The Oeuvre

by Greg James

  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 down, 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 war
m 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.

  Bony king keeps on walking. His eyes are beads, flash-frozen cryogenes. Each one a galaxy in abeyance, possibility in checkmate, arctic temperatures keeping the future at bay. Black circles form under his eyes. When he closes those long frosty fingers on his heart, he will be gone.

  We will be gone too.

  The young pretties squirm on glistening ends. Tongues stick out of every place, licking at the air for salt and nourishment. The mouths are beautiful, lush with Botox, eyes clear as wind-screens. A California midsummer glaze. Fall asleep in the grass and wait for the night’s blankets to settle, breathe it in like the Prozac powders they crumble into your milkshakes. Soft warm feeling of the thick dairy buttermilk, chilled to sperm flavour.

  "Can I have some more please, sir?"

  Dreams die at night. Too long begging on the streets wears them out, begging for someone to take them on, give them a home. A dream is nothing without someone to dream it into being, a dream is in danger of becoming a nightmare if it is abandoned, left unnourished. So there they are, clinging to your shoes, fluttering around your feet, mistaken for scraps of paper and discarded plastic bags, we kick them away.

  The nightmares don't beg on the streets. They have so many homes to go to. We readily accept them as old friends, invite them into our loving warm homes in the hope that they'll make them turn cold. Fimbulwinter settles in where the nightmares roam, in the crumbling hollow eyes of destitute housing, in the bloodstained mattresses of immigrant hostels, in hearts that have all the warmth of a calcified black turd. They leave a faecal odour to hang in the air, invisible and heavily breathed in, nightmares get spread around. The vain hope that misery shared relieves itself withers and dies.

  There are too many nightmares.

  I dreamed a dream once. Young and innocent, spun from golden threads. Thinking on it now, I had not realised how long ago I left it behind. How many nightmares and other attendant kinds of unpleasantness had taken its place? How unlike me, I think. But then how am I like me? Who or what is like me if I am not? I realise the notion is ridiculous. I am like me, no-one else in the world is.

  What is gone is gone.

  From such a state, I have moved on.

  For better, for worse.

  Not richer, much poorer.

  Story I heard at the water cooler #1

  The terrorists storm the cockpit of the plane. McDonald's grease-bags over their heads with eyeholes cut in the paper. The eyes in there are as processed as burger meat. The sub-machine guns jab-jab at the ribs of the pilot and co-pilot. The heads fall off, the peg-stumps of store window dummies are revealed, cracked and pock-marked with alabaster paint crumbs, the wooden hands are sellotaped to the joysticks.

  The plane shrieks, starting its dive.

  The terrorists shriek in tune with the engines and the passengers.

  They run back into the plane, spraying bullets into everyone. Men, women, children and hostesses, bodies sag and crumple, tissue-soft, soundless, not a drop of blood is spilled. Wood shavings and sawdust crunch underfoot, they find a reel-to-reel tape-recorder. Stop-start-stop. It is playing a sampled loop of horror movie screams.

  The plane is full of dummies and glass-eyed puppets.

  It was all a lie, not as it should be, not the revenge they wanted to claim.

  Bullet-laden screams to Allah! pierce the fuselage. The plane weaves and tumbles, making contact, it dissolves, blooming into flame, scattering hot pollen of scorched debris and charred torso. A dummy falls to earth, is caught on camera, mistaken for a man, the hunt is on for his remains but nothing remains, nothing is found.

  A burning rain falls on a city, burning the date into memory.

  Nothing will be the same, not ever again.

  Change the channel, there must be something else on.

  I tried to escape the city last night but couldn't do it.

  The motorway is melting down. Liquid essence of chaos emeralds and midnight drives. When the orange sodium glare is a balm to sleeping children, generating a tarmac and asphalt world. Outside of which wriggle and writhe the shadows of the static and the still, life goes by at speed here, as it should. The miles creep away ahead, dissolving into a dulled electric distance, it is an umbra-born of the things that live behind the sun. They came to earth and made the motorways their own, snaking grey acres chewing the arable into wastelands of cracked slab and cigarette butt stains, words crawl over upright shelter walls. Spray-paint smears declaiming incantations of industrial twilight, piss-teeth streaks in blotches of disco purple and terrible green spotted with a bubonic black.

  He has no face or body to recognise, only those gnashing beggar teeth. Brown creases of rot, enamel twists and calcium flakes show through his gnawed lips, behind them lurks Blackbeard's tongue. This is a different breed of pirate, a roadside wayfarer, the hitchhiker you wish you'd left behind, him with his soft cheesy breath fogging up the inside of your car. The heater breaks and the car goes cold, interior frost bites your fingers, his piss-teeth bite you open, eat you raw. He'll be along the way, somewhere, tattered cloth hands, overcoat rape. No, I cannot escape here by road.

  The air smells of Kosovo.

  So many colours in the world and every one of them an ugly sin. Relapse was inevitable, the cure only lasts as long as a woman’s heart. I’ve held one in my hands, for a while, small and hot and pounding so very, very fast. They wither too quickly, leave us behind to turn to stone, granite chrysalis in this cold arbour, vines growing around the feet, burrowing in as the warmer juices run out.

  She’s gone long before the bed has gone cold around you.

  Another day in the office. My mouth tastes of hot ink and burnt plastic. Dizzy sickness lollops its way around my brain, bright spots burst before my eyes as I try and concentrate on the creepy-crawl of the red numbers.

  My eyes flicker, dirty picture arcades, sepia and wet, open their anterior doors, puckering to suck me into their trembling guts. Somewhere, an audience of shudders nudge and giggle amongst themselves. Then, they go quiet, pink twanging chords are plucked out on nervous strings, this death-world pitches and spins around me, making me throw up a yellow dangling string. Catching at it with my fingers, I tug on it, feeling barbs snag inside me. The audience mutters to itself, shifting its dulling posterior, slapping out its many cunts and cocks, nursing them with double-k
nuckled thumbs to pass the time. Blood wheedles its way out through my grinding lips, I pull again at the yellow string, its raw fibres dragging, back and forth, across the tartar-softened undersides of my teeth.

  This isn’t going well.

  I let the string go.

  With a snap, it flicks back inside me, spitting a little stomach acid into my eye, a mocking gesture, the audience snickers and breaks wind violently.

  Time to go.

  Unformed ... wet yellow ... membrane wings ... dragging over the asphalt grain ... snapping the spinal exhibit ... sneering sadistics with big hands ... black stone ... zonies close in on us ... crowds all left ... look elsewhere ... hide safe and well ... punctures run in the embryo jelly ... gentle syringe ... spiking the body count ... placing y’best bet besty ... shrivel too ... evaporate into plastic smoke ... wash ashore on some other host-forsaken chemical beach ...

  Overflowing landfill site. Dumping ground for baggage, emotional and otherwise. The diggers stand tall, rusted dinosaurs not able to dig down deep no more. The wires hang from uncrowned trees. Autumn’s passed, we’re into winter. Heads down, in burial hoods, the workers march on by, ungloved hands shaking from low temperature bites. Warm home to bed and sex and wife. The ground is still, so desolate. No surprises here to see, except for the car that’s stalled nearby. The overweight man inside can’t take much more. He is crying, knowing no way to stop. He’s heaving on a length of rubber piping. The engine’s not stalled, it’s hot and running. Window glass goes from clear to mist to fog, soon comes a darkness, a carbon shroud for him. Such a pretty place, this desolation, with its diggers, dead land and suicide. There are no trees here from which he could go hanging, swinging in a wind that cries and cries.

  Wet ride coasting on the outer limits. Dipping into the cool of the twilight zone. Do in the spectrums of night galleries spinning overhead. Well ready for what comes next. Foam cascades of ashes and ember rabies splatter the vertigo-veins of his shaft. Pumping in and out. Hot and hard. Scar nebulas are rising into horizons. Out of the whirling dim. The burned black eye. Haloed with night-wounds and junkie-dust.