Borderlands 3

by Thomas F. Monteleone (Ed. )

  The average mind shuts down completely before the exquisite enigma of a beautiful woman having a bowel movement—the arcane, chtonic mystery of how her perfect body takes bean sprouts and tofu and Haagen Dazs and turns them into "that which may not be mentioned." But I have it on excellent medical authority that healthy shit does not, in fact, stink. Else why would Venus, inquires an irreverent bard, erect her temple near the place of excrement?

  Yes, I killed. But you must understand: I am not therefore a killer. I am the Ton Ton Macoute of Art, a member of the esthetic Wehrmacht, dedicated to replacing the old Christian hymns with a new metaphysical scat. While avant-garde writers "push the envelope," I shatter the old paradigms completely and map out a brand-new ambit.

  I am a flaneur, a wind that bloweth where it listeth, a holistic quester of the true, a fowl owl on the prowl—I am Eros and Thanatos locked in their dirty dance. I am Inframan.

  I had been on the qui vive for months before I finally spotted her. Appropriately enough, she was attending a poetry workshop in which, simply as a lark, I also had enrolled.

  It was more workshop than poetry, a group of conventional dullards who met every Monday night in a redbrick school building to share their cow warmth and gush over jerrybuilt jingles. Our 'facilitator' was, of course, a standard-issue academic wordmeister, a card-carrying member of the Effete Elite, a sensitive liberal concerned about the ozone layer and "the rights of women"—in short, a cracker-barrel philosopher in a cheap polyester tie.

  But of course he hardly mattered. I had finally discovered her—Her name was Ursula. She was willowy and demure, with cola-colored eyes and raven-black hair pulled into a tight Psyche knot. When she closed those eyes, as the professor read badly from some trash by Dylan Thomas, the lashes curved ever-so-sweetly against her pallid cheeks. Hers was a quiet, Levantine beauty that left retinal afterimages when I shut my own eyes.

  But though her beauty, with the exception of a very slight jaw-alignment problem, was complete and meticulously polished, her intellect was still in the rough draft stage. I realized this during that first night, when she failed completely to comprehend my own mordant genius vis-a-vis Mumford, our 'facilitator.'

  He had just finished relating a tiresome, mawkish story about his father's deathbed stoicism. As he finally wound down and dabbed at his tears, I cleverly blurted out, "His art belongs to Dada!" Mumford only smiled wanly, his eyes going remote and sliding away from mine. He only half-glimpsed, you understand, that I was mocking him in a clever pun. But what truly saddened me was Ursula's reaction: She flushed and failed to meet my gaze for the rest of the class period.

  Time, they say, heals all wounds. But that is more pious piffle promulgated by the herd. You must understand: Time is a wound, and space is only that which we can not imagine not. When other men skim the lines, I memorize the subtext. While elegant fops cry, "You gotta have art. I piss into the Cosmic crack.

  ▼

  Against your better judgment you will read this disgusting story for the same reason the editor bought it: because you will not be able to put it down. And the reason you will not put it down hasn't thing one to do with 'style' or 'fine writing'—I am a meta-stylist, a meta-rhetoritician. I have left my jism in dirty socks, I crave the smell of my own farts, and I believe a thing of beauty is merely one more item to kill. I am loathsome, psychotic, and instinctively spiteful, and you—decent denizen of this Great Shining Republic—are enthralled by all of it and by me.

  If you are a woman, you may well lubricate before I am done, even as you revile me; if a man, you will surely hate me intensely, feel the vicious sting of a cowardly envy at my visionary brilliance, but what of that? You'll read—oh, you will read, just as you always look in the toilet before you flush. And long after you have forgotten your favorite "opening hook," the mindworm nurtured by my story will remain a glorious and festering canker in that collection of chemical traces you call memory.

  ▼

  It was essential that I obtain a pair of Ursula's underwear. But before I actually accomplished this, I managed to engage her in face-to-face interaction.

  This transpired at the next meeting of our "poetry workshop"—my last, as it mercifully turned out. However, I was first condemned to once again endure the insufferable verbal effusions of that poetical panjandrum who presided over us.

  Mumford was, of course, true to his ilk, and thus given to spontaneous outbursts of overpowering emotion. On this night he suddenly exclaimed, "As poets, we must drink life to the lees!" A moment later an ebullient young bubble-snapper in a ZOUK TILL YOU PUKE! t-shirt raised her hand to ask what "lees" meant. He himself was in fact drinking tepid coffee from a paper cup, and saw no irony in any of this. He answered as calmly and carefully as if she had asked him to differentiate between an iamb and a trochee.

  I finally cut short his flummery by abruptly rising and announcing, "I have written a poem."

  Ursula actually met my eye at this and encouraged me with a subtle glimmer of a smile. The rest watched me with expectant faces, providing a "supportive" atmosphere. I slipped a dog-eared sheet of notebook paper out of my shirt pocket and unfolded it.

  "It's titled 'The Exhortations of Inframan,'" I explained. After a gravid pause, I added coyly, "It's by Inframan."

  The sonorous rumble of my own voice, as I read aloud, raised the fine hairs on the back of my neck and stiffened my nipples into hard little BB's:

  "Socrates was a plebe. So

  mostly it is only ambiguity

  of purpose;

  Or, to be brief:

  Why did the old faggot quaff the leaf?

  Rub your boogers on a rock,

  Rub your boogers on a rock,

  Rub your boogers on a rock,

  And pule the shake of Three!

  The tips of flywing glow glittergreen

  and blue, but fly's rare affection

  is rarefaction to you who gild

  great surfaces with cat gories.

  What is Art?

  Art is that which fits

  into the trunk of a Volvo and

  comes home with you on weak ends."

  The immutable beauty and truth of my lines moved me to rare tears. But the mood in the room, when I had finished, suddenly came down like a blow card fluttering out of a magazine.

  "Some very... interesting uses of language," Mumford finally managed, though the others—including Ursula—remained as silent and still as stone lions in a midnight garden. Nonplused, Mumford now announced a short break.

  Still riding the adrenaline high of my recital, I boldly approached Ursula where she stood alone in the small ell of vending machines outside the classroom, perusing a volume by Mallarm. Opening my shiny new American Heritage Dictionary, I said, "Dictionaries are extremely useful, don't you think? Listen to this: 'Fucker: One that fucks.' Hah!"

  I fully expected this display of playful levity to finally break the ice. Instead, she flushed pink to the very tips of her earlobes and hurried away to join Mumford, who was just then in the act of drinking his second cup of bad coffee to the very lees.

  Her bizarre behavior finally convinced me that I had guessed correctly about her. I exited the building for good, elated, determined to obtain a pair of her underwear as tangible proof of my suspicion.

  ▼

  Things are gouged out of the nose, flicked off the fingernail, and eventually returned to dust. But now it is dust touched by humanity. And so you run along a beach thinking it is only sand, but it'sssnot.

  Do you get it? I like that pun; oh, Jesus H. Katy Christ-on-a-crutch, I like that one—that's clever!

  ▼

  An opportunity to obtain proof of my theory about Ursula arrived sooner than I anticipated.

  I had easily obtained her address from the city phone directory and was strolling slowly through her uptown neighborhood, laying plans to stake out her house, when I spotted the lady herself through the front window of a Laundromat. Heart stomping violently against my ribs, I ducke
d into the marl-paved lot and entered the building.

  My eyes prowled the interior and found her immediately, feeding clothes into a dryer. But while I was calculating how I might discreetly obtain a pair of her underwear, a dashing young man in a classic pink '57 Cadillac convertible pulled up outside. Seeing him, her face "lit up," as the pulp writers say. Soon the two of them were engaged in a lively tate-E-tate in front of the very dryer I hoped to raid.

  Competition often inspires me to brilliance. Deciding to take the bull by the horns, I now boldly approached the flirting couple. "You know what the whores in Quebec say," I greeted her. "Big car, little dick— I have no car."

  It was a brilliant sally, but of course I was casting pearls to swine: both of them gaped stupidly like stoned metalheads at a Rachmaninoff concert. Her inamorato was nearly twice my size and weight. But after a brief glance into my eyes, he paled noticeably and hastily led Ursula away—no doubt he sensed the apocalyptic vision she was incapable of comprehending.

  It was child's play now to pop the dryer door open and swipe a pair of pink cotton panties. The particular stain I had in mind would not be removed by detergents. I stuffed the panties into my pocket and returned to my dingy one-room walkup for a long examination. However, all my efforts proved bootless: the crotch of her underwear was immaculate.

  ▼

  I see them: in the mornings I see them, in the morning-smoked silver streets, their arms linked, I see them slowly purl away, lost in their own eyes before mine. Come up from your dying, go to your life, come away from your beat leaderless to dance with me!

  Beneath their scorn, and so, beyond, I watch them dance on a string, confusing freeplay with tangenital absolute. Dance, brave indentures, on the thrust and tips of your disciplined wingtoes, dance to the tremulous ritual of Being.

  ▼

  I was not, however, dissuaded by this apparent setback with the clean panties. Obviously, the omniscient presence she harbored within had anticipated my vigilance and planted a "pink herring," so to speak, to throw me off the trail. I expected as much, and the clever ploy only renewed my determination. Nothing excites me more than a worthy adversary. I now laid plans to enter her dwelling the very next night and obtain another piece of evidence.

  Ursula rented a downstairs apartment in a plush glass-and-red-wood house set well back from the street. The only vehicle in sight was a Mercedes two-seater parked in the crushed-shell cul-de-sac out front. Patting my pocket to make sure I had what I needed, I approached under cover of some poinciana bushes just as night was beginning to draw its indigo burial shroud across the heavens. A nascent moon like a sliver of cold ivory hung low in the sky.

  I ignored the waisted curtains which marked the kitchen window and circled around a small backyard pond carpeted with water lilies. Spotting a bay window on the side of the building hidden from the street, I crept nearer and peeked through a wide gap between the brocade draperies. I glimpsed shirred lampshades, a Boston rocker, an antique cherry spinet, a Hepplewhite loveseat.

  Ursula was settled in comfortably among some scattered cushions in the middle of the living room floor, working on a beautiful origami rose. Behind her, a demi john of wine on a glass-topped table; behind that, in a gold scrollwork frame over the loveseat, a painting of a farthingaled Madonna. It seemed to mock me and ridicule my purpose. But again I was not deceived by this clever prop.

  I made my way around to the side of the building, then felt a smile tugging at my face: the bedroom window stood wide open.

  The rest happened as if in a well-choreographed dream sequence. I stepped easily over the low sill onto a thick pile carpet which muffled my footsteps. The room smelled vaguely of almonds and patchouli, laced with the faint damp-earth odor of female sex. A Tiffany lamp glowed on a nightstand beside the bed, pushing the shadows back into the corners.

  And illuminating the delicate silk undergarment which lay in a puddle near the bed.

  It was a teddy, a one-piece chemise top combined with loose-fitting panties. Quaint, I thought as I reached to pick it up. It conjured up the 1930s and gin-flavored kisses and spit-curled "dames" with husky contraltos.

  Heart scampering in my chest, I turned the panties inside out and held them close to the light. A second later my blood seemed to stop and flow backwards in my veins.

  I ignored the lone black comma of a pubic hair, likewise a faint, rust-colored trace which might have been feces or blood: instead my attention was riveted on the gamboge-colored amoeba of stain which so surely marked her as one possessed.

  How could I know this? Better to ask, why does a stone go on being a stone? Better to ask, like that weary roue gazing out over the streets of Paris: Why these things and not others? Just as spent seed stains the bedroom air with a lingering smell like bleach, so the Foul Tyrant always leaves a distinctive, golden-yellow mark behind. My male muscle was rock hard now, twitching with each heartbeat, and the breath fairly whistled in my nostrils. Dizzy with purifying elation, I dropped the teddy on the floor, followed a narrow hallway to the living room, moved to within five paces behind her.

  "Ursula," I called out softly.

  It was a final proof that the naughty little thing had been expecting me all along. She hardly even started; indeed, she almost forgot to drop the delicate paper rose from her hand. She merely looked back over her shoulder and paled slightly.

  "You," she said in a whisper. Please understand this point: She could have screamed. They usually do.

  "You surely must know," I admonished her gently, "that when you cross your legs, you close the gates to Hell?"

  She feigned an exterior puzzlement, the huge cola eyes fixating on me. Her breathing matched my own now: fast and hard and hoarse, a lover's pant. The foul entity inside would not let her consciously admit it, but she welcomed my presence and what I was about to do. Her eyes cut to the pulsing furrow along my right thigh, and I knew she liked that too. "And do you know," I said, my words nearly tumbling over each other in my excitement, "this is fascinating! I mean, right now—now, as I speak—I am watching the initial stages of shock glaze your eyes! True fear, fair and undisguised..."

  But my words were coming out thicker now, and besides, terror had nearly reduced her to a palsy—this play-by-play account of her emotional undoing was as superfluous as foreplay at an orgy.

  "Undress," I instructed her gently, "and then spread your legs wide."

  The haste with which she almost eagerly shucked her harem pants and bikini briefs convinced me further that she subconsciously championed my cause.

  "Rape me," she said, voice cracking with the weight of her awful guilt, "but please don't hurt me. Please..."

  She lay back against the cushions and scissored her long and slender legs open wide, exposing the salmon-pink depths. Instantly I smelled the dank jungle odor of womanness: and the sulphurous, outlaw presence of the intruder within. Dropping to my knees between her splayed-open legs, I lowered my voice to an intimate whisper and asked shyly, finally opening up a little and letting her glimpse the man behind the artist:

  "Ursula? You know those tiny white bumps on the bottom of a man's thingie—the little pickle warts? Well, I pinched one the other day and this tiny nurdle of zit meringue spurted out! I rubbed it off on something, of course, and I've since forgotten what. But don't you ever wonder: where does all of it go, the secret little castoff bits of us like those fuzzy little brown hairballs stuck inside our underwear, or—"

  "I won't fight it."

  "What?" I regretted my harsh tone, but she had interrupted me at a special moment and I was piqued.

  "I won't fight it," she babbled on, cutting me off rudely now as he moved her to gibbering hysteria in a last-ditch effort to thwart me. "I'll try to make it good for you—but—but please don't hurt me!"

  Clearly she had wanted me all along, but this was pathetic and I could stand her hell-spawned theatrics no longer.

  "What is my undersin against the scale of your wrong?" I demanded of her, flecks of sp
ittle spackling her face. "Your dying generations at their wrong? What have platoons ever left for history? You provide references? So! Then you also provide frames!"

  She had begun hyperventilating even before I finished these last Zen koans. Now, even while my eyes slid south again to the nooks and crannies of her exposed womanness, a quick-streaming arc of urine spurted down the inside of one thigh as her bladder emptied reflexively.

  Watching Ursula's pee drip into the rose-patterned carpet, I nodded approval. My voice sounded small and exhausted when I said, "Good... that means he's gone now. Left in a hurry, too, by God!"

  At this, fear and revulsion finally overloaded her synapses: As if finally resigned to her awful guilt and complicity, she did not even cry out, but—brave little trooper!—only spasmed a few times like a gut-hooked fish and passed out without a whimper.

  Then, with tears of mingled joy and compassion streaming down my cheeks, I removed the tube of epoxy from my pocket and quickly, methodically sealed all of her openings, keeping the Beast far hence that's foe to man.

  ▼

  My black nightslime, under moon's sear visage, chokes wildlife still left to create.

  Wings droop with my dumbshow intent.

  I lower all-peering eyes before clouds not manufactured.

  I am beneath your scorn, and so, beyond.

  I am Inframan.

  Leavings by Kathe Koja

  "Distinctive" is the single word most readers would use to describe the style of Kathe Koja. She recently won a Bram Stoker Award in the First Novel category for The Cipher, and is regarded by many to be a talent to be watched. Her short fiction has begun appearing in many magazines and anthologies over the last few years with increasing frequency. While her quirky, literary short-hand flavored with a dash of stream-of-consciousness recalls the American Dadaist writers of the Thirties, her voice in the genre of imaginative fiction remains unique and worthy of attention. "Leavings" is one of those strange evocations of universal experience—the one where we just can't get away from something or someone we detest.