“So you theorize. There is no totality because life keeps on going. Every meowment we are born again.”
“Definitions like that are meaningless.”
“Pants are a facile means to define her personality. Reify it for the audience. You know how G’nesh is acting about this show. This is the only city for which we’ve performed in a long time, so perhaps that’s why this one is a big deal. If we aren’t top of our game, G’nesh is going to recycle us. The girl’s gotta sell it.”
I am squawk, and they are regard. This coop. The bars are rattles of sensation in my body of bent and broken. I’m a quarantined universe; I am ache or I am evaporate. Desire and fear. Touch nothing. Stay here perched or in the air. This terra is infection by the disease of norms, normalized cruelty. Avoid surfaces. Touch nothing. Memories brand my body. How could I be started as one of them? Horrible. Before they are taking my arms and hollow out insides. White suits, faceless—as they cannot be face what they be. I am hate the programmers.
“No exact situation can be repeated although you can conjure up very similar ones,” says the DogTwin. “Like putting someone in a room with three doors. The exact same room with three exact same doors. They are labeled ‘one,’ ‘two,’ and ‘three.’ Perhaps one of them has a vicious monster behind it or a tangelo. Perhaps it doesn’t. Perhaps the others lead to a haberdasher or a donnybrook. It matters not. The situation is: What does the individual do?”
“But you would have to start them in the exact same physical position,” replies the CatTwin. “Since physical size and shape can vary, that would be difficult.”
“Undoubtedly physical size and shape have an affect on personality. But we’re barking about a situation here.”
“Insects,” states the CatTwin.
“Did not have a personality. Too primitive.”
“Put them in your test.”
“Weakness is a prerequisite for personality. In fact, it may be the definition of a persona non grated.”
“If you created an object maze and placed an unconscious insect. Then tracked his every movement on a graph.”
“There’s nothing to track if he’s unconscious.”
“After he woke up. You placed another insect of the exact same file and speeshum in the exact same spot.”
“You would have to be very careful.”
“Every limb would have to be in the exact same position.”
“The body’s orientation would have to be precisely matched.”
“Track the second insect’s every movement on a graph. If the two graphs diverge then you have unique personalities.”
“Bark, bark you be sure that the first ant didn’t leave a scent that might affect the trajectory of the second ant? You can’t know. Or what if they were different ages? Or if you built a second but different maze to control for that eventuality, you could not be sure that the floor might have fractionally different bumps that would affect the insects.”
“Personality is REEOWR.”
“If the results are different, then their brains were geared differently. Insects were machines, chemically, neurologically cranking along, chugging forward against incoming sensoria. But mammals invite the potential for randomness. Chaos allows for learning and change.”
“So test your theory on Anophelese, how ’bout?”
The best part of me is bird. Being air stroking my feathers. The border between body and spirit. The solidity of peaceful nothingness, free fall. My feathers become air. Swooping and rolling through hoops, through fire. Pause for applause/annoyance. To launch into the air again. But I am good showmanship to allow for applause; the audience are need to feel involved somehow, or they are unfulfilled.
Impatient. Back and forth on my perch, back and forth.
Eh, purifier astray—readjust. Stupid air mask wall against fecal air exhaled from the fetid units. But separates me from the air around me, inside me. Air is life. And life is dirty like the norms. Norms. As abnormal as anything could be. Fuck them. I am free. Lucky to be out alive. Curling into my head am a snail, a wormspasm after a rainstorm. Hammered on my wing bones, the force—calibrated, incremented—until I was fracture. The note taking. That note taking, want to shred every word and their bodies shred them shred them shred them. Healing torment day by day, the clocks and notes. Again and again. That room is a silver bowl. Deep breathing. Circling and circling. Breathing too fast … slow it … hyperbreathing … slow it, slow it down … slow it … slow it … there.
Too worked up. The past is consumed.
What were they say? Before they left? I was dropped from the air in exhaustion. The bile in my throat. Others like me, around me dying. Dragging a body on a leash, two were pass by talking … experiment, a chained reaction, global genetic experiment infection. And after that, the look in their eyes falling on me were changed. From blankness to fear. They no longer were touched me. One day they were gone, the place abandoned, and I was alone.
“Fish.”
“What about fish?”
“None but warm-blooded creatures had personality.”
“Trees have personality.”
“So you think plants have personalities?”
“They invented personality.”
“They are pretty boring on that front. You have to distinguish between personality and a unique appearance. Each flower is unique, but each flower does not have a unique personality. No. Flowers, one can assume, given the exact same conditions—soil, light, nutrients—would react in the exact same manner.”
“Except for genetic diseases. Which are genetic differences.”
“So personality would have a genetic basis.”
“You’re saying personality can move from body to body regardless of the host?”
“Traits can move on, lets say.”
“Genetic diseases were genetic differences.”
“Genetic difference allowed survival.”
“Personality is an entirely cultural construct.”
“Personality is an aspect of intelligence. And intelligence is genetic.”
“Define intelligence.”
“Intelligence is making a conscious choice, having a personality. Bark, bark, bark.”
“Mmmmeow, can o’ worms.”
“Were birds warm-blooded?”
“Did birds perspire?”
“Anything that perspires or pants was warm-blooded and would have a personality.”
“Crocodiles, turtles, and lizards had personalities.”
“Birds pant.”
Be patient. Breathe. If only I could become the maker of a set. I couldn’t be fingered instead of taloned? The show is all that matters. They must be the idea creators. I may become insane first.
“Birds were not mammals. They were avian of nature.”
“Birds pant.”
“Fssss, bird pants are what I am looking for right now because our cultural dilemma is how to create a new act that does not put G’Nesh to sleep.”
“Or put us to hybridization.”
“We will dress her in pirate pants. She flips up and down the eye flap, uncovers her glass eye. She birds a … a cannon … on a boat, a model of a galleon, which we build from scrap wood, and she fires a metal ball into the crowd. To keep it interesting, sometimes she kills an audience member. She walks the plank, dives into a tank of feathers. She poops; we pee. We collect tips from the crowd.”
“Ruuffff about the airobatics?”
“Yes, yes, we will bring out a—change the hoops to be yardarms with sails, and she can pull stunts around the yardarms.”
“She flaunts the glass eye.”
“We bask in the long glow.”
“We exit stage left.”
“We get what we need.”
The amethyst parrot disappears into the helium sky. Like to kill one of them randomly. The bird holocaust seared into memory like no other fact. It all turns on that. Units—untrustworthy, weak and obvious. My clothes tight to pronounce my form. I am what I exist
to do. Breathe, fly, breathfly. I am do it anyway. Is it time to—
“Rain!” I am the cry.
Their heads are turn simultaneously toward the sound. Claw the coop door with my foot and shoot straight toward the gillies. Almost everyone are gathered at the perim, beyond which we are unprotected. Grip a tubed funnel and a bucket and shoot out—everyone the same—placing them beneath the ceiling; the thunderheads are low growls shivering calico and fierce; I am the feel of the air, the smell of difference across my feathers—wearing cool keen drizzle as a jacket. I am flight through the slate drizzle, dark and tender and beautiful and blissful; my wings kiss the grass, all of us glazed with the mists of elysium. I am a sprite striding through dew of translucency and ecstasy.
I am a perch upon the terra—for once—droplets of water effervesce around me, moments of life dying. Unattainable pure smell of life and peace. I am not feel myself at
Blackness. A terrible pressure on my chest. Open my eyes—a shaggy leg, a hoof crushing me to death. “HELP! GET OFF!” Flailing, my screech ricochets like buckshot. A glass cube, the bison creature.
“What … is … your place?” Bisonman asks haltingly.
“What? No place! Stop hurting me!”
“What … are you … doing?”
“Anything! Nothing! Somewhere to go! Just looking just food!”
“Hmmhh.”
The pressure decreases, and it removes its foot from my chest. Muffled whistles.
Ow. No move. Just no move for a bit.
The creature’s dark brown flanks. Muscular. Kind of appetizing. A monstrous bird throwing himself at the cube—Sphinx, right, Sphinx. His claws scrabble uselessly against it. Light outside is fading. I stand up and put my hand on Bisonman’s side to steady myself. A howdah sits on his back with a pole going up to the center of the cube. He carries it on his back.
“You have … purloined a puresuit.” Two insect legs protrude from his mouth and iridescent beetle wings coat his tongue—instead of a tongue.
“What?”
“Puresuit.”
Ehh, the suit? “Oh, uh, the suit. Yeah. I found it somewhere. What’s the—this thing for?” I ask tapping on the cube.
“Enguardment against … protean tempest. I know where food is found abouts.”
“Uhm. Are you offering?”
“Aye.”
“All right. Okay. Why not? Really, why not. But it needs to be for both of us. I can’t go alone.” I point at Sphinx.
A shrug.
“We can follow you.” I crawl out from under; the beam of light shrinks and vanishes, the land returning to inescapable evening. Sphinx is panting, waiting. I put my hand on his beak, and he licks it, caws meekly. I climb onto his back, the dusk clinging to me like coal dust.
“Let’s follow Sherlock here,” I say. “He will … he may take us to somewhere with food.”
I close my eyes and jolt awake later.
A door. We are in front of a house. A suburban-style home. Stained wood siding. It sits in a grass yard. I’m on Sphinx’s back. I look back, and everything is swaddled in fog. To my right and left, fog flattens dimensions. Moving forward is like falling, space is too naked when hidden. I knock on the door. No answer. I turn the knob and open it. From within: music. Many strings overlapping in rich harmony. We look at each other. I enter and hold the door. He squeezes through, and we’re in a dark hallway. Sphinx breathes softly.
Down the hall, the music increases in volume. At the end, a door. Opens into a room.
A spooky resonance weaves a rhythmic thrum inside me. Straight ahead a creature sits in profile playing a harp. He is facing toward a window to my left; albino humans are throwing themselves from the roof of a building just outside and landing in mangled piles at the building’s base.
just as, one after the next, the humans swan dive to their deaths following the call of the harp. Like performers in a circus. Surely the weeping rainstorm of music will catch them. Others run hard at each other—forehead to forehead—knocking themselves senseless.
The creature playing this Song of Destruction is black and twiggy, made of strips of some overlapping fibrous material with preying-mantis legs, slender arms, and extremely long, pointed fingers. Black Stalk taps his splay-toed foot on the lime, melon and mahogany tessellated floor. The ceiling cops a rustic attitude with thick oak timber and visible cross beams. On the windowsill, a dribbling amoeba trails pendants of ooze as it slugs along. A woman with tits on her back and a featureless face sits on a stool next to Black Stalk. She wears a dress of many faces, faces making expressions, discordant and unconnected expressions: happy, angry, quizzical, confused, scared, self-satisfied. With her foot, she rocks a cradle. Against the far wall is a clock with a face on it, but the hands of the clock do not move. The face is smiling. A female mannequin enters the room through a door to my right. She speaks inaudibly to Black Stalk; he does not react, and she leaves.
I walk to the window. I need to see what is out there, need to stick my head out and see these humans, to see if one of them can fly, to pull myself outside closer to them, and I bump my forehead. The window is a painting of a window. The figures on the painting are moving, plunging from the building—the people and the music stop. Black Stalk is no longer playing the harp. A black eye protrudes, peering at me from between his fibers. I look back at the painting, but there are no figures anymore and nothing moves.
“That was nice,” I say.
Black Stalk ignores me and goes to the cradle. He leans over the bassinet and juts his eyes down. He pulls apart the husk of his chest to lay bare fist-sized black kernels. He wraps his fingers around a single kernel and tears it out. An oozing, stringy yellow pocket is left behind like ragged gums after a tooth is knocked out. Black Stalk seems to be pressing the kernel down into the cradle and grinding it as if he were juicing an orange half. After a minute he gives up and turns back toward me.
“That’s the way it is. Like memories—it is faulty, enit? There no proof of nothing. Ya-hey, you look familiar. I wonder we meet before.” Small black eyes like marbles. White-dot pupils. The accent, the cadence … familiar sounds … from where?
“Uhm. I don’t know. I think a bison-man … thing … led me here. This back here is Sphinx.” I motion behind me in the hall.
“That great, enit? Glad you stop by. I collect guest, all kind yet. I wonder if you meet Baby ever.”
I walk over next to Black Stalk and have a look inside the cradle: a bronze-colored baby with corn smashed in its face. Black Stalk lifts it up and shows it to me. The baby is not reacting to the corn mush dripping down its forehead. He wipes the mess aside with a blanket and places the baby in the crook of my arm. Definite metal sheen … hard and heavy … not a baby, a statue or a baby that has been bronzed. Looks like a fat human baby with a small elephant nose.
The Gooey Amoeba has many small feet like a gelatin caterpillar. It has moved off the fake windowsill under the painting and squiggles a trail across the back of the woman with tits on her back. She wiggles as he walks across her breasts. The statue is cold in my arms. The woman drones as if she has a motor in some unknown orifice, and milk drips from her nipples down her back. She stands, walks to Black Stalk, and rams her hand like a javelin into his chest. She brings her hand out dripping with juices, clenched around another palm-sized kernel. She crushes it on the baby in my arms, juices dripping all over my red suit.
The Gooey Amoeba shoots off of her tits onto the Harp with a thrummmm! It’s a pure and clear note—a single string struck. The Amoeba slides across and down the strings, a sweeping symphonic chord,
it’s the sound of time splitting off from space.
And
the child breathes on me. Like steam.
Its long prehensile nose is a gentle tentacle curling around my arm like a glass noodle.
Black Stalk smacks his forehead. “Cha. Dat some crazy shit, iah. I neba nuh ku pan no one do dat, an me see dum crazy shit backaday. Yuh got di obeah. Rispeck.”
The baby has become warm and pumpkin orange. It gurgles at me and smiles.
“Uhm. Do you by any chance have some food? Could we stay here a little while?”
“Dat’s right, yuh. Soon come.”
He goes through a door to the right. I hand the baby to the woman with tits on her back and no face who slings it over her back by its leg, and it begins suckling. The room smells vaguely of incense. Frankincense? Black Stalk returns with a knife, a bowl, and a plate, which he sets down on the stool. He proceeds to carve a kernel out of his chest and dish it into the plate, another into the bowl.
“Fe oonu an yuh bruddah.” I take the first to Sphinx and set it in front of him. He wolfs it down.
I hold the plate with one hand and shovel the food into my mouth with the other. Bursts in my mouth like corn. “Uhm, thanks.”
The room is silent except for the baby sucking and my chewing. Sphinx has put his head down on his paws, and his eyes are closed. A tapestry in the corner of the room depicts a man—a human—with a jaguar flying above his head about to pounce. I finish and return the plate to Black Stalk.
“Thank you.”
“Whey dun yuh lay dun dem rap, ras?”
“May I?” I ask gesturing to the stool, and he/she nods.
I sit down. Feels good to rest my feet. “Uhm, so. You’re asking for … my rap? Well … someone … I hear … my rap, my story, is what it’s all about. I’m trying to write one for myself. I’m looking for a circus. Where I might be able to find … a girl. With wings. I want to make things right.”
“BUMBACLOT! Give it up bout dis buhdguhl.”
“Well, I’ve been searching. Uhhm. I mean, I think I’ve been searching. I don’t know for sure or for what. But I have this memory, my clearest memory, of a girl surrounded by white fire. And I need to save her. I need to pull her from the fire and save her. Because …”
Because I love her. I loved her. I love her. I loved her. Did I?
“I have no idea why. I have no idea.”
“Dis ya dey di goodis reason. Whey else do yuh memba?”
Black Stalk idly strums the harp, triggering a short string of mental pictures: brick buildings, black roads, people who won’t stop walking, going, moving, won’t stand still, passing by me.
A Greater Monster Page 14
