I’m thinking of eradicating all textual possibility within her. If I could stop her body from writing she would be dead. She only lives to write. Isn’t that so?
We need her words, I personally crave them, says Member.
We can get words from the others. Someone will replace her as favorite corpse, Dark Ray says. She’s driving me crazy, he glowers. Her words attack us; her body comes to pieces in a minute as if she were waiting to be read. I’m bored with her torso. I found a new word in her last transcript: genofest. A combo of genocide and festival. It applies to us. We, by killing her over and over—granted she has a lot of bodies—are celebrating a genofest.
Insult, Member says.
It should have been genocifest, Member says.
But we do kill her and others repeatedly, Member says.
All Members look thoughtful.
Are we really conquerors? says Member.
We conquer people because they need it, another says. So they can be read, broken into pieces, and distributed to the true appreciators of their forms. They can’t do this by themselves.
We liberate her each time she dies, Member says.
Get to point. How will you eradicate all text within her? asks Member.
Dark Ray says, I will destroy her base ghoul.
Ahh! They all say.
There is an ancient potion, says Dark Ray, that eradicates a ghoul. We haven’t ever used it before; we scarcely know how we finally die in Dead. Let’s find out!
Dido is haunting the Club, lurking in a corner, behind some damaged art. Thinks, They are so like the Romans and Greeks, solemn little men.
Member says, What if she’s becoming Medea? Medea never dies … I know this as a classics major. (Member is getting off on role here.) I don’t think you can kill Medea that way.
Dark Ray glowers again (he thinks the word as he does it). It hasn’t happened yet. There’s still time; she hasn’t learned all of the Medean arts.
Dido: Though they think like cartoons, they are often effective. It’s because they’re always allowed to do as they please. But all the genocide victims throughout history are amassing in our city. I am founding it truly. Though I don’t understand what it’s like.
Maat watches everything hovering above us with her wings of in Dead spread out, the feathers refusing to resolve into either blue or green. I’m tired of my jobs, she’s thinking. I’m tired of hovering, I’m tired of judging, I’m tired of maintaining the appearance of balance. And if I’m tired, something big is going to happen here in Dead.
Affixing crisis into changeable Dead isn’t easy
Perhaps
chaos expands until the back of Dead breaks
until the dorsal skin splits, its spine revealed.
Whose spine’s cut open so you can watch my
figure playing keyboard—gaps open between
the keys, until we’re just learning to think again.
Staring at my palms I’ve begun to see.
The lines connecting my hands and spine
are a gold-black current, Medea
My back tells me to play the keys but
these words emerge: You don’t know us
so play anything. How do you do that, Medea
To stand where nothing’s formed,
how—this palmistry opens
first to M, then to noise. Nostalgia
breaks you, but chaos, No. M, N, O go
past on my way. Leaving them
At the métro station Q-K I’d almost
gone too far. E-qe or ekue means Hear this
in Minoan, don’t you know? A warning not to
go further. I listen to my spine, not these social
stations. Medea, what can too far possibly be?
Foolish men afraid of magic
want it, of course. It’s just beneath known letters
Sail back over the Black Sea, above
alphabet. A letter was once fishes
Or it was once a head. He put a man’s cap on it, didn’t he
I’m listening to the sounds in these palms.
The connections I’ve made to my Back.
Letter B comes before where you
are. The spine opens to further. It hears it
my senses organizing ghoulish novelty.
Magic, keep him from killing me.
After all this time. I’d like to say that he
hasn’t the right, but I don’t know
if that goes. There are no rights here.
Magic, I just ask you for me.
How do ghouls really die
I think they decide to, says one ghoul
I think they know they have to; but
it hasn’t come to me yet, she says
I don’t want to go now says the ghoul. I haven’t
received what I’m owed.
There are blood-sacs for the taking among the potsherds. Or is it a cemetery? Feed me like the others. Is it real blood? The red of it goes grainy and grey; the color crawls across the form. The statute is to go on doing good; good begins with eating the blood-sac. I don’t know how it continues.
We are here in the graveyard, Medea, Dido, and I. Medea hands me a blood-sac; Dido is draining hers. Her pale face takes on color. This is our city, she says. Our foundation myth, she says, sarcastic.
Are you from the famine, my love? Would I almost let you eat me? I’m speaking to a ghoul.
You are broken art, that ghoul says bitterly.
I can’t be perceived as edible.
Eat your blood-sac, says Medea. I swallow some.
This carries us back, forward, she says. Back to the point where it started. Where blood-sacs were generated. Where we began to eat.
Some soldiers are shooting from the tombs. Over there. They’re aiming across the street at half-wall buildings. They don’t seem to have time to swallow blood.
Why protect ghouls in Dead? Dido asks. Force of habit, she answers herself. What’s the difference between you and me, Medea?
What?
You’re the I that refuses to comply. Or testify. I’m the lissome Elissa, the you in a man’s eye. Only in his eye. But that’s trite, we’re just more eaters of blood-sacs.
Found a city on this, I say, why?
Because it’s already here, says Medea. In the greater death rate of time as it is lived progressively, going forwards, more and more ghouls are generated. But each time we eat a blood-sac, we’re back where we started to do that. I see a city arise on the banks of the Black Cauldron, over and over, cathedral, capitol, and battlefield. I can’t accept a single one of those elements. Can I only defy it? And I stand there. On the banks of the Black Sea. Watching more and more forms emerge from its cauldron.
If all images are equal—and each one existing is thus as if created at the beginning—I must always be in the source of magic, I say.
The magic of Dead, Dido says.
Dark Ray approaches with a gun.
We run to hide behind headstones. Potsherds trip me but I manage to get down.
Dark Ray lurches between tombs. It’s almost soothing to see him: a simple pursuit. Stay down, Dido says. We do.
Red was his hair. When. When did they get to have hair. Stop asking and eat your blood-sac, so your hair will grow thick and glossy.
We run away.
Dark Ray gives up on the females, wonders again why he’s in Dead not Day. He sits down and picks up a blood-sac. Where do they come from? No one’s known where food comes from for eons.
Ghoulish Club Member number one finds him in his dejection, near some grave or other.
No one cares where blood-sacs come from, Dark Ray says. In Day there would be a vending machine or a restaurant. Something. A known source. He swallows some blood.
What do you think we’re really up to? the Club Member asks. Why are we doing this?
I’m living in a metaphor I can’t escape from. She would say life in Day is stupid too. You connect, you build, you multiply. You make more
for glory. You are driven by urges inserted in you by Someone, or No one, depending on how you think. It all began when a cell divided etcetera.
And in Dead?
It’s a flipped-over consciousness. Other side.
Where should we be?
I WANT TO BE IN DAY! Why bother, she’d say.
But maybe she’s right. What do women get out of anything?
Dark Ray says, I don’t know whose side you’re on. I think you kill her too much.
I’m starting to know her too well, says the Ghoulish Club Member.
I am, Dark Ray says, going to go for the ultimate murder of her. Can you take it?
I don’t know, the Ghoulish Club Member says.
They say genocide victims are amassing everywhere around here, millions of ghouls. More and more arrive every day. Will there be enough blood-sacs to go around? In Day I suppose they just disappear. The famine victims just die. The people in the wars just die and go away.
What about Medea? Dark Ray says. Can we do a routine kill on her, read her insides? I know it’s never been done—she never even gets a superficial hit. Slips into air … But there must be a way. She may know how to kill someone in the final fashion. And she may know about a way out of Dead. First, why don’t you try to kill Medea.
You never kill anyone, Club Member says.
Well I do have to cut them up, Dark Ray says hieratically. And I will kill her, but I have to find out how. To do it permanently.
Medea won’t let me near.
Just try, Dark Ray says.
How did you catch Medea? I
found her standing at a crossroads
staring
in a black cloak standing, staring
at a red
flower. I’d lost this flower, she said
and seemed
to welcome me. I’m not going to avoid
my murderer
she said. Is this flower important? I
asked. He’ll find out in my autopsy
she said
when he cuts me up, that is if he
can understand me.
I stabbed her and then picked the flower:
it’s blatant.
I feel like I’m in a story I can’t follow.
I’ve always felt that way, no matter
what. Here she
is, open her and read her: you’re the
coroner. Here she is.
How did you catch Medea? I
found her standing at a crossroads
staring
in a black cloak standing, staring
at a red
flower. I’d lost this flower, she said
and seemed
to welcome me. I’m not going to avoid
my murderer
she said.
I’m sitting in the Palms Motel, catching psychic flashes off my palms. Medea’s on ice in the mortuary; the Coroner cuts her tomorrow. She told me they wanted to cut her to find the formula for my elimination. She said she didn’t think she had it in particular. She knows few formulas; she does what she does out of air. They want her general knowledge: she says they won’t find it.
Dido remains outside though they’re after her too. She sits with the ghoulish, looking ghoulish; they have a maquette for a city. It’s sometimes white and sometimes a bloody pink, the color changing as they look at it.
I’m in some mental channel where I hear Casino proprietors talking about the difference between a keyboard and computer poker controls.
You play a keyboard not knowing how it’s going to sound: sits with his spine open showing the nerves, as he touches piano keys. 88 keys. What will happen? Who knows? And 52 cards, 5 buttons—nothing much happens; activity along spine? nothing much happens. You move your fingers, you ghoul—but the same thing changes. Rigid images. It’s always the same thing changing, the proprietor mournfully says. We know all the changes.
She’s taught me enough so I can stand by the black cauldron. She didn’t really teach me anything, I got it by being around her. I stare at my palms then I seem to be there. A white webby shape emerges from time to time, hovers then goes. What will it be? A person or thing? An event? How does one move here? What’s in charge?
Continuity is a mystery. It stumbles, stutters: the event of Medea’s capture, for instance: the ghoul stabbed her beneath the breastbone, but then it was as if she forgot to bleed. Though she was lying dead, the next thing he knew. He screamed at her, You’re not bleeding, and stabbed her again. Got a drop of blood.
The controls of Dead, say the proprietors, are like those of a worndown poker machine. You can’t see the images of the cards very well; the machine never wears out though. Outside the river’s thick and black. It’s not very wide or very deep.
Dido asks if there has to be a casino in the future city. Everyone stops to think. They like the images on the cards but they don’t like the games. They’re old images, someone says. I’m an old image, Dido says. Am I worth retaining? Everyone stops to think.
How new can an old song be, played on the 88 keys? Pretty new.
Might be playing us high above Dead. Below Dead. Who’s playing it? Sometimes one ghoul, sometimes another, is one thing to say.
Dark Ray’s cut open Medea. Can he find what he wants?
Black Sea full of concubines, small plant-like. They give or take the implanted ring, scorches you though you never wear the bastard. The reason no one will ever understand me: I don’t break. It’s easy for you to read a fragmentary being, shaped conceptually by you. And oh god for a short while I tried to be a fragment. That means yours. Anyone’s understanding of anything or one foreshortens it … Slipped away; I always got away.
Magic one steps into. They are too ignorant to know this moment and seize it …
Sometimes I’m in an ancient room and everyone I’ve disliked enters. Just comes in without calling or even knocking. It’s all men and some girl students, women always students. How do I leave? It’s my own room, isn’t it? No. Dark Ray I’m poisoning you if you’re here: the acidic feature is my intent to ruin your life. She would never do that, or wouldn’t have before, but what I’m saying is the following: I’m poison. You’re thoroughly wrong; you can’t leave Dead; you’re a ghoul. We’re each a different kind of ghoul: the one you are is Wrong about Everything.
What appears to me to be an anger inscription is coded into one symbol, an Etruscan A. I don’t know how I know it’s anger. I’m too upset to continue for awhile. Dark Ray says then shuts off the tape.
The trouble with Jason was that he was silly. A liar. A believer in his rights. To be king! Great. One gets tangled up with these people. Now I want him to leave me alone, but he appears from time to time in hungry ghoul form. So stuck. I refuse to remember anything else about him. I look at him; look away. He leaves.
POEM BY MEDEA
He comes for me; I don’t go.
I stepped into a doorway in the dark. I realized I could be in My Version. The whole door vanished, I said, Let there be no light. There was already no light, but from that moment I started to shape the fact of no light.
There’s poison where you touch me, Dark Ray, the poison of my not accepting Your Version. When I expelled the Creusa Etcetera implantation, there was a grooved carving left. I filled the grooves with a repellent, in case anyone tried it again. It’s mental of course, but that’s real. Don’t touch it.
She doesn’t seem to have any files, Dark Ray says into the mike. It’s possible there’s nothing left of her mind. After all this time. Her mid-section organs have a texture I haven’t seen before. It could be print, but it’s faint, worn. Covers everything. Experiential remnant?
And there’s only a shadow in her skull—no actual brain. How does she think?
I can’t bear it, Dark Ray says. There’s no way for her to communicate with me, but I hear her. There’s hardly anything to read, but I hear her voice. She isn’t telling me anything so far, except that she’s dangerous.
It’s a poi
sonous love, not to give in. I’m slowly poisoning Your Version. I have no interest in your thoughts on any subject; though one sometimes listens to pass the time.
In My Version, that is Dead—which I don’t own but do touch and interpret freely—one tinkers with time. If I don’t have to take the time to listen to you, time changes. If you cease to schedule it, according to the way you want to run things—the 24 hour Casino/Coroner’s Office/Club—you are, poor thing, shut out of your own times. Well you are, aren’t you?
I have you in the dark, Dark Ray. I have you not knowing how things are run. Everything that should be here is here but in nightmare form; you see you’re your own nightmare, don’t you? Can you do anything about it if I don’t let you?
But I only have so much control over what I’m doing. Also—this is important—it isn’t clear to me what I want the world to be like. If I could change Dead, I’m not sure what I’d change it to. Dido has her maquette, but she toys with it aimlessly. She doesn’t really know what to do.
Dark Ray throws the microphone down. He doesn’t know who he wants to kill anymore. What does killing have to do with anything? He’s beginning to wonder …
Are you in it yet, here, this magic
Nothing’s in balance, you say. Or in key
Those phrases, events, don’t work?
Maat’s balance begs you do
something about your heart—If I
accept that, you, the reader, say,
I must be in it, what can I do with
it? Your heart, fix it. Your guilt
fix it. I stepped into a doorway and
the air, heavy with failure, changed
as if it now served a different machine
There is no machine. There’s something
What story I reside in, who can prove?
I step into a doorway with a yellow light overhead. I don’t try to enter the building; I stand with my back to the door. Where was I before? Probably at the Palms Motel.
Songs and Stories of the Ghouls Page 6
