Autopsy of an Eldritch City: Ten Tales of Strange and Unproductive Thinking (16 page)

Ah, the Yellow Notebook. Even as I finish writing this account I can see the accursed object resting on the surface of my desk, mocking me in a voice only I can hear. If only it had never crossed my path! I’m still not sure what I should do with it. The rational part of my brain says I should destroy it, but it seems like such a shame, considering all the work that Bruce put into it. For now, I’ll just leave it alone. What I
won’t
do is allow it to ruin my life. Bruce Kadmon may have been a brilliant man, but in the end, he allowed himself to fall victim to mad fantasies of Time Vampires and beings named Abbalath. He traded in his healthy skepticism for blind belief in absurdities. He claims that the Entropiors exist and are around us at all times but I think this is utter nonsense.

I did, however, have a slightly unnerving thing happen to me while at the hardware store yesterday. While shopping for some new shelves for my bookcases I found myself gazing at a pyramid of cans of white paint as if they were hypnotizing me, and I ended up wondering, in an absent-minded manner, while the Pink Floyd song “Time” played over the store speakers, if I knew anyone who’d be willing to give me an epidermal injection to the spine.

“Hell goes round and round.

In shape it is circular and by nature

it is interminable, repetitive and

very nearly unbearable.”

—Flann O’Brien

“Bhikkhus, all is burning.”

—The Buddha

The deliquescent prenatal memories of swimming one-tailed through your father’s groinal cathedral, Pre-Ovum, back when Mother used to spend an hour in the bedroom of her parent’s house, listening to “What in the World” off David Bowie’s
Low
over and over again while putting on her
Clockwork Orange
-inspired
make-up before hitting the local disco, where one September night in 1979 she met your Father (you were conceived when your parents first had sex in the restroom of said disco, while Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” played over the sound system in the background). Father, a physicist who was utterly discredited years later when he wrote that article defending Hanns Hörbiger’s World Ice Theory (Welteislehre), stating his fanatical belief, in no uncertain terms, in the doctrine of Eternal Ice and Glacial Cosmogony. Your mother was an archaeoastronomer and a member of ISAAC (The International Society for Archaeoastronomy and Astronomy in Culture). The year that you realized that most other little boys didn’t have tails and scaly skin and forked tongues and extremely flexible spines. The times when your peers would chase you around the schoolyard, throwing stones at your frail body and calling you “Son of Godzilla” (and oh, how you cried when you got home, in the privacy of your own bedroom, yet at the same time you also took a secret masochistic pride in being called Godzilla’s son because Godzilla’s son, Minilla, was the Godzilla character with whom you most identified). The same jeering peers who only grudgingly accepted you as one of them the year you developed those warts on your right hand (on the webbing in between your thumb and index finger, an area known as the thenar space), and you would chase the screaming girls around the schoolyard, trying to touch them with your warty hands, while the boys whom you both hated and at the same time wanted to impress laughed and cheered: misogyny creates strange bedfellows (years later you would partially redeem yourself by selecting Chun-Li as your preferred
Super Street Fighter II
character of choice, a partial feminist statement, though a subconscious one). Playing on the beach one overcast August afternoon, digging a large hole in the sand and pretending that it was the hoof print of an enormous horse, the kind of thing one would expect to see featured in a Surrealist painting from the 1930’s, or perhaps the final work of Alan Kirschner. All those games of Stratego played with your father, who would often win said games thanks to your tendency to blunder your most pivotal pieces onto his mines: years later, when he was on his death bed, in your final conversation with him, he admitted that he would almost always cheat at those Stratego games, that he would often move his mine and flag pieces, and that was how he always beat you, yet you forgave him. The fact that all your life, Autumn was always your favorite season: one year you were raking leaves in the backyard and you shaped the leaf pile in such a way so that the leaves formed the outline of a man, and you named him Frogmorton (where did you first see that name? Was it in some Tolkien book?), though sadly, no sooner had you finished work on him than did a strong gust of wind blow past your house and scatter him to the four cardinal points, like the corpse of some criminal left at the voudon crossroads to be devoured by vultures: imagine the expression on GOD’s face if, after creating Adam, He would have been forced to just stand by and watch His most beloved creation fall apart into a pile of wailing dust, for that was the expression on your face, that afternoon. Your best friend, Lucas Favaro, that overweight boy who used to always dress as He-Man at Halloween, who one day in the third grade was coaxed by candy (a Milky Way, to be exact) to climb into the backseat of a strange man’s car (a sick man, as it turned out to be: poor Lucas was tortured, raped and killed, and his body was dumped into the sewers beneath Thundermist, where it was never recovered). That time in high school where you attended the auditions of Thundermist High’s drama club’s production of
Les Misérables
and tried out for the part of Jean Valjean and even though Mrs. Nadelman (the drama club teacher) complimented your lovely singing voice she suggested that in terms of looks you just weren’t right for the part and maybe you could audition for, say, the part of Monsieur Thénardier? Your Broadway dreams died that day. The year you enrolled at UMass-Amherst College and realized that college really wasn’t all that different from high school: the frat boys still taunted your appearance, only now their insults were a tad more literary (for example, one of them, evidently a Tolkienphile, took a liking to calling you Smaug). That time you spent the entire weekend in your dorm room, cloistered from the general campus populace, afraid to leave the confines of your four familiar walls (that protected you from those crawling, faceless dolls that clambered up the sides of your house in your worst childhood nightmares), obsessively reading assorted texts on Eastern Religion such as the
Bhagavad Gita
and the
Tao Te Ching
and
The Upanishads
and th
e
Ā
dittapari
yā
ya Sutta
and the
Dhammapada
, trying to figure out for yourself what the point of it all was, the point of pointless suffering (better you had tried to solve the eternal question of how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, or what came first, the chicken-headed Anguipede-Abraxas or the Egg). That oh-so-trendy nihilist phase: on a Sotos literary kick, you had begun collecting back issues of Philip Sitz’
Chaste
, a serial killer fanzine, the one that had featured artwork of a crying child on the front cover of its final issue, with a row of swastikas underneath, along with the words “real power,” “real sadism,” and “Brady’s babies,” but to you,
Chaste
just seemed kind of toothless and watered down when set side-by-side with
Pure,
but still, when it came to reading magazines celebrating child sex murders, one couldn’t be picky because there wasn’t much of a selection out there: C’est la vie, to quote B*Witched.
A soft voice whispers, “Beware the dull, smoke-colored light of Hell.”
A mental photograph of you stalking around campus dressed in a most utilitarian fashion, wearing a simple gray dress shirt (with pockets on both breasts), suit trousers (with a hole cut in back for your tail), polished brogues on your feet, and a gray military-looking overcoat with an upturned collar, the Ian Curtis look in other words, listening to the
song “Look at Your Game, Girl”  on your Sony Walkman, the first track off Charles Manson’s
Lie: The Love and Terror Cult
LP, and for a song recorded in 1967, it wasn’t bad, in your opinion. You would record music in your dorm room, make cassette tapes of unlistenable noise, songs named after concentration camps like Ravensbrück or Treblinka, unaware that Maurizio Bianchi had already beaten you to the punch back in 1981 with
Symphony for a Genocide
(one of the best industrial/noise albums ever recorded, though still perhaps not as good as MB’s
Technology
). One of the covers of these cassette tapes was nothing more than a grainy black and white photograph of Sharon Tate’s butchered corpse. No escape from these Paths of Frustration, no salvation from those icy, Meonic regions of metacosmic darkness, the Ghost Worlds limned by the Shadows of Reflected Light. But still, the notion that love conquered all could never be far from your thoughts. The first time you saw Ithell, Charlie Brown’s Little Red-Haired Girl in the flesh (indeed, her hair was as red as the eyes of Melisandre), clad in a Staind t-shirt and wearing a Russian ushanka atop her head, during a trip to the W.E.B. Du Bois Library, and there she was standing in the History section, her left shoulder resting against one of the bookcases as she flipped through a well-worn copy of Oswald Spengler’s
The Decline of the West
with a rapt expression on her face while chewing on a stick of Wrigley’s Extra Long Lasting Flavor Classic Bubble Gum (a few weeks after you had met her she had tried to get you to read Yockney’s
Imperium
, but even though you liked the final line, “This Destiny does not tire, nor does it falter, and its mantle of strength descends upon those in its service,” it was a bit too Germanic for your tastes, not that Ithell was a fascist, of course, only a woman who just happened to be the editor of
Confrontation
, the campus left-wing newspaper and who had an extreme amount of interest in radical far-right politics, which may have also explained why she had tried to get you to read Savitri Devi’s
The Lightning and the Sun
as well). She had looked up from the book and complimented your fashion sense: you had been wearing a white short-sleeved t-shirt, tight black leather jeans, petite black leather women’s boots (your feet being quite small and delicate), and, tied around your neck, a pink satin neckerchief that you had purchased at Tiffany & Co. on Fifth Avenue during a trip to NYC you had undertaken over the summer:  on the front of the t-shirt there had been a black and white print of Philippe Halsman’s 1951 photograph
In Voluptas Mors
, a portrait that depicted the artist Salvador Dali posing next to a large grinning skull that was actually formed from the artfully posed bodies of seven female nudes. Ithell, born in the city of Ilium, New York, the kind of girl who sang Sonic Youth’s “Little Trouble Girl” at that off-campus Maui-themed karaoke bar you went to one weekend (the one with the giant Easter Island head statue by the front door), the kind of girl who wrote down “Bokononism” as her religion on any sort of official form or paperwork she was required to fill out. She had the kind of smile that could turn the crotch of any heterosexual man in her vicinity into a one-tree forest (one-tree forests do exist: for example, near Fish Lake Forest in Utah one may find a 106-acre forest that is essentially one supermassive tree, this tree being a single male Quaking Aspen, or
Populus Tremuloides
,  known as Pando, which is Latin for “I Spread,” though some people also refer to it as “The Trembling Giant,” and this tree is believed to weigh 6,600 tons and is estimated to be over 80,000 years old, though some experts believe it might even be a million years old). The evening in late November when you and Ithell did acid in her car while listening to Radiohead’s
Kid A
and The Cure’s
Disintegration
albums. Memories of attending all those on-campus antiwar protests, clutching posters depicting bloodied George W. Bush visages, Ithell shouting through a megaphone that all wars were wounds on the Immaculate Body of Christ, that every death was a tragedy as profound as anything one could find in the oeuvre of Shakespeare (a lesson she had no doubt learned from Sister Ray: years later, after the break-up, she would join some fundamentalist religious order known as the Brethren of the Redeemer out in Gilead, New Jersey, but by then you were in Egypt). The first time you made love to her in your dorm room, under that film poster of
The Rules of Attraction
that showcased row after row of stuffed animals artfully arraigned in carnal positions, a Kama Sutra for the Plushed Ones, and how it was on that day that you came to the realization that your forked tongue, which you had always thought of as a disfiguring curse, was in fact quite a valuable tool when it came to eating out a woman. The year the two of you moved to New York City after graduation, her to start up her own plastic surgery clinic (which she ended up calling Acéphale, which had also been the name of Georges Bataille’s secret society), you with the intention to become a novelist. The plane you took to Egypt after your falling out with Ithell. The fatal step. The explosion that you feel before you hear it, though by that time it’s too late. Cruelly delivered to the dancing, laughing Leper-Light, which kind of reminds you of the Deadlights that appeared at the end of Stephen King’s
IT
(the largest book you ever read, even though you lied in college and told all your friends that the longest book you had ever read had been Victor Hugo’s
Les Misérables
), or that artwork you had seen one year at some museum, Mikhail Larionov’s
Red Rayonism
(1913), the sinister and dancing red, orange and yellow light, Autumn reconfigured as the colors of Hell. The light you see now, the light of your liberation (it had been on a class trip, when you had been just a child, and your art teacher had wanted to expose you to modern art, and at the time you had remembered a saying from Clark Ashton Smith’s Black Book: “Modern art, though often stimulating, through its novelty and variety, is yet essentially decadent. It has broken down the old forms and patterns without replacing them with anything adequate. At worst, it runs to utter chaos and disintegration,” and for a brief moment, you had had a disturbing glimpse of the future of art, a future that was rapidly arriving: you saw crucifixes submerged into jars of urine, a Virgin Mary made of elephant dung, an American flag used as a doormat, a diamond-encrusted skull, a tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde in a vitrine symbolizing the physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living). The memories continue falling all around you, like dead birds dropping from the sky during an aerosol-based chemical attack, or the pearls sliding off of Martha Wayne’s necklace at the moment of her execution in the Year of the Bat. That field with the sign with the words on it that you couldn’t understand, what with them being written in Coptic, undoubtedly some kind of warning. How you wandered into the Sahara like a 21st Century Bishop Pike, or Timothy Archer (to make here a literary allusion to Philip K. Dick: but you never really read that book now, did you? Lyre Liar), with some vague notion of either achieving enlightenment by meditating under a palm tree or getting fat on locusts (locusts being surprisingly nutritious). A lunar camel seeking a Stellar Yggdrasil. Your disillusionment with modern-day Egypt, so lacking in the evocative glamor of its Pharaonic past, and how it had looked nothing at all like the mysterious Pyramids did on the back over of Pink Floyd’s