing what they’ve betrayed. Born into this artificiality with no intervening stages, they walk through life as if they have an appointment with their own ghost, a blameless blank crippled by appearances, living a philosophy which has its sensations only in imitation. They’re so timid of their own skin that they live like a spirit departing or never present, immaculately inauthentic. They’re the dead merely held in reserve.

  ‘But things are more interesting than that. Earlier today I trod on a spider and it made a sound like the pip of an automatic car lock. Now tell me this world’s not a weird one.

  ‘If you tape the average man’s mouth shut he’ll lie through his nose. That’s undisputed. But we have to ask, what will be the last words spoken on this planet? Concrete cannot complete the universe. The derelict society glitters, celebratory with weakness. Facts are acknowledged only when the events they relate to are far in the past and safely irrelevant. Rare outbreaks of commonsense are stifled and ignored by the media, never heard of. Fatuous influences shrug off the brain for reasons of balance. Warnings of catastrophe are dismissed as mere “warnings of catastrophe” but soon the little patronised problems of chance will be lethal. I await the brave dismay of the honest. Love has the innards of grief.

  ‘Careful: a uniform is a dice. The Nobhead Liberation Army is slandered but who among you has witnessed a more reasonable frenzy than ours? Who has not experienced the desire to tear off his own face in the midst of society’s bullshit? Don’t decorate my name with importance. You can’t name the saints of true atrophy – the label slips amid our rotting flesh. Irrational perspectives decide the angle of our wounds. We will crash your mind and serve a feast of discouragement. You can tame the loops out of my head when I’m fucking dead. We won’t succeed, finally. But after all, what’s the point of being doomed in a variety of ways?

  ‘Riddle me this: who are you? It’s hard to see a system of which you are part. It’s hard to see your own eyes. You pay to make fools of yourselves. To hear your own veins drying up. Don’t mistake intensity for hostility, mate - some people have things to do. You’re a bloodless, clueless wanker and you think you’re great - and that’s why I get fundamentally disappointed.’

  A blare of noise interrupted him, a helicopter above the skylight. ‘Put it down, put it down!’ came a cry through a loudhailer. ‘Desist!’

  ‘How are you spelling that?’ Brank yelled, pulling his Daewoo only to sling it away at the end of the motion, all strength gone from his arm – the gun clattered into a corner. His shoulder was bleeding and skylight glass powdered the floor like sugar. There were booming shots from downstairs and as he reached for one of the gullwings a soldier entered. Brank swung and two rashers of uniform flew in different directions.

  Then something slapped him in the head. The hot wind from it surprised him. Blood looped out behind him, hitting the wall. It was a graffiti exclaiming ‘O’. He’d known he’d end this enterprise utterly licked against a drystone wall, shot-up and bucking in dust, but now it was happening he felt as dumb as an adult in a teacup ride. To be insulted by these fascists was so degrading.

  Blood hanging out of his face, he fell backward into Buck’s vat.

  Feeling squirly, he could still see cloud above the skylight roof. It seemed to be getting closer. Then the window frames were pressing against his face like a griddle. They burst outward and he continued to swell, his head tilting aside so he could see the neighbourhood getting smaller. His head was expanding like a slow bomb, his body a useless doll beneath it. The house began to crumple, dust exploding down the surrounding streets. He felt like hell and tried screaming the fact. Confronted with a massive head momentarily capable of opinion, the authorities were unprepared. Brank was dilating across districts, his head a confusion ball of white and pink fat arching through a spritzed halo of bloodcloud. Power lines spanged, fizzing out. Upheaval edges powdered to rubble. He was making good on his promise to replace glamour with swampy death, to the extent that he was now breaking through a bridge as a train shot up his nose. Of all the ways I expected to die, he thought, this seemed the least likely. The train passengers were having similar thoughts. Sonic booms shattered windows as tectonic skull plates changed position.

  Beyond a certain reach he began losing integrity. Dilating blood vessels tore and brain canals broke. Veins whipped open, hosing the town and tangling with spires. An eye burst like a water-bomb. A tumbling onward wall of cortex was rolling through its own pink rain, proportions stretching, blasting through whole blocks before exploding finally and washing a cascade of wreckage through the tilted city. His last thought was, To live past hope, like walking into thin air ...

  A slow-motion shower of shredded brainweb like cotton candy floated down on the ruins. Nerve netting stretched between bridges and towers. Pink scum foamed the river. Seagulls picked at the tangle of disease-ridden flesh in yellow liquid. Streets were clogged with dark, hardened gore. The decade-long task began of clearing the slurried headflesh and dismantling the titanic skull which, rested on its side, was almost a mile tall from cheekbone to cheekbone.

  Even dismantled it was inconvenient. As in any conflict, false motives had to be set in place. But with this strange episode, invention failed. Humanity had to use time to evade it, a desperate measure. So, inevitably, Brank was canonized. Once an idea has become universally accepted, it’s easily ignored.

  GRACELAND

  In what has been described as a ‘stupid bid for attention’, Thomas Sumpter, an injection-moulding technician from Dayton, Ohio, released an undernourished leopard into Elvis Presley’s Graceland mansion on Saturday. The animal sprang onto the top of a cupboard and watched anxious visitors without saying anything. Apparently sensing that the animal had no intention of mauling anyone at the mansion, Sumpter attempted to entice the leopard from its perch by holding up some chewing gum and making a sound like a cartoon fish. The leopard pounced on Sumpter and became snagged on his garish shirt, tearing itself free with only minor injury to Sumpter’s chest. Security staff from Memphis Zoo and Aquarium cornered the big cat in the media room, where it had fallen asleep. When they fired ten tranquillizer rounds into the beast, it awoke in surprise and attacked both men, injuring George Harrod, 38, and Terry Heem, 26. Sumpter finally spoke to the leopard in a whisper and he and the cat left by a rear entrance. Onlookers claim that Sumpter merely whispered to the carnivore that he had become bored with the escapade and that it was time to go. When traced to his Dayton home on Sunday, Sumpter expressed bewi
lderment at accounts of his antics and claimed that he had not left his home for three days. Doctors have found no wounds on his torso and there was no evidence at Sumpter’s home to suggest the care or maintenance of a leopard or similar animal. Injured zoo employee Terry Heem stated on Sunday that he was ‘angry and flushed’. Family and friends of his colleague George Harrod told news media that Harrod was ‘beaming’ and talking like a child. The leopard may still be at large.

  CABELL’S NEW SINS

  a one-act play

  Flames climb the rear of the stage, all is flushed a fierce red and strange convulsing shadows freak the walls - grotesque figures are glimpsed onstage.

  CONSCIENCE (a Burroughsian universal voice, casual & laconic): To those with fully-functioning senses the planet Earth is already a living hell and to such folk the prohibitions of those who claim to be in authority come across as absurd at best, drowned out as they are by the high-frequency roar of hypocrisies too extreme to process. Most aware people dream of living a mere few instants of peace, away from the hysterical admonitions of neighbour, god and government. The sins listed are uninventive and boring, and the constant assumption that people are aching to commit them seems designed to insult the human imagination. Consider the case of Lord Cabell, one of the most inconvenient of the fifty-seven rakes of Regency England.

  (The flames have died down, normal lighting takes over and the shadows on the rear wall recede - the figures onstage are a bunch of posh Regency types in a large well-appointed drawing room, drinking and being urbane.)

  LORD HARKEN: Congratulations on the new poetry, Cabell - everyone’s jabbering about its relevance to you alone.

  LORD CABELL: Then they understand it - I’m gratified.

  HARKEN: This is my wife, the Lady Harken. And allow me also to introduce the Archbishop Strauss. Still managing to be surprised repeatedly by the same thing, padre? I’d like to know how you do it - you’re a marvel!

  ARCHBISHOP STRAUSS (dubious): Thank you.

  HARKEN: This is the poet Lord Cabell. Keeps his morals in an eye-dropper. Author of Childe Shrub’s Adulterous Schedule.

  CABELL (bored): Here I stand, my epidermis flavour-less.

  STRAUSS: If you live by the same philosophy as your literary protagonist, you will find your arguments derailed by a fiery abyss. A man should perform congress only with his wife.

  CABELL: Sex with his wife. Isn’t that incest?

  STRAUSS: Thou shall not commit adultery, Lord Cabell.

  CABELL: Not a very interesting prediction. Am I meant to be tempted to alter it by battling fate?

  HARKEN: What is it Shrub says about fate? ‘How many deaths are in the lion, awaiting distribution?’

  CABELL (uninterested): So, my ink is immoral. Poor ink. No wonder corpses are editing my powers. (Begins to undo his trousers) So which sort of a priest are you - dehorned, bungling and kindhearted; a religious freak, towering and brittle; or the fun kind? (suddenly emphatic, looking at an armchair) There she is!

  (Lord Cabell goes trouserless over to the chair, stands behind it and begins thrusting away.)

  LORD SKYWAY (outraged): Is my view correct?

  BARON ARBUSTO (disbelieving): Must I check every attitude?

  LORD CARLYLE (flabbergasted): At last this criminal has decided to smash the world and his position in it!

  CABELL (mildly): Harken, that wife of yours seems to be made of wax.

  STRAUSS: Do you have nothing to say about your behaviour?

  CABELL: Well, I’d rather not be doing it surrounded by spooked failures, but other than that ...

  HARKEN: But in your defence, man! Tell us this is the first time!

  CABELL: It is, as a matter of fact. And it’s not that adultery business the padre mentioned, so his prediction was correct.

  STRAUSS: ‘Thou shall not worship false idols’, then.

  CABELL: It’s true that I’m not worshipping this object, merely using it like a whore. Any objection to that? Oh I suppose I’m coveting this fellow’s furniture am I? Lord Brickham - any objection to me plugging the old tadger into the backrest of this chair of yours?

  BRICKHAM (vaguely): It’s not an antique.

  CABELL: There. I take nothing away, and if I retain enough control to withdraw at the prime instant, I’ll leave nothing behind. Though my seed would doubtless add to the value of this stuffed wooden carcass for those in future times hoping to glean some clue to the habits of our shining society. History dries in your parlour, Lord Brickham.

  ARBUSTO: Oh this bastard is intolerable. Get him out of here.

  CABELL: What do you expect, Arbusto? A vacuum like this longs for profanity. Hup! Hup!

  (They lunge at him and he dodges about, climbing over tables etc to escape them.)

  STRAUSS: Your perversity has no label but it is perversity nonetheless!

  CABELL: Why? Because my fidelity’s more colourful than yours? (rambunctious) I sense a new sin in the making! What about this? (He springs up and grabs onto the chandelier, hanging by one arm and swinging like a monkey - his ears seem to be inflating like balloons and bursts of Tesla energy crackle and branch across the ceiling) Got a name for that? Or how about this? (As Cabell drops to the floor, from above a dozen Cabell lookalikes drop with him, scrambling immediately offstage) Or this one? (An upright coffin rises from the floor behind Cabell and he glides backward into it, the coffin slamming closed and sinking from view - Cabell enters stage right, smoking a cigar.)

  SKYWAY: You bloody crook!

  CABELL: Why so drunk, Lord Skyway? Consequences too scary again?

  SKYWAY: How dare you, sir - who the hell are you?

  CARLYLE: So what does it all mean, Cabell, this business?

  HARKEN: Yes, Cabell - you’ve been building up our expectations like some sort of demented barber. What are you about?

  CABELL: Something very particular. I intend to grow a limb which has no name in this world. One as alien as honesty, and as shocking. Look.

  (As an echoey voice ululates from somewhere Cabell’s chest swells, his shirt bursting open as a massive glowing green limb inflates several yards into the room, knocking over vases and furniture.)

  CABELL: It’s not competitive but it is playful.

  (The others react with shouts and panic.)

  CABELL: I could punch this hand between your shoulderblades and drag you through your heart backwards. (casually examining his cigar) But, I for one will breathe easier when ...

  (He touches the cigar to the giant limb - it bursts with a flash of light, plunging the stage briefly into darkness. When the lights come back up, Cabell is gone but there’s a frog on the table.)

  HARKEN’S WIFE: Oh good grief, there’s a frog on the table!

  (Chaos erupts, everyone chasing the frog and declaring that the situation is intolerable.)

  CONSCIENCE (Burroughsian universal voice): It’s a fragile system in which a frog is an emergency.

  FADE TO BLACK

  GROUND WHALES

  Seven burrowing whales were denied entry to a restricted bunker Thursday afternoon, during the worst snows to hit New Mexico in twenty-one years. Taos Sheriff Sam Edwards said he felt sympathetic to the ground whales, accepting that they may have been simply obstructed by the bunker, which exists for the protection of bureaucrats in the event of a nuclear strike. ‘The burrower whales came up against the bunker wall at about 15.15, causing a general security alarm. A specialist mining contingent went below to guide the whales aside by taunting them and tying industrial tow cable around their beaks. The whales didn’t say anything, because they never do.’ When asked the precise form of the taunting, Sheriff Edwards refused to comment, except to say that the remarks were ‘deliberately cruel to be kind’. He denied that he and others had taken shavings from the bone-like beaks of the rare ground whales, adding that if he had, he would now be ‘obscenely rich’. Heavy snows hampered the work and twice the hydraulic winching rigs broke down, leading the Sheriff and his team to deliver a volley of abuse to TV c
rews and other bystanders - behaviour the Mayor has since dismissed as mere ‘high spirits’. After six hours the subterranean giants were sent on their way, and Edwards has returned to the more mundane activity of sitting around in his car.

  THE THINGS IN THE CITY

  (after Lovecraft)

  When I drew nigh the nameless city I knew it was accursed. I was travelling in a parched valley under the moon, and afar I saw the construct protruding uncannily above the sands as parts of a corpse may protrude from an ill-made grave. Fear spoke from the age-worn stones of this hoary survivor of time. I should have known that my brothers had good reason for shunning this sick place. The aspect of the spot was unwholesome, yet I longed to encounter some sign or device to prove that the city was indeed fashioned by reason. I sought some guiding principle, but all was chaos, retaining the crudity of the negligently left-off, the merely adequate. Its unsane edges stopped short without plan or sense, a jigsaw unrequited by the nature above and beyond it. Chambers and altars faced the world with the shabby incoherence of the mindless. I perceived with an unnameable horror that their foundations were as arbitrary as their spires. Only the most contorted artifice could manifest this unimaginable combination of sterility and necrotic corruption. It told of existence as a hammer, repeated doses of the same day, a desolation of such repetitive detail that I was almost mad with its ceaselessness.