then i wake up. his words linger in my head, they move around like a scrub-brush vigorously applied to the inside of my skull. but they leave no meaning or realization in their wake. tiny creases? what does that have to do with?--
the phone rings, almost right away. my god, i think. if that’s bradley, that is going to really fuck with me.
i pick up the receiver and hear gibberish on the other end.
 |
| Muriel Clayton |
i assume it’s a wrong number. do i say 'hello'? do i hang up? that wouldn't be my style. i gotta get with the natives, get indigenous, you know what i'm saying? so i parrot back new nonsense words with a similar inflection.
'woot ginnenah?' 'sit voo ginneh bah.' 'soo menh hahl bah! kittchee kittchee kittche joo boo bahhh frennnwich?'
we go back in forth in a 'conversation' like this for about 3 minutes, until finally the voice begins to raise, (is it anger? emphasis?) and then, in clear english, the voice says to me: “THE LIPS OF WISDOM ARE CLOSED, EXCEPT TO THE EARS OF UNDERSTANDING.”
click. the receiver goes dead.
i wondered what language they were speaking, or what they made of our exchange... but so it goes. most questions go unanswered. story of my life, right? i drift back to sleep.
I was at a Chinese feast of some sort, served all these different silver platters by attractive Swedish girls, and the food on the plates are small ancient nation states.
Feeling both full and wise after engorging myself on such multi-cultural fare, (Athens was particularly tasty) I took a walk in a shopping center parking lot. I was back in southern California now, an endless expanse of overgrown highways and outdoor malls and shopping centers. Unless if you're going back in the mountains, most of the places to walk are parking lots. I've taken many 'leisurely strolls' in them. It's particularly relaxed, because you're absolutely assured of getting absolutely nowhere.
I saw a girl standing in the lot. She was pretty much the american ideal (tm) of beauty, which isn't normally my thing, but I recall thinking something along the lines of 'when in babylon,' and as I was thinking that my perspective moved up and out, until I was maybe 100' above her or so. at this point i became aware that the parking lot was in fact a playing board- like chess, checkers, othello, ... I returned back to normal scale, a being of pure perception. The narrative lives inside our bodies. Get out your grapefruit spoons, it’s time to dig.
By this point I was clearly flirting with her, which is pretty incomprehensible if you think about it, since I had neither mouth nor eyes, but it seemed to be going pretty well because I transformed into a bedroom, lined with lace, and strange dangling mobiles and tinkling bells.
She took her clothes off inside my walls.
As she undresses inside me, another of her popped into existence, wearing some kind of nightgown. Still a Skinemax “After Dark” type of production, but condensed and made more tangible as it is squeezes through the churning vortex of a DMT kaleidoscope. This damsel in a dress narrates at me, up to the walls of pressed-wood and plaster that pretend to be my body, “thanks to the Order of the Hidden Carriage House, i speak in a secret code that will bend all to my Will, which is so Secret that even i, who am but a shadow of my Being within this timeless Company of great Carriage Houses, know it not and lo! if you find yourself performing the most Holy Communion with an ice cream cone, you will know that you are one of the few, True members of this Hidden Interior Order.” The juxtaposition of her talking in this way, and then another of her undressing was surreal. And she is perfect, I mean stunningly, inhumanly perfect, in the way that only science could produce. She is a simulacra, an ideal sheathed in flesh. I want to slather her in wet plaster.
Now all three of them are inside my bedroom body. One is undressed, tied to the bed, struggling against her restraints, and another is wearing a business suit. The third is still wearing the dress. The one in the business suit starts making out with the the one tied firmly to the bed, though she keeps pulling just out of range, her attention easily switching between playful teasing and intense concentration at the documents in a folder that she has splayed across her lap. She grabs her restrained self by the hair and forces her mouth open. In come all those sweet numbers and words from the spreadsheet, arcane mathematical formula pouring down her consentually nonconsenting gullet.
I am an ice cream cone, dripping from the ceiling and walls, dairy, sugar, and salt congealing into the approximate shape of a man.
All of them freeze and turn into playdough. I press one of their perfectly formed bellies and it indents and stays that way. The smell of salty playdough overwhelms me and
I awake drenched in terrorsweat to a surreal, orange sky; ashes raining down, eyelashes to the red eye of the sun.
The air is still.
Too still.
No comments:
Post a Comment