Every place has its pariahs, often the ones it deserves. I don’t know why, in here, they’re the ones in need of a miracle. Some say that it’s kind of their own fault after all. Others whisper that alcohol is a common shortcoming, a shortcoming, a propensity, a Pisa of filthy weakness. For many insanity is a burden scraping down to their shoulder blades since sudden childhood, perhaps they refuse to apply compassion to those who are well-off in the head. Perhaps we’re jealous, those of us who didn’t choose our pathology, who have to live with it every day, our chatty illnesses impose their diktats upon us, no temporary comfort, no familiar dizziness, is it then possible to envy the apathy, the debris of existence spreading at the feet of our granite pride. We suffer with spirit, we syndrome with grandiloquence, we see no sparkle in their resignation. We are beautiful and mortal in our stone dreams, hardened by the constantly tolling bell, to the west no Eden, nothing will be found not even eternity. Jacques, Viviane, Jean-Claude, Cyril, like their brethren could can and will be able to carry out intermittent pauses, digressions, know the temptation of each side exhibited before the mirror. Too mercury-sticky, it’s impossible for us to know temptation. Amnesiacs, schizophrenics, psychotics, neurotics, manic-depressives, and so many more: it’s clear that we’ll never know straps that can tighten or be removed at leisure, chains of events and expectation are unknown to us, tomorrow night the next hour, no, we’ll never manage to imagine it. Who cares about the nasty violent aftershock, they approach pleasure, at least that’s what we think. Overboard maybe: my vagina is a crevasse frostbite greed, never in the past did delight ever stumble into this slutty trench. They used to say witches had a mark in the hollow of the vulva, there is no scraping that can scour clean what’s inherent.
My memory remains phlegmy imposing arachnid infiltrated alveoli at the slightest curves. My memory is nothing else, black widow mucous, it’s naive enough to be belched out by loose coughs but chanting will always give my throat a pounding. A bad head cold must be what turned me into an amnesiac.
Miss Scarlet in the Kitchen
with the Monkey Wrench
I wonder where memories go. In fact a memory really can’t be lost. All it can do is wilt, gently wither, go bad fade in tender agony, but never be lost. There is no land of lost memories. There is no cemetery of banished memories, not a single one, not even for the most porous, the most debilitated. There is no ossuary, no funeral home where their remains can be laid. Maybe because deep down a memory can never die. Not really.
So I wonder, I wonder a lot, where my memories are, what has become of my plethora of rejects, my pointy-toothed horde of dirty little secrets. Have they been grounded, has their case been dismissed, are they trapped in some vague place where everyone is condemned to some wretched orgy, a catacomb free-for-all their tiny blister death rattles vapor stream abortion. Could my memories be simple components requiring collective memory fermentation. I wonder a lot, but I don’t have much of an idea. Dr. Lagarigue doesn’t really like this question. She says it does a lot of harm to many things, many things inside me that keep on eroding, like she says for example your principle Aline your reality principle.
That makes three weeks four days and seven hours followed by sixteen minutes since I stopped being careful about what she might say and especially about what she might answer. Because I certainly do know where my memories go. Where they go and how and what I do with them too. I know the song that goes along with this rite, a very personal and rather disgusting rite.
I eat my memories. If my brain is empty it’s because one night I stuck in a spoon, a big old soup spoon, not even made out of silver or anything. I dug carefully so as not to mix the edible morsels with just any old thing lying around in there. My head is full of offal. Smooth little, soft, shapeless blobs of dark, angry blood greedily pulsating, intertwined with cables of veins and aquamarine quivering to the rhythm of each transmission. My head is offal. A rough little, harsh, shapeless blob of completely clotted blood cyclically vibrating, strangled by the throbbing dance of the blue flies. Sometimes a bubble pops at the edge of my cortex and out comes a voice calling me by a name as it’s liberated, a name that isn’t mine, a name that doesn’t belong to me, a strange, masculine name, and it whispers words that I don’t understand and it whispers words I don’t want to understand and it says that the flies are because of me and it says the flies have come just for me, they’re the guardians of memory that it’s their job that I deserved it that they won’t leave that they’ll invade everything that they’re a little like the voice itself compulsively bursting my head, familiar pressure followed by a rock slide eight words fourteen syllables: They are the Furies, Orestes, the goddesses of remorse.
The first time I stirred the spoon around I was a little scared and very cautious. I didn’t feel anything, just a kind of pinching around the hippocampus at the initial penetration. Rummaging around in your head makes a weird noise, especially since your ears aren’t used to it. Rubbed the wrong way, my eardrums took a few minutes to adjust to the direction the broadcast was going. I’m having a hard time describing the musical score composed by a spoon stirring in a head in order to load up with memories, the most accurate onomatopoeias, the exact adjectives. It’s pretty close, I think, to what you can hear if you eat yogurt mixed with cornflakes, with the difference that it’s not in your mouth but one floor up.
As I was taking the spoon out of my head, I discovered that memories can be very heavy. It’s like almost topaz-colored jelly with glittery confetti in it, I don’t know if it’s the glitter or its viscous prison that’s responsible for the astounding density (9.8 μ). Nonetheless I’m sure about it and can confirm: memories are allotropic.
I brought the spoonful of memories to my lips, a previously unseen texture, between crunchy and infinitely muddy. In the beginning I just wanted to reduce my contents a little, but there’s a fine line between bulimia in its initial drive and the irrevocable lair of hyperphagia. Memories taste like carbonic snow and exposed ashes. Apparently, when I was little Daddy used to say: Let’s leave the burning embers in the fireplace, tonight Santa Claus will come back to us roasted. Some of my thicker memory mouthfuls tasted gamy, I have to admit. I made no effort to chew the rotting taste beneath the condiments. You’re not supposed to play with your food, and I’ve cheated enough already.
I chewed slowly. My molars mashed up the summer of ’93, the day I was born, Saint John’s Day folk songs, piano lessons with the Méthode rose, my first baby tooth, the fall of ’78, my tears when I saw Donnie Darko, all my birthdays, my cousins’ laughter, the dress I loved too much, Maurice Carème’s Le Hérisson, the smell of the dunes in the south, double flavor Malabars, champagne on ice, the megaliths in Brocéliande, I devoured my memories, auburn henna that turns carroty, the little boy’s smile, the winter of ’86, daisy petals, my mother’s lovers, Chinese New Year, I conscientiously ground them to bits, some were very stringy, others tougher than cheap meat, my incisors were tearing and tearing rodents are white rabbits, my enamel got dangerously hot, my dentin was on the verge of crumbling but my jaw held out.
It’s the leftovers, the memories from the back, the very back of my skull are what was an issue. The spoon scratched sharply, with tenacity. I didn’t want to leave anything behind, especially not the sauce base, the buttery base of words bleeding me dry. Moving the edge of the spoon passionately, flirting methodically, scouring clinically, working eruditely to pull out its tongue, a slightly ulcerated pink snail’s head standing left mouth corner, a blind snail, we won’t go over the river and through the woods anymore the antennae have been cut. No matter how hard I scrubbed this thick film harder than lava clung to the walls, ravaged walls snails house open to the sky renovation work, on its back the snail in a smashed shack, Scotch Brite rubbing rubbing its ruined walls the shadow of memories indelible Hiroshima shaped charcoal, with a wood plane break the tartar off the floor baseboards nooks incrusted interstice memories, making the effort to break my back and my tools, me
mory tartar is nothing but granite, even worse than what some hearts are made of. My fingers fissure the spoon handle, only jackhammers work, I said to myself, against dry lava, how can I conquer the fermented memories sons-of-rock memory and cousins-of-mica memories, bringing down memories is a complicated task, complicated, difficult, much more arduous than that silencing the insolence and vulgarity of the sun in July, yes much more laborious than strangling the sun to save Icarus arterial consumption, I said to myself I said to myself in the wing chair. My head is Pompeii, especially can’t leave mummified cadavers there in the stone, random-access bloodsuckers’ stone, lapis lazuli slug stone can make you sadder than the adage, absolutely can’t leave stony memories deep down inside, they are an anthology of loose caustic stones that grate and scratch from the brain to the heart.
I put hot water in my head. Boiling water, half a cup. When a pot won’t come clean everyone knows you have to run it under hot water, fill it with steaming water and let it soak and add a couple of drops of bleach. I hesitated a little but didn’t pour in cups and cups of detergent. It’s so easy to be poisoned. I just let it soak, an hour, barely an hour, less than sixty minutes, the vapor-encrusted water in the hollow of my skull. I stirred spoon adapted broth. The defiant memories floated to the surface, nothing simpler for me than to fish them out. I hated the taste of soup in my head. Such a rancid consommé, hard to swallow. Shame and remorse apparently resemble a stock teeming with red herrings. My throat swelled up, my esophagus rebelled as the mustiness of my venality quivered upon my already solstice-minced tongue.
Hubert Gérard Mathieu Stéphane Jean Aaron Patrick Christophe Albert Maurice Alain Bernard Olivier Patrice Jocelyn Thibaut Michel Thierry Pascal Piotr Claude Léon Richard Jean-Luc so many tapeworms paragraphs and paragraphs filled with rough strident sluggish pipeline trash paragraphs filled with nomenclature ulcers ingest assume consonants syphilis vowels peppery spirals list where how many sailors not only captains to chew growling ruddy guttural faces to swallow up Saint-Tropez Courchevel Saint-Lauren Gucci avenue Montaigne gulp down heavy tongues every mouth half-open sewer on breath so white every case half-open on a chain a perfume a watch approval Aline approval, I was saying to myself as I nursed a lobe of their ears. My tonsils burned this grimace soup this soup is too tough but less so than the heady vacant passageway that made up my pre-autophagy data.
A little ball of bark, hard and shiny, and very full like a still fresh though slightly green hazelnut rolling carelessly, surviving in my skull despite the minutely executed drainings. I needed some time and to get my fingers right in to catch it. It was resistant, and sitting on the table quivered like a jumping bean in order to escape me. Inside, I knew it, was Charles, his square clammy hands, his perverse tomcat simpering, his dark gray fur, his eyes, eternally damp with cognac, desire, and breathless stupidity. I couldn’t eat anymore. My stomach was tainted by the evening menu, by the small-fry menu and was already begging for mercy, no way to force in so many fats, Charles-margarine would be an excess of fat, the tipping summit, the fuse that would transform my lair into a seesaw. Eating the memories wasn’t particularly easy, throwing them up wouldn’t have made any sense, I’m not a fan of pointless all-this-for-thats, and the molar-ground memories the enzyme- and digestive juice–harassed memories must really be ugly, not very pretty to see, and it must hurt too, hurt even more to cough up memories than to swallow them.
I didn’t stuff myself with memories of Charles. I strangled them with the monkey wrench. Not having a nutcracker, I used what I could. I must admit I did enjoy going overboard with the vice, tightening up the metal, cracking the beige shell till it bled. The hazelnut holding memories of Charles was full of a kind of very dark hemoglobin, with pulsating little jet-black organs. I counted five of them, five symbolizes man and maybe middle-class female vampires. For a long time I sniffed at the five sinewy marbles, I touched them with my tongue caught by the particular sponginess of madeleines cooked at the wrong temperature. For a long time I rolled the tiny taws inside cheeks and lips. My mucus membranes were distressed by their acidity. I arranged them like internal jewels, grafted between gums and lippy circumflex. The mirror gave me a scornful look, saying Snow White is the fairest you know the fairest in the land, adding, oh you poor dear you think you’re Orlan get those out right now. I spit out all the marbles into a blue Sèvres porcelain saucer. They didn’t look like little hearts, more like brown beans. One after the other I made them blossom with that monkey wrench. With the first turn of the screw a voice Often the heat of a beautiful day could be heard makes a young girl dream of love. Hoarse to gather diligently unhealthy the grain the scythe cuts awful my Nanette bends towards. With the second it became haughty the furrow yielding it rising in high wavering threatening notes in sniggering arcana. With the third and fourth it blew she died very hard the atmosphere that day. With the last it skinned my ventricles and eardrums to the bone and the short skirt blew away blood turned spurted so thick and the short skirt blew away the rancid little marble its drops echoing and the short skirt blew away thin stains on my fingers. Five little balls of memories emptied and scattered, their envelope consumed, a small shift, honored puddle of mercury, salty, troubled liquid. I lapped at the metal warmed by their seed, right up to the flecked handle. I don’t remember his hands on the small of my back or the first sigh I had to fake and especially not the retching that shredded my throat with every kiss.
I’d like to disappear, devour myself like I did my head, snap my bones, reduce my vertebrae to powder under the reign of that monkey wrench. I secretly hoped that some random bite would lead to the nerve, the rind, the very first piece that turned my heart to meat, but it’s the whole system, yes my whole system, it’s cartilage kneaded with corruption. I’m intrinsically tainted. Not an ounce of libertinism, not a hint of hedonism, no Juliette on her cushions. I wanted I wanted reconfiguration data cleaning garbage dumping the life out of Aline, well the one from before. I didn’t give up, I’m on the wrong side. Huddled in my bosom are the blessed beds and wall hangings of holy whorishness.
From the time I was born, or rather a preteen, smashing constantly smashing in back of Dr. Black’s head. Every spinal movement, every wink of a shoulder displayed bare appetizing curve, all supply and demand, my body is more a market than an ecosystem I’m a cowardly market stall paid for with biopower, every corner-of-the-mouth twist a cervical hit, I kept putting his fragile little neck between the polar teeth of the rusty wrench described as a monkey, I kept strangling yes constantly strangled Dr. Black between the iceberg teeth, I kept crushing his porous marrow, I specialize in handsome old men and in a good rabbit punch and a good rabbit punch and I’m not white and a good rabbit punch I’m late terribly late eternally late a soul must be punctual if the bleach of redemption is to fall upon it.
Some of my sisters, because my race is fertile, grow and multiply is common encouragement, so many plans across the generations, some of my sisters often invoke war sexuality combat, choice of rancid arms shoot me first. Some professions are teeming with my kind, I won’t list them, but not out of goodwill. Simply out of decency. And because everybody, even the Petit Robert dictionary, knows the truth even if the dictionary holds its tongue. Maybe the Petit Robert isn’t always candid because it’s a man. One or two examples are scorching my tongue, so, unfortunately, I can’t completely refrain from such ridiculous denunciations, from knocking down gaping wide double doors. Everyone knows about interns, known as little hands. Originally used in the fashion world, can we deny the reasons the term is still in use, knowing its popularity outside this sphere? Assistants are a serious problem, too, if you look carefully. Of course in many cases, it’s understandable for a woman to reject the dreadful, dated secretary, especially looking at the accumulation of associated tasks. Still, assistants gets me excited, I admit it, especially since they were often previously hired as little hands. I’m a prime example, but since using my hands wasn’t enough, I managed to go far beyond, a whole departm
ent. And as for press secretaries, even though, except for a couple of crude puns, the term doesn’t have any intrinsic connotations, one noteworthy anecdote sheds light on the reason: the efap, their communications school, is located in Paris at 61 rue Pierre-Charron, opposite a proud establishment known as Le Milliardaire, a famous hooker bar where it’s not uncommon to run into employers, reporters, and others in the company of women who are still in training. The joke about the horse is not only crude, it’s also dangerous because it’s cryptic. Sleeping your way to the top is more about laying down. I don’t have the strength to stay on my feet, but even as I say that I know my bitter nose is growing a bit. I didn’t try, maybe though, honestly, I didn’t even think of it. If today’s thirty-year-olds position themselves as Pharmakos, it’s as much procession inhabited as scapenannygoats.
Not a Clue Page 8
