Dadaoism (An Anthology)

by Oliver, Reggie

  Second Tableaux

  Hedgerows in the rain.

  Third Tableaux

  A crashed ambulance in a different corner of the same woods in the first scene. Its lights are like tiny transparent maraschino cherries. The ambulance’s back doors hang open; the vehicle is tilted upward at an angle that would only be possible in a wreck, and Tyler, naked on a stretcher under a white sheet draped as carefully as if it were painted onto his skin, is being lifted into the ambulance by two eternally blurred attendees. His eyes are shut and shaded by the black curls of his hair; his lips gape slightly, vaguely heart-shaped. In glittering lavender letters across a parchment ribbon that floats in the grass: Tyler’s first overdose, wherein he found death to be a soft violet light, a hum, and the deepest peace.

  Fourth Tableaux

  Three emaciated deer cut from cardboard, their legs like bits of kindling over which has been stretched moth-eaten plush, placed upon a hill in a glass cage with gilt corners. The sky is the color of the inside of a skull. The great black eyes of the littlest one are set with huge pearls for tears, their surface tarnished and specked with dirt: his hoof is trapped in the brambles of a rosebush.

  The legend reads: The deer gambol in the dusk, regret.

  Fifth and Final Tableaux

  A stretch of human skin, porous and hairy. A mosquito, a drop of blood that looks as large as a child’s rubber ball. A hypodermic poised a centimeter from the skin, not disturbing the mosquito with its child-like eyes and wrinkled face.

  The legend: Everything was infinitely still.

  *

  I have had the Super 8 films that pertain to both of us, mostly those of the year that Tyler and I were at boarding school, spliced together and put on a single reel. Tonight I play them on a projector in the bathroom for the two of us to watch. I have created a title for the set, and it falls on the wall in flickering blackletter:

  SUMMER OF NIGHT

  First Film

  Black nets broken by glittering lights: the camera coming through tree branches from out of what looked like night into a sunlit field, grass saturated green, as is the surrounding woods. Two boys, between the ages of 15 and 17, are walking across this clearing towards a hill. The camera follows them as they ascend and stop at the base of a gigantic ponderosa pine. The film with its dark edges has an unnatural look, as though it were made on an indoor set. A title reads: It was a day with a sky so blue it looked painted; everywhere in the brightness were dark shadows creeping, especially amidst the foliage. A shot of a garter snake crawling out from under a piece of tin, a green ribbon threaded through the grass. The boys climbing the tree together, it must be thirty feet tall. The camera cannot catch the slight swaying of the trunk, but the boys feel it. The camera looks up from out of the middle of the tree: the perspective of one of the boys who can see the edge of the other at the top of the tree, his back turned towards the camera. Something wet falling through space that catches the light. The camera following a stream of urine shot from the top of the tree. The other boy, myself, reaching out to the blue sky and scratching its surface—to reveal darkness on the other side.

  Second Film

  The camera is in the place of a television set, the blue light of which glows on the bones of two skeletons seated on a plain couch in a plain room. One is dressed like a woman, the other like a man. There I am, about 6, with wild, dark hair and eyes, playing with a big rubber spider and some dolls on the carpet. The camera switches to a view of the TV, presenting a nearly identical scene; there’s him, younger, his dark hair wilder, his eyes bright green and turned away from the TV as he plays with a toy guitar. His parents look the same as mine, bones, with the exception that around their necks hang little glittering crosses.

  Third Film: A Childhood Experiment

  Deep in the woods. He and I sitting beneath a tree, teenagers. Disturbed leaves give evidence of a gentle rain. Shot of a hot pink spray paint cap between thumb and index finger, full of orange gasoline. Small hand, calloused fingers. Close up of a scar between the thumb and index finger. He holds the cap under his nose, inhaling the fumes, just this once. His large, wet eyes roll back in his head. Close up of his eyes rolling. His body begins to shake, not shake so much as shiver, to shiver violently. The other boy mouth open, fish-eyed, staring. The spilt gasoline. His still body, now so still, disturbed leaves give evidence of a gentle rain. Shot of water droplets on his full, lower lip. The other boy, grabbing hold of his friend’s shoulders. Shaking the still body, pulling at his purple sweater. Beads of water on his eyelashes. And then, like a breeze in the grass, or a butterfly alighting on the air, a fluttering of the eyelids, life. Eyes open he looks at the boy holding him by the shoulders, he looks from what seems a great distance, and announces that he is no longer afraid to die, but he only mouths the words because the film is silent. His pupils are dilated, and his face offers them in their magnitude as though they were something from which one could drink. A puncture in his gaze. Disturbed leaves give evidence of a gentle rain.

  Fourth and Final Film: Asleep in a Car Crash

  In slow motion and seen from within, a car crashes. The boy in the passenger seat is blissfully dozing. The scene is switched to an almost identical scene in slow motion of another car crashing, seen again from the interior, suggesting a head-on collusion with the first crashing car. It is hard to know that the cars are crashing until shadows fall on the suddenly awake faces of both boys. The cars crash, roll, and are crumpled: this causes the strange, even beautiful light and shadow play on the boys’ frightened, staring, faces. At this slowed speed it looks as if they were bathed in the light filtered through a forest from a setting or rising sun, as, perhaps, seen from the compartment of a train as it chugs into a darkening woods. A few bits of debris and glass floating in the air around them, catching the light—what may be no more than scratches and dust on the film: this is a very strange thing to see. The sound of the film changes as it jumps the sprockets, and this accompanies a new, sudden and crazy darkness—composed as it is of countless layers of black, none of which match—all of which are suddenly vanishing and returning, in very short intervals marked by a single frame or so of soft gold light. Gilded crazy darkness, scratches on film out of focus. Spot-lit cotton blown across the void. Fluff of dandelions or rotting fireworks: the remains of a summer at night. This only happens this once, is never to be seen again after, as it is a lovely mistake occasioned by the film being ruined in the projector. Silence and dust swirling in the light of the projector, the light that hangs in the darkened room: a monochrome moonbeam, as purposeful and as weak as the supporting thread from the web of a spider. And the light is blown out now too, analogous again to a spider web, ruined in the breeze.

  *

  The bulb of the projector has burnt a hole through the trapped film. The plastic that Tyler’s face is printed on peels back in a ring, and a circle of white light shines from the demolished upper half of his head. Behind me there is a flash and I turn to see Tyler as he floats down from the ceiling, his body an enormous strip of transparent celluloid with a corresponding burn. Headless, he lies on the bathroom floor, thin as paper and unmoving. I rush to him. I wonder if the heat from my hands will cause him to curl like one of those red fortune-telling fish.

  *

  Unspool the book. About a mile or so of black leader. Don’t look back. Looking backwards: the images jump, the sprocket holes don’t catch, looking forwards: roadside flowers. The light that illuminates the image requires it to be transparent; the light that illuminates the image easily burns the pictures.

  *

  The staircase has collapsed. Fortunately the dormitory is one of many structures, the uppermost, that have been left to ruin—buried one on top of the other, where structural integrity permits—in an immense landfill beneath the haunted house. In actuality, what constitutes the bulk of Trash Town is underground. I roll what I have of Tyler up and put him, or it, into a cardboard tube for carrying posters. I place his remains in a bac
kpack I find in the dormitory. There is nothing to do now but head further down. Through a rickety door under the Astroturf rug in the dormitory, I follow Robert and Joachim into a system of tunnels where the other dead boys—who long ago ceased working at haunted houses in the autumn on account of their more considerable decrepitude—have made their homes. The landfill is so deep and so wide it contains disposed-of tract homes in their entirety. Robert decides to set his room up in the hollowed out shell of a once suburban bedroom, the crème-carpeted floor of which tilts up at an angle of 12 degrees. It is actually quite like the home he used to know above ground in topside Trash Town. One wall is missing and opens onto a pit in the earth from which wafts the smell of a subterranean sea, a private place that Robert likes to visit, and which he defends from marauding cadavers by occupying the bedroom night and day. A red shade-less light bulb glows in the lamp on his desk making his bedroom, with its hanging baskets full of bones and its death metal posters, a kind of cartoon hell. He spends his days listening to his favorite bands on a set of headphones and spray-painting the walls. Joachim is in the house next door.

  *

  A note about the older dead boys. The dead boys, tucked away in their burrows, at first used matches to guide their tunneling. Packets of lost book matches always find their way to them. They slide from a table into a space between the floorboards, down until they are retrieved by pale cold hands. Sometimes they access the matches directly through the gaps in the floorboards of especially old homes or those built near cemeteries. It was a black eternity of cold, burnt thumbs striking sparks and flares in the crawl ways—until the development of electricity. It began in the neck, or lower, for those much deeper underground who did not have matches, but carried fire-starting kits around their maggoty waists, fanny packs that kept tinder, spindle, board and bow for building bow-drill fires.5 When the boys first noted the pale, stalk-like things that had begun to bud from their necks and backs, they assumed they were merely diseased or the victims of a new parasite—many varieties of which, from fungal infections to the presence of higher organisms, had already been observed on their persons. So it was something of a surprise when these stalks sprouted faintly luminous lavender florets. It was a further joy when they began to pulse and bloom more brightly with each arbitrary intake of cold air into what remained of lungs—or when they were brought to a rounded brightness by the subtle stirring of casket winds. They eventually flowered into egg-sized orbs of light that rendered the match an anachronism among non-smokers.

  This new development in the process of their decay was unusual in that it favored them. Or so it seemed to in that it preserved their corpses from certain hazards. Boys were quicker to avoid pestiferous vermin, less likely to sleep in an area that might be growing damp. This period of time was remarkable not only for its illumination, but also on account of the sounds that were heard then. Many of the boys had not seen much of each other before and certainly not in such detail. Whenever they happened upon each other now, in their steadier lurching and digging in the dark, they let out cries. A wet chortling sound lost between chest and mouth in whatever remained there. Sometimes it almost sounded like laughter, sometimes like a shriek.

  Though the boys were on the whole happier with their neck lamps, this development also occasioned a wave of violence. For the most part they were a relatively gentle, if sardonic, lot, but there were the inevitable bad apples. Some cruel types delighted in sneaking up on their resting fellows and stomping out their lights with their big, bare feet. They’d grind their friend’s filaments into the dirt and run off, leaving them in the dark.

  *

  While digging at the edge of a little garden he kept near the burial mounds, a boy happened upon a big toe. It had a cracked, yellow nail and a callous, and it was quite large. He tried to retrieve it, but it was attached to something. He gave it a hard jerk and it came off in his hand. Something moaned and scurried off.

  The boy took the toe home to his warren where he lived with another, older boy who was a good cook. He showed him the toe.

  “It looks good and fresh,” he said, “I’ll cook it for dinner.”

  In the gloaming the boy chopped the toe into two halves, which they cooked and ate. They did the dishes and went to bed in a pile of dead leaves and grass. They fell asleep, cold together under the leaves. But in the middle of the night a sound awoke the younger boy. It seemed not to come from above, outside the burrow, but from beneath them. Something was moaning, calling mournfully,

  “Where is my to-o-o-o-e?”

  Terrified, the boy pulled his friend close. It doesn’t know where I am, he thought, I’m just one dead thing among others… I’ll sleep, and when I wake up it will be gone.

  But then he heard a scuffling sound.

  “Where is my to-o-o-o-e?” it moaned again.

  Slowly he heard it climbing up from the depths, dislodging little avalanches of dirt with its feet. Closer and closer it came. Now it was just outside the earthen dugout where they nested.

  “Where is my to-o-o-o-o-o-o-e?” it gasped

  Then there was a long, terrible silence. The boy reached for his matches beside the bed, but just then the voice shouted, right in his ear,

  “YOU’VE GOT IT!”

  The boy struck a match and pushed his still sleeping friend onto the floor in front of him, toward the intruder.

  “He ate your stupid toe!” he cried.

  His friend had knocked the intruder to the ground, but his face could still be seen. It was a young man with large, bloodshot eyes. His alabaster complexion was streaked with yellow bruises, the eyes sunk in purple pits. He was at that stage in which his decomposition had begun to produce hues in him that were more alluring than any he’d had when he was living. Like a fruit so ripe it’s about to rot, his beauty had risen with the dead blood that stung his lips the color of liver and violets.

  Now awake, the boy who’d been thrown on the floor lay there still, in a kind of trance. The intruder pushed him out of the way and stood. The white, bare skin of his chest clung tightly to a well-defined musculature that had not begun to mellow, though the silver chain around his thick, blue-veined neck was rotten with rust. It left an ochre ring, a brown halo where the marble mass of his chest, shoulders and back met. And there were other dark shadows playing about the collarbone and Adam’s apple a bit too deeply. Flecks of mulch and dirt were trapped in the thin, clay-streaked sheen of corpse sweat that glossed his heavy torso.

  “Where is my to-o-o-o-o-e?”

  “We ate it.”

  “What?”

  “We ate your toe. We didn’t think it was anybody’s.”

  The other boy looked distraught, his lips slightly parted in surprise.

  “Look, I don’t know what’s wrong with you—if maybe worms got in your ear and ate your brain or if you were a football player when you were alive, or something, but if you lie around half-buried near the garden… you gotta figure, a carrion bird or something… you’re lucky that it was just your toe, now that I’m getting a good look—oww, shit! The match!”

  But, before he could strike another, the intruder’s hands were on him, not aggressive, but clammy and uncertain, drawing him down into the leaves.

  *

  Joachim has his stereo on in his bedroom: a synaesthetic mess. Violet and ochre pop music oozes from the speakers down the sides of his dresser like melted wax. He’s using the Internet. The Internet is the unreached paradise of the 19th century symbolists. When Charles Baudelaire wrote “Anywhere Out of the World,” he was thinking of the Web—which is more “a country entirely made of mineral and light,” than any Lisbon, the landless apotheosis of those “countries that are the counterfeits of death.” When he exclaims “Anywhere! Just so it is out of the world!” it’s as if he’d written: http://.

  Joachim is logged onto DeathSpace.com, Myspace for the dead. His glass eyes shift in their sockets, the keys click. He is bored with “that other half of nothingness, monotony.” Advertisements,
pop-up windows sparkle on the glass of his eyes. An endless photo stream of pretty girls retreats from him, preserved under glass.

  *

  A fingerprint in sperm on a cold window in the dark of Joachim’s room. A match blown out as a pipe is lit. His rotting brain gives rise to a sickly vegetation of visions; dream images in the glass, nocturnal fields, lacrosse goals. In the distance half a preparatory or boarding school, one side of it under construction or missing, to reveal: cross-sectioned classrooms, locker rooms, gymnasium—all with their lights on. The school looks as neatly cut in half as if it were a cake. There is a boy on the field, well lit in the black air, maneuvering a lacrosse stick, grass stains on his white shorts; black greasepaint in rectangles under his eyes. His exercises blur his form until it is a mere smudge on the glass, embers, or lights from a passing car flickering underneath it. A yellow lawn chair, a table with a lamp, a carafe of strawberry Cool Aid. Joachim mouths the words “strawberry.” A cake, frosted yellow, with a wedge cut out of it, in the boy’s hands. He’s running with the cake. It falls and is trampled into the field under his sneakers, the yellow frosting smeared against the grass, slicking it down. The visions fade to specks of cotton blown through the blackness of space. Dandelions. Dark edges.

  *

  Rumors have circulated that farther down in Trash Town there is a school. But it isn’t like other schools. Tired of TV and not having much else to do, we have gone to find it.

  *

  The school is lit by high, bright lights and fenced off by rosebushes. Blue roses hang heavy and glowing in the darkness, as unnatural as decorations on a cake and smelling almost as sweet, so sweet they’ve drawn numerous nocturnal bees: the lurid yellow of the school is fenced off by a buzzing blueness. Not far from the perimeter of rosebushes is a beehive, built in the side of a cottonwood tree. Towering at an unknown height, the tree disappears up into the blackness above, perhaps having grown into the ceiling of this immense cavernous region. The tree spills a slow but steady stream of honey from the opening in its side, out onto the grass where it has formed a shallow pond. The pond is full of dead things drawn and lost to the sweetness. The sweetness of the humming air mingles richly with the dampness of the earth.