Still Waiting for Brain Death

When I came into the court my neighbor greeted me from the laundry room. She was always friendly, even though I didn’t encourage her.  Things happen, though. 

“Something wrong?” she asked.

“Nope,” I said.  “Tired.” 

I stopped and looked at her. OK, she was a babe, I could dig her.  She dug me, too.

“I see you are doing your laundry,” I said.

She smiled and bit her tongue and looked all smoldering.  “Yeah.  Laundry.”

“I’m going to drink this wine,” I said.  I proudly held up the liter bottle I’d gotten on my way home from work, thinking to get blasted all by myself.  But now, you know . . . I said, “Do you want some?”

“Where’s your wife?” she asked coyly.

“Don’t have one," I admitted ...

Now I’m kissing her, I’m kissing her, the rest is erased.  She’s up in my apartment, she’s all over me. Her heavy thighs press against my ears. She screams when she comes. I enter her then.  What is her name? Maja? Majolie? She won’t tell me.  Before I come she takes me into her mouth.  She looks up at me when I finally do climax, making little bird sounds to the rhythm of my ejaculation, which is a jungle rhythm, make no mistake, it is joyous and bloody, and she says, “I just took some of your intelligence. Whenever I do that, you lose a little.  It’s why they call it a perversion.”

  

She was putting on her lipstick. “I feel disgusted with myself,” she said. She paused briefly to consider her words, then: “Perhaps that’s a good emotion for us to separate on.”  

She left.

*    *    *

We go to the beach.  She wears almost nothing.  You can see pubic hair sprouting out of her loose bikini bottom. Her breasts barely fill the top.  She is happy with them, though.  They form perfect cones and the nipples are hairy.  I like that very much, I find it sexy.  I like to lick them, even bite them.  She likes it, too.

She throws the towel over me and reaches inside my trunks. She laughs when I rise under the towel.  “Reminds me of my tent out in the Mojave,” she observes.

The life guard is watching us, his arms spread wide, as if to block those who would pass, who would arrest or interrupt.

The sky goes pink with the dusk.

*    *    *

Everything’s gone to hell at work.  I no longer attend to my patients, I let them slide into apathy, and they just go right on aslippin and aslidin along from there into the country of strokes and seizures, in some instances to be finally embraced by dirty old Death himself, with his razorblade smile and smack pinned eyes . . . I’ve stopped feeding the experimental fish, also.  They’ve risen to the surface of their tanks, bloated and unresponsive. I never did like those fish.  They gave me sour looks, or exhibited the sort of attention-getting behaviors which are lab fish giveaways every time: this renders them entirely unsuitable for deployment at sea. While the birds we keep, for which I am also responsible for reasons I’m still unable to fathom, have grown metallic sheathes, the lips of losers, guilty expressions and painted fingernails – these in place of their formerly militant beaks and fulsome foliage of feathers, so useful in the making of quill pens – hence they will swoon away with the East Wind, which blasts through the dining room window as if to liberate them, even though it is a non-ideological type wind, not symbolic; neither a religious wind, nor a wind inimical to religiosity but . . . look, just a wind, OK? And it blows like a motherfucker.  I like it, I’m digging on it.  Even so, the birds are not prepared for freedom and so must perish, but it’s good to see them acting like real birds for a change (already they’re starting to shed some of that neurotically adaptive growth . . .), even if it is only for an instant, because in no time at all, I fear, some murderous blue jay will make fast food of them.  And I ask, were I to release the fish upon the wind also, would they in turn discover it to be their true element?  Yea, would they grow wings, to wheel and gyre upon it, lose their gills and fishy eyes and learn to fly like a man?  Well, no . . . The fish are dead, of course. And when the wind dies down the stupid birds sit on the window ledges and mope like metaphysicians. I call in Garcia from Maintenance and have them whacked. So much for the dream of freedom . . . But there are other dreams . . . those of an old man, for instance, who now must soar in love, drop  all exoskeletal adaptations and go naked in the world, for this is what love demands, O fool who would attain to Her.  Not just a stiff cock but a stiff heart, O fool, and, worse, a stiff heart with a soft gooey center.   Fool, who can say what love will ask of you now? . . . Well, for one thing, shitcan  that dead end job of yours.

-Yet if I’m to woo her – in the style to which she is accustomed, I mean – a  guy needs some change in his pocket.

-She shows every symptom of being a cockhappy cooze.

-Yet also a  goddess . . .

-Well, goddesses . . .  Easy come, easy go.  She’s not worried about money, anyway.  Let her foot the bill.  You just keep her wet and wild, toots.

*    *    *

I had to consider all this.  A guy can’t ignore such invasions from the unconscious.  You do and they’ll get you. Know what I’m saying?  Monsters from the Id?  That’s what I’m talking here. Is there still such a thing as I’m talking? Who cares?

I went out on the roof and paced.  That’s the thing to do in a situation like this.  First of course I rubbed myself all over with sunguard. A guy should be prepared.

The woman, then.  What? Madge?  Margorie?  I don’t know.  It never became clear.  This was an adventure and it couldn’t go on for long.  It would be fast and furious as all such things must be.  Don’t kid yourself.  Love is for chumps.  You gotta fuck ‘em and forget em, that’s the old philosophy, but does it still obtain?  Dunno. We’ll see.  Meanwhile, let’s just play it by ear.  That can be a trustworthy instrument sometimes and, in my case, the only instrument.

These were my thoughts as I paced, and when I concluded I snapped my fingers happily and ran back inside.

“Hello Hello Hello hello!” I sang as I skipped down the halls.  I kissed a nurse, rubbed a CNA.  She went “Mmmmmmmmmmm.” (I know I could make it with her anytime, but she’s not my type. Only when I’m real, real horny will I go against type preference.  It too often leads to unwelcome involvements. Get the picture?  She once even said to me, “When I’m not in love and you’re not in love maybe we can get together sometime, but, you know, not now . . .”  I told her to blow it out her asshole, and she didn’t speak to me for awhile after that but  then one day we found ourselves alone together in the elevator and she asked why I no longer groped her when she walked by my work station. I promised to resume the practice.)

*    *    *

But she’s gone.  Where can she be?  For days I’ve watched her apartment, hoping for a sign, a light, her shadow moving behind the dancing, diaphanous drapes. (Like that? “Dancing”?  “Diaphanous”?)

The first rain is coming, I can feel it.  The air smells of ferment.  The others here stay inside now.  That’s good. I hate it when they stand out by the pool and gawk at me.

But where is she?  She told me she had friends, many friends, friends from all over. Men.  Before we started fucking I’d watch her stroll out with them arm in arm, and she was always wearing some stupid skimpy thing. I wasn’t interested at the time.  Yeah, cute, Ok, but . . .  Then I saw her in a dream one night.  She was undressing in front of a mirror.  Images of old and young men, helpless before her as she played with herself, put a finger to her mouth and wet it, brought it down and slid it gently over her labia . . . Suddenly she was pushing me to the floor, moaning, swallowing my head. Was this true prophesy?  Your intelligence. It’s mine now. That’s when I knew I wanted her, when I awoke from that dream, remembering orgasm, feeling the wet sheets.

*    *    *

She came to me.

My joy was complete. I went “Whoo-ee, baby!” and instantly  flushed.

I lit a cigarette to cover my embarrassment. I fought it off, and presently lost it all in my intent concentration on the love act of the present moment in which I was presently engaged, presenting for her delectation my fully engorged member to enjoy, first of all as an art object (note how she looks both ways over her shoulders to see if anyone is watching, for instance a museum guard, as if she were actually in an art museum where such guards are likely to be employed, and letting her fingers play over the surface of a lovely, monumental sculpture with a sign above it reading, “Please Do Not Touch”), then moving on from there into a sort of totemism and finally to the point where she is helpless to prevent herself from the actual licking of the worshipful object, the taking and placing of it finally, accepting its forceful thrusts into her increasingly juicy vagina and, to enhance her enjoyment, allowing her finger to lightly rub her clitoris, or, for his pleasure in turn, letting it slide under his scrotum and stroke this with equal skill.  When it was finally done, she lay silent in the throbbing darkness, her eyes darting this way and that as if in an effort to detect the cause of such a throbbing.  Had bats been allowed in, for example, or some other pulsing, avian form? I of course knew them to be the ghosts of those birds I had released come back to haunt me, but I didn't want to get into it with her. So much to explain, so little time. Also, I remembered . . . 

I asked, “Where were you?”

She looked away.  “Oh.  Business,” she said.

“You . . . work?”

“Of course,” she laughed.  By now I had blown several smoke rings in her direction, so that what she said seemed to labor towards me through tunnels, and the tortured nature of her communications awakened jealousy again . . . As with the following, which I heard as: “I like to get laid . . . as a means to an end (I cannot speak its name), the which is always compromised in any monogamous relationship . . . at best a makeshift, a falsification . . .”

“You were with a man, weren’t you?” I said, stoppering the smoking flow.

She bit her lip.  Looked away.

“Were you with a man?”

She takes the glass out of my hand and drinks deeply, runs her tongue over glistening lips. Then she says something which I hear as, “Do you want to punish me?”

She’s on the couch, legs spread, touching herself.

“Well?” she says.

I put my head under her dress.

“How will you punish me? Do you hope to find the answer down there?”

I’m biting her thighs, taking her underwear in my teeth and then letting them snap back against her tender flesh. I always thought this was a fun thing to do when I was a boy.

“Why don’t you punish me? Don’t you want to punish me for what I did?”

She spoke in such an unusual tone, her manner suddenly serious . . . it brought to mind those first sweet days of our affair, and the expectation that maybe that delightful lightning would strike again. For, as Gregary Peck has so wisely observed, it strikes rarely. And when it does, trees are lost.

Somehow this thought inflamed me further.

So finally I hit her with a sledge hammer (Used to work the streets, making little ones out of big ones, by God).  Then I hit her again, harder.

“Oh yeah?  Oh yeah?” she challenged.  “That’s interesting.  Do that.  Go on, do it.  Are you afraid?”

I gave her what she wanted.

“Like that?” I said.

“Oh, yes,” she moaned.  “Do it.  Go on. Oh!”

I hit her, hit her, hit her.

  

“How’s that?” I said breathlessly.  “Do you like that?"

“Oh, yes.  Oh, please.  Oh, please.”

“Does it hurt?” I asked.  I may have betrayed the genuine concern I felt.

“Please go on,” she begged.  “Are you afraid?  Oh, please. Oh, please.”

“Oh, yeah?  Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah yeah yeah!”

“Do you like it?”

“Oh, God, yes! Don’t stop.  Oh, God!”

“What do you like about it?”

“Oh, it’s … Oh, it’s …”

“Yeah?  Yeah?  You want more?  You’re a mess, you know.  Hey.  Just one more, all right?  Maybe two.  You want two? Where do you want them?  How about there?  And there.  And there and there and there.”

After much of this action – more than I am happy to confess – I busted her wide open and party favors shot forth.  Little kids ran in and started yelling, “I want the red one,” – “Fuck off, you like the blue,” – “The red, I want the red, I shall have the red,” – “No, the blue, you are allergic to the red, see, already you’re breaking out, but here’s a striped, trade you a striped for a red one,” – “Get your own red one, I already wet on it.”  Shit like that, the expected urban conflict . . . Still quarrelling, they ran out, evaporating as they did so.

Her mouth is bloody.  She’s leaving a red slick along my inner thigh.  One of her teeth has fallen on my belly.  It dances like a hailstone.   She has this dizziness that is troublesome.

The ambulance comes.  The attendants are drooling with excitement.  The doctor can hardly speak from his rising tumescence.

“We’re here to collect her electrolytes,” he says.

This is too much. I’ve got to get out of here.

She reaches for my hand as they carry her out.

“Wait for me,” she says. “You have more to give.  Much, much more.”

She still feels dizzy, somewhat sleepy, not confused, and I think it is on a basis of her treatment under my  vigorous love because she is alert and oriented to time, place and person.  She answers questions in an intelligent, proper manner, VIZ.:

-Are you John Lennon?

-No.

-Do you feel that he is dead?

-He will never die.

-How can you say that?  All of us must die.

-He will not die because of his music.

-His music, too, is dead. It has been superceded.  We have advanced a great deal since then.

-How?

-By means of downsampling, attenuation, failure of nerve.

-How sad. What a pisser.

-Perhaps.  Can you handle more questions?

-Shoot.

-What do you think about Jesus?

-He’s all right.

-And Mary?

-She’s all right, too, but less so, somehow.

-But your name is Mary?

-No, it is not.

-Do you dislike the name?

-I dislike all names. 

She remains afebrile.  Her heart tones are fair, blurry, irregular, betraying a French influence. There is no trace of John Lennon’s forthright rhythms. What more can I say?  This is a dysfunctional relationship, characterized by enabling, co-dependency and the entire complex in which such pathologies subsist, sometimes among an entire society of other pathologies which must be treated in contradictory ways.  You kick one, you kiss another.  You shoot a guy full of uppers, his significant other needs downs.  If you don’t get it just right, shit happens. Know what I’m saying?

*    *    *

But she has another man in.  When will she learn?  She even leaves the curtain open a crack so I can see.  She’s going down on him, taking him.  He’s nearly comatose when he leaves.  I jump the fucker while he’s trying to find his way to his car.  He doesn’t even resist when I cut him open. He laughs when he sees his own guts tumble out.  I put my ear to the smoking ruins and receive the following:

“What’s in the box, whadaya think, whadaya think? I’m in the box, whadaya think, whadaya think? I remain in the box forever.  Even when I’m outta the box, I’m still really in there.  Like now. Ripped me out, ya think?  Wrong. O wrong. Wrong wrong wrong, you are.  We do not die. Cannot. Cannot.  We are men of steel, you dizzy fuck.  Yet some parts are pliable, and then obviously the outer sheath, of course, which is little better than hard rubber such as you would find concealing the empty nature of dolls . . . So why not just fuck off and let me pretend to die.  Give me that small moment alone to look at the promise of a consummation devoutly to be wished – and always withheld at last from my kind, like a carrot withdrawn from the aspiring teeth gnashing of a donkey.  For when we die there isn’t even a moment of the vaunted In-Between-State before we are reborn.  And as the same damn thing again.  The same insufferable person.  Can you yourself imagine how you would feel if you yourself were condemned to be you?  Yourself? Always and forever, ever echoing down the bloodlit halls of Time . . . Hey.  Are you listening, dude?   I guess you didn’t hear me or something.  Leave the parking lot.  Go home and pull your pud.  Let me be a man for once and go out whistling Dixie.”

“Please don’t whistle in here,” I warn him, shaking his shifting, shapeless mess of a body by grasping the corny large lapels or his Hawaiian shirt.  “You’ll wake the Super, who used to be a cop, by the way, and he’ll be out here with all the blame of Heaven in his eyes.  And when he casts that blame upon the rays which issue from those same eyes, it is not landing on me, you get the picture, Tex?  I won’t be zapped like a droid.  I was born free and well favored in the Human Realm, while you, you conceited, clonable clot, are mere working garbage.  Even while you were porking my woman you were simply being worked by her.  You were merely a substitute finger, or a vibrator – maybe even a dildo, for all I know from her masturbatory methods. For all I care, slave.”

“Hey.  I’m a sex toy,” he protested.  “She called me, you dig?  My service had me paged while I was trying to finish off Marie a la Versace-Lorraine, who takes forever.    And . . . you’ll like this part . . . She confesses to yours truly that she actually prefers our service, in fact, to yours.  She complains that humans display tremendous theoretical passion (and  you know what that means, buster; it’s why you’re getting all that swell head, heh heh, get it? get it?), yet it is short lived, sort of a cocaine high, it just don’t stay with you long, and nothing sticks when it goes.”

“I am not serving her, Tex,” I insist.  “I’m riding her ass on the wind, I’m boinking her to Heaven, thou steeping pool of swoozy chemicals, batardo of unnatural matings betwixt the unliving and the undead.  While you sit somewhere getting charged, to all intents and purposes non-existent, I’m dinging all her endorphins like the goddamned Hunchback of Notre Dame.  So just abort that last statement, ladies and gentlemen of the Jury.  And as for you, Oh son of Fictitious Being and Wrong Ideas About Reality, exit my Universe of Discourse at once.  I say, 'Poof!' therefore, and snap my fingers.  And vye-ola.  You are gone.  You n’exist pa, motherfucker.  Stay that way.”

*    *    *

The police arrive.  She tells them everything.  They don’t understand, this is entirely outside the narrow purview of their expertise.  I’ve got to get out of here.  My attention wanders. At work they’ve put me on probation again.  The lab fish swim away with my thoughts, the birds will compromise them.  The wind thrills and scatters.  Gotta watch out for that wind. Belongs to Charlie.  She tries to get me at the hospital.  I undo her IV.  I can’t find my house.  My house is in a thicket somewhere, among the standing stones, overlooking moors and heathcliffs, a lake so smooth that I must call it the Great Mirror. The stones rule. Break up the stones, making little ones out of big ones until they are merely pebbles to be tossed into the lake so that concentric circles of the watery element spread outward and inward at once; and toss the remaining stones at the passers-by. “Ouch!” they must cry.  The fog moves in timelapse,  so now the fog rules.  (Fog is better than love, no?) Anything but love.  A woman keeps bothering me, actually taking bites out of my arm.  I don’t know this woman for shit.  I don’t know anybody here.  What gives her the right to take bites out of me?  The others all turn their faces to the wall.  Their mouths are filled in.  They have bright holes in their faces, the light is showing through. They’re going fast, yet still they manage to attract the attention of our boys in white, who run in on tracks (guilty, narrow gauge), and toot their whistles.  That failing, they stick tubes in my arm.  Who is she? What does she want? What does she want now?  She’s biting my tube.  She’s sucking up the clear fluid.

“Your intelligence,” she says.

She is laughing.

The Valley of the Kings

I trudged through the blasting sand all swaddled up like a mummy, even had my face covered but what’s to see out here? From an approaching shadow I knew I was coming upon one of the lesser tombs, those thrown up by the poor from stones that had been rejected by the quarry bosses. Scratching about with the hands of the blind I found an entry facing away from the storm and pushed my way down the  ramp. 

Unwrapping my head at last I was surprised to find it dark, and when I torched up I saw that it hadn’t been used. Someone had been preparing it, though. It was already fitted with lighting fixtures. There was even a generator. Again I was surprised when the thing just ripped into action when I gave the starter a pull. There was the expected shrill of a motor laboring against a buildup of sand. 

I didn’t bother lighting the place. I’d explore it all tomorrow. Just now I fell down in a dead faint right then and there and finally slept after several days, I don’t know how many, several though, several. I heard things, saw things. There were dreams of my dead wife wailing over the pieces of our children, hands and feet hidden in cupboards, of the Japanese who’d been caught out and quickly jumped up from the couch and shot everyone down, just like that, it was amazing. The whole meeting falling down dead. Why did he spare me? I really had no sense of it. I was just as guilty …

Then there was a sound. Someone … perhaps mine host. 

He came forward quickly, leaping for me. I simply rolled away and the idiot bashed against the wall. It was Ed. Of course it was Ed.

“What are you doing?” I demanded.

“I’m here for my revenge,” he said matter of factly – well, everything he said was rather matter of fact through his vox. Ed was as mad as the desert. He’d followed me for years.

“You’re always here for your revenge,” I told him. I was tired of telling him this. How many times did I have to remind him?  I’d rehearse our story again and again, sometimes adding needless details, which he enjoyed; he always clapped his hands at these little bits of new furniture to our tawdry little scene together back in Cairo. The woman. He called her his wife. She wasn’t. In fact she’d been mine for quite a while, years. I finally got rid of her by making such a case of myself that she asked me to leave. That was my first experience of finding my own way without resources. I pushed a shopping cart around and stopped off at various friends’. Most of them told me to jolly well fuck off, they’d had enough. Leonard finally took me in. He was my last resort. I hated him; everybody hated his ass, he was going to die, and he was making a great fuss of it. He had his TV blasting, as usual. Without even a greeting he told me that great Alviso was dead. He’d been discovered in his bath, head back, eyes burnt out from looking at the sun, yet he was smiling, smiling. I can see the plush lips, the way they crooked up to one side when he smiled, something of a snarl to it, nasty, conceited and feral. I’d gotten bored with the man long ago. But it’s not necessary to tell all this. It is Ed we’re considering here. Just now he was standing up and dusting off his foolish clothes, leather from head to foot, and I bet he still wore a dozen fragile gold chains around his neck, and of course the ever present motorbike helmet, and his lower face was veiled to cover his blasted jaw.  

“Ed,” I sighed. “I had hoped to find a friend here.”

His vox whizzed out what remained of a programmed laugh. Obviously not his choice; it was the only one remaining. He’d been out here a long time. 

I sat down against the opposite wall. The lights were up now. He’d turned them on when he came in, I suppose. 

“I broke into your gallery,” he said. “I saw your girls, your trophies. Penelope was there, too.”

“She wanted it,” I told him. Told him for the nth time. “Would you like to hear an account of this?”

“Please.”

“Ed. This is a desperate land, Ed. Boys like you … how can there be boys like you still after all this?”

“I’m older than you are.”

“No one is older than I am.” 

“She came to you,” he urged me. “Let’s have it. Let’s have it.”

Again I told him. It was before the plague, before everything, the old world in all its stinking, brazen glory. She’d come to me in high Renaissance drag. Even had her hair colored, and the cosmetic surgery had completely healed so that she now appeared even younger than she’d been when I last saw her  … that was … well, in Nova Burbank, I think, where we’d met in the first place … Ah, those nights of love, her easy Levantine residence in flesh, nay, she was one with it, she was flesh all through and she dripped with sex. If only she weren’t so mad. At the  end there she was thoroughly gone. She knew it. That’s why she came to me. 

“Make me like her,” she said, stroking the marble flesh of my Cosima, the one commissioned by the Great Man himself. Her hand played over the small breasts, the coils of hair I’d wrought so lovingly and left off polishing sooner than the rest so they’d retain the look of my model’s own course tresses. She really wasn’t so much lovely as … Oh, striking, I suppose. That’s how you describe a woman who would be ugly if she weren’t so magnetic. True of Penelope as well. Can you imagine her with Ed, though? A force like that made to fit his bricked in religion. His little house must fall at last, as I’m sure it did. She’d run out on the fool  and he blamed me. “You ruined her. You ruin everyone with your sorcery.”

I had her undress and marveled again at her body. 

“What was her body like?” Ed pressed.

“Oh, you missed something there, Ed. You were such a poor, wasted looking animal beside her. Even in that sackcloth you all wore she was still a beauty. Your Priest saw it. The way the pig watched her, the way his eyes always slid away after her when she passed by his dais. You say he married you.”

“We were married!” his vox crazed. 

“So he could have at her, you poor fish!”

“It is the Law.”

“How convenient the Law is for priests.”

“Shut up!” he slapped at his thighs, raising dust.

I leaned my head back against the ancient stone. Yes, that day, that last day. As I raised up the Circling Fire and let it race through me, empowering my hands finally, as I touched her heat once more, one last time, her hair, her throat, her breasts even smaller than Cosima’s yet with more prominent nipples, and a stubble from the hair she must wax off each day. I’d love to run my tongue over it when we were younger, loved the feel of her nipples firming up against my lips, her belly, soft and warm and full of her (she was firmly centered there as one should be), and there was the plunge of the flesh into her deep navel, hair surrounding that as well, or it had then, and her bush, her opening thighs, ah! I loved the way her thighs locked around my head when I kissed her in the secret place, and later pressed against my own and pushed rhythmically as I plunged into her … My hands remembered her warmth even as it slowly fled, as her soft, rose and olive toned flesh went blue white, went hard and chill to the touch, died slowly under the Fire. Strange that the Fire would make such a cold thing of a woman, of anyone who wanted the cold for the sake of … of what? What?