Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea (14 page)

August 20, 2027

No sleep last night. Today, I filed for my next assignment, but so far the green bin’s still empty. Maybe I’m being punished for blowing the DL on Weds. night, some sort of pass-ag bullshit bcause that’s the best those weasels in senior edit can ever seem to manage. Or maybe it’s only a sloooowwww week. I am having a hard time caring, either way. No sleep last night. No, I said that already. Time on my hands and that’s never a good thing. Insomnia and black coffee and gin, takeaway and durian Pop-Tarts and a faint throb that wants to be a headache (how long since one of those?), me locked in my office last night reading a few chapters of Darger’s grand flop, but there’s nothing in there – fascinating and I don’t know why it wasn’t better received, but still leading me nowhere, nowhere at all (where did I
think
it would lead?). This bit re: La Llorona (“Bloody Mary”) from Ch. 3 – “Some girls with no home feel claws scratching under the skin on their arms. Their hand [sic] looks like red fire.” And this one, from a
Miami New Times
article: “When a child says he got the story from the spirit world, as homeless children do, you’ve hit the ultimate
non sequitur.
” Homeless kids and demons and angels, street gangs, drugs, the socioeconomic calamities of thirty goddamn years ago. News articles from 1997. A journalistic scam. None of this is gonna answer any of my questions, if I truly have questions to be answered. But this is “Jane Doe’s” magnum opus, and there is some grim fascination I can’t shake – How did she get from
there
to
there,
from phony diy street myths to sewing her gf’s mouth shut? Maybe it wasn’t such a short goddamn walk. Maybe, one night, she stood before a dark mirror in a darkened room, the mirror coated with dried saltwater – going native or just too fucking curious, whatever – and maybe she
stood
there chanting
Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary,
over and over and over and La Llorona scratched her way out through the looking glass, scarring the anthropologist’s soul with her rosary beads. Maybe that’s where this began, the snips and stitches, #17. Maybe it all goes back to those homeless kids in Miami, back before the flood, before the W. Antarctic ice sheet melted and Dade County FL sank like a stone, and all along it was the late Dr. J. L. Darger let this djinn out of its gin bottle in ways people like Sabit have not yet begun to suspect and never will. I’m babbling, and if that’s the best I can do, I’m going to stop keeping a damned journal. I’ve agreed to be @
CeM
tomorrow night with Sabit. I’m a big girl. I can sip my shitty Merlot and nibble greasy orange cheese and stale crackers with the best of them. I can bear the soulless conversation and the sweating porcine walls. I can look at #17 and see nothing there but bad art, fucked-up artless crap, pretentious carnage and willful suffering. Maybe then I can put
all
this shit behind me. Who knows, maybe I can even put Sabit behind me, too.

August 20, 2027 (later, p.m.)

Sabit says the surgeon on #17 will be at the show t’morrow night. I think maybe it’s someone Sabit was screwing before she started screwing me. Oh, & this, from
The Breathing Composition,
which I’ve started reading again & frankly wish I had not. Seems Welleran Smith somehow got his paws on Darger’s diary, or one of her diaries, & he quotes it at length (& no doubt there are contextual issues; don’t know the fate of the original text):

“We are all alone on a darkling plain, precisely as Matt. Arnold said. We are so very alone here, and we yearn each day for the reunification promised by priests and gurus and by some ancient animal instinct. We are evolution’s grand degenerates, locked away forever in the consummate prison cells of our conscious minds, each divided always from the other. I met a man from Spain, and he gave me a note card with the number seventeen written on it seventeen times. He thought that surely I would understand right away, and he was heartbroken when I did not. When I asked, he would not explain. I’ve kept the card in my files, and sometimes I take it out and stare at it, hoping that I will at last discern its message. But it remains perfectly opaque, bcause my eyes are the eyes of the damned.”

& I’m looking thru the program for the Trenton Show on the 15th, last Sun., & only one piece is
numbered,
only 1 piece w/a # for a title – #17. Yes, I know. I’m going in circles here. Chasing my own ass. Toys in the attic. Nutters as the goddamn snips if I don’t watch myself. If I don’t get some sleep. I haven’t seen Sabit all evening, just a call in this afternoon.

August 21, 2027 (Saturday, 10:12 a.m.)

Four whole hours sleep last night. & the hangover is not so bad that coffee and aspirin isn’t helping. My head feels clearer than it has in days. Sabit came home sometime after I nodded off & I woke with her snoring next to me. When I asked if maybe she wanted breakfast, she smiled, so I made eggs & cut a grapefruit in half. Perhaps I can persuade her to stay home tonight, that we should
both
stay home tonight. There is nothing down there I need to see again.

August 21, 2027 (2:18 p.m.)

No
, she says.
We are expected,
she says, & what the fuck is that supposed to mean, anyway? So there was a fight, bcause there always has to be a fight with Sabit, a real 4-alarm screamer this time, & I have no idea where she’s run off to but she swore she’d be back by
five
& I better be sober, she said, & I better be dressed & ready for the show. So, yeah, fuck it. I’ll go to the damn show with her. I’ll rub shoulders with the stitch freaks this one last time. Maybe I’ll even have a good long look at #17 (tho’ now, I should add, now Sabit says the surgeon won’t be there after all). Maybe I’ll stand & stare until it’s only flesh & wires & hooks & fancy lighting. Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette wrote somewhere, “Look for a long time at what pleases you, and for a longer time at what pains you.” Maybe I’ll shame them all with my staring. They only feel as much pain as they
want
to feel – isn’t that what Sabit is always telling me? The stitchworks, they get all the best painkillers, ever since the Supreme Ct. wigs decided this sick shit constitutes Art – so long as certain lines are not crossed. They bask in glassy-eyed morphine hazes, shocked cold orange on neuroblocks & Fibrodene & Elyzzium, exotic transdermals & maybe all that shit’s legal & maybe it ain’t, but 2380 no one’s asking too many questions as the City of NY has enough on its great collective plate these days w/out stitch-friendly lawyers raising a holy funk about censorship and freedom of expression and 1st Amendment violations. The cops hate the fuckers, but none of the arrests have had jack to do with drugs, just disorderly conduct, riots after shows, shit like that. But yeah, t’morrow night I’ll go back to
CeM
with Sabit, my heart’s damned desire, my cunt’s lazy love, & I will look until they want to fucking charge me extra.

August 21, 2027

So Sabit shows up an hour or so after dark…she’s gone now, gone again bcause I suppose I have chased her away, again. That’s what she would say, I am sure. I have chased her away again. But, as I was saying, she shows up, & I can tell she’s been drinking bcause she has that smirk and that swagger she gets when she’s been drinking, & I can tell she’s still pissed. I’m waiting for the other shoe. I’m waiting, bcause I fucking know whatever’s coming next is for my benefit. & I’m thinking, screw it, get it over with, don’t let her have the satisfaction of getting in the first blow. I’m thinking, this is where it ends. Tonight. No more of her bullshit. It’s been a grandiose act of reciprocal masochism, Sabit, & it’s been raw & all, but enough’s enough. @ least the sex was good, so let’s remember that & move on. & that’s when I notice the gauze patch taped to her back, centered between her shoulder blades just so, placed
just so
there between her scapulae, centered on the smooth brown plain of her trapezius (let me write this the way a goddamn snip would write it, cluttered with an anatomist’s Latin). & when I ask her what the fuck, she just shrugs, & that swatch of gauze goes up & then down again. But I know. I know whatever it is she’s done, whatever comes next, this is it. This is her preemptive volley, so I can just forget all about landing the first punch this time, baby. Sabit knows revenge like a drunk knows an empty bottle, & I should have given up while I was ahead
. I’ve been wanting some ink,
she says.
You helped me to finally make up my mind, that’s all.
& before she can say anything else, I rip away the bandage. She does not even fucking flinch, even though the tattoo can’t be more than a couple hrs old, still seeping & puffy and red, & all I can hear is her laughing. Bcause there on her back is the Roman numeral XVII, & when she asks for the bandage back, I slap her. I
slapped
her. This use of present tense, what’s that but keeping the wound open & fresh, keeping the scabs at bay just like some goddamn pathetic stitchwork would do. I
slapped
her. The sound of my hand against her cheek was so loud, crack like a goddamn firecracker, & in the silence afterwards (just as fucking loud) she just smiled & smiled & smiled for me. & then I started yelling – I don’t know exactly what – accusations that couldn’t possibly have made sense, slurs and insinuation, and truthfully I knew even then none of it was anything but bitterness & disappointment that she’d not only managed to draw first blood (hahaha) this round, she’d finally pushed me far enough to hit her. I’d never hit her before. I had never hit
anyone
before, not since some bullshit high school fights, &, at last, she did not even need to raise her voice. & then she just smiled @ me, & I think I must have finally told her to say something, bcause I was puking sick to death of that smug smile.
I’m glad you approve,
she said. Or maybe she said,
I’m glad you understand.
In this instance, the meanings would be the same somehow. Somehow interchangeable. But I did not apologize. That’s the sort of prick I am. I sat down on the kitchen floor & stared @ linoleum Rorschach patterns & when I looked up again she was gone. I don’t know if she’s
gone,
gone, or if Sabit has merely retreated until she decides it’s time for another blitz. Rethinking her maneuvers, the ins & outs of this campaign, logistics and field tactics & what the fuck ever. Cards must be played properly. I know Sabit, & she will never settle for Pyrrhic victory, no wars of attrition, no winner’s curse. I sat on the floor until I heard the door shut & so knew I was alone again. I would say at least this gets me out of
CeM
on Sun. night, but I may go alone. Even though I know she’ll be there. Clearly, I can hurt some more. Tonight I will get drunk, & that is all.

August 22, 2027 (2:56 a.m.)

Always have I been a sober drunk. I’ve finished the gin & started on an old bottle of rye whisky – gift from some former lover I won’t name here – bcause I didn’t feel like walking through the muggy, dusty evening, risking life and limb & lung for another pretty blue bottle of Bombay. A sober & lazy drunk, adverse to taking
unnecessary
risks. Sabit has not yet reappeared, likely she will not. I suspect she believes she has won not only the battle, but the war, as well. Good for her. May she go haunt some other sad fuck’s life. Of course, the apt. is still awash in her junk, her clothes, her stitch lit, the hc zines and discs & her txtbooks filled with diagrams, schematics of skeletons & musculature, neuroanatomy, surgical technique, organic chem and pharmacology, immunology, all that crap. Snip porn. I should dump it all. I should call someone 2830 to cart it all away so I don’t have to fucking look at it anymore. The clothes, her lucite ashtrays, the smoky, musky, spicy smell of her, bottles of perfume, cosmetics, music, Sanrio vibrators, jewelry, deodorant, jasmine soap, baby teeth & jesus all the
CRAP
she’s left behind to keep me company. I don’t know if I’ll sleep tonight. I don’t want to. I don’t want to be awake anymore ever again. Why did she want to rub my nose in #17? Just that she’s finally found a flaw, a goddamn weakness, & she has to make the most of it? A talkative, sober drunk. But wait – there is something. There is something else I found in Welleran Smith, & I’m gonna write it down. Something more from the diary/ies of Dr. Judith Darger, unless it’s only something Smith concocted to suit his own ends. More & more I consider that likelihood, that Darger is only some lunatic just happened to be where these people needed her to be, but isn’t that how it always is with saints and martyrs? Questions of victimhood arise. Who’s exploiting who? Who’s exploiting whom? Christ I get lost in all these words. I don’t
need
words. I’m strangling on words. I need to see Sabit & end this mess & be done with her. According to Welleran Smith, Darger writes (none of the “entries” are dated): “I would not tell a child that it isn’t going to hurt. I wouldn’t lie. It is going to hurt, and it is going to hurt forever or as long as human consciousness may endure. It is going to hurt until it doesn’t hurt anymore. That is what I would tell a child. That is what I tell myself, and what am I but my own child? So, I will not lie to any of you. Yes, there will be pain, and at times the pain will seem unbearable. But the pain will open doorways. The pain
is
a doorway, as is the scalpel and as are the sutures and each and every incision. Pain is to be thrown open wide that all may gaze at the wonders which lie beyond. Why is it assumed this flesh must not be cut? Why is it assumed this is my final corporeal form? What is it we cannot yet see for all our fear of pain and ugliness and disfiguration? I would not tell a child that it isn’t going to hurt. I would teach a child to live in pain.” Is that what I am learning from you, Sabit? Is that the lesson of #17 and the glassy stare of those six eyes? Would you, all of you, teach me to live with pain?

August 23, 2027

It’s almost dawn, that first false dawn & just a bit of hesitant purple where the sky isn’t quite night anymore. As much as I have ever seen false dawn in the city, where we try so hard to keep the night away forever. If I had a son, or a daughter, I would tell them a story, how people are @ war with night, & the city – like all cities – is only a fortress built to hold back the night, even though all the world is just a bit of grit floating in a sea of night that might go on almost forever. I’m on the roof. I’ve never been up here before. Sabit & I never came up here. Maybe another three hours left before it’s too hot & bright to sit up here, only 95F now if my watch is telling me the truth. My face & hair are slick with sweat, sweating out the booze & pills, sweating out the sweet & sour memory of Sabit. It feels good to sweat. I went to Pearl St. & the Trenton reveal @
Corpus ex Machina,
but apparently she did not. Maybe she had something better to do & someone better to be doing it with. I flashed my press tag @ the door, so at least I didn’t have to pay the $47 cover. I was not the only pundit in attendance. I saw Kline, who’s over @ the Voice these days (that venerable old whore) & I saw Garrison, too. Buzzards w/their beaks sharp, stomachs empty, mouths watering. No, I do not know if birds salivate, but reporters sure fucking do. None of them spoke to me, & I exchanged the favor. The place was
replete,
as the dollymops are wont to say, chock-full, standing room only. I sipped dirty martinis and licorice shides & looked no one in the eye, no one who was not on exhibit. #17 was near the back, not as well lit as some of the others, & I stood there & stared, bcause that is what I’d come for. Sometimes it gazed back @ me, or
they
gazed @ me – I am uncertain of the proper idiom or parlance or phrase. Is
it
One or are
they
3? I stared & stared & stared, like any good voyeur would do, any dedicated peeper, bcause no clips are allowed, so you stand & drink it all in there the same way the Neanderthals did it or pony up the fat spool of cash for one of the Trenton chips or mnemonic lozenges (“all proceeds for R&D, promo, & ongoing medical expenses,” of course). I looked until all I saw was all I was
meant
to see – the sculpted body(ies), living & breathing & conscious – the perpetually hurting realization of all Darger’s nightmares. If I saw beauty there, it was no different from the
beauty
I saw in Brooklyn after the New Konsojaya Trading Co. popped their micro-nuke over on Tillary St. No different from the hundred lingering deaths I’ve witnessed. Welleran Smith said this was to be “the soul’s terrorism against the tyranny of genes & phenotype.” I stood there & I saw everything there was to see. Maybe Sabit would have been proud. Maybe she would have been disappointed @ my resolve. It hardly matters, either way. A drop of sweat dissolving on my tongue & I wonder if that’s the way the ocean used to taste, when it wasn’t suicide to taste the ocean? When I had seen all I had come to see, my communion w/#17, I found an empty stool @ the bar. I thought you might still put in an appearance, Sabit, so I got drunker & waited for a glimpse of you in the crowd. & there was a man sitting next to me, Harvey somebody or another from Chicago, gray-haired with a mustache, & he talked & I listened, as best I could hear him over the music. I think the music was suffocating me. He said,
That’s my granddaughter over there, what’s left of her,
& he pointed thru the crush of bodies toward a stitchwork hanging from the warehouse ceiling, a dim chandelier of circuitry & bone & muscles flayed & rearranged. I’d looked at the piece on the way in –
The Lighthouse of Francis Bacon,
it was called. The old man told me he’d been following the show for months, but now he was almost broke & would have to head back to Chicago soon. He was only drinking ginger ale. I bought him a ginger ale & listened, leaning close so he didn’t have to shout to be heard. The chandelier had once been a student @ the Pritzker School of Medicine, but then, he said, “something happened.” I did not ask what. I decided if he wanted me to know, he would tell me. He didn’t. Didn’t tell me, I mean. He tried to buy me a drink, but I wouldn’t let him. The grandfather of the
Lighthouse of Francis
Bacon
tried to buy me a drink, & I realized I was thinking like a journalist again, thinking
you dumb fucks – here’s your goddamn story – not some bullshit hearsay about chicanery among the snips, no, this old man’s your goddamn story, this poor guy probably born way the fuck back before man even walked on the goddamn moon & now he’s sitting here at the end of the world, this anonymous old man rubbing his bony shoulders with the tourists and art critics & stitch fiends and freaks because his granddaughter decided she’d rather be a fucking light fixture than a gynecologist.
Oh god, Sabit. If you could have shown him your brand-new tattoo. I left the place before midnight, paid the hack extra to go farther south, to get me as near the ruins as he dared. I needed to see them, that’s all. Rings of flesh & towers of iron, right, rust-stained granite and the empty eye sockets where once were windows. The skyscraper stubs of Old Downtown, Wall St. and Battery Park City, all hurricane aftermaths of it inundated by the rising waters there @ the confluence of the Hudson & the E. River. And then I came home, & now I am sitting here on the roof, getting less & less drunk, sweating & listening to traffic & the city waking up around me – the living fossil with her antique keyboard. If you do come back here, Sabit, if that’s whatever happens next, you will not find me intimidated by your XVII or by #17, either, but I don’t think you ever will. You’ve moved on. & if you send someone to pack up your shit, I’ll probably already be in Bratislava by then. After
CeM
, there were 2 good assigns waiting for me in the green bin, & I’m taking the one that gets me far, far, farthest away from here for 3 weeks in Slovakia. But right now I’m just gonna sit here on the roof & watch the sun come up all swollen & lobster red over this rotten, drowning city, over this rotten fucking world. I think the pigeons are waking up.