by Greg James
The way home is full darkness with bowing street lamps trailing mottled streams of light, spilling their luminous guts, burning through the night. I navigate by them, stepping through icky three-in-the-morning slush. I feel the chitin opening itself, letting loose those unthinkable feelings that do not smooth out over time. I dance from light hole to light hole. Heading on home. The air ripples with a febrile tension because this is their city, not ours. It is merely haunted by us. We are the aberration, parasites scuttling over the body we have poisoned, unhappily hungry, begging to it for wealth and power. We are so petty and small in our whining, they are sick of us, incessant us. They advance on us with shining, sticky hands, dripping with the deposits left by the masturbatory ferocities that grip them in the draughty bus-shelters of the afterlife.
This city belongs to the dead.
There’s an atheist in the church and all eyes are on him. He approaches the altar with outstretched, subordinate hands. His eyes downturned. His steps shuffle, mutter then curse. Then he comes to an end.
There’s a place called The Shop and you can get everything there. Good price. Low price. Cut price. That is, everything you don’t want. Why would you want something you don’t want? That’s what you’re thinking but is that not what we want all our lives long? Things to fall over at home, ever-increasing hoards of rubbish, snapping, splintering, breaking-down clinkered heaps of microchip, beads, plastic, perished rubber and wood.
So in we go, into The Shop.
Marching in, we tick the box on the disposable card-strip and stand patiently in line. Our faces serene, unlined and our guts gurgle, our throats are in turmoil, so eager, expectant. We know what’s coming, what the assistants will bring to us, place in our hands, hurriedly. Look at us askance, plead with their eyes for us to take it away. They wipe their hands on their tunics to erase the wet electric sensation of having touched our purchase.
They try to look away but are drawn back to stare at it. The softly shifting dimensions of it, the out-of-focus outlines, patches of damp. Then, there is the way the vestigial limbs twitch and grow, fingers and toes recede and deform, according to the mood of the purchase. Stinking geriatric fuck-holes open and beg, embarrassingly, in public, to be fingered as we pass by. A slit opens, forming a lizardly eye from yellow putrescent jelly. The eye is soon overcome though, strangled to death by the bloodshot web of its capillaries. It makes such a mess when it pops like an old egg, the dripping remains of it giving birth to a rustling brood of white-haired whining spiders, which scatter to every dark corner.
Some of the purchases are swathed in used hospital linens whilst others are stuffed into stapled-shut supermarket boxes, bandaged with reams of brown packing tape to keep the amniotic fluids in, as much as is possible. We hurry out. We are ashamed.
The Shop is an odd place.
Every city has one.
Intersections and vivisections. You can cut and peel it how you like. Staple down the open flesh. Admire the naked meat from your favourite position. See it glisten, run with blood and shine under the surgical lamp-light. A scalpel, a rough guide and an idea where to start working on it. Hack work.
Shit scared and nervous. Insects writhe on hot plates behind my eyes. Popping black popcorns leaking cartilage. I wear the same clothes and skin as ever. Thin and sickly hiding in pretentious heavy black. Passing into the office as an afterthought in the lower ganglion reaches of an unwanted HR assistant. Self-righteous malaria stalks the corridors on high heels with a face that implies deep-seated internal pain. The tap of the heels is the same tap as fingers on keyboard keys, as the rattle of a dismissal interview door handle. A mad monkey, red-eye wild, whoops and bangs on its glass cage.
I collapse into a thousand shivering neuro-statics. Slip into the deep, dark shit of human existence. In high colour, I’m out. Found out. Seen for what I am. Better out than in. Sad grey eyes follow me and my fear, staring from cemetery cells, redundancy graveyards, butcher’s yards of abattoir-fed fools. Take us with you. Out of this place. This corporate cut-out Hell fermenting in the sulphur of Financial Times hues. Theft and murder are the pandemics uncured by the patient, high-born sodomisers who stride the steel, oil and plastic-made spaces of restructured disaster.
Sit back, I say, sit back and relax, my friends.
An ice-cold Coke’s the cure.
Taste sick dizziness, lose some sleep.
Give yourself something to worry about.
The world can wait.
His throat is hanging open. His belly is trailing its tacky ropes, kindly smiling without teeth. He jiggles and jingles the battered tin cup that he begs with, stroking the dead dog lying across his lap. The dog’s gums are fleeing from its teeth. Eyes hardening into crispy nuggets of black and white. Soon, the vermin will have eaten away the skin and shown a bit more bone. Whatever else remains, the tramp can have a nibble on.
Them’s the rules, you see.
The tramp has been dead for about a week. His jaw is loose, his beard is coming off in faminous clumps and the dog died maybe a day or two longer ago than that. I remember seeing him cock his leg and piss thick blood about a month ago. Today, stiff zombie fingers rake and stir through the thinning hound’s fur, a rib tip punctures wasting flesh, a fish-hook end. The tramp runs a coarse finger along it, making music, licking off a clear, corrupt fluid. I nod his way and he smiles at me.
We look after one another.
Know what I mean?
This is my workplace and I am finally accepting that it is my asylum. The air echoing with cries and despair. I sit lower in my cubicle, hoping not to be seen. My fingers work against the keyboard, turning red numbers to black. My workplace is staffed by the living and the dead. The sick and bizarre truth being that the dead are the better workers; they don’t sleep, their brains are dead so you can leave them to work through the night. Grey, speckly masks staring into the flicker of their computer monitor screens, walking away from the building, sometimes, you look back over your shoulder. You see it lit from within by epileptic, high-definition ghosts. They scamper and writhe about as dead bodies go to and then fro, disturbing the flow of artificial light. From desk to photocopier to fax to confidential recycling bin, best workers in the world, you see, because their brains are shot. Gone. Stone dead. They’re not as interesting as the zombies you see in films because if you’re dead, you don’t want to do anything, never mind eat the brains of the living.
What would be the point?
No reason to do it. No more than there would be for them to wander about, arms outstretched or to snarl, make a sound at all. No, the dead are quiet. They smell bad, eggs and old cheese, sometimes they leak and no-one wants to clean the stains up. The dead don’t care what state they’re in.
Again, why would they?
No reason to, no more than there would be for them to remember where they lived. Dead means brain dead. Nobody home. It means don’t care, don’t know, don’t want, don’t need. I envy them that despite the emerging fact that they’ll do us all out of work. Sometimes, you look back over your shoulder and see those tell-tale eyes; receding, dried-out apricot pits and the beehive-husk brains behind them looking back, out from the black, at you. Holding your gaze with a mere suggestion of intelligence, recognition, perception. Something’s in there, inside those dead heads, it knows what it’s doing. Someone I work with for a long time, never knew their name, they dropped dead yesterday. I know, terrible thing to happen, right? You know what the first question was? The one that everyone asked?
“When’ll he be back at work then?”
Tonight I have tried to become one of the dead. I’ve cleaned all the matter from my fingers and hands. There’s blood everywhere, I can feel the mattress squelching, wet with love. I hold shivering white bones up to the moonlight and try to move them but there's too much pain. It fills every inch of me and everything in my surroundings is in me. It takes the form of hump-backed goblins, their stilted faces splashed with the bleached glee of badly-animated shado
ws. The angles lean and bite at me with whittled edges, a song escapes me, thin and reedy with melancholy. I whistle its tune, hoping to dissipate the pain, but the melody breaks and so do I.
This bed, this room, get to the outside, I can’t do a thing with my hands though. I look at the door handle. The key, loose-tongued in the lock. The glistening spaghetti and scraped sticks sting and whimper. I make up a number with the clogging blood, I dab at the emptiness before me. I watch the number I have made hang there, dripping down. A click, a creak and the door opens. The number, mine, dissolves into copper mist.
Outside is waiting, for me, and I go to it.
I am the fractured man, so it seems. A scarified suit that bleeds creation and control with dust and moisture. I’ve rewoven my hands from the bloodied ruins I carved them into. The wounds must be small and hidden, if made at all. My legs, arms and torso will be suitable for this; little, little cuts. A few drops of gore fall to linoleum floor, shining bright. That’s all I need. It will keep me going.
My alarm goes off.
With the usual array of grunts and sighs, I get up and am soon ready and go on my way to work.
These dreams are getting worse.
I stop by a window that is on my way, seeing the tone of its glass, its deeper shade. Last night, I came by and saw a couple inside. Canoodling on the couch, pale legs and roaming hands, rucked-up peachskin blouse, a breast-fed jiggle of coffee areola. I could not have seen a scene like that through this. The glass is too dark; heavy, opaque. It obscures all else as I come up to its smooth, natural surface. The carbon particles settling on it remind me of Time. People are at work, wasting precious time, making this dark thing stronger.
I suddenly want to go to the bathroom. My pancreas coruscates and there is hot urine running down my legs. The air that I breathe onto the dark glass oscillates. Then, I can’t inhale at all. Everything stops, so still. It vanishes and so do I.
Only then is the glass clear once more.
There is an advertisement on the wall of the train as I travel in and this is what it says.
You don’t need innocence, you know. None of us do. It’s quite a very useless sickness, a humdrum disease. We can’t cut it or flush it out so we have to burn it out. That little soft spot of trembling white blood-jelly, we cauterise, close it with a hermetic seal. You'll never feel a thing after that, no more bothersome loves, hurts, sorrows or serenities. Those all for nothing yesterdays will be a thing of the past.
I cry out.
Don’t be such a baby. I know it stings a little.
I forget what happened at work today. Can't remember. I toss and turn and then I toss myself off, emptying my fantasies into my hands as a wet, spoilt wight. Feeling a young sore open on my cock head, birth can be an infectious thing. Oh, sweet child o’ mine, I shall treasure thee. There are tongues and bared things wiping themselves clean on my skin, leaving a residue on the underside that dries as I gnaw on the royal jelly of rotting dreams.
There are rooms at work we call the Quiet Rooms. Hermetic bunkers from the chatter of the world. If in dire need, you go in and lie down in the darkness, say what you like, say what you feel, shout and scream aloud, dance until raw, fight with yourself until one of these broken, synthetic aspects that you call you begs mercy. You emerge cleansed, able to face the world, to do anything, be anything. Until the bug-brained chatter gets under your skin again, grows incessant, turning the sulci fissures of your brain into a black hive of blind, wild, buzzing banalities. You go back to the room where it’s quiet and think about how a loaded gun might set you free.
My e-mail pings. Someone needs something from the Archives.
The office basement’s geography is much as it was. The textures are all that’s different; the taste of the air, tapioca shit and a mild nerve agent. Enough to get you twitching, to keep the ganglions fetid and the cortices septic. Sex and violence float on the near-fluid waves of the atmosphere, emerging as fish-scale broken teeth, glimmerings of spit, sticking to you, after-images of cigarette smoke, making you prickle and take things slowly. Losing your balance, you want to topple on down, into yourself, never wanting to get up again. Only get it up again and again and again, rolling and curling, grabbing at me, at themselves.
The tangy musk of wet penetrated spaces hangs over them, a dry early morning fog, lapping at my ankles, simpers, whimpers, cries and soft plops pepper and salt the strange scene. Fellow workers on all fours, colleagues in anal coitus, teary eyes, milk stains and misted rims. See how they are tender with each other; giving, needing, touching in lighter ways, sometimes. They crawl on all fours through their sick and piss and shit, eating the blood that is coming from the holes in their faces. Buggered bone seeping brain slush. Little boys and little girls mount the mewling donkey wreckage and drag tiny fingernails down their backs. A flaying, a scourging, that will take years and patience to complete. Tears and semen run together as we fuck to forget.
I've not got time for this, there's work to do.
I remember sunlight scattering as gold coins on dirt tracks, leaves fluttering in a summery breeze. Odd light filters in from some point in space I cannot see, and settles over the dust and debris of the Archives before me. Boxes of folders, folders on top of boxes, rickety stacks, doddery shelving, a clutter and a mess.
There’s no order to it.
It’s all discarded, unwanted.
A place for the forgotten.
The rest of us, those who don’t become great, those who don’t matter, who live without the beauty, skill or talent to make things better. We who will never rise again; the fallen, the trampled-upon, bottom-feeders who subsist on mediocre, give-away gruel. The testaments that we existed, were once around in the world, are all in here. Frail invoices, decrepit dispatch copies, carbon scrunches, creased-up scrawls, bitter, meaningless lives that wither away.
Dead flowers in old dustbins.
This is our resting place, the long cold waiting room on the precipice overhanging nothingness, yearning to feel the death-rattle of existence and everything else that made it come into being. Gently, I go picking my way through false corridors of stationery, building a bookshop claustrophobia, second-hand, it gnaws at my fingertips.
A box shifts of its own accord, a ghost in my periphery that I barely see, sending down a rain of mummified leaves. Something falls out that is neither paper, nor a folder or files. Something flesh-heavy and wet. The box exhales. The cat is dead. The card insides of its makeshift coffin gouged with tears, fur clings to strips of yellowed decomposition.
"You were a sacrifice here, weren’t you?"
The carcass’s drawn lips, edged with wriggling blackness, don’t speak but I know.
The Archive demanded an offering, a sacrifice so that one of my predecessors might come here and go out again with impunity. That’s why they put you in here, shut you up in a box, leave you to premature burial, to the air being sucked out of your lungs by the presence down here, your eyes popping like frogspawn bubbles.
Did it laugh as it was doing death to you?
I think it did.
Maybe, I should look for another job, another workplace, somewhere like this but better. But it must be like this.
I’m in my home from home. The gents toilets, for a break, a breather, to sit in one of the cubicles, make everything go away for a while. It’s very quiet in here and doesn’t smell of recent use.
I open the nearest door.
Bile spits against the back of my throat.
It‘s everywhere – raw rivulets, spatters and scarlet ribbons, wet rubies, curdling into ruddy blushes, all clogging in the bowl with pieces of masticated face-meat that bob and seep more juice-violate. The wall drives into my lungs. I am empty. My throat is full. I swallow the surge, tasting warm acid. Not sure if the splashes on my vision are in the cubicle. A fine cold makes its way through me, from head to toe. System shock. The muscles of my heart are bulging fat, wanting to split and burst open wide, become bleeding tidal mouths. I sink do
wn, down, down, watching the gore come creeping my way, fingers of deep red forming in the coarse mortar valleys between tiles. On the surface of the flooding bowl, I saw it. The pieces of a face, half-digested, what was left over.
I remember she tasted like bacon.
I sit through the days to come, reading time between the lines. The low wattage of office nights and archive days. Cell walls, so thin, fragile twilight zone of cautions and damage-case sleepovers. Huddling in on myself for warmth, learning how to hug oneself. Unwanted talent of the lonely, hour and minute as indistinguishable as warm and cold, comfort and understanding, you are missing the point here.
Everything is mathematics. The red numbers operate of themselves underneath the structure of things, fitting us out with wires, limits and negotiable boundaries as per the requirements. The decay must continue, the dissolution must be absolute, there will be an end to us one day.
One day soon.
To this end, the red numbers go on, they be the purging agent, everything will move on and on until we are no more. The universe will exist without us. Very likely, it will be better off when it does. We will not see what we are, what we have done or what we eat. Too far gone is the mess known as Man.
In a vain vale of concrete continents gushing cunnilingus waters, the bony king of nowhere comes to call, his jointed knees are sparkling with thick craters of rust and neglect. His face is a crater-burn itself. Street spirit is in his veins as he stumbles and bumbles about. He wants to know how to disappear completely. The meat machines will not communicate; all mouths here are stapled shut and eyes done too with needle and thread. The sewing is expert and worthy of grandma. The faces are masks of wasted fruits and vegetables, lumpy, ungiving. Sprouting from collars that have not been washed in weeks, white has gone to grey.
Soon, all will fade to black.
The king wheezes, the failing iron cladding of his lungs loosens some more. Underfoot, the cracking and bursting of a fragrant shell. Dead hatchling plastered onto the paste-colour sole of his foot. He scrapes it off on the pavement, peering down, a cooling spatter of yolks and haemorrhaged membrane, insignificant trail of death, leading to the gutter. In the gutter, many hatchlings have been crushed down into scrapings.
