The Cannibal's Prayer

by PW Cooper

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  The hotel is an animal. People are antibodies, are energy passing through. A permanent entropic state. It is like living in the water, to stay here is to swim forever against the current. Faces come to be known, faces which never return. There is no sense of permanence to our lives here. We are unmoored. That is the world today. All that is left to us are our collective idols.

  My wife and I live in the hotel. She knows nothing. She is the personification of ignorance, of blissful idiocy. I envy her that amentia which has freed her from the pain of truth. She is content with the telephone, to disseminate herself across the vastness of this world, to scatter herself on the wind.

  She loves me for reasons beyond my understanding. She endures me. I beat her and she wipes the blood off her lip and apologizes. I tell her to her face how thick is my revulsion and she wipes the tears from her eyes and apologizes. She is broken to me.

  The actress upstairs is coming apart. Her body no longer satisfies me. She is on the edge of transcendence, and, though I am pleased, my needs are no longer being met. I must return to my wife. I tell her that I will be fucking her tonight and she smiles. She seems pleased. She seems to think that this is a sign of my love, that things are changing between us. Going back to the way they were, she thinks, unaware somehow that such times have never been for us, not unless it were in the depths of her fractured memory. I dress her in the famous woman's clothes and I tell her that she is not to speak to me unless it is in the voice of the famous woman. I cover her face. I turn on the television and I play a television documentary about the actress; it was made years ago, when her star was still ascendant. I turn my wife over. Her putrid body is too large for the clothes of the famous actress. It seems a horrible joke that such a creature should attempt to climb into the skin of a god. I push her face down into the pillows and tear her skirt. I spread her fat white cheeks and push my finger into her anus. She cries out. I push my cock into her. She screams. I hit her hard on the back of the head until her cries turn to muffled tears, which I can better tolerate.

  The beautiful people on the screen are talking about her, about the famous actress. How talented she was as a child, radiant long before she was discovered, long before she was plucked up out of this life and drawn onto the higher plane. I see her silvery essence in the rough home videos. Her face is cherubic, alive with sexual promise even from infancy. I listen to the story of her rise, her fame. Her success. There is no success which does not result in fame, none of consequence. I listen to the stories, the dark rumors of abuse, of the abuse of her body by her father and her agent and her manager and her directors and her co-stars and by herself. And of what emerges from that putrid shell of a person: a creature of pure light, radiant on the screen. See her shining on the red carpet, see her smile manufactured to please us, see her body given for us.

  I collapse onto my wife, the wretched creature. I cannot bring myself to punish her as she deserves. The thought of touching her fills me with disgust. She cries after me, don't go, don't leave me. "Come back to me," she says, "I'll be her for you! I can be her!"

  Hers is such a sadness, such an embarrassment. I return to my god on the seventh floor of the hotel.