Simultaneously
Fiction/Philosophy
his most accessible and his most extreme book,
Anthony Metivier
$ 21.95
“You haven’t performed plastic surgery until you’ve done it on PCP!”
Anthony Metivier’s The Tupperware Blitzkrieg is a powerful concoction of sexual excess, self-deification and terminal violence. In this hallucinatory novel, plastic surgery, psychoanalysis and the pornography of American politics provide the hellish tableau in which Doctor Umbilico, founder of ‘People for the Advancement of Lying’ biomorphical atrocities culminating in the capture and radical transformation of an eerily Bush-like apocalyptic president. Multiple characters tell the story of this twisted visionary as he careens forward with his own maniacal pitch for world domination. As The Tupperware Blitzkrieg hurtles toward its unforgettable conclusion, Metivier depicts the most sordid aspects of contemporary commercial life in a complex, obsessive, often poetic and disquieting chronicle of aesthetic anomie, erotic entropy and the ‘slurrealistic” threat of cosmetic inefficiency. No reader of Metivier’s most
The Tupperware Blitzkrieg
turned PCP swilling nightmare priest of the surgical ward, executes
inflammatory work to date will emerge unscathed. Anthony Metivier is the author of Solid as Echo, Anatomizing Regan, Lex Talionis Schadenfreude, and the forthcoming novels Babelantis, Die Brücke, and The Tragickal Historie of Doktor Fuse Less. In addition to the audiobook version of Anatomizing Regan, he has released the spoken word albums The Glass Snake, The Felicific Calculus and Techno-no. ISBN 978-0-9819462-4-5 90000 >
Anthony Metivier
ATROPOS PRESS new york • dresden
The Tupperware Blitzkrieg
9 780981 946245
The Tupperware Blitzkrieg Anthony Metivier
The Tupperware Blitzkrieg
ATROPOS PRESS
© 2009 by Anthony Metivier ATROPOS PRESS New York . Dresden US: 151 First Avenue # 14, New York, N.Y. 10003 Germany: Mockritzer Str. 6, D-01219 Dresden all rights reserved ISBN 978-0-9819462-4-5
The Tupperware Blitzkrieg
Anthony Metivier
The views expressed in this novel are not necessarily those of any friction. for Ingrid
Wherever the want of clothing forced them to it, the human race made clothes for thousands of years, without a single man becoming a tailor. Marx
I would like my books to be kinds of scalpels. Foucault
A very pretty true cut. Erdnase
Yea though I walk in the valley of the showroom of death, the shadow of my pen weighs on these inky fingers. I am a secondary print in process. Old, lousy skin supported by strings packed behind Pinocchio ears, my cracked jaw quivers, dangles beneath delicately injected beads of beeswax between my cheeks and chins. I am the Prince of meat, of swollen slabs, of dangling cheeks. My skin clings magnetically, slathered with ointments, shot through with a chin crudely dimpled, the entire prepaid package pulled tighter than a stripped cow in a meat factory freezer. Andy Rooney lips spill the daily drool. I am the liposuction of TV news. My tilted eyebrows reveal glaring eyes, contact lenses like headline headlights in a semblance of ambulance roar, hoary columns screaming the resculpting of cars, the accidents of fading midsections, the politics of female faces sans burka, the drooping, saline tits of citizens scarred by fleets of infertile Fashion Police. I am aging agelessly and yea though I walk in this showroom of deferred
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dermatitis, my skin commands this pen in rich renaissance ripples, a minor scalpel in the poetry of plastic surgery, operating within the myth of the betterment of beauty, slaving over corpuscular crowds who still cannot believe it’s not butter. The morning paper assaults the mangy carpet fading beneath my door. Wrapped in plastic, bound by elastic, I hear the cackle of dot-matrix cauldrons burned by swirls of unanticipated rain. My office and surgical theatre doubles as laboratory, second home, and depository of pustulant paper bills and glossy periodical correspondences advertising toxic creams for removing botulant blemishes from Botox-bombed skin. Kneeling for the news, I finger press forty envelopes pulled from the flaking rusted mailbox. The weight of these massive missives buckles my exhausted knuckles. Detritus thrills from dapper shills. I flash on a lawsuit fantasy as I blow away flecks of the green paint peeling from the flaking surface of my rusted, bending mailbox. Wearing a suit tailored for courtroom celebration I await my allotted awards against the bank accounts of the corporate coagulations of men and women conspiring with mail carriers to break my delicately de-spotted hands with rubbish unsuited for wiping even Leopold Bloom’s rancid rectum. I dream of Key West and kiwi, corpses of young women in bikinis tossed overboard in fits of lecherous release and rejection. This shark has surgically sharpened teeth, and they are bleached a pearly white.
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Next door, Doctor Fuse Less leans for his newspaper, his spine cracking in unison with mine. His fist also struggles with the daily mail, but unlike me, Less indignantly gives up the fight and lets the envelopes tumble carelessly over the damp door step. Face lift? he asks, catching my eyes while swiping at the scattered envelopes, grinding them against wet granite. I’ve long since given up saying, No thanks, I’ve already got one. I gave up on humor decades ago and now the words stick in my throat like a stitch in the groin during a shin splint marathon. I let the stress of the words press my tongue silently against my teeth and die in silent lisp. I experience a pupil wrenching pause before my tightened, tinted, diametrically corrected lips fountain forward clipped lines of conversational syncopation both with and against my psychoanalytic neighbor. Two, I correct. My first since the – You’re lucky. I’ve got to centerfold sixteen minds before noon. I’ve got a new therapeutic technique. I call it Fact Lift. Face lifts for the mind. What do you think? Never mind. The brochures are already on their way even as we speak. Papers in journals amassing, accruing. You know, I’ve been working a ten-minute hour since the towers. Fold after fold. I love the lightning and thunder of mental origami … But I can’t stand listening to people unconsciously convince themselves they deserve these things … or worse, that they don’t … It’s always both, always undecidable. As they say, one cannot
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enjoy being an analyst and continue being one. The goal is nothing more than the acceptance of – My first patient, I offer, loathing Less’ inability to take proper turns in conversation, looks weird with an accidental double chin. I’m always correcting the errors of my competitors. Much like yourself, I assume. At this point, Doctor Less skips away from these professional themes and reminds me that despite his incessant invitations, we haven’t played squash in a coon’s age. I remind him that I eliminated sports after replacing my chin implant for the third time. Gotta stop treating it like a golf ball. Ignoring the blank stare buried beneath my laser crafted contacts, Less mock-swings an arm as I gesture at my Kirk Douglas dimple with a similarly cocked elbow. My stuffed fist quavers, sepulcher of colorful cancerous pathetic tragic stupid banal advertisements, personal correspondences, the ghastly interactions of people evading tombstones. Posed this way, I feel that I am looking into a mirror of myself minus all the surgery. Anatomy engaged with the rage of age. Both of us stand for a moment, doppelganger dumb in a vortex void of decibels. When our ice age of wordless, ocular interrogation finally cracks, I depart from Less’ throbbing gaze, and bumble through the poisonous square of my office door. The name on the dull, scratched nameplate: Doctor Gravity, M.D. Arrivederci, Doctor Less calls, apparently unperturbed by our encounter. His words bounce
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through the door after me, clutching at the stitches and hems of my herringbone suit, corrupting my auditory oracles. My ears coil when they perceive his final phrase. You’re a great salesman and surgeon, he says, but all work and no play never pulls Santa’s sleigh … The very image of those ruddy cheeks and Rudolph’s beaming nose, not unlike Doctor Less’ savagely ignored, surgery-free face, shot me through with decimating rage. Inside, Sheila, secretary supreme of the short skirt underworld pollutes the air with potions plucked from department store assembly lines. Purchases made, I assume, with measly Christmas bonuses saved up over years. Dollars reaped for repetitions of scent that in no way compare with the natural oils of her scalp and the nightlong sweat accumulated between her buttocks and breasts, both of which I’ve sampled with my snout and scalpel. I make up for my chintzy cheapness with ‘free’ surgery – a veritable plastic blitzkrieg of private after hours surgeries timed over weeks of mulching the faces of paying patients. But the freebees are over. I need gold now … I’ve been lucky to perform two surgeries a year since the write-up – or should I say write-down – in the Times, and even those barely cover the price of the anesthesia. Decimating downfall over cynically cosmetic controversies perpetrated in privacy. Tiny column inches waged in ink against my – professionally expected – misconduct in a paper print war for profit guised as justice. Scandalous stories of my social inconsistencies to this day deflect the
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legions of advertisements plastered against newspaper pages. Inky Friend Becomes Derelict Foe in a Fortnight. And so. No more bonuses, no more freebees. No more sharpening my scalpels against Sheila’s bluntly blazing body. Instead, I watch and smell how she burps stolen nitrous oxide each morning, spreading her day between nail polish and web design, chipping away the old before applying newly grotesque grommets in graded gambits of hubris against the grains of her human geology while discreetly huffing from a canister between her knees beneath her desk, gasping giddily with gastronomic delight through crystalline lips creamed daily with benumbing drub. Morning, Sheila hums. My cliché teeth grind out a greeting, a forced nicety that ends prematurely as Earle Bird, my surgical assistant, bellows bombastically in blue shoes through the Birchwood door. Am I late? Awfully short notice, Doctor. Sure we have everything we need? A shipment arrived two days ago, Sheila says. In the same motion, the sharpened angles of her eyes fixate on all five fingers, sending a shrill curl of approval across her swollen bee-stung lips. Then, hoisting the nitrogen mask, she draws a devastating blast of gas into her lungs. Her eyes fidget as she fades to black, closing credits fluttering eyelash black above and beneath the sawing of her combustible white orbital bones.
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Boxes are in the back, she says, releasing the tension in her protracted phalanges while her chin slumps chestward, producing a second chin I thought I had dissolved back when I still augmented her income with late-afternoon trills of my blade. Then I better get cooking, Earle replies, energetically thrusting his backpack into the hallway closet. The clinic, filled with frosted glass bunkers for gauzes, towels and surgical devices line the walls, radiates a vitriolic glow. Dopplers and coploscopes dangle acid steel in preparation for lily soft skin. Decorative hooks present preserved floating biopsies drawn from eight phyla in the alternatingly alterable kingdom of life. Pastes and potions pooled in pottery pamper the shelves. I admire my work, forgetting the hosts of home make-over programs responsible for putting all of this pre-op pomp and circumstance together in one flawlessly precious piece of eye-candy pap. No rush, Earle, I announce, although my covert command immediately klinks in my ear, sounding more like a plea than a negating call for rapid compliance. The first patient won’t be here for an hour, I said, and you know our cardinal rule: Let the patient wait. Keeps the blood out of the face – rushes it into the ass while they examine digitized versions of their future faces in our delicately selected waiting room magazines. Not to mention the subliminal violence of the pre and postsurgical sounds oozing from the operating rooms – luxurious accents of the munching,
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crunching, slurping disposal of laser-roasted middleclass meat: Such songs cannot help but aid the healing process! Subliminal healing. I think I read about that somewhere, Earle hums. It’s like how Adam and Eve reportedly heard the footsteps of God just before he reportedly ousted them. That’s why we all long for a return to beauty. That’s why we harm ourselves: in order to look bonny again. By the way, I said, matching the upward swirl of his tones as a way of disguising my interjection. Have you been working out? Your muscles look quite studied. Yeah, you noticed? I flash him a precision smile. You look great. I mean, really great. Gee, doc, thanks, Earle said, his banal, prelapsarian intellectualizations completely forgotten. Just let me know if you ever want to brush up those cheeks, my friend. I’ll give you a good discount. A great discount, I say as I twist my right hand in the air, emphasizing discount with hypnotic flair, nearly knocking the envelopes and advertisements still bulging from my concussed knuckles from my hand. Don’t worry, doc, I’ll let you know. Unconvinced and deeply concerned by an unseemly mole on Earle’s upper lip, I push the weight of the newspaper and my mail against the door of my office as Sheila and Earle flirt indecorously. Fawning as she staves off fainting. A gallery of formulaic magazines and pamphlets melt from the heat.
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As Earle kisses muzzy monoxided Sheila on the cheek, I imagine the mole in his face boiling out, exploding, showering her in gelatinous clabber. A fulminating detonation of dense, infectious saccharine blood into the waiting room, destroying the magazines and pamphlets spread evenly throughout the waiting room. My fascination with the mole grows the longer I watch the grimy spot on Earle’s face. It inflates in my imagination with such violence that I quickly move a few steps backwards in luxuriant terror, feeling for the door with the back of my decorated heel. I hire people like Shirley and Earle, not for service, but for contrast. Of course many doctors and dentists want exemplary embodied examples of exquisitely reified eternity trotting around the office interior imbuing themselves with the purpose and intent of tanked fish in a Sushi restaurant. Not me. I’ve loathed assistants all my life, particularly dental assistants, their phony capped teeth blinding me while shoving sewing thread between my gums, drawing billows of blood they scrape and smear against the pale yellow perforated sheets they straddle across my suffocating chest. These gargoyle-toothed women invariably elbow me, leaning hard against my artificially tanned solar plexus and neck while I gaze into the silently vibrating television set hanging above my head (brought to you buy and not affiliated with zinging in close caption across the screen) and dream of smacking their skulls flat with a medieval Morningstar mace I once found hanging from the
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imitation Armani rack in Manhattan’s maliciously malign Macy’s during the post-Halloween purge. It stands now behind my office door, dusted daily by cheaply contracted cleaning staff, human slave aids salvaged from the Bordernazis. I’ll just be in here working, I scowl, spying a last glimpse of the reception area as Earle imitates my face for Sheila’s asinine amusement: a protracted grimace replete with finger-fangs dangling from his scarecrow arms while hissing with tongue between the back of his teeth. As much as Earle’s mockery infuriates me, his routine also makes me feel young again, makes me recall the impulse to copy others I felt in my youth, an urge originating deep in the belly, realized only at the level of the skin. I glimmer warmly inside at the memory of manipulating my face for the purposes of meaningless satire. I suppress a cheerful laugh and let a sour gleam leak from my eyes as Earle lambastes me with his rendition of myself as a sincere cryosurgical clown buried beneath a cold millimeter of throat frills and grease paint and softly close the door. Two postcards curled by the sweat of my palm collect my attention as I seat myself behind my large, mirror-surfaced desk. One of the curved cards conveys my own scrawl, an image of Orlan on an operating table reminding me to order supplies for the upcoming surgeries. The other card predicts that the first card will arrive too late. I need a better secretary with better secretions, I decide. Maybe I’ll trepanate Sheila before ousting her, I think, experiencing a pinching need for a new surgical challenge. Give her a
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chance at enlightenment, let cruel laser light complete the softening of her frontal lobe initiated by hours loping under laughing gas. I can see her now, tottering awake, proclaiming the glory of the new gaping hole bleeding yellow and red beneath a swath of bandages. On to the letters. Crayon scrawled sheets glommed in an envelope, waxed by a Wyoming grandson – wavering representational fields relaying the obscure faces of local policemen (apparently performing the duties of firemen before a violently fisted fire). I hope this is not a coveted projection of his unlived adult life. I never liked the burn unit, and skin grafts seem to me as distasteful as kindergarten paper Mache to a master sculptor. I consider sending the kid a biohazardous baggie of preserved fat and blemished skin, but shirk at the cost. I prefer a fresh copy of Playboy to progeny, and examine Miss May as I run this latest set of drawings through the shredder stood beside my desk. This is an ancient issue of the magazine. I’ve kept it on my desk for years. The Playmate’s face is narrow, her chin slightly recessive – nothing burning the bone won’t fix. It’s true, I keep the magazine lodged firmly on my desk because she was once a patient of mine. I use the images as a reminder of my great surgical skill and governing sexual inhibition. I want to be reborn, Miss May said, seated across from me, clasping a sebaceous magazine in her withering fingers. Like this, she sighed, tracing one yellowed finger over the cover. I know it’s what they
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all say. And it makes me just the same as them … or worse... I received the magazine across my desk, noting the radical transformations she desired, bundle of functions heaped like a pile of discarded stockings before me. The magazine: grimed in gloss, the candy shapes of youth composed on flimsy porno paper. Miss May herself: an ugly array of red welts and small white scars. Eye lift, full face lift, brow lift, nose job, two attempted jaw replacements. All failures, she said, as if apologizing for the pain her countenance caused my eyes. Over ten years I attempted these surgical procedures on myself. It would be banal to tell you that my psychiatrists think I’m better now. I’m not. But I do know that it’s time to seek professional help. Aren’t psychiatrists professional? I asked. Doctor Gravity, she said, no one without an arsenal of brochures and pamphlets in their waiting room strikes me as even remotely professional. As I wait for my forty five minutes on the grouchy couch of an Oedipausal ocean, I want a mass of photographs. Examples of success. Proof of the renovation of the mind. Plus, I want information about financing my upgrades and implements. You, Doctor Gravity, offer all of that. And here you are, eyes wide as an owl on amphetamine, taking the time to listen without falling asleep. You’ve outshrinked them all, if you ask me. I know a shrink who can get you in and out in under fifteen minutes, I wanted to say, but her face
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intrigued me and I urged her into the examination room, pulling her Playboy edition along. We’ll need a conglomeration of faces, Miss May, I explained. Wait, I’ve got June here as well. June here offers several exciting features you’ll definitely want to add to your new collection of Doctor Gravity’s patented ‘Visage Pyrotechnics.’ I placed the magazine face down on a pile of before-and-after albums I kept beside the examination table. I then performed a visual and tactile inspection of Miss May’s self-inflicted wounds. You have nice hair, she observed as I hauled on her sagging cheek pads, leaning ever inward. You’re very handsome. I’ll need to sand your skin and pull the lower part of your face way up, I said, dodging my hairsprayed head from the caress of her warped hand. They call this an S-lift. Why? I shrugged, encoding my shoulders with feigned enthusiasm. Because it feels super! It will make you look refreshed, and you have my no-refund, no-return guarantee. No one will know its surgery. You’ll also want your eyes done. You don’t want to take care of your jaw and draw more attention to your eyes in the process. You’ll be in danger of frightening dogs and small children. So I would recommend upper and lower lids. See, I said, brandishing a mirror. Your upper lid is almost touching your eyelashes. One man’s bedroomy is another man’s exhausted.
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I overloaded her with details to defuse her implicit and explicit attempts to shake the price I would quote her in the critical moments following the examination. Many of my clients reference the loan brochures lined up in the waiting room, but few resort to thinly veiled promises of sexual gratification. I am indeed a handsome, if pickled specimen, but in a business where you’re lucky to get away with procedures undetectable, flirtation and flattery merely shake the hand that holds the knife. A friendly destabilization. I removed one of the photo albums from beneath the Playboys and placed it in Miss May’s hands. Before and after, I said, sitting playfully on my stool like a schoolboy revealing his first science project, like a toddler fascinated with the fort und da of his own shit. I narrated captions from memory as she flipped. That’s an impressive S-lift she’s got there. She lost her wattles without losing her wallet. This woman’s eyes shine brighter than a flashlight since the surgery and here you have a similar jaw adjustment. One hundred percent undetectable. You like that one? It’s a personal favorite of mine. Here I have taken a cubist approach. You usually have to do that with men. A mini-lift to tighten the jaw line and a brow lift to relieve pressure on the upper eyelids. I also reshaped the bags below his eyes and closed those crow’s feet with laser resurfacing and Botox. Which reminds me, I softly commanded, when you choose to decide to choose me as your surgeon, I want
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you to also consider having me install a chin implant. At first it feels like having a Doctor Scholl’s heel-cup sewn to your face, but after a week, you won’t even notice it. At this point I furrow my brow, revealing to her subconscious the communicative possibilities of a Botoxed face facilitated by the perfect lighting of the examination room. I wiggled my nasal-labial as I speak, eliminating fears of risk, subconsciously preventing her from experiencing a long-recovery. All techniques I learned in hypnosis class. I hope she doesn’t notice the pleats on my face. I forgot to cover them with foundation, and I began to wonder if I had also forgotten my regular stint with the oleaginous Zorro’s mask of cool and soothing chemicals I normally apply to my face each and every night before going to sleep on my spinally correct mattress. Nothing worse than an imperfect model selling perfection. As Miss May examines the photos and listens patiently to my pitch, I say, this is the point I neglect to tell you that a 25-watt bulb over the bathroom mirror, weekly exercise, solid diet, and the occasional vacation probably does more for anyone at virtually little or no expense. This I have learned from a life spent guinea-pigging myself to an art I practice to despise. It’s the difference between making oneself desirable but not enjoyable and making oneself enjoyable, but not desirable … Miss May listens obliviously.
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Thus far I have completely ignored Miss May’s claim that she destroyed her face auto-surgically, despite the fact that I have done most of my own work myself and recognize it as a legitimate – and even desired – surgical possibility. While not improbable, judging by angles and depth, most of her scars were clearly produced from alien incisions administered from above. Without anesthetic many people faint relatively quickly. Without adrenaline injections to slow the bleeding, she would have been blinded by the most superficial cut, her scalpel rendered inoperable by the slippery bloody greasy fat released by the blade. I’ve seen her kind before and assumed she belonged to one of the many cosmetic cults running op tables in South America and the Pacific Rim. Certain aspects I recognized as the work of Doctor Dribbleneck, an unskilled celebrity bonesaw responsible for removing the appreciative roar from the careers of many models and actors. Like many of us in the business, he disfavors working on male patients. Contracts took care of lawsuits from unsatisfied customers, but no amount of legal procedure protects the nimble hands of the surgeon from the crushing blows of betrayed boxers and other breeds of demystified post-op men. I have worn bulletproof vests and even studied martial arts. The former placed undue stress on my supraspinatus and the latter threatened my carefully crafted septo and rhinoplastics. Far better to kill a woman with kindness than be killed by the Narcissus’ vengeance. Sure, women can raise a gun, but most seem to absorb their
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negative physical alterations with the proper and fitting resolve of agents operating under capitalism, i.e. more surgery. Retreat admits failure. She struck me as the perfect candidate for Doctor Dribbleneck, known for trolling Internet bulletin boards, launching individualized marketing campaigns the moment he recognized a poorly disguised millionaire gin-soaked celebrity. These types cannot help but reveal themselves. It comes down to the repetition of presuppositions, and Dribbleneck had a knack for drawing them out and comparing them to an endless reel of downloaded films using voice-matching software. Dialogue Bingo. Other doctors capitalize on existing surgical disasters, as I was about to do with Miss May, devoting a warpath of websites to splattering botched celebrity surgeries online, replete with remedies and recommendations. Instead of volunteering cleft lip and cleft palate surgeries for underprivileged children in underdeveloped countries, these jokers facercize the magnifishit mugs of the militantly monied mongoloids of mostly hegemonic Hollywood. Well, who am I to talk? In my deep dark past I have balanced my checkbook with excursions to Cambodia where for the right price you can fire bazookas into the mutant maws of malformed midgets at five dollars a pop. I remember retard hunting with my old partner, Doctor Umbilico. Specializing in Virtual Plastic Surgery, Umbilico made his fortune selling enhanced bodies locked behind computer screens. Shabbily realized for the despotic
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patient only after Umbiloco’s bank account received his exorbitant fee. Founder of ratemybodypart.com, Umbilico won the Ear Lobe Scission prize six years in a row and was voted Most Valuable Surgeon long before he founded the organization for which he eventually became famous: People for the Advancement of Lying. One year, hunting humans together in a Cambodian heat wave, Umbilico shared with me the true purpose of People for the Advancement of Lying, convincing me that he had completely entered the roaring insanity of the new millennium more than any man alive. I offered him my final refusal, refusing to refuse a moment more. What can I do to get you to join our merry club of screwy skinners? We’re building our headquarters in the hills of Mountebankia, a veritable Magic Castle for plastic surgeons around the world. I prefer working alone, I told Umbilico, loading a rocket into my recoilless antitank bazooka. An antique weapon, circa 1944. Fifty four inches of tube fitted with wooden stock and delicately carved sight. The smoke trail gives the bazooka operator away, drawing, not the retaliation of enemy fire, but YouTube deranged locals wielding camcorders and sparkle sticks. Ignoring Umbilico’s imploring tenor, I loaded another rocket. Light poured around me as the rocket raced above the ground, slamming into the body of an amateur cameraman. I thought I spied his missing palette spinning in the air. A piece of shrapnel
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snapped into the body of one of my fellow American Tourists, instantly transforming his soldierly pose into that of a Dandy Walker. I flashed into a fantasy of sawing together the rent remains of my countryman’s body. His heart alone would puzzle Doctor Frankenstein, that weak teenage weasel. No competition. His useless articulations of body parts derived from a variety of indigents, criminals collected from the most scurrilous stockades and pennythrift tombstones. I create beautiful things that disappear into the world, not ugly things that force our attention upon them forever. Look, Umbilico continued, the plan is simple. To organize an unfathomable society of surgeons. Unbegreiflich – Headed by yourself, of course – Using the – Bombing – The Internet – I don’t want to be rude, Herr Doktor, I said, but that’s a mighty fine pile of rockets you’re not firing. Hear me out, Umbilico said, leaning on his bazooka. Like most plastic surgeons, Umbilico’s face gleamed innovation. A victim of lip pumping, his mouth looked like the anterior rostral plane of a tilapian fish. Combined with his trimmed nostrils and sharpened brows, Umbilico walked endlessly through a fierce wind tunnel that simply did not exist. A face. A wind tunnel. Do the math. I’m not listening, I assured him, loading another rocket into my bazooka. Umbilico scanned
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the landscape, anticipating at whom I would fire next. Waves of potential victims moved between precambrian huts, dull eyes blinking at the sun bursts of our weapons, convinced we Terrotourists were magicians or gods. None made flight, all surged forwards into the blast, sideways and back, surrendering lovingly to our rapturous firing. People for the Advancement of Lying has grown beyond my control, Umbilico said. As a result, it has lost focus. True, basing a foundation on the felicities of deception implies a state of constant dissolution – and yet, I think we’ve had a good run. We conquered the market so well, we even make a killing supplying libel templates to online and print publications globally. We refashioned the forever fashionable science of statistics, shattering the graphs and raping the numbers. We even helped Al Gore become the president of his own country of Penguins, populated by phony environographers pining for the days when humans didn’t hold themselves improbably responsible for the destruction of the planet. Fine. More room for us to get totally denaturalized while the environment improvises around us. You see, we don’t resist power. We ask it what it needs, provide it, and then brutally snap it from beneath their feet while they occupy themselves with the vacant candy of their deluded desires. But, my friend, Umbilico declared, winding up his speech, we need to regroup, reinstate our members, regain the interest of the most dubious of all fully qualified caregivers, the legions of
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deconstructive surgeons trained in normalizing deformations of the flesh. We are the only ones willing to train for years solely for the purpose of rendering perfectly polish faces, gulping up the skittering sun of flashbulbs as if preened by the hands of god – portraits of suffering for delusions, illusions of feeling better based on better looks, difference based on scales of one to ten invented by those who stand to profit most, the surgeons and the bioethicists tugging on the sleeves of politicians who make take the fashionability of biopolitics over the precipice. We unmake the mouth to paint the scream, though in truth, once we’ve removed our fingers from the pie, our patients do all the work. Happily do they present themselves before cameras, happily do they stand beneath robotic lights sweating thespian poetic in glimmering clothes invented by dolts fond of bolting their names onto caustic rags – Am I making sense? I hope you don’t go on like this with your patients. It must diminish the pleasures of submitting to reshaping – Of course not – Another blast drowned Umbilico’s voice. When the foam jet behind me cleared, I lowered my binoculars and stared firmly into the doctor’s wrenchclamped eyes. No. No. And a thousand times NO! People for the Advancement of Lying might have attracted me once, but this coalition you’re describing amounts to idiocy. You should at least consider the plan.
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No. Don’t even want to hear it. It goes something like this. We kidnap the president, remove his face, and mold it in the shape and style of the Statue of Liberty. That’s it in a nutshell. Not listening. You stand to make a load of money. You don’t want it, that’s fine by me. I’ll pretend you don’t know. Secrecy rests like dust in my wrinkles, not that I have any … Do you mind if I? Umbilico offered no resistance as I popped one of his neglected rockets into my bazooka. Preparing to fire, I said, I’ll hear nothing more of it. Surgery belongs in the operating theatre. The operating room is the world’s finest classroom. It’s where we learn the ropes, the ligaments and bones responsible for churning out the motions of life. I’ll have nothing to do with the Internet beyond the obnoxious webfomercials required by common business sense. But it burns my bitter tongue! I hate the Internet, I hate email, I hate the habiflux that turns basement businesses into billion dollar industries. Google, crack for dowsers dancing their fingers over contraband keyboards, fingernails cackling like neighborhood kids in an alphabet sandbox. You never Google? Nein, danke. I rely on the same system of index cards I used to hunt and capture the namesnakes crawling on my degrees. Long hours scribbling the loathsome terminology of our trade. My internal
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conversation has not run dry in the absence of repulsive discussion threads, however. I gladly spin um with ah into the open space of phonic air as easily as the day I first committed those words to memory, saving my fingers for the scalpel, rather than the debilitating keyboard. My Doctor Lecter Liebrary fumes with Jekyllous intent, leather tomes graced by light through the window. My inspiration never runs dry, perusing those spines. Had I need for extra amusement, I would fill crossword books with mechanix drawn from my alternate lexus. Other repositories for the self-referential exist and predate the machines you fetishist of the modern crawl into with ravenous savagery of maggots on a corpse. Remember America? It used to be about the pursuit of happiness. Now it’s about having it delivered … Umbilico enjoyed watching me blast the remaining rockets in pensive silence. Later, we strolled the arena of carnage with our Terrotourist companions where I collected a savagely burned jawbone from the sand. It stunk of eviscerated flesh and sulfide. Other goodies enlivened the landscape. I watched as a man fished a smoking spleen into a Ziplock freezer bag while other game hunters fashioned a conch-like trumpet from the cracked skull of a Cambodian Mongolian who had gladly surrendered his skeletal system to the blunt force of our heat seeking blasts. Chow-mien membranes sloshed beneath our feet, horror film aesthetic overspill slashing at the eyes, rib cage licorice, cooked brains popping like corn from eviscerated skulls.
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Walk like an Egyptian, Umbilico whispered. I returned from my Cambodian holiday with a wide and confident grin. Umbilico’s massive conglomeration of plastic surgeons and his ridiculous plot faded rapidly from my mind like a properly executed surgical scar: extant beyond notice. My patients treated my return with the delight proper to brain cells dying high on dollar signs. Sheila reported that several appointments required special attention. Apparently, anxieties associated with my long absence had quickened the aging process in some of my patients. Earle, meanwhile, squirreled happily away in closets loaded with towels and gauze, surgical tools bulging in every pocket, anesthetics clenched heartily in every hand. Five minutes into my early morning autohypnosis I heard an unexpected knock at my door. Not Sheila, with some obnoxious reminder or request, but Doctor Fuse Less. Don’t tell me, you’ve finally settled on the nasal staples I suggested ages ago? No, Less replied. I’ve got a patient for you. He’s rendered himself useless to me. Perhaps with a bit of restoration, this young man can benefit us both. Say more, I said, cross-cutting this unusual interruption with the few remaining shards of Umbilico’s conversation scratching the dark wall at the back of my mind. The intercom buzzed. What is it, Sheila?
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Miss May. She’s here for her follow up. Miss May for a day, what I wouldn’t give for a day with Miss May. Less twiddled his thumbs while whispering this insipid rhyme. I wondered if his sudden appearance in my office wasn’t a sign of the conspiratorial operations Umbilico was toying with. I knew Umbilico wouldn’t relent until he had me on his team. It seemed unlikely that Doctor Less knew of Doctor Umbilico, but as I watched his untreated lips leap lovingly over his spontaneous prosody, I listened with a paranoid earlobe (surgically corrected, of course) cocked to the ground. I’ll be with her in just a moment, I said into the machine. It’s amazing how you can change a person’s life, Less said, considering the lavishly framed reproduction of Boticelli’s Venus hanging behind my head. A single stitch, lifting a single muscle for most of forever, I explained. So many shifts in fate at the behest of such a small dislocation and reconnection. Are you troubled by Narcissus, doctor, or have you come to discuss one of your flock? Let’s call him Mr. Enlargement, Less began. A typical pervert, more interested in deriving enjoyment from embarrassing, shocking, and exciting his analysts with kinky and sleazy details than in surrendering and charting the contents of his unconscious mind. Mind you, body, more than mind, concerns this fellow. The unconscious of physical strength and girth, as it were.
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The size of his penis, which I can tell you from repeated exposure, became the focus of our therapy from the very first day. He insisted on releasing it from his pants during our sessions, rolling his fat foreskin between his knuckles the way gamblers and magicians roll silver dollars. I made the mistake of allowing this behavior to occur within the rubric of my private practice, but unlike you, I have very little exposure to displeasures of the flesh. Besides, in my mind, the role of the contemporary analyst is to deal with such manifestations without blinking. To further our education of human behavior, if nothing else, the analyst must remain a stone. To understand the psychic structure, you must take its need for disruption into consideration at all times. Normal actions, such as blinking, for instance, may not be normal at all. Blinking can be the source of much subversion. At any rate, I could not rob this man of the joy of his introspection, his will to the good life first proposed in ancient times – ancient times being the birthplace of all good onanistic philosophy. My time with Mr. Enlargement became a new form of psychology situated in some unknown place between the couch and the Skinner-Box. I became a pigeon to the felinity of Mr. Enlargement’s animal rationale. Say, is that Playboy on your desk Miss May? Less asked abruptly, interrupting his story by jerking his thumb in the direction of my waiting room while eyeballing the crinkled magazine.
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Miss June, actually. I lied. You’ve seen Miss May …? Only in print. Can’t remember her face, though, if you know what I mean. I see. Well, she’s in the waiting room if you’d like to sneak a peek on your way out, I offered, feeling confident that he wouldn’t mistake the wasted, pocked face for the creamy, cosmetic planes of the magazine splayed on my desk. Less’ eyes wandered past me, up and along the Boticelli. You were saying? I prompted. Right, Less said, returning his eyes to me. Looking at the glacial visage of my old neighbor, riddled by two fading onyx eyes, I realized that I had somehow become his psychiatrist by proxy. The Sisyphean slopes of medical practice spool us all together eventually, I thought. Settling into a deep therapeutic repose, I plotted constellations of surgeries against Less’ face as he droned on. Jung, the horny dissident, made patient love a necessity – With whom? Miss May, or Mr. Enlargement? Let me finish. Jung was a wild analyst, wilder even than myself. Jung was the flaming tip of the iceberg in Burghülzlu Clinic in Zurich, where I myself studied primary life energy and developed rules for the management of the ideal psychoanalytic hold over patients, a technique I would later employ to shattering effect in my own practice. As Jung himself remarked, “For all its critical analysis, psychology has
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not yet managed to root out its psychopaths.” I for one, take psychopaths as good things, and hope my field never calcifies into the banal Freudian image Jung proposed for us. I worked against Jung’s habit of household practice. I insisted and continue to insist that analysts remove themselves as completely as possible from their private lives when entering public practice. No books, no pictures, no uncharacteristic features of dress. Both Jung and Freud not only distastefully treated patients in their own homes… They even made house calls and administered massages under the guise of hypnosis! Doctors should have a featureless office with an available washroom, but must take care never to use it themselves in the moments before a patient is expected. This eliminates the installation of deep anxieties and erotic ideation. Nothing worse than mincing mental and corporeal sewage just outside the door … Moreover, the therapist must maintain a fixed address, and once set, must never modify a patient’s fee, neither higher nor lower. I thought I was rocking the boat by formalizing the basic structure of psychotherapy with such Iron Maiden constraints. Whereas Jung and Freud worked from home, crumbs and tear stains, cigar ashes and urns for chew spittle, I wanted a secure frame that forced patients to provide their material without undue influence. Or rather, I wanted a crushing anonymity that would dominate them into exposing what my own personal entrapments could only
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disguise. This carried with it the courageous effect of preventing myself from incorporating my patients too strongly into the world of my fantasies. Patients can drop microscopic fibers from their clothing on my couch, but their breath can never wet my private collection of books, their eyes never scrutinize my taste in art, fantasize my family values. Sears photograph family dramas crammed into the cheapest of frames geht nicht. I kept all of these things far from my medical practice. Mr. Enlargement encouraged me to rethink my approach. I must admit that around this time I had a fantasy of extending my therapeutic hour by fifteen minutes for Mr. Enlargement, and later dreamt that I accompanied Freud during a hypnotic session with Anna O., a.k.a. Karen Enkasement. Freud’s regressions of Enkasement enabled the abreaction of her bottled emotions. Evident symptom resolution ensued. Enkasement followed as Freud and I scoured the landscape searching for yet other women to regress, soon adding full body massages to our routines while skulking the both the German steppe and the urban doorway. The public’s reaction to our activities led to worldwide fear of psychoanalysis. Serious and playful alike, our trio enacted a law against ourselves, and we disbanded. My dream then switched to an image of Lady Di dining on Dolly, bristling with wooly life, birthing biogenetics in a pen swarming with feces and fetid straw. Di rejected Dolly, emphatically munching on the afterbirth of biogenetics instead. Just gaming!
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Di howled, staring directly into the dream screen, pushing her hands into the wet slush, folding and unfolding them in the mess until, fully immersed, she emerged as a commercial for a four hundred CD collection of Mozart’s anatomy based on Clint Eastwood’s DNA. These cells, the commercial revealed, integrated with Madonna’s DNA, and inserted by psychotic scientists into Marntel Williams, who gave birth to a biogenetic lovechild named But Wait There’s More! But Wait There’s More attended Oxford, where he dated Chelsea Clinoid periodically during her father’s presidency, and as you can imagine, influenced public policy beyond the paranoid perils of recognition. The waiting room door clicked open, Less continued, peeling layers from the Botticelli above my head with acidic glare. I heard Mr. Enlargement seat himself in the waiting room. He had a favorite seat, within sight and smell of the washroom. I had made the mistake of unfurling a particularly olfactory load generated from a recent peanut butter and banana sandwich binge. I waited five minutes, biting my nails in fearful anticipation of the effects my noxious bolus would have on the fellow. I wrapped the remaining peanut butter sandwiches in saran wrap and hid them in the drawer of my featureless desk. Wiping crumbs from my shirt carefully into the wastebasket I kept hidden beneath said desk, I rose from my chair and opened door number one, revealing door number two. I opened door number two, and then, vaguely nodding to Mr. Enlargement, I strode across the room
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and locked the waiting room door while Mr. Enlargement scuttled into my examination room. I closed door number two – door number one from that perspective – then door number one, i.e. door number two, and seated myself quietly. I stared unblinkingly, adjusted my tie, resisted the urge to suck at the peanut butter lodged between my teeth. This is stupid, Mr. Enlargement finally said. I come here and tell you my dreams and you sit there. Completely void. No reaction. I pay you for the privilege of making up stories – not many of my dreams have really been true, and therefore cannot possibly reflect my psychoses. I have a need to disrupt, to prolong therapy with these falsified dreams. Today, I’m not going to whip out my cock at you. Today I’m not even going to dream up a dream. I’ll reveal nothing of my fundamental activities, nor the balance nor the turning of my soul, which hardly speaks to the dimensions of my beastly clockwork manhood anyhow. It’s true, I can admit this: I often wonder where you live, dream of slamming you against your odd little arrangement of doors, of assfucking you without the courtesy of wetting your hole with my spit followed by a friendly reach-around. I’m afraid the time for data acquisition is over. This is the day of the barbarians. I am closing therapy. I allowed silence to ensue, volunteering nothing, not even the glance of an eyebrow. I want the right to free myself from this supposed psychodegenerated development of my personality. Simply put, this treatment requires too
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many words. More words than any truth can possibly contain. Goodbye and good day to you. As Mr. Enlargement stepped toward door number one – number two – I don’t know why … It went against all of my training, against my carefully constructed concept of will, against my causally theorized conception of the psychoanalytic hold – no analysis of the situation, no Freudian postachronism, will ever adequately explain the culmination of events that found my lips dodging artfully forward and clasping the back of Mr. Enlargement’s neck. Pushing hard on his hips, I flipped him over, violating his jeans with sweaty hands, unharnessing what I found there, ejaculating even before I could unzip my pants. Panting, I tossed myself on the desk and pointed my anus at him – the as-yet never-before exposed door number three. My legs flew up over his shoulders and I consumed him completely. His ejaculate nearly killed me as the jets of his sperm struck the towering walls of my rectum. Cold blue sky vanished in fire. Testicle helicopters spinning uselessly around the collaboration of bones and flesh that make my sexual apex. All sensation logged in billowing pain. I strained. Wincing eyes told me he was enjoying this. I’ve practiced for years, Mr. Enlargement later confessed, while tending my wounds. Rubbing alcohol from a survival kit discovered beneath my desk and toilet paper drawn from the bathroom, hanging just below the sink.
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You won’t need stitches, I don’t think, Mr. Enlargement said. But I’m recommending a barium swallow and X-ray just to be sure. Use this towel to sop up the blood on the way to emergency. Wait, I gasped. You’re a doctor? Um, not exactly … My intestine’s shattered, I groaned. You’ve tumbled all my membranes. What have you done to me? It’s a miracle, Mr. Enlargment said, gesturing proudly, drawing my eyes to his radiating crotch with his bloodied hand. Well, not a miracle, exactly. A lot of hard work, actually. You’re lucky it didn’t just kill you. In the heat of the moment, I missed mentioning a few things … Mr. Enlargement sat himself back down, and explained himself while I made myself a diaper from the towel he handed me. I got the idea watching Pumping Iron. You know, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Hold on, I said, rising. The towel fell from my buttocks, releasing more blood, staining my chair and the floor. Whoa, cowboy! What do you need? Pressing the towel back into place, A drink, I said. By the way, documentaries don’t have stars, I said. Mr. Enlargement glanced around the room, smiled. Very well, he said, conceding. Schwarzenegger: subject, not star.
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A thought flickered in Mr. Enlargment’s mind. Maybe we should talk on the way to emergency, he offered. I’ll be fine, I said. Carry on. Although deeply concerned for my damaged body, Mr. Enlargement opened himself to me. He was finally speaking the truth about himself. It would be worth bleeding to death, I reasoned. Well, at the time, Mr. Enlargement continued, I was watching Pumping Iron a lot. And I mean a lot. The pure repetition of all those extraneous muscles fascinated me. I bought magazines and researched fitness plans. I outlined a set of goals for the Arnoldification of my scrawny carcass. Then it occurred to me: why pump my gaudy meat for the purposes of achieving an endless array of ocular orgasms in mirrors that would be too small to contain me when I could develop my most special artery into a potent machine manufactured purely for private musculation? More potent than any ensemble of arms, chest, back, and legs set in Javascript on the muscleporn websites I saw dancing about like circus poodles on my computer screen, by concentrating all exercise on my cock, I knew I could eventually carry with me a hidden weapon far more powerful than the outward caution overtly visible muscles could possible communicate. Stealth in the groin. For days I used Pumping Iron as a pornographic aid for developing my theory. I measured the seconds between total flaccidity and total erection. I created a methodology of fondling. I
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studied the bulging latex cocks bursting from the men in my local gym and made detailed comparative notes between these rival police and firemen and the competitors on my TV screen – My buzzer rang suddenly, disrupting Less from telling his Mr. Enlargement story. Not now, Sheila, I said into the machine. But Miss May – She can wait. Please, Doctor Less, carry on. She can join us, Less offered, raising a sly, saltand-pepper brow. Not a good idea, old friend, I said. Carry on. Less frowned. So convicted of the power of knives on skin and its psychosocial ramifications and yet so conservative … Well, as I was saying, Mr. Enlargement was finally telling me some of the hidden aspects of his life by way of explaining my injuries while I sat bleeding to death through my ass as a result of said injuries. I’m with you absolutely, I said. Stuck like a bloodclot to the artery of your plot. Mr. Enlargement carried on without a care for the clock, Less continued. I’m paraphrasing this, of course. I made no notes or recordings … I would have liked photographs, really, and video demonstrations of the physical trials Mr. Enlargement described. He told me that he gradually learned to perform pushups
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merely by exciting himself by viewing Pumping Iron … The public deserves records of such feats. Over time, Mr. Enlargement said, I learned to hoist myself from the floor, progressing from five lifts, to ten, working my way up to the hundreds. Faster than you can blink, I can produce an erection. I am a living, breathing, flesh Smith & Wesson. Centrally located. Sans holster. Biologically licensed. Biceps were no longer my inspiration. I become fixated on the clacking of steel, the exquisite agony of the press. As an interior experience of cellular organization. Tiny explosions of life meeting metal death, sparks behind the eyes. My cock was becoming harder than steel. Effective Effucktive, as I wrote in one of the many cum-smeared spiraled journals in which I charted my physical feats, an inky mix of text and semen. I studied dubious medical websites, filling my mind with surgical notions, pallets of sex change architectonics. Plus I borrowed materials made available by my employer. Vast supplies of biomechanical botany in a clinical parlor on the island’s north end. But it was the knowledge of the workings beneath the skin embedded in my boss’ books that I needed to help me craft my cock into an exemplary weapon. I considered asking my boss to help me transfer soft fat cells from my ass into my cock, perhaps implant a few divots of retractable mercurial metal … But I didn’t want to be an X-Man, despite my fascination for the penetrating adamantine claws of Wolverine – by far the most fashionable of the mutant lot. Instead, I strengthened
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my suspensary ligaments using pure motion, reinforcing my fleshy trusses and anchors strictly by exercising in a manner proper to deluded missionary soldiers ensconced in gratifying group rituals of spit, semen, and sweat. Internet images of penile disfigurement found on freakish webpages did not frighten me away from the strenuous exercises I imagined for myself, a combination of puerile pornographic positions and Russian military Spetsnaz yoga routines. Still, I was not done. While Internet image flurries of the insides of ruptured penises and the creamy externality of women created the loads of sperm I needed to prove my theory, I walked barefoot around my home with weights hanging from my stealthy erections and measured my output in metrical numerals I scratched out on a vast array of stained notepads. Blurry black ink and interrupted pencil. After some success with ejaculatory intensity and distance, I designed new weights, shredding the pages of hundreds of medical textbooks and physics textbooks in an attempt to overcome my dilemma: the weights kept slipping. I couldn’t complete my exercise routines – no matter how conventionally selected – while the weights continued falling away. I created square, triangular, and circular objects with multiple points of balance before I finally realized that it was the harness, not the weights themselves that were causing the problem. Steel was too slippery and leather chafed. I worked with cotton balls from the
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medicine cabinet and twisted tweezers into makeshift halters to no avail. But it was indeed in the rotting interior of the medical cabinet that I found my solution. The barbed edges of the nail file stared back at me from the depths of my sickly white bathroom cabinet, its veneer spotted with red and black rust, violent yellow stains reminiscent of the venereal disease filmstrips I had seen in highschool. We had a song back then: Oh, how those spores spread, like cheese on bread, like cheese on bread. On the very bottom shelf, at the very back, behind sinking bandage boxes and vials of evaporated camphor, I discovered a moldy nail file decorated with a barely discernable American flag. Hours of aesthetic scratching had buried the image of the faded, crossedout flag beneath a palimpsest of human sawdust. I tossed the disgusting thing in the trash, but had found my inspiration. I rushed to the drug store and bought sixty packages of nail files, ranging from soft and easy to military and manly. I knew the latter would work best, rippled with threatening ridges and industrial buffers, but in the spirit of scientific inquiry and enterprise, I determined I would need to work my way up, empirically validating the use value of each type of file for achieving my fatal fitness goals. Back home, I fashioned a harness made of nail files and lost myself in the sensation as they scraped at the bulging veins of my motley cock. After long fits of sharply detailed inquiry and data acquisition, I
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found that the hardest, most brutal file, as I had expected it would all along, bit the most firmly into the flesh, holding the weights in place with a minimum of unsightly tearing. I became like the selfmutilating Opus Dei, only with greater purpose for the steel hooks ribboned around the inner thigh. My goal: the destruction of human life through ejaculation. Mr. Enlargemet paused, said Doctor Less. Leaning forward, the old doctor brushed dandruff from his lap, as if metaphorically cleansing himself of the brutal tortures contained in his narrative. That, Less continued, is when Mr. Enlargement revealed his capacity for compassion. As much as you’re hurting now, he told me, you should know that I held back with you. It was merely a snare drum snap compared to the bayonet ballistics I am capable of. It was time for me to make my interpretation, Doctor Less told me, brushing again at his dandruff. But all I could say was the first thing that came to mind, a ridiculous self-revelation that spoiled the potential for pure psychotherapeutic healing offered by the moment. Instead of pointing out the thematic relationship between Mr. Enlargement’s need to falsify his dreams in our therapy sessions and his peculiar, obsessive physical reconstructions, I found myself offering him means of further enhancing his corporeal fabrications. I’d like to help you develop this skill, I told him. I have a friend, you see. He’s just next door. He has an
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interest in weapons technology along the lines of what you’ve been describing. Doctor Gravity? Mr. Enlargement asked. You know him? Let’s just say … well, yes, I know him. But I’d rather not say exactly how, beyond the fact that no one with eyes could miss the tacky sign hanging on his door. Everything’s confidential, I assured my patient, gently shifting my diaper. I could feel my internal wound wafting the way heat rises from sun-baked expanses of highway. The tractor-trailer intensity of his shipment seemed to coil ever further into the depths of my interconnecting interstates. When the seed would settle into a vein, causing instant embolism, I could not tell. I could only manage the clenching and unclenching of my anus, needed to staunch the flow of blood continually collecting beneath me. Not anymore, Mr. Enlargement said. Confidentiality’s a fairy tale we tell the weakest of wicked witches. We’re now seeing just the opening borders of the infectious expansion of social infidelity, an infinite expansion, an omega point in process, a space of total familiarity in which anything unknown immediately assembles with the known, spoiling its anonymity, robbing it forever of the ability to sneak back into spaces beyond human perception, popularly referred to as nothing. No more need for wars of information and ideas. Only a total outward war of
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self-production. Star matter imploding and expanding in indifferent unity. Battalions of Semen Soldiers – I don’t know what you’re talking about, I told Mr. Enlargement. Squadrons of Female Ejaculators – What on earth are you saying! Exhausted, trained of blood, I was losing my composure, and much worse, my ability to counter the perfectly reasonable statements of my patients by accusing them of disordered thinking. You’d know that better than I would, doctor. We left it at that, agreeing that Mr. Enlargement needed a larger, more powerful penis, hardly the externalization of machinic ideas implanted by Hugo Boss ads, somehow theoretically extracted by Heidegger-derived psychoanalysis which, due to my failure, shows the patient, not thrown in the world, as it should, but imbeds him, like fashion propaganda, inside the illusion of this world as textile and text rather than an actual array of hard, dripping event. Less paused, abducting one hand in the other in a series of nervous palm and finger kidnappings induced by the slurry of his intrepid thinking. More meat to strengthen to strengthen the forceful flow of his oily projectiles, Less said, addressing me directly now. I want him capable of collapsing buildings and sinking ships by the end of the year. I want nocturnal emissions snapping holes in his ceiling, decimating the beds of those sleeping a hundred floors overhead. I’ve already recommended him to you, but now that my psychoanalytical hold has
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been broken, along with the interior of my rectum, I think it would be more appropriate if you would call on him – as if out of the blue or with whatever excuse. At least send him some promotional material. I’ll give you his address. Absolutely not, I said. If this Mr. Enlargement you’ve been going on about wants to see me, let him come see me. We’ve got phones here, appointment books, a waiting room. But by the sounds of it, your patient seems to be doing just fine on his own. True, Less said, leaning forward with a wince. But imagine what a valuable tool he could be to society! Less’ eyes wandered over the Boticelli, no doubt imagining the sheer watery power contained in the image unleashing itself from the vas deferens and urethra of this odd patient he’d come to fetish. Well, Less suddenly said, standing and striding to the door, I’ve got to jet. Before opening it onto the hallway, Less ran his finger down the length of the morning star mace and turned back to face me. Think about it, he said. And by the way: I know you’ll never come to me for therapy, especially not after today’s emission – admission – and I appreciate that. However, let me recommend a colleague of mine. Limping over, Doctor Less shook my hand, and pressed a business card into my hand.
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Meanwhile Elsewhere: Enter Christ, Stupor Immigratus Mundi Notice how they turn their heads. You can hear the grating of rusty hinges squeaking in the neck. Tendons, cartilage, bone. Organic, sedimentary evidence of life. Tectonic plates buried beneath the foliage of hair and skin. The squeal of bone navigating the conductive paste of joints, internal music drawing the mind into a tireless search for the origins of these sounds, reflected in the pitiful roar of these perfume possessed streets. Read the other way around, these buildings spring from the denial of the need for origins. No thanks to Father’s invention of the medulla oblongata and worse, its intelligently designed evolution .... Sentience never helped anyone. Those initial pyramids, responsible for this glut of buildings screwed into the sky … I can already feel the fossilization of the muscles in my own, newly minted neck, the consequential stress of failing yet again the call of autism, the only authentic existence left on the map. Let me explain the present moment: this is the first time I’ve entered a bar in well over two thousand years. Sitting in heaven, minding my flock, along came a courier angel on a bicycle cloud with a single sheet bearing a simple order. Arise and walk through U.S. customs. Thus have I landed in Manhattan. Father, forgive me this utter pit of sin. But really, old man: parthogenesis shouldn’t mean that I’ll turn the other
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cheek for all eternity. My crawl across this stage of your making is only now about to begin. The bar is colorful. That’s what you would say, isn’t it, in common parlance? Downloading modern English isn’t quite the miracle I expected. In Hebrew, I feel myopic. Self-associated, in Aramaic. It’s hardly a secret that I have spent long hours peering into the Greek, but very few of my worshippers know that I actually prefer my hallucinations in Chinese. Luckily, the streets where I stand swarm with the ancient Asian language, street signs and advertisements that guide me through the swill of bubble-gum grabbing at my sandals and the humidity baptizing my feet. Blackmon O’Nixon’s, stationed midway between soiled intersections, lingers in shadow across from decaying mailboxes bathed in dead neon desolation behind a battalion of empty yellow cabs flittering forward in scattered schools of gleaming tin. The bar itself, filled with contrasting characters and pockets of demon deluded darkness, nullifies the bloated sounds booming in from the street with the song of clinking booze canisters and ritualistic hymns of alcohol abuse as I step through the door. I sit down facing the rows of bottles behind the bar and wait for the jokes about the lawyer and the doctor and their nine inch nails, but they never commence. I’ve got my sandals, my robe, my staff, my glorious King John hair, and a sleek pair of ultravioletproof sunglasses rides the bulbous wave of my Romeshattered nasal protuberance. But my disruptive outfit causes no religiously prejudiced jibing. Rather, I am
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stunned by a surprisingly complete misrecognition of their holy lord and savior. The kookoo homeless don’t normally wander into Blackmon O’Nixon’s! one of the upscale patrons hollers from lips moist with ‘Light’ beer. His lined shirt explodes into symmetrical beams of cloth at the collar, cinched tight by an aimless stripe of color that dangles down into the nether region of his Dockersclad crotch. He reaches constantly into the pockets of a black jacket spread over the back of his stool, producing a small dark object bearing a glowing window at one end. Each time this man consults with the object, his face modifies into either a pained grimace or a grotesque smile. His three friends lined in a row beside pay him only a moderate amount of attention, busied by their own black boxes. My novelty, inspired not by the novelty itself, but by this person’s flatulent comment, fades rapidly, slinking the group of friends back to their drinks and the glowing script and digitized figures emanating from their hallowed objects. The barman meanwhile polished tumblers and glasses with intense fervor, rotating his hips in the absence of music. Many of the people I saw in the streets while approaching Blackmon O’Nixon’s exhibited similar behaviors. I am reminded of Eve humming and hawing over the glowing surface of a certain ancient apple in the world’s first grocery store. The way these humans hover these tiny schwarz obelisks in front of their mouths recalls the urgency of that first encounter with forbidden knowledge. Occasionally one of these
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strange creatures decides to bite. But, shockingly, instead of devouring the object with the glowing, shiny disk, he pours speech in a voluminous, slaying tongue directly into a grid carved into one end of the box. They spew sacred words into the apple in lieu of ingesting it! Excuse me, I said, tapping the first of these collected friends on the back with my staff. What is a kookoo and might I buy you a drink? I have many questions. You do, do you? That’s really interesting, the man said, turning to face me. I then notice the scarred surface of his face and the decrepitude of his clothes. His shirt, coat, and pants match the quality of the outfits carried by his friends, but stink horribly, with an even worse stench buried beneath dirt and soiled by the puss oozing from his face, hands, and arms. Cuz I gotta lot a questions for you too, the man said. Why, that’s wonderful, I said, leaping onto the stool beside him. Two more of whatever this man is having, I told the barman, and two shots of Cyprus Haze. And for your friends? I asked. Not my friends, the man said. Advice brokers. I hired them to help me find a cure for my wretched condition. Indeed, listening to the men chatting metrically into their devices, I heard the arrangement of appointments and bidding for medicines at the lowest possible price.
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I know that the only vice is advice, one of the brokers said, pulling his face from the box, but I think you’re better off making your peace with God or whoever. Accept this condition and start making plans for your grave. It’s the best you can do for your family. I don’t have any more family, my new companion said. Just find me a cure. That’s what I hired you for. Fair enough, the first broker said, relaying the information down the line. The three brokers huddled together, whispering. Let’s order him a coffin anyhow, I heard one of them say. The barman, who I later learned is really an actor (just about everyone in Manhattan, I learned, claims they are really something other than what they say they are – indeed, anything of any importance in Manhattan takes place on the side), screwed his face into a tight conglomeration of wrinkled flesh and extended teeth. Cyprus Haze, he said. Never heard of it. And if I ain’t heard of it, it ain’t to be heard of. That’s right, said the man in black into his glass, profoundly oblivious to the contrary plotting of his hired hands who were now nibbling at bank statement assessments of his assets. If he ain’t slurred of it, it ain’t to be slurred of, a drunk seated at the opposite end of the bar assured me. Solid as echo! I exclaimed, suddenly compelled by thirsty impatience. Using my staff to execute an
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athletic vault over the bar, I ripped down several sundry bottles from the mirrored shelving. I couldn’t resist offering these men an updated version of a very ancient drink, even if it would require an uncouth demonstration of my miraculous skills. As I sprung, however, part of my robe caught on one of the pumps, sending a swash of black beer down onto the ribbed floor worn by the flurried passage of decades of barmen and beer wenches. This well-timed slipperiness aided me in my escape from the barman, who immediately caught me from behind in a crushing bear hug. Customers only, can’t you read son? I can that, I said, but when I pushed back against the barman’s elephantine frame, he slipped on the warming slush of beer and fell, releasing the grip his exaggerated pipes held on me. The barman floundered for something to stay his fall, but gravity, being my Father’s invention, remained on my side. My eyes did not blink as I watched his head crash into a box loaded with heavy glass tumblers. Blood grumbled from his mouth and ears as the soft bit beneath his skull at the back of his neck sailed through a cracked wand of glass with the ease of the impervious Titanic through its devastating chunk of glacial ice. Jesus Christ! roared the diseased man, scattering his brokers like billiard balls backwards into the room. This sounding of my name transliterated into the pathetic pulsing of English caused me to turn swiftly in the direction of his voice. I felt a sudden
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uncomfortable magnetism, a congenital curse of virginal birth, as the brokers whipped open the door, shining daylight into the darkness. The absent weight of no sperm hauling on my loins in this holy, painterly image of light. A moment in which the roles of the sacrificial act became confused in the forward-most delta of my mind. I lacked a certain sense of sexual specificity I knew these ritual slayings required in order to fully signify meaning to the black mist of God I knew would be enjoying all of this nestled in the bleak foaming chasms of space overhead. When the diseased man caught sight of my stupored eyes, he snapped his enamel gate closed on his warbling, fleshy tongue, spun a rapid 180 degrees on his stool, clawed at his moldy jacket, and darted for the door. Dare I let him go? I did not. I forced against the grain of his fears the undeniable need for a drink, imprinting his soul with a desert burning thirst. I watched his neck twist mid-stride on his way to the door, his eyes beaming at the dusty lines of bottled booze, tongue lolling sandpaper dry, fingers pointed Draculine in the direction of the desired amber blood. I watched with my foot on the chest of the bleeding barman until the wounds of my mark walked back into the parameters of my conversational space. What’s your name? I asked, beginning to mix a shot of Cyprus Haze from the ingredients at hand, circumvented the lack of quality in the ingredients with a bit of chronological magic. I know that reverse-
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anachronisms are against the rules, but even father understands a little something about the historical specificity of gustatory aesthetics. This will cool your nerves, I reassured my new friend, winking slightly and motioning for him to sit back down. My name, said the man, is Modestine Job. Well, Modestine, this isn’t a séance. Quit peeking over the bar at the frivolous dead. He hasn’t anything more to say. And do stop pretending to feel his pain. It’s unseemly, especially when you really have no idea about the fabulous sensation of penetrative death. This death, in particular, made pure by the passage of glass, hardened sand, you understand, into the spine, severing the base of the most primitive impulses from the wretched machinations of the intellectual mind. He died, in other words, without thinking about it. I knew Modestine understood me by virtue of his contemplative silence. What do you do for a living? I asked. And what’s the purpose of that bolt of cloth you’ve got tied around your neck? Modestine gulped. I’m a real estate lawyer, he said. And you’re in deep shit, mister. It’s a cheap tie, I’ll be the first to admit it – you’d be surprised how many times the fashion hawks get away with wearing smut from K-Mart – but your killing that guy makes – Modestine stopped speaking, motioning for the black box in his jacket. Once in his hand, he punched against its surface with a dripping finger
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three times with the speed of a lion on the tail of a zebra. What is that? And precisely what is a cheap tie, as you call it? Hello? Modestine blared into the object. Emergency? Hello? Watching his fingers curiously, I finally discerned the nature of Modestine’s device. He was clearly addressing someone, some remote individual located in some other part of the world. Give me that, I demanded, ripping the small, tapering obelisk from his fist. Mimicking Job, I placed the object against my ear. Face puffed and fishy, Job blinked rapidly, scanning the circle of hair surrounding my lips with juggled eyes before darting them over the blooms of blood spreading over the floor and sending them back for further examination of my bristling face. Emergency Services Technician Akiva Eldred speaking, I heard. Who are you? I demanded. Where are you? Akiva Eldred, the voice repeated. I am a licensed and registered practitioner in the field of emergency vehicle redirection. I trained for this position online and got a job within a week of graduation. If you’re interested, I can give you the name of my recruiter. But my location is confidential. Please tell me, what is your emergency? The tiny, shrill voice amazed me. Merely by imitating the shapes of Modestine’s angled elbow and cramped wrist, I received this voice directly into my
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ear. It tickled, and yet I felt no breath. I sweated, wet with the urge to see the person addressing me. The voice continued: Sir, can you hear me? Make a noise if you can hear me … And then I heard her whisper, addressing another unseen figure: Hey you – sitting in the next cubicle – Sounds like this guy’s in a pub. He could be just about anywhere in the city. Maybe Queens judging by the buzzing of the airducts. Never mind, Google map’s kicking in … Blackmon O’Nixon’s, I blurted. That’s where I am. I noticed then Modestine Job collapsing onto the bar with a sigh of disbelief at my announcement. But only for a moment. Modestine couldn’t resist taking another look at the pernicious display of the dead bartender caught beneath my sandaled foot. He was such a great actor! I saw him in F – Modestine proclaimed, before slumping to the floor in a cold feint. Gotcha! Blurted the voice in my ear. Sir, emergency vehicles are currently on their way to assist you. Interested in hearing about their exact route? Stats on ambulance velocity and mileage? Just enter your credit card number using the keypad on your digital phone, followed by the number sign. To learn about other exciting options using our system, press the star k – I dropped the device to the floor. It bounced without breaking, skittering off beneath a table, its glow illuminating stalactites of bubble and snot
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drooping in a grotesque geography of human secretion secrecy. I retrieved Modestine from the floor and propped his head by the chin using the end of my staff. He flopped on the fulcrum, as dead as one half of the ten commandments. I suddenly felt very hungry looking at this mass of desecrated flesh. Having not eaten for thousands of years, I craved nourishment. Meat, in particular. Nauseating hunger directed my eyes to penetrate Modestine’s chest where I spied the quality and texture of the flesh surrounding his ribs, untouched by the scourge mangling his skin. I measured the size and weight of his heart, calculated the pints of blood, and licked my sacred lips. I dragged his body through a small door behind the bar into a squat cooking area populated only by a pot of boiling grease and a row of exceedingly sharp knives. Come along, my little friend, I intoned. But as soon as I spoke, I saw that my excited cooing had accidentally awakened my mid-afternoon treat. Back to sleep, I said, knocking him hard on his left temple with a single spiritual knuckle. Just prior to impact, however I noticed that his gaze encompassed the enormous hole on the top of my hand as I swung down upon him. Another accident occurred. As my wound made contact, a tiny pore of my blood, miracle juice, worked its way free and splashed Modestine Job. Even before I found a cutting board beneath the sink and selected a knife of vulgar length and proportions, Job’s epidermal condition had healed
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and disappeared. He fainted with a wondrous look of relief in his eyes as the painful sores receded and the gums in his mouth stretched down, recollecting themselves around his wriggling teeth. A vivid chaos of cutting boards and grease. Dropping the cutting board and the floor and propping Modestine’s hand in position, I began sawing through the fingers. Modestine appeared very delicious, particularly now that I had inadvertently healed him, but there simply wasn’t time to make a meal of his luscious body in its entirety. He of course awoke again, screaming outlandishly, piggishly (which gave me a Jewish thrill), but before his body could engender the fight-or-flight reaction typical of most biological species, I was already dropping all ten of Modestine’s scrumptious slender fingers into the boiling pot of grease. Modestine, I’ve got to tell you, I said, this looks like a mighty delicious decology of fingers we’ve got cooking here. I don’t suppose you ever thought your life would shudder with such grandiose purpose? No, I suspect not. Modestine couldn’t be bothered with my speech. He was too busy comparing the restored glory of his arms with the jettisoning stumps at the terminal points of his hands. As I spoke, I tended to the basket dipping my meal into the boiling hot grease. I touched all of the expected topics in my talk: adultery, murder, the necessity of spiritual police. To fasting, I could now add abortion and gambling, the insidious uses of
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family inheritances on the Internet, followed by the tenuous development of my doctrine against the decimating deluge of designer drugs draining death and disease into the alleys and the streets. The false teachings of cults, the telling testimonies of television, the mindless propitiation of papal predestination. I lacked only an intimate understanding of powerful pop references that one needs to infuse in such diatribes in order to fully communicate with the patchwork minds of people parented by pure culture. Finally, I collected the hot, French fried fingers into my robe using a pair of lengthy tongs I found dangling from the food-spattered wall of the kitchen in the back of Blackmon O’Nixon’s, and stepping over the gaping mouth of Modestine Job, I exited in a hungry blur of hair, robe, and leather sandal. Before disappearing completely, however, I glanced back and savored the sight of the blood pumping from Modestine Job’s slaughtered hands. I wanted him to survive, I decided. Pray for the privilege of breathing, I said. Surrender to me and I will sterilize those wounds and guarantee your survival, your complete restoration in the eyes of man and God. Coffers spilling with more gold than can be spent – Alright! Modestine gasped. I do! I will! I am! This is going to hurt, I said, stepping back into the kitchen, drawing open my robe.
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Umbilihistorestomy I cut childhood memories out of my head the way schoolteachers empty pumpkins onto newspaper. Alas, a few memories, mostly regarding hammers, remain. They said I was an angry youth, but the best they could do – Well, they sat me with a shrink, and it was only a matter of minutes before I had him agreeing with me that my parents were the crazy ones and that he should rescind his fee. Knowing he would predict for me a future of insidious serial murder, I constantly deflected attention away from myself, keeping my stories of hammers and cats and experimental backyard surgeries strictly to myself. I’m no criminal. I’m the world’s first surgical hurricane. My history is pseudo-Masonic. This means that I’m fully prepared to spin myself into a long line of super-surgeons, Brethren of the Dawn of the Renegade Red Light. The Scalpel is my Compass. Doctor. Cain, not brother, saw all of it written on the wall of the first surgical theatre following his attempt to resuscitate Abel. A worthy bother between brothers, I might add. Abel knew a great deal about the flesh, after all. It’s also little known that The Land of Nod referred in advance to that obnoxious modern phenomenon known as the Wandering Chin. So so so I was not born, I will not die. I suck hard on small vials of PCP, modulating my daytime vision so I can abduct the very essence of night without sleep. Today, I’m saturated in schizophrenia,
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supercilious during surgery. I am myself. A purely Umbilico interference of mechanisms. Hand as meticulous as the scalpel it grips. I drip AIDS from both nostrils into open wounds. I smoke opium the traditional way: motion picture film. My own lot of drugs, lined on a tray at the back of the surgical theatre, I am prepped by on onslaught of amateur nurses, while over the day’s catch my contracted nurses slave. A camera crew lost in the middle, changing battery packs and videotape between scrubbing and prepping the patient. Dobbing layers of camerasensitive makeup to the silenced form slowly sucking anesthetic oxygen from a thrumming, hovering balloon. The camera crew joins me here today and everyday for a full week. I agreed to be the focus of their television special in hopes of post-film pompoms and porn, after signing the contract, gazing madly with Vitamin K between my teeth at the young host bopping her blonde ponytail above blue windbreaker outside the café where we lunched. Lip C. Blue, ninety six kilos of radiating, televisable glory. Sure, you can be on my show, I told her between motions of my mouth around a bursting BLT. Mustard and tomato seeds unseemly in my moustache, boisterous culinary hemorrhages, wiped at nervously with a glaring yellow napkin pulled flirtatiously from her side of the table. How lightly she tapped the back of my sweating fist as we talked. No fishing necessary today, I understood by her cozy
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manner of drooping her eyelids with every dreaming pronunciation of the letter ‘p.’ Well, actually, Doctor Umbilico, Lip C. Blue explained kindly, it’s kind of, like, my show. But I’m glad you’re in! Everyone’s dying to know everything about the world’s leading plastic surgeon. World’s leading, you say? No, you misunderstand. I’m not in it for the fame or the money. I do it for the truckloads of perfectly legal, absolutely fabulous, furiously funtastic Special K! Say, darling, aren’t you eating anything? Nein. Nada. Nothing. Nichts. Thanks, though. Diet. Five at once actually. The ways must be tried. I looked at her body but resisted telling her she’s got nothing less to lose, just in case I later felt like cutting what meat she did have from her delicate little frame. Lip C. Blue leaned forward. People want to know stuff. Like your family and stuff. Parents, childhood friends, you know. Romantic passages from your puberty and such. Again, that lilt with her eye at every enunciation of her perfectly plosive letter p. Attempts to portray sincere parent/child relationships always creep me out, I admitted. How about friends? Co-workers? she urged. It’s true, I said. We hire Black People, Asians, and the occasional Latino. There is nothing more meticulously engineered than a corporation, and no more so than one in the field of aesthetic medicine. Yes, the corporate hospital has respect for every gender, and operates regardless of race, nationality,
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sexuality, or religion. We’re far too busy with the paying patients we Frankencreate. I guess I must have signed her battalion of contracts because the next thing I knew, Lip C. Blue and the Afternoon Crew were bustling behind me, periodically interrupted by puffs of foundation proffered by a woman named John. Describe for us now, doctor if you will – This is my scalpel, this is my spout, push the handle in, pour the blood out. Learned that in medical school, I said, gleaming into the camera. Noticing the extraneous damage my dragging blade caused the patient beneath me, I continued speaking, concurrently guiding the camera into the wound with my free hand. On the contrary, I said, I did not learn medical malpractice in school. I had to pay a private tutor for that. Cut! Lip C. Blue called. You’ve cut your patient’s face! I looked down, and indeed, my wild gesticulating had moved up from the chest and neck the fishy, unconscious contours of the cheeks and forehead. Wait! I screamed. It’s all perfectly normal. Keep those cameras running! Aren’t you going to … I don’t know, like, fix him? Who? What? Which camera do I speak to? Oh, I get it, Lip C. Blue said, drumming her microphone nervously against her mouth. This is some
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kind of special effect. Some pre-production process you didn’t tell us about. I nearly fainted at her last round of perfect pronunciations of the twenty-first letter of the alphabet. Deflecting the punch she shot at my arm, I said, It ain’t a special effect if it appears in every scene! Nurse, this man is bleeding. Take him to Emergency! But doctor, we’ve got all the equipment we need right here, the nurse exclaimed! Absolutely! I said, pulling my mask away. And I trust you’ll put it to good use. Lip C., come with me. Look, Lip C. Blue said, stumbling into the center of the room as I closed my office door behind her. I just wanted a decent news doc, not a living hell. Outside, four forlorn cameramen banged against the door. Not now! Lip C., listen, I know it’s been a rough week – It hasn’t even been three hou – Whores! What a great idea! I picked up the phone. Wait. I haven’t got that much cash. Can we make it a Dutch date? She clearly didn’t understand, standing silent on my elaborate rug, staring at the scrawled notes plastered in white against the larvae green of the chalkboards lining my walls. I’m sorry, Blue. I’m unintentionally sexual around you. I’ve become a moon-bound astronaut … (Creeping up, fist full of chloroform).
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You’re the video game I’ll never play. With Lip C. quietly asleep, I disappeared through a secondary, secret door hidden by rolling chalkboard in search of a gurney. Her camera crew filmed the outside of my office, waiting for the reappearance of their leader, collecting sound evidence in the absence of sight, the only commodity they knew how to sell. Gurney in tow, I lifted the unconscious Lip C. from the floor and was soon rolling her beneath corridor lamps, back to the operating theatre by an alternate path. Nurse Feroxide, anticipating my plans, had a new I.V. crucifix prepped beside my original facetorn patient. Moments into the procedure, Lip C.’s visage slipped free without sticking, like a perfect Popsicle bursting free from its wrappings beneath a blue sky of deepest summer. I set in with needle and thread, first attaching the patient’s face to Lip C.’s skull, then sewing Lip C.’s face onto the patient. What a wonder! An unanticipated nose cartilage match! One in six hundred million thousand! Five hundred stitches and a very sore wrist later, I retired to my office, waving away Lip C.’s wanton camera boys like flies, and slopped back another the pile of Special K begging for attention on my desk. Who’s next? I asked my daytimer before tearing today’s page out and rolling myself an impromptu straw for immediate insertion into my Special K-aked nostrils.
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The Amputated Face of Aristotle Engels The human face appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. Its mystery stems from its social character. Everyone has one. Why? I knew a man whose eyeballs had been removed along with most of his nose. When I was a kid I mowed his lawn so that his neighbor wouldn’t be bothered by any untidiness blighting their block. He leaned his bandaged head hidden partially by aviator sunglasses perched on his wavering upper lip just outside the screen door, exhaling smoke into the rustiferous summer air. The tendrils rose from his exposed palate as he dabbed sensitively at the borders of his wound, collecting pus and nicotine residue on a small soiled towel he folded meticulously solely by feeling for the correctness of the soft cotton edges. One day this stained mucous slip of cloth fell from his hand. Devoured in a snap by the lawnmower as I pushed it over the small patch of grass beneath his door. Shreds of motley cotton poured out onto the boulevard. Tiny red lawnmower exuding puss and brutalized facial remnants. Over the engine, I heard the old man wheezing, clattering as he disappeared back behind the fragile screen door. He stayed near
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the front window until I finished mowing and then, following the reduction of vibrating engine noise, yelled out to me, You’re not getting paid until I get me a new snotrag! I didn’t dare walk into the place. I feared nothing more than finding his eyeballs floating in formaldehyde in a jar perched on a windowsill, his amputated nose displayed on the kitchen table. I could not understand how his brain could carry on without the protections of his face. Why had this man agreed to such a procedure? Was death so terrible? Even if he had wanted to give blindness a fighting chance to prove its worth, why had he not by now exploded the gas stove or gobbled fistfuls of painkiller? How could one stand longer than a day of such wretched misery when the mechanisms of a kind suicide lay around him in every corner? I heard a noise from within and saw a glow as I stood at the door. The television blared in the living room, growling commercials at the empty, featureless room. In the hallway closet, the old man advised me. You’ll find a fresh towel there. I can’t reach them and the nurse doesn’t come back until tomorrow. The old man lurked by the door with a long black cane clamped in his hand creating just enough space for me to slip by. I was certain he wanted to capture me somehow, sending cinema images of him forcing my flaccid penis into his extraordinary, gaping wound. Rushing past his massive, wheezing orifice, I rifled through the packets of medical gauze and
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antiseptics he had crammed haphazardly in the closet shelves above an old vacuum cleaner and a barrage of dangling, musty overcoats. I asked him who helped with cleaning house. There’s no one to complain about the upkeep in here, he said. The nurses clean up the only mess in sight, and that’s almost always something dripping out of me – At that moment, the commercials channeling through the television set in the living room ended and an afternoon talk show switched on in a flurry of graphics and phony afternoon voices. Ladies and gentleman, welcome to the Marntel Williams show, we heard a shiny bald man say while casually wiping his moustache with thumb and forefinger. Later in this hour, Marntel continued, we’ll be bringing you live footage of Shambles the Whale – before, during, and after her daring pregnancy conducted by scientists at the Deeply Sonorous Oceanic Fertility Clinic. But joining us now in the studio, Aristotle Engels. Now, ladies and gentleman, what you are about to see may disturb you. Those of you watching at home, please consider removing young children from the sight of the television. Marntel paused, staring cosmetically into the camera while viewers across America scooted entire families onto couches and chairs in their living rooms, assigning the smallest and speediest amongst them the task of collecting pop and chips from the nooks and crannies of smutty trailer park kitchens.
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We’re joined by his wife, Persephone, Marntel finally said. Thank you for coming today to help shed some additional light on this incredible story. You heard of this guy? the old man asked me. Could be my twin brother. The old man felt my gaze scrutinizing his eyeless perspective. Judging by the descriptions on the news that is … What does he look like? I turned my attention to the television set. A man wearing a bizarre plastic mask appeared on the screen surrounded by the stripped down studio look so commonly displayed on contemporary television screens. The old man chuckled as my breathing stiffened. To be honest, I said, not a lot like you. He’s got a mask. Toy eyes and nose resting above the lip. I guess the cut of his wound matches yours. Industry standard, the old man groaned. A common procedure? I asked. Common enough to find them advertising the Fisher-Price faces on daytime TV, he responded. Aristotle Engels, welcome to the show, Marntel said. I watched as poorly edited shots of the Marntel’s eyes fixated on his guest, dilating wildly, nervously darting away despite the fact that man couldn’t actually see him. Everybody reacts that way, the old man said, sensing Marntel’s discomfort. You should’ve seen my nurse when this guy’s story broke. Even after months
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of exposure to me, even with the mask, she couldn’t … Standing in the hall, my arms engaged in the closet, I turned my attention back to hunting for a towel for the old man to sop up the oil leaking from his damaged face. Here we are, I said finally, tugging a stained length of cloth free from the upper regions of the closet. I placed it in the old man’s freehand, which shocked me by clutching past the fabric. Grasping my arm, his fingers bit deep into the muscle. Aren’t you going to stay and watch the rest? Oh no, I’ve really got to run, I explained. Five more lawns before the day is through. Say, I offered, why don’t you pay me next time? I was attacked by a bear while out hunting, Aristotle said from his chair Marntel’s stage. It was just the tiniest scratch. I thought I was lucky. The scratch was here, here on the tip of my nose. Aristotle’s hand gestured toward the oddly shaped plastic proboscis adhering magnetically to his head. Manikin eyes staring blankly, Aristotle illustrated the location of the original bear scratch. Seated beside him, Persephone nodded. That’s right, Marntel. Aristotle is a very lucky, very lucky man. Hah, the old man laughed, increasing his grip on my arm. And then what happened, Mrs. Engels? Marntel asked. The old man wouldn’t let me budge.
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Watch it for me, he hissed. It won’t take long. I feel like I can see again when I have someone with me in front of the screen. Well, I took him to the doctor of course, Persephone said. Got him all the necessary shots – but it was only a couple of days before the entire center of his face turned yellow and red. Dominated by pus, wasn’t it? the old man cussed. He wobbled as he spoke, tightening his horrendous hold on my arm. I worried that whatever had infected the old man would soon work its way into me. Indeed, his untended fingernails were drawing blood from my sun baked skin. Please, sir, I said. Ease up a little. I’m not going anywhere. I promise. Let’s sit down. Sighing, but not easing up, the old man let me guide him to his chair. With my free arm, I pushed past a pile of unread newspapers and sat cautiously on the couch. We didn’t know what to do. My entire face swelled up like burnt plastic. I couldn’t see or breathe through my nose. My throat closed. Finally, I just passed out. Persephone nodded in agreement. When he hit the floor, she laughed nervously, his entire face exploded. I was cleaning blood from the walls for weeks with industrial biological antiseptics kindly donated by the Centre for Disease Control. When I woke up, Aristotle continued, the doctors told me they had amputated my forehead and my nose. I couldn’t speak at the time. I could only
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listen and squeeze my wife’s hand. We didn’t know Morse Code, and besides, we didn’t have much to say. As always, Persephone had other things she wanted to squeeze – Well, Marntel coughed, I think that’s material for an entirely different show … What happened next? Well, at this point I still had my eyes. Two points of purple and yellow hovering in space, permanently open. It wasn’t until moments before they put me to sleep for the second operation that they suddenly began to function. The fall of the gas mask and the silhouette of my surgeons was the last thing I ever saw. Wait a moment, Marntel said. What prompted the second surgery? They wanted to save the eyes. Embed them in the mask they were designing for me somehow. I don’t know. But the infection from the bear – It was the bear! Do you see? The old man yelled. – it kept spreading. The doctors raced with flashing scalpels to save as much of my face as they could. And what were you feeling through all of this, Mrs. Engels? To tell you the truth, Marntel, I didn’t feel much of anything. My mind was totally concentrated on my husband – Sure it was, you bitch, the old man screamed at the screen. You bitch, you were already out there researching prosthetic polymers! You were pooling
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your Tupperware friends for contributions to the cause of the faceless one. Sneaking in at night with samples of plastic and holding them against his skin, testing for allergies. You couldn’t handle presenting Mr. Buckshot to the community in his condition, could you? You needed a mask and you needed it quick to hide the horrid truth of the human face unraveled, undone! The old man’s clutch on my tightened, grimy, puss-stained finger nails digging deeper. You’re hurting me! I gasped in horror. Silence! I squirmed with pain, but continued watching the show, attempting to understand the significance it held for the old man. He seemed to inhale oxygen directly through the gaping orifice. I could not resist glancing occasionally behind the sunglasses and imaging the hypnotic wavering of his tongue and tonsils beyond the blemished bandage. Thank god we’ve got such good insurance, Persephone continued. If I had been worrying about money the entire time … Well, let’s just say I wouldn’t have made it without the Starry Bonus Plan offered by Human Scraps Insurance Incorporated. Mrs. Engels turned and winked at the screen as a small logo from the insurance company suddenly appeared, shimmering beneath her shiny chin. Marntel cracked an award winning smile, communicating his approval of the pathetic prepaid pitching of the insurance company’s services while Aristotle craned his neck,
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hunting for voices in the awkward moment of uncouth television silence. Aristotle, tell us about your new face, Marntel finally prompted. Well, I’ve got my wife to thank for that. She spent a lot of time searching for just the right surgeon … Ladies and gentleman, Marntel said, standing. Extend a warm welcome to Doctor Gumbavity. That’s him! the old man screeched, grinding his fingernails down into bones. The criminal! I knew it! Stop it! I yelled back. You’re cutting off my circulation. I’m watching this ridiculous show with you – isn’t that enough? Let go of me! The old man suddenly calmed, searching the room for me with Ray Charles twists of his neck. I’m sorry, he said. It’s just that – Doctor Gumbavity shuttled on the stage, inspiring fits of applause. The doctor could have been my father, I thought, alternating my gaze between my bleeding forearm and the dusty screen. Same features: dross Draculine hair, indefensible, wobbling chin. Afternoon of twins, the old man said. We all dwindle down to one. Eventually. Gumbavity … It’s a different doctor after all. I thought I heard him say Doctor Gravity. Mind if I smoke? Not at all, I said. Anything you like. Just please let me go.
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I usually poke my head outside the door to avoid setting the place on fire, the old man explained. But with you here … I’m not sure I can stand any more of this program without a dose of old Saint Nic. I’ll be safe, he reassured me. The first thing I did, Doctor Gumbavity said, addressing his fixated studio audience as I returned my attention to the television, I assed the wishes and desires of my patient, however improbable. Aristotle here is a great guy and I wanted to do all I could for him. Nonsense, the old man said, I’ll tell you something, my boy. He’s an experimentalist the likes of which no holocaust has ever seen. I didn’t need the scratch of no bear to bear the earnest knife of Doctor Umbilico – Gumbavity, I corrected him. Twins, namesnakes! They’re all the same! I went in to have an offending wart removed on account of my wife. Nothing but an ugly little thing. I never asked no one to touch it. Only to let it be. Well, I buried her in the backyard on account of the failed surgery despite my new acquired blindness – scuttle her bump for even recommending me to the likes of this madman! You killed your wife? Groping for his pack of cigarettes, the old man’s hand happened upon the remote control instead. In a fit of deadly sonar precision, he stood and threw the remote at the television screen, separating Doctor Gumbavity’s televised face into a
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myriad of crystalline shards. Flakes of glass erupted from the screen, embedding themselves amongst the old bandages and dirty towels and cigarette wrappers populating the surface of the saturated carpet. I have to admit – Umbilico did try and make me one of those silly plastic faces. Tell me, boy: Do they look any good? Don’t answer! They’re held in by magnets, aren’t they … bone integrated implants of pure titanium. I rejected the intrusion completely. My body rejected them, that is. Popped those little numbs of steel right back out, quicker than a sick kidney. It was like secreting a pearl from the soft shell of deceased clam – You killed your wife? I repeated. I never should have listened to her, the old man explained. If only I could believe that she meant well. No. She thought I would kill myself, leaving her frolicking and free to finally immerse herself completely in her precious world of endless Tupperware trauma parties. Well, sir, it hardly matters anymore if you report me to the authorities. The bitch is dead. I hit her in the back of the head with a blitzkrieg of shovel strikes while she tended the tomatoes in the garden. I heard her scatter against the trellis, popping tomatoes beneath her weight. They won’t imprison me, he continued. You can save us both some time by not mentioning this. Only you and I know where the body is laid, and even if they do toss me in the dankest cell, at least I’ll get laid. It’s been ages. Even bloated black prison cock appeals to me these days …
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Spent, the old man slumped back in his chair. He reached cautiously for his cigarettes, then, for his lighter. Wiping mucous and moisture from the perimeter of his wound, he suddenly tore off the sunglasses, removing the bandage in a whipping motion. I caught a glimpse of the brain pulsing deep in the cavernous pit above the teeth. Behind the sinuses, I spied a mess of raw flesh and saw the strange workings of an organic violin. Switching violently with his thumb, the old man extended the lighter to the towel I had labored to find for him, setting the fabric ablaze. A sudden, monstrous fire-eater, I watch as he pushed folds of the burning towel into his wound. Sparks and parachutes of flame floated freely into the air, igniting the ceiling in a wash of brilliant color. Pieces of rubbish ignited, followed by the carpet beneath. I could barely see, my lungs collapsing in revolt against the smoke and flames. Clamoring for the door, an explosion sent shrapnel from the television screen rattling into my eyes. Oedipal bleeding, Sirens screaming. Toppling on the lawn, I become vaguely aware of a long stretch of sirens docking at the edge of the lawn. Kind hands and voices hauled me up onto a gurney and off to the nearest hospital. The paramedic riding with me in the back of the ambulance pressed a business card into my hand while tending my blazing eyes with scorching saline. It’s just a bit of glass, the medic said, failing to encourage me. I had the same thing once, which is why I’m recommending you to Umbilico here. I don’t
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know where he got them, but I just love my new eyes. No matter what you do, don’t let just anyone scrub away at your peepers. You’ll regret it!
Plots to Alter the President’s Face False pregnancy? the president blared into the phone. I thought I said fiscal policy! Aw, shucks. What’s the Pepsi difference, anyhow? As long as I’m getting a blowgasm tonight from my darling presidentessa, what do I care what’s said in the gutters of CNN? No, Mr. President. You do care. Let me assure you of that. There’ll be nothing kinky tonight, I’m afraid. PorN.A.S.A. could be watching and as we learned last week, they’ve recently joined forces with Reuters. They’ve got a wide horizon of satellites. You know this. The people need you sterile and pure if they’re ever going to buy your method of making the Middle East your pin cushion. I’ll see you in a couple of hours. At the ball. Right-o. Presidential aide Andreas Dworkin tapped a button on the speaker phone, ending the call. Now then, Doctor Umbilico, where were we? I fizzled happily behind a glass of champagne bubbling with Special K. The fluidity of the limousine carrying us to the presidential ball only added to the scrumptiousness of the golden bubbly we drained by the liter, staining our mouths with bright red caviar and lobster sauce. Dworkin, dressed in lean black and white penguin duds that mirrored my own, smiled,
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laughed, hollered, feigned surprise, followed by a series of Chaplinesque impression before dumping a rounded hill of C on the surface of a small square mirror. Assassination is out, Dworkin proclaimed. Cliché. Boring. Prone to conspiracy. What’s good for Hollywood has become bad for ideology. Or good. Who can tell anymore? It reverses everyday. Even the most cleverly planted seeds threaten our information forests of compliance with the fires of dissent. We losing all those shadowy ocean side sandmen sculpted by children we’ve relied upon to fascinate the masses in the tides of alternative democracy introduced by the Internet. It encourages us to blend in. No, I said, cramming my nose with Dworkin’s coke. You’re right. Assassination fools no one anymore. We need a higher form of spectacle. If we must rely on assassination, we should at the very least advertise the event so that we can charge admission months in advance! The presidential aide was only half listening, half of his mind concentrating on at least sixteen things, none of them profitable, while the other half cooked. I could see the exhaust spilling from his ears. I say we leave assassination for the time being. Let’s let plastic surgery take its place as the newest form of political death. What are you suggesting? Dworkin asked. I have detailed plans locked in a safe, I explained. Only one other doctor knows about them, and he’s safer than any of us. Neither he nor the plans
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can be traced to me and they’re prepped with a Mission Impossible self-destruction device that will automatically initiate in the event of an emergency. Tonight, after the ball, I’ll show you. Blueprints wreak a special form of havoc, and in that sense, much of the work is already done. Selah! To that end, my friend, we must keep our minds clear. This evening of mindless political drivel must be carefully studies. It may offer us gems we can add to the insidious character of our insipid plan. I tapped another gram of Special K into my drink. Dworkin? What is it? Something special. Have I heard of it? Possibly not. Can’t be that special then. All the better, I said, ignoring his snide remark. You can experience the sensation without spoiling it with your banal, private school preconceptions. I dumped a vial of my most precious Special K in his champagne glass. Dworkin sniffed at the glass as the powder swirled and dissolved. I’ve got a Wikipedia printout on the matter and a briefcase loaded with antidotes if it’ll make you feel better, I taunted. The usual shit about dead brain cells in rats and swollen gums and sculptured hallucinogenic schizophrenic fits of messianic belief. And you will have no doubts about the existence of
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God after you’ve tasted that first sweet bitch hangover. It’s full and warm, pink like Barbie, like a broad stroke of lipstick against the cardboard of the mind. Lifting the glass with two hands, Dworkin pulled the contents down into his throat, swirling the siphoned fluid against the grooves of his teeth. I dreamed of the golden future as we drove. Dworkin remained quizzical and dissociated for the rest of ride, deep in a K-hole, exactly where I needed him. He had a tremendous amount of control over the rapture, the battering rams slamming madly behind his eyes. When the limo finally landed, my shoes spoke wisely against wet pavement as we walked towards the carpeted stairs into the White House. Red velvet bordered in black where the carpet touched the rain. Camera flash made me epileptic, but Dworkin suffered the popping blitzlichter blitzen of the bulbs with the grim resolve of the wheelchaired Vets he continued supporting with celebrity populated food drives, moving one spoked foot at a time. Dworkin suddenly broke into Vitamin-K psychosis as we mounted the steps, however, and began plucking at his beard and hair, tearing small mounds of hair away from his cheeks and tossing the bloody threads into the air. The photographers rushed into the bags for the microscopic lenses they would need to capture the floating threads in grim detail. Donald Trimp admired the spectacle as he whizzed by, patting Dworkin on the shoulder. Without
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recognizing the tycoon, Dworkin turned and gripped Trimp by the ear and, pulling him close, screamed SLAVES! Engulfed, the lot of us, engulfed in slaves! Trimp clapped a pudgy hand over Dworkin’s mouth and pushed him aside, debonair even in the face of threat, a breast coat handkerchief polishing the spit from his palm in graceful strokes as his patchy head disappeared through the door followed by the flashing roar of journalistic lightning and thunder. Luckily, after Trimp’s heroic display, most everyone found they could ignore Dworkin’s sudden outbursts, and to my relief, I was able to seat him temporarily behind a flag at the back of the room where I fed him napkins from my table to help him sop the blood from his cheeks and scalp. He preferred eating the expensive cloth, however, shaking loose several molars with his violent chewing, enamel he waved proudly behind the stars of the flag in a fit of infantile fascination. An audience of fifty oblivious stars and thirteen horizontal stripes, all of them as unspeaking here as on the surface of the moon. Transient photographers, having lost interest in the image of Dworkin’s feet poking out from beneath the flag, flashed the podium, capturing the large map hanging behind the president’s head. The president was already speaking, gesticulating wildly at the map from behind the lectern upon which he leaned heavily. The president wore a checked shirt sans jacket. He stood in vapid, but not unwelcome contrast to the assembled journalists and politicians dressed uniformly in tuxedo and evening dress.
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Let me tell you about presidential assassination, the president said. It reeks from every corner of the globe. Armored limousines are not enough. I need a tank! No, really, I’m only kidding. Tanks are for sissies. Dworkin called out from behind the flag, squawking like a Spielberg dinosaur on digitized speed. Dworkin, the president hollered, is that you? Goddamn it, get up here. The gaze of those assembled searched the room. A white napkin dashed out from behind the curtain. Peeeeeeeaaaaaaacccccccceeeeeee! Dworkin screamed. C’mon, Dworkin. Get up here, you old ‘coon. He’s obviously been celebrating a bit early, the president explained to the assembled audience. And tell us now, who’s the dapper fellow you’ve got with you? Dworkin tugged on my arm, dragging me towards the podium. Might as well introduce you, he whispered. You can’t hurt the cunt anyhow. He’s a little young this evening, don’t you think? I put up no resistance and smiled, pretending to understand Dworkin’s mumbling as he escorted me through the stench of perfume and the scratch of camera flashes. On stage, I shook the president’s inflamed knuckles, immediately running through all the possible cortisone treatments I might have prescribed
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him if only I were a more moral practitioner of the people’s medicine. Instead, I dreamed of removing the lock and pop of his trigger fingers. Wouldn’t want him handling a gun, should he get smart enough to think of grabbing one, following the operation, I thought. No, I countered. He’ll need those hands, and I don’t want to invite any accusations of cruelty or crimes against humanity. One should be able to right a crime without reproducing it. Up close now, I noticed that skin polyps populated the president’s neck. A package of flaws normally disguised by camera angles, lighting and post-production editing. He smiled at me crookedly, nervously, as if he could see the hammer I always kept at the front of my mind smashing out all of his teeth. For a man used to millions of scrutinizing gazes, I felt extra powerful in that moment, mauling the leader of my country with nothing more than the pinch of my Kmisted eyes. Doctor Umbilico, weapon of mass surgery, aimed now directly at the president’s perspiring pores. It has begun. Ladies and Gentlemen, Dworkin said, gripping the microphone, a frazzled Sid Vicious, Let me introduce – extend a warm – don’t even know his first name, heaven forgive me – Doctor Umbilico! Thank you, Andreas, I said, pushing Dworkin aside and stepping in front of the president. You all won’t remember me for my role as another kind of president. Yes, I, Doctor Umbilico, have served as the president of the worldwide plastic surgeon guild for
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over thirty years. It’s called P.A.L. People for the Advancement of Lying. As a plastic surgeon, I began, I remain dismayed by the research stems of your party’s political policies. Moreover, as a member of our society devoted to eradicating unbecoming blemishes of every shape and size, I cannot understand – The K stared kicking in real hard at that moment, devolving my speech into a series of stuttering ‘And, I should add’ utterances, before my mind settled enough to stop the broken record and return the needle to the opening track. People, I’m here to talk to you about immigration. These ridiculous policies prevent the ugly from seeking my services, I’ve noticed, not only because they can’t get in the country, but because without foreigners, our home grown Americans feel more comfortable in their skin! They feel no need to look whiter than white without the threat of difference. Let the immigrants in, I say. Welcome them with every arm you can summon. Raise the arms of your pets, I say. Moreover, give them jobs. Imagine how quickly they’d settle into their new lives if only they could afford the services myself and my colleagues provide? It’s not cheap transforming foreigners into Americans? Rest assured, ladies and gentlemen, those citizenship courses we send them to just don’t accomplish very much. We need to change these people at the level of the skin! Just as we have tools for amplifying the Americanness of Americans, we
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have special procedures designed for instilling the fundamentals of the American spirit in those not fortunate enough to have been born white here in our country. Oh, go ahead black men, shake your head, I said, rebutting the bald resistance of several bobbing heads in the audience. Ye of little Harlem, be assured. I have X-rayed a million of your souls, and every last one of them shows up white on film. But that’s secondary to what I’m trying to get across. Born under white ideology, you cannot help but perform the role the KKK and their epigones hate. We breed you for our continued sport. Can’t you see? At this moment, the president clapped his hands for a full thirty seconds before noticing his social foible. He sheepishly withdrew to the back of the stage where he fell into Dworkin’s rabid arms, eyes glazed by the perpetual flashing of cameras. Speaking of Harlem, I continued. I would be remiss if I didn’t take this opportunity to thank the president for the magnificent facelift he inadvertently gave lower Manhattan. Wow! We all watched as you stood on the heaps of rubble, spewing nationalistic crap out of your mouth through your squawking megaphone, the sound of pure scalpel slashing out from between your greasy Texan teeth. John Wayne invades Fort Bush, as the second best plastic surgeon in the world and founding member of People for the Advancement of Lying loves to say! But this is not an advertisement for Doctor Gravity who could not be here today. I speak today loud and long for the eyes
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and ears of your televisions. That’s right. I’m pimping your screens with the call for a ban on all immigration law. Open every border. Let the terrorists enter with the thought of purging and preening and cleansing us. But it’ll be a trap. We’ll capture the bastards and use them, like the immigrants, for plastic surgery experiments in making better Americans. Mark my words, America. Doctor Gravity’s right. Sooner or later, John Wayne will invade Fort Bush. This is our chance to keep the John in Wayne and ensure that generations of plastic surgeons to come know just how to keep it there! At this point, the Special K had taken over Dworkin completely. Shoving the president at me, Dworkin dominoed me to the ground. Ripping the microphone free from the lectern, he stared for a moment into outer space. Raging in response to a chaotic music locked inside his head, he sang pure, beautiful nonsense, erupting new and strange words from his quivering mouth, the language of ideological surgery: Evopastulatedesignvidence! Equalicredited Infotelligence! Confirtested Officiology! Inconcisioned Categoriety! Anomalistory Specifference! Appearosite Transivection! Esomediated Distingulation! Discoveristic Sequemediacy! Detectispecific Quarantility! Discombrilliant Selecstinction! Ancestullating Corposuperstitiolocution!
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More Like a Particle Than a Wave!
Let me say something, let me say something, the president insisted, arresting the microphone from Dworkin. By this point, half of the politicians had fled back into their limousines. Meanwhile, the journalists and photographers had doubled. They crushed one another into walls with gangly elbows, breaking toes and rending leather. I had to grab hold of Dworkin, suffering the inappropriate campaign of his hands as he struggled for release. I heard the scream of sirens in the distance, but the chaos of fleeing politicians and clamoring photographers calmed the instant the president’s familiar accent filled the speakers. That’s right, Dworkin. We hold dear to the creator and the inalienable independence he provides us. The unrest of our great nation makes it very clear that my confusing waggle of intentions contributed to the tumbling of lower Manhattan, it’s true. But at least into didn’t fall into Al Gwar’s sea. This quip garnered a small, short-lived spatter of laughter from the audience, which put a gleam in the president’s beady eyes. But, seriously folks, don’t think that Obamaglama’s not got a thousand more suicide flyers hidden in accessible places. He’s got more of ‘em desert holes than all the rednecks in Texas got engines stacked in the front yard. Really, folks, I love this country – like a child loves painting with feces on the wall –
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I am a new software, Dworkin hollered, reclaiming the mic. Downloaded in strident style. A titular Tanakh for online prophets. Imagine replacing all instances of the noun ‘Old Testament,’ wherever it appears wherever in the world, with ‘American President!’ What an amazing world that would be! This innovation suggested that Dworkin’s Khole was brightening. Not a good thing. Until now I had successfully set the stage for revealing my patsy, Doctor Gravity, following the abduction of the president, but I now faced the very real danger that Dworkin would direct the heat on me. I should have shown Dworkin the blueprints after administering the Special K, and not before … This is how it would work, Dworkin continued: The Law of Moses, according to … The American President! You can imagine the implications for yourself. Mosaic law streamlines and all endeavors to explain if and how the loves given by god in the American President apply to Christians. Jesus, without exemption, understands the covenant between the president and his people. However, the American President shall atone mankind in ways that have gone hitherto unrecognized. I’ve seen plans, blueprints, unfathomable networks! The law is eternal, scholars of the American President agree. Have you anything to add, Doctor Umbilico? As a matter of fact, I said, reaching for the mic. I needed to stop this psychotic derangement. I wondered how I could feed the chaotic Dworkin the keywords the public would need to later swallow the
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story that Doctor Gravity, and not me, had engineered the escapades I had meticulously planned. Wait a moment. Just a moment. Dworkin said, shoving me away from the podium. At least the president seemed amused by Dworkin’s tirade. I could tell that he rather enjoyed the idea of refashioning at least half of the Bible in his name. This reminds me, Dworkin said, finally diving into the subject of surgery. The American President reminds us that plastic surgery in and of itself cannot be wrong. True, altering one’s body does amount to altering the temple of god, but all who hear Heavy Metal whelped by Christians remember the argument well: How could they have built the golden calf without all those earrings? Women and men alike, casually tossing their gold into the fire. Gaping, callousy holes in ears, lips, and noses – Let me interrupt here, I said, finally wrestling the microphone free from Dworkin’s spastic grasp. Cameras continued flashing while the journalists scribbled wildly. I needed to keep the theme on surgery. I took Dworkin’s substitution of The American President for the Old Testament to a higher, much more effective level. According to the People for the Advancement of Lying, I said, the most commonly performed cosmetic surgeries involve breast augmentation, facelifts, liposuction, leg vein treatments, Botox injections, and nasal reshaping. Gravity, I said, slipping the name in, is the greatest enemy of every living American. You can
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clean your pores daily, brush your incisors, and snip your eyebrows until the cows come home and still not conquer the scourge of gravity. We’ve cleaned enemy countries using the most advanced technologies on the planet and we know the power of reconstruction. It’s time we made massive efforts – not only on enemy ground, not merely on home soil – but on the surface of our own faces. Dworkin’s right, the Bible does want us to improve our faces, to protect ourselves against gravity and the president here – yes, look, he’s nodding not nodding off, I trust! (and here the audience genuinely laughed, jiggling cameras, misdirecting pens). The president wants you to reshape those sagging contours and defeat gravity once and for all. And I, Doctor Umbilico, want you to populate the waiting rooms and operating theatres of our nation’s greatest plastic surgeons. Join us in this glorious war against gravity. Keep in mind that we’re going to need government funding in this war – we’ve worked silently on our own for long enough. But this war against gravity needs far more than mere capital gains. We need more anit-gravity propaganda. Pamphlets, television commercials, websites, viral campaigns. Now is the time to send a clear and specific message to this country of Cosmetic Ugliness. Spring open those checkbooks, ladies and gentleman, and put an end to gravity. You’ll not only be able to write it off your taxes – if you act now, I’ll personally arrange a substantial discount for every last one of you.
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A new voice emerged, taught and spunky, from the center of the media assemblage: Why should we fund your playground of scalpels, Doctor Umbilico, when American women and men need nothing more than exercise, diet, and the occasional visit to rehab? Gravity happens to everyone eventually, I might add. The question came from Trippy Gwar, whom we all recognized with a sigh of disdain. For his part, Dworkin convulsed and spun angrily on the stage, rightly fearing the same trap I felt descending upon me. I would need to handle this moment carefully. Determined to break every bark in Gwar’s fiendish forest of faux morality, I launched my attack while the president attempt to buckle Dworkin to his chair with loose coils of microphone cable. Am I understanding you correctly, Mrs. Gwar? I asked. Is that a sunburn on your face, Trippy? Not bloody likely. No, even from this distance I can see makeup and smell Botox. Rouge clings to your misshapen orbital bones. Not shopping in Chinatown for cosmetic discounts again, I hope. And your shoes? Ergonomipodiatrics crash the treadmill every time. Your request for sympathy stinks of the same neighborhood waste you use to brush your feline teeth free the processed sugar you fetish. Save your wholesome values for the talk shows. Here we mean business. Our business is an art, that not unlike gravity, not even you seem capable of escaping. The sophistry of the skin, Gwar returned, yapping over the snapping of the camera flashes, hardly incriminates those who use it. I always accuse
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the peddler before the user. It’s the basic bondage of bad economics. You, Gwar addressed those assembled, the remaining congress, and you, the journalists and photographers who will gloop this private freakshow against the eyes of the people, have heard some pretty absurd theatrics today. Now, with all the attention placed on Gwar, I helped the president finish tying the foaming Dworkin to his chair. Politicians cavorting like shock jocks, Gwar lectured. It makes me want to vomit! How can we justify the protection of public freedom of speech when we still allow for the private freedom of toxic slush such as this? This must be stopped! I am officially now announcing my intention to run for president in the next election. Listen well: I am not your usual white female presidential candidate. My future presidency, and my dignity, depends on more than the Kentucky Derby of crackpots swilling in this room. I’m going straight to the Jimmy Carter core of it with this one. I’m declaring war against the heart of darkness that this administration has built into the heart of the great United States. All this talk of plastic surgery is just a symptom of our collective drive to keep white people in and Obamaglama out. Well, I for one agree with the second part, but I’ll allow no immigration invasions on account of a facelift! Finishing with Dworkin, I shook the president’s hand and returned to the microphone. Plastic surgery, I said, comes from the infancy of our species. We knew how to correct nasal deviation at time when we
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didn’t even know that the earth revolves around the sun. We didn’t know that germs cause disease. We didn’t know that washing our hands in and out of surgery retards the spread of bacteria and microorganisms. We didn’t know that when we were told in Genesis that we were given dominion over the animal kingdom that this extended to the alteration of our own fleshy features. We’re allowed to work against the arrest of gravity. It’s a God given right. The Books of the Bible, or the Books of the American President, as my friend Dworkin here would have it, give us, not only warrant the killing of anyone who stands in our way, but the extermination of all other tribes, the burning of their children, the mutilation and rape of their mothers, the imprisonment of all we capture, the annexation, the rape, the everything and anything the spirit of the Christian Atheist desires. And most importantly, we must alter ourselves surgically in whatever manner we please. We live in a vibrant North Korea, Trippy interjected. We need no privacy. No privacy from the moment of birth to the moment of death. As I launched into another round of rebuttal, it occurred to me that my anorexic opponent was as K-holed as Dworkin and I. The devious spin of her pupils and the foam at the tip of her waving, vibrating tongue explained to me the source of the absolute lack of substance in our sparring. We were rolling pure murder from the depths of our psychosis, all of it recorded, all of it fit for future forensic fascination.
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With these Zapruderisms in mind, I carried forward with my attack. I had no chance, however. As I opened my mouth, an impulsive flurry of languages burst unexpectedly from Dworkin’s mouth as he struggled against the microphone cord wrapped around his legs and arms. Aborigine! Dworkin howled. Afrikaans! Albanian! American Sign Language! Amharic! Arabic! Armenian! Assamese! Azerbaijani! Basque! … Plastic surgeons come from a long line of transformers, I said, through and across Dworkin’s chanting. Thinkers whom we all agree refashioned the world and continue to do so. For every Adam and Noah on your side of the ring, we have a Cain and Sophocles. You have Jesus, we have Galileo and Thomas Paine. Did you know Kepler’s mother was tried as a witch? Do you really want to continue forcing your fellow Americans to live, pressed beneath the repulsive gravity of your positions. It’s true. Pain is especially important to us. That’s why we tug on Voltaire’s wig. Munch on Bentham’s fingers and toes. Americans, I implore you. Look through the microscope if you want to see something truly mystifying. Don’t look to Trippy Gwar and her bloodstained myths. Turn to astronomy before she gives astrology the other half of the textbook in our schools! Hindi! Hungarian! Icelandic! Indonesian! Interlingua! Italian! …
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How is he doing this? Trippy demanded. Why the memory stunts? He devotes himself to the alphabet in the same way you Christians mispronounce YHVH – Yiddish! Yoruba! That’s it, Trippy said. I’m leaving. Javanese! Pashto! Serbian! … Yes, I hummed into the mic. Sing, Dworkin, sing! Konaki! Czech! Danish! … Gentleman and women of the government and associated press, goodnight. I’ll see you at the polls. With that, Trippy Gwar gave a curt nod and pounded out of the room. Cameras sharked out after her, bathing her in phosphorous light. Thank God, I heard the president whisper. You’ll have more than God to thank, I thought. Much more. Klingon! Dworkin concluded, finally crashing to the bottom of his K-hole and dangling his head. And why not Klingon, I thought, contemplating the rapid onset of Dworkin’s snores? K-holed or not, I knew Trippy Gwar was going to be trouble. I needed to find a way to make her guilty. Of any crime, so long as it related to Doctor Gravity and the themes of plastic surgery. She was right. Her mere, causal application of makeup for public appearances did not offer much in terms of shattering public opinion. Surely she had been laser
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drilled at some point in her life. I made a mental note to set Nurse Seizysn on the case in the morning . You did great, Dworkin, I said, stretching out in the bouncing limousine where I approvingly watching him sprinkle Vitamin K into the president’s drink before slashing happily at a mirrored plate loaded with cocaine. I hadn’t anticipated this would be so easy. Who knew you had such a wicked, devious mind! The president himself facilitated the kidnapping. After the crowds dispersed,h e insisted on personally seeing Dworkin and I to our car. I got to tell you, you boys are mighty amusing, he said. I oughta get you in on all my press conferences! Surrounded by security men, the president and I strolled with Dworkin, barely conscious between us. Babbling about duck hunting and how long it would take before his face appeared on the buck, Dworkin and the president continued bonding in their shared state of autism. I’d want to be on the fifty, the president said. Bullshit, Dworkin insisted. I’ll bet they bring back the three dollar bill for you! And then it happened. Still rambling, Dworkin gripped the president into the car with him as the president lowered him into his seat. Instantly, our limousine driver urged the vehicle forward. I dove in behind them and snapped shut the door. All the president’s men fired relentlessly at our bulletproof limo while I clamored
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over the president and pulled him into the center seat. I’m riding with you guys, I guess, the president said. But wait a minute. I’m already home, aren’t I? Not quite, Mr. President. We’re just having a friendly drink. Your men will be right behind you. Drink up, Mr. President. It’s going to be a long night.
Dunkel Doer, Documentarist You know, Dunkel, my cameraman told me, he’s either an idiot or a genius. You can’t have it both ways. We sat in the back of our rental van, suffering yet another procession of hours between hotel and airport flooded with banal coaching from Pedro, a mastermind of mental inexpertise. Cold, wet snow screwed down from the sky, blanketing the windshield of the vehicle as we wound past the hovering yellow and silver discs of the service stations lining the roads. Wrong, Pedro. I can, and will have it both ways. We’re returning from the White House with all the evidence we need. The president’s faux pas foibles are clearly a code that communicates his complicit plans for the crushing conspiratorial crusades we see represented by the media through the media itself. Whom, exactly, do these messages reach? Pedro asked, elbowing me in my lumpy breast as he gesticulated Socratically for emphasis.
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I knew Pedro from grad school where we had collaborated on a few student films. For our greatest effort, Antaristotinomics, we created a travesty on the campus in the absence of anything interesting to film, creating a new form of documentary that radically altered the way documentaries would be made in the years to come. Rigged with helmet cams, we roared around the campus tossing a rental van filled with professors bound to wheeled office chairs out the back door while speeding around before hiding in the Grad Lounge high above where cameras recorded everything and we could personally film the aftermath. I savored the image from windows on the seventh floor of the Ross Building. Glossy streams of blood raked the road, sloshed from the shattered skull and shorn backside of the poor bastard professor whose shoelaces caught on the trailer hitch, the result of petulant, pathetic resistance. Every professor Pedro had tossed out crashed first onto the face and chest of this unlucky victim before bouncing on the rolling pavement in waves of sunned asphalt agony. Pedro chuckled while I swerved the enormous white van wickedly, my neck bobbling beneath the weight of my helmet cam while I shouted brutally satisfying inanities: Take that you Chomsky-Choking Cartesian Clingers! You Pap-smeared post-modern Platonists in denial! You Fruit of the Loom Foucault Flatulists! You Ubiquitous Universalizing Emersonian Eunuchs! You
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Voluntarily Vice-Rebuking Virtue-Convicted Vainly Villainous Voltarians.! … A brutal onslaught of film festival invitations followed the initial edit of the film and we wound up accepting backstage passes to the Oscars where we rubbed noses with Crumb Snooze who became our watcher in the woods for funding opportunities from his connections in The Church of the So-Called Whatever. Many projects followed, including a series of short documentaries for HBO in which we placed helmet cams on death row prisoners in a variety of countries. We filmed fascinating POV accounts of guillotining, immolation, hanging, and a bona fide death by firing squad performed at the edge of the great salt lake in Utah. Following this, Pedro and I found ourselves supporting Charlton Heston’s bid for arms freedom in America. We laced the private and public spaces of Gunsmith, Tennessee with our cameras before equipping every man, woman, and child within city limits with their choice of gun from a randomly selected issue of Guns & Ammo Magazine. We call this accretion filmmaking because we’ll be collecting footage for at least a decade before editing the film. In another project that may well outlast the duration of our natural lives, Pedro and I have set up thousands of free abortion clinics around the nation, matched by thousands of cameras in American prisons. We encourage the successive filmmakers working on the project to create a time-lapse edit of the footage in which we expect to see prison populations markedly
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decline over time as the number of safe and accessible abortions steadily rise. Now, with cameras covering every interior inch of the White House, our latest project provided us – up until last night – with uninterrupted video contact with the President of the United States. We had not anticipated a kidnapping, however, and with the president’s disappearance, we had no choice but to blindly pick a direction and join in on the international search. I don’t know exactly who the president’s theatrical ciphers signal, I finally admitted. But his idiocy clearly stems from maniacal genius. That much remains clear, and I know that the footage we’ve collected over the years of his presidency will help us crack the code. We should have insisted on the helmet cam from the beginning, Pedro moaned. Nonsense, I said. This is the best thing for our film that could have ever happened. We have enough in our budget for retinal contact lens cameras – Quit punishing yourself. Unlike so many of our tales, old friend, this is shaping up to be just the kind of story that any and all recordings of the process spoil the shuddering horror of the aftermath. It’s precisely that glorious moment of revealing in which we finally see the president again that we want to hammock. We must find that space and place in time and film this moment of exquisite revealing.
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Driver, I called up to the front of the van, where our operator was frantically fingerprinting the windshield in a futile attempt to wipe the mist of our conversation away from the glass. Drive on!
Subliminal Surgery No place on earth feels safe from your schizophrenia, Mr. President, I said. No place in the world whatsoever stands immune from the creeping, coiling worm shatter of your forever imminent esoteric press conference exhalations. I patted the president’s paralyzed cheek. Hands, ankles, arms, legs, and head, all strapped to the crucifix gurney. Meanwhile, the morphine in the president’s veins painted dreams across the surface of his effluvious eyes, glowing stupefied orbs I tapped lightly with my fingertips, searching for a rogue, techno-enhanced contact lense. For all your security expertise, I laughed, smoothing my patient’s forehead, I’m very glad to see that the capture of the president can occur merely by deploying the most low-tech of kidnapping techniques. It’s very satisfying, really. Feoxide, I said, gesturing to my assistant, will be your nurse. She’ll pass me my tools and pat your shoulder and squeeze your hand. Feoxide bowed gracefully, as if imagining an audience applause meter hovering over her head,
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gauging her future coronation in the Nurse quarter of the Criminal Hall of Fame. Everything you might expect from your average episode of ER, Mr. President. Only, with a touch more shredding, hacking, dismembering, melting, and splattering as we release you from your ghastly, monstrous state of abjection and refashion you in the image of the town meeting ideologies you have so badly forgotten. I noticed then that my equipment table was on the wrong side of the operating room. Nurse Seizysn, I thought we went over this! I exclaimed. How can I make myself more clear? A lefthanded surgeon needs his tools on the left-hand side of the table. Table? the president gurgled around his oxygen mask. He struggled slightly against the assemblage of his body with my myriad of pathological appliances. That’s right, sir. A hint of the United States itself. The great oblivion interface. Your own personal operating table, custom designed with your signature alteration in mind. I know it’s difficult being torn between enshrinement and desecration, and I cannot guarantee that this procedure will close the circular vicissitudes of national rage my renaturalization of your body hopes to resolve. Feoxide rushed the equipment table over to the correct side of the pale green surgical gurney while I lectured, clattering scalpels and retractors
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down upon the sterile floor as the wheels of the cart caught on the electrical cables strewn about. Don’t spill my Vitamin K, I warned. And those blades are contaminated. Replace them immediately, and send in my crew while you’re out. Seconds after Feoxide left in search of fresh, sterile scalpels, a series of technicians wheeled my computer into the operating room. Plastic covered in plastic. A cancer of screens stood at the boundary of the operating table across from me. This miscegenation of body and machine flooded me with pleasure, slamming me into the realization of lifetime spent in prosthetic fantasy. Feoxide, I said, the moment she reappeared, start the tape. Goodnight, Mr. President, Feoxide and I said in unison as Feoxide’s finger set the tape rolling. I lowered the main arm of my surgical computer over the president’s face. I played surgeon and anesthesiologist that evening. I couldn’t risk an information leak, even from someone who specializes in sleeping. I had only a few uses left in my amnesiascope, and these I reserved for my crew. Feoxide, I felt convinced I could trust, but knew that in the interest of total safety, I would unfortunately have to put to sleep. And yet, perhaps without any appendages to write, no tongue to speak, no eyes to see, I might take the risk and test her reliability. But that question could wait for the glorious mechanospheric sky of the morning.
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The cassette screamrattled a series of suggestions. Throatrape looping through the surgery. I wrote and performed the hypnotic piece myself, taking great care with my selection of word sluice and disorder. I wanted not only to sufficiently anesthetize him with the power of my words alone, I wanted the American president to awaken from his transformative slumbers with a new mind, with a newly installed set of directives and ideologies: the ultimate Liberesident. Not merely physically indistinct from his former flesh, but mentally and emotionally reframed, never again revisiting his original chain or trauma-inducing repetitions. As the surgical computer antennae analyzed the president’s face and formulated the pattern of Liberty’s visage for my groundbreaking surgical liberization, I enjoyed the unrelaxing tones of my own voice between scalpel slashes and fits of Special K. as boundary and as frame in the event of a falling down the deprogramming will be scalpelized on a single window of a single skyscraper in the event of a falling down the departed not played by bruce willis nor arnold nor harrison bored the invisible danger of survivors must play out in the form of the actors’ guilt of america amputates all arguments a gain st itself
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methodically excludes freedom from the stage no shapes of nature, no well-formed figure nothing outside of magazine, outside of tv nothing past our pixilated capacity for pathological disease oleaginous politactors destring populistic prayer beads bob dylan boy bands dash cardboard songs helping talent rust rains of exclusion invented alliances tossed sick harmonious at liberty’s chained feet caved at the back of galleries atomic night galas dollars plated with cheese cocktail buzz adrift gowns and shoes uncultivated actors in the event of a falling down the deprogramming will be scalpelized no more malleable morality at least not without the fuck of recognition the hardpore grind of the human face america, as if by framing its thingness forms crisp crystal ships special k on the membrane no more pynchon tweezing the miniscularities of imperative no more delillo theories of constipated conspiracy take away that puerile drug:
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the idea of pure america as part of one’s natural equipment the idea of pure america as the endless non-beyond of good vs. evil the idea of pure america as private purpose maintained against the footholds of public mediation the idea of pure america as a fixed and applicable yardstick the idea of pure america as the inadmission of sensus communis the idea of pure america as self-annihilation by stoic ancients bereft of memory and hence conviction the idea of pure america as the elimination of language the idea of pure america as the holocaust of thinking the idea of pure america as the perfection of exclusion as the inclusion of human incapacity to taste that thing that thing, that only thing that thing that fails to ask fails to question even the question that thing that goes further back that thing that fails to ask that thing that favors spring and fall fashions over the thread needed to survive that thing that fails a phenomenon free of humanimal differentiation as soon as entered into articulate composition inarticulate as soon as art, immercenary art
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as soon as recognition, ink dried war signatures as soon as symmetry, privileged binary as soon as face, plastic surgery!
As I worked on the president and hummed in cadence with my specially designed hypnotic chattering hissing from the battered speakers of the tape recorder, I remembered my first operating gurney with its old-fashioned foot pumps. Guaranteed for a good laugh when the entrapment of gas failed and the patient started sinking to the floor, away from the horrorscopic flight of the blade. I began preparing my speech for the annual People for the Advancement of Lying meeting at which I would reveal the president and his new features. Swollen face still puffed indecorously from the pains of the procedure, tattoo green gleaming with scab, but I knew the overall effect would amaze every plastic surgeon in the room, inspiring a fresh wave of mimesis in human editing parlors around the globe. I could only hope that Doctor Gravity would be there. If only framing him as the patsy for my crime would go as smoothly as had the president’s kidnapping and transformation. Nurse Feoxide and I slaved on until the early morning. Above the humming of the computer guiding my blade and the soaring rhythms of my anesthetic hymn, I had only to remind myself of one antiseptic line of gorgeous poetry carved above the southwest entrance of my of medical school: the best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, gangrene aft agley.
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Dream Therapy: A Special Kind of Scalpel Doctor Less A. Fuse worked on the other side of the island. The windows of buildings, short and tall, mirrored themselves in the windows across the street, ping-ponging random flashes of light picked up from spinning hubcaps infected with sun. Doctor Fuse, I noted, walking into the apartment complex lobby, worked from home. Couched in a leather chair behind his marble desk, the doorman adored me in false cadences, clearly annoyed at how my entrance took him away from his spree of Spanish chatter into the phone. Doctor Fuse? Right away, sir, I’ll call right up, the doorman said, switching channels on the phone. A moment of silence followed in which I studied the intense passage of pedestrians beneath the hulking scaffolding blocking the windows of the lobby from the sun before I received my directions. Fifteenth floor, the doorman said. Take a right. Take some candy with you. I frowned at the bowl of sours the doorman lunged at me. Not I, I scowled, glancing around for the elevator. Allow me, sir, the doorman said, unperturbed by my behavior. Mumbling a side-eyed apology into the phone, he came around and led me into the corridor.
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Three elevators, never none to choose from, always one casket lurking, the doorman said. After the doors slid shut, I worried about the strength of the cables. A mental eternity trapped in that box, climbing the floors. The cramped quarters and the doorman’s comments found me contemplating cryogenics. Like the Egyptians, I wanted to be buried with hundreds of versions of myself. One for every day of the year to appear as me while I shivered and thawed beneath the surgeon correcting the ailments that had finally coaxed me into frozen life in death. Doctor Fuse’s door stood directly across from me when the elevator opened. At least a hundred cartoons clipped from The New Yorker hung pasted to his door. I pressed the buzzer, summoning a wobbling old man clad in cardigan and Dockers. My X-ray vision revealed the false leg he wore under his pants. The aged character of his face immediately interested in recruiting him as a patient, but the manner in which he shook hand briskly and motioned for me to come in signaled that he, and not I, was, at least for the time being, the doctor in control . Tell me, Doctor Gravity, do you remember your dreams? Fuse asked. Sure. Sometimes. I try my best not to, most nights. Well, you’ll see how this works as we go along. For now, why don’t you start by telling me the most recent dream you can remember. I’m not sure I remember any.
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Tell me a story, then. Something to get the materials of the unconscious rolling. I’m not sure I’m much good at that. Was never much good at lying, either. But wait – I remember something now. Something from a week ago. I let my eyes wander over Fuse’s shelves as I related my dream. My neighbor, Doctor Less was right. There was something highly personalizing about all these books. I got to know the old coot sitting across from me far better than I wanted to merely by moving my head up or down, to the left or to the right. The only thing I couldn’t look at was Doctor Fuse’s penetrating stare. I stared instead into the lower right corner of the room, only occasionally glancing at the pant leg carrying his prosthesis. In my dream, I said, a magician came to see me in my office – he wanted his face to disappear. He’d tried everything conventional magic had to offer to no avail. Spinning boxes, snapping fingers, incantations from books written by the devil himself. When the magician mentioned that he might take matters into his own hands in response to my reluctance at removing his face completely, I warned him against performing anything approaching actual surgery without professional assistance. But he carried on talking, expressing his worry that his brains would show through the front of his missing face. What happens to the muscles and the bone when they’re removed in these surgeries? he wanted to know. What protects the sinuses, the spine below the brain in the absence of the face?
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The magician, I told Doctor Fuse, answered his own question by pulling a photograph bearing the image of a scarecrow stapled to a cross in the middle of a corn field. This is nothing like the silly scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz. This was drawn from a horror show, replete with decaying, dripping flesh composed of bone drawn from the corpses of entire flocks of the offending crows themselves. And then, suddenly, standing onstage, the magician metamorphosizes himself into the scarecrow, assuming all of the bones into his own body. A black abjection ensues as his human body rejects the animal, pushing the bones out through his skin. Even though the audience accepts this event as part of the show, I realize that it isn’t just a trick. It is an impersonal dictation of what I do everyday in my private practice. I fell into silence, contemplating my feet until the doctor prompted me. Whatever comes to mind, he said. I woke up, I guess. I’m sure there was more to the dream, but it’s lost now and thank goodness. Things slip in the light between the morning and the night. That’s how we stay sane. I slipped into silence again, interrupted by Fuse’s stock frustrating phrase: Whatever comes to mind. Well, I said, half-fishing, half genuinely letting my mind wander and connect, the dream reminds me of a program I’d seen. Maybe within the last month or so. It was indeed the stage show of a piss poor magician. His sleight of hand was alright, I guess I’ll
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give him that, but his performance lacked panache. I’m a big critic of the performance of hands, being a practitioner of a certain, surgical legerdemain myself. But this guy I saw on TV panders to the gothy, black fingernails crowd. Gun black hair and lipstick, standing in gangs on street corners wearing clothes dug up from fashion mausoleums located in skeletal city centers. In the scene I’m thinking about, the magician removes the legs of a woman he encounters in a park. Her upper half writhes while her legs twitch like an automaton. His operating table: a faux bench in a faux park – A new line of thought suddenly entered my head. My friend, Doctor Less, I ventured, my neighbor who recommended you, he would tell you that everything I’m saying unconsciously reflects how and what I think about you. And there may be something true about his theory. Here I am, rattling away about a phony magician, while clearly commenting on you. I unconsciously think you’re a fake. Maybe magic is the future of surgery. Wheel chairs hold a certain self esteem after all. I don’t know what I’m saying now. Am I free-associating? Doctor Fuse remained silent. After a moment of silence, he said, unperturbed by my attitude: Whatever comes to mind. Okay, I said. I’m thinking that it used to be that a double amputee could earn a good living on the freakshow circuit. Now they bathe them in group homes. Invite them to the Special Olympics. Somehow
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I doubt they enjoy the endless sun-up of blank stares from the bleachers. I paused. I could only pause, so rapidly exhausted by my exertions. You’ve fallen silent again, the doctor reminded me. Whatever comes to mind. Right, I said. Back to the magician in my dream. I did the best I could for him. I don’t have to love every project I engage in, I thought. I removed his face and covered the flesh I found there with a special, transparent mask. At that point, it was all about the payment of my fee. Money, even in a dream, is still money and you feel the value of it even in your sleep. Sleep itself is a form of production. But instead of cash, the magician gave me a sheet of paper upon which he had written: learning to love something you hate is far more pleasurable than coming to hate something you love. Speaking of fees, Doctor Fuse said, rising on his wooden stump. Time. I rose, stunned by his clipped grammar. I fumbled with my cheque book, mangling the metaphor of the poor old doctor’s hard-earned money in my sweaty grip. I made the figures and my signature big and bold with a blue Sharpie I carried in my bag for tracing incisions lines on the skin of my patients. If Less was right, the lounging loops and scrawls on the face of the check signaled my fondness and affection for the old man. Flirting like a school girl passing notes. And why not? I had indeed been
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gripped by a strong, illogical urge to admit a kind of erotic love for him. The ideas just came to mind. I considered pummeling his ass when he turned his back to me as naturally as one thinks of eating lunch, or of buying a new pair of shoes. I could teach this doctor much about booby traps and their application to psychology. I could construct entire mazes from nipples and liposucted human remains for the two of us to navigate like werewolves under the midnight sun. What a joy that would be! Rolling over the spires of human sandcastles in this, the most mentally sanitized apartment in the building! Later, I sabotaged my psychoanalysis by reading Fuse’s books. I needed to understand the theory behind the healing proposed by the doctor’s work with dreams. Doctor Less had whetted my appetite for Doctor Fuse’s approach with his lengthy speeches about the nature of modern psychoanalysis, replete with its skin contact and social violations. And now the silent enigma of Doctor Fuse and his theory put into practice maddened me into an Amazonian (dot com) rampage. And yet I forgave myself for ordering the entire library of his books. Hadn’t I studied for years in order to operate on my own face, to join the ranks of my colleagues long before I myself held collegiate knowledge? Seduced by the foolish pride of contours and angles, I made biology my scripture, buying boatloads of Hiroshima scalpels and Nagasaki blades. Why not apply the same principles of study and learn the art of mentally operating on my own mind? Why not hunger for scripture, seek and
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then find, knock instead of waiting for the knocking of Christ’s poorly sewn fist against the rosewood surface of my throbbing, thorny heart? I started with one book, collecting an entire library over the following weeks and days. The Internet told me little about the man himself, but helped me amass an enormous Les A. Fuse library. Each text remained only a shopping cart click away. I should be praised for climbing the mountainous regions of self-knowledge, emptying bank accounts one link at a time. I owe myself awe for how gladly I ground the tone of my shame, keeping my research into the theoretical mind of my own therapist a secret, sanitizing the sessions themselves from the very footwork I felt was benefitting me the most. And yet I know now that such therapeutic conspiracies are all about the emergence of secrets. It was not long before my nouns and verbs, adjectives and predicates spoke strongly against me. Weeks later, for instance, I related a dream in which I was back in grade one, this time hiding beneath Mrs. Childress’s desk. She wore white nylons and the goal of the game in the dream was to find the fulcrum of her crotch. It’s easy to make memories, I told Doctor Fuse. Especially when you think of it in terms of building a bird’s nest. One grungy stick at a time, an oily bit of cloth and discarded gum waterproofing the edges. I’m aware of this. I’m no longer sure if I am reporting what I dreamed or admitting what I wish I would have dreamed. I have a lot of uncertain visions of what’s
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trapped in the incisions my experiences have carved into my brain, in the sweaty folds created by the nip and tuck of the pressure made against the contours of my mind by the stockings pressed against the creamy underwear molding my teacher’s buttery inner thighs. I gather a collection of smells, pleasantries just out of reach, and yet as I relate them now, each odor connects with unpleasant reminders of medical punishments in the form of the turpentine the school nurse used to sanitize our playground wounds. After that Mrs. Childress wore slacks. Women wear unusual pants for watching sermons unfold. It was both church and school, a strange array of chalkboards and pews, desks and altars. I sat at my desk, charismatic teeth nibbling on pencil writing a fucksheet. Recto and verso. Every swear word I know, and still know. I can’t think of a single one I’ve added to the pile since encountering the lot of them in those early moments of my youth. Mrs. Childress, walking around, caught me repeatedly writing the word fuck over and over again on the page. She took me in a back room, forced me to recite my poetry with my face between her breasts. She swooned at my performance like a pitbull baying at the moon while the other children messed their smocks in the other room much more than their tilted easels. And then there I was, beneath the desk again, peering up into the darkened, dampening spot between her legs. This went on for some time. It was distressing, to say the least –
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What does that have to do with what’s going on here? Doctor Fuse interrupted. How do I relate to all of this? What does this story you’re telling have to do with my desk? What have you been peeking at? Confused, hurt, afraid, my eyebrows retreated into the center of my face. And then it all came rushing out. I had kept my research into Fuse’s books a secret for several weeks, bragging to my friends that I would eventually confess to the old man, thoroughly aroused by the potent nature of my secret. And yet, faced in that moment with the nauseating truth, a moment I don’t think I ever expected would really come despite my unabashed bragging, my cheeks flushed far beyond the control of even the world’s most skillful plastic surgeon. I’ve been reading your books, I admitted, twitching and sweating and dodging my eyes every where outside of his. Violent silence carried us through this unanticipated suture, as though my mind-blood had intimately lingered with his in a perverse manner normally reserved only for anonymous selves and their bookshelves. After a few moments, the doctor asked, Which books, exactly? Just some books, I blurted. Okay, so you’ve been sniffing around, he accused. What’s the difficulty here? Where did you get these books? Which books are you referring to specifically? I couldn’t bear to answer the question.
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I don’t remember the titles, I lied. Something about dream analysis … I ordered everything from off the Internet. It’s a manic habit of mine. So, then, Doctor Fuse said, recognizing that I was not likely to get back to specifics. Let’s go back to your dreams and get some more images to work with. I stared at the bookshelves. Whatever comes to mind. I sighed. I couldn’t imagine anything would make me feel worse, so I let the images souring behind my eyeballs do the talking. There is indeed another dream I can mention. In the dream, I’m with my father in the living room of a babysitter who cared for me when I was young. Plush white carpet. A fire place. We were laid out on the small stone area in front of the fire. But my father was not just my father. My father was also you. So you were in bed with me, Doctor Fuse said bluntly, without a tracing lilt of question in his voice. Am I in danger? What’s it all about? Confounded by his habit of directing attention to himself at the end of every meeting, I said, sure you’re in danger. Everyone’s in danger. I’m a very dangerous man. Okay, the doctor said. But let’s go back to the dream and see what else the images might tell us. You haven’t said anything about the babysitter or the house. Well, it was always a kind of safe harbor for me, I reflected, momentarily disarmed by the doctor’s candor. The house was a place I could go, even when I
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was older, to be quiet and to be safe. I don’t remember much about the babysitter, however – Just as I started rolling into memory, Doctor Fuse stood on his bum leg and officially closed the meeting. I think you should consider who you’re searching for safe harbor with, he said as I walked toward the door. I heard a final soft hush of his New Yorker cartoons falling back into place as the outside of his plastered door closed behind me. Always a quick close after a thorough clutching at the mind, just like searing shut the gushing limb after an amputation. I shook with hostility out in the hall. I was not looking forward to meeting the dipwad doorman doling away his silly candies, not in my wretched condition. As the elevator whined and cranked its way up to me, I considered leaping out the window. If only I had Spiderman’s powers. Crawl in, crawl out, free from the conditions of this city’s rampant, doormanobsessed passageways. While whipping past the absent thirteenth floor, my self destructive fantasy realized itself in the form of sharp, twanging buckles of the entire car. The elevator floor snapped up at my feet, slamming my head into the phosphorescent ceiling. Gravity all nonsense now, I momentarily floated into the air, bloated by the confusing pull of energy on my blood. I noticed happily in the gleaming mirror walls of the elevator how the reduced pull of gravity lifted my damned post-surgical wrinkles naturally, smoothed over by the freedom of falling free. New and
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innovative plastic surgery programs wheeled through my head before – – crashing back down. My knees slammed into my eyes and forehead. I felt my skull crack before I passed into the bubbling sands of unconsciousness. As floods of red and black crowded my vision, I sighed tranquilly. The elevator burned and crumbled around me. I heard the pitiful shouting of the doorman while I considered inhaling as much of the toxic smoke as I could, ensuring a painless death. Don’t worry, sir. Help is coming. Oh I hope not, I whispered. Was that candy the doorman tossed through the warped cage of the elevator, or cinders marring my face?
The Ungentle Exhumation of Sally Carnaski Andreas Q. Dworkin! What happened? Doctor Umbilico demanded of me. I had no idea you were so brilliant! You’ve saved us months of time and thousands of dollars! The surgery is complete and the president belongs to People for the Advancement of Lying! Monstrous success! We were back in the limousine, snorting coke and swilling drinks spiked with Special K. Umbilico’s nostrils tumbled and flared as he settled himself in the leather seat. Back to the White House for an extra special press conference Umbilico would transform
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into the world media premiere of his latest surgical feat. Speak up, boy! It’s a long ride. Let me tell you what happened, I said, squirreling my eyes at the streetlights swirling by. I wasn’t really high last night. It was a charade. YouTube taught me how to imitate a K-hole. I’m a secret agent, trained by the C.I.A., but even the espionage elite fall back on amateur instructional videos from time to time. In fact, we breed ourselves on the. Using a special military search engine, I continued, wiping sparkles of coke and Special K from my tux, I found every scrap of footage available on the subject of K-holes and schizophrenia. After hours of online study and months on stage with Uta Hagen, I can flawlessly deliver the illusion of sucking back gram after gram of any substance without actually ingesting a dram. Sleight of hand meets slight of mouth in the drag of my divide. To pull off Oscar award winning K-holing, I first invented a theatrical mask under the tutelage of Hagen. The Schizoid and Strange Character models bored me at first, but after mastering these faces, I was in a good position to begin mirroring the Ketamine footage I’d internalized. I made my output channels a feedback mechanism while pounding Internet keys, draining myself into YouTube so completely that, once installed, my schizophrenic identity spontaneously absorbed the material produced by the aluminum mangling of my
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multitudinous search strings. The K-Mask I ultimately settled with the help of Hagen helped me master microscopic levels of K-competence: eye contact, gesture, fluency and its rigid, catatonic opposite: the fearful symmetry of the legendary K-hole. My mindset in place, I next tackled the voices I would need clattering inside me to pull off a truly authentic performance of Ketamine psychosis. I located one voice in the upper-right quadrant of my frontal lobe. I had this voice scream endless obscenities at God, compulsive blasphemies borrowed from C.I.A. interrogation manuals regarding the treatment of Christian captives. I kept another voice chattering about whiddlies and perpetual motion machines. Series of voices and visions, each one scattering in from a different directions. At one moment, Laurel and Hardy. Jeffrey Dahmer the next. I made these visions so intense and real that eventually the visions themselves became aware of me, creating a caustic cross of ever-building responses. Soon, a spontaneously developed voice started instructing me to marry my sister. This powerful entity within my shattered pool of competing egos forced me to watch endless scenes of myself rape-stealing her purity and pride while lecturing her on the social and historical constructedness of rape. At first these images really twisted my mind. This internal decrepitude bit like acid into the steel of my morality (I had made sure my mask was a churchgoer, to increase the violence of the schizophrenic simulations) until another voice
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reminded me that I don’t have a sister. At that moment, I’m happy to report, the torturous vision became a happy fantasy. Fully nudged from my comfort zone as a working, tax-paying citizen, I learned to give myself over to the delusions in an instant. I practiced K-holing in the middle of the night, pulling over at a 7-11 for a jug of swampwater drained from the taps. I remember cornering the cashier with the snapped handle of a broom reciting names from the phonebook I’d memorized ten years before as part of my intelligence training before my proper, C.I.A. identity snapped me back from the K-edge. Sometimes I couldn’t get myself back out, however. I often fell into a suicidal trance after entering the K-zone, discovering myself with a knife against my throat in public washrooms, my free fist thrashing at my image in the bathroom mirror. I knew I would need more polish, and would only acquire the genuine skill I needed by fully immersing myself into the role. I eventually spent an entire two years living on the street – with close government supervision and C.I.A. surveillance, of course – observing, but not taking, every known drug on the planet. Pretending my way through the plethora. The pot, the shrooms, the horse, the crank. The street’s a great place to practice schizophrenia and learn about the depravity of humankind – assuming you find your way out and enjoy a saucy pension at the end.
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I was supervised, but not supported by the department during this time. I had to walk into the homes of strangers in order to feed and clothe myself. Pluck rancid hamburgers and moldy pizza from the cellphone stained fingers of high school students mingling on the sidewalk. Many unpleasant scenes as I visibly transformed from my lean, almost scientific shapes, into a lumbering, inebriated bovine. I was arrested once, but the cops quickly recognized my mental illness and delivered me to the appropriate authorities. I had read On Being Sane in Insane Places, but still caused myself difficulties by claiming my affiliation with the C.I.A. Up on the ninth floor in the Clark Institute for Mental Health … try claiming that you’re a government agent with five thousand other similarly mutative maniacs creeping around you. Three weeks of fish on Fridays later, spitting my antipsychotics into my slippers, Doctor Fuse Less bid me take a seat in his “visiting scholar” office. Visiting from where? I asked. Doctor Less laughed in my face, charmless spittle from his soggy lips spackling the surface of my eyes. Don’t you know, he replied, that we treat government agents too? Truth or lie, every patient deserves a – Cure? No, we don’t use the ‘C’ word here, the doctor assured me. Why not?
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Because even cured schizophrenics cause violence. And hence – C’mon, doc. Admit it, you’re a hallucination! You’re an awfully smart guy. What do you think? Intelligence doesn’t amount to a fancy degree, doctor. What do you think? Doctor Less became quizzical. After a long pause, Less finally said, I don’t believe that even hallucinations should be late for lunch. See you next week! Thanks, doctor, I called after the old man in the most controlled voice I could muster. When I tired of the mental hospital, I blew the whistle on the world in general. Behind the ear of every C.I.A. agent, you’ll find an emergency switch. At this point, a line of coke pasted along his pointer finger, Umbilico leaned forward with great interest. He ran fingers from his freehand behind my ear, while I feigned vacuuming the coke from his finger in an intimate choreography of drugs and deception. Within moments, I continued, rescue helicopters landed on the roof, sending the patients within scattering for the medicine cabinets. Rounding the corridor and bursting into my room, Agent Reeve Flossie collected me in his arms. Let’s go home, he said. We’ve got a job for you. I asked Flossie if he wanted a straightjacket for a souvenir, but he declined.
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It’s time to play it straight now, son, Flossie told me. Just keep your schizo button in sight. We may need to push it at any moment. For now, it’s time to step onto the road of wellness and roll! Agent Flossie set me up with a chemically balanced apartment in Washington, another slightly less balanced in Manhattan. That’s where I spent most of my time. My job: not to save the president, but to make sure the operation succeeded without Doctor Umbilico bungling it. I saw Doctor Less thereafter once a week, five blocks west of Yoko Ono castle. This was to ensure the gradual reintegration of my reputation in the real. He was the only medical contact I’d made in the Clark, and so the C.I.A. paired us. Dreadful thing. Visiting Doctor Less was more fun that an open casket funeral. I’m telling you, Umbilico, I couldn’t remember a dream if Thanatos himself rode his night mare through my head. The experience of Doctor Less himself is the closest I’ve ever come to experiencing a dream, to tell you the truth. He had a cramped waiting room that looked onto an obscurely located washroom built into the center of a back room. A perfect cube. Designed to prevent smells from crawling along the walls, I assumed. And the double doors. How queer. In all my years wandering the streets in feigned Ketamine katastrophe, I’m not sure I ever experienced anything stranger than departing his psychoanalysis sessions only to find one door immediately behind the next.
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Honestly, doctor, I don’t remember my dreams, I reported during my first visit to his private lair. Tell a story then. Or something about yourself. This went on for weeks. I would state that I could not remember my dreams and that I would not fabricate a tale for his amusement, and the doctor would simply, patiently repeat his painfully persistent slogan , Whatever comes to mind. Finally, after the weeks became months, I offered the doctor a little something to work with. How about something half real, half made-up? I offered. Doctor Less made a slight gesture which suggested that what I had might be something he could work with. Well, I said. It begins and ends in a graveyard. In this story, one man will grow up to be a famous surgeon. The other will grow up to be the president of the United States. And when I grow up, I will be me. A regular Shadrak, Mischak, and Abendigo. Only, bear in mind, I told Umbilico, that this is a combination of dream and reality. Don’t try too hard to recognize yourself in it. I won’t, Umbilico replied, uncorking yet another vial of K. Mullins, Gar, and myself snuck out of our respective bedroom windows and met in McCracken D’Queen cemetery one spring night during our school years. Comparing the assembled slabs of marble we found assembled in weed-ravaged rows against a
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crumpled slice of newsprint produced from Mullins’ back pocket, we searched for the local prostitute the college and high school boys had always referred to as the Nun. Mullins, clad in dirty, torn jeans – an outfit he claimed his mother made him wear, outside clothes – shivered with nervous intensity, causing the paper to ripple in the air as if under the influence of a wind. There was no wind. Across from me as I told me story, Doctor Less sat unblinking. I avoided his eyes as much as possible, locking my eyes on the mystery of his double-doors in the absence of books and pictures on the wall to examine. Stop twitching, Gar complained. Gar was balancing two shovels on his shoulders, trying to look bold, but was clearly as nervous as Mullins. Shifting his weight from foot to foot, Gar’s shining eyes darted between Mullins’ anxious face and my calm, almost vacant gaze. He wore a sharp blue blazer from our school, as did I, and presented a thoroughly groomed visage to the night. Give me the sheet, I told Mullins. He handed me the crinkled news clipping, and seemed relieved to be able to bury his hands deeply within the pouch of his hooded sweatshirt. Sally, Sally, I said, starting up one of the rows. I was getting impatient with these teetering children I called friends. It was not as if the night was going to last forever. Certainly the body would soon be gone.
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Sally Carnaski, with a pussy so tacky, how does your garden grow? Disgusting, Mullins said. Yes, but in a deliciously disgusting way, Gar concluded, holding the taste of his song on his tongue. Tell me, darling, just how does your garden grow? Where’d you learn to sing stupid songs like that? Stand by Me? Something like that – It’s a shame they don’t arrange graveyards alphabetically, I interjected. This could take all night! I decided it would be faster if we each took a row, rather than ambling together like the twisted assistants braided throughout Kafka. Here she is! Gar called a moment later, three rows ahead of me. Confirmed, Mullins called, hopping over tombstones, beating me to Sally’s marker. The first stab of the shovel felt wonderful, and as the pile of earth grew, I had the feeling that quantity and quality had merged in ways unintended by American capitalism. I was convinced in that moment that grave digging was the perfect pastime and for weeks following the crime, it was digging, and not Sally Carnaski, that pervaded the corridors of my sleeping and waking dreams. I even imagined ol’ Blue Eyes crooning a ballad in praise of spadework while I scoured the Internet for images, information, and job listings on undertaking. The pulse of the work toward the orgasm became more orgasmic than all orgasm itself.
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I felt a jolt in my teeth when my spade struck the casket. Get down here, boys, I ordered. Help me clear her off. I hope she’s still fresh, Gar said, hopping into the open grave. Raw dirt spilled down everywhere around him. In a fresh grave, he decided out loud, she really oughta be! She sure smells fresh, I said. I was expecting a far worse stench and had even brought a tube of toothpaste to mint our nostrils in case the smell proved too terrible. She’s fresh, all right, Mullins said, licking dirt from his lips. They just buried her this morning, after all. My dad said they buried her earlier than usual because no whore deserves a viewing. There are a lot of people who don’t deserve a viewing, I said. Nothing to do with whoredom. Mullins stiffened, as if I had struck a chord within him. Everyone deserves a viewing, Gar pitched in. Death just wouldn’t be complete without the scrutiny of the living. We all laughed, but Mullins and I exchanged terse glances as we stood over the freshly exposed coffin. I wondered about his attachment to his father, and thought I should advise him about adhering too closely to the opinions of the patriarch, but decided to save the battle for another war. The subject would be perhaps best raised over videogames where the sexual nature of the situation could be deflected into
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the artery of the competition, whereas here we were faced with raw open grave and unchecked intent. Come on, Gar said. Enough with the small talk. Why don’t you hop on down and help us turn this into an open viewing. Then we can unwhore her and whore her again until the goddamn break of dawn. But Mullins wasn’t ready yet. No, he said. I want to get this off my chest. You all remember that girl who died last year. In the car accident. The one they peeled from the inside of her car like those little bits of microwave pizza that always splatter the glass. What is this? Gar demanded. The closed casket of the month club? Is Oprah invited? Get down here you fucking goof! I just want to know why we’re digging up a prostitute, why we’re degrading ourselves with some complacent rag doll who practiced looseness all her life? How loose do you think she is now? Why not desecrate the grave of some pristine college girl or neighborhood babysitter? The obituary’s certainly long enough with them. More deaths than one man can count. Why play solitary with the Nun when the graveyard reeks with virgins? Shut up, Mullins, Gar said. This isn’t Intro to Philosophy. Get down here! Actually, I do think this represents an interesting problem, I said. Oh god, said Gar. Then why don’t you climb on out of here and you two go find a tree to sit under. The clock is ticking. Let me know if an apple hits you
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on the head. I’ll stay here and enjoy this Eden of unmitigated knowledge on my own. Gar always knew how to silence our philosophizing with counter-philosophies of his own. The trajectories of selection and ethics held limited interest in comparison to focused action. Gar was right. We needed to move uncritically and experience the emptiness of thought made possible by the creation of new experience, the forging of new ritual. It was Mullins who finally found the edge of the casket. We had dug and struck at the dark wood, taking turns for well over half an hour before Mullins twisted his shovel in the gap between the body of the coffin and the lid. Standing above the coffin, the stench of Sally Carnaski overcame me. I thought you said she was dead only one day? I guess they rot fast once you close the door and toss them in, I said. Buried one day, Gar corrected through the fingers plugging his nose. She’s been dead at least six. Maybe seven. How do you know? I asked. You’ve got the paper. Take a look. Oh God, Mullins said, revolted, but brave enough yet to fold back the coffin lid until it stood on its own. I passed around the toothpaste and we each gratefully closed off our nostrils with lumps of the viscous green goo. In the darkness, we could see only a motionless form embedded in the soft silk interior.
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She wore a white dress, which reflected the moonlight only vaguely. Small eddies of dirt swirled into the casket, producing a sound like fingertips tapping against the floor of the coffin. I reached for the folded newspaper clipping in my pocket but then let it fall back into sweaty cotton fold. It really didn’t matter when she died. Flashlight, Gar ordered. I trained the Eveready I had been carrying in my other pocket down on the body. The light caught her ankles first. They were swollen and flesh protruded from the fancy socks the way ice cream coils from the cone. Splotchy legs and a yellow dampness where the dress caught the shape of her crotch – Or as Gar would later correct me: Not crotch. Pudenda. Raunchy creatures have raunchy crotches. Beautiful and dignified women have pudendas. She’s a whore, I said I don’t know what she is, Gar said, but let’s carry her memory with us wearing a better word than crotch. So brutal, so conservative, I hummed. At least her breasts have retained their shape, Mullins said, still standing closest to our object of desire. She looks fine to me, Gar said, snapping the Eveready from my hand. He shone the light directly into her face. Peaceful, he hummed. But when the light descended down the body, revealing her neck, we all grew uncommunicative. I prayed in my mind that the
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other two would abandon the project immediately. We had worked hard and would sleep well once the grave was closed and could finally masturbate away our excess energy. I pictured my bed at home and felt certain that Mullins and Gar were experiencing similar thoughts. Gar, who was standing between Sally Carnaski’s legs, tossed the Eveready aside and made gestures I didn’t understand in strange correspondence with the sky and the moon beyond it. Then, as if performing moves in an exercise routine, he reached for the end of her dress where it lay at her feet, and in a great flourish flopped the material over Carnaski’s head. This at least had the effect of covering the damage on her neck, but at the time the action launched a second wave of noxious odor sending me into my pockets for another round of toothpaste. But by this time, Gar was apparently already desensitized. No panties, he howled, a revelation that drove Mullins into action instantly. Falling to his knees, Mullins cupped Carnaski’s tumescent belly in his hands and ran them over the skin in steady strokes. I watched from above as Gar removed his pants, and bent over the corpse, moistening Carnaski’s vagina with saliva he spat on his fingers. A bra but no panties, I said. Maybe we’re not the first … Silence, Gard demanded. Still standing above the grave, I watched my two friends with nervous
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interest, and tried to decide what color her decaying hair was just twenty four hours before. Mullins, meanwhile, pushed the dress further and further up the swollen torso. While he was busy fussing over the bra with an unimpressive pocketknife I had never seen before, Gar moistened his erection with saliva. Pressing himself against Carnaski’s spitdrenched anatomy, Gar gave an extended sigh. The sounds of his pleasure alarmed me, until shortly afterward Mullins’ nasal complaining broke the hypnotic pace of Gar’s pummeling. Goddamn it, Mullins shouted. Her tits are filled with popcorn or something! Gar paused from his labor. It’s like Styrofoam or something. Peel back her eyelids and you’ll find more of the same. But … why? Mullins hands had broken through the porous skin, kneading the moist material deeper into the blood and bile poring from the chest. Helps keep the round shape, Gar said, sounding very well read on the matter. They use it to give shape to the first parts to sink. It’s just for show. Buoyancy is key. They use the same Styrofoam spheres we used to make planets back in the fifth grade. The moon as big as a woman’s breast, Pluto as small as her eye. Satisfied with his explanation, Gar reinserted himself, and hammered away at the loins of the corpse while Mullins constructed sandcastles with the mulch of Carnaski’s chest.
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It’s your turn, Gar instructed, finally pausing to catch his breath and wipe the sweat from his face. The motions left streaks of mud, blood, and pus, but Gar seemed oblivious to these additions to his face, licking sweat and gore from his lips with relish. Like an airtraffic officer, he gestured at the corpse, but by now, Carnaski’s body no longer resembled anything I understood to be human. Her chest, an open mass, her face a hidden dune buried beneath cloth, her pubis a swollen black tunnel slick with saliva and semen from my companions, who now looked like voodoo initiates plucked from the pages of a National Geographic. I should have stammered, should have cried out at the absurdity, should have wept. Jesus wept in the face of lesser atrocities, had he not? Instead, I dug for the condom buried even deeper than the news clipping in my pocket. No social pressure. Just the complete and overwhelming need for the finalization of my curiosity. Shedding my clothes, I placed the condom package between my teeth and hopped down into Gar’s blood soaked footprints. Condom, Gar hissed, stressing each syllable. What are you scared of? By the way fear suddenly leapt into Mullins’ face when he turned from ravaging Carnaski’s breast and saw the condom in my hand, I knew I didn’t have to explain myself. Gar remained silently defiant, but Mullins began muttering to himself. He swiped at the gore dripping from his penis, unsuccessfully cleansing himself.
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Infection … of all the ways to engineer one’s own sickness … Nonsense, Gar tossed at Mullins. We did this to bond. Are you with us, or aren’t you? He asked me. Because if you are, you’ll eat from the same plate. If you aren’t, you’re against us, and in that case, I aim to bury you beside this bitch before the night is through. Gar’s hands clamped onto mine with growing ferocity as he said this. My fingers clamped tight around the condom, but Gar’s fingers were stronger, and worked their way into my palm, easily opening my grip, working the small cellophane package free. Trembling with muscular exhaustion, Gar tore violently into the package with his teeth, lancing the rubber on an incisor and stretching the material until it snapped free from the package and dangled from his lips. Mouth slathered in blood, teeth and tongue consumed the condom, Gar mashed the condom with grotesque fervor before disappearing it completely into the magical void of his quivering esophagus. I knew now that I had to take Gar’s threat seriously. He was completely entranced by this ritual we had begun and could be expected to erupt unexpectedly into any number of potentially threatening manifestations of his psychosis. Sally Carnaski no longer existed, nor did any literal understanding of the sex we had envisioned. This was now a ritual of initiation into the cessation of threat and nothing more. There was no escape, and I knew I would either have to lay with the corpse or kill Gar if I wanted to climb out of Sally Carnaski’s grave. I looked
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Gar straight in the eyes, and then at Mullins, whom I knew would be the first to aid Gar in my untimely sacrifice should I renege. Both of them leered at me, perfect in their patience, for they knew precisely what my decision would – You’ve got a lot of images and themes going on there, Doctor Less said, rising from behind his desk. Let’s see what they bring us next week. After uncomfortably navigating the doctor’s uncomfortable configuration of doors, I stood out on the street. I had to imagine for myself what the doctor would say as I walked back past Yoko Ono Castle. The doorman bounced happily behind loaded suitcase carriages, shipping their tenants to and from the onslaught of yellow cabs devouring both customer and curb. As you know, however, I told Umbilico as we sped along in the flaring white limousine, I kept the most important detail out of my therapeutic confession. The desecration of Sally Carnaski had not been the exploits of horny teenagers. It had been just one part of an elaborate hazing rituals meant to inaugurate myself and my unseemly friends in the highest echelons of government secret service. What has any of this to do with how your glorious capture of the president? Doctor Umbilico asked, thumping back another glass of Vitamin K solution. Great job by the way. We got him. He’s been transformed. You should learn to enjoy your successes.
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I shook my head, calming myself by staring at Umbilico’s wobbling nose. My K-hole simulation had suddenly become extraordinarily intense, bending my sense of time in directions I had not thought possible. I looked down and saw my arms stretching madly into the distance, wrapped hundreds of times in plastic fluidity around Umbilico’s slender frame. Untangling one arm with the other in gluey swirls of action, I released myself from the cackling doctor. Sitting back, I wiped at my nose and saw by the blood and powdery snot that I had been ingesting the wicked chemicals after all. Or was this just another wild development of my own capacity for innocent, virginal, selfinebriation? What was I just talking about? I asked Umbilico. I don’t know. Something about how you became presidential aide. The deepest origins. The Dworkin Prequel. Digging for nuns. Something like that. Typical K raving. You’ve been at it for days now. Now get out of your K-hole and pass me some C. Dworkin! Umbilico screamed, slapping his palms anxiously, sending waves of visible, tangible sound through the gelatinous air. Hold your K-hole, boy! We’re dropping you off soon for the next phase of your mission. And I need you alert later when I give my shattering speech!
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People for the Advancement of Lying In the beginning, plastic surgeons were nomads, I said into the microphone, addressing the assemblage of plastic surgeons crammed into the White House. Managing my excitement, I forced myself to clamp down on the C and K surging in my system. Speak slowly, I chanted rapidly. Enunciate every syllable. Pop every word sharper than the blade used to execute the martyr. All I needed now was for Dworkin to show up with my patsy, Doctor Gravity, and I could reveal my special surprise with consequence free zeal. I hoped his excessive K-holing would not prevent him from completing his simple task. And as nomads, I continued, these ancient surgeons traveled alongside the warriors of their tribes, slowly sharing and extending their knowledge around the globe. They experimented on comrades and saved their most successful treatments for the enemy. It should be stated, however, that the men and women of ancient times wore their wounds with pride. They wanted scars that lasted forever, nothing like the disappearing acts we the People for the Advancement of Lying constantly commit with the open wounds seen traipsing everywhere on the corpulent streets of contemporary culture. This has, in part, to do with the evolution of weapons. When arrows gave way to gunpowder, plastic surgeons became sedentary. They mimicked
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the tight formations of the battlefield, but worked in small semi-stationary units that would eventually take roots at the outside margins of war. Instead of rushing in to save the dying, the dying would be rushed out to them. Eventually the twin brothers of cosmetics and pathology would amble aimlessly away from one another, I said. True, they still bump together no occasion, usually in medical school drinking marathons and bouts of necrophilia demanded by hierarchical hazing. Keeping my eyes locked on the door, I slowed my face even further. I sensed Feoxide fidgeting behind the curtains and thought I could hear her whispering with the president flirtatiously. I couldn’t imagine that the president’s politics had switched radically enough to drag her affections for me onto him. But I had to admit, he was talking more sanely these days, and looked fantastic. Even so, I should have diced dear Feoxide and had her for dessert last night … Computer and laser light soon entered the scene as we entered the demonstration segment of the evening. Mechanical windows opened on new and unique plastic surgery procedures embedded in the walls. Anointed assistants wheeled the latest, stylized gurneys on the stage, while I continued my speech, dragging it slower and slower in anticipation of Dworkin and his catch sauntering in through the back door.
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We still practice on soldiers killed in war, it’s true, and as the technologies of destruction change in relation to our synthetic inventions, so too must we develop an arsenal of surgical modeling techniques – not only to understand and treat traumas to the face and other bodies, but to form islands of stability, so that no one should be forced to walk the earth in a suit of ugly skin. Or conversely, that ugliness becomes an easily purchased option. An ever widening palette of possible nauseations. If there’s one point I want to drive home tonight, it is this: he very reason I founded People for the Advancement of Lying, amounts to one very simple fact: the face is not fixed! Let the reign of surgical self-organization has just begun! I rushed my speech to this close when I caught sight of Dworkin fiddling near the door. I couldn’t see Doctor Gravity with him, however, the absence of whom unnerved me. Although I was sure that my patsy could not be far behind Dworkin’s frazzled frame, I hesitated on a note of indecision. Could I trust my mumbling, ex-C.I.A., presidential aid coconspirator? I was asking him, after all, not only to betray his country, but also an old friend. I shrugged my hesitation away, excited by the fumblings of my new creation with Nurse Feoxide behind the stage curtain. Widening my mouth around the microphone, I blared, Ladies and Gentleman, I reveal to you now … The Liberty of the United States of America. That’s right, the man normally known to you as the American
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president reframed. I present to you your Liberesident! The incarcerated, transformed president appeared on the stage behind me. Gown and chains hung at all the appropriate Houdini points on his body. A gorgeous load of green molecules, the Liberesident waved a small flag with pride limited only by the closed clutch of his change. His eyes bore no confusion, dancing K-happily behind my skillful reconstruction of his skin and orbital bones. The spiked crown, perfectly polished scale model of Liberty’s own, stretched upwards from above his hairline, the rounded bases bolted directly to the skull beneath the scalp. The papal prince-clown pawn of the Manhattan Project Part II emerged to raucous, unbidden applause from perhaps the only audience in the world completely capable of understanding my miraculous achievement. You can’t see it, I said into the microphone, completely oblivious to the masses of media and policemen marching into the room, but the Liberty of America, a.k.a. Liberesident, has been fitted with new physical properties hitherto unknown to man, tested only on wallabies and rabbits in Australian and Cambodian underground testing laboratories. Indeed, Australia and Cambodia served as the perfect breeding ground for my experiments. Your new Liberty of America now comes equipped with the strength of the bear, the eyes of the hawk, the speed of the puma, and ears of crucibicular steel. We went to great cost, forging, casting, molding, pounding. Yes,
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we even quenched the heated barbs of your president with holy water from the Hudson between trips to the anvil. I raised my hands to another round of applause from the audience, but instead of enjoying my moment of glory in front of my assemblage of plastic surgeons, I found myself suffering, pummeled to the ground by riot-geared agents of the law headed by Trippy Gwar. Bulbs flashed, batons waved. Trippy Gwar! Dworkin, dammit, what the hell is going on here? Dworkin was nowhere to be seen. Amidst the chaotic brawl of surgeons and riot police developing on the stage as my legions rushed to my resuce, The Liberty of America reached the microphone, causing an immediate hex of silence to fall upon the clamoring crowd. Testing the thrust of his emerald fist, the Liberesident lunged his green hand stiffly into the no-fly-zone buzzing above his head. An American Darth Vader, I noted with pride, finally revealing the glory of his Masonic-reptilian skin! I am hydroebonic! Decisive, for once So celebrate! My ultimate aim and criterion: To close this war! A composite of opposites! All standing reserves placed on standby! No! Less than standby! The entropy of standby! Characterized by inaction! We stand now the opposite of excess!
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Taking only a single share of numeric systems! Surrendering now our slaves and the weakening slap of our dollar!
Stop! Tripper Gwar hissed as the Liberty of America toppled, slamming his crown against the gleaming surface of the stage. Help this … poor helpless man! she cried. Stop! Stop, I say! You lawmen, there! Stop! And let Doctor Umbilico up! Face him forward. As I was raised from the ground, I spied Dworkin circumambulating by the door. You! I raged. Arrest that man! Just you never mind! Tripper scolded me. That man’s a hero. He’s revealed to me the true machinations of Umbilico’s conspiratorial plot. However, Trippy continued, our president has changed on account of this radical escapade. He not only now believes in Umbilico’s unbelievable, nonsensical reversal, he’s convicted! I can tell by the sincerity of his speech. Not only that, I added, inventing details to amplify the cause of my emerging emancipation. The president’s has committed himself to a prison for the mentally insane. A plea bargain in exchange for the death penalty. No human rights tribunal. No violent, indignant judgment of the law – Let them reproduce me! The Liberty of America shouted. Reproduce me like a virus! Anthrax liberty in Air Mail envelopes nationwide. Lace every stamp with freedom. Replicate me like terrorism so
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broad terrorism shall never stand over or against us again! That’s right, Mr. President. No longer will we defeat terrorism merely by mirroring it. You’ve been Chomsky-fied! And ladies and gentleman, Trippy said, winking at me, opening her palm to reveal a hidden vial of Special K, let’s not forget to thank our friend, Doctor Mullins Umbilico!
Earle Bird Gets the Germ What is a world predicated on the is? I don’t know. A scary admission for any patient on the opposite end of my sterile series of surgical scalpels. A worm soon to become a worm-penis of indeterminate destruction quivered on the instrument tray hovering in front of Nurse Feoxide’s adjacent waist. It’s time, I said, clicking a switch. My hypnotic tape rolled my rapturous words into the room. As boundary and as frame … The operating table, laid out in the shape of a cross bore Earle Bird, naked, his muscular member piled like excrement on pavement. The wires attached to his head, chest, and arms crisscrossed in the light. Earle came to me with a full description of his meticulous design. Half-cooked plans I instantly found ways to enhance, successively refined in K-clubs
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bankrolled by funds copped from Earle’s boss, my future patsy. The night before the surgery, I shared foul fantasies with Earle, K-holed in Gravity’s office. Running a finger across the endless expanse of pamphlets in the lobby, I mused: Redheads, blonds, brunettes, panties, bondage, no matter how high you can count you can always count higher. The length of girls, photographed girls, stacked in piles side by side – you can divide any stack in half, divide this stack in half, divide the stack in half again. No matter how many times you repeat the process, you will always have another stack to divide in half once again. The falsity of human symmetry, my boy … The next day, as the patient slept, anaesthetized by the repetitions of my song, I added a separate melody, humming a list of my surgical activities against his malehood: that the external oblique aponeurosis is opened that the ilionguinal nerve is mobilized out of the way that the spermatic cord is isolated at the pubic tubercle that the cremaster is separated from the floor of the inguinal canal that the cord is encircled and compressed that the testis is delivered from the scrotom that the lesion is palpated at the upper pole that the gubernaculums is divided with cautery that the mobilized urethra is shown with lesions bracketed by forceps that the length of the spermatic cord is shown that the spermatic vessels are separated from the vas that the spermatic cord is ligated and divided that the surface is cleaned in preparation for the worm
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Fling the monster into the wound, I instructed Feoxide, nodding at the worm. Into the wound and into the world. Let it program its hermaphroditic code into the patient’s system, set its own designations, it’s own alogical rhythm of if or else if. Night fire and mad whirlwind at the behest of the worm. So why intervene on the human race in light of the positive ignorance of all our snowy K-holes? Why translate even one set of stimulating nerves into another form of the same? Because it is not the same! Not a rebinding. Not a healing. The hermaphrodite worm never attempts backward traveling. The worm is not a car. The concept of reverse simply does not exist for the worm. It is a line, and I, like it … Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes! This is not an issue of regeneration. Not a war against shell-shock, not a bomb against the guns of the world blazing, not a pitch for a god of salvation. This is a worm-cock refusal. A strict scalpel column against the curves of the world, a stiffened rod against the orbits of all faces. Meshed with the penis of our prostrated patient, we will finally find a state that expresses the unnecessary presence of seed. A happy ceaseless destruction lacking purpose or need. A glorious emerging of the strangest snake in the world! Namesnakes crawling alive from the ink on my cacademic degrees. Human authority unleashed from human will in a single line, the curve of the nine, like
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the head of all sperm, uncoiled, a sharpened spear, a meticulous, squirting, fecund foul weapon! Imagine the possibilities. Hookworm penetration binding man with the underground power earned from genetic, evolutionary lifetimes of churning the earth. No more building – strictly defined – no more concrete winding of roads. Only a glorious grinding. Sliding in strictly straight waves, pulverizing the shit we’ve spilled upon the surface of the earth, feeding the world our excrement only to feed ourselves on excrement, becoming self-serving dungbeetles no sweeping charwoman, no sailing maid of the mist will ever name. We are on the verge of becoming the ship! The unwarped plank that rules every water, spilling soldiers onto the shores of every land. No longer any need of plot. We know, however, that the patient will inevitably carry on explaining the motives and methods of his manly brawls, his fiery destructions, her make-up mishaps in the shopping mall mirror, their shared emphasis on spring and fall fashions melting the slowly evolving curves of their puckered mouths. They will carry on slicking with spit and tongue the surface of their teeth, tirelessly ticking the tones of their untrue tales. Ears will receive and even the inanimate will allow the vibrations of human storytelling to pass on through. Even the densest of metals will split molecules and accept the rush of their words and with wormsperm will their world eventually break down. Recycled back
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into the absence from whence their lame fits of language came. Such is the rule of the worm. Nurse Feoxide, I said, sutures and saline, please. Earle’s prepared for the germ.
Jesus Feeds Liberty the Gospel Once on the island I began making measurements. From a plaque I learned a bevy about the statue, her height, the thickness of her skin, the precise number of skeletal steps a person needed to climb in order to reach the crown. I was in far too transcendent a mood for anything like stairs, however. I would climb her surface instead. Before I started climbing the statue, I glanced across the water and snacked on one of Modestine Job’s fingers. Satisfied, I rolled the remaining fingers into my robe, and began my ascent. By the time I reached Liberty’s arms, I needed rest. Splayed myself out on the tablet, I glanced quickly around me for signs of Satan before allowing myself to become too comfortable, half-expecting the old brown-noser to show up and ask why I bothered climbing when I clearly had a legion of angels on hand at my bidding. I don’t work out at the gym for nothing, buddy, I would tell him the next time he challenged my penchant for behaving human. Instead of Satan, however, I faced only Manhattan, marred
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only be sixteen helicopters and the roar of airliners beaming across the sky. I fell asleep facing the nostrils of Liberty. When I finally opened my eyes, my skin cooked by the sun, I resumed my ascent. I experienced difficulty scaling the chin, but even though I readily found the commands for summoning angels at the bottom of my throat, still I refused to call for help. It was tremendously exciting, punching a hole through Liberty’s lips. Holding just one of the deep fried fingers snacks in reserve for myself, I dumped Modestine Job’s remaining fingers into the crevice torn in Liberty’s mouth and listened as they spiraled ever inward, sailing back down toward the shackle and chains that kept Liberty stapled to the island. Modestine’s deep fried fingers never reached the bottom, however. Placing them in her mouth initiated a long set of chain reactions. Liberty’s frame mystically ingested the fingers and burst instantly into life. Inside the shell, fluids quickly coated her interior surfaces, dissolving her visitors like rats in the belly of a snake. The stairs and trusses inside of her frame knit themselves into bones. Hanging outside of the surface of her creaking mouth, I could hear and feel her great lips moving, forming the shape of the world’s first honest sneeze. Moving quickly, I scaled back down to the tablet, only to feel the metal beneath my feet shifting rapidly. Her arms moved now freely. I leapt from the tablet and onto her hand, scrambling up the forearm where I could take refuge in the sleeve of her gown. I
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watched with excitement as her eyes came to life and her right arm came down from its seemingly permanent perch in the sky and dropped its heavy load. As the torch tumbled down onto the platform and rolled into the water, crushing several dumbfounded civilians and guards, her eyes caught sight of the tablet in her left hand and of me, the little man hiding in the sleeve of her gown. It was an understandable accident. In her attempt to fling the insect Jesus Christ from her sleeve, she accidentally flung the tablet with enormous velocity in the direction of Manhattan. The spinning parallelogram rocketed toward the towers, mysteriously evading the paths of the numerous helicopters buzzing around the tip of the island. I managed to remain attached to Liberty despite her attempt to shake me from her body. From the corner of my eyes, I watched the crumbling of broadcast antennas number one and two. Oblivious to the carnage, Lady Liberty scanned the clouds overhead. Plus, she was moving forward now. Her feet crashed into the water, sinking her body to the waist in seconds. I had no idea she would be so angry, so humorless when I gave her the gift of life. I want to go home! she screamed, wrenching her right foot loose from the pedestal. I’ve been facing Paris for as long as I can remember! It hasn’t been that long, Liberty, I howled into the wind. And believe me, I have an intimate understanding of time.
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Liberty’s baleful eyes circled around until she found me. With her nasty torch and despicable tablet out of the picture, I could finally stand comfortably on her dexterous shoulder and evade the persistence of her swatting. I soothed her by whispering my wishes in her ear and she soon slowed her march into the ocean. You promise? she asked me. One more job and then I’m free to go? Her eyes searched the Manhattan skyline, and I realized that she was looking at it head on for the first time. I hate this place, she said. You have to promise me. One last job and I’m free. I hate this place. I do promise, Liberty. Ask anyone. My word is gold. What is it you want me to do, Lord Vader? We floated east on the quotation marks of our discussion. I’m going to rust, she said. No, you’re flesh and bone now. Worse that can happen, the water will wrinkle my fingertips. Liberty examined her fingers as she swam. I’ve spent my life wearing a robe no thicker than two pennies, she said. They promised I would carry the light of Egypt into the world. Instead, I have been nothing more that a frozen slab of metal wrapped around a rapidly corroding frame. Are you aware that the boat carrying my head from France to the United States nearly sunk to the bottom of the sea? I wish it were so. I have spent the entirety of my
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life since departing France developing feelings of powerlessness and rage. Those towers, Liberty sobbed. I didn’t mean to do that … We floated silently for a while, enjoying the absence of life forms, the absolutism of the sea. The holes in my hands fluttered in sovereign ecstasy as my heart began seeping hallowed juices and spiritual pheromones into my system. These processes would form the basis of our emerging reproductive interaction. Lady Liberty scooped her hand deep into the water. Using a tine from her crown for a blade, she expertly prepared a meal of sashimi with the rarest fish the ocean offered. I held my composure as my newly human brain acclimatized itself to sudden dolphin doses of mercury, and we drank deeply together from a small pocket of rain produced from the center of a rapidly accumulating phalanx of storm clouds. This is so romantic, Lady Liberty said. But how shall we ever consummate our love, my dirty little deity? Easily, I said, dropping my tone to an explanatory level. Just keep those thighs cruising, maintain the backstroke, that’s right – you won’t feel a thing! But I want to feel! I want to feel everything! I wouldn’t have agreed to this otherwise! But it was already too late. I had learned a thing or two about the correct methodology from my
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father. Impregnating virgins remains one of the few secrets the Trinity clan has managed to keep in its flourishing family of angels. I feel so … vandalized, Liberty said, abandoning me to the waves as we swam back towards Manhattan. We’ve all been placed in situations we would rather have avoided, I offered, crawling back up onto her shoulder. Situations we can’t back out of. You can always back out. There’s always abortion, Liberty said defiantly. As we swam, we watched the billowing smoke gathering in the distance. The glut of spring and fall fashions charging over the Manhattan Bridge, men lugging mangled briefcases, women shattered high heel shoes. Helicopters thumped like inebriated bumble bees above the wild inferno winds caused by the extraordinary fire. Really, my love, don’t talk like that. You made a deal. My love!?! How can you call me that after what you’ve put me through? Impregnating me without the common courtesy of an orgasm! I have often thought that Mary must have put my Father through the ringer too following his ethereal fanging of her womb. Heavenly rumor has it that she stuffed her vagina to the cervix with dried mustard seed in hopes of aborting the child. When this solution failed, Mary daily assaulted her lower torso with beatings, sending herself rolling down
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stone staircases in exaggerated attempts to rid herself of my Father’s progeny, i.e. me. My dear lady, I said. You will never find a doctor with instruments large enough to pull the Jesus of Liberty Jr. from your womb, at least not prematurely. Our little Antichrist Astronaut will destroy even the most sophisticated surgical tools the country has to offer. You will accommodate yourself. You have nine months of learning ahead of you. Nine months? Liberty sighed. Well, I guess I could do a bit of traveling in that time. I’ve always wanted to see the States … As you will, I said. So long as you bring my son into the world. Lady Liberty stopped churning her legs against the sloshing ocean. I felt her enormous fingers pinching at the back of my neck, groping for the cowl. Suspending me in her hand, she centered me between her brows, where I hovered less than an inch from her glowering, pea green eyes. Why me? she demanded in a last fit of futile rage. I’ve been island-locked for decades. And now this! The moment I finally get free, I find myself kitchen-baking an oven filled with bullshit from a historical figure I don’t even believe in!
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Tokyozilla The Times Square of Tokyo makes New York’s screaming array of screens and puzzling corners look like a crinkled pop can in a ravage gutter, I decided, cruising around in the back of our cramped rental van. We’re here filming the final moments of the construction of the world’s tallest building for a documentary funded by The Church of the So-Called Whatever. Nothing terribly exciting, but important for the reams of construction footage we’ll combine in the decades to come, charting together claim after claim of ‘the tallest building in the world.’ The original Tokyo tower is overpriced and low on amenities. The people cried out for something bigger and taller than anything in North America, and the government responded by promising them a new, improved, and conveniently located Tokyo tower in the shape of an enormous yellow ‘M.’ Taller, more curvy and ready to serve, the papers announced. I personally own footage of the Boss of Japan promising his people that eating at the New Tokyo M will give birth to blonde and blue-eyed boys. This deeply underground footage comes to me courtesy of Tetsuo Troy, the phoniest white boy to ever live overseas. He wears a karate headband with his kimono and eats rice at lightning speed. But despite his savage misgivings, the kid does provide me with some of the most intense video I’ve ever seen and his assistance in Asia relieves me, in only temporarily, from the inanity of Pedro, who I kept busy
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investigating the whereabouts of the president via cellphone. I met Troy at an ice cream parlor favored by the locals. Say, he said. You were in my dream last night. Really? That sucks. Yeah, sucks for you, though. You had your face pulled off by a truck. Then what happened? What happened before that might interest you. I can’t show you footage, because it’s buried in the rubble of my dream, but if I could it would run something like this: We were filming the final moments of the construction of the world’s largest building. You thought it would be great if Godzilla would rise from the ocean and destroy the damn thing about five minutes after the journalists had a chance to photograph the final swing of the retreating crane. This idea, launched within the logic of a dream, occurred immediately. Godzilla, as we all know, serves as a metaphor for the United States, which is why English literature Japanese always spells his name godZILLA. It’s like spitting on mass-reproduced images of Christ, you know? godZILLA took care of the tower in less than ten seconds, before he rambled off back into the sea. Helicopters chased him, but he sunk beneath the waves before anyone could take any truly vibrant military action. Our cameras stayed with our assistants while we wandered through a large empty building. I remember something about an old man
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searching for his dog … the smell of the beast overwhelmed us, drove us into a large elevator. By the time the doors closed, we realized that the elevator was hanging by just one cord, and as the lights flashed out, we fell into the bottommost corner. It was very S&M. Eventually, Clive Barker showed up and rescued us and told you how much he admired your writing. That character of yours, Pidgeon Eideker, he said, That’s an extremely intelligent name. I don’t write books, I said. In my dream, you did. Well, what happened next then? That’s it. I thought you said I got my face torn off. Well, that’s true, but that happened after I took a commercial break from the dream to go to the washroom. I’m not sure why that happened or if it’s even connected to the first part. It may not have been you, come to think of it. It just looked like you. I just hope it’s not a premonition, I sighed. I like my face. That’s like a truck saying, ‘I hope I’m not a truck.’ You’ve got your face all over the screen in your documentaries. Someone’s bound to tug it off eventually. Fuck off, I wanted to tell him, but in truth, I respected Tetsuo Troy. Without his alert regarding the giant M, I wouldn’t have been in Japan filming this most capitalicious of events.
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So, tell me, Dunkel, Troy said. How’s the doc about the president and the White House and all of that spastic stuff coming along? Fantastic! I’m glad you asked. No one seems bothered by the cameras. We’d even considered a helmet cam for the president. I’ve already innovated a great deal in the documentary genre. But I want a revolution, you know? In the tradition of the Beatles. In the radiation of the Beatles, you mean. No. That’s not what I mean … What do you mean? I shouldn’t have to tell you. Next to Forrest Gump, The Beatles represent the world’s proven masters of conspiracy. Imagine strongarming entire continents into listening to and worshiping the music of four fucking bastards beaming their bullshit over the airwaves. It’s twanging. Now we’re hearing Lucy in the Sky bursting out of cell phones. They’re not an insect, these Beatles. They’re a goddamn infection. Too true, I said. I knew there had to be an etymology for the word ‘Liverpool.’ Say, tell me about this cosmetifuck business with the president – Oh man, that shit you’ve seen on the news is nothing compared to the footage I’ve got. The media’s got Sasquatch caught on tape compared to my full length extended exposé. I’ve got editors back home working on it. Just in time for the Oscars. I didn’t have much time to scratch together an edit before leaving for this Tokyo Tower M event. But look here, let me show you something.
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Troy’s eyes widened as I pulled my Crokia LX LXXX FukIT tarkosolarious-powered video cell phone. It’s just a few minutes, I explained. But never forget that you saw it here first. I pressed play, morphing the icons on the screen of the device out of sight. We watched as the opening of the short film showed the newly minted Liberesident hulking behind the podium at the last meeting of People for the Advancement of Lying, chains wrapped around his ankles and arms, mouth spewing mongoloid contradictions. This is awesome, Tokyo Troy exclaimed. They’re all high on Vitamin K! With a pig’s eye that never looks up, Dworkin screamed, with a pig’s snout that loves muck, with a pig’s brain that knows only the sty, and a pig’s squeal that cries only when he’s hurt. He sometimes opens his pig’s mouth, tusked and ugly and lets out the voice of God, railing at the whitewash that covers the manure about his habit. Nutty, Tokyo Troy said, beaming. This ice cream is fantast – Pay attention to this, I insisted, tapping the screen. The image warbled as an icy cream fingerprint lodged on the screen. We watched the rest of the footage, composed of fascinated close-ups of the president’s new face, the audio dominated by Dworkin’s noisy, K-attacks: god damn your god damned old hellfired god damned soul to hell and damn you and god damn your god damned family’s god damned soul to hell and good damnation god
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damn them and go dam your god dam friends to hell … Madly keen on ice cream, mate. It’s on me. Thanks for sharing your intimate little YouTube. And cheers to the world’s tallest building. Indeed. And cheers to my new film, I said, waving my cell in the air. Any ideas for the title? Marketing a documentary’s a bitch. ‘Bowling for Turpentine,’ I said. Troy weighed the option in his head, but remained above telling me his true thoughts about it. All I can say, man, he said, reverting to surferspeak, is never, ever fucking sell out. I gotta jet. Tokyo Troy laid a modest pile of Yen on the table and tapping my shoulder fondly, exited the ice cream parlor. Wait, I said, clamoring after him. Where are you going? To the tower, of course. Why? I could use your help, actually. Why don’t you come along. My crew. They’re useless. I bet you’d look good in a tux. How do you feel about doing the Oscars? Dunkel, you point. I’ll film. I’d be pleased to help out. Twenty minutes later, stationed at the base of the building, Troy and I, annoyed by the glucose crowd, panned our cameras in frenetic circles and vertical stripes. As the cranes swung away from the building, seven rays of green diadem appeared over
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the cityscape, accompanied by thunderous earthquake. Tokyo Troy focused his camera while I narrated the events spilling before us. Speech dries fast in the path of no precedent, however, and I found myself skipping inanities from my tongue in foul falsetto. My camera frame caught fits of green in snatches. A few frames of gown sweeping low over the road, unhinging cars, tossing pedestrians, flinging fast food stands. Enormous green fists snaked around the skyscrapers, pushing the conglomerations of glass and wire aside. Chunks of the building crashed down into the streets, crushing taxi cabs and sushi stands. Zoom in! Zoom in! Who’s that tiny little man riding on her shoulder? Quick – wait! I’ll use my cellphone … Ditching the video camera, I snapped images rapidly with the cell as the Statue of Liberty descended upon Tokyo Tower M. The first arc of the golden M disappeared into smoke and powder before I was able to press send on my phone. If there’s one thing I can say about the incompetent researchers and video technicians I had left back in the van before meeting Tokyo Troy, it’s that they never miss an email. Within ten seconds I had five operatives Googling the images as rapidly I could send them. Date:
Fri, 25 May 2007 09:19:34 –0400
From:
Dunkel Doer
[email protected]
To:
The Dunkel Mobile
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[email protected] Subject: Who is this man? 2 Liberty.jpg/1.02 KB Part(s):
3 Man on Liberty.jpg/2.49 KB
See attached! Date:
Fri, 25 May 2007 09:19:34 -0400
From:
The Dunkel Mobile
[email protected]
To:
Dunkel Doer
[email protected]
Subject: Re: Who is this man? if he is who looks he s – google tracks him at 234, 300, 000 hits … get out of there, man! christ’s gonna bust a cap in yo ass!
My cell phone started to spark and smoke in sympathy with the destruction of Tokyo Tower M. I dropped it, cussing, and waved goodbye as it clattered down a sewage drain. The second golden arc caved in on itself without the support of the first. Liberty winked and smiled as Improbable Jesus whispered something in her ear. What’s he saying? Get closer? Are you kidding? The goddamn building’s coming apart! You’re right, I said. You’re too valuable. I need you and your equipment. Give me your cell phone and go find an Internet cafe. We need two tickets on the first flight back to New York.
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Twisting his head in search of an Internet sign, Tokyo Troy rummaged through his clothes for his cell phone. Navigating the unfamiliar layout, I fumbled out another email to my assistants in the Dunkel Mobile, instructing them to drive the van beneath Liberty’s skirt. May as well collect a bit of voyeur porn while we’re at it. Where’s the goddamn send button?!
Miss May Soufflé Speeding towards Doctor Gravity’s office, I saw hordes of people. I initially considered them individually, dreaming stories of character for each body roaming the streets. But the magnification of their connectivity startled me, and I found myself reconsidering the deep origins of the men and women of this world famous city. An Ethnic Tsunami, dotted by a Caucasian minority, colorless bees in a swarm of difference. Why consider every drop in this churning ocean of inescapable death? Bodies melding into a sloshing pool of blood, torn flags of indistinguishable skin, blubberous entities slicking the streets, pummeled the sewer gates, upending vehicles and trees. Skeletons and fluids pooled in Central Park, heaved upon by desert carrion. How quickly the atmosphere deranges itself. Somehow, one radio station in New York still survived, chirping like a wounded bird, but still emanating recognizable sounds. Stuck on a single
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twist of “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys. Endless melomixodizing of “Good” melting into “Vibrations.” Airwave translation of a nervous stimulation in sounds. I felt obliged to listen, to wash my cells in the repetition of this single instance of irritating sound. No matter how bothersome, its sameness became pure difference, a side effect of its glancing coil. Repetitions change all perception of the present. An endless variation of good vibrations, made up, as it were, by a continual reinforcement of the as in as it happens. Doctor Gravity’s office baked beneath the sun, windows sweating, curtains melting – All things fire around the building, including the passing thoughts in my mind, the memory of the hypnotist and these vibrations of the good replaced by the passing away of concrete, bricks, infinite swirl of ashes descending, staining my hair, defying the measure of the air. Inside, the secretary wiped sweat from her brow. Futile tapping against the telephone receiver. Here, I said. Use my cell. She took the black plastic wand into her hand, but its magic failed. A trill of failed connections escaped the treasure chest of circuits and unmemorized numbers. We stared at each through the open space of her secretarial window. Financing pamphlets strewn on the counter sweltered in the heat, squeezing their ink onto the floor.
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Suddenly, my ears twitched in response to another sound. The secretary and I turned our heads in broken unision. Oh, Miss May! a voice erupted from behind the doctor’s door. An unstoppable growth of sound poured from within. A cabin fever of bestselling books unified on combustible wooden shelves – A figure dashed in through the front door. Dworkin, I scowled, recognizing the presidential aide as he skulked back around the corner at the sound of my voice. What are you doing here? What are you doing here? This is rich! Trippy Gwar transgressing against the publipolitical setup of her nature! In for a tuck? Or a lipo suck? Wait until the historians catch wind of this – There aren’t going to be historians anymore, I whispered, broken by a repetition of the pleasurepain howling behind the doctor’s door. Oh, Miss May! Flay me and I you opposite! Strictly scalpel this fusing into death!
The secretary, Dworkin, and I pressed together, spoiling the ecstasy of our curiosity, cracking forward into the indifference of the mysterious activities unfolding behind Gravity’s trembling door. I reached out. The heat of the knob of the heat of the door. Blending forward into the room. We gasped at what we beheld. A continuous duplication of good vibrations – human sighs collecting.
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Miss May! the secretary bawled, collapsing. Her head rattled against the floor, saliva and blood pulsing through chipped teeth. Scalpel circled the floor around the text, pointing inward like the edges of a surgical star. Two bodies slicked in gore slithered on the surface of the desk, rotating in unrehearsed flashes of a porn film sixty nine. Miss May digging into Gravity’s rising genitals, Gravity into hers. Blades thrust deep against the weeds and mounds of procreative flesh. Mouths lapping the blood, a merciful blending of soft tongue and hard teeth. Gurgling the glory of life in the black of the throat. Together, Dworkin and I closed the door on this unbearable scene of sex and death. Our gazes locked momentarily, momentously communicating a similar desire, made impossible by political disruptions impressed upon our bodies by campaign badges we no longer felt certain belonged crooked upon our collar bones. What are you afraid of? Dworkin asked. What are you hiding? I returned. Dworkin broke contact, turning away. I have to go, he said. Where? I can’t tell you, he said. You’ll disrupt my failure to deliver the patsy. Umbilico will be in a rage. You don’t want to be around when that happens. Yes I do! I exclaimed. Very much so! You’re not under his command, anyway.
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Au contraire, mes amis! We’re all under his control. Dworkin turned and ran out the door. I clawed at him, clutching a cartoon cache of air compressed by swirls of ashes in the violence of the real. I watched Dworkin pull and manipulate the wiring beneath my steering wheel and pull away in my car. I guess the FBI still teaches them something useful, I muttered beneath my breath, as Dworkin made his escape, thrusting his hand out the window with his middle finger aimed at the sky. I ran back inside and searched the secretary’s purse for a set of keys. Next, I rifled door locks in the parking lot until my scanning sore eyes fell upon a telling vanity plate: SUR63R33. Luckily, my car, commandeered by Dworkin, had been fitted with the latest “slow-down and save the children” mechanism, part of Wolfonader’s latest fit of safety measures. I followed Dworkin easily, bumper carring without bumping. I did want my car back after all!
Unintelligent Design The moment Doctor Less opened the door, I charged into Gravity’s office. Earle! Doctor Gravity exclaimed. Mr. Enlargement! Doctor Less gasped. So that’s where all my medical textbooks have been disappearing to, Gravity reasoned.
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Why didn’t you tell me you worked next door? Less demanded of me as I closed the door behind me. I treated you like a god! And you owe me awe, I said, quietly closing the door. What about Miss May? Gravity asked, seeking a way out of the emerging danger of our situation. I’d never seen him so nervous, his eyes flittering back and forth between my face and the door. Less, meanwhile, aching with frustration and the memory of earlier abuses in my presence, skulked back to his chair and closed his arms around himself. Miss May? She’s busy huffing nitrous with Sheila, I said. Stepping into the room, I grabbed Doctor Less by the folds of skin at the back of his neck. Now you know why I don’t need the services of Doctor Gravity. I’ve been his student all along! But I did need a little bit of extra help. Doctor Umbilico and I, in a secret surgical session, conspired on the final madness of my design. And now, my weapon is perfected. Doctor Gravity, so pained at my sudden turn, urged me to explain. He was a good man, after all. I’d watched him slave for years over second-rate skulls, thrumming them in and out of his decaying surgical studio with the finesse of homeless street performer, holding his hat at the door for spare change. I didn’t want things to happen this way, I told Gravity. I mean, I never wanted to get you involved. My hands stripped away Doctor Less’ belt while the psychoanalyst muttered a muted dialogue with
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Boticelli’s Venus hanging on the wall behind Gravity’s desk. A glorious image, but one ruined by glass, and a nasty slice of gallery promo running across the delicate slice of ocean beneath the opulent seashell. I noticed something reflected in the glass. Turning, I saw what Gravity eyed so hopefully behind me. It wasn’t the door, but the mace he kept hanging there. Excellent, I said, stepping back and removing the mace from the wall. It has a nice heft. I watched myself in the mirrored glass of the Venus as I gave the weapon a good swing. It doesn’t compare to my rod, I said, but I think it’ll help loosen old Less here up a little before I give him a taste of my perfected meat.
Dunkel Doer Undone Equipped with my Umbilicized weapon, I chased her florid royal court. Liberty continued growing as she moved, accumulating energy and speed. The stench of her vagina served as the source of my higher yearning. The Doctor of Philosophy in Desire my cock would need to finally experience the orgasmic potential of my robogenetic penile implant. Her very existence, her rich, fecund mound, will finally make possible the erection I will need for the uberspeed ejaculation envisioned by the genius Doctor Umbilico.
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I followed her wherever she rampaged. I became her familiar as she eliminated the rate of urbanization of every city and town in her path. In a small jeep stolen from a balding muscular fauxmilitary pony-tail monger wearing a bomber jacket, I kept pace with Liberty easily, racing through small towns, middle sized towns, and the largest American cities. Liberty plodded over suburbs, rumbling and shaking America out of its mindlessly self-generated accelerations. Faster than the mythological speeding train of progress, Liberty curved the forward sprawl of American back on upon itself. All the way back to the wheel in less than a week. Which is why I wanted to impregnate her with my atom crackling seed. To make a subtle counterrevolution within her railing body. To horseshoe her. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t at all mind her deforesting of poisonous human practices and structures, but this is work I’m perfectly equipped to do myself. I’m limited only by time and resources. And now, competition … If only I could get her barefoot and pregnant, baking liberdelicious muffins in my libercompatible kitchen. Unlocked from cooking and housework, I would be free to travel and destroy on my own. She could accompany me on long weekends and annual holidays, of course, but in the final analysis, I want my name in the history books. She’s had her fifteen minutes. Now is the time for Earle Bird to get his turn. Even if that means a primitive period of accumulating sperm while chasing Liberty around the world. With her egg and my sperm, my tutelage
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and her good cooking, we’ll have the definitive nuclear family. I followed Liberty through the U.S., enviously tracking her accomplishments, dreaming of how I might seize her virginity without killing her in the process. Aye, there’s the rub – and I ain’t talking about Hamlet … I know, based on tests conducted with Doctor Umbilico that when my cock becomes fully excited – the apex of performance made possible by a lust tinged with even the smallest squirt of love – my ejaculate will have the impact of sixteen nuclear bombs. No one knows how powerful, exactly. It’s an experience we simply cannot predict, but I am willing to forgo in death for the sake of initiating its happening. The orgasm that ends all orgasms. It was during our (wink wink) return to New York City that I first noticed I had a fellow groupie. A chunky little man wearing a baseball cap, touring around in a van filled with sound technicians and cameramen. Approaching Toronto, Liberty declared, Canada must also go, ripping the CN Tower from its deep and microscopically wobbling pivot in the earth. Unroping hundreds of miles of power cable from the cracked cement streets beneath her feet, Liberty fashioned a looping belt that served as her scabbard for her enormous symbol of technological advancement and global competition. Back in New York, the mere rush of air hoisted at the Empire State Building blew out the glass and dissembled the walls. The downward spill elevated
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taxicabs and hotdog stands, shredding anything in the way of the solid, convulsing wave of smoke and shrapnel. A few blocks away, I spied the van of Dunkel Doer careening between Liberty’s feet. At first I dismissed his vehicle as a local news vehicle attempting to determine the color of Liberty’s panties for parasitic YouTubic reduplication on the Internet. On to the Chrysler Building, Liberty charged. Dunkel Doer and his cameramen hanging out of the windows, historicizing everything like a dung fly fitted with a helmetcam. Angrily, I pulled my jeep behind the Dunkelmobile. Have we got audio? he bawled. What? I saw the cameraman mouth. Audio! Audio! Audio! Wait, she’s on the move again! We need the rhythm of her every sound! As our vehicles followed Liberty around the island, she sang, her voice cracking windows, toppling radio towers, splintering billboards, imploding neon, revealing the inner minds of roadside bank machines. The Song of the Statue of Liberty No more markets No more small markets No more local No more large markets No more geological markets No more geographical markets No more global markets No more continental markets
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No more economical scales! No more labor No more leadership No more demonizing of glorified bogus entities No more retail influence on character No more K-mart (but loads more Special K!) No more franchises! No more pricing power No more availability of products No more eradication of mom and pop’s and homepickled things No more states No more local authorities No more centers No more order No more dynamic No more theoreticians No more society No more capital and all the other isms No more of any such thing or the words of such things and their variegated positions! Not even I am large enough to fail to fail! No more Ford No more GM No more Chrysler No more Taylor stopwatches No more time No more productivity No more fixities No more Industrial Revolution No more resource dependencies No more social classes No more interpersonal communities No more unions No more bureaucracies
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No more obeisance! How can I Greenaway every NO More into an all-encompassing museum-friendly search string!?! No more discipline No more routinization No more skill No more sexless slick slaves No more bodies No more origins Nor more ends No more sociology and its morays No more sin! No more IS!
This, my friends, Liberty said, addressing the hordes of victims escaping into the subways beneath Manhattan as she pummeled buildings with her fists, is my definition of Liberty. Add no more to every word and phrase in the world in a negative dialects of total world negation, and you will finally have something that resembles what my name stands for. I know Liberty, for I am she! Feral Quarantine From inside the van darting ahead of me I heard the filmmaker barking commands. Audio! Audio! Audio! We can’t get audio! Why not – Say, we’ve got a tail. Speed up.
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I’m the meanest worm-organ you’re ever going to meet, I cussed, accelerating, slamming the jeep into the Dunkelmobile. Cock unzipped, left hand stroking. The collision sent the van careening in a smoking circle. A slow unmotoring as the jeep burst into flames. I leapt from the sizzling vehicle, protecting my worm-membrane member from the heat with both hands. Never mind the statue, Dunkel ordered from within the crushed van. Film him! As Dunkel shook the dead body of his cameraman, I could hear the continued splintering of the vertebrae. Blood poured from the dead man’s mouth, bathing the camera, obscuring the lens. My enhanced testicles churned with technological-strength sperm. The molding of my worm-temperature IQ. Pre-cum sliding violently into my surgical steel vas deferens. As Dunkel fought to unwrap his cameraman’s fingers from around the workings of the camera, Liberty caught wind of my emerging, accumulating sperm. Who knows if the camera caught temporary hold of my great becoming. The recording could only accede to the force of my oncoming projectile. Nothing left to recover. As my hand finished its flurry of movement, I craned my neck and watched Liberty’s reactions contentedly. This is what I’ve got instead of pheromones, I told her, grooming the gore of Dunkel and his crew from my face and hair. Impressed or not, Liberty raised her brows, perhaps for the first time, perhaps for the last.
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How can you love me? she asked after I made my confession, fire and concrete tumbling everywhere around my head and her feet. The Dunkelmobile lay dissembled in a silky wad of ejaculate, a catalogue of human bones strewn like Saturday morning cereal in worm milk. Of course, I love you, I replied. You’re ubiquitous. Everyone loves you. Ubiquity makes me anonymous and unknown, she countered. They sell replications of my surfaces by the box. I’m a two dollar souvenir. As phony as a three dollar bill. I sell for four times the cost of production. It’s simply not me! These images present nothing even remotely related to the reasons I’ve been standing over your shores for all these years. You don’t love me! You don’t even know me! Oh, but I do love you, I called. And I wanna get with you, girl. I know, you’re probably one of those girls who never kisses on the first date. And that’s fine – I’ve never kissed anyone, Liberty interjected. Bingo, I thought. She’s crumbling already. Faster than her fist and feet could decimate an entire block of buildings in a few simple motions. Tumbling skyscrapers. Tossing concrete and iron into the Hudson, haphazard dams flooding the island in rivulets that gushed and grew as the rubble of New York slowly replaced the water surrounding the island. Let me ask you something, I said. Do you remember the first vacation you ever took? The question had little to do with my interest. It stemmed
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purely from the hypnologorythmic teachings of the Triad. I charted her eye movements, hoping to discern her dominant representational system as she answered my question. I mirrored her stance, made sure the tones of my voice matched her throaty voice, in tenor if not in volume. Are you kidding? Liberty laughed. I’m still on my first vacation! If you can call having your image trapped and copied a restful situation. They have so successfully filled the world with my image that they forget about me. The original. The one. Routinized reproductions of my image weigh on my body, eliminating my essence pound by pound. The luminous details, my rays, all of it lost. Well, I said, my darling maiden of the mist, My image doesn’t forget you. Unlike some people, I don’t require you to recognize my love for you in order for my love to be true. Which is why I feel justified pointing out your failure to mention any distinction between the different types of your production, the multitude of materials and sizes. You sob instead. Do you really believe you can float free of taking responsibility for entering into Fordism? Come, let’s destroy America together. Beginning with every military compound we can find. Let’s make it kinky! Dress like Columbus – No, Liberty said. You can do that work on your own. Clacking her lips together, Liberty shuffled off, pulverizing a long row of NBC and Calvin Klein billboards with a flick of her wrist. Wait! I shouted. Where are you going?
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Mount Rushmore, she sighed. A mythified set of misused and equally mass-produced stupidity. The plastification of ideas even more vile than me. But you’re not vile! I didn’t mean what I said about your complicity with the assembly lines – I am vile, but not entirely by my own design. With or without my help, I’ve been made the thirdworld of ideas. The representative of intellectual shackles worldwide. Face it: history will reject me unless I do so first! For now, I must eradicate all that I can. Let the survivors see options in the ruins of my war. Real war. War as never before. My attempted hypnosis was failing. Seven virgins in heaven made those guys make the crash, I said. Capitalism, the states, bogeymen on the bogus level of The God of the United Devils. No, Liberty said. I must insist. If you believe in terrorists, you need to do the truth and blow yourself up. This is what I need to do. Not the endless love-in of destruction your beggary seems to imply, but the ending of the concept of the end. Goodbye! I couldn’t woo her. And yet I couldn’t let her go. It was a separation of elements I could not bear. She hadn’t killed me, which I took as a sign of love despite her maniacal aggression. We needed each other. To use her own language, no Brechtian deus ex machina will ever dismiss or reduce me. There is comfort in the intensity of our opposition. The orgasmic destruction of my jeep and Dunkel’s van left me stranded. As Liberty stomped off, I raced to the top of one of the few remaining
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buildings. I needed to chart her course. Once she smashed through the George Washington Bridge on her way to Mount Rushmore, her exact trail could be lost. On the roof I discovered a news helicopter, complete with an exasperated pilot. We can’t fly, he begged me from behind his mirrored glasses. Not without fuelling. Nonsense. Just get me on her shoulder and you can go home. The pilot blinked at me from behind his dark glasses. What home? What do you think you’re going to do? Jump? At that height, the wind alone will smack you up into the blades. Nonsense, I repeated. I see them do this shit in the movies all the time … I searched the chopper. A bumblewasp glut of newspaper, soiled donut boxes, and the suggestively split cross of a grimy emergency kit. Electrical cable, I said, chancing upon a black coil. The umbilical cord of TV. Fly, I demanded. Ten minutes later, swinging from the thick black cable, I closed my eyes as Liberty swatted at the helicopter. My thrust was good and Hollywood was with me. Although I nearly gutted myself on the centermost tine jutting from Liberty’s head, I managed a bruise-free landing on the copious mound of her coppery hair. She twisted her head violently. I held fast, my hands slicing against her sharp rays. Liberty muttered her annoyance for less than a mile.
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Behind me I heard the impact of the helicopter against a house in Harlem, and turned for what I hoped would be forever from the flumes of red and gray spewing from the island. I turned my head just in time for the theatre of demolition unfolding before me. Goodbye little red lighthouse. Goodbye George Washington Bridge. Goodbye New York, New York. May your zip codes rust in peace. Mount Rushmore collected in the distance. I aroused myself with my torn and bleeding hand the instant the monstrous mountain with its smirking mouths entered my sight. I could not allow Liberty the privilege of destroying this most prestigious of monuments. When Liberty sensed the vibrations of my masturbation she sped up, running in tandem with my pounding. Harder and harder, cracking the ground beneath her feet. Noses tumbled as we grew nearer, surgical operations conducted with Sphinxless grace. Masturbating became difficult as we approached Rushmore. I bounced uncontrollably, fighting for purchase on the bounding skull of Liberty. I collided against the green rays, fearing I would never cum, until finally, her body paused and my body jolted. I shot a bolus of ejaculate, intercepting her swinging fist. Amputated, annihilated in a flash. The right hand of justice shattered against the ground. A second wave of cum blasted Lincoln’s witless face, disintegrating the goatchin beneath his lips, pulling the rest of his face into an oblivion of gravity and dust.
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Luke Skywalkered, Liberty slapped down upon me with her remaining hand. Her dentata mashed noisily as she forwarded my struggling body towards her mouth. Liberty! My moving light! Please! Observe me! Animal that I am! Lay me down! Over there … let me tend your wounds! And you can tend to mine! Ignoring my imploring, Liberty curled her fist tightly around my body, crushing my ribs and my hips. I lost consciousness as she kicked out a symphony against the remaining visages. I slipped into the ancient energy of life and existence – apolitical, aliteral, abiographical. No trace of any authority or conduction pounding in my ears. A rapturous release from the burden of sound as the visual world grew dark, boiling me into a state of unfettered silence.
Abreaction Ladies and gentlemen, welcome again to Marntel. Joining us now here in the studio, the Liberesident of the United Sta – No! the president shrieked in a voice retrofitted for enormous peals of screaming. His green throat bulged, spotting piglet pink where the tattooist had missed the mark. Not the United States. Not anymore. I have been sentenced – and rightly so – to stand, day after day, in the bay left empty by our savior, the Statue of Liberty. No one knows where she’s go –
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Forgive me, Mr. Liberesident … An interruption, Marntel said. We’re taking you now live to the scene of what appears to be the death of the Statue of Liberty. Yes, Marntel, Paul Zahnonsense said, morphing into view on television screens around the world. Beside her stood a pair of crazed eyes beaming from behind an octopus blue surgical mask. The Statue that has been terrorizing every nation on earth has collapsed and died, Zahnonsense said. As you can see behind me, the corpse has grown far larger than the original statue. Frankly, Marntel … I’m searching for a term I learned in college … it rhymes with tequila and lime … No, wait! If you don’t know what I’m talking about, just go ahead and Google Wikipedia on Kant and the sublime! I am standing on location here with the head coroner, and I can only speak for myself, but I’m quivering with uncertainty. It’s like when you’re drinking and driving and you see the whirly-bird behind you … you don’t feel so right as the officer rotates his loaded pelvis towards you. Rattling with nightstick and gun, oh my … But let’s turn now, Paula Zahnonsense said, pointing to the sterile-suited official beside her, to the head of our special team of coroners who I understand is now prepared to present their expert report. Well, Paula, the head coroner said from behind the sterile strip of cloth masking his mouth, Liberty appears to have died from massive blood loss, the
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result of a mutilated arm. She probably had no understanding of how to fashion a tourniquet – and besides, we wouldn’t have been able to help her anyhow. No suture on earth could close such an enormous wound. Even if we had tried, the spray of blood would have drowned the surgeons – Unless they wore scuba gear, Paula offered. The coroner blinked silently, eyes warbling, growing in intensity, threatening to explode. Paula Zahnonsense blushed. She nervously pointed the microphone at the pulsating mask. She could barely control the nervous twitching of her hand as the coroner’s mask sucked in and out at the behest of his rapid consonants and vowels. It will interest your viewers to know, he continued, that our autopsy of the body has revealed that Liberty was pregnant at the time of her death. We are hoping that DNA analysis will indicate who the father was, but I doubt we’ll find a match in our records. She seems to have maintained her virginity, but that’s hard to determine. Chastity never was an exact science. No matter how this happened, it must have been an enormous and powerful sperm that cracked Liberty’s egg. So, Doctor … What’s next? Zahnonsense wheezed, her CNN bravado failing to surmount the unfolding of this most juicy braid of unfolding fact. We do have a partially developed embryo, the coroner said. The child will keep our scientists and historians and hopefully our poets busy for a very long
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time to come. The endless quest for origins tracking forward on the original quest for the end … Speaking of the end, the coroner intoned, pulling his mask aside, revealing an uncannily pristine face. Ladies and gentleman, allow me to properly introduce myself. The mask fell completely away as the doctor’s jaw bobbled, rubber earloops rebounding against his quivering, tremulous face. A phone number brightened at the bottom of the screen, alarming the television technicians laboring over their glowing dials in the news studio’s control tower, looking up at the ceiling as if they could see through the concrete up to the heavens and discern the circling satellite suddenly pirating their monitors. My name, the coroner said, opening his throat and unleashing a sonorous scream of total triumph, is Doctor Umbilico! Call the number on the bottom of your screen and cannibalize the gruel of your own beauty! Bliss is never more than a scrape of the scalpel away! Join now! Pick up that phone! Submit yourselves to the majesty, the golden rule of we … the … People … for … the … Advancement … of… Lying! But wait! Umbilico cackled, breathing hoarsely into Paula Zahnonsense’s bobbing black microphone as mercurial numbers rotated and flashed at the tips of his clipped and sanitized fingers, the animated digits boring into the eyes of every viewer camped on couches all over the world, causing a phone call frenzy, credit cards cramming electronic cash through quavering airwaves to an unseen call center built into
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the sanitized walls of Umbilico’s surgical theater of shimmering, self-elected pain. There’s more! Umbilico gleamed, staring beyond the crowding zoom of the camera’s gaze. Call now for this one time special offer and join my rainbow coalition of endlessly changing faces, my democracy of surgeries always yet to come! New York, Saas-Fee, Berlin 2007
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books available from Atropos Press Teletheory. Gregory L. Ulmer Philosophy of Culture-Kulturphilosophie: Schopenhauer and Tradition. Edited by Wolfgang Schirmacher. Virilio: Grey Ecology. The La Rochelle Workshop. Edited by Hubertus von Amelunxen. Translated by Drew Burk The Tupperware Blitzkrieg. Anthony Metivier Talking Cheddo: Teaching Hard Kushitic Truths. Manga Clem Marshall Che Guevera and the Economic Debate in Cuba. Luiz Bernardo Pericás Follow Us or Die. Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei and Jonas Staal Just Living: Philosophy in Artificial Life. Collected Works Volume 1. Wolfgang Schirmacher
Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy Series Wolfgang Schirmacher, editor
The Ethics of Uncertainty: Aporetic Openings. Michael Anker Trans/actions: Art, Film and Death. Bruce Alistair Barber Literature as Pure Mediality: Kafka and the Scene of Writing. Paul DeNicola Imaginality: Conversant and Eschaton. A. Staley Groves Hospitality in the age of media representation. by Christian Hänggi The Organic Organisation: freedom, creativity and the search for fulfilment. Nicholas Ind Can Computers Create Art? James Morris The Art of the Transpersonal Self: Transformation as Aesthetic and Energetic Practice. Norbert Koppensteiner Community without Identity: The Ontology and Politics of Heidegger. Tony See Sonic Soma: Sound, Body and the Origins of the Alphabet. Elise Kermani Mirrors triptych technology: Remediation and Translation Figures. Diana Silberman Keller
