by Paul Curran
* * *
Every paradox in this novel is a complete falsehood. I swallow mushrooms from a paper cup, walk in the rain expressing more or less the same words written here, and never return. My mother finds me in a motel identical to this one but without rooms. She requests the police to personally identify my body because she has forgotten my appearance. This place is ash, England, Ireland, Wales, a bus pulling out of Hammersmith station, to Australia, or anywhere else, the ancient colonies diagnosed with disposable storyline hallucinations, before returning to Shepherd’s Bush Green, where I stand as an old man reading a future edition of this novel aloud into a children’s plastic toy walkie-talkie, an experiment in fear, the rust that eats my imagination. A lobotomized girl sits on my shoulders brewing mechanical corrections and inserting them into my spine. The plastic toy walkie-talkie seems like a cheap interpretation of intestines, heart, other organs, and dissatisfaction, a rear door in the back opening to sniff the languid Australian air, the person I become, inhaling that self like a cockroach.
* * *
Outside this motel without rooms, I walk along the balcony, holding the rail, and see a rocket, broken and inattentive, hurtling above the desert. That rocket is something, I say to myself, that rocket is a thing, like my father rising from cancer and the writing I do while masturbating and drinking. These are empty times, and I have no expectations to advance the progress of things, but it is a beautiful day in the desert, bypassing the stink of the body beside me, my body if you like, whoever, and I expand this relationship to all objects. I travel the country craving the young, the beautiful, and the easily brainwashed. I am a nomadic magician, a sidewalk buccaneer, a suburban minstrel. I bring news and other fictions that flow between people simultaneously like blood from the back of their necks. I witness people dying in boiling tanks. They pay me to read to them, to entertain them, because perhaps these empty times need excretory things, and erroneous cloning is preferable to rat extermination products. I write and publish articles about this imaginary novel. I march through tropical zones, tasting the ground. My yearning is strong for a very short skirt. I move my stump. I remember this day because of my stump. A crowd gathers around me outside Great Portland Street station. I emphasize the medical experiments I have agreed to undergo in Harley Street. I unite my leg, trying to sit, and become part of some cold legal canvas.
* * *
When a novel is written into the wrong body, the body must do something unwritten. I do not want to be a writer, but I have to write this novel. I express these things as the corpse of a narrator who has been made into a zombie in a motel without rooms. I have died many times in this motel without rooms. I have removed the walls because they form a false connection between the conscious writer and the plural transcendental beings who believe single author production is directly responsible for any created text. I order sex dolls for my dead narrator to inflate. I insert medicine into the dolls and reposition them for sexual intercourse. As I force unconscious sounds from the voices of dead people, I am trying to capture language as it might appear in an imaginary future, having expressed every broken sentence, and pull this forgotten condition into an excessively darker stage where every crawling, sick motel room wall becomes human and loses its neurotic dependence on personality information. I love stockings and high-heeled shoes. I cruise the local mall and pursue beautiful girls. I fall asleep and dream about the process of psychosexual development through extreme loss. A beautiful girl faces a dressing room. I ejaculate in my hand. Small-numbered shocks. I tremble, collapsing, pulling the dressing room curtain down, pulling the motel room walls down.
* * *
Perhaps I am this novel’s recalcitrant travelling salesman continually talking about continual murder and experimental writing. It is an endless pitch and one primary headache. I return to this motel without rooms under the appearance of cooperation with this novel. I want to read about, and experience, more self-indulgence. This time it is another fine young boy. I grasp his hand in the standardization of some unspoken context. My morbid persona makes the young boy die. I enjoy his dead body. I need his dead body. More perversion, amusement, in the evening, in the dark, in this motel without rooms. A human head is in a box at my feet. I kick the box. The young boy praises me. I attach something to his mouth. He recovers consciousness. He sits down on the bed. He looks at the screens showing the lunar surface collision and the World Trade Center landing. He places my body on the bed and takes photographs with the screens in the background. My clothing wears prostitute tension and broadcasts abuse, darkness, musk, and copper. A plural transcendental being materializes at the window. He has an erect penis. He collides with the window and takes off his motorcycle helmet. He asks me whether my penis is eager. I ask him whether his penis is eager. I cannot deny the chemistry. I open my pants. Something starts. When I come, I grasp the boy. He is not loved. I tear him apart, under the water, as in the pages of this polluted novel, swirling eternally up and down the plughole of its own creation.
* * *
Early editions of this novel contribute to psychiatry and the world completely, but have not been given official recognition. According to international classification, the first edition of this novel is insufficient in various conditions related to the transient pleasure of book-reading happiness. Although some reviewers have called the first edition of this novel an existential implosion of the sixth order, international classification is considerably insufficient in order to classify the large number of alterations brought in since then.
* * *
Editing these inconsistent grammatical structures, even now when my head is relatively good, in order to shut off any obstinate craving for the sake of the most unbiased allowances, produces this kind of corpse dissection writing, this extreme deformation, where resistance to the pull of the text is useless. I rearrange these words like they are ex-porn stars trying to get a straight job. While this rearrangement requires considerable concentration, redeveloping this novel’s tabulation provokes illegitimate internal drive damage to the agency systems in my frontal lobe and sparks off cravings that take on other lives. This process happens autonomously, through translation, while the pieces, experiences, feelings, and intuition, left behind contradict knowledge and create their own inseparable hallucinogenic ordering systems. In the first edition of this novel, separation is classified as a symptom that leads to modification, but does not change the character of the novel, whereas in subsequent editions, there is always something being pulled and cut. I am perhaps the writer’s double who steps in to complete the pulling. So this novel’s raw materials may be cries for love whispered next to glory holes, but the inclusion of various chronic coding letters and neurotic decoration phrases has given unusual personality and gains in transient book-reading happiness. In future years, psychiatrists will offer this novel to patients and witness automatic recovery.
* * *
If every section of this novel feels like another dominant organ winning spontaneous opposition through concentration, then this section presents various distorted facts in order to allow the reader to realize the whole thing is suspect. These qualities are not usually recognized in the colonies coming from England. I pass on the procedures here in order to live outside this world, the manuscript in my mouth moves to a position that gives the impression of medicine, and the organ in my hand becomes a coffee cup, but my voice remains a dirty crescendo, an abrupt disharmonious clatter.
* * *
There is a photograph of my father from the 1960s. He is wearing a jumper and taking a photograph of himself in a mirror. I burn that jumper to my body when I am finishing high school. I inject badly cut heroin and homemade amphetamines in my bedroom below his bedroom. When all my friends leave town, my voice is restricted to my own head, and something else happens, and I carry extra voices, and these voices carry me. I read transgressive fiction and teach myself to write. Ten years later, I inject my father with prescription morphine and liquid Valium in
his bedroom above my bedroom, the cancer expanding from his stomach where he grasps the camera. I call what I am talking about here literature, an incomplete development report on an imaginary novel. I am an impostor fascinated by removed limbs and organs. There are times when I write and times when others write. There are times when my body makes corrections and times when the corrections are made by other bodies indifferent to the host. At times I cannot distinguish between the different voices here. That is the truth. I am not just being quaint and evasive. A single body cannot hold a single thought related to a single voice.
* * *
This novel’s critics have all-too-often concentrated on the cliche of having anarchic voices gargled and back-washed through an infinite stream of motel rooms, but I am actually walking free and transparent through each excessive example all the way to the last section where I become process itself expanding outside unlimited fragments that crack and separate. When this novel is republished, I will go to Japan intending probably to sleep. After receiving recognition by direct report or inference, my limb actors will mime redundant philosophy and move through lyrical metaphors into other things called bodies that I find excessively erotic because fiction is what I feel when I write, and the distortion I am currently experiencing is impossible to maintain. There is just this one rush. Then it will be gone.
* * *
Most literature is boring, excessively foolish, and suffocates revolutionary cravings. My literary impulses stem from rare symbolic substances with direct aesthetic routes to insubstantial information. I decipher and fuse contradictory field reports that induce reaction maneuvers designed to be misunderstood. Before I leave high school I create a magnificent mixture of notes and diagrams for this novel and then throw them away but grow conscious of how process and method are more interesting than any finished product and how an edge of intuition is meant to topple any balance. My teacher purchases a first edition of this novel in a second-hand bookstore and compares it with an earlier edition, where horrible things happen to me in unfilmable detail, downloaded from the internet. My teacher asks to meet my parents. I tell my teacher and my parents I cannot be responsible for the actions of my limbs. I make hundreds of inadequate attempts to explain the theory behind this novel, but without words or silence, the whole thing disintegrates into a grinding, uselessly large number of unintelligible patterns.
* * *
The last thing my father says to me is I love you. After that, I tear apart his corpse and inspect his organs for secret letters to secret sweethearts. The process intoxicates me. I create an installation from the things I find. My mother registers me for critical theory and creative writing classes. The rules automatically make me write. I do not write a diary, this is not a journal, although I think I would like to write about the river where I dragged and burnt my father, and the empty chair I erected above the ashes, but I do not want to, and I do not know how to, and I do not know how I know or do not know anything. Instead I form the identity of other fake people from random verification websites where I discover small group images pasted on the surface, like a young boy fascinated by his confident simplicity, and my hands approve the attaching requests that belong to my arms but even in these actions there is deep suspicion, fatal object alienation, and this corrupted unconscious language dampened by amphetamines.
* * *
Every metaphor is a gloomy truth that damages the obligations required to refuse harmful medical service and qualify as a human being. I am the cancerous tumor growing inside my father’s colon. I ride my motorcycle around the desert and masturbate until my jeans are covered in blood. I slide my penis into my mouth. I carry old village food and miscellaneous goods to my father’s redoubling process mine where a radio informs me about rebellion, the end of capitalism. My doctor puts a device into my vagina and controls my heart. Wires spill from the back of my head when I wash my hair. My brain carries screens that classify the activities I conduct. I move to Japan for schoolgirl sexual intercourse, but language learnt insufficiently, excessive laziness, and broken payments leave me blank and intoxicated. Occasionally, negligence and indifference to being are necessary to decide whether or not I know the results of my own behavior. It is sometimes necessary to decide.
* * *
With this novel’s future republication, an ancient unrecognizable language is transmitted not only to mental hospitals but also to courthouses, government buildings, and company offices throughout the world. I continue to disseminate my own mental technology and form systems to attribute everything. Society continues to collapse and infectious diseases are spread as the only form of social entertainment. The end of civilization is clinical. The surface is struck. The blood traces my mouth. I am drunk in a Prague strip club saying things like, easy life goes out easily, when I decide to announce a worldwide commission into the importance of staging an inquiry into the technical problems facing this novel.
* * *
Any successful experiment is a failure. I am a writer. There are no words to explain what I do. During the trial that follows my arrest, my girlfriend chooses to live with my father. We do not visit each other for ten years but the murder cravings in this motel without rooms form a cell membrane, and through abstract conceptual distortions of time, I give up playing the drums in a heavy-metal cover band and convert their shells into noise literature. I become a dancer. I get a small part as a nurse in a television drama. My girlfriend contacts the television studio and delivers a blank envelope containing a secret letter. I cannot read the letter because it is in a language that does not exist. I pick up my girlfriend on my motorcycle, rape her, and drop her roadside. She dies when a mining truck runs over her. I see her body open, everywhere, on the road and in the ditches, could eat the substances loosened, her clothes, her vagina spared somehow, but I wait for her to reappear and smile. We fight simultaneously. Then a long hard kiss, kiss, kisses. Baby. Baby. We have sexual intercourse on the beach. She dies from AIDS in this motel without rooms, her limbs removed and her open organs echoing a kind of happiness no one could even attempt to grasp.
* * *
I buy a ticket next week and fly to New York. There is a body in a bag beside me. I tell the body in the bag that when this novel is republished and I claim my prizes, my father will remain in a glass case in a strip bar, and when society collapses from whatever, fiction will reclaim its necessary status. I make a club sandwich at five o’clock and eat it at six. I call a male dancer. He dances for me sexily. We play some functionality games. I tell him homicide for a writer is the terminus of an imagined father, who should remain outside the text, ranking stories like emissions from outer space, because denial is a conviction concerning creativity, whether caught in double-bind truth declarations, or when trying to nail a fact whose disappearance into the logic of fake self-destruction as self-recognition, where transcendence accompanies ego death, collapses the gap between signs and hallucinations of abnormal play into a symbiotic uterine state that commutes twisted recognition onto institutionalized separation. He is sucking on my penis hatefully. I am blind to his tongue on my skin. I punch him in the throat. I gag him.
* * *
Everything in this motel without rooms is happening and not happening simultaneously. The plural transcendental beings jump on my neck with hacksaws. Their blades bore holes through three layers of clothing and a bed. They carry this motel without rooms into the desert. They do some kind of purification sacrifice. My father reads and corrects this novel after I die. He uses an Apple IIe. I go to my funeral with a girl from school. I rub my penis against her vagina. She stops me from inserting it. I masturbate repeatedly to the memory of her and then my father reads my revisions in that post-orgasmic haze. I watch him from behind a screen and sketch other scenes of sexual intercourse. I attack a young girl who looks identical to the girl from school. She dies. I play with her corpse. I dig out her organs and find a video clip of a different girl who also looks identical to the girl from school doing masturbatio
n while reading this novel. I project that masturbation scene from this motel without rooms to a mirror in time with her ex-boyfriend doing masturbation while wearing her stockings. I attack the girl. The girl falls asleep. I pull her body to this motel without rooms. The taste of the girl is beautiful. I watch her having sexual intercourse with her boyfriend in the back of a van.
* * *
I believe these dolls, these drifting people, these prostitutes, these empty chairs, and these screens are sufficiently disassembled signposts to indicate the multiple levels at work here. My internal organs are thinking things, getting inclinations, the lattice of some story, the nervous system, but even though the USB cables that tie me to this bed lead endlessly to information, irrational primary factors, and conditional recognition programing, perhaps I am really just sloshing around in my own blood.
* * *
On a Vietnamese beach in summer, I tighten my girlfriend’s neck until she cannot exist. I drink red wine and look at her hair. She is excessively incomprehensible. I am a fan. She thinks I want someone much younger but have been made helpless by morality. I hit her. She groans putting on a voice. It is unnecessary to kidnap and electrocute her. Her bicycle transfers everything into a dream. I hang upside down in the back section of a nightclub in Marrakech. After injecting some ambiguous material, I walk to the dancefloor shouting, England is dying, London is dead. I pull dangerously close to becoming part of a mountain of bodies slaughtered out of existence by plural transcendental beings. I fight from this mountain. I meet a boy in Nepal. He opens a tissue to the midday sun in order to see the skin layers outside a dead girl’s eye completely waterless. He removes the layers until there is nothing left. He says no one will ever understand my brain conversations, and this vulgar literary experiment is a cheap zombie movie compilation. I reply with something along the lines of new methods are needed for seeing and exceeding language and things and the start of non-books that can read you reading them and can feel you feeling them. He says this novel is meaningless and completely continual, its own interview with itself, a long cool masturbation, a serpent sucking its own penis until it flips inside out and back again. He closes by saying these are not your hands. These are not hands. These are not.
