Paunch has his doggy mouth open wide, lips pulled into a snarl, teeth sharp and eager. Ready to eat my hand down to a stump, he springs from lunge to leap. Airborne, his doggy eyes go wide and his little paws futilely start to backpedal. His fur raises fright-wig-style and he looks like an overgrown flying porcupine. Something is scaring him out his doggy wits. Can he see what I see? I’ve heard that animals have an uncanny intuition about these things. Earthquakes, ghosts, danger. But can Paunch actually see my hallucination? It’s in my head. Imagined, not real, not even imminently real. It’s not about to happen, it is happening and it’s doing so in my skull apart from the world. Apart from the animal kingdom.
Regardless, Paunch, yelping and yipping, suddenly wants nothing to do with me, but alas, he is moving through the air much too fast to stop. His snout slams into my palm. I feel nothing, but Paunch’s body goes rigid and hangs frozen in midair. It begins to buck and shake and slowly disappear into my hand.
As before, the backside of the hand is unbreached. When I lean forward and peer around for a better look at the front, the palm has become that gaping, endless void and it’s sucking Paunch down. I try to pull my arm away, but it’s locked up. Like always the little bastard gives me no leeway. The world has completely fuzzed and the hand-trick freak-out is in full effect, except this time it’s not just me caught in the maelstrom, it’s me and Paunch. Well, me and what’s left of Paunch. His hind doggy legs kick and kick and his tail quivers, pulled down low with fear. Just before his entirety is swallowed up, his legs become still and his doggy tail droops limp. The remainder of Paunch goes in dead and sick, sick, sick, I become jelly.
My hand shoots skyward, arching and contorting, leaving me to dangle and wait it out. I feel my heart sprout gnarled, evil thorns when I think that I have just killed a dog. Yeah right. In the real world good old Paunch is probably gnawing on me, effortlessly subduing me while Officer Lumpy makes ready to haul me in. All of this has to be an extremely detailed, realistic hallucination. And I thought things were intense at the library. This is by far the worst freak-out ever. My palm ate a dog?
The world swirls and swells and my dream centers start vomiting up crazy shit. I am no longer a man, I am spiders and leaves, pollen and semen. I am heat. I am that ecstatic tingle at the base of your spine, the bubbling fluid that licks your brain into action. I am everything and nothing. I am Paunch turned inside out, dog organs steaming and unhinging, structured mass becoming pulp and blood and shit. I am emotion gone sour, yellow and thick, drunk down, corruption, curdled, dried-up systems. I am defeat. I am gone.
From out of the black, Annabelle comes raging across my mindscape, red demon, naked from the waist up, breasts on fire, riding a wild-eyed, panicky Paunch. She digs her nails into his hide and lets out a vicious peal of laughter. Paunch bucks and leaps and snaps at the air. Releasing her grip and leaning forward, Annabelle seizes Paunch’s snout. She begins to work her fingers into the crevices between his gums and his lips. With a terrible ripping sound she begins to pull and pull and pull. Rivers of blood and flesh travel down her arms and her stomach. Paunch whines and shakes, his skinless head, now a bloody maze of tendons and sinewy muscle mass, looks slick, streamlined, feral, alien.
“Come on, Charles!” screams Annabelle, breathy, blood speckling her chin. “All of this could be yours!” She pushes off Paunch, who barrel rolls out of sight.
Arms outstretched, bosom gored and heaving, nipples pointed and stiff like fleshy little knives, Annabelle floats within the center of my mind’s eye. She gives a little twirl and in an instant she is clean, unbloodied, wearing her hallmark uniform. This time the T-shirt says Got Death?
Images fracture and fragment.
Inner vision becomes a television test pattern accompanied by a long, drawn-out beep.
White.
“Hands up high!”
I flicker back into reality and see Officer Lumpy ten, fifteen feet ahead, gun drawn, visibly pissed.
“Both hands up! Now!”
To my surprise I am not on the ground being incapacitated by a police dog. I am not getting mauled or beat down with Lumpy’s nightstick. Instead I am standing, my left arm raised high, the bastard hand limp, seemingly finished. My right arm dangles and my body sways, dead weight, suspended by my upraised left arm. Officer Lumpy is about to shout again, but my brain snaps to it and I manage to raise my right arm. Quasi-equilibrium is achieved.
“Paunch?” Officer Lumpy looks about.
“Paunch!” Again, with force.
He continues to worry about his dog when my left arm takes control and lowers itself. Working in tandem, my left hand goes into stop-sign formation. Uh-oh. By the time the arm is fully extended and my palm fully open, Lumpy takes notice and screams at me to put it back in the air. I try. I can’t.
“Hands up or I will shoot you in the fucking head!”
The flesh of my palm explodes outward like before. Here we go again. Lumpy cocks his head to the side and squints. Can he see my hallucination? No way. And come to think of it, where is Paunch? Did my palm really suck him down? No. No way. But here we are, no Paunch in sight, and Lumpy going speechless, mouth hanging open, eyes widening with horrible comprehension. He can see it. Goddamn shit, he can see my…
Lightening quick, a bolt of brown and red shoots from the hole in my hand. It speeds through the air and strikes Lumpy, knocking him to the ground. I want to move or run or something but my asshole of a hand holds its ground and keeps me locked in place. Lumpy gets up fast, a cloud of dust rising around him, an audible sigh of relief escaping from his lips. Apparently he’s okay.
Alleviation spreads across his face like a sunrise in fast forward. In the span of a second, that bright relief darkens as he realizes that he has dropped his gun. Scared, he eyeballs me. From his core: vulnerability, fragility, an air of sweetness and for a moment, Officer Lumpy seems decent. I can almost see the child, the family man, the human being inside. Fear strips away that ugly power and authority. There is a semblance of compassion flickering behind his eyes and if ever there was a time to run it’s now. Unfortunately, my gimp hand isn’t having it.
By the time Lumpy recovers his gun, everything about him changes. Everything goes rigid and tough. Now, gun in hand, he’s the same asshole that thunked me on the head with a flashlight. He’s the same asshole and already the screaming begins:
“Stay right there, motherfucker!”
Careful, he keeps his eyes on me as he edges closer— investigative cop-walk—to the brown and red thing that dropped him. “What the fuck?”
We both figure things out at about the same time.
I am dizzy with awe, nauseated, and swallowing back lumps while Lumpy gives a little shudder and drops his gun for the second time. He falls to his knees and buries his face into Paunch’s tattered, lifeless carcass.
There’s a nasty ball of discomfort gathering in my throat. Tears muscle their way past my eyes and again I try to make a run for it. Again, the hand keeps me in place. Officer Lumpy sobs into his mangled dog, affording us a minute of peace. While he works it out, choked up with the past, with memory and mourning, I spend the time divided, thoughts jumping between escape and self. Run, run, run. What am I? How am I going to get out of here? Has God finally taken notice? A reward? A curse? I have got to get out of here. I am powerful? Deadly? I ate a fucking dog with my palm! My palm. My undifferentiated palm. Run!
Officer Lumpy sits up, wipes his face and then looks over at me. We lock eyes. At once I am flooded with guilt. I didn’t mean to kill the man’s dog. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t, yet Lumpy isn’t looking at me like I’m a worthless drug addict anymore. Instead he’s looking at me as if I have killed his only child. He’s looking at me as if I’ve killed his only child and eaten its head. I plead forgiveness with a doleful stare, my heart visible through my pupils.
Waves of remorse gather in a sorry, steady thump and blast from my eye sockets. Lumpy receives this, and at first I think he understands. Throug
h the billowy white sorrow collecting at the base of his grieving deliberation I think I can see the birth of empathy. I think I can see pity. I think I can see sympathy.
I think and that’s always my problem, for during this private, sad, stare-full moment my hand eases up and body control returns.
I am free.
But damn me, I think and I think and I think and here I am still thinking that this pig cop will find it in his heart to forgive me for allowing my palm to swallow and kill his dog.
Here I am watching and thinking instead of running.
Here I am watching sorrow turn to exasperation within Lumpy’s eyes.
Here I am watching him jump to his feet, flush with anger.
Here I am watching this pig pick up his gun and point it at me.
Here I am watching his eyes loop and twist crazily.
Here I am watching Lumpy come apart from the inside out.
Here I am watching him pull the trigger over and over again.
Here I am, chest, stomach and upper-right thigh exploding. Here I am white-hot as bullets tear through flesh and bone. Here I am falling backward in slow motion, the cool night air kissing my wounds and seeping through the wet, sucking bullet holes.
Here I am spinning, climbing, brain racing through the nothing images of my nothing life.
Here I am unborn.
Here I am almost happy.
Here I am getting lost in Annabelle’s crazy eye chasms.
Here I am everything I was meant to be.
Here I am dead.
Chapter Five
Inklings: The Glorious Promise of Destruction
Everything is blue, deep dark blue and angular, boxy, pixilated, like fragmented midnight. Too blue, in-my-head blue, nothing-like-it-on-earth blue, and I guess I must be dreaming, sleeping, lost inside. No matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to get my bearings. This frustrates me to no end and I attempt to shake myself awake. Commotion ensues, the blue rolls like a digital wave, like a television screen with no vertical hold, but my body, my head, is unresponsive. I can’t seem to open my eyes.
Out of nowhere, sound: “At last.” The words stutter, breathy, infinite.
Annabelle?
In affirmative response: “Char-lie?” Singsongy, slow, low sample rate, stretched to its phonetic limit.
I try my eyes again and again and again. Nothing, save for the limitless, fractured cerulean.
“Charles?” Annabelle’s voice continues to resound in my head.
I decide to play along. “What?”
“Get with it,” she commands.
“Huh?”
“Stop trying to wake up. You’re not sleeping.”
“I can’t open my eyes,” I protest.
“They’re not closed.”
They’re not closed?
Motherfucker, she’s right. They’re not closed. This isn’t a dream.
All of this broken blue is real?
I try to blink. Nothing. Ever-stare. Struggling to close my eyes.
I try to look around and everything seems to shift as the blue surges with movement. I look up, I look down and again everything shifts. My eyes are most definitely open and they are actively obeying my commands, but it’s hard to tell because there is nothing to see, save for this endless blue. And if they are really open, how come they don’t sting or burn or dry out? If they’re really open, what happened to Officer Lumpy and Paunch’s corpse and the mini forest? If they’re really open, where the hell am I?
Trapped.
(Where?)
Electric sky. A video game gone bad. An Atari universe.
(Where?)
I am nowhere.
“No,” Annabelle’s voice rings out, metallic. “You are everywhere.”
I implore my eyes to get right, to align the pixels, to compose and bring the world into focus. No dice. Fractals in motion. Nebulous swells of starlike static. But then an idea, a bit of sense, mind bloom, realization, as confused thought unfurls, opening like a flower: I am floating. I am weightless, lost, dangling blue-dead in this digitized expanse of outer space.
But no.
I can breathe. I feel alive.
Annabelle giggles, “Dream on, Dead Boy.”
I remember Lumpy’s bullets, the heat, the strange, good feeling that I was dead. My prayers answered, my father calling me home, each bullet a benediction, a fast, hot nail crucifying me, saving me. This was the moment I had been waiting for all my life. And for a millisecond, right before the blue, I felt complete. I felt meaning. I felt love. I felt death and it was everything I ever dreamed it could be. In that one glorious millisecond I was free, I had escaped the drudgery of mankind.
Bye, bye TV (evil addiction).
Bye, bye food.
Bye, bye Information Superhighway.
Bye, bye defecation.
Bye, bye CPUs (you all-consuming soul suckers you).
Bye, bye human congestion, ambition, progress, commercialization.
I am no longer a product.
I am whole.
I am free.
Finally, differentiated in the only way that matters. Not becoming one with another slimy, smelly, fleshy humanoid. Not forming soft-tissued organs. Not procreating and becoming a fully realized biological system. Transcendence. More than skin. More than blood. I am now one with the almighty. I am above greed and fear and inadequacy. I am reborn.
Or so I thought (hoped).
Yep, for a second there I thought I had escaped.
But no.
I am not free.
No.
I am not dead.
No.
I can’t be.
How can I be?
Here I am thinking the same old idiot thoughts I have always thunk. Escaped? Escaped to where? To the fucked-up recesses of my squishy little brain?
No, I am not dead, I can’t be, because this isn’t heaven. This isn’t god.
Back in the real world I must be lying mute, a line of drool for a mouth, hooked up to a whirring, whizzing bank of artificial respirators. Back in the real world there must be thousands of snaking tubes and electrodes looping in and out of me, keeping me alive.
Will somebody unplug me, please?
Somebody get this artifice out of my body. Stop it from seeping into my head and digitizing my coma fever dreams.
Dear lord, I cannot believe this. Lumpy shot the fuck out of me and here I am still alive. Please kill me. Let me go.
“Relax, Charles, you’re deader than dead,” Annabelle chimes in.
Sure. I wish it were true. I wish more than anything that Annabelle’s words, her stupid detached voice floating crazy in my skull, were right. I wish, but I am alive. This isn’t God. No matter what she says, this isn’t God and if I really were dead, that’s where I would be, the prodigal son returned, loved, granted his just desserts.
“Get over this God thing, Charles. God is for the living. You’re dead and this is it. Welcome to heaven.”
Shut up.
Go away.
I am alive.
I don’t feel it, but I am. I feel nothing, but I am. Less than physical, but I am. I have to be, because this supposed heaven, this infinite, sketchy hard-drive blue has nothing to do with god. This is manmade. This is in my head.
Annabelle makes a tsking sound and then says, “Nope. Let me show you something.”
Suddenly I feel as though I am stretching, growing, and it’s not like I’m floating in that digitized expanse of outer space, it’s like I am that digitized expanse of outer space. There are no boundaries, no frames, no body to hold my organs fast, no sockets to restrict my vision. Unblinking, constant, three hundred and sixty degrees, spreading outward, thinner, thinner, thinner…
My God, what am I?
“You are everything.”
* * *
In a flash of white everything comes undone. It only takes a second to realize I am of the flesh once again. No more boundless sight, pink protuberances encircle each of my eyeballs
, normalizing my view.
Not that there is anything to see. The digital blue has gone blinding white. It’s like I am on a Hollywood sound stage with a white screen backdrop, except the screen isn’t only in the background, it’s everywhere. But never mind my surroundings. I am heavy, thick, sluicing and systematic, burdened by biology. Hair and blood and muscle and bone, but changed. This new body is firm, muscled and perfect. Powerful. The blood flows quickly, smooth, tingly and I feel incredible. I take a giant breath and cold air surges in, tickling the undersides of my new skin. My brain swims with a zillion thoughts. If I didn’t know any better, I would swear I was god.
“Almost.” Annabelle appears, same consuming eyes, same outfit, and a new slogan emblazoned across her T-shirt. It reads World Without End. She comes close and runs a finger over my bare chest. I can’t help but notice I am completely naked (as impressive below the waist as above). Strangely, I feel no shame. Assuming a strong stance, I puff out my chest and glower with pride over my perfection.
“Easy. Flesh repulses, remember?” Annabelle crosses her arms over her chest and looks me up and down. Talk about perfection. She looks fucking incredible. Pure perfection. Dream fuzzy, but crystal clear, she barely looks real; she looks as if she has been airbrushed. Zero flaws. Familiar. Where have I seen her before?
“Right,” I answer. Flesh repulses. But maybe not. What a difference a good body makes. For the first time I feel…sexy?
“Unfortunately it’s a little late for that.” Annabelle reaches around and gives my bare butt a hard slap. “You’re dead, Charles. This body doesn’t belong to you. We were getting nowhere in the blue and I had to do something to ground you. This body is here to help you focus.”
I am about to ask her who she is, where I’ve seen her and why does she look so recognizable, but I don’t like her slapping my rear as if it were a side of beef, so instead I grumble, “What the fuck is going on?”
“Okay. Stop thinking. No more tangents or worries or distractions. I am going to lay it all out for you and I don’t want any more interruptions. Got it?”
I Will Rise Page 6
