13 Doors of X
Sunday, February 22, 2015
…she loves me not.
Door 1: Hyperdeath
Sleep is a night that grows, a malignancy, a labyrinth of
dreams, expanding in silence and out of sight, forever and ever, etc, etc, etc,
ad infinitum. There’s no end to its spread or the doors that death opens beneath
you and unto you. The earth is honeycombed, rotten, with freeways going nowhere.
It’s time to get up again, she thinks, waking in what she
can only call a coffin, although she’d rather not. She’s naked, of course,
buried naked in someone else’s memory, except for a chemise as thin as
propaganda. Lies, lies, lies, that’s all that’s left. She crosses the chilled
chamber on high-heels as fragile as icicles, overhearing distant switchboards.
She sits at a white birch vanity to study her mirrored face for signs of rot.
The mortician has disguised her well tonight, her skin a
painted moonscape starved as a geisha’s, lips drawn up in a small black
strawberry, and eyes the color of a broken heart. It’s the kind of disguise
that disguises nothing and yet grants her access anywhere. That is her only
hope in this place where prayers aren’t answered. She has no name, no past, no
memory, only a scar where her heart should be, used to be, will never be again.
Her other injuries, which are massive, haven’t healed, but they’ve been
pardoned, doctored by make-up artists and illusionists who transmute eternity
into plastic. She has nothing left that is her own but a sense of mission,
which might be said to be similar to the compulsive return of a ghost, a
vacuous haunting.
The atmosphere here is thin and everything is slow-motion,
intoxicated, lacking energy. Above ground the trees are withered for the
season, their root-systems insinuating themselves, clutching the darkness in a
stranglehold everywhere, to squeeze away what little nourishment is left. There
is media, but all the stations are tuned to static, which is the language in
this place. There are no clocks, but you always know when it’s time: the time
is always too late. She puts down the brush, which she lifted but never touched
to her perfect hair, and rises from the vanity to begin the night’s grim work.
She’s a spy, a booby-trap, a terrorist of love. She’s an
assassin whose target is immortal, but who she must terminate at all costs all
the same. The problem, stated simply, is this: how do you stop what has already
come to an end?
She exits the stone cottage over a threshold she was meant
to cross, but only once. Everything she does from here on out is unnatural. The
name carved into the marble lintel above her head isn’t hers, she’s sure,
although she isn’t sure of anything. It’s a family name, perhaps, but she has
no family anymore, if she ever did. Anything you could call her is irrelevant
at this point. But in the meantime (and it’s all in the meantime, after all)
you can call her Xie.
Door
2: Night is hunger
Every
night is exactly the same as this one—and it is endless. She walks a path she’s
walked many times before, her feet leaving a faint trail like unanswered love
letters. The streets are wet and empty at this zero hour, the cobbles
glistening with the slime of passing monsters, and almost every window black as
a burnt-out tumor.
There is
the sound of a ship announcing itself at harbor, but, hearing it, one wonders
if any harbor really exists in this part of the city. She’s been to this area
many times before—a neighborhood where she has no business being—and yet.
What’s left of the leaves on the diseased trees give a little epileptic shake,
and the hard grit of a post-midnight rain hits her in the face. She smells fish
and roses and mortuary glue.
In the
doorway of a murky brownstone, Xie spots her right exactly where she expects.
The woman is sitting on the topmost stair, just out of the rain, holding an
open cell phone and sobbing, her narrow shoulders shaking under the fitted
denim jacket and her face crumpled like a carnation. Is she calling someone
inside the abandoned-looking building, a lover, perhaps, who is inside with
someone else, or has she only stopped here by chance to make her call after
coming to some other kind of despair?
It’s
irrelevant, but Xie can’t help but being touched by the question, pausing for a
moment to consider the woman who, in another lifetime, could have easily, and
fatally, been mistaken for herself. In the blue gloom of the cell phone light,
the woman’s face is touched with an otherworldly gentleness like a weeping
Madonna of vaguely Asiatic origin.
Several
seconds pass and the cell phone light has gone out. Xie is suddenly standing
directly behind the woman now, as if she’d just come out of the bombed-out
brownstone. From this vantage she can see the cotton skirt stretched thin over
the woman’s lap, her long musician’s hands, palms-up, lying useless on the taut
fabric, still holding the dead cell phone. The woman’s bare knees are resting
against each other as if unconsciously protecting her genitals and the light
from a streetlamp twenty-five yards away is shining off the polished toenails
of her pale feet.
Leaning
forward, Xie runs a red nail along the scar-like part in the girl’s rain-soaked
hair. There’s a sharp intake of breath, a little stifled cry, and she looks up
into Xie’s angelically impassive face as the blade chews its way across her
exposed throat.
Xie feels
like she’s sawing through a washing machine hose except the pressure built up
inside the ribbed tube is blood and breath. Both start spewing out of the slice
in the woman’s windpipe with a terrible hiss, along with mucous and chunks of
vomit.
The filth
sprays out of the woman and plops onto her lap and around her feet which are
now slipping ineffectually on the grue-covered stair below her, providing a
stark contrast to her rapidly whitening face. Death perfecting, as is its
tendency, at least in the first few moments after it arrives. Words bloom in
frothing blood around the woman’s mouth—a language all its own. The woman’s
hands stop making those annoying and ineffectual fluttering motions and drop to
her sides on the stoop as her arms suddenly flop down.
Hugging
her now, Xie leans close, as if to tell her a secret or to breathe in her last
breath, but she’s doing neither. The body in her arms is shuddering violently
as if it were packed in ice and rapidly freezing to death with a staccato
series of wet lumpy farts and the intermittent sizzle of scalding urine, which
jets through her silk panties.
This is
food for Xie, not the toxic fluids and spastic bloody spray paint, per se, but
the energy bathing her as the light radiates off the dying woman, cocooning
them both with a brief intimacy that excludes the world of good and evil.
Afterwards,
Xie drags the woman into the brownstone, which is a trap from which no one ever
emerges, and bounces her up the stairs to a room empty except for the mouse
droppings along the baseboards and canopied with dust like an Arabic caravan
going nowhere. There she quietly strips the corpse and dons the soiled clothes
as much to soak up and surround herself with whatever’s left of the dying
girl’s essence as to obscure her own nudity, not that it’s visible to anyone
until she chooses to reveal it, usually in the last seconds of her target’s
life, that’s how good she is.
She
thinks of the one she’s hunting now and knows that no matter how good she is,
she won’t be good enough. She can already sense that she’s been spotted, that
the night is metastasized with his countless eyes and ears, a terminal night,
with no hope of cure. The darkness is his flesh and his flesh responds to her
and when she at last arrives to kill him, he will be ready for her, as he
always is, tonight and every night for a thousand and a thousand and a thousand
years.
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.
Door 4: The surgery and the revolution
For some
time now, which means as long as she can remember, Xie has considered the
hypothesis that no one exists besides herself, and if others do exist, they are
so unknowable as to be, for all practical purposes, non-existent.
She is
simultaneously aware that there is something wrong with this hypothesis, but
what that is, eludes her, and does it matter? No, she concludes it doesn’t, at
least not tactically. The resemblance of everyone to herself, for instance, has
not escaped her notice, and has gone a long way towards forming this theory of
a self-projected world, an inner world turned inside out, that, and the
realization that anyone or anything outside herself is absolutely unnecessary
to the business at hand.
She is
led, then, through the broken emergency room doors of the abandoned hospital,
led by a premonition down the cold corridors where steel gurneys lie overturned
and the tiled floors are sugared with crushed syringes. A false air-raid siren,
perhaps, has caused them all to seek shelter, even the sick, all but the infirm
taking to their feet to escape the imminent catastrophe, and the others, well,
who knows, wheeled off to protective underground bunkers, presumably by the
staff.
Xie is
not sleepwalking through this sick mall but her occluded senses have an
underwater quality that suggests that the hospital is literally submerged,
overwhelmed by floodwaters when the levees broke shortly after that series of muffled
concussive explosions that no one remembers hearing forty-five minutes before
dawn…
The
elevator is the scene of a crime, or perhaps, a human sacrifice, it’s all a
matter of perspective. It’s the very absence of a body that leads one to
suspect this, but it would be impossible to say how. It’s not the blood, for
there is none, nor torn clothes, or even a discarded ceremonial weapon: there
are only a scattering of feathers. The elevator is operational, by the way, in
contradiction of all logic, because the hospital is otherwise without power,
even the emergency generators have been disabled. It is obviously an inside
job—and it is thorough.
Xie gets
out on the third floor, Ward North. Halfway down an identical corridor,
identical, that is, to all the others she’s traversed already, the elevator
doors close abruptly behind her and the elevator heads up in response to a call signal. Whether Xie believes in their
existence or not, someone else is in the hospital, someone who may at this very
moment be in pursuit of her with what bad intentions are anyone’s guess.
Though a
sense of urgency has thus been added to the proceedings and herewith duly
registered, it remains a sense merely: that is, Xie does not betray by
expression or gesture any urgency whatsoever. She continues to move down the
corridor as before, as if this were the only way she could move, which it is:
almost floating.
It’s in
Room 304 that she attains the climax of this episode, behind a heavily armored
door festooned with all the usual dire warnings declaring it off-limits to
anyone but those “authorized,” “licensed,” “sanctioned,” etc, and wearing the
protective garments strictly required by the State against unnamed
“biohazards.”
The door,
of course, is unlocked.
They’ve
seen to everything.
The room
that opens to her isn’t a conventional surgery, that’s apparent immediately, it
looks more like a staff break room, only much smaller than you’d expect such a
room to be. There is none of the usual machinery and fittings of a typical
surgery either. The room, in fact, is relatively bare except for a six-foot
conference table, an empty bulletin board, and a looted vending machine.
Surrounding
the table is a small grouping of characters in blue surgical scrubs covered
with dark wet stains. Let’s be precise here: there are four figures standing
around the table, all but one masked. They have a smug, conspiratorial air
about them when they look up, as if they are sharing a private joke at your
expense, or as if they’ve been caught red-handed (in this case literally), at
something clearly inappropriate, but circumstances favor them and their greater
number give him an advantage. In other words, their collective posture and
expression conveys an attitude of defiance, as if to say, “Yeah, so now you’ve
seen, and what of it?”
On the
table, which they enviously surround, the thing this grim crew seems to guard,
to greedily possess, even protect, by
the very positions of their bodies—this thing can best, perhaps only, be
accurately described as a botched surgery. There is a body, white, too white,
of indeterminate age and sex frozen in a position of extreme contortion. At its
center is an alarming hole, heaped around it meat and pulped gristle, an
excavation made for god knows what purpose—waiting for who or what miracle or
miracle-worker to repair…but no, that’s not it at all; it’s a hole made for no
purpose whatsoever, the way children, in the old game, attempt to dig to
China.
The lower
extremities are covered by a bloody sheet. The upper body is exposed to view,
smooth as soap. The victim’s head (yes, “victim,” not patient, is the correct
term, for this could in no way be voluntary) is turned toward the door where
Xie is standing, the jaw unhinged, throat tendons straining, eyes rolled back.
It’s difficult to tell if it’s alive or dead, the expression, overall,
recalling nothing so much as the iconography of tortured martyrdom without the
benefit of anesthesia or belief in God. The face, though transfigured by pain,
is somehow familiar to Xie, like an indecipherable echo of a line of perhaps
once familiar poetry, like any one of three dozen or more lovers who’ve
orgasmed beneath her.
“What is
this place?” Xie asks herself out loud, the question largely rhetorical, as
usual.
The
others don’t move, but remain looking up, in frozen tableau, as previously
described. It’s the doctor who answers.
Doctor?
–what doctor? Others? What others—and how?
There is
no one here, as always noted.
It’s the
ghost of a doctor, or another figment of Xie’s imagination. That’s the most
probable explanation. But, no, it’s not that at all, not exactly, not entirely.
It’s more like the film of a doctor, and a makeshift surgical team, too. The
image is projected on the wall by a hidden projector. The immaterial doctor is
looking up from the ruined body on the table accompanied by his three erstwhile
immaterial assistants in masks and gowns. He, as previously noted, is wearing a
gown, but no mask, that hasn’t changed. A cigarette dangles from his lip. The
tools of the trade are in his hands, scalpel in one, forceps in another, both
held prissily in an affected manner, like a Yale man at his filet mignon at the
club. He grins. He hasn’t shaved in days, you notice.
“Experimental
sex surgery,” he says, with a sly, insinuating wink.
It’s at
that moment that the fake air-raid siren goes off again and gun-fire starts
popping at the head of the hallway which the paramilitary security unit has
finally accessed via the broken elevator.
It’s long
passed time to escape, or to wake up, and Xie, frozen to the spot, all the exits
sealed, has left herself no other choice but to face what comes next, to enter
unwillingly through a door that leads deeper into this enigmatic fantasy.
Door 5: The interrogation, during which things become less clear
“Let’s go
over this again, shall we?” His tone is of the sort you’d hear in idle
chit-chat, small-talk on a train between two strangers, perhaps, but with an
undertone of savage, uncontrollable violence lying just beneath the surface.
Xie
listens as if trying to identify a bird in the woods that’s fallen silent.
She’s restrained to the chair she’s sitting in, a simple wooden affair of the
sort you’d find in old schoolrooms, and there’s a kind of electrical apparatus
hovering about her head like an elaborate coiffure with multi-colored leads
attached to her nipples and fingerpads running off somewhere she can’t follow
with her eyes, her head, as it were, immobilized by a high, stiff leather
collar; she’s naked, too, of course. The entire effect is hieratical, Egyptian.
The general mood in the room, otherwise, is relatively normal.
Sitting
across from her, in plaid shirtsleeves and loosened tie, the man cocks his head
at a friendly angle, as if this were a blind date at Starbucks and he were
trying to be genial, feigning interest in her thoughts, when all he really
wanted to do is get laid. He’s an ordinary-looking man, mid-aged, balding, as is
customary in these situations, long sideburns, and a five-o-clock shadow
despite recent shaving. Xie finds herself puzzling over what must be the
resemblance of this man, on some level, to herself, for otherwise, she knows
all to well, she wouldn’t be subjected to this unwelcome interview.
Meanwhile,
he is waiting, with mock patience, for an answer, but Xie hasn’t properly heard
the question. She has instead fallen inexplicably asleep and been dreaming of
mass graves, a dozen hills in the green summertime, crowded with angels,
crosses, and obelisks carved from stone, each bearing a word of a tongue no
longer spoken.
“So many are the dead, so many the
places to which they will never return, and the world we pass through nothing
but their absence”
This
line, or one very similar, speaks itself inside Xie’s mind and at first she
thinks it’s the man speaking, but it’s not, he’s saying something else entirely,
and in the act of confirming this, she finds herself re-focusing her attention
on him, but only briefly.
He
repeats his question and although the words are not spoken in a language unfamiliar
to Xie, she fails to understand all the same, as if the syntax has been chosen
with a deliberate disregard of the normative rules of grammar, intentionally
garbled, in other words, to release some other forbidden shadow meaning that
our ordinary everyday language keeps carefully concealed.
He has,
Xie can’t help but notice, tufts of black hair growing on the tops of each
thick finger.
The hum
of bees.
Xie, wonders: Are the wires attached to
her nipples, her fingerpads, and now, she realizes, to probes inside her vagina
and anus, as well as needled at strategic points along her vertebrae, and god
only knew where else, and, of course, let’s not forget the multilayered
contraption on her head—are these the source of the bee-hum. Are they devices
recording or transmitting?
If
neither, what then?
They
brought her to this room for observation after she was found wandering in a
restricted zone, dazed and incoherent, unable to produce her papers, or even to
recall her name. She offered no reason for her presence in the forbidden
sector, nor any resistance upon detainment, but remained, for the most part,
mute, when questioned by the soldiers on the scene, giving rise to speculation
that she might be an escaped patient from a nearby ward for the experimental
treatment of sexual autistics that had been destroyed in a recent terrorist
bombing.
This,
anyway, is what they tell her. According to the records, of the forty-three
patients originally assigned to the ward, nineteen had been killed or wounded
in the attack, eleven had already been recaptured, and the rest were still
unaccounted for.
Xie was
one of the rest. One of the unaccounted for. As per always.
She was
placed under provisional arrest, held without charges, pending interrogation, this
being the law of the land for undocumented refugees as per Executive Emergency Order
No. 7717 instituted immediately after the heinous, unforgettable, needless to
say, unforgiveable incidents of fifteen April. She was taken back to headquarters
where she’d been held in a 3x5 cell in utter isolation for an indeterminate period
of time under twenty-four hour observation. But who was observing and what they
were looking for remains unknown. What seems clear from the subsequent
questioning, which Xie realizes is happening even now as she recounts these fragmented
false memories, is that whatever whomever has been looking for…it has not been
found.
They must
be looking for someone else, she thinks; it must be a case of mistaken
identity. It makes no sense otherwise what this balding, mid-aged man with the
glistening black hairs on the backs of his knobby knuckles is asking, asking repeatedly,
in a tone that reminds one of casual chit-chat but with an undertone of savage,
uncontrollable violence.
Perhaps
it really is the humming of the bees in her head, or, on second-thought, they
might be flies, that is distorting his words.
She only
catches sketchy fragments of his question, like a poor radio transmission from
somewhere that’s been largely destroyed. Piecing it together as best she can,
filling in the blanks, the question seems to go something like this, “Why is it
that you don’t love me?”
The room
is shaken by distant tremors, like seismic shocks, as if miles above ground and
far away, the bombs are falling again, but that might be wholly imaginary, some
effect they are producing within her own physiognomy to induce the deep
psychological terror that she is under attack from an enemy common to us all.
This kind
of thing is common: the border between inside and outside in these Final Days
has grown so porous, anything can get through.
Us? Who’s
that? There is no “us.” From the start, “US” was nothing but a fantasy. Do they
think she still believes in “us?”
She knows
enough not to disabuse them of their misperception. Let them think she still
believes. It’s safer for her that way.
Meantime Xie
says nothing, what can she say? Fact is, she’s lost interest once again. The
man, the inspector, or whatever he is leans forward and whispers in her ear,
perhaps trying to make himself heard above the humming or buzzing he must know
fills her head, but what he says makes almost as little sense as what he said
previously, which Xie has already lost in a blizzard of static and meaningless
signals; in fact, what he says now might even be identical, or at least,
indistinguishable, to what he said before.
In either
or any eventuality, the words act as a hypnotic trigger or prompt the start of a
session of guided imagery and Xie sees a colonnade of statues where she is
replicated ad infinitum in stone all the way to the vanishing point and yet she
cannot locate the seat of her consciousness anywhere in this scene. It is thus
from some theoretically omniscient vantage point that she sees the men
wandering down the endless central gallery, like dreamers in an x-rated museum,
touching, as lepers might, her stone tits, her stone ass, her stone cunt.
She feels
nothing, nothing she feels, and there is no rain, but an intermittent and
concussive thunder beyond the horizon like the bombing of a distant city and a
dull red flutter of soundless light.
And
there, illuminated along the perfect and insensate thigh, only a millimeter in
length, almost invisible, is a tiny crack, like the trace of a long dried tear.
Or love
stain.
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.
…and, of
course, Xie wakes, as she always wakes, in the same place as before,
specifically, her casket within the misnamed mausoleum beneath the colonnade of
giant yew trees glistening in the quiet rain at three a.m., etc.
She
rises, crosses the cold stone floor, barefoot, as previously mentioned, and
sits at the white birch vanity, checking her ceremonial makeup, as the
surveillance cameras record the entire scene on all thirty-six monitors in the
empty guard room—the screens in question showing a grainy blue video of a
vacant room that will later, after the crime, be examined frame-by-frame, and
marked with technical graphs and notations indicating splatter patterns, lines
of fire, and other arcane measurements that will be quite indecipherable, even
mysterious, but which will appear to be vaguely divinatory in intent—but of
what?
This
sense of determinism that seems to weigh upon her every movement gives Xie an
air of great weariness, even reluctance, as if she were moving underwater at
the bottom of an empty swimming pool. Of course, that makes no sense, none of
this does, and yet Xie, finishes brushing her long black hair all the same,
and, weeping quietly, walks, head bowed, to the strategically unlocked door, as
if deep in prayer, or memorizing her lines for the next scene in a play in
which she has no role.
All of
this will happen again, we already know this, it’s no surprise: the escape into
the city, the weeping woman on the stairs, the murder, the concealment of the
body, the search of the abandoned hospital, the capture and pointless
interrogation, it all keeps happening, recorded carefully each and every time,
repeated but never seen, endlessly re-interpreted as if with every repetition
some new clue might be discovered that would provide, at last, the long-sought
answer that we’ve been seeking, the key that will reveal everything, but, alas,
no…
Let’s
imagine, then, for the sake of argument that something could happen, even if
only hypothetically, if Xie were actually able to break the endless cycle of
which we’ve been so painstakingly describing up to now—if, in fact, she were to
be even temporarily resurrected, what might happen then…what might come next?
To say
that it is evening is to say very little; it is evening, it is always evening,
and she is haunting the streets as she always does, like a breeze that shifts
the leaves of the potted geraniums outside the Plaza Hotel or the luminous eyes
of an unknown actress on a movie poster staring out seductively at nothing, as
the streetlights change over an empty intersection, hours and hours before
dawn.
She rides
the subways, the bone-white of her face flashing into and out of view,
startlingly beautiful, but hollowed out like a mask of vengeance no longer worn
by anyone. It was outside of a cozy French bistro that she saw them, sitting at
a small iron table beneath the burgundy umbrella, the female just a smile
behind fashionable dark glasses, little more, unimportant, something petite and
vivacious, full of life and electrical excitement, albeit temporarily.
She could
have been anyone, what difference did it make (and yet it did, it made all the
difference in the universe, that’s one paradox). It was him who had the
spotlight, the unblinking eye of the camera, alternately charmed and stunned,
and Xie watched this man whose hands she could feel inside her still, like a spirit-surgeon,
caressing her internal organs, an intimacy that should have healed, that should
have magically lifted out the pain and disease, but instead, placed it
irretrievably inside her, an ache as deep and empty and eternal as the frozen
center of the cosmos would have been before the cosmos even existed, moons and
worlds and star systems, the explosion of all that, but unexploded.
After a
light supper, salmon crepes for him, tartines for her, they strolled up
Broadway towards Lincoln Center where the spray from the fountain blessed them
all like holy water shaken from the stolen fronds of some mythic underworld
tree.
He
clasped her hands at first, said something tender and irreproducible; it made
the woman smile, and their eyes shared the same light from somewhere far away for
longer than seemed possible. (Oh how Xie hated her in that excruciatingly
timeless moment, a feeling like falling in a dream, and she woke with a kiss
that had the impact of finding a snake in one’s bedsheets, never had she felt a
kiss so profoundly, this kiss that hadn’t even touched her lips, this kiss that
had been place on someone else’s mouth, that wasn’t meant for her).
Of the
inevitable, do we even speak of it, is it necessary, is anything? Let us speak
of it. The cab ride across town, the easy banter with the doorman (several
missing minutes in the elevator) the lights on in the seventh-floor apartment,
and then, only minutes later, off, as if the last star in the sky had burned
itself out like a cigarette on the lip-like flesh of Xie’s heart.
If I had
not died before, she thought, I’d die again. If I had not been buried, I’d
never wake. If forever meant oblivion, I would never have loved, etc., all
these phrases, pregnant with meaning, but meaning nothing, flashed ceremoniously
through her mind like a slide show of a romantic Stations of the Cross, each
slide as shocking as the instant of a head-on collision, and all of it, each
panel, printed and displayed in 40x40 format at an upscale gallery where
everyone who’s anyone among the Hampton set is sipping hummingbird aperitifs
and tastefully discussing one of the more arcane social aspects of sexual
cryogenics…
{Next
slide, please.}
And then
she is climbing up a concrete stairway, the kind at the center of buildings
used in the event of a fire or other emergency, often the only thing that
remains standing after a disaster, shattered, charred, the tower at the core of
things, the central spiral of what was once a whelk shell in the trough of the
retreating tide, but, as noted, she is going up, not down, so it’s not a matter
of an emergency (or is it?).
She isn’t
attempting to escape from some the catastrophe (is she purposely going towards
it?) Are the elevators out of
order, requiring her to take the stairs?
That might well be, except that the building she’s in doesn’t have a
central emergency stairwell made of reinforced concrete to be used in the event
of fire, terrorist attack, earthquake, etc. but an ineffectual and outdated
network of metal ladders and rusted catwalks, (a.k.a. a fire-escape) bolted to
the side of the plum-colored brickwork.
It was
one of those nights, in other words, that snag a corner of your consciousness
and won’t let go, a little fish-hook in the brain, the kind of all-pervasive
sensation that “things aren’t quite right” that one might have in a dream, but
that having while awake makes everything that much more unreal.
“It’s all
made of tissue-paper,” Xie whispers as she climbs, tentatively touching
everything. “I could rip right through it, tear the world to shreds…” but then
what would I see, something worse, what could be worse, there’s always
something worse, no it can’t be worse than this, but what if, not it can’t, etc.
Love,
when it ends, is like a city that is no more, a vast expanse of rubble and
burnt plastic, punched tickets, expired visas, and bones pounded into dust. Here,
the phones never work and the network is always down, the connection is forever
lost and every message is undeliverable. This is a wasteland of fatal errors
where language is a code no more decipherable than the wind, a noise once full
of intimations and imaginings, but stale and empty in itself, all white noise
and junk mail.
What
survivors still stalk this fallout zone are stripped to essentials, brief and
cannibalistic, their features stamped with idiot lusts and cancerous
hunger—it’s a wonder you never noticed this before.
A wonder.
And a mercy.
What
happened here, what unspeakable disaster, to reduce the world to this, to what
we feared would one day happen, to reveal what had been behind the mask all
along? And now that it has happened (and stands revealed), whatever it is, how
do we go on, or do we?
Perhaps
we don’t go on, but then it’s clear we do, or is it? Is it possible that we
just imagine we go on?
“Hello,
hello, I know you’re there,” Xie prays, her voice trembling this side of
glossalia, “please pick up, please, I want to talk to you, just for five
minutes.”
She’s
standing under the broken arch of what used to be the entrance to an office
building at 38th and Broadway, that is what you think, but the
address could be anywhere, a ruins in Pompeii or the rubble in the aftermath of
the Dresden bombing.
She is
talking into a cell phone that is connected to nothing whatsoever, a message
machine, perhaps, a forever spooling tape like on the interrogator’s table, God’s
ear, an information harvester like the NSA, and into this inattentive,
indiscriminately-recording device she speaks her confession, a bit of evidence,
never-to-be-heard, forever inadmissible.
“Please
pick up, please,” she chants in a language of her own desperate invention, a
language that, in any event, no one even hears, like the language of whatever
god one believes in, who might be defined as is anyone who doesn’t answer.
“Please
don’t do this,” she pleads and gasps, as if she were being strangled, or
perhaps she has finally crossed over into speaking in tongues, after all, and
this we can only guess is what she is saying, now and next and forever, “Please
answer. I love you…”
There is
always a door we don’t want to open, how many fairytales tell us that, a door
behind which something sits and waits for us, sits and waits to be revealed.
The very thing we’ve hidden from ourselves, but cannot forget, the symptom we
ignore that kills us.
That’s
the door Xie stands in front of now, a white door of painted aluminum,
numberless, scratches around the lock where a key jabbed and missed repeatedly
in the dark of numberless nights, a featureless white door otherwise, silence,
cold to the touch, anonymous, did we say aluminum?
She
stands outside this door, the last door, behind which all the mysteries are
resolved, all questions answered, the door that has drawn ((and repelled)) her
from the start, and, yes, its locked, and yes, she has a key, a key he’s
probably forgotten she still has, or maybe not, but she doesn’t enter. The exit
from this nightmare right in front of her, but she doesn’t enter, doesn’t open
this final door, but waits, and waits….for what?
Is it
like delaying an orgasm, an orgasm that will shatter you, render you
defenseless, in other words, to the annihilation of love?
((Much
later, this delay will haunt her with ‘what-ifs.’ What-if, for instance, she
had opened the door at the moment just described? Would things have worked out
differently? Would she have been in time, would she be laughing on the Cape
right now, the sea wind in her hair, etc? But we jump-cut ahead of ourselves…))
Let us
say, and say it simply, that she delays the inevitable, slipping
surreptitiously into the room next door, a dingy room of yellow walls, small,
cramped, as in old rooming houses of the 1950s, newspapers stacked and tied
with rough hemp in bundles on the floor, a small writer’s desk pushed beneath
the only window, the view, over an adjacent tarred rooftop, of a trapezoid of
street approximately the length of her thumb and forefinger stretched to their
limit.
A stained
coffee mug, discarded pens, several pages of someone else’s manuscript tuned
over to the blank side, the topmost sheet no longer blank, but covered with
lines that seem to be sliding rightward off the very paper. A letter it seems,
a letter begun and abandoned and begun again, aborted and reconceived so many
times it doesn’t carry a salutation or any preamble, but begins, as they say,
in medias res, like a Greek tragedy.
Xie
doesn’t need to read it to now the text, indeed, she can’t read it, written as
it is in some antediluvian language, a pre-Edenic text that is basically the
fossilized imprint of some strange winged creature crashed to earth, not an
angel exactly, but not a pterodactyl either, something fallen in the mud,
unable to rise, and suffocated: a hieroglyph that died in her heart ((if,
perchance, you were to autopsy her post-mortem, remove her heart, and bisect it
lengthwise, you would find this archetypal symbol on the chambered cave-walls
therein)).
So it is
in this room that Xie sits, night after night, a cheap pen in her hand, poised,
the tip long dried-out, no words left, a fugitive, writing an apologia for
those who accept no apologies, a confession for those who do not forgive, and
explanation for those who cannot help but misunderstand.
Her text
submitted to translators and censors, given to actors and interpreters and
psychologists and linguists, to policemen and critics, submitted to a jury of
her peers…what is left but to acknowledge a confession no longer bearing any
resemblance to our actual crimes? What is left but to sign our names, our names
that will adorn our tombs and tell nothing of ourselves, nothing but that we
were born, we died, and can deny our guilt no longer?
We admit,
in other words, everything.
There is
no sound from the room next door. Is he out? Asleep? Can she put off breaking
the silence any longer, answering the question, following the trail of blood?
Can she put off answering the door? What door?
The door
she hid behind, but behind which they’ve found her all the same, as she knew
they must.
“Open up,
I know you’re in there!” they shout with authority.
It’s
here.
The
pounding on the door, the destiny that must be met, the lover you’ve been
awaiting to with held breath.
The one
who you know beforehand will rend you limb from limb.
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