Strange Violence
Page 19
And I was a demon.
Whenever I get too far away from the guilt I pull depression over me like a black funeral shroud. I don’t deserve to be free of guilt, I must live inside it, a prisoner in a prison where the bars are made of your bones and the bed is made of your dead hair, and it smells so lovely, so soft, but dead, and I remember how it smelled on you alive. You are the only person who I have ever loved, Stephen. You are the only person that ever I could love… you manifested yourself to me in a dream, and you died inside a nightmare…
I hate myself for killing you.
I wish, sometimes, that I was below the sewer grates, prey for the mutants. Pray for me. Amen, dear Lord God, please vanquish mine foes and eat mine eyes so that I can be blind. Rip to tiny little bits my flesh and allow the rats to feast on it, assimilate myself with them, for I am not a human being but a vermin. Infect me with pesticide and let me die screaming like a gray beast with withered eyes and a hole in my side. Let the darkness in my body bleed out, let the other rats drink of it.
Dead. You Stephen, oh my God, you are dead. I can’t believe it. Smoking gun on the floor to my right, you, lying in a corner, breathing heavily. Hole in your chest. Missed your heart by an inch, but I can’t… I will not call anyone. There are no more bullets. I have to do something. I grab a bat. What the fuck is wrong with me?
(whack whack whack whack thud)
I’m only doing it because I love you. You know how much I love you. I could never really hurt you. This is salvation. Forgive me heavenly father of my sins, forgive--
There is no salvation, no forgiveness, and now angels with needle-hole eyeballs and flesh coated halos stare at me screaming “God does not forgive you, mother-fucker. God does not forgive you--”
8. Walking through Heaven.
Angels are staring at me and I can feel the guilt starting to sink in. All of my fears, all of my indignations, all of my allegiances and pledges were all for nothing. My redemption cannot come, my forgiveness and my salvation are through with – I sit inside of a circle and the bodies of decaying angels stare at me with bloody wings and rotting eyes.
There is no light in those eyes – they stare back stupidly with idiot gazes, like bleeding dollies arranged around a pivot by the little boy God who has gone away, kidnapped by some other force, some stranger.
I sit and wait for something. A black presence stands millions of yards away from me, angels stretch like broken ventriloquist puppets, hanging over rusted rails, some fallen on the ground, all the way to the tiny pinpoint of ebony in the distance.
The angels are all dead.
Heaven is what I saw in the sky that night – black, broken. There has been a war here, and the divine have lost. Although dead, they do not know it – the Metatron is the darkness, and it will not give up his throne. Even in shambles I am judged.
“You have sinned,” it whispers, but it’s whispers surround me and bore a tiny hole in my skull, then crawl inside like maggots and begin to fuck and reproduce. “You have murdered. You have broken God’s will… you have turned your back on Heaven. How do you plead?” Perhaps, I think, I am making this up in my head.
“God,” I begin, “is as dead as you are, but neither of you know it yet.”
Silence pervades. I wait for a response, but there is none. Maybe during my short reply, the Metatron breathed its final breath, died silently and is encompassed by a darkness even blacker than the cloud of flesh that had surrounded it.
I walk forward, gazing at the angels on my side. Still dead. Some are beginning to rot. They do not reek, for they are not human, but they are dead nevertheless, and they are feasted upon not by worms but by tiny black slugs, crawling through gaping eye-holes and pain-frozen mouths.
Dead, like I should be.
I walk for what seems like minutes, like years, like seconds, like eternity. And I reach the throne. I know what lies behind the darkness. It no longer resembles a cloud, but now a funeral shroud, and I can see a tiny body shriveled up beneath its many silken layers.
Pulling layer to layer to the side, I advance until I reach the final section, and parting it, I see Stephen. He is not decaying, but he looks far more dead than the rotting angels I have witnessed. His eyelids are closed and painted with black eye-shadow, his lips are bright crimson, and his skin is so white… like ivory. He looks like a wax doll.
His fingers grip the sides of the black throne upon which he sits, holding on with clenched fists, but he looks relaxed, at peace. I move to him… he is not a dead body, but he is a wax statue. It is easier to think of him this way.
“I am so sorry I hurt you,” I whisper, and move my hands to his face.
It is not wax. It is flesh. Cold, dusty flesh – powder comes off in my hands and I rub it between my fingers. Stephen’s eyes open suddenly and look up at me. They are red, red not because of some demonic force or angel light, but from the burst vessels in his eyeballs.
“Killer,” he whispers. And then he is glass.
I back up. Light reflects from his mirrored surface, and I stare in awe of this. The drugs--
(IT’S THE DRUGS WAKE UP MOTHERFUCKER IT’S THE FUCKING DRUGS NOT REAL NOT REAL NOT REAL)
--are killing me slowly and softly.
A glass mannequin walks up to Stephen, a vision of myself, baseball bat in hand. He shatters this work of art into a billion tiny, jagged shards. Light issues forth and drowns everything, and I find myself falling, I fall farther, faster, and harder than I ever have coming down off of speed. I hit the cold ground, and I look up at the black skies. Clouds pass overhead. This is familiar. A man walks up to me, and I recognize something sinister about him.
“Spare a buck?” he questions, and begins to feel through my pockets. I grab his hand, grip it, and he hisses – hisses. A black tongue flickers out from beneath his tattered gray hoodie. Shadows hide his face. I let go, frightened, and begin to back up, trying to get to my feet.
“You know where you are, and you know what you are,” it hisses. Then it turns and runs. It’s nails tip-tap against the cobblestone sidewalk and it sprints into darkness. I am surrounded by shades of black and white. There is no color here – even my skin is gray, I notice. This is like a horror film projected in monochrome. I wait patiently for Jakob to descend from above and drain my life’s black blood…
“This is Hell,” Stephen says from behind me. I turn around, but now I see everything. Neon lights – the black and white is gone. Colors are bleeding into everything. Limousines glide slowly by and I recognize suddenly where I am.
Bit City.
“This is Hell.”
9. Breaking the wall.
It’s here. All things left untouched finally coming back with an angry remembrance at my guiltless expenditure of blood, my wanton song into the night as I forget everything but poor dead Stephen and reflect only on the emptiness of every room in my shackled soul.
Like dust under a dresser I listen to the breathing of a sleeping God in a lonely midnight hour. It breathes ever so gently, softly, then wakes up and groans, terrified from the nightmare. My lifespan is up before it even awakens screaming and is clasped by ninja shadows hanging from the ceiling and just waiting to fall upon their prey.
I pretend to know that the things that I see are fake. There can’t be monsters in sewer grates, dead angels singing for my damnation, rotting corpses in theatres being feasted upon by rats, wax-doll lovers in a wasted Heaven, acid-trips and facelifts and dead boys and vampires, dandies and blood, mutants, monsters, maniacs, albinoids, genetic products.
This is all fake. None of it is real. Even dear Stephen never existed.
(I can’t pretend any longer)
My prayers have always gone unanswered. My life is forty-six years in nine chapters, twenty-six minutes in thirty-seven days, two seconds, twelve hours, four billion years, 9,385 words without an ending.
My life is not in my own blood-stained hands. These sins I have committed are not my own wrongs, but still I am damned for the
m. I never killed Stephen. But I must face the consequences of his murder because it is fate for me to do so. Stephen died in your head - you’re the killer. You killed him!
I can’t pretend any longer that these apocalypses are nothing more than drug-induced visions. Painted hands do crawl off of the face of their wearer - I wonder where Ephengelson is now. Perhaps he faced the same fate that I will. Perhaps he is dead. Or like the beaten dandy boy, perhaps he is like that. You can only press your luck so far. Maybe he is shackled now on the top floor of Jakob’s hideout, or maybe he is dead and lifeless in a gutter somewhere. I fancy he got his face erased, although that’s a horrible waste of beauty, a tragedy within itself. I feel so sorry for him... perhaps I’ve already sold him as genetic product. Maybe he never existed.
I don’t think the train is coming. I think the angels were right. There is no salvation, no forgiveness. Only the heat remains. I don’t even understand what is happening to me… I must already be in Hell. I must have been right. I told you that I sold my soul for morphine. Maybe I made that up. My words come out garbled and my memories are all in black and white, they reel through my head like ancient cinema. They are soundless.
Perhaps there are corpses watching silently in my mind as well... or they were there all the time. I’m watching, waiting for the encore. Because after the encore, then it all ends. Then I finally die. I disappear.
These nightmares aren’t dreams, and the bogeymen really are tapping at my window. They’re whispering ‘Let us in, so that we may finish your story.’
Death, O Discordia, come swiftly to me!
I can smell smoke. It’s coming from all directions. I’m at the last page. THE LAST SENTENCE, THE LAST WORD approaches.
(fire closing in all around me, and the heat is making me dizzy and tired)
My god is dead. My face is melting. My hands are dripping black, I’m made of ink and paper. Highly flammable. Liquid flesh, black, stains the ground, flash-fries and tattoos into it, and I can feel it still. Something black gets in my eyes. Gotta wipe it away.
I’m melting. My entire world is on fire, this is Armageddon. I’m the only one left. They’re all gone. Ephengelson is gone. Not dead... just gone. Stephen is gone. The boy with the green make-up is gone. Jakob, gone. Gone. Everything is gone. Burned up. Now I will go.
Fire closing in all around me, and the heat is making me dizzy and tired. I want to fall. I want to sleep. Suddenly I realize it, I see things for what they are - my life as words on paper, ink on the flesh of trees, cast into the fire. Thrown away. Vaporized. The story deleted. Such is my fate.
The last word, reader, I can see it. Its lurching toward me on the ground, pulling itself closer… touching me. Its slithering into my skin, assimilating me. Moving in my veins. Up to my head… warm… cool… I see stars for a second… And now only the black ink staining the page as it crumples in the heat, darkening… and now only the fire consuming me…
Michael Chen-Thompson unfortunately lives in Cincinnati, Ohio and hates most everything.
http://bulletprooffaces.blogspot.com/
BABA-BOOEY
5
* * *
[1] William Shakespeare, Sonnet 132
[2] Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Will to Power”, 1888
[3] Mark Twain, “The Mysterious Stranger”, 1916
[4] Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, 1923
[5] Alexander Pope, “The Dunciad”, Book IV, 1743