The Urban Book of the Dead (2 page)

The new pad mate was an inferior specimen, he was finding prison hard but hiding it by trying to assert his authority through prison bullshit, he had already accused Monster of stealing his powdered milk, which Monster may have taken by mistake, but he was really a coward and Monster was dominating him whilst hardly saying a word. He was slightly shorter than Monster and chunky in his sweater and blue-stripped prison shirt, but the chunk was flab not muscle, it gave Monster the impression that he had fattened himself up for prison rather than worked out. Monster couldn’t eat the food in front of him because he was antagonised, he played with it with his fork in a meditational way rather like the food represented the interplay of ideas, pushing a thought of a carrot up hill, he was too wired to eat. The pad mate made a show of wolfing the food down from the tray in front of him, he even licked it. Monster looked at him then spat on his food to ensure the bag of yeast would not ask for his food, which traditionally he would to ensure his dominance. I think that rather sealed it for him, I did not fail to notice the look that flicked across his face.

Having finished the meal as far as he was concerned, Monster put the tray next to the door and got on to the top bunk and continued his studying of a book on the rise to power of the Nazis, making notes on blue prison letter paper. He was sitting upright with his hand out on the knitted green blanket with its many holes and long history of desperate spunk stains. The pad mate got up and rang the prison bell with his tray in his hands. Monster had known what was coming and prepared for it, this really was a very cowardly act. My Monster self got ready to block a tray with his arm, I touched the ghost scar on the side of my head.

I watched as a ghost. I had to wince at the next bit I knew was coming, this discomfort showed itself as a cramp in my wings, which I could however not stretch in the confines of a cell, as much as I existed in that dimension. I decided I would not intervene in this particular experience, as it was very positive for my future good opinion, however it was rather unfortunate that Monster was interestedly reading about the rise of German fascism, this would be bound to exert its influence in a negative way.

The door opened and two large prison officers were there looking smart and officious in their uniforms, our own uniforms didn’t fit and were worn. “What do you want?” asked one rather nicely.

The pad mate’s face reddened and there were tears in his eyes. Monster tensed. To me as a ghost, I imagined a short man with a large red beetroot hovering instead of a head, I would of liked to bite a chunk out of it, besides being only slightly partial to beetroot.

“ I want to move from this cell”, he said. “My pad mates a thief!” He cried launching the tray at Monster’s solid head.

An arm went up almost casually to absorb the blow, but, unexpectedly he grabbed the arm and went flying with the tray again. Fountains of blood leapt from Monster’s bald skinhead. In a wonderful display of adaptability, I knew my solid self was enjoying the flow and the pain, almost in a reciprocal relationship with metal. Monster dropped from the bunk and the retard dropped the tray, the thud of Monster’s feet and the clang of the tray answering each other. Monster thumped him continuously and he answered back with weak, but wide swings that Monster easily blocked, Monster enjoyed it with the blood increasing his power, as the beetroot took a beating in the heady flow of blood, getting marked and thumped with gratuitous feeling of hitting a piece of vege. Two fingers went to the eyes ‘so that’s were that move came from’. Then the prison officers grabbed the beetroot and wrestled him to the ground outside the cell. As Monster was grabbed, he kicked the prone body in the balls several times feeling every inch the powerful fascist. The prison officers who had arrived on the scene dragged Monster away with respectful looks.

I followed Monster down the wing with two officers; one had his arm on Monster’s back. We went through a gate at the end of the wing and down to the medical office. Monster sat down in a twizzy chair “I’ll kill him next time I see him” Monster said twirling in the chair, then he was playing with some blood with his finger, that had fallen on the side desk where lied a medical kit.

He saw his face in it and retreated from the pool, worried by his own fierceness. He tried to scratch it out absently but only succeeded in spreading the blood making his face bigger, and then the reflection grinned at him. Aware that he hadn’t grinned he turned surprised and saw me looking over his shoulder; I put my finger to my lips to shush him.

A medical officer came in. Monster knew the medical staff that attended. An officer in white with glasses and a kind face, who when I got transferred gave me his baccy, said with humour pointing to my eye brow, “your hair will cover that”, and to the side of my head, “And that won’t show”. Monster swore revenge, and at this point I intervened, stopping time for the others and becoming more visible to myself.

“Relax you get him back!” I said, then added “A good solid kick in the head on the hospital wing, and you get commended rather than charged for it, he was a bully.”

Monster looked at me too angry to be disturbed or surprised “Do I die?”

“Not for more than ten years, besides, its not so bad”.

“When do I get out of here?” He asked.

“You don’t want to know?”

“But originally I got bail, its not serious”

“No, but you get stuffed, very badly stuffed”

I continued. “I need you to get an army together, to invade heaven, a rather satanic army then, and here would be a good place to start, many of these people will be dead in a few years, and believe me they’re going to be pissed.”

“Those wings suit me.” Monster said.

I replied “Yeh. How are you doing with inventing new economic and political systems?”

“It passes the time” Monster said.

“The problem is that a lot of these ideas you’re discovering, have their real life historical counterpart, but its like you’re inventing them yourself, so they’re bound to hold some attraction when you discover them later.” I said.

“What, a communist society based on sharing to lower production and increase free time and liberation from property?”

“That’s called usufruct” I said “There’s nothing wrong with that. No I was thinking more of the ‘fusion’ theory you developed. Cancelling out bad feelings through love of the leader, love cancelling out feelings of disempowerment with feelings of empowerment despite giving itself over. The problem is although its rather a clever take on Nietzsche, its very close to the totalitarian fascism of Mussolini, a brilliant if rather psychotic mind, he saw the state as the source of national culture and morality, shaping people in its image, the people thus identifying with their own culture and morality are then expressed through the state, which means whilst they agree they’re empowered by it, by their own super ego if you like.”

“That’s brilliant” Monster said “fucking horrible but brilliant”

I replied “Of course it is because in a way you invented it. God likes it too. Don’t think that sympathy with Hitler’s developing the Aryan race state is going to pan out either, Jane is Roman, not Aryan, blonde hair aside; white supremacists tend to notice things like that. In short you should stick to anti state, communist ideas and steer away from ideas that reconcile class antagonisms. You will go a long way with that.”

“Okay.” Monster said, “What’s this idea about taking on God. What do we have to do to overthrow the bastard?”

“I’m not sure yet, just prepare the ground for me in the future, I might come back in your past and future from time to time, to put a few things right and prepare the way. Now I have to go. Prison is rather depressing.”

With that I turned around and got the chalk out of my pocket, I quickly marked the door with a pentangle and stepped back into my spirit apartment.

My spirit apartment had seemed to grow and I was suspended somewhere in the middle of the room in height. I was wedged and stretched achingly between a row of pillars of ivory something wet and foaming pushed under my feet, giving me temporary relief by lifting them, then they fell back and I ached more, dangling. A wooden spear stabbed me in my side and I was lifted out, I pulled a piece of rotten cabbage away, that had caught over my eyes; and I realised I was suspended by my wound on a toothpick before the face of God, seated in my armchair, having been picked out of his foul grinning teeth.

I flapped my wings and I raced at him, putting in running motion my feet and arms but I did not move off the toothpick, instead my internal organs wrapped around it with the movement and I was roped there on my intestines, as by a row of sausages. God picked them off and dangled them on the giant tongue that had massaged my feet. The pain of the act was intense, burning; he swallowed my innards and grinned between closed teeth “sausages! Cumberland! You needed a shit!”

Still speared, too painful to move, he put me down pressing the toothpick into a cigarette butt in the ashtray, furiously and agonisingly I kicked out, falling over and billowing a cloud of ash that choked me and painted my face, showing him in a grimace my deadly little war mask.

God looked down at me, the veins in his eyes criss-crossed over and over until they stared back at me bright red and welling up with blood. Red tears dripped down his mask face twirling and forming symbols I had seen in the book of Thelema, before changing again into tattooed dollar signs on his cheeks deeply engraining themselves.

God took up a packet of cigarette papers from the table and tore them out one after the other, his snake like pupils looking around the room, occasionally glancing at me and grinning his too sharp teeth. He tore the papers so only thin strands with the gum on were left, then, having done this about ten times, carefully licking some of the papers with his tongue, he bound two cigarettes together in a crucifix, I meanwhile had been in too much pain to move or resist, he wrapped my small hands around the crucifix with more thin strips of gummed paper, then bound my legs to it, and propped me up and secured me in the dog ends in the ashtray.

God took a leafy, loose rolled, cigar out of the breast pocket of his wallpaper/ pinstriped business suit, he pursed his lips attentively at me as if he was going to blow a kiss, then he blew on the cigar lighting it. My nostril’s stung with the sickly burning. “You are important to me; this is what I have to offer you.” He said stretching his arm out and flicking ash on the carpet, then gesturing all around in the cigar smoke with the hand holding the cigar, at shapes of fornicating bodies that disappeared as soon as the eyes focused on them, “All this can be yours.” Forgetting myself I saw an image of me in an athletic sexual position, grinning devilishly at me and I gave the grin back, then I remembered what I was about “Not interested.” I stated “I’ve done all that, you know what I want, if there’s any hope at all I will spare Gods life.”

God stabbed me repeatedly with the end of the cigar between words, burning my body, “You-Just-Don’t-Get-It.” He stabbed at me. The holes in my body smouldered painfully, I spat a glob of spit at him that sailed through the air and lost altitude uselessly; landing on the arm of the chair he was sat in before ever reaching him.

God continued speaking but the stabbing stopped; he got up close to me so I could smell the corpses on his breath, adulterated with the perfumes of all the dead girls I knew. “Its not all one big unity you know. It’s not an atomisation of every one neither like the world I created down there. I have a use for you in the safety of my unbreachable hierarchy, surrounded by the harmony of fools, I am going now, but I will leave you with a taste of the real gifts I have to offer; to refuse or conspire is to invite on yourself the second death.”

I was back to normal standing in the living room, the cough medicine smell of heroin wafted in from the kitchen and I followed my nose into the kitchen. Some one I knew was stirring a whole pot of the dirty water of heroin with a big wooden spoon, cigarette filters floating in the mix so they could be sucked up cleanly by a syringe. Pink butterfly wings of the girl fluttered in segments of my mind which was flicking on and off, overpowered by heroin. Her silently laughing face filled the broken movie.

Jane’s proud loving face came close up to mine, then she stood back and danced in her bra and pink silk knickers, with a syringe in her hand, danced from padded foot to padded foot, then up on her toes, then grinding her hips at me, she smiled at the light bulb she danced under, reaching for the light, she squeezed the syringe off, a rainbow forming over her head in refractions of light, she did a sign of the cross with it and captured the bits of falling rainbow on her grinning face so they looked like tears of joy. I came up to her so happy, I had not seen her for fifteen years, I kissed the heroin tears then licked them off, fading in and out of heroin reverie with each kiss and lick with their powerful magical effect.

She stuck out her hands and pushed me over laughing, “Here smell this!” She shouted, straddling my face with her arse she farted and I temporarily lost consciousness in the smell of heroin. I came around and she laughed again, her face now in mine.

We got up and faced each other smiling. She smiled a mum smile and said “Hold me.” holding out her hands. I hugged her; she said “Hold me tighter; don’t be afraid of hurting me.” I held her tighter; she told me to “Relax!”. We hugged and rocked then uncoupled and she went back to the stove, stirring intently in a stylised way that I thought served no other purpose, occasionally looking back at me and smiling.