s
NAME OR FORM, A DREAM
A distant future unfurls before me. The shiny kind you imagine because you've seen films of it. Silver forms soaring into the sky, sleek and clean, without fingerprints. Sloped feminine-like devices, ultra-quick everything. As I stand there admiring the traffic and buildings, I think... I know... deep down... the future is empathic, cloaked in a gentle firmness. Strength through compassion and decency, honest communication soul to soul. We will be fair and kind with one another. And these qualities will be prized above all.
But hot steam rolls in, then a shattering and falling. Faceless male beings have entered, growing bigger as they breathe and hack away at it all. Jagged, razor-sharp mirrored bits, every ideal we've ever built on, scatter and radiate outwards into obscurity, past the point of retrieval. Of rebuilding from the broken. The society we built avalanches down within seconds. It's always easier to destroy than to build. Remember that.
Right before my eyes, I know we're reverting back to before, when physical strength was prized above emotional strength. When women were “little women” and men ruled the world. Just because they were bigger and stronger. Because they attained their initial positions, their head start in civilization, through force and intimidation.
My world closes dark, suffocates and seethes. I can't see a way forward. I am not seen. Valued...
A glamorous woman under a spotlight in a silver dress, with short, platinum blonde hair delicately curled under and over. Pink lipstick, and long, slim, gleaming arms. A quintessential bombshell. Feminine in look, yet mask-like because of the adornments. And overtly masculine in her projection of it. Flagrantly in your face. She reaches slowly bit by bit into a thick, black swamp, moving her arms round and round in slow-motion, wide sweeps, searching for the thing she never had, but knows she should have. Doesn't know its name or form. Only that it's the missing piece that completes her.
BEAT HIM
In times past, when I've been afraid, I've mustered my strength and moved forward with a plan. But the fear of the past is different from the one I feel now. The fear of the past was based on survival, scraping by, trying to get a foothold on a ladder upwards and onwards. Not the kind that I feel now, which is fear for loved ones, for my life as I know it. Ours.
I don't know how to approach this. I want to change myself, evolve. Change from observing and inwardly complaining to doing something. But I'm afraid. Should I involve Jamie somehow? At least tell him? What about my mother and his parents? What happens to them if I'm discovered to be the one who told. I hate that Dr. M is the one who planted these thoughts within me. No, he didn't plant them, but gave it that first drink of water. That first knowledge that perhaps I could actually do something. Should.
Should I contact a journalist anonymously? There would be no guarantee they would report my story and what I know. I sense the media is controlled or at least heavily influenced by the government. The older I get the more I see how prominent media is in shaping us, our paths. The movies, video games, stories, news, signs, marketing and advertising. How most of it is a form of programming, pushing us in the direction the government and industry want us to go towards. Of course, we have free choice, free thinking. But really only if we know we are being programmed in the first place. Only if we care at all. Only then do we have a chance to consciously choose to believe or think differently. How do I get in touch with media that thinks differently? Everything seems censored, controlled. Stifled and stamped down. The truths are fires put out with a heavy blanket before they spread. Nothing can grow.
We say we are lucky, so very lucky. Lucky to have a government that cares. Lucky that even though we are censored and monitored, we are not led by people who are hot headed and focused on the short term, like the violent hot land where many families don't have jobs and the majority live with technology from many decades ago. Women there cannot work. Hordes of males have nothing to do but focus their anger and hostilities on each other, not the rulers hiding away in air conditioned castles, bringing forward false symbols to absorb the blame. The shame of having nothing, not even respect, waits impatiently to be transferred to others through blind rage. We are told our land is on the cusp of showing the world our greatness, that everything the government does is for the best, our sake.
I want to fly forward in time and see the consequences of my decisions laid out before me. The wandering, winding patterns of blood bleeding from each action.
I watch Jamie as he fixes his morning coffee and ponder, ponder. Endlessly in a round and round purgatory carousel. He chats about our Sun Temple Priest and his new alliance with our city's politicians. The priest's quest for influence is unquenchable. Little does he know he can't control all of us, like he wishes.
I approach from behind and hold Jamie still. His hands rest on the cup, waiting and watching. The overhead light blesses us with its radiance. My fingers reach over and pull his hands away as I pull him down onto the cool, stone kitchen floor that was mined from mountains thousands of years old. Fascination, questioning and awe fill his eyes as they watch me intently. He's taken off guard by my animal extinct, he didn't know. I want to forget my situation, force myself through my thoughts so I force myself onto him where I can reach in and change him instead of changing myself. I pin him down. The cold floor shocks and awakens our bodies, intensifies, making us savor the warmth between us as we wrangle out of our clothing. I'm on top, my hair falling around him in a confessional veil, and I devour his soft, pink mouth and smooth, slack neck. Then his hard chest and that thin trail of hair downwards. We are a sensual scene of flesh-toned limbs and curving bodies lit under the spotlight, the bright light illuminating every unspoken gesture, every sigh, every crescent moon shadow. I take total control when I mount him and pause, look him in the eye and see him wavering between surprise and ecstasy, delicate wings of lashes fluttering open and closed. He lets himself be taken and changed, that's how he is. He enters and flows with the moment, wherever that may take him. I'm close to dissolving, following him down the stream to that place where everything amplifies then narrows to the singular, that silent sound wave between our bodies. I don't really want to change. I say I do, but I'm blocked by fear, protective instinct. I want to remain unconscious, close my eyes to it all because I know if I open them I'll be changed. Take me to the sun, burn me into him. Let me forget.
The boy-man on the table has darker, olive-toned skin with large, almond eyes. His face is soft and rounded even though he's not overweight. His nose is flat and wide, and his lips are sensual, generous, fleshy. There's a noble, old wisdom about him even though he's only in his late teens. It emanates from him in invisible volutions, I don't know how to describe it or why I know it. His face or whatever emanates from him tells a story of acceptance, a solid core in his soul no matter where he is. His eyes foretell a sober truth. They tell of having seen, having known, without the acid of bitterness. Life was taken from him too soon.
I'm shocked when I learn that he most likely overdosed on pain medication. How could wisdom allow himself to take his life prematurely and purposely.
The six toes on each foot and smaller lungs are his only physical defects. His insides are crystal clear, vibrant. No hardening. I remember the stocky man along the river, repeating his odd mantra. How I had seen him before on this metal table. And I wonder if there are copies of this wise man, boy really, wandering the city. I would ask him, why, why, why. What was so profoundly sad that wisdom couldn't overcome it? There was no sentry in his life to stop him.
Dr. M taps on the man's heart twice then pauses while giving me a private look. I know what that means. I turn away, preferring to continue the anonymity between us. I want to ignore him, hurt him the way he hurt me. But I know that's immature. I know I'll never be able to beat him.
OUR SOULS
He begins to walk down the block when he sees me approaching the electronics store, and I follow amidst the city crowds. There's something humiliating about following at
a distance though the logical side of me knows it's not meant to shame, it's just a way to be discreet. I watch his olive-green mask bobbing amongst the crowd, I follow his chess game.
He enters a building called “Cyclops”. I'm close behind and the ticket agent says he's paid for me. I hear echoes of sinister laughing and cackling reverberating from the rest of the building. I'm about to enter a nightmare.
The first room is a fun room filled with mirrors, stretching my face vertically, making my forehead and chin long enough to touch the ceiling and floor. Old fashioned fun. I find his disfigured face facing mine in a mirror.
“We'll never be taped here,” he says. “We should meet here next time.” I merely nod my giant, lanky, aww-shucks face with an empty, inchoate expression. I walk into the next room where our faces are wide and flabby with a third eye on our forehead. I want him to follow me for once.
“What do you know about clones?” I ask.
He considers the question, his eyes rolling back and forth as he concocts an answer. Everything is exaggerated under the glare of these distorted mirrors.
I continue as I watch him carefully, “I saw one the other night. It was one of the men we've worked on, one of the clean ones, without dust atrophy.”
His eyebrows raise in surprise a tad then he remembers himself so they lower to their controlled pose. It's microscopic, but I catch it.
“That must be a coincidence, he must've had a twin or brother,” he pauses. “I don't know anything about clones, just the dust... what it does.” He looks straight in the mirror of my third eye. “I don't think the technology exists for it.”
I turn and enter the next room where transparent images of old witches float around us, spraying a mist that smells of old cobwebs and simulated death, sulfur and rotten eggs. If the scent was of real death people would run from this room instead of being entertained by it.
We stand facing each other under a canopy of flying, swirling witches cackling down on us like omniscient gods.
“Have you thought about telling?” He asks.
“No, I haven't.”
“What about society?”
“No, I don't care.”
“That's hard to believe.”
“You don't know me. Why would you find that hard to believe?”
“I just thought... you people... stick together.”
“I'm not a stereotype. The poor are people too. Just like you.”
“I didn't mean that... just thought you'd care.” He looks down, looking even more middle-aged in his guilty posture. He's used to talking about us, the other, in a certain way that's acceptable in his strata. He hasn't thought about changing his language for me.
“Where do you live?”
He's uncomfortable. Doesn't want to answer or doesn't know if he should splinter the truth. “In the country, but close to the city.”
“Where there's clean air. How many children do you have?”
He considers his answer. “Two.”
“What's your name?” I want him to feel naked and exposed.
He says nothing for a while. “Larren. Mavy.”
“Do you think you're doing good by pushing me to tell? Is that your good deed for the year?”
He's silent.
“Your kind... you may have good intentions, but it's at my risk. Your kind doesn't own the rest of us.”
“Eloisa,” he interrupts. He knows my name. I thought he didn't, but of course he does. I'm caught off guard and vulnerable. “How do you think the slaves were freed?”
I'm dumbstruck.
“Some in the power class helped them. That's how it accelerated. Whether or not you like it.”
I begin to say something indignant but he interrupts me, holds his hand up, “I'm not saying you're a slave. I'm telling you how the system is... It's a slow walk to freedom if no one in the power class helps.”
I'm digesting, desperately wringing meaning from his words.
“Did you know that's how it is?”
I did. But didn't. I'm confused by how things are and how I wish things would be. Can't tell the real image from the fun house image.
“If you want to help your kind...”
“Stop. Don't tell me what to do. And don't say 'your kind'. I'll make my own decision. You don't have a say. You never do.”
I turn and run out of the room, the witch swooping after me, shrieking. I run through the rest of the rooms full of decrepit skulls, half decomposed corpses, hulking monsters and cyclops', hundreds of twitchy eyeballs watching bright eyed, the ethereal spirits. I slice through this rash of horrors, their presence lingering on me and in me as I exit into the street bustling with people on their way home. Those with a regular life. There's a disconnect between me and them. What I've seen with my eyes is something they've never seen nor will. As if I live in another dimension. How little people really know. But I don't know it all either. We live at different levels of knowing and ignorance for all sorts of things. The key is to know this about ourselves.
If Larren is higher than me, who is higher than him?
Dust is partly composed of skin cells. The dust in our homes, I mean. And I wonder if a clone can be made from dust. If it's enough material to spark the fire of existence. I eye a dust tumbleweed in the corner of his room. The maid hasn't come by for a while now. For some reason, he's cancelled her services. The clump stands there pale, grayish white, fluffy, waiting - innocent in its knowledge of what it stands for.
He's in the other room rummaging in the kitchen, so I pick it up and put it in my pocket, deflating its air and lofty presence into something matted and flat. I know it's odd and I'll never be able to explain the impulse. I want to save a part of him for myself. And I'll do the same for mother, I'll look for a tumbleweed under her bed to be sure it's primarily her and not me. I'll put the flattened lint in individual, sealable bags and tuck them away in a drawer or under my mattress. It's the strangest thing, I know, but it's a way to preserve, to think of the unbelievable. A phantasm of the flesh, fantasies of infinity.
We hold hands as we leave my apartment at dusk and walk down the street, forming a gloppy mass of hands with our gloves. We both wear heavy-duty masks that Jamie has bought for us and my mother. It's a world of difference and perhaps it's mostly psychological, but the air smells fresher. The smell of mother's baking bread clouds around us and on our jackets before being swept away by the light breeze. We head towards a bar where we'll meet his best friend and Madlon, who are a couple now. He swings my hand happily, like a carefree child. I'm the steady, stoic one. The hundred-year-old tree standing solid, whose trailing, corded roots dig deep into damp earth, underneath to the core.
He stops abruptly and takes off his mask. I ask, “What are you doing? You should leave it on, it's dangerous.” He shrugs and continues walking, this time arm in arm with me. I'm tense about the mask. He doesn't know how bad exposure really is, sometimes he doesn't take what I say seriously, thinks I'm too cautious.
He whispers into the ear piece of my mask, which is a thin, steel filter with small perforations. “I want to tell you something,” he says in a lowered voice.
I nod.
“I think the government isn't what it seems.”
I turn to look at him. If he could see the expression on my face. But he can only see the mask, it's circular, metal, shaded goggles and straight line of a mouth piece, a cyborg face. He gently turns my head back so he can speak into my ear piece again.
“I think they listen in on conversations on the street, everywhere.”
I turn my head again then turn my head forward to hear more.
“That's why I have to whisper. I think they use propaganda and media to manipulate us. They have a plan for all of us, to keep us down, uninformed.”
“How do you know? Is that why you leave sometimes?” I ask loudly so he can hear me through the mask.
“I've just heard things, read things.” He's not ready to tell me everything yet.
I nod my head
and turn to him. My heart breaks bit by bit, cracks slowly forming on a mirror I'm looking into. I don't know what to say. Is this the time to tell him? I'm on a crumbling crest about to fall into an abyss. But I hold myself back out of fear, relieved the mask covers my face. “I can see that, I know what you mean.” It's all I can say to show support without disclosing anything.
He turns to my ear piece. “Shhh, don't say anymore.”
We continue walking. Him perhaps thinking of what else to say, how to close that up, especially as we approach the bar. Me deciphering what he knows and doesn't know, what is real and what is paranoia. Searching for what he's learned and how, untying knot after knot to straighten the string of truth. If he's right, we can't talk about it in any external place. Where is it safe? Cyclops? The bar is getting closer. How do we switch this off and become social and light with our friends when this hangs over us?
Free Beast Page 8
