Door 6:  Intermezzo, because it must be

Xie wakes in her room, her chamber, her coffin, her crypt, exactly as before, as always, and the journey, she knows instantly, must be undertaken all over again. Her failure, capture, and imprisonment is disappointing, to be sure, but hardly unexpected, and there’s nothing to be done but to do it all over again.

Once more she must escape the tomb, resurrect herself, and assay an approach to her ever-elusive target. An approach that this time will not be detected and intercepted by the considerable obstacles arrayed against her.

Assassination, like a seduction, is a matter of mood and timing. Nothing can be forced, and reluctance, regret, and guilt must be charmed away, as in a fairytale. For only when the heart is open will the shot fly true and destiny, in triple retrospect, be realized.

Two steps forward, two steps back, it’s a kind of dance that can be mistaken for going nowhere at all and can’t be measured in ordinary terms by how far one’s traveled or how far one has yet to go, but must be appreciated as a thing of beauty in itself, like a dance, as I said, and true, but also, perhaps, like action painting, with blood spatters.

And so Xie sighs, flutters open her viole(n)t eyes, and sees the unfinished roof of roots holding back the endless weight of earth and suffocation. She rises from the bier of stained and tattered silk, etc. etc., and crosses to the white birch vanity under the surveillance cameras installed for an audience of necrophiliacs among which, my love, you are numbered.

Her every move is thus catalogued and captioned, her every pose captured as if premeditated (which it is) in a series of stylized gestures as iconographic as the Stations of the Cross before which men masturbate, indeed, in prayer. They are, of course, synonymous with the vidclips from the galleries of pornographic websites.

“Your mission, my dear, ultimately and teleologically,” her father tells her, touching the chart with his laser pointer, “is to raise through warmth, moisture, and imagination, the temperature of the cum residing in the alembic of the testicles, to the boiling point so that it rises, rejecting gravity, through the sacred lingam, and, by the by, gushes forth in that moment of magickal chaos in which anything, anything at all, might be born.”

Okay, its true, Xie thinks, brushing out her hair, which is longer, as it was when she was younger, this man was not her father, per se, or maybe he was, it makes no difference, for no girl knows her father, not unless, well, never mind.

No, this man was the Father behind all fathers, the imaginary father, the Father that doesn’t exist, the spook Father, God, the director of Central Intelligence, the hidden camera, that nagging sense of paranoia that always lingers, always lingers, the man in the white coat who, looking down at his clipboard, says in bored and routine monotone, “Please remove your gown and lie back with your feet in the stirrups, Miss ummm (fill in the blank).”

He looks up again and his eyes are the color of the dust on one of the moons around Saturn. “Okay,” he says, “let’s have a look at you.” And just like that his forceps, like the mandibles of a voracious Middle Eastern insect, are inside your most private of parts.