by Edward Lee
Quest for Sex, Truth & Reality
by Edward Lee
Kindle Edition
Necro Publications
2011
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Edward Lee’s Quest for Sex, Truth & Reality
“The Seeker,” “Pay Me,” and “The Goddess of the New Dark Age,” © 1992 by Edward Lee. First appeared in Sex, Truth, & Reality, a chapbook by Tal Publications.
Cover art © 2002 Chris Trammell
This digital edition February 2011 © Necro Publications
Cover, Book Design & Typesetting:
David G. Barnett
Fat Cat Graphic Design
http://www.fatcatgraphicdesign.com
a Necro Publication
5139 Maxon Terrace • Sanford, FL 32771
http://www.necropublications.com
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This is for S—.
I am forever
and ineffably
yours.
Goddes of the New Dark Age
(For Chara)
“What is real?” he wondered aloud.
Then Smith heard the words: Revere me. Make me real. Not his words, but a muffled hiss, like someone whispering on the other side of the wall…
The wall was nightmare: tremoring flesh, skin sweating in turmoil, pain, despair. So I’m dreaming standing up now, Smith thought. Wide awake, in daylight.
Flecks of mica glittered up from the sidewalk. The sun raged. Old man, he thought. City cops cruised by, eyeing him, squab faces dark behind tinted glass. “Frog, Ice, Cokesmoke?” a hand-pocketed black man asked him. By a newspaper stand, where headlines blared MAN SETS WIFE & CHILDREN ON FIRE, a raddled prostitute twitched, scratching at needlemarks inside of her thigh. In the mouth of a brick, urine-soaked alley, a woman in rags vomited up blood as rats the size of small puppies boldly approached the emesis, to eat.
Smith hated the sun. It seemed bright with life, which made him feel even older, more depleted. Where am I going? The question didn’t mean now, today, this minute. Where am I going forever? he wondered. Where have I been?
The footsteps padded behind him; they had for weeks. Smith had long since stopped looking back. It sounded like someone walking barefoot—a woman, he surmised, a robust, beautiful woman. He also detected the lovely scent—perfume, and some kind of inexplicable heat at his groin and his heart. Whenever he turned, though, at the sound and the lush fragrance, nothing was there. Just a shadow sometimes, just a fleck, like the mica in the cement.
Perhaps it was a ghost, whatever ghosts were. Ghost, or just hallucination. His physical body felt like vermiculated meat. Too many artificial sweeteners, cigarettes, alcohol, saturated fats. A body could only take so much vandalism. But Smith didn’t care. Why should he, now? Or ever, for that matter?
Or maybe ghosts were real. Physical residuum, he speculated. Interplanar leakage. Was there really a netherworld, like an anxious tongue licking across pressed lips, desperate for entry? He’d read somewhere that horror left a stain, a laceration through which the tenants of the void could ooze into the world. But if this were true, mankind would surely be smothered by such ooze.
So what was this “ghost?” A spirit? An angel?
Was the ghost real?
Sometimes he could actually see it, via the presage: the longing perfume scent, the warmth. Generally only at night. Of course, he thought. Night. Dr. Greene had told him to expect as much. But ghosts? “Be prepared for some contraindications from the chemotherapy,” came the words like a clipped dissertation. “Olfactory and aural hallucinosis. Exodikinesis, immoderate scotopic debris, synaptic maladaption and toxicity intolerance. It’s normal.” Normal, Smith reflected. Dying’s normal too. Three treatments left him racked for hours, dry heaving bile. His hair had fallen out. “To hell with this,” he’d told Greene, on the fourth visit. “Let me die.” Cancer seemed an appropriate way for a writer to die. It seemed nearly allegorical. The festering beneath the miraculous veneer of human flesh.
No, the ghost wasn’t a side effect. It must be real. He thought he could see it, the shadow within the shadow, peering back. A shadow in want of flesh.
Was it Smith’s flesh it wanted? Why should it want me? My flesh’s dying. I am essentially a walking corpse. He could smell the perfume, even over the city’s mephitis of carbon-monoxide, stale sweat, and garbage. “You smell beautiful,” he whispered. “Whoever you are.” He walked on, shriveling against the glare of the sun, but then stopped to look back once more.
“Are you real?” he asked.
««—»»
“What is real?” Smith lit a cigarette; it scarcely mattered now. But the question kept occurring to him, like an itching rash. Why should it be so important?
His biopsy analysis—now that was real. The single sheet seemed too thin for such a grievous message. It drooped in his hand like something already dead:
CYTOLOGY REPORT
Name: Smith, L.
Age: 61, W/M
Clinical Consultation: Large Cell Coaxial Mass
Specify: Right Lung Mass Aspirate
_ Negative
_ Atypical
x Positive
Microscopic Description: Right Lung Aspirate showing numerous malignant large cells, some of which showing large vesicular irregular nuclei, consistent with non-keratinizing carcinoma, probably large-cell differentiated type of adenocarcinoma.
Smith was a realist. No sense in crying over a spilt life. He felt he had a mission now, but wasn’t sure what it could be. He couldn’t stop thinking of the ghost.
“Are you real?”
Behind his typewriter, behind his desk, a shadow, or a smudge, seemed to nod. “Who are you!” Smith suddenly yelled. “What do you want from me?”
Your reckoning, something seemed to hiss. It wasn’t even really a sound, more akin to insect appendages abrading. The soft bare footfalls followed him to the bathroom. A ghost is coming into the toilet with me, he thought. It was almost funny. He smiled at the lovely perfume-scent, then winced, urinating blood. Of course: by now the disease had bloomed. Dr. Greene had warned him, hadn’t he? “Renal malfunction. What happens, Mr. Smith, is that the raging malignant cells become insinuated into the nephrons and the cortical kidney tissue, sceloriticizing the calyx cavities.” Charming, Smith thought now. The pain was extraordinary, like bright light.
Smith had been a writer for over forty years. Had been, he emphasized, pulling up his zipper. He flushed the toilet, and thought of his career. Had he been a good writer? He’d thought so, until Greene had told him the truth. The good doctor had at least been respectful enough of Smith’s profession not to mince words. “You’re dying,” he’d said. “You’ll be gone in oh, say, six weeks.”
Gone, Smith considered. He was still in the bathroom. What did gone mean? Did it mean no longer real? The question continued to nag at him, worse than the cancer. “What is real?” he asked.
Find out, the hiss replied. You haven’t much time.
As a writer, he’d spent his life trying to create realities out of assessments of imagination. The truth of any story can only exist in its bare words, he’d heard someone say in a bar when he was eighteen. He’d been a writer ever since, pursuing that. But now, now that he wa
s dying, he knew that he’d failed utterly. Was that why the ghost had come to him, evoked by the knowledge of his failure? What was the hiss trying to tell him?
“I see you,” he said. For a moment he had, behind him in the mirror. Beautiful, he thought. A beautiful, beautiful woman, an amalgam composed of inverted bits of wallpaper, a prolapsation. It smiled weakly, then vanished. Only its pleasant smell remained.
The television poured forth atrocities. Or were they realities? “Up next,” promised the newswoman, with a visage of wood, “Texas State Supreme Court grants local journalists the right to televise executions.” Outside the courthouse, a crowd in floodlit darkness cheered. Then, a commercial, a slim brunette in a white swimsuit: “If you’re counting calories, here’s something you should know…” Smith changed the channel. “…where officials estimate that one thousand children are starving to death daily, while government troops remain free to confiscate relief rations from the United Red Cross, selling to the black market what they don’t eat themselves.”
And next: “—confessed today that he knowingly tainted the entire hospital’s transfusion supply with AIDS infected bl—”
“—amid allegations of abducting over one hundred children for what FBI officials have called ‘the underground snuff-film circuit—’”
“—strangled slowly with a lampcord while her common-law husband and his friends took turns—”
Smith turned off the set, feeling as confused as he felt disgusted. The newspaper offered more of the same. CRACK MOM TURNS KIDS TO PROSTITUTES read one local headline. The Post seemed less blunt: EARTHQUAKE DEATH TOLL EXPECTED TO REACH 120,000. Here was a story. A Tucson, Arizona, woman locked her three children in her attic while she went shopping with a friend. All three children died as the temperature in the attic exceeded 150 degrees. Stray bullets in a drug-related shootout killed three six-year-olds in front of a Detroit apartment project. The body of a thirteen-year old was found by hunters in Davidsonville, Maryland; the police reported that she’d been raped en mass and tortured with power tools. A suitcase was discovered in a dumpster behind a Washington D.C. convenience store, containing a dead newborn baby complete with umbilical cord and placenta.
Smith’s contemplations wavered. What could be more real than all of this? But there must be something. The ghost was walking around, he could feel it. It seemed to be perusing the bookshelf full of his work. Then it hissed at him, and disappeared.
««—»»
The sun felt like a blade against his face as his guest dragged him back out onto the street. He was shriveling. It occurred to him, as he ascended the stone steps, that this was the first time he’d entered a church since he’d become a writer.
An old priest limped across the chancel, his bald head like a shiny ball of dough. He began to change the frontals on the altar.
“Excuse me, sir…er, Father,” Smith interrupted.
“Yes?”
“What is real?”
The priest straightened, a frocked silhouette before stained glass. He did not question, or even pause upon, the obscurity of Smith’s query. He answered at once: “God, Christ, the kingdom of Heaven.”
“But how do you know?”
The priest’s bland face smiled. He held up his Bible.
Smith thanked him and walked out. He felt abandoned, not as much by God as by himself. Conviction wasn’t proof. Belief didn’t validate a reality. Next, he took a Yellow cab to the University, where the static sunlight made everything look brittle and fake. Inside, cool darkness and tile shine led him down the hall. PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT. Smith stepped unannounced into the first office. A man—who looked as old—glanced up from a cluttered industrial gray metal desk. “May I…help you?”
Smith considered how he must look—a haggard, emaciated vagabond. “Forgive my appearance… “but it’s hard to look good when you’re dying from a large-cell metastatic mass. He had no time for intricate explanations nor cordialities. “I have a question that only a philosopher can answer. The question is this: What is real?”
The professor lit a pipe with a face engraved in relief on the bowl. His eyes looked tiny below the great, bushy gray brows. “That’s quite a universal question, wouldn’t you say? You want my opinion?”
In the window, the campus stood empty in sunlight. “Yes,” Smith said after a pause. That’s when he noticed the ghost. It was standing just outside, looking at him, an ethereal chaperon. “Yes, yes,” he said. “I’d appreciate your opinion very much.”
“Ah, what is real?” Pipe smoke smeared the professor’s aged face. “Consider, first, the initial tenets of conclusionary nihilism. Truth is reality, and there is no objective basis for truth. Take mathematics for example, which exists only because space and time are forms of intuition; all material qualities are only the outward appearances arising from monadistic nexi. See? What is real can only be found in the immaterial mind; hence, the solipsistic doctrine. The human self is the only thing, in other words, that can be known and therefore verified. Quite a contradiction, since life is clearly a material, or a physio-chemical, interaction. Being and reality are not found in objects of knowledge but in something accessible only to the free and total self. Man’s destiny is a struggle for power, or, in your case, for answers. What I mean is, the real can never be made manifest in our finite minds but in the genetic empiricism beyond the whole. To put it more plainly, and I think it should be obvious now, reality is a consistence of a judgement pursuant to other judgements, fitting in ultimately to a single absolute system.”
Smith resisted rolling his eyes. He thanked the professor for his time, and left, thinking, What a crock of shit.
««—»»
So it wasn’t truth, and it wasn’t spirit. Smith lit a cigarette, pondering the smoke. Love? he wondered. Was love real? Did love make something real? He didn’t know. He’d been too busy writing to ever find out.
These were simply subjectivities trying to be concrete, which was impossible. Beauty, then? He leaned back. Hmmm. Did beauty—a true subjectivity—make something real? Suddenly Smith felt buoyant with excitement. His kidneys throbbed, and his lung felt like a bleeding clot. Yet the surmise gave him energy.
Beauty.
Wasn’t beauty what all writers were supposed to pursue?
He heard a sigh, or no—a hiss. Did it denote relief, or disappointment? “It’s beauty, isn’t it?” Smith asked aloud to the shadow which now lingered at the closet. Was it inspecting his clothes? The shape sharpened as dusk bled into the room, creeping. What had it said, just days ago, on the street? Revere me. Smith knew at once that he must appease the ghost, with aphorism, with comprehension. “I’ll show you,” he said.
He opened the Yellow Pages, to the E’s. ESCORTS UNLIMITED, BEAUTIFUL GIRLS, CONFIDENTIAL, 24 HOURS, VISA, MASTERCARD.
The sigh replayed in his head, and the wondrous scent rose as Smith reached for the phone, to call beauty.
««—»»
“Do you believe in ghosts?”
The girl’s smile twitched. “Uh, well…”
“Never mind,” Smith said. “I was allegorizing, I suppose. I used to be a novelist.” He sat behind his desk, behind his typewriter, which was turned off. He would never turn it on again, and this left him dryly depressed. He had nothing to write. But it seemed a suitable place from which to observe: the lap of his insufficiency. I’ve written over a hundred books, he felt inclined to brag. But so what? Why say that? His books had not been real.
“What, uh, what would you like me to do?” the girl inquired.
Smith squinted. “I want to see you. I realize how obscure that must sound, but I’m on a quest of sorts, and I’m afraid I’ve become subject to a considerable time constraint. I’ve been made aware of a possibility, though, quite recently, that reality only arrives through an acknowledgment, or a reckoning, of human beauty. Not an objective acknowledgment, but a temporal one. I’m looking for something, the underside perhaps, of what makes something real in our minds and,
more critically, our hearts. Use a sentence in fiction as an example. Objectively, the sentence is nothing more than configurations of ink on a piece of paper. But the mechanism of the words, and the function of the mechanism, in conjunction with the manner by which we define the sequence of the words, affects a transposition of imagery. It makes the sentence real in the process. The process—do you understand?” Smith doubted that she did. “The words suddenly become real, in some other, ineffable way.” He must sound worse than the professor. You’re just a piece of physical meat, he could have put it more simply. But I need to see what you are beyond that, not as just a body but as an image transposed through the body. Would it offend her? Would she understand?
At least the ghost seemed to understand. Smith caught frequent glimpses now, since the call-girl had arrived. He felt certain that the more effectively he strove to conquer the question—What is real?—the more real the ghost would become.
“I smell perfume,” the girl remarked.
“Yes,” Smith said but did not elaborate. “In other words, I merely need to see you, all of you.”
“Ah,” the girl said, stretching the word. “Now I get it. Now I know what you mean.” She smiled, a manufactured wickedness, and took off the short fuchsia dress. “You just want to watch. That’s okay. It’s your dime.”
Smith’s “dime,” in this case, had been a $150 escort fee on his charge card, plus “tip.” He’d given her several hundred in cash, all he had left in the apartment. What did he need money for? He’d never really needed it in life. What good would it do him now?
