‘Shut up and stretch out your arm.’
Dolores stretches it out. ‘Palm up.’
She turns it over.
Ludovico pulls a knife out of the drawer, Dolores starts to gasp. He presses the blade against her Adam’s apple.
‘If you scream, I’ll cut you up, got it?’
‘Yes,’ says Dolores, completely still. Ludovico runs the knife blade over her shoulders, along her upper arm, down her forearm, her wrist, over the palm and carves a line into it. The flesh turns white for a second, before it pools with blood. She shakes with the pain, but Ludovico’s grip is a vice.
‘We have blood. Who will be the victim?’
‘Ludy, please, no, please, no,’ whispers Dolores.
He pushes her up against the freezer – ‘Ludy, please, no’ – and opens it. Inside lie icy corpses of stray cats, frozen into grotesque positions.
Dolores starts to cry, to sob hysterically. Ludovico grabs her bleeding hand and pushes it into the freezer.
‘Victims, as many as you want, as many as you want, each one has been to the altar, don’t you worry, Ludovico is always prepared for everything.’
He steers her hand over the prickly furry cadavers, leaving bloody streaks. Dolores, helpless, closes her eyes.
‘Here, kitty, kitty, kitty. I hope you can conjure up something magical.’
Dolores shakes her head. The freezer’s coldness mitigates the pain of the cut. Ludovico pulls her hand out and twists Dolores towards him. The freezer door falls shut.
‘Put the wig on my head, anoint my face and spout some voodoo!’
Dolores closes her eyes, the tears run together with the powder and mascara. Ludovico smacks her.
‘I’ll slaughter you!’
‘No, please, no.’
‘Magic!’
She sticks the wig on him and places her bloodied palm over his cheek.
‘Abra…abraca…hocus.’
‘Fuck, Dolly, if you don’t give me some voodoo, I will rip out your entrails.’
‘But,’ despairingly, ‘I don’t know any!’
‘Ok, repeat after me, syllable for syllable, ok?’
Dolores sniffles and nods.’
‘Car-i-ous.’
‘Car-i-ous.’
‘Cut-tle.’
‘Cut-til.’
A slap. A stifled cry.
‘Cut-tle.’
‘Cut-tle.’
‘Well done.’
‘Well-done.’
Ludovico lets her go and grins. There’s blood all over his face. He rests the knife on the counter.
‘Thank you.’
Dolores opens her eyes, gazes, stunned, and steps to the side. When Ludovico doesn’t respond, she sprints wildly, bare-foot, wigless, flecks of blood on her clothes, through the door, out.
It looks like anyone who is anyone came. Max Adorcuse is star-struck. The Medio Twins, Kaveman KoleKtive, Sgt.Sange, Rufus Transparency, Obiton Tonga, Mme Nadir, Zuck de Borg, Sisek, Lillion Flawerss, the Lost Children, Occram Wristcut, Beda Venerabilis JR, Gadfly Ister, Synchro-Step Teaparty, CEO Birthmark, Mypeace Pepé, OBGYN Aboriginal, Grotto Vergilius, Santa-Claude, Margharet & Maester, Some Meri Slaves, Lobana Bolanja q-inc., Metatrololor…
These aren’t just any people. These are artists, techno-masters and lifestyle magicians. All of their names spread, or had once spread, or will be spread, in concentric circles around the city’s neighbourhoods, outwards, across the border, to the suburbs and beyond, to the countryside and farther still to the abandoned trailers and shacks and tents and ghettos and forests, and fill the hearts of the young, who catch them in their ears, with the promise of the possible. Any way you look at it – even if it seems unlikely and even if the sky sometimes pins you down against the grass, incapacitates your limbs and renders you completely immobile – you will not necessarily remain forever Joe, with parents and grandparents and a few relatives, caught in a caricature drawn by a, let’s say, an untalented hand. Come to the city, lay yourself bare, tell Joe to fuck off. Leave him to croak and rot among the postmen and the unmerited pensions. Among the boredom and the apathy. Your body is a vessel. Don’t you forget it.
Still no Zoja. The presence of an increasingly large number of people Max had never seen before, though he’d heard of them more often than he’d had a chance to appreciate their work, robs him of the courage to keep on bellowing into the megaphone. Candy Lipkiss, a fifteen-year-old conceptual artist from Chattanooga, has stripped naked and climbed onto the bleached roof of a car where she’s now playing the flute and interrupting each melody with bestial screams whenever her buttocks happen to come into contact with the metal. A few people are clustered around her, nodding approvingly, though still avoiding eye contact since nobody can say for certain whether the whole affair isn’t a little morally and legally dubious. Still no Zoja, and Max admits that’s worrying. The horrific possibility that he’ll be known as the organizer of the biggest scam since the debacle of 2021 stabs him coldly somewhere around his kidneys. But don’t worry, she said she’d be there, for sure she’d be there. Max tries to evade the ‘as-it-were’ old guy, but he can’t and the old guy latches on to him like a tick, spraying saliva and incessantly nattering on about parallaxes and symptoms and syntheses. The guy’s stream of thought has long since sped away from Max and now, in the middle of things, there’s absolutely no chance of catching up with it. His sense lies elsewhere, Max tells himself, and turns his hearing to another sphere.
Gotham Syndicate has set up an enormous black tent in the middle of the car park. Someone very timid has picked up a guitar. His voice wilts in the midst of the crowd and its aggressive conversations. Max can hear it.
Dirty brick. Stacks and stacks of them. After millions of years, sediments, will people pore over the layers of broader Brooklyn the way we pore over the rings on a tree trunk? A stuffy scent has risen above the road. The breath of a dog gorging on tar. We are steamed rice in a saucepan. Someone is draining us. Anwar and Marjorie’s boyfriend are changing the tyre. They’ve cleared up their misunderstanding through joint action. I told him it was possible. We are all what we are when a tyre is being changed. Especially since, come to think of it, I saw him naked that morning, purged of all that is superfluous. Marjorie doesn’t want to get out of the car. She says she’s afraid. Of what? Premonitions of evil, she says. That has nothing to do with me. I packed my premonitions of evil into my suitcase and, how forgetful of me, intentionally left it at home. The façades are hidden below tattered, weather-beaten, forgotten economic propaganda. IRONWORKERS 40, red spray. It’s been decades since anything was built around here. Just constant, incessant crumbling, brick by brick. A single clumsy step and a house is demolished. The intersections look like somebody accidentally overlooked them, somebody who was quite powerless to begin with. Even the rubbish is fleeing, with the wind, with leisure. The unbrushed teeth of a giant, all this construction. Red. It reminds me of the idea some fleeting individual had of starting a Throw a Brick project in the heart of the city, so that people would be looking up, heavenwards, towards the tops of all these buildings more often. He failed. The people weren’t for it. Even if the bricks were made of foam, no. I don’t know why I thought of this now… Green graffiti: ZOIA, when I look over a fence, down, on the grill over a closed shop. What an odious feeling of alienation, when someone appropriates your name to proclaim something for themselves. Everyone knows what it is they mean, only I have no idea. The road is gnawed up. Nobody makes an effort any more. To me this seems most beautiful.
Flames are shooting out from behind Ludovico. His footprints are evaporating in black smoke. Bending light, he is a cosmic phenomenon. Air runs away from him. The vacuum he leaves behind fills up so fast that tiny lightning bolts are triggered, and the men in the news stands crane their necks skywards in search of thunder. You stumble if you look just a little closer at him, or you run into a traffic sign or you cross the street right into the path of an old Cadillac whose brakes then have to be s
lammed and a curse has to be flung out among the screeching. Grandmas drop things when he comes near. Shoelaces come unlaced all on their own. You step into a road apple. Bloody Amish.
He’s dressed in a white tunic that flaps in a self-created wind, too quick for the eye to see, like a mosquito’s wings. This flapping emits a low vibration that drives bipolar people and certain breeds of dog mad. German shepherds and Dalmatians, especially.
He looks like a hermit returning from the mountain with a brand new set of commandments. The weaker minds won’t be able to resist him. His every move is a cult in the making. Stronger minds just find him outrageously cool. That he’ll cause problems is clear even from the thirty-fifth floor, where Maude and Larry are, during working hours, secretly sipping coffee, smoking cigarettes and stroking each other right where it feels best. As they look down at him, they quiver with pleasure.
The blood on his face makes him look Native. Chief Ludovico. Three blocks away from Poetrylitics, sharper with each passing moment. He can already hear the constant pulse of the crowd and he’d be lying if he didn’t admit that he’s being guided in the right direction, as if by divining rod, by a titanic imagined erection.
Hard to put it in another way… The sun is setting.
Still no Zoja.
The exits on this stretch of the motorway (that is, on this something that was once a motorway but which now looks more like a war zone, since carved into the lanes are holes, gaps, the supporting iron frame that runs under the asphalt, around the holes are bands that were once screaming yellow but are now a mere light pink, which is why the careless and the colour blind and the intentionally inattentive drive into death and oblivion (traffic accidents no longer make the news, nor do accidents in general – while we’re at it, they don’t bother with any sort of news any more), but people’s language is slow to change and they still call it a ‘motorway’, this cemetery of cranes that, try as they might, have been overtaken by rust) are choked up with sheet-metal leftovers from the dead-for-decades automotive industry. Nobody moves. An old Ford was being pushed over the guardrail, inch by inch, allowing the three teenagers (two boys and a girl) to get out before it thundered into the nothingness, and now they’re standing with thumbs raised and gazing straight at the static windshields, which causes awkwardness among the many people who would otherwise like to take them into their cars, but become uncomfortable at the thought, so they look away, avoiding the kids, and they honk and they curse the heat. During the day it really was hot, but that’s nothing compared with the evening, when the rays slacken. Then all that concrete which has been thirstily drinking zenith begins to exude vapour into the cooled air.
It’s easier in a white tunic, as Averroes and his crowd are well aware. The mangers for the cows are full, no camels anywhere.
‘What time is it?’ What an old-fashioned question.
Still no Zoja.
The online social networks, which sucked in most of the world’s techno-savvy, electro-accessible populations, are regarded by many as, if not the main, then at least very influential reprobates of the Great Cacophony, which is in a sense true, but if you look a little closer it’s not true at all. For those who look a little closer, saying that social networks are to blame is a cheap and pat formulation. For the rest, it’s commonsensical and clear. But since very few people could even dream up what actually happened – dreams being rather causeless things, hardly in accordance with the facts of the world – let’s just tell the truth as we see it. The real causes of the disaster were processor strength, artificial intelligence and a cabal of people with extremely high intelligence quotients, called in certain circles, in reverential, whispered tones, Car-Cut.
I’m late. Anwar says, ‘We’re already really close, just walk there. I’ll follow you.’ Marjorie nods. Her lover is lost in thought. When Zoja gets out, he says, ‘Now I remember that I read you once.’ I’m printed with straw. Turned over like leaves. Marjorie smiles and gets out. He asks, ‘Where are you going?’ Anwar looks at him in amazement. ‘Didn’t you hear me?’ He doesn’t respond but jumps out of the car and starts to scream. ‘Rip me, rip me, rip me in half! It’s you, isn’t it?’ I’m not, not really. Meaning gets lost, sometimes. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Still no Zoja. Kavemen KoleKtive are standing in a circle, clad in leather hides. As they murmur their farewell song to the sun, sweat pours over their mud-scented bodies. The Medio Twins finish off each other’s completely senseless sentences. As-it-were has gone off somewhere. A most uncongenial man is selling synthetic drugs and people are hissing at him to fuck off back to where he came from. Max is getting a little nervous. When night falls the people will go inside and he’ll have to turn on the lights. The guitarist doesn’t stop. Someone has come to the edge. Someone else looks awfully lonely. Hope is in the air,
primal progenitor pre-prophet
passion is in the air. Celebrity culture is healthy and in full swing. Nameless people are the grout between the tiles of fame, but that doesn’t bother them, not in the least, since they’re happy to be able to hold things together, so that there’s no cracks in-between, that the landscape is diverse, that no one is forgotten. Someone has clutched his chest in a display of surprise, and someone else has put his hands together in applause. On the edges of the car park things are moving like a fire through dry grass. The queue at the entrance winds in a human snake, left and right, the heads turn towards the source of the applause and although they don’t know exactly why, they all automatically start to clap. They love her. They love her.
cur
Her.
In a cone of light.
PANCAKE PALACE
Ten. Pain awoke with the morning. In the knees, in the ankles, in the muscles, under the nails. Everywhere. He groaned.
‘Eeeeevan, are you ok?’
Her breath reeked. He turned onto his side, away from her. Nine.
‘Are you sleeping?’
It didn’t help that her breath had found a pathway around his head, enveloped him, suffocated him. He was totally slimy, sweaty, sex-soaked, with wrinkled skin, unshaven everywhere, beard stubble prickling his neck. Eight. He could feel the pimples on his back, on his arse. Muggy moistness. His lungs had collapsed, his breath was wheezy. Everything hurt so bloody much. He rested his hand against his chest. Silence. He groaned. Seven.
‘What is it?’
Something vile had collected in his mouth overnight. His teeth had grown fur. He could feel a half-dried splatter of saliva in the right corner of his lips. One eye was blind, glued together by the nocturnal discharge of tear canals. Six. His nose was totally stuffed up. Shit. His left arm had fallen asleep and was hanging numbly by his side. Would they have to amputate it? His back ached, his neck was sprained. He groaned. Five.
‘Eeeeevan…’
‘Just leave me alone, please.’ Four.
‘I had a dream about opening night, a really beautiful dream. Everything was going fine and you were smiling. A week to go, oh my, you know my stomach feels funny every time I think about it.’
A stomach ulcer, acid reflux, intolerable heartburn hell for Evan. Cirrhosis, thrombosis, an aneurysm. Death is just a step away. Let it slide. Three. He was counting down silently, he often did, counting from ten to zero, swearing that once he got to zero he would get up and go to the bathroom. Two.
One.
‘Can you please get me a cup of coffee?’
She so loved to please. She didn’t even leave a sigh behind. His neck cracked as he turned over. She rolled out of bed and the sheet slid down from her lower back, her buttocks, her ample thighs. She wasn’t shy. She walked naked to the console and pressed. As she waited she stretched, raised herself up on her toes, lifted her hands high in the air. He rubbed his eyes and stared right through the gap between her thighs. He saw the dark slit. He filled it with his imagination, but reality leapt before his eyes and shattered the illusion. Under her right cheek there was a desiccated white smudge. His member had shrunk
back into the skin. The blood had flown elsewhere.
Her legs spread slowly, too deliberately. She covered his eyes, not herself, with her hand.
‘Don’t peek.’
He closed his eyes and pushed her hand away.
‘My eyes are closed.’
He put her together through scent, in the dark. Microscopically, bit by bit. Each crinkle separately, incipient stubble, a waxy veneer of passion. He reinvented her form from the powder of existence. A slit. A perineum. Lips. A mound.
The coffee scalded his tongue. He didn’t say thank you. She was constantly trying to touch him, nudging in closer, forcing her breath into his nostrils. He grabbed her by the side, his fingers sank into white flesh, and he held her at a distance. His eyes automatically sought out her nipples, the dark premonition underneath. He had to shut his eyes. He blew into the cup. His fingers were burning. He was seated. He felt revolting. Watery mucus in his gullet. He didn’t know where to spit it out, so he was swallowing it with long constrictions of the throat.
‘Eeeeevan…’
She ran her fingers over his chest.
‘What time is rehearsal today?’
‘I don’t know,’ he murmured.
Along the spine, downwards.
‘In the afternoon, no? What do we have today? The third act? The fourth? The final?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Not the second, my back still hurts from the last time. And we already know it.’
‘Mmm.’
Over his lower back, around, against…he pulled away.
‘May I drink my coffee in peace?’
Her hand was numb. He tipped his cup and drained it. A cloud of steam escaped his mouth. ‘Take it away.’
With a sour expression, she got up again. When she went towards the table, she turned sideways.
Which characteristic of time draws lust from people’s mouths?
Evan and Mojca had been going around in circles. Once the initial enthusiasm had disappeared (literally, in his case), they nurtured apathy for a time, and perhaps this would have continued indefinitely if complete strangers hadn’t suddenly started to smell like sex. Because they were grown up, not just in years but also in consciousness, they knew how to confide these new scents to each other. And they didn’t make the amateur mistake of saying: just follow your instincts, there won’t be any problem, we love each other. That doesn’t work. An ancient chemical process that, with physical contact, binds hormones into what people call emotions, stands in the way. And then emotions battle with declarations, and people end up in limbo.
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