Autopsy of an Eldritch City: Ten Tales of Strange and Unproductive Thinking

by James Champagne

  -Sincerely,

  Bruce Kadmon”

  And there the letter came to an end. True to Bruce’s word, at the end of the letter there was a photocopy of one of the photographs from the Fortean Times article that Bruce had read. The photograph was a snapshot of one of the pages of Dr. Jekyll’s notebooks, and it contained a detailed illustration done by Dr. Jekyll of one of the “Time Vampires.” The creature had a gecko-like body, with green and black scales, while four wings sprouted from its back. Its head was notable in that it resembled the prostomium of the earthworm, utterly featureless save for a shrew-like mouth lined with extremely sharp and pointy teeth.

  IV

  Yet, like Bruce, there was a part of me that was still skeptical. I wondered if this Bruce Kadmon guy was just some mentally disturbed individual who was trying to mess with my head. Maybe this Fortean Times article he mentioned didn’t even exist. Maybe he hadn’t even committed suicide and was still alive and well. For my own peace of mind, I decided to look into the matter. After all, when has blind trust been anything other than an intangible Pied Piper that leads young men and women to pointless deaths and early graves?

  It didn’t take a lot of effort to find out that the Fortean Times article was authentic. And I just as quickly found out that Bruce Kadmon had, in fact, killed himself recently. His death had been big news in the local newspapers, on account of his unusual manner of suicide: he had impaled himself with an antique samurai sword. I must have missed this story when it first appeared in the Thundermist Times, though how that was possible I don’t know: perhaps it was because at the time I was paying more attention to a national news story involving another local man, a pilot who had made an emergency landing in the middle of a cornfield in Nebraska after being frightened by, of all things, a rainbow. I tracked down these articles and learned some more details about Bruce’s life: how he had been born in Seattle, but how his family had moved to the New England area when he had been just a boy; how his father had been a Roman Catholic theologian while his mother was a professor of quantum mechanics; how he had graduated from MIT with a PhD in Theoretical Physics; how he had worked for many years at the Cedar Banks facility in Pittsburgh before he had suffered a nervous breakdown and was forced to resign, and so on and so forth. Apparently after this latter event he had begun devoting his life to filling up the Yellow Notebook with his researches into the lost religion of Atlantis.

  Ah, the Yellow Notebook. Even as I finish writing this account I can see the accursed object resting on the surface of my desk, mocking me in a voice only I can hear. If only it had never crossed my path! I’m still not sure what I should do with it. The rational part of my brain says I should destroy it, but it seems like such a shame, considering all the work that Bruce put into it. For now, I’ll just leave it alone. What I won’t do is allow it to ruin my life. Bruce Kadmon may have been a brilliant man, but in the end, he allowed himself to fall victim to mad fantasies of Time Vampires and beings named Abbalath. He traded in his healthy skepticism for blind belief in absurdities. He claims that the Entropiors exist and are around us at all times but I think this is utter nonsense.

  I did, however, have a slightly unnerving thing happen to me while at the hardware store yesterday. While shopping for some new shelves for my bookcases I found myself gazing at a pyramid of cans of white paint as if they were hypnotizing me, and I ended up wondering, in an absent-minded manner, while the Pink Floyd song “Time” played over the store speakers, if I knew anyone who’d be willing to give me an epidermal injection to the spine.

  THE FIRE SERMON

  “Hell goes round and round.

  In shape it is circular and by nature

  it is interminable, repetitive and

  very nearly unbearable.”

  —Flann O’Brien

  “Bhikkhus, all is burning.”

  —The Buddha

  The deliquescent prenatal memories of swimming one-tailed through your father’s groinal cathedral, Pre-Ovum, back when Mother used to spend an hour in the bedroom of her parent’s house, listening to “What in the World” off David Bowie’s Low over and over again while putting on her Clockwork Orange-inspired make-up before hitting the local disco, where one September night in 1979 she met your Father (you were conceived when your parents first had sex in the restroom of said disco, while Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” played over the sound system in the background). Father, a physicist who was utterly discredited years later when he wrote that article defending Hanns Hörbiger’s World Ice Theory (Welteislehre), stating his fanatical belief, in no uncertain terms, in the doctrine of Eternal Ice and Glacial Cosmogony. Your mother was an archaeoastronomer and a member of ISAAC (The International Society for Archaeoastronomy and Astronomy in Culture). The year that you realized that most other little boys didn’t have tails and scaly skin and forked tongues and extremely flexible spines. The times when your peers would chase you around the schoolyard, throwing stones at your frail body and calling you “Son of Godzilla” (and oh, how you cried when you got home, in the privacy of your own bedroom, yet at the same time you also took a secret masochistic pride in being called Godzilla’s son because Godzilla’s son, Minilla, was the Godzilla character with whom you most identified). The same jeering peers who only grudgingly accepted you as one of them the year you developed those warts on your right hand (on the webbing in between your thumb and index finger, an area known as the thenar space), and you would chase the screaming girls around the schoolyard, trying to touch them with your warty hands, while the boys whom you both hated and at the same time wanted to impress laughed and cheered: misogyny creates strange bedfellows (years later you would partially redeem yourself by selecting Chun-Li as your preferred Super Street Fighter II character of choice, a partial feminist statement, though a subconscious one). Playing on the beach one overcast August afternoon, digging a large hole in the sand and pretending that it was the hoof print of an enormous horse, the kind of thing one would expect to see featured in a Surrealist painting from the 1930’s, or perhaps the final work of Alan Kirschner. All those games of Stratego played with your father, who would often win said games thanks to your tendency to blunder your most pivotal pieces onto his mines: years later, when he was on his death bed, in your final conversation with him, he admitted that he would almost always cheat at those Stratego games, that he would often move his mine and flag pieces, and that was how he always beat you, yet you forgave him. The fact that all your life, Autumn was always your favorite season: one year you were raking leaves in the backyard and you shaped the leaf pile in such a way so that the leaves formed the outline of a man, and you named him Frogmorton (where did you first see that name? Was it in some Tolkien book?), though sadly, no sooner had you finished work on him than did a strong gust of wind blow past your house and scatter him to the four cardinal points, like the corpse of some criminal left at the voudon crossroads to be devoured by vultures: imagine the expression on GOD’s face if, after creating Adam, He would have been forced to just stand by and watch His most beloved creation fall apart into a pile of wailing dust, for that was the expression on your face, that afternoon. Your best friend, Lucas Favaro, that overweight boy who used to always dress as He-Man at Halloween, who one day in the third grade was coaxed by candy (a Milky Way, to be exact) to climb into the backseat of a strange man’s car (a sick man, as it turned out to be: poor Lucas was tortured, raped and killed, and his body was dumped into the sewers beneath Thundermist, where it was never recovered). That time in high school where you attended the auditions of Thundermist High’s drama club’s production of Les Misérables and tried out for the part of Jean Valjean and even though Mrs. Nadelman (the drama club teacher) complimented your lovely singing voice she suggested that in terms of looks you just weren’t right for the part and maybe you could audition for, say, the part of Monsieur Thénardier? Your Broadway dreams died that day. The year you enrolled at UMass-Amherst College and realized that college really wasn’t all that differ
ent from high school: the frat boys still taunted your appearance, only now their insults were a tad more literary (for example, one of them, evidently a Tolkienphile, took a liking to calling you Smaug). That time you spent the entire weekend in your dorm room, cloistered from the general campus populace, afraid to leave the confines of your four familiar walls (that protected you from those crawling, faceless dolls that clambered up the sides of your house in your worst childhood nightmares), obsessively reading assorted texts on Eastern Religion such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Tao Te Ching and The Upanishads and theĀdittapariyāya Sutta and the Dhammapada, trying to figure out for yourself what the point of it all was, the point of pointless suffering (better you had tried to solve the eternal question of how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, or what came first, the chicken-headed Anguipede-Abraxas or the Egg). That oh-so-trendy nihilist phase: on a Sotos literary kick, you had begun collecting back issues of Philip Sitz’ Chaste, a serial killer fanzine, the one that had featured artwork of a crying child on the front cover of its final issue, with a row of swastikas underneath, along with the words “real power,” “real sadism,” and “Brady’s babies,” but to you, Chaste just seemed kind of toothless and watered down when set side-by-side with Pure, but still, when it came to reading magazines celebrating child sex murders, one couldn’t be picky because there wasn’t much of a selection out there: C’est la vie, to quote B*Witched. A soft voice whispers, “Beware the dull, smoke-colored light of Hell.” A mental photograph of you stalking around campus dressed in a most utilitarian fashion, wearing a simple gray dress shirt (with pockets on both breasts), suit trousers (with a hole cut in back for your tail), polished brogues on your feet, and a gray military-looking overcoat with an upturned collar, the Ian Curtis look in other words, listening to the song “Look at Your Game, Girl” on your Sony Walkman, the first track off Charles Manson’s Lie: The Love and Terror Cult LP, and for a song recorded in 1967, it wasn’t bad, in your opinion. You would record music in your dorm room, make cassette tapes of unlistenable noise, songs named after concentration camps like Ravensbrück or Treblinka, unaware that Maurizio Bianchi had already beaten you to the punch back in 1981 with Symphony for a Genocide (one of the best industrial/noise albums ever recorded, though still perhaps not as good as MB’s Technology). One of the covers of these cassette tapes was nothing more than a grainy black and white photograph of Sharon Tate’s butchered corpse. No escape from these Paths of Frustration, no salvation from those icy, Meonic regions of metacosmic darkness, the Ghost Worlds limned by the Shadows of Reflected Light. But still, the notion that love conquered all could never be far from your thoughts. The first time you saw Ithell, Charlie Brown’s Little Red-Haired Girl in the flesh (indeed, her hair was as red as the eyes of Melisandre), clad in a Staind t-shirt and wearing a Russian ushanka atop her head, during a trip to the W.E.B. Du Bois Library, and there she was standing in the History section, her left shoulder resting against one of the bookcases as she flipped through a well-worn copy of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West with a rapt expression on her face while chewing on a stick of Wrigley’s Extra Long Lasting Flavor Classic Bubble Gum (a few weeks after you had met her she had tried to get you to read Yockney’s Imperium, but even though you liked the final line, “This Destiny does not tire, nor does it falter, and its mantle of strength descends upon those in its service,” it was a bit too Germanic for your tastes, not that Ithell was a fascist, of course, only a woman who just happened to be the editor of Confrontation, the campus left-wing newspaper and who had an extreme amount of interest in radical far-right politics, which may have also explained why she had tried to get you to read Savitri Devi’s The Lightning and the Sun as well). She had looked up from the book and complimented your fashion sense: you had been wearing a white short-sleeved t-shirt, tight black leather jeans, petite black leather women’s boots (your feet being quite small and delicate), and, tied around your neck, a pink satin neckerchief that you had purchased at Tiffany & Co. on Fifth Avenue during a trip to NYC you had undertaken over the summer: on the front of the t-shirt there had been a black and white print of Philippe Halsman’s 1951 photograph In Voluptas Mors, a portrait that depicted the artist Salvador Dali posing next to a large grinning skull that was actually formed from the artfully posed bodies of seven female nudes. Ithell, born in the city of Ilium, New York, the kind of girl who sang Sonic Youth’s “Little Trouble Girl” at that off-campus Maui-themed karaoke bar you went to one weekend (the one with the giant Easter Island head statue by the front door), the kind of girl who wrote down “Bokononism” as her religion on any sort of official form or paperwork she was required to fill out. She had the kind of smile that could turn the crotch of any heterosexual man in her vicinity into a one-tree forest (one-tree forests do exist: for example, near Fish Lake Forest in Utah one may find a 106-acre forest that is essentially one supermassive tree, this tree being a single male Quaking Aspen, or Populus Tremuloides, known as Pando, which is Latin for “I Spread,” though some people also refer to it as “The Trembling Giant,” and this tree is believed to weigh 6,600 tons and is estimated to be over 80,000 years old, though some experts believe it might even be a million years old). The evening in late November when you and Ithell did acid in her car while listening to Radiohead’s Kid A and The Cure’s Disintegration albums. Memories of attending all those on-campus antiwar protests, clutching posters depicting bloodied George W. Bush visages, Ithell shouting through a megaphone that all wars were wounds on the Immaculate Body of Christ, that every death was a tragedy as profound as anything one could find in the oeuvre of Shakespeare (a lesson she had no doubt learned from Sister Ray: years later, after the break-up, she would join some fundamentalist religious order known as the Brethren of the Redeemer out in Gilead, New Jersey, but by then you were in Egypt). The first time you made love to her in your dorm room, under that film poster of The Rules of Attraction that showcased row after row of stuffed animals artfully arraigned in carnal positions, a Kama Sutra for the Plushed Ones, and how it was on that day that you came to the realization that your forked tongue, which you had always thought of as a disfiguring curse, was in fact quite a valuable tool when it came to eating out a woman. The year the two of you moved to New York City after graduation, her to start up her own plastic surgery clinic (which she ended up calling Acéphale, which had also been the name of Georges Bataille’s secret society), you with the intention to become a novelist. The plane you took to Egypt after your falling out with Ithell. The fatal step. The explosion that you feel before you hear it, though by that time it’s too late. Cruelly delivered to the dancing, laughing Leper-Light, which kind of reminds you of the Deadlights that appeared at the end of Stephen King’s IT (the largest book you ever read, even though you lied in college and told all your friends that the longest book you had ever read had been Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables), or that artwork you had seen one year at some museum, Mikhail Larionov’s Red Rayonism (1913), the sinister and dancing red, orange and yellow light, Autumn reconfigured as the colors of Hell. The light you see now, the light of your liberation (it had been on a class trip, when you had been just a child, and your art teacher had wanted to expose you to modern art, and at the time you had remembered a saying from Clark Ashton Smith’s Black Book: “Modern art, though often stimulating, through its novelty and variety, is yet essentially decadent. It has broken down the old forms and patterns without replacing them with anything adequate. At worst, it runs to utter chaos and disintegration,” and for a brief moment, you had had a disturbing glimpse of the future of art, a future that was rapidly arriving: you saw crucifixes submerged into jars of urine, a Virgin Mary made of elephant dung, an American flag used as a doormat, a diamond-encrusted skull, a tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde in a vitrine symbolizing the physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living). The memories continue falling all around you, like dead birds dropping from the sky during an aerosol-based chemical attack, or the pearls sliding
off of Martha Wayne’s necklace at the moment of her execution in the Year of the Bat. That field with the sign with the words on it that you couldn’t understand, what with them being written in Coptic, undoubtedly some kind of warning. How you wandered into the Sahara like a 21st Century Bishop Pike, or Timothy Archer (to make here a literary allusion to Philip K. Dick: but you never really read that book now, did you? Lyre Liar), with some vague notion of either achieving enlightenment by meditating under a palm tree or getting fat on locusts (locusts being surprisingly nutritious). A lunar camel seeking a Stellar Yggdrasil. Your disillusionment with modern-day Egypt, so lacking in the evocative glamor of its Pharaonic past, and how it had looked nothing at all like the mysterious Pyramids did on the back over of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon LP. The aesthetic misery you experienced deep within your soul when you realized that there was no longer any difference between the Great Sphinx of Giza and the tacky one that can be found outside of the Luxor Las Vegas hotel & casino; if the Devil is the Father of Lies, we may also lump tourist attractions amongst his progeny, for that was what the laser light show had reduced the original Sphinx to. The limo ride to the airport, “Miss the Girl” by The Creatures playing on the stereo system, your face up against the window, watching the world scroll by, thinking to yourself, I’ve never cared for poetry. It’s not that I don’t understand it; it’s simply that I have little time for an art form that, generally speaking, strains too hard to see beyond the surfaces of things. I’ve always found the haiku to be a far superior method of poetic expression: short, concise, and direct. I look out the window of my limousine and I realize how an artist could easily see a potential poem in the various sights and sounds of the outside world. But when I look outside I only see objects that can be categorized: people, buildings, trees, sky, grass, rain. The track listing for an alternate version of the Talking Heads’ Fear of Music album. So many things in this world of ours can be summed up with one word. Your final conversation with Ithell: her angry accusations and your feeble denials, the slammed doors, the glassware being shattered, the black mascara running down from below her eyes like the oily feelers on the face of Great Cthulhu; the shock to your system that came after that, as if GOD had just injected a wartime Soviet mycotoxin into your nervous system (perhaps Kurov-DK, 2 tons of which had been made by the Soviets during the Cold War as part of their Biopreparat program; or even good old Anthrax Tau, the Illuminati-approved germ warfare weapon of choice for the flesh servants of the Lloigor).With her out of your life, why not go to Egypt? Why not pursue that most elusive childhood dream? It was either that or die, flip or go to India. That seedy apartment with the Maxi-Pad lighting and the tattered Nightmare Before Christmas poster, the unmade bed, the naked female body next to you (on her left ass cheek there was a tattoo copied from the Seal that appears on the front cover of the Simon Necronomicon), you with a melancholy expression on your face, the fan girl flipping through Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene and reading aloud a passage she came across on page 133: “For instance, there are honeyguides who, like cuckoos, lay their eggs in the nest of other species. The baby honeyguide is equipped with a sharp hooked beak. As soon as he hatches out, while he is still blind, naked and otherwise helpless, he scythes and slashes his foster brothers and sisters to death…” (when you asked her why she had felt the need to read that particular passage aloud, she had replied, “What can I say? I just adore brood parasitism.” Then she had mentioned how yesterday she had spotted what she thought was a peluda in the laundry room of her apartment building, and you had had no idea what a peluda was and you didn’t really feel like asking her as it sounded vaguely like it involved some type of female sex organ but later on that evening you had looked it up in an encyclopedia and realized that the peluda, also known as the “Hairy One” or “Shaggy Beast,” was a mythological porcupine-like dragon that had been said to terrorize a certain commune in France during the Middle Ages, and that it had been denied access to Noah’s Ark yet somehow had survived the Great Flood, and you had idly wondered if such creatures made good pets). The girl with curious hair in a t-shirt that said “Zap-You’re Pregnant-That’s Magic” at your book signing at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square who claimed to be the lead singer in a witch house band named Hungry Ghost Realm and who gushed to you how your second book (Globus Cruciger) had changed her life, and would you like to go back to her place afterwards? The argument you had with Ithell one afternoon at MoMA, an argument that took place in front of Roy Lichtenstein’s 1965-1966 work Explosion. The joy that had coursed through your veins the day you signed that first publishing contract. The day you graduated college and you and Ithell decided to embark on an impulsive road trip, down Route 66, The Killers’ “When You Were Young” blasting on your car’s stereo system as loud as you both could tolerate, followed by Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way” (your favorite song, it appeared in the film Casino, the only thing you can remember about that movie). Finishing your thesis paper one foggy weekend, an examination of the Gnostic and Sufi parallels of Doris Lessing’s 1971 novel Briefing for a Descent Into Hell (your favorite book of all time, followed by Yeats’ The Celtic Twilight). The jerk who tore photographs of supposed shape-shifting reptilian aliens from the Draco constellation out of some David Icke doorstopper (most likely The Biggest Secret) and taped them to your dorm room’s door. Listening to the song “Circle” by Siouxsie & the Banshees on your Walkman at the UMass dining hall while half-heartedly eating a sandwich with pickles and writing down the following sentence in creepy Slayer font on the cover of your notebook for ENGL-224: “Within my skull there resides an entire universe of pain, and I am not brave enough of an astronaut to explore it.” That gym class in high school where you all went out to play softball and it had just rained and giant fuzzy caterpillars were everywhere and one of the girls in your class looked at one of the caterpillars, then looked at her boyfriend and said, “You know, I just want to step on all of them, and I don’t know why.” The revulsion you had felt that day. Your pet cat Mitzi chasing her tail around and around and around and around (Mitzi was the only creature you knew who never judged you: she would sit curled up in your lap for hours, the sound of her loud purrs reminding you of that of logs crackling in a fireplace during the winter). Father Severin’s nightmarish sermon (one of many you experienced, and you weren’t alone in finding them nightmarish: Christopher Oz developed iridophobia from the infamous rainbow homily) where he had proclaimed to the assembled congregation that Hell is a circle while Heaven is a straight line, and the nightmare you had had that evening where you had begun to suspect that the Grand Design of your life was nothing more than the outline of an inverted V, the bottom horn of some metaphorical pentagram. A soft voice whispers, “Beware the Womb-Doors.” The cartoon strip you had cut out of the Funnies page that depicted a skeleton choking on a crust of bread. That pair of mannequin legs in the basement of your parents’ house that had haunted your nightmares for years, they had given you a bad case of the howling fantods because no one, not even your parents, knew how they had ended up there, and your sister had even gone so far as to claim that there had been some nights where she had spotted the legs moving of their own volition, as if they had been possessed by the spirits of Ormaoth and Emenun, their original archigenitors. That time you snuck into the rectory after CCD was let out and you spotted Father Severin seated alone on a bed, crying, listening to Smokey Robinson’s “Tears of a Clown” as he gazed at an old black and white photograph of a young girl with freckles on her face. Those rare happy moments from your childhood struggling to break free, as if your mind is trying to unclog a recalcitrant amalgamation of fecal matter from the bowels of a toilet, the variegated recollections screaming across the penetralia of your bonescreen like a waylaid V-2 Rocket doused with psychedelic colors: struggling to play the allemande from Johann Sebastian Bach’s French Suite No. 5 on the family piano; the blue-skinned sphinx perched atop the six-spoked wheel of Pamela Colman-Smith’s “Wheel of Fortune” t
arot card, a sword clasped in its paws and an Egyptian-style pharaonic headdress on its head (you even had a name for this sphinx, and that name had been Wallow, which had also been the name of the leather Abercrombie and Fitch rhinoceros once owned by Edie Sedgwick); Gor, the Brain from Planet Arous; a pleasant childhood dream in which you had come across a box of imaginary crayons, with colors such as “Autumn Rot” and “Night Rainbow”; the first time you ever ejaculated, in the early 1990’s, after happening across a full page reproduction of Mel Ramos’ 1967 painting Hippopotamus in one of your father’s Pop Art books, the image in question being a nude blonde woman resting atop the back of a hippo, only as you jerked off in your mind’s eye you saw instead a naked Kelly Ripa atop the hippo (this was back when Ripa was one of the stars of All My Children, a show you used to love watching when you were a teenager: the crush you had back then on Hayley Vaughan); Bernini’s sculpture The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa; Judy Garland singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” in Meet Me in St. Louis; Beryllium, your favorite element on the Periodic Table, whose chemical symbol is Be and whose atomic number is 4 and whose Atomic Mass is 9.012182 amu and whose melting point is 1278.0 °C and whose boiling point is 2970.0 °C (it also had 5 neutrons and 4 protons/electrons); Exodus 20:23 (“Ye shall not make with me gods of silver, neither shall ye make unto you gods of gold”); and how could you forget how you had adored lying down on your bed naked as a child and flipping through Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, this edition being graced with the whimsical (yet sinister) illustrations of Sir John Tenniel? You had been especially fond of the illustration of the Dodo, and for your sixth birthday you had asked your parents to get you one as a pet, unaware at that point in your life how such birds were long extinct: oh, how you had cried when you had been told that the dodo had died out long ago, and no longer existed in this world, and it was at that moment in time that you first began to consider the possibility that maybe this world we live in isn’t the best of all possible worlds, for how could a world in which dodos no longer existed claim to be the best of all possible worlds? Nostalgizing on one’s childhood memories is like handling a rose: while it is pretty to the eyes and often smells divine, one must be ever wary of the thorns prickling such recollections. For behind the radiance of nostalgia is a shadow that can never be forgotten. The day you asked your mother, with tears streaming down your herpetological mien, “How can I be happy, when this whole world is burning? Who will love a boy who looks like nothing other than a desiccated pterodactyl?” (“Looks aren’t everything, my little bon-bon,” she said, somewhat pithy advice, you realized, even all the way back then). Let it all go, let your identity scatter like the wind, cut away all the chains that hold you down, be they good or bad, pleasurable or painful, happy or sad. The time your father took out the grill and began to start up a barbecue of some sorts in the backyard and after you had eaten your hamburger you had started digging into a glass bowl of ice cream when a bee had buzzed by your face and you had screamed and dropped the bowl of ice cream and this bowl had shattered on the stone patio, the shards of glass flying in all directions, the lumps of ice cream melting in the hazy summer sun resembling, in your mind, the final remains of some microscopic Heaven melting away to nothing. The first video game you had ever played, a home adaptation of Pac-Man, which had triggered a bad dream that night: in the dream you were gazing up at the night sky and the crescent moon had mutated into an enormous lunar Pac-Man, one who promptly began gobbling up all the stars in the sky, one by one, until Earth was plunged into an eternal darkness. Your first unofficial pet, a cockroach that your mother had promptly smashed flat with her foot when you showed it to her, a murder that disciples of St. Gulik would no doubt see as an act of the utmost blasphemy. One last neurological regurgitation before you surrender yourself to the Great Black Time of Kali’s Cunt, the tohu-bohu blackness of the Beginning: that year, probably your sixth or fifth (or maybe it was even your seventh) on this little spinning ball of despair that is our home, when, in a rare moment of theological rebellion, you decided to defy Father Doyle and make a circle of yourself. So you tilted your head backwards (easy enough to do, what with your freakishly flexible spine), and you opened your mouth and you took your tail into your mouth and you had just begun to bite down on the tip when your mother came in with your laundry and when she saw what you were doing naked on the bed she dropped the laundry and ran over to you and cried out hey, what are you doing, are you trying to swallow yourself whole? Knock that off, stop–