A Greater Monster

by Katzman, David David

  Flanking a cube of necrotic metal—scintillas of their ivory flesh vanish, reappear in the space between—tiny flying fish gliding, frost and night.

  They come out past the wires.

  “Don’t go so far!” they cry in chorus and flash together.

  “Nothing,” they say, nod together.

  They look at each other to see themselves—sisters, twins. Their hair straight, short, pantherblack. Littlefaced and pale—balanced, watersupple, lithe and concise. Legs and arms clad in down, feet padded and silent. Over their shoulders, bows and bandoliers, and between their small hairless milk organs, quivers.

  “Hungry,” they say. They nod.

  They explore the fanged rictus wreckage, picking through the tortured membranes of steel. They hear their breathing. They incessantly flick slitted eyes like fire at each other then at the buildings, remnants of leprous fabric. The air moldy and infected. They run side by side, launching from escarp to scrap—feet gripping metal pipes projecting from walls, releasing—muscles in their legs warm. Inhaling deserts of sand with every breath. The bread of the feast is desert.

  They hump the byways, the land starved, choked. Eating dirt to feel ill and full. Humping from closed place to closed place. The one left, the undiscovered country. From which all life is born and taken and given. Past the last city.

  Movement—draw, fire. Simultaneous, like two faces of a coin. Four arrows hold a screeching slice of life wall-solid. Little snake-beaver. Touch it and it quiets, falls limp and silent—acquiescent. They kill to appease the demon hunger. They hold it, touch it to their foreheads. Migrate all the fur, bone, cartilage to one end, scoop out the organs and muscle. Tear in half and eat. Tastes like life, drink the juices.

  They say their thanks to the snake-beaver for this gift, and they thank their small bows and sharp arrows found in a concrete structure (floor and walls with no roof, remnants of some unknown dis-eased civilization). They are side by side. The rest is mysterious.

  They cross a square and come to a hill—dirt brown. This hill looks like excrement. A pile of excrement, they think.

  It does.

  They go up the hill and come upon a small flower at the top. A fragile canary star. They sit cross-legged with the flower, foreheads touching over it, and hold hands. The flower fills up their eyes—four petals, yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow—clarity and calm. The stem is narrow, a faint blue tube. Watery, elemental, tentative. They sniff fresh powdery pollen.

  “It is beautiful,” they say.

  Dark threads ripen from the center point of the petals outward. Flower sits, real and patient, insignificant, indestructible. They look up, looking at themselves—their eyes burgundy with black vertical slits, comforting— they touch cheeks—

  a sound—they spring to their feet

  bows ready,

  composed,

  It comes—

  large as ten of them—

  faster than they can run—

  bury arrows in it—

  empty quivers—

  it grows—

  they’re holding on as it comes—

  on its back—

  under it—

  holding its spine, closing their eyes and concentrating—

  it squiggles and gurgles—

  held inside.

  Open their eyes—

  they have two slicers at the ends of their arms, claws full of yellow flowers, long limbs, possumbody pressed flat shortsharpfrazzly fur. Nothing in sight. Sniff the flowers—noses long and mobile. Ecstatic. They eat them all. But leave a single flower.

  They stretch asleep to the flowergods.

  He opens his eyes. Facedown in the moss. Throws himself over in fear, looks around—his helmet! There it is. And the mossy, overgrown wall. The sunflowers lean over him protectively. He tries to hold on to the plant, two girls, and a monster and … but … what was … fading, fading already. His memories disintegrate like shabby ghosts. He’s still in the red suit; he’s still green-skinned. But there’s no sign of a door. He searches the wall for some distance until noticing a smaller building buried within the forest of sunflowers. He follows a passage that the flowers open to it, moving aside. The structure is a block of heavy dark grey stone crawling with vivid-green ivy seeking crevices, unanswerable question marks curling up the walls. Weeds sprout waist-high from the crumbling foundation, and clusters of too-sweet sunflowers rot against the wall like weeping scarecrows. An opening is visible, a doorway; grainy light spills across the deep threshold, barely revealing a room beyond. He spies inside, seeing what appears to be a single room and hunks of slug-like plants or ambiguous animal intestines dangling on a hook. Also: a zinc-grey statue (marble?) on the threshold and what appears to be a grey rat at the base of the statue.

  He comes abreast of the door. The rat—not a rat—is a foot, a paw. The statue stands about three feet tall: a hunchback shape, a cloaked figure, female-ish (as suggested by a slender white neck and what appears to be cleavage) with a head like an upside-down teardrop nearly half the size of the body. Chiseled in the form of a bathing cap with a deep widow’s peak, its hair ends just above thin eyebrow lines incised over large, half-closed eyes. A sad mouth whispers sweet nothing.

  He picks up a dead sunflower, removes his helmet, and begins plucking sunflower seeds and popping them into his mouth.

  “Hello”—his heart skitters in his chest.

  The statue steps forward into the light. Behind its head, the amorphous shapes sway. Dry scent of antiquity. He’s prodded by a dead spot in his gut, his joints stiff, his keratin hardening and distant.

  “Come in,” she says. “Join me.” He should not have been caught surprised, but he was. “Come in. We can talk if you’d like. Countless beings have found themselves at my door. Many come inside. I have had wondrous conversations and learned many things. Perhaps you could learn something from me?”

  She backs into the room. He steps closer, and she retreats further. He crosses the threshold and looks up. The ceiling and walls are shingled with clear slats. Two low, wide chairs sit around a pot while a dirty floodlight with a hand crank stands behind them against the far wall.

  “I have enough to share, would you like to eat?”

  He nods. She waddles toward a heavy cast-iron pot. He catches a glimpse of her large padded paws under her shawl. Rounded shoulders, dull silver cap of hair.

  “Once,” she says, “once an abysmal deluge of misery flowed from my hands. I recall it. One could say many lifetimes ago, but, as you know, time has broken its leash, so one can’t even say that. I gave, also gave succor to the powerful. But no longer.”

  She moves to sit on one of the two chairs. He comes over opposite her, looks into the pot. Soup the color of twilight. They sit quietly around the pot for awhile. She leans forward and stirs it with a longbone.

  “What is it?” he asks, meaning the soup.

  She looks at him with clear moonstone eyes big as ostrich eggs. A smell settles across his face and neck—meat, bone, and fat. She nods her head toward a terra-cotta bowl. “Have some.”

  He puts his helmet on the floor by the chair and takes a bowl, scoops out a serving. Viscous and pocked with flaccid chunks of mystery. He holds it up, pours it down his throat. Tangy oil on his tongue. He sees her echoed on the surface, her eyes looking at him and into the soup simultaneously. He switches his focus and sees his reptilian mask. He looks back up at her. The odor of decay creeps into the suit and clasps his body like a spectral lover.

  “If … you’ve been here countless … met countless beings … tell me what happened. What is in the past?”

  “What do you remember?”

  “I remember monshters … meeting many monsters … eventually coming to your doorway and sheeing … seeing you there.”

  “This is a memory, what some call history. The present is history embodied. Would you like some more soup?”

  “Uh.” His stomach hurts. The soup is unknowable. “Yesh please.”

  Th
e longbone has a cavity at the end in what seems to be a joint. She scoops and pours into his bowl.

  “What can you tell me about … about what happened … before?” he asks.

  “Before what?”

  “Before … I don’t know. I know what the idea of a pazsht”—he positions his tongue more carefully—“past is, like your … your life story. But I don’t know what that really feels like … I … I’m … I don’t know if I’m … my storiezsh are … there are a few in my head, but they don’t seem to be me … or, they’re immediately not me once I remember them. I have a halfhearted recollection of dead letterzsh, and I can’t figure out what they say.”

  “You’re looking for something concrete to believe in? Here’s what I can tell you. I was born during what others called the Apocalypse War. Eventually, I found this building. I came inside and have never left since. What I’ve learned has come to me.”

  “Pleazsh. Tell me. I don’t … can’t … I can’t see anything clearly.”

  “These narratives seem to have a common ending. I’ll tell you the story as I know it.” Her hands are as white as the bone she tenderly holds.

  “This one here,” she says gesturing at the soup, “he told me there were many occult Gods in sapien times, and they battled for dominion over the field of experience. One of the Gods was Wildness. Wildness welcomed Time as its own, as wild experience itself. However, the perpetual enemy of Wildness was the God known as Order, and Order set out to use a weapon Wildness could not—language—to invent Religion, which defined a beginning and an endpoint to Time and thus captured it. That’s the story as I’ve heard it. Time was imprisoned by a jealous God.”

  She pours some greasy sustenance into another bowl, raises it to drink. He notices tufts escaping from under her shawl, behind her neck.

  She wipes her mouth. “He gives it the taste of truth. Don’t you think?”

  He says nothing.

  “The God of Order had many Avatars (my last guest enlightened me) of which three were primarily worshipped by sapiens: Religion, Science, and Economy.”

  “But … theeth … these Avatars. How are they real? I still don’t understand how they changed … life … to be … whatever it is.”

  “The Avatars formed alliances against Wildness when it suited them and battled when it did not. Science accelerated time and matter faster and faster as that was his irresistible nature, serving both himself and his ally Economy. He crowed as He split hard matter and soft spirit, melting the human form in the crucible of Apocalypse. Hadron’s Wall fell and atoms collapsed like bubbles, the soul in the machine was unbound. The barriers that separated species breached, and so did the bondage that tethered supines to Order, and the stew boiled over, the vengeful Darkness rolled in, and it tasted sweet and terrifying. In the end, Order ate itself, leaving Wildness as the victor.”

  “What is this?”

  “Some would call it history. Call it what you will.”

  She moves into a dark corner of the room and sits on a low wooden shelf. He can just make out her huddled form, the tips of her claws.

  “What do you think is true?” she asks quietly.

  He begins to pace. “This … I don’t know. It’s all so confusing. It doesn’t exist. I feel I was—came into existence. All this stuff, life came into existence around me. Just minutes—moments ago. It feels. And … or … I feel also like I’ve been reincarnated. Or maybe I’ve gone from one planet to another without remembering … anything. Because I …”

  What is he, what was he? Where is he?

  “I understand words,” he continues. “Language. I didn’t learn it, I just knew it, but words—it seems you need to learn something like that. There has to be a history to … I have glimpses or see photographs of previous moments in my life, devoid of feeling. They float in a void in my—in the back of my head. I traveled through time. I heard a story somewhere that dreams can be bought for a piece of your self. I just heard it. And … love is a … also I don’t understand it either. I feel like there are many thoughts in my head … that astonish me. They linger like scents. I’m trying to associate meaning with all these things. I’m … confused.”

  “These are clues,” she says rocking forward, her argent face peering out at him, eyes like drowning gemstones, “to what you should be.”

  “What I should be?”

  “Are you hungry?” she says. “I’m still hungry.” The iron pot sits heavy and immediate. “Why don’t you put that friend of ours in the pot, and I will tell you more history.”

  He looks around, realizing she’s talking about the thing hanging on the hook. He pulls it down with a thud-squish to the floor. He can’t bear to look at it. Drags it (feels the moisture between his hands) and heaves it into the pot with a splash. Sits back down and begins stirring with the longbone.

  “He also told me about a place where males killed each other in competition to mate with their mothers. I don’t understand why males would do this. What do mothers want? Who says males have a right to mate with anything? They fuck their own emptiness. It goes back to the origin. The ending returns to the beginning.”

  The scent of too too melted flesh settles across his body; he can taste it in his chest and thighs, his groin, and through his back.

  “Another guest told me life was born when two male Gods were fighting over a female God. In order that she could not have the power to choose, it was a fight to the death. The first God—humans named him Mas—threw a spear through the second God, Kaos, who ruptured into myriads. This was the birth of the animals. Mas raped the female God Gaia, and she gave birth to the humans. However, to spite her assaulter, she spurned him and her offspring, and instead loved all the animals who were made from pieces of Kaos. So humans were one generation from a God, but animals are one with a God.”

  “How do you remember this? I seem to forget things right after they happen.”

  “These walls are my bounds,” she says. “And I remember every moment. They are all I have.”

  “But … how is that possible?”

  “I have never slept or changed. Sleep is the river of forgetfulness. If you wish to solidify memory, to make the past exist, then you can never sleep or change.”

  “I need help.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t want stories. I don’t know what I need. There’s a woman with wings. I’ve seen her in a flame of white light. I have to find her. You … do you know another woman? Like you? I need, I can’t …” He stands, knocking the chair back and over. She’s talking. He begins to pace back and forth, kicking a ceramic pot which breaks.

  She says, “…”—he is pacing—she says “…” She says, “… walking on there?”

  He looks down and instead of feet, out of the ends of his space suit—dozens of serpentine shapes, legs like banded water snakes. He leans to his left, and his legs take him toward the left wall. He leans to the right, rolls across the room. What has she done to him?

  “You think you can avoid it? You’re taking the hardest journey of all. Tell me. What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon and fifty legs in the evening, no legs the next day, and—”

  “No!” He is in front of her, gripping and lifting her over his head. “NO! I am a MAN!” Tossing her at the wall.

  Her wings erupt from under her robe slowing her flight but—CRACK! against the stone. She’s on the floor, facedown, head flung back.

  Breathing hard, chest heaving, he kneels down and rolls her over. Her eyes are closed, body still. Against his right temple—her hand—he jerks back, seared by pain. Her arm drops.

  “What are you?” she asks. A bubble wells up at his temple.

  “What have you done?” he cries.

  Oh, nothing you wouldn’t do if you were me.

  He blows up and burns. This is not real. He burns and echoes and vanishes and disappears, and he is inside the sun and flares out into

  … the Zirk train stops. I sense an urgency. Someone cries
, “Buttons, to the gate!” so I immediately gallop around Mobius toward the entry point. Several others coming from all directions.

  Arrive to find nothing. Stillness. Quiet sky visible through the clear prow. To the right, a crowd of blue trees.

  Sense liquid—

  there—

  flying toward us, meat hits the chromeshield, slabs of meat on red sticky disk toes—

  bulging globes of aqua for eyes—

  more meat piling on, more meat, filling up the shield, looking in—

  squelching like suckers, eyes never leaving us—

  I sense the water in the eyes pleading—

  now visible, coming up from behind, many bony sticks and twigs on spike legs.

  The spikes come up and tap on the shield. Pieces break, dangle threadbare or fall off. The meat eyes us. A mouth opens. It juts a tongue out, the others follow. All opening and closing. They eye us, carry sadness in bags under their eyes.

  The spikes come up, blunder into the meats, and drop them down onto their pointy bodies. The forked meat looks balefully back as the spikes stilt past us, legion of them.

  There is no danger here after all. We sit for the parade and feel

  … ravenously hungry, I fall and eat her dead body. Tear off her wings, fillet her ribs and breasts and legs with my claws and teeth, swallow the muscle. Fill my helmet with soup from her pot. Kick her bones outside and run into the sunflowers.

  I run. Roll. I’m fucking rolling, keep rolling on many, many impossible legs.

  A gigantic volcanic crater drops away before me. The interior is a sea of bones and skulls with half-submerged, rusting vehicles like whales rising for air. I skirt the rim, the outer slope appearing to have been filled in with soil sprouting angry weeds and short ferns. What psychosis has befallen the world?