Door 3:  Even the dead are stalked by someone

Speaking of which, someone is following her even now, like death follows each of us, only not usually so intimately. It isn’t death, of course, that follows Xie, being already dead herself (as such, she follows you), but something else, something that relentlessly follows the dead of which we know only the palest shadows: memory and regret. They are interrogators who already have all the information; torturers who never deliver the coup de grace. They don’t ask you to remember: instead they never let you forget.

She’d often seen their victims abandoned in the Lost Quarter: skin peeled off like a plum, sexless and pulpy, grinning with idiot sarcasm. The last one had reached imploringly for Xie, what was left of it, anyway, just instinctive hunger, and the very movement of the air across its exposed nerves caused it to convulse and shit itself in a symphony of agony as if administered a fatal electric shock that could not kill.

From a hole in its head of raw meat, surrounded by exposed teeth, a tongue protruded that looked like it might have been sliced with piano wire so that even the whispered plea it directed at Xie issued forth as a senseless scream of obscenity and accusations.

Fearing a trap, Xie crushed its skull with a broken chunk of concrete she picked up from the remains of a demolished bakery. She beat and beat and beat the thing until the side of the head dented and brain matter snorted out of the skinned nostrils like bluish cottage cheese flecked with blood and bone splinters. Even now, Xie couldn’t say whether it was fear or mercy that provoked her homicidal frenzy. For all she knew, the thing had been calling to her, begging for its own annihilation.

In the end, it didn’t matter what the hell it was trying to convey. Xie had destroyed it quickly and instinctively the way a cat will hide a turd, just to get it out of sight.

She’d seen the shades attack, but only once in all her days of pilgrimage, a swarm of them, for although they stalked in pairs they destroyed exclusively in swarms. They fell upon a forlorn girl, a poetess contemplating suicide, and tore her apart like a chicken, a cyclone of rape and rending that Xie watched from a distance, as if spellbound, the way one would watch a killer storm on a weather map, a swirl of abstract colored patterns, nothing more.

She was a willowy girl walking barefoot by a canal with an appearance much like Xie’s during her years at the university. Later, when the shadows had departed, Xie approached. What was left of the pale girl looked like a half of raincoat pulled inside out and twisted, a spot over which a large female animal, a camel, or even an elephant, had suffered a spontaneous abortion.

That said, Xie moves carefully through the streets and avenues by a predetermined route, catching the reflection of what is behind her in shop windows and the various random reflective surfaces to be found in the typical urban environment, such as the chrome on cars, rain puddles, empty vodka bottles, and the like, not to mention that she monitors the shadows looming along the walls and sidewalks in order to keep a lookout on whatsoever might be seeking to overtake her before she can complete her mission.

But the dead have blind spots, too. They, too, are assassinated by what they don’t see. Xie is no exception.

She doesn’t see it coming either, even though she’s seen it all before and come this way ten thousand times, countless thousands, over and over, throughout all eternity. It’s a conspiracy, some say, that even the dead are in on it, and that death itself is a conspiracy, or so this theory goes, and, if so, then Xie is playing her part to perfection, by playing ignorant.

She’s an actress, after all, and this is all an act, not a movie, exactly, but more like a loosely scripted sex-game, except maybe without a partner. It’s always possible, for instance, that this is nothing more than masturbation…

        

So it is in her imagination that an angel grabs her from behind, not from out of a dark alley, mind you, but right under a corner streetlamp, and leads her unresisting into a shaded courtyard between two buildings filled with sleepers—an invisible angel,  no less, because there are no other kind, except in the imagination, but not in Xie’s.

“The shadows are closer than you think. They always are,” the angel says, and by that Xie knows it’s not the shadows that have caught up with her, after all, because angels only double-speak.  Nor would an angel be urging her on to actions which could only lead to fresh memories and renewed regrets.

The whisper in her ear is like a voice inside her head, like a fantasy or dream that’s come before and will come again and that troubles her because it is so alien, as if it were dreamed by someone else.

“I am impregnated by a stranger’s psychosis,” she says, matter-of-factly, to no one, as if to depersonalize what comes next, the way a soldier will say “orders are orders” before hanging the women and children of a remote native village,  hang them like a row of dressed-out deer to send a “message” to the guerilla fighters who’ve vanished into the surrounding jungle.

“I have no choice. How can I end this until I know who the dreamer is?” she continues her monologue, looking at the gutted bodies, viscera glistening silvery inside with cum and flies. “As much as I despise it, I must keep my rendezvous. For without the information this informant can provide I can go no further nor can I retreat and I will have to abort that which offers my one and only chance of escape.”

Abort what, precisely, she wonders, what hope is it that she has, and with this question the angel she has imagined has disappeared and she is suddenly alone in the dismal  courtyard between the two buildings full of sleepers, stacked up, floor upon floor, like a dream-machine.

She is sitting on a black iron bench placed in front of a second black iron bench and between these two black iron benches is a large concrete urn of what appears were once red geraniums, once as recently as this past summer, but which is now only a wet and yellowish rot, a kettle of unregenerate decay.

At this point, Xie would be weeping if there were only time for the tears to fall.