Unseaming (34 page)

Since I grew tall enough to sit at a classroom desk, I’ve longed to be a monster. There is no reason for this that you or your friends in the department will ever be able to find, should you have an opportunity to delve into my history. My mother and father loved each other. They were neither too lenient nor too strict. The bullies in my school, the ones who introduced my fellow gifted students to cycles of humiliation and pain, paid no attention to me at all. My teachers never singled me out for praise or discipline.

Perhaps you’d find this of note: I never courted the opposite sex and never considered my lack of interest a shortcoming, and never drew down any mockery because of it. It would be fair to call me a loner, though I’ve never suffered from the affliction of loneliness.

I had learned to make things disappear by the time I could drive, but the only proof you’ll ever have that speaks to what or whom I’ve vanished is my word. Just as an example, nowhere in that building will you find a single body, no matter how many tons of charred debris you remove. And yes, you found me in the ruins after the blaze, but it’s not because of those flames that I look the way I do.

Missing? Oh, but they’re not, dear friend. Help you find them? Of course.

Here’s some useful history. Just before the European empires carved up Africa and Asia, their mathematicians confronted a phenomenon that their small white minds struggled to get their greedy grips around: the possibilities of curves that are infinite in length, even though they occupy a finite space. They viewed these puzzles as freakish mysteries and, in keeping with the spirit of the age, dubbed them “monsters.”

I have long been fascinated by the concept of a universe that can contain infinitely many things within its borders, and yet outside be no larger than this table. Or you. Or me.

I started with an equation brutal and repetitive as razor wire, with variables that grew in complexity and instability with each new iteration. I learned the craft of trance. I sliced pieces from my soul in a symmetrical pattern and replaced the portions removed with the entire model copied in miniature, then wounded each of them in the same way I did before, and filled in the holes with copies smaller yet, carving into those and grafting yet again, on and on.

For years I dedicated every waking moment to making new folds, new incisions, new growths. And I never lost my precision, no matter how small the surgeries or how large their number. I have mutilated myself for so long the process now self-perpetuates.

When I passed puberty the changes no longer manifested in mind alone. They took hold, first in the folds of my brain, in my yellow globs of adipose, at last in the pink layers of my living skin. And deeper inside as well. You look at me, seated across from you in this tiny room with its walls painted flowery colors to keep the inmates calm, and you see a walking scar, a melted mass of tissue, an arsonist who earned his just deserts. But you’ve wondered how I can see, for you can see, can you not, I have no eyes? And yet, I do see. And I know you’ve also wondered how it is I speak. Your partner watching from behind the one-way glass, he fears for your safety, even with these manacles on my arms and legs. Your partner, I believe, has perceptions you lack. Though you may yet come around.

To you, I am a shriveled lump, but I speak with pride when I tell you that I’m a self-made monster, a Mandelbrot set, a Koch curve, a Menger sponge, and inside I have no boundaries. When I decide it’s time to teach you, you’ll have no more hope of unlearning the lesson than you do of finding these others whose pictures you’ve spread here on the table.

My good man. Your laugh inspires me. Let me give you more to laugh about. I have a shaggy dog story to tell. Let me explain how it unfolds.

When you turn to aim that look of disbelief at the mirror that your partner lurks behind, you’ll see me standing between you and the mirror, my shackles gone. I’ll bet you won’t take the time to study what my reflection looks like, what hints that will give you. Instead you’ll shout, and when I don’t move, you’ll shoot. Your brain isn’t equipped to accommodate what you’ll see next. Your eyes will tell you that the bullets never reached me. No burst of flesh, no impact, no reaction at all, no matter how many times you squeeze the trigger, no matter how close you hold the gun.

When you finally turn to run, there I’ll be, in the way. Wherever you look next, there I am, closer. Finally, you’ll charge at me, because there’s no other direction to move.

Were you as smart as your partner, you might glimpse for just an instant a chaotic lattice of wax-flow flesh, an interlacing weave of soft honeycomb forms that billows about you like a cast net. Most likely you’ll just find yourself in among them, these biomorphic vistas that open and open and open before you, repeating themselves in scales large and small, patterns that on close observation yield segments of the same half-formed face or slats of ribs or curls of hair or pillars of fingers, growing more and more complex and cavernous as you stumble and slide, as you scream like an junkie in the throes of withdrawal, piss down both legs of those tasteful flat-front slacks your detective status grants you the luxury of wearing.

I’ve seen it before, the way your partner will react when he follows you, pausing to inhale the fractal wonders even as knowledge of what it all means dawns in his more sophisticated cortex. You eventually regain your head, lean against one of a thousand identical strands of pulsing flesh thick as sequoia trees. You do what a good cop does, you draw a grid in your mind across your surroundings, methodically parse out the squares to deduce the logical way back, valiant in your failure to comprehend how space now flows one way.

You’re a practical man, not as brave as everyone who’s known you believes, but you apply assertiveness the way a carpenter wields a saw, and your sense of duty remains as fixed in its proportions as Planck’s constant. It takes a long time, doesn’t it, in the face of the latest endlessly repeated face in my Escher landscape, for your resolve to approach zero. You’re thinking about your wife, the look on her face at the table this morning when you snarled at her about the unpaid electric bill, and about your arthritic dog who you absently struck when he pressed his head under your hand at the height of the argument. I see down into that moment in the track of your life, and your simple little mind revisits it now. And you’re thinking about your father lying in his back room bed, the oxygen tube hissing under his nose, and how it always falls to your wife to bathe his sores and empty his bedpan because this job you so love and so hate keeps you out at all hours. You’re thinking about all of them, about how they’ll remember you, and what will happen to them now.

This is new, an experience I’ve not had before. You try your cell phone. Wonderful!

The connection’s faint, she can maybe understand one word in three as you tell her how sorry you are. Both parts of the conversation are clear to me, my strings of synapses stretch forever, my ears are without number. Odds are that somewhere within me, some semblance of a heart is moved to beat faster in a manner not unlike the breathless effect I sometimes feel when contemplating the perfection of numbers, or the efficiency of tissue breakdown in a starving human body, or the cosmological processes of decay mirrored in the moist disintegration of a corpse. I am stimulated in a new and delightful way until the battery in your device dies.

Screaming your partner’s name isn’t entirely futile—there is a chance, though astronomically small, that he will find you.

Yet your despair is based on illusion, my friend. Here, you will never be alone.

And no matter how long you wander you will never be lost. Not to me, my weeping friend. Never to me.

On weekdays,
Mike Allen
writes the arts column for the daily newspaper in Roanoke, Va. Most of the rest of his time he devotes to writing, editing, and publishing. His first novel, a dark fantasy called
The Black Fire Concerto
, appeared in 2013, and he’s written a sequel,
The Ghoulmaker’s Aria
, that’s in the revision stage.

He raised more than $10,000 through a Kickstarter campaign to revive his anthology series dedicated to boundary-blurring work,
Clockwork Phoenix
. That Kickstarter funded
Clockwork Phoenix 4
, released in 2013 to much critical acclaim. He also edits and publishes
Mythic Delirium
, which began in 1998 as a poetry journal; a second Kickstarter campaign in 2013 rebooted it as a digital publication for poetry and fiction. In other words, 2013 was a big year for him, and 2014 isn’t far behind, with the release of his sixth poetry collection,
Hungry Constellations
, and his first collection of short fiction,
Unseaming
. Somewhere in there he squeezes in time for an audio column, “Tour of the Abattoir,” which appears in mostly monthly intervals at
Tales to Terrify
.

He receives a ton of help with all this editing from his wife, artist and horticulturalist Anita Allen. Their pets, Loki (canine) and Persephone and Pandora (feline) provide distractions. You can follow Mike’s exploits as a writer at
descentintolight.com
, as an editor at
mythicdelirium.com
, and all at once on Twitter at
@mythicdelirium
.

Novels

THE BLACK FIRE CONCERTO

THE GHOULMAKER'S ARIA (forthcoming)

As Editor

MYTHIC DELIRIUM (with Anita Allen)

CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 4

CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 3
New Tales of Beauty and Strangeness

CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 2
More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness

CLOCKWORK PHOENIX
Tales of Beauty and Strangeness

MYTHIC 2

MYTHIC

THE ALCHEMY OF STARS:
Rhysling Award Winners Showcase (with Roger Dutcher)

NEW DOMINIONS:
Fantasy Stories by Virginia Writers

Short Fictions

SHE WHO RUNS

SLEEPLESS, BURNING LIFE

STOLEN SOULS

FOLLOW THE WOUNDED ONE

Poetry Collections

HUNGRY CONSTELLATIONS

THE JOURNEY TO KAILASH

STRANGE WISDOMS OF THE DEAD

DISTURBING MUSES

PETTING THE TIME SHARK

DEFACING THE MOON

Throughout
Unseaming
, reality is usually in bad shape right from the start—and from there things proceed to go downhill. Such is the general background and trajectory of life in Mike Allen’s fictional world. More could be said, of course, but there’s one thing that I feel especially urged to say: these stories are fun. Not “good” fun, and certainly not “good clean” fun. They are too unnerving for those modifiers, too serious, like laughter in the dark—unnerving, serious laughter that leads you through Mr. Allen’s funhouse. The reality in there is also in bad shape, deliberately so, just for the seriously unnerving fun of it. The prose is poetic, except it’s nonsense poetry, the poetry of deteriorating realities, intermingling realities, realities without Reality. And all the while that unnerving, serious laughter keeps getting louder and louder. Are we having fun yet?

—Thomas Ligotti, author of
Teatro Grottesco
and
The Spectral Link

Allen’s 14-story debut collection saturates alternate dimensions with literal horrific fleshiness. His unsettling Nebula-nominated “The Button Bin” is as disorienting as it is disturbing; it neatly sets the stage for the blood-soaked dreamscape vision of an overstuffed sin-eater in “The Blessed Days,” as well as the more direct but no less chilling creature that crawls onto the Appalachian Trail in “The Hiker’s Tale.” In prose both lyrical and unvarnished, Allen depicts haunting regret in “Stone Flowers” and disembodied shrieking rage and grief in “Let There Be Darkness.” When he combines both emotions in “The Quiltmaker,” a continuation of “The Button Bin,” he transforms that original tale in ways that resonate throughout the collection. Never obvious, sometimes impenetrable, Allen’s stories deliver solid shivering terror tinged with melancholy sorrow over the fragility of humankind.