I see a control panel in front of me flickering a moment. Made out of air. Gone. Over there you’re sighing. But there’s no you, it’s only my breath.
I’d be a target for Dark Ray in this light. But I think I’m supposed to do this.
I could effect a change here, but I could effect a change anywhere, for a moment. I don’t know if I can effect a change alone.
Ghouls are slipping in before me, creeping near.
To the ghouls, as another ghoul, I’m naked, sexless and protoplasmic— cross between bones and wraith-substance.
Why do you want me to talk?
We don’t. We’re tired of starving; running and migrating. Witnessing massacres and bombings. We don’t know if we’re tired of being alive or not. You’re just another one of us.
I saw a control panel flickering—a minute ago—don’t know what it’s for.
Its image floats around in Dead, but it’s insane. A ghoul says. It was a part of everyone, it’s totally nuts.
If I were to catch it, I ask, could I do anything with it?
I don’t know, probably. But there’s no proof of anything here. What does your proof have broken down?
Did I have a proof ? I ask.
Everything you did was like a proof, but the proofs are all broken. Shattered.
And then the keyboard’s in front of me again—it’s the keyboard this time. I reach out to make notes sound …
‘Why do you like anything?’ That’s the song I’m playing, hitting the keys without knowing what I’m doing, enjoying; I don’t know the song.
Why do you like anything?
What’s any good? Don’t know
all my proofs have broken down
all my proofs have broken down
A stupid person, a ghoul says, would say it’s good that proofs have broken down. Prove it, you’d say.
I don’t know how I can make changes inside this world. This Dead. I’m just another ghoul. Naked, sexless, practically transparent. All of us races look alike, don’t we?
Tonight’s blood-sacs will be in the shape of shrimps—small, one per victim, bright red. They call us courageous noble people.
No one knows or cares why I’m playing this keyboard. No one knows that my back bursts open while I’m doing it: my back’s to the door. My spine feels like it’s burning. Burning is good.
If this were the control panel, that would be too easy.
We used to call to something to master us, says a ghoul, but now we run from the butchers.
When they murdered us by remote control, they sang to themselves a lot.
Stop bringing me things, says a ghoul, stop bringing me blood-sacs.
You don’t mean that, says another.
I want to migrate again.
Well I want to write something down with the blood in my blood-sac. But it’s only enough blood for a short passage. And what will I eat?
Pass on, says another song. Why are you trying? There’s supposed to be proof of something. I’m supposed to prove my love, worth, or talent, according to or in reaction to historical precedent: can you hear me calling? I can’t stop playing the keyboard. It’s effecting no change.
Maybe it is.
Maybe it isn’t.
I can’t stop playing it.
In my remnants self-contained. Because you can’t read me. Where I came from or how I became learned. (How could it have been her?) Someone beyond the Sea taught her; who told me: nothing.
The alphabet within grew like flowers, and I was its medium, the soil.
In a trial … patiently … cutting up … the masterpiece … oh that’s you. You’re cutting me up.
This language in me you can’t read, you will never decipher. It isn’t necessarily historical, my Dark Ray; unless I am history. I suppose I am, in Dead.
The other ghouls see through you and your work: just another job. We run from you, but we don’t think you’re very interesting.
It was perhaps a spontaneous language. A record of experience as you said. Or an experiment in beauty, as one finds that statues have been degraded by weather, until their difference from the imagined before is what one cares for.
But maybe it’s something else.
So if you had known me as a girl, what would you think of me now? What would we think of me now? If this were a silly novel … But as one always says, nothing written or made or said corresponds to what’s going on. What’s going on is a language you can’t decipher. Within me I may have an exact record of what went on; for, aren’t I magic? And isn’t the language you’re finding indecipherable?
But then, you don’t really know what I’m up to.
Dark Ray has tears, very small ones, in the inner corners of his eyes. Who can he kill? Can he kill this corpse right now? He says into the mike,” This corpse won’t shut up”
I don’t have a so-called brain because I stopped needing one. Or a spine. Though as for the spine-connected-to-hands thing—that operative, musical effect, of course, I can still do that. Make something new come up front from the back or out of the air or ground. There are many effects and physiological patterns throughout the body, which itself one might call the brain. But I don’t have that any more do I, though I exist.
The Greeks were wrong about so much: about gods, war, women, and so on. Statues. They thought they had discovered the body. I’m sure it’s nice to discover something, and Illusion allows all manner of Discovery. Though no one has ever discovered anything that improved the lot of women.
So you don’t know how you can hear me since you can’t find something decipherable to read? Where do you hear me, in your ears? In your head? In the air? Perhaps you’re in the process of discovering something: what can it be? Would you dare tell anybody? Are you hallucinating?
A question of Dark Ray’s self-esteem—something as simple as that. Or some other stamp of a word? YOU ARE A BITCH.
Why does it matter to him? Why does he have to win? Could it be that he’ll have a breakdown? Then he could diagnose himself (he’s a doctor, after all) and take the pills.
The victim ghouls don’t take those drugs. They stare at you and wait for real food. Blood-sacs.
When the Greeks discovered the body, they lost timelessness, as real as I am.
Now am I supposed to list everything I’ve seen down through time as if that’s what timelessness were?
Okay I saw Jason. Jason thought he was happy. He was hilarious, wasn’t he?
What is a thought? You think it’s neuronal activity corresponding to an interaction between one and one’s environment. Wrong. A thought is a cultural imposition, a thing stuck in there by jerks. So Jason thinks, I should be king and that’s all he thinks—who cares what neurons are up to when there is this thought in the world about kings? Which hasn’t gone away. You want to be a king, Dark Ray. Girls want to be little princesses, like I once was.
When I rejected Princess of Colchis, did I reject my brain, is a good subtle question. I’d say yes. No one could put things in it any more.
The ghouls amassing here call no one’s names, Dark Ray. They don’t call your name or mine.
Medea ran with her children, as far away from Corinth as she could. It doesn’t matter where they went. Was it Media? No this was earlier. Do you remember the old culture? No one remembers it, or do they?
She had directed me to find and open a small box she kept in her room, on the other side of the doorway where I’d stood recently, among the ghouls. Where I’d played the keyboard with pleasure.
The box is plain and wooden, a small coffer. It contains leather surfaces with writing on them (which I don’t recognize); several dried flowers in a jar; and a peculiar item which is a cross between a garment and jewelry. It is made of amber beads, fastened together by thread and wire, and would cover the upper torso and hair. The headpiece, wired to the bodice, is a sort of radial tiara, with extensions that create a sunburst effect. The whole item is rather small.
It doesn’t fit you any longer, d
oes it.
It’s something I can’t give up, though I’ve outgrown it.
Medea ran with her children; they ran and ran. She took the box with her. It explained who she was to herself. As long as she had it, she could explain to her children who they were. It’s because this has always been done. A cat or a bird does it differently. Humans teach their children what they’ve invented.
Medea knew she didn’t have to teach them anything, but if she didn’t they would be unhappy. They are somewhere in Dead in possession of the language on the skins, the symbolism of the dried flowers invoking magic, and … the amber garment?
Why do you outgrow radiance?
I wanted to wear it but I couldn’t. Only a child could wear the culture. I kept it as simple as possible for them, since they would insist on “wearing something.”
Were you hated for this?
People hate you for whatever you give up.
It must have been so long ago; now we’re ghouls, starved for blood, and I can’t read the language on the skins.
Sit and listen.
They can’t decipher it, because they want it to say what they think. Think they know. In what manner they think they think.
This was the first of the inscriptions left by ghouls, Medea says, that I’m about to recite to you:
Came to kill us in the name of peace and right rule
I knew as a woman I had a pretended say
Especially if I pretended to be generous, radiant, and wise
And they pretended that those were respected qualities.
They now included the conquerors and the male
Conquered. Can I leave you? Can I ever get out of
This world you keep stealing from me?
You
Are an egotist, aetheist, woman without a culture, if you
Take off your garment of light.
But I am fleeing with
My culture, I am my arts.
You have blood on your
Hands.
I am only eating to go on. Blood of food. I’m
Running now, running with my children.
Migrating across and out of history. They will never let us out; here, children, then, these are the remnants of our culture. Hide them from history, hide them from conquerors; show them to no one for no one can be trusted. Our culture will always be a secret among us.
The conquerors are always arriving. The conquerors arrive, I escape. Someone implants their story in my mind, I rip it out, I escape with my children.
There is no radiance, there is no god, nothing you ever said. This is what our writings say. The writings are all tales of Medea, at the end of each of which is written Medea ran with her children.
She ran from culture to culture, from mass killing to mass killing.
She helped create Dead so we could live, the writings say.
You will never get her.
There is no way out, you are killing us
or forcing us to become other. I
will always return but who will I be—
a ghoul? Casino: no value: that’s that
word. That’s where it went. Wandered all
across those continents, looking for a way
off this globe. Go back to the old
Motel, and die like an outcast— “just” a
spirit. You butchers. Leaving nothing but
blood as an allowance in your clement night
you will give us the coin of democracy
so special, invite the survivors to apply for
papers, a progressive and literate dinner. I
don’t know where I’m going or who my love is.
When my poems were burned in some lost or future century. Yet I’m becoming Medea, she’s giving me her remnants; needs to go now—die as they say—she wants that. I will embody her now, take in the stories on the skins. She’s telling them to me before she leaves—at her own will, since she has no more parts or organs. I will become the one Dark Ray fears and cannot kill, or dispatch the Club Member to kill. It will simply be evident that I am the new Medea. Perhaps I will just say it. It’s purely psychological but it’s power. Aren’t you with me?
Dido will continue to try to found. I will assist sometimes, sometimes back off to be more purely power, player of keyboard, crackling electric. All that that means. Do I care if anything gets founded? I’m right here, in silly Dead, alive. And as much in control as anything is. Including the berserk control panel.
Dark Ray into tape: The corpse seems distracted. I get the feeling it’s elsewhere. I’ve never seen a distracted corpse before… Now, I’m beginning to hear her voice again.
So did I represent a so-called people or a so-called sex, at that time? The worst was to be a woman in the thousands of years of prohibitions across culture and class, empire and nation-state (don’t you love those phrases? how they roll across a man’s tongue.)
But then if they came in to slaughter all of us, all that mattered was the finality of that moment. Because your loves were gone; because you always had some. I’m just sick of it.
(Dark Ray: I’m not sure she’s just talking to me.)
There are ciphers for everything I know, but they’re almost unnecessary, because you are now like me. Think of them as amber beads, hard light but worn inside. The damned thing’s internalized.
I represent the other side of the Cauldron, don’t I? But I am a principle of defiance, right? Survival, but not adaptation and change. Don’t give in.
It’s not that I’m tired, as I may have said. It really is that I’m now empty. Too empty to be part. Empty enough so you can have … me.
Dido is lurking, listening: what she does.
Thinks: In order to found my city of ghouls, I may have to get rid of the Club … Since it is constantly replenished with Members, how can I do this? Something involving the berserk control panel? I’ve got to put a stop to that Coroner.
This is her ghoul destiny. Found the city, pursue the Club, destroy it. Eat blood-sacs with victim ghouls: how else do you found anything?
And Maat, ah Maat. She’s still up there but trembling with weariness. What will happen? What happens when Judgment finally collapses?
When my poems were or will be lost. It was because—will be because?— something came for us, a bomb, or vengeful warriors. I remember it as the destruction of all my time until that point. I was a people, shattered. I still carried much inscription inside me.
What more would I tell anyone of myself? I live in a motel that I am fond of. The seediness of my position in Dead satisfies me: so much unchanged.
The ghoul-victims continue to gather in the city.
TESTAMENT: 2005
A RARE CARD
The skills you lack
are designed to keep you
down. . .
Logical.
Someone is working right now
to get ahead
of you.
Someone is working right now
to get ahead of me.
I have returned
I am reasonably
endowed with the skills of my trade
Those are no longer skills.
If some power came to me
if some
and not meager.
Then
Don’t hide. I won’t. This
is provocation
that’s how I’ll find it.
Maybe I just do
this
She swallowed the paper she needed;
It contained the
Idea. She must have internalized it.
Words are
drawn to one and soon take over.
No, really, where do they come from?
Mother of flies
face of the beautiful
corpse
I have
to start.
Write with a zigzag pencil
and sand.
I’m inside the medicine all
the time. This is my
&
nbsp; medicine.
Let the words come to the space
who do you talk to if no one reads
it doesn’t matter
When someone comes
I’m always there.
Because I drew this very rare
Tarot card, the Witch.
Out in the world they have stories
that match the machine. The one
they appear to be in
If you have walked outside the machine
who are you?
I will enter their space
later today & become enraged.
I will know exactly
how much it has cost me
to be a woman.
Here, in magic, it’s other
any word
to bring
retrieval.
Mother of flies,
mother of ghouls, of survivors
Form has to be earned. this body
Some voices
will probably talk
to me
PERHAPS NOT FOR YOU
There is
no
audience
because
there is
no audience.
So if you speak only to
imagined beings
what does “only” mean?
This building formerly a restaurant. . .
this small room has been scraped of its paint
and denuded of most former furniture: but
also it has grown in size—can a building be
enticed to grow? Because it is now as big as an
airplane hangar.
Your
beautiful face
unbloodied beneath
flies
Songs and Stories of the Ghouls Page 7
