August 16, 2027 (later, 11:47 p.m.)
Sabit came back with a bag full of Indian takeaway, when she’d gone out for sushi. I really couldn’t care less, one way or the other, these days food is only fucking food – curry or wasabi, but when I asked why she’d changed her mind, she just stared at me, eyes blank as a goddamn dead codfish, & shrugged. Then she was quiet all night long, & the last thing I need just now is Sabit Abbasi going all silent and creepy on me. She’s asleep, snoring bcause her sinuses are bad bcause she smokes too much. & I’m losing the momentum I needed to say anything more about what happened @ CeM on Sat. night. It’s all fading, like a dream. I’ve been reading one of Sabit’s books, The Breathing Composition (Welleran Smith, 2025), something from those long-ago days when the avant-garde abomination of stitch & snip was still hardly more than nervous rumor & theory & the wishful thinking of a handful of East Coast art pervs. I don’t know what I was looking for, if it was just research for the article, don’t know what I thought I might find – or what any of this has to do with Sat. nite. Am I afraid to write it down? That’s what Sabit would say. But I won’t ask Sabit. What do you dream, Sabit, my dear sadistic plaything? Do you dream in installations, muscles and tendons, gallery walls of sweating pig flesh, living bone exposed for all to see, vivisection as not-quite still life, portrait of the artist as a young atrocity? Are your sweet dreams the same things keeping me awake, making me afraid to sleep? There was so goddamn much @ CeM to turn my fucking stomach, but just this one thing has me jigged and sleepless and popping your blue Peruvian bon bons. Just this one thing. I’m not the squeamish sort, and everyone knows it. That’s one reason the agency tossed the Guro/Guro story at me. Gore & sex and mutilation? Give it to Schuler. She’s seen the worst and keeps coming back for more. Wasn’t she one of the first into Brooklyn after the bomb? & she did that crazy whick out on the Stuyvesant rat attacks. How many murders and suicides and serial killers does that make for Schuler now? 9? Fourteen? 38? That kid in the Bronx, the Puerto Rican bastard who sliced up his little sister & then fed her through a food processor, that was one of Schuler’s, yeah? Ad infinitum, ad nauseam, hail Mary, full of beans. Cause they know I won’t be on my knees puking up lunch when I should be making notes & getting the vid or asking questions. But now, now Sabit, I’m dancing round this one thing. This one little thing. So, here there’s a big ol’ chink in these renowned nerves of steel. Maybe I’ve got a weak spot after fucking all. Rings of flesh, towers of iron – oh yeah, sure – fucking corpses heaped in dumpsters and rats eating fucking babies alive & winos & don’t forget the kid with the Cuisinart – sure, fine – but that one labeled #17, oh, now that’s another goddamn story. She saw something there, & ol’ Brass-Balls Schuler was never quite the same again, isn’t that the way it goes?
Are you laughing in your dreams, Sabit? Is that why you’re smiling next to me in your goddamn sleep? I’ve dog-eared a page in your book, Sabit, a page with a poem written in a New Jersey loony bin by a woman, & Welleran Smith just calls her Jane Doe so I do not know her name. But Welleran Smith & that mangy bunch of stitch prophets called her a visionary, & I’m writing it down here, while I try to find the nerve to say whatever it is I’d wanted to say about #17:
spines and bellies knitted & proud and all open
all watching spines and bellies and the three;
triptych & buckled, ragdoll fusion
3 of you so conjoined, my eyes from yours,
arterial hallways knitted red proud flesh
Healing and straining for cartilage & epidermis
Not taking, we cannot imagine
So many wet lips, your sky Raggedy alchemy
And all expecting Jerusalem
And Welleran Smith, he proclaims Jane Doe a “hyperlucid transcendent schizo-oracle,” a “visionary calling into the maelstrom.” & turns out, here in the footnotes, they put the bitch away bcause she’d drugged her lover – she was a lesbian; of course, she had to be a lesbian – she drugged her lover and used surgical thread to sew the woman’s lips & nostrils closed, after performing a crude tracheotomy so she wouldn’t suffocate. Jane Doe sewed her own vagina shut, and she removed her own nipples & then tried grafting them onto her gf’s belly. She kept the woman (not named, sorry, lost to anonymity) cuffed to a bed for almost 6 weeks before someone finally came poking around & jesus fucking christ, Sabit, this is the sort of sick bullshit set it all in motion. Jane Doe’s still locked away in her padded cell, I’m guessing – hyperlucid & worshipped by the snips – & maybe the woman she mutilated is alive somewhere, trying to forget. Maybe the doctors even patched her up (ha, ha fucking ha). Maybe even made her good as new again, but I doubt it. I need to sleep. I need to lie down & close my eyes & not see #17 and sweating walls and Sabit ready to fucking cum bcause she can never, ever get enough. It’s half an hour after midnight, & they expect copy from me tomorrow night, eight sharp, when I haven’t written a goddamn word about the phony stitchwork @ Guro/Guro. Fuck you, Sabit, and fuck Jane Doe & that jackoff Welleran Smith and the girl with peacock eyes that I should have screwed just to piss you off, Sabit. I should have brought her back here and fucked her in our bed, let her use your toothbrush, & maybe you’d have found some other snip tourist & even now I could be basking in the sanguine cherry glow of happily ever fucking after.
August 18, 2027
I’m off the Guro/Guro story. Missed the extended DL tonight, no copy, never even made it down to the gallery. Just my notes and photos from CeM for someone else to pick up where I left off. Lucky the agency didn’t let me go. Lucky or unlucky. But they can’t can me, not for missing a deadline or two. I have rep, I have creds, I have awards & experience & loyal goddamn readers. Hell, I still get a byline on this thing; it’s in my contract. Fuck it. Fuck it all.
August 19, 2027
Welleran Smith’s “Jane Doe” died about six months ago, back in March. I asked some questions, said it was work for the magazine, tagged some people who know people who could get to the files. It was a suicide – oh, and never you mind that she’d been on suicide watch for years. This one was a certified trooper, a bona-fide martyr in the service of her own undoing. She chewed her tongue in half & choked herself on it. She had a name, too. Don’t know if Smith knew it & simply withheld it, or if he never looked that far. Maybe he only prigged the bits he needed to put the snips in orbit & disregarded the rest. “Jane Doe” was Judith Louise Darger, born 1992, Ph.D. in Anthropology from Yale, specialized in urban neomythology, syncretism, etc. & did a book with HarperC back in ’21 – Bloody Mary, La Llorona, and the Blue Lady: Feminine Icons in a Fabricated Child’s Apocalypse. Sold for shit, out of print by 2023. But found a battered copy cheap uptown @ Paper Museum. Darger’s gf and victim, she’s dead, too. Another suicide, not long after they put Darger away. Turns out, she had a history of neurosis and self-mutilation going back to high school, & there was all sorts of shit there I’m not going to get into, but she told the courts that what Darger did to her, and to herself, they’d planned the whole thing for months. So, why the fuck did good old Welleran Smith leave that part out? It was in the goddamn press, no secret. I have a photograph of Judith Darger, right here on the dj of her book. She could not look less remarkable. Sabit says there’s another Trenton Group show this weekend & don’t I wanna to go? She’s hardly said three words to me the last couple of days, but she told me this. Get another look at #17, she said, & I almost fucking hit her. No more pills, Schuler. No more pills. You’re frying.
August 20, 2027
No sleep last night. Today, I filed for my next assignment, but so far the green bin’s still empty. Maybe I’m being punished for blowing the DL on Weds. night, some sort of pass-ag bullshit bcause that’s the best those weasels in senior edit can ever seem to manage. Or maybe it’s only a sloooowwww week. I am having a hard time caring, either way. No sleep last night. No, I said that already. Time on my hands and that’s never a good thing. Insomnia and black coffee and gin, takeaway and durian Pop-Tarts and a
faint throb that wants to be a headache (how long since one of those?), me locked in my office last night reading a few chapters of Darger’s grand flop, but there’s nothing in there – fascinating and I don’t know why it wasn’t better received, but still leading me nowhere, nowhere at all (where did I think it would lead?). This bit re: La Llorona (“Bloody Mary”) from Ch. 3 – “Some girls with no home feel claws scratching under the skin on their arms. Their hand [sic] looks like red fire.” And this one, from a Miami New Times article: “When a child says he got the story from the spirit world, as homeless children do, you’ve hit the ultimate non sequitur.” Homeless kids and demons and angels, street gangs, drugs, the socioeconomic calamities of thirty goddamn years ago. News articles from 1997. A journalistic scam. None of this is gonna answer any of my questions, if I truly have questions to be answered. But this is “Jane Doe’s” magnum opus, and there is some grim fascination I can’t shake – How did she get from there to there, from phony diy street myths to sewing her gf’s mouth shut? Maybe it wasn’t such a short goddamn walk. Maybe, one night, she stood before a dark mirror in a darkened room, the mirror coated with dried saltwater – going native or just too fucking curious, whatever – and maybe she stood there chanting Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, over and over and over and La Llorona scratched her way out through the looking glass, scarring the anthropologist’s soul with her rosary beads. Maybe that’s where this began, the snips and stitches, #17. Maybe it all goes back to those homeless kids in Miami, back before the flood, before the W. Antarctic ice sheet melted and Dade County FL sank like a stone, and all along it was the late Dr. J. L. Darger let this djinn out of its gin bottle in ways people like Sabit have not yet begun to suspect and never will. I’m babbling, and if that’s the best I can do, I’m going to stop keeping a damned journal. I’ve agreed to be @ CeM tomorrow night with Sabit. I’m a big girl. I can sip my shitty Merlot and nibble greasy orange cheese and stale crackers with the best of them. I can bear the soulless conversation and the sweating porcine walls. I can look at #17 and see nothing there but bad art, fucked-up artless crap, pretentious carnage and willful suffering. Maybe then I can put all this shit behind me. Who knows, maybe I can even put Sabit behind me, too.
August 20, 2027 (later, p.m.)
Sabit says the surgeon on #17 will be at the show t’morrow night. I think maybe it’s someone Sabit was screwing before she started screwing me. Oh, & this, from The Breathing Composition, which I’ve started reading again & frankly wish I had not. Seems Welleran Smith somehow got his paws on Darger’s diary, or one of her diaries, & he quotes it at length (& no doubt there are contextual issues; don’t know the fate of the original text):
“We are all alone on a darkling plain, precisely as Matt. Arnold said. We are so very alone here, and we yearn each day for the reunification promised by priests and gurus and by some ancient animal instinct. We are evolution’s grand degenerates, locked away forever in the consummate prison cells of our conscious minds, each divided always from the other. I met a man from Spain, and he gave me a note card with the number seventeen written on it seventeen times. He thought that surely I would understand right away, and he was heartbroken when I did not. When I asked, he would not explain. I’ve kept the card in my files, and sometimes I take it out and stare at it, hoping that I will at last discern its message. But it remains perfectly opaque, bcause my eyes are the eyes of the damned.”
& I’m looking thru the program for the Trenton Show on the 15th, last Sun., & only one piece is numbered, only 1 piece w/a # for a title – #17. Yes, I know. I’m going in circles here. Chasing my own ass. Toys in the attic. Nutters as the goddamn snips if I don’t watch myself. If I don’t get some sleep. I haven’t seen Sabit all evening, just a call in this afternoon.
August 21, 2027 (Saturday, 10:12 a.m.)
Four whole hours sleep last night. & the hangover is not so bad that coffee and aspirin isn’t helping. My head feels clearer than it has in days. Sabit came home sometime after I nodded off & I woke with her snoring next to me. When I asked if maybe she wanted breakfast, she smiled, so I made eggs & cut a grapefruit in half. Perhaps I can persuade her to stay home tonight, that we should both stay home tonight. There is nothing down there I need to see again.
August 21, 2027 (2:18 p.m.)
No, she says. We are expected, she says, & what the fuck is that supposed to mean, anyway? So there was a fight, bcause there always has to be a fight with Sabit, a real 4-alarm screamer this time, & I have no idea where she’s run off to but she swore she’d be back by five & I better be sober, she said, & I better be dressed & ready for the show. So, yeah, fuck it. I’ll go to the damn show with her. I’ll rub shoulders with the stitch freaks this one last time. Maybe I’ll even have a good long look at #17 (tho’ now, I should add, now Sabit says the surgeon won’t be there after all). Maybe I’ll stand & stare until it’s only flesh & wires & hooks & fancy lighting. Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette wrote somewhere, “Look for a long time at what pleases you, and for a longer time at what pains you.” Maybe I’ll shame them all with my staring. They only feel as much pain as they want to feel – isn’t that what Sabit is always telling me? The stitchworks, they get all the best painkillers, ever since the Supreme Ct. wigs decided this sick shit constitutes Art – so long as certain lines are not crossed. They bask in glassy-eyed morphine hazes, shocked cold orange on neuroblocks & Fibrodene & Elyzzium, exotic transdermals & maybe all that shit’s legal & maybe it ain’t, but 2380 no one’s asking too many questions as the City of NY has enough on its great collective plate these days w/out stitch-friendly lawyers raising a holy funk about censorship and freedom of expression and 1st Amendment violations. The cops hate the fuckers, but none of the arrests have had jack to do with drugs, just disorderly conduct, riots after shows, shit like that. But yeah, t’morrow night I’ll go back to CeM with Sabit, my heart’s damned desire, my cunt’s lazy love, & I will look until they want to fucking charge me extra.
August 21, 2027
So Sabit shows up an hour or so after dark…she’s gone now, gone again bcause I suppose I have chased her away, again. That’s what she would say, I am sure. I have chased her away again. But, as I was saying, she shows up, & I can tell she’s been drinking bcause she has that smirk and that swagger she gets when she’s been drinking, & I can tell she’s still pissed. I’m waiting for the other shoe. I’m waiting, bcause I fucking know whatever’s coming next is for my benefit. & I’m thinking, screw it, get it over with, don’t let her have the satisfaction of getting in the first blow. I’m thinking, this is where it ends. Tonight. No more of her bullshit. It’s been a grandiose act of reciprocal masochism, Sabit, & it’s been raw & all, but enough’s enough. @ least the sex was good, so let’s remember that & move on. & that’s when I notice the gauze patch taped to her back, centered between her shoulder blades just so, placed just so there between her scapulae, centered on the smooth brown plain of her trapezius (let me write this the way a goddamn snip would write it, cluttered with an anatomist’s Latin). & when I ask her what the fuck, she just shrugs, & that swatch of gauze goes up & then down again. But I know. I know whatever it is she’s done, whatever comes next, this is it. This is her preemptive volley, so I can just forget all about landing the first punch this time, baby. Sabit knows revenge like a drunk knows an empty bottle, & I should have given up while I was ahead. I’ve been wanting some ink, she says. You helped me to finally make up my mind, that’s all. & before she can say anything else, I rip away the bandage. She does not even fucking flinch, even though the tattoo can’t be more than a couple hrs old, still seeping & puffy and red, & all I can hear is her laughing. Bcause there on her back is the Roman numeral XVII, & when she asks for the bandage back, I slap her. I slapped her. This use of present tense, what’s that but keeping the wound open & fresh, keeping the scabs at bay just like some goddamn pathetic stitchwork would do. I slapped her. The sound of my hand against her cheek was so loud, crack like a goddamn firecracker, & in the silence afte
rwards (just as fucking loud) she just smiled & smiled & smiled for me. & then I started yelling – I don’t know exactly what – accusations that couldn’t possibly have made sense, slurs and insinuation, and truthfully I knew even then none of it was anything but bitterness & disappointment that she’d not only managed to draw first blood (hahaha) this round, she’d finally pushed me far enough to hit her. I’d never hit her before. I had never hit anyone before, not since some bullshit high school fights, &, at last, she did not even need to raise her voice. & then she just smiled @ me, & I think I must have finally told her to say something, bcause I was puking sick to death of that smug smile. I’m glad you approve, she said. Or maybe she said, I’m glad you understand. In this instance, the meanings would be the same somehow. Somehow interchangeable. But I did not apologize. That’s the sort of prick I am. I sat down on the kitchen floor & stared @ linoleum Rorschach patterns & when I looked up again she was gone. I don’t know if she’s gone, gone, or if Sabit has merely retreated until she decides it’s time for another blitz. Rethinking her maneuvers, the ins & outs of this campaign, logistics and field tactics & what the fuck ever. Cards must be played properly. I know Sabit, & she will never settle for Pyrrhic victory, no wars of attrition, no winner’s curse. I sat on the floor until I heard the door shut & so knew I was alone again. I would say at least this gets me out of CeM on Sun. night, but I may go alone. Even though I know she’ll be there. Clearly, I can hurt some more. Tonight I will get drunk, & that is all.
Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea Page 13
