The Myth of Falling

by Charlee Jacob

  The dualism of good and evil is a tenuously learned lesson.

  Stomp, splash, splatter, dismember, flense, behead. Blood, flesh—the privacy of bones, what becomes waste, a substance modern humanity turns away from as alien, unconnected. We endeavor to ignore what we find offensive.

  Violence, hatred, sex out-of-control, slash, gouge, the monster a baby demanding instant gratification without responsibility, the victim the symbol of the beast’s vindication from needing to compete for satisfaction. Both beauty and beast share a crisis of identity.

  Peeled to stinking cheese cancerous thrall all that remains of reason, catatonic slutdom sniffed out by iron tigers, stripes alternating streams of omen and ichor. Flesh-eating, gram-positive, ecumenical. Stained lifeless among the fall of secrets even I don’t know… and they’re MINE, deformed among wolves, defamed by jackals.

  Death. Death. Death. The only image we all understand. Trap, annihilation, absolution.

  Principals of ambivalence, we engage to survive, we disengage to survive. Either way we’re in denial. The only way to be safe is never to be born.

  Angels of vengeance, demons in fragments, castrated from the Godhead. Finally the gods themselves.

  Suffering and its imbedded memory become a religion, a definite magick weaving intricate talismans of protection, sigil spell out a refusal to have our sublimated narratives censored.

  I have suffered occasional difficulty with speech and memory for decades. This surfaced several times at conventions— during panels when my ability to talk sensibly suddenly fell apart, making me appear pretty stupid. I would be unable to recognize people I’d met only five minutes before. I couldn’t explain my work to prospective publishers. I retreated into myself. As this is a progressively debilitating problem, I seldom appear in public now. I can’t travel even short distances without the pain increasing all too often beyond endurance. I can no longer sit at a desk and the shaking fingers on the computer’s keyboard is a mess not to be easily deciphered. It wasn’t until a new diagnosis in 2004 (or 2003?) that I finally knew there were organic causes for my misery, not just (just?!) the abuse.

  Every poem and story I manage to complete now is a miracle of concentration and muscle control. I always wanted to write. The fact that I don’t make a living at it has never been an issue and is even less of one now. I don’t have anybody to please, which makes whatever I create something that would never have existed if it didn’t mean that much to me. Every word, barbarous and empowered, is pulled—hidden in the folds of my brain… out of darkness.

  R.E.M.

  The nightmare wheel turned through starlands and border- events, breaking Loa upon it before waking could commence—in gospels where coming awake meant salvation. Hazards of empty railroads long past since any train ran or jack-knifed into sensational chaos Loa had been thrown clear.

  Skeleton souls didn’t rattle but glided like dolls from song, employing tongues too blunt to translate melody. The putrid guts within such souls are an anomaly, are pure reverie, revealing what memories had been consumed and digested before sleep.

  Her dreams unwrapped toward renouncing what Loa feared to believe. That living, waking phenomena could be far worse than the mysteries told through lies silhouetting the realms of R.E.M. The colors in mischance’s rainbow leaned against walls she slept beside.

  “What if it’s the breaking that saves me? What if it’s consciousness that keeps me dumbfounded?” Loa asked.

  Worse. In the bedroom where she’d been born, set upon by roaches, rats and bats, had bled out her shattered hymen, the unexplainable menses, a heartbreaking miscarriage, Loa finally shook the mirror… revealing that she had no head. This must be why she clung to the dream-bones, no matter how warped. Here she saw, smelled, tasted a freakish world’s whirlpool, enriching those gliding skeleton souls.

  Loa now understood that she must escape, hugging the storm once through the window. Leaning into an apocalyptic flash, lightning seared her open neck, turning the jagged tip of the spinal column the shade of hot blue that the city of Sodom must have seen on their last day. The abbreviated veins and arteries in her neck warmed up enough to dribble and squirt, the bolt continuing to descend through the inside of her trunk, mixing thunder with her heart.

  Could one dream without a head, into the endless unlit streets of the unconscious? Or, as in her case perhaps, the no-conscious? There was no way to rise to the conscious level of –to that necessary realization of “I Am”—without a head. The blood in the veins (only the ego could feel those sanguine rivers of electricity)— no ego without a head, brain, mind, interaction between scanning waves and active, sensory cerebral cortex. Consciousness was the communication between these two separate areas of the brain.

  Loa somehow detected her shadow in the lightning’s flash. This shadow twitched behind her and had a phantom head. The corona of hair on it convulsed with illusions… images of evolution and rhythm, flapping effigies of despair. Her body’s attic was gone, probably stolen away by whatever rapist had taken her innocence and the stillborn infant awash in secrets. Loa’s ego had taken up residence in the shade’s basement.

  In essence: a head, its shape a witness to the other’s annihilation, projection of apparitions in undisciplined sheet of rain. Martyrs of dangling dimensions, this abstract fugitive would dream forever—of a daughter who might have been her (“I Am.”), HER pious plunge into immortality. But… termination along the disturbed fringe. No daughter to be sheltered, one day to rectify the insults of Loa’s history. Loa’s humility was yet divine—diverged and converged congenitally.

  The thunder engraved a shrieking talisman on her heart.

  “What realms of R.E.M. have been possible?” Loa asked. How could she have spoken it?

  Rapid Eidolon Movement.

  (“Limbo!” cried an insane butterfly.)

  He’d sawed off her head but left her body behind on the mattress stained in hell. He also lived in the house. Did he come down from time to time to look at it, wondering why it didn’t decay? Did he lie down with it, probably on top RAPID, and make the motions EIDOLON of unblemished love?

  Loa went down the alley, past fences of bundled wooden nerves, to the street where lamps sprayed lavender light through circles of downpour. Turning the corner, she found she’d retuned to the house. She hid in the bushes, her shadow lifting the redundant head to peek between indigo/vertigo heads.

  The final nightmare sat on the sofa, trousers open, calloused hands grinding meat by the pound from a strange appendage. The movements were mechanical, neither desire, nor gracelessness employed.

  He had no head.

  (The insane butterfly laughed gleefully. “Limbo Loa Now!”)

  She began feeling pity, both of them merely leftovers from a second-hand creator. Could they have been intended to be together? I AM…

  She noticed he lacked a shadow. Lights and wires were plainly visible—by her head in contradictory’s dungeon—like tinsel stuffing the opening between his shoulders. A robot?

  A whole man bustled into the living room, wearing only an apron. He used an electro-static duster of Dodo feathers to clean a delicate arrangement on the coffee table. Amid nightshade leaves and delicate oleander flowers he set Loa’s head on an incomplete term female fetus. The tiny arms and legs were fused together, resembling wings.

  Loa’s eidolon head stretched back her illusion of mouth and tried to scream. The shadow thrashed, shivering itself from black to white.

  Mackerel flesh bubbled as the baby rocked on its bottom, under the ponderous weight of its mother’s head. Was it trying to wriggle free?

  It gestured one wing-like, fused meat limb toward the part in the window and the dark curtains where Loa stood, hiding.

  “I am!” declared the insane butterfly. “You’re not!”

  ONE NIGHT, REACHING FOR BOTTOM

  Oh shit, I don’t know… not a fuckin’ clue. I been here before. I couldn’t have gotten myself this fuckin’ turned around… Woods
. But the sound of traffic. Oughta be that-a-way, the highway… not far. Blood on my clothes… mine?

  (Spot her jogging in the park. Now that’s just plain dumb, you ask me. Asking for it. Most folks don’t believe you when you try to explain that there really is a type of gal that’s looking for it. Out after dark alone in the metro-jungle, titties bouncing in the tight tee- shirt. Well-defined nipples. She’s wet with perspiration. Do ladies sweat in their panties? Yeah, lubes ’em right up. She’s got looks but not one lick of sense.)

  (Right now I got my own bottomless pit of a mind. Suspect I done this before. Well, darkness reveals the frightened and the dead. Slack flesh, sometimes bones. I hear their screams whether or not they got time to make any noise. What can I say? It’s a gift.)

  (She’s listening to music—means she’s that much less aware of what’s going on around her. Black-Eyed Peas, I think. ALL THAT JUNK ALL THAT JUNK… HER TRUNK, UH HUH. I know what to do with that trunk-junk, bitch. Bodacious bunk that shivers out of her crunk.)

  (Zoom! Run her down with my car, just hard enough to knock her off her feet. Punch her a couple times, make sure she’s out. With that sheen of sweat, her skin steams in the night. Glowing from the back seat and fogging up the windows. I thought that only happened in the fuckin’ movies.)

  (Yeah YOU. You were asking for it, bitch. Might as well be wearing silk shorts with a bull’s-eye on ’em. And the crease of your ass is sweating, too. You lubed up for me, honey?)

  (I slip into the perfect niche for what I am. White male, thirty-four years old, from a dysfunctional family although I have a better than average I.Q. Evil abuse as a kid. Started fires, tortured animals, really got into porn and drugs early. Even the army kicked me out. Seems I’m definitely an army of one. I could’ve been the soul of the Redeemer. I might’ve been the heart of the Redeemer. Fuck… I might’ve held the conscience of the world.)

  (Instead I’ve got no soul, no heart, no conscience.)

  (A few very young faces peer out at me from the core of my darkness. I didn’t do them because I set out to. If only they didn’t make themselves so damned available. Made me really fuckin’ ill. Really prefer the fully-developed chicks. But it’s like arriving late to the movie rental place on Saturday night. You take what you can get.)

  (I put my trunk-junk woman with the wet ass-crack under a tree. Rage turns everything white. Blood all over me. My face is lubed.)

  (Don’t hear ’em as I’m surrounded. How did they find her so fast? I’ve never been that careless, have I? Shit! Fuck! What happened? I peer ’neath my shirt, pat my jeans down. She must’ve put up a helluva struggle. At least part of this gooey red mess is mine. Or maybe running through the park woods, an amnesiac without the presence of mind just to return to his car. Tree branches and thorny vines give me the sort of beating I used to get back home among the beasts.)

  (They cuff me so I can’t fight. Now I’m dragged back to the tree. The woman leans on the hood of my car, talking to a guy I’m sure I know. She laughs at a joke he tells as they sip coffee.)

  “There’s Belfort now,” he says to her as the others bring me up. “What do think, Agent Teal?”

  (She’s disheveled, big bruise blooming on her jaw with others around both eyes. She wears a jacket over her shredded tee- shirt. All the jackets have F.B.I. insignia on them. F.B.I.? What are they doing here?)

  She chuckles though her expression’s grim. “I think this new technique for profilers needs a lot of work. I warned you that it could cause susceptible agents role-playing serial Subs to suffer breakdowns. We just see too much, all the time.”

  “There he goes,” commented the man drinking coffee with her.

  I collapse into the arms of the agents around me. The night’s bottomless as my damnation rushes up to show me the faces, frightened and dead. Mine, in the rage that blinds and binds me.

  MAKING DEMANDS

  Her face remained at all times behind her harrow hair. One glance and I was grateful for this.

  It was an ordinary night. The little frost shrank under the light from half a moon. Across the alley wind chimes barely sighed as neighborhood dogs rose up to walk on two legs.

  I felt a rumbling between my bones. Requisite belly-mares.

  “Please,” I whispered, “No more meat.”

  She passed (white what trailing…?) before the scarred mirror hanging in the room I’d been given, more glass than silver in the poor reflection. I was terrified the way a child is frightened. I grabbed parts of myself and hung on. Felt heat and liquid—melted mercury quickening between my fingers. Yet I’d summoned her.

  Second thoughts…

  Ever walk on a carpet that has suddenly frozen to the floor? The walls wept from expressions rendered in stains left behind, one hundred and fifty years of obscene transgression. Had the ceiling unraveled, opening it to chaos?

  I could have fainted. I might have run, right through plate glass. Instead I squeezed my crotch to a dissolve to scent carnations and dry ice obfuscations.

  I wished her spirit would forget my name. I wished she’d never found me, however it is they find the text of prayers.

  I wished she’d never invented me.

  The windows magnified every crystal she bled. The light she sucked dry from hallway wells and kitchen shadows.

  She came, mincing her teeth the way cats do while hunting. The flower stem-shaped fingers traced her phosphorous demand sat the cairn base of my spine. One by one the vertebrae fell like dominoes.

  There was no such thing as an ordinary night.

  JASMINE

  Elias didn’t know Siam anymore. Apparently he never had.

  Doors opened and closed on spirited stitches in time. Years, once ivory, showed darkness through cracks and tumors. The jasmine garden through which they made a pilgrimage after panther fever- claw sex, suffused with brilliant hollows and holograms of oblivion’s reveries… now irrigated the dying desert with useless stink-stains of blood. Carmine static chattered, the tatters remaining of the moon and its peach pustular shadow swinging from shotgun blasts at close range. Both barrels let go left Elias with little to remember his wife with. Especially as he intended to burn all of her photographs that night.

  How had she managed to twist him so much? Their baby was near them, no longer crying because of the noise… the gunshots had really terrified him… but because he wanted his fleshy cup of milk.

  Elias was going to take Clint, even if he didn’t know if the boy was his. Possession was nine-tenths of the law. But how had he ended up this way?

  Siam entered the room, picked up Clint, guiding his toothless lips to her breast.

  Then who was this other one? The castle of brain matter and lung pies hanging like a sleeping bat from the ceiling, striped with a specter of past deceitful smiles? Prior to pulling the trigger, he believed he’d witnessed the dominion of her final scream holding court among exploding cunt-ladies-in-waiting, wanton nuns of tapeworm-stitched rectums, and warrior monks singing deflowering lyrics out of yeast-encrusted dick holes after jealous lords ordered them beheaded .

  The infant sucked, a delighted leech. She patted Clint until he burped, turning him so he coughed up on Elias. Her husband cursed her with a thousand names for whores.

  “I don’t know how you did this, who SHE is… or WAS, but let me out of this mess!”

  Elias was naked, on his back, legs bent out at the knees, ankles and wrists fastened behind him. His head rested in the dead woman’s crotch. Her thighs were wrapped around his neck, constricted at the stench of nearly combustible evacuation, methane mephitic. His own torso was trussed in entrails, slippery as ordure eels, amid gunpowder gore and hex-sputum on the rank shroud of the expensive bedspread.

  Elias moved his eyes: left, right. Where was the baby? Elias had just seen him there. Had his mother done something to Clint?

  “Siam!”

  The thighs tightened slightly around his neck. The victim’s sagging belly gurgled with the corpse readjusting to base m
atter’s lust for gravity. The thighs, white as jasmine and blotchy with wilting pink mimosa, tightened again. Starbursts, Elias groaned as he came.

  Downstairs, outside, in his swinging crib, Clint drew someone’s attention.

  “David, what are you doing out here?”

  Elias recognized his law partner’s voice. He tried to cry out, “His name’s not David!”

  Why didn’t he cry for help?

  “Where’s your mommy, David? He hasn’t hurt her again, has he?”

  The legs squeezed again, unwound titanic farts and… what was that next sound? Overhead, a jiggling glissade startled him. The sleeping bat on the ceiling came alive, realigning itself like strings of prowling gristle dreams. Elias squinted, blinking as silt loosened from its curdled belfry to strike his face. And what dribbled was in ecstatic abundance. Disgusting. He’d been trying to keep from retching because he feared that—bound in the awkward way that he was—Elias would surely aspirate his own vomit into his lungs and die.

  Instead he came again.

  Elias heard a key in the front door. He cried out, “Siam, are you all right?”

  (Wait… wasn’t he on the bed in a demonic game of Organ Meat Twister?)

  “Help!” No answer. The footsteps on the stairs faded, his orgasms sickly overwhelming.

  The door to the room opened. Elias watched in wonder, with slowly diminishing oxygen supply, as a younger Elias carried in a younger Siam. Wedding day.