And in the lecture hall the professor was talking of writing and spilling, spilling oneself onto the page and wafting oneself into the world, and always the spilling was of blood and ink, fungible, for ink must flow downhill, and that hill was death. And the map of death was evident in the shortest and simplest letter, the unprotected I, a letter so black and conquerable its nude defenders had no choice but to die with honour or in either cowardice. And there were many ways to suicide on the page, and the professor talked of writers with a text so compressed and sharp it shredded its own pages into tiny, identical black and white pieces, like a puzzle, text so sharp it opened the throat of the author rehearsing in his mind, staging and dancing the suicide, and brownback was sleepy. And the professor spoke of writers hanging themselves from a tree branch made entirely of ocean, and of worlds of broken eggshells hungry for the open throats of characters and writers alike.
And the browncoat wondered whether lactates could kill his potentialities in progeny and whether one of his neighbours would fall pregnant and defeated before their morning milk because mysterious were the paths trodden by the will of the lord so he had been taught in all his books and all his courses and if the lord wished to grant the browncoat perpetuation then so it would be even if it be through the calcareous mouths of his voluble morning neighbours.
And there was one who titled himself brownback’s self-anointed favourite fresh face, an insolent dark student whose course was even longer and more caliginous that the brownback’s, and this new student often walked to the browncoat’s flat with the browncoat, and he often would come up to the browncoat’s storey and come into his room. And there the new student would susurrate blind milky nothings into the browncoat and he would fuck the browncoat and always very quickly and very cleanly, and then the new student would stay in the browncoat’s one-room apartment and he would read the white sheets on the browncoat’s bed and would sometimes write on the sheets and sometimes dress up in them and walk back to his own room in a student hall of residence clad in the browncoat’s sheets. And once after fucking the browncoat the new student asked for some good white paper and a pencil, and the browncoat was to remain very still, and within an hour the new student had painted a good functional portrait of the brownback. And the new student hung the portrait on brownback’s wall and left the apartment. And brownback tolerated the portrait for many of his university years, although he had never been painted prior to this, and the price of the portrait was never seeing the new student again.
And the brownback had two small mirrors in his flat, and he took one off the wall and on it he drew using the same pencil the new student had used an excellent copy of the new student’s portrait of brownback. And the browncoat’s version of the new student’s portrait was much improved and less gravitated earthward by the demands of verisimilitude and had far better movement, and fury in it. And then the browncoat approached his second mirror, which was still hanging on his wall, and he stared hard inside the second mirror and then punched it so hard the mirror was permanently broken but not in fragments merely cracked survival and the shock of the punch was so great the second mirror never displayed another reflection and was permanently reduced to repeating and repainting the last image it remembered before the punch and this was the long stare of the browncoat. And the browncoat returned to the first mirror and started bending and folding and creasing it and at first the mirror threatened to break but the browncoat knew how to write his will through the small wounds in between his knuckles and the first mirror did not break and it finally bent and was submissive and the browncoat fashioned an envelope out of it. And the browncoat repeated the bending upon the second mirror and despite similar resistance and shrieks and protests of unnaturalness the second mirror, she of the immortal frozen browncoat, folded also and became an envelope. And the browncoat sent both envelopes to the hall of residence where the new student had a room, and the new student opened both envelopes and cut his fingers and inside each envelope he found a rejection slip and a commemoration of a bonfire of some vanities or others. And the new student never came up to the browncoat again and forgot the walk from the course to the browncoat’s street.
And after two and an half years of his course brownback finally removed the new student’s pencilling of the browncoat from his wall and burned it using a redheaded match and tossed it out of the window in midburn. The portrait writhed and coiled in its fall and landed in a small ditch still filled with muddy rainwater from that mourning's downpour and the parts that weren't submerged kept burning for a while, until the drenched and the charred met and a sarcastic sizzle was all the browncoat got for his efforts. When browncoat returned to his flat that evening there was still a puddle in the small ditch but no remains of the portrait.
And on the full-bodied rictus of the browncoat’s experience of the city, university stood bulbous and dominant as a curvaceous accumulation of pus rooted upon the very sole of the browncoat’s right foot, rendering any movement impossible without screams of pain and generous, illiquid slushes of molten fatty. And the fresh faces bred of the university’s suppuration would crawl underneath the browncoat’s skin like worms of pus, and traverse the entirety of his body without finding an adequate breeding ground for their parasitic pus ideas, for the pus worms bred by speaking and by snaking their pustulous speech behind the ball of the browncoat’s eye, up his nose and down his ears and straight through his tears would they shoot words carved in purulent drool. But not all their speech was so immediately viscid, the host organs had to be seduced first, so the fresh faces and the professors charioting them in fervid races across the browncoat’s undersoil engaged for him and others in tourneys of amative dialectics where each of the fresh faces would duel another with blades of soapbubble and hilts of lilies. And the elegance of their games was thraldom for an open mind and the competition gentle and the lights unceasing. The cursive duels caressed their spectators down to their very core, and the professors and the fresh faces almost always believed that core to be reason and utility and the human grasping of æviternity, and the soporific gentleness of their lilies flew soothingly from the duellists to the spectator’s sacred soul. And the browncoat watched this war of roses, this flower-throwing contest. And the fresh faces spake and thought as if it were easy to make a rose petal fly anywhere, fly not float, especially forwards, without an iron pellet ‘neath it. And they told him so and they saw no reason to give up.
And the browncoat never thought particularly hard on much of what truly concerned and occupied the professors and the fresh faces, so his mind did not need to breathe at all in their alien atmosphere and there were no cracks in it for their pusworms to blade through. He did not need to think, for each night, long after his games with the milk bottles, he would grow awake and require no more physical sleep and he would stand up on his bed. And in this lucidity his member would shoot up and tattoo itself onto his stomach, strangled red with its own momentum, seeking to reënter the undifferentiated safety and flaccid quiet of an imaginary womb hidden underneath the omphalos. But then matin would insinuate itself through the open windows, and in the matin his flesh thawed, cruciferous, and fell again into the despondent vigilance of the shrivelled leper. And the brownback loved his flesh no more than he sacrificed to his mind, but at least the matin and its ever nascent population of fresh faces were mostly uninterested in his flesh and wanted only the simple kenosis of his mind.
And yet this would not happen, the pusworms would not get an empty, fertile cradle in the brownback’s cranium, because his mind already knew no terms resistance limits definitions and did not exert itself in distinctions judgments feelings retentions-of-sapience and had no words to defend repel divide apprehend and no logics had ever irrigated its desiccation and no cartographies blackened it with desire and discrimination. The brownback did not find their reason strange or violently unpleasant, he simply learned to live alongside reason and remain indifferent to its tempestuous echolalia and its untiring territorial provocations and its staunchly intentional prosopagnosia.
And so the browncoat abdicated himself from his reserved chair at the university, and gave back all the books and returned unto the fresh faces their opinions and exegeses and forgot his morning walk from the flat to the lecture hall. And the professors were not much deranged by browncoat’s departure since the remaining bodies were warm and the sedentary pulpit faces were fresh and neatly folded and freshly painted so not dry and the professors could steal the fresh faces’ thin watercolors and fingerpaint and watch the real moustaches shoot forth from the fresh faces.
And when the brownback made his final return from his previous university he was stopped at his door by one of his neighbours whom the brownback had never heard utter a word before and the taciturn neighbour asked the browncoat whether he knew why he the neighbour had always been so taciturn. And the browncoat did not know and the neighbour said that he would tell the browncoat of it and the taciturn neighbour’s mustache moved as he spoke.
The neighbour had been a man once and he had had a wife and also friends of a great many condiments of personality. And the former man and his friends escaped to a sordid bar one night and other men did not take kindly to them and there was escalation and one of the other men lost an eye and one of the other men died the following mourning. And the former man appeared to be responsible and so was sent to jail for a dozen labors of four movements and twelve notes each. And the former man had not been a rich man and left his wife almost nothing and his poor wife had never worked a day in her poor life and so she struggled awhile and stayed with friends but they hadn’t many friends and all the friends had been the former man’s and they never could forgive the poor wife for stealing part of the former man away from the night of the former man’s friends and so the poor wife could not stay with any of the friends long. And after there were no more friends and no relatives for the wife and the man both had been orphans the poor wife began to starve but could not take up work for it was beneath her and she would have to learn new skills and her soul was not capacious enough and the hours were horrible. And the poor wife grew in her decision and she became a whore; and a good whore she was for she was very popular and all the former man’s friends came to see her and paid good money for her but she gave back some of their money so long as they would not talk to her during. And the poor wife failed to lose her looks and lustre in all of the twelve years and she led a good if boring life materially and the former man’s friends, all married friends themselves, could never stop seeing her and were very much addicted to her smell and her lazy veins. And the former man got out of his jail and as soon as he was released he ran to his former house but no one was there and he asked the neighbours who were all new faces to him if anyone lived there and they said yes a lovely decent lady lived there and he asked if they knew where he could find her for he needed to see her and it could not wait and the new neighbours nodded in comprehension and gave the former man the address of his poor wife’s brothel although they did not tell him it was a brothel for they thought there was no need he must have known already since he was asking for her in the familiar desirous desperation of other passers-by and they the neighbours were smiling unto him. And the man ran to his poor wife’s brothel and saw it was a brothel but did not stop for contemplation not for one second for business was his and the former man entered the brothel and saw his poor wife at the bar but she did not see him and he approached the sallow bawd and paid for an hour with his poor wife and issued clear instructions and the bawd understood and she went to the poor wife and told her to hurry upstairs and wait in there with a blindfold and not speak until spoken to and the former man ascended the short staircase for some men were more obese than he
And then the taciturn neighbour opened the door to his own room and walked in and did not pause his retelling and shut his door and moved on echoless footstep and his soft machine lost its brittle words in the brittle movements of his mustache.
And the browncoat knew he the browncoat would make himself at home in an absent life so very much like the taciturn neighbour had made himself a durable home in his own absent life. Certainly there was little else he could do.
On the night of the browncoat’s conception, his mother really should have, in hindsight, just sucked his father’s cock.
But such an omission would in turn have prevented his parents from telling and retelling and endlessly rewriting and mythologizing the event for the four year old browncoat, as indeed any well-meaning parent literate in the psychology of the abyss would and should have done.
‘he fucked me so hard my kidneys shifted,’
had been his mother’s prevailing diagnosis and fondest recollection thereupon, whereas his father apotheosized and eulogized the primal scene thus