The Apocalypse Reader (6 page)

You SPLIT THE topside of my leg one night in the summer. Without thought I allowed you my bone. You lifted it away and placed it before you on the floor. You scraped it with your fingers and nails; my bone was not white, but grayish and brown-stained all over; it lay before you as you knelt; indeed, because of this extraction, my wet leg, extending from my body, lay paralyzed, dear, for the nerves had been destroyed. You took my bone and its shreds of wet red muscle; you wanted it, so I had given it to you, adorable one, at great risk to myself and to my detriment, defacement, exhaustion and enslavement, my terrible prostration, my deference, my horror and pleasure, every bit of it my choice, my leisure.

And you asked that I would pierce you in kind, gouge you somehow, find the green stink in your gut and bring it into the air, the light, astound you with this, rip your layers of muscle, make you feel the curious interstices and gradations of pain that arise when wounds are made wider, or deeper, or are hollowed out from beneath.

Angel, monster, I would not do these things to you; I only wanted that you would dig me bloody; I itched; I would not rip you, much to your dismay and frustration, because I loved to see how you begged, and when you did so, in screams, my pleasure increased a hundredfold.

I am certain we met in the past; I am not always certain. This year, huge news has been flooding the world: fevered failures and pinprick successes in economic and foreign policy; I just wanted to be flayed by you, awful darling; I was astounded at having found you; I wanted this always, that you would continue this nightmare as you tore at me daily; I was mustard yellow, green, purple, bluish, all colors, all over; I wanted always to save these colors, to swallow each of your heartstopping blows and see every day how they bloomed beneath my skin.

I am your starveling, your trash; in the morning you wake to the ferrous scent of my blood tricking across your face, and suddenly you are up, beginning to dig at my navel, tearing upward; you howl that I am bad, terrible, that I am always in error, that I should be different; I should destroy you further, spill your blood more, blackest spider; you burn away my sense that I am myself with your abuse; my veins fill with ammonia, naphtha; I am chilled and familiarly paralyzed. You bellow at the brown and red juice foaming in my stomach as you separate with the strength of your hands the two halves of my belly; you dig my gut, ruining my wet gelatine organs; if only this ecstasy were happiness, my demon, sadist, ass.

Long ago, when I was just as lonely, my mother made me in her gut out of warm blood and sugar; I became myself there; I could not change. I fed and grew with the blind diligence of everything alive and became myself; I formed; you cannot change me now, my horror, though I can die; though you have flayed me many times, detested me, pierced my throat until I fainted in astonished pleasure.

And you say you want me any other way, warmonger, simpleton; you say you're going to remake me. That's not possible, but no one can tell you otherwise; I accept your terms, I know only you, your acute, circular unhappiness and nothing else; I revel in our nightmare; I give my organs for you to smash; I refuse to flay you, this being my finest pleasure, second only to receiving your fantastically sustained torture; I will not hurt you; I cannot; you shout in terrible frustration, livid creature, at which point I dissolve in joy.

Before, when I knew only her, I ran crying, running in circles after my lost mother who had thrown me out of her house, who had sent me away, alone. I know you, she said. You're weak. You'll try to stay here forever but you can't. You can't hide here anymore, she said. Go outside, or you'll die from your own weakness and fear. Leave, she said. And don't go grieving for your mother. She hated herself.

After she had thrown me out, I hurled myself in the sand at her, yelling, I hate you, I'm not just weak, there are other things, why can't you see me, I hate you.

Then, after a time, my heart closed, sewed itself beautifully: the work of silkworms. After all, I was young, and my body worked flawlessly. My body was perfect and perfectly self-contained. Then, I stopped howling for her each night. Then, I never dreamed of her again.

But I blamed her for bringing me where I never wanted to go; I woke up one day and I was already formed; it was too late; I was a child belonging to my mother; I wanted that my blood would reverse, return to her, but it was much too late. You, flagrant murderer, were already there reminding me of this, blowing a great heaving wind into my mouth, exploding my sinuses and nose from the inside, bursting my cochlea, my eardrums; you entered my eyes with your fingers; I licked your wrist weakly as you delivered to me your heavenly guerilla blows, and I fainted repeatedly, my creature so absolutely alive, my joy; it was always your astute sense of courtesy, your sensitivity, to wait just long enough before resuming your protracted attacks so I could remember who I was, my offending terror, my dearest; I fall this instant, hearing your execrable insults, my ecstasy a monsoon.

In your night dreams, twisted sibling, you are dog, orangutan, starving for my blows, begging for my bite. I act on anger, calculation, and impulse; I tear into you with pain and no warning. You want this; your body splits into fragments of mirror, making you multitudes, unmaking you into many, each hurting distinctly; you become a fly's eye, perceiving the world not in waves of light but in throbs of pain. Throughout, I am starving, my dear, then gorged on your blood, my body ceaselessly moving in relation to your ignorant violence.

This year, the papers say that the national economy is strong, and that there are more high-paying jobs than ever; I am advocate of, accomplice to our nightmare, constantly desiring our wretched delight, unearthing each day some new timbre of agony, employing again and again the few mechanisms I know; you drop your head and seize my body, darling, groaning, fisting my throat, my esophagus, seeking a hemorrhage; light from the window seeps to my eyes as I gag; I wet your arm and bite, scrape it with my canines; I reach and twist at your genitals until tears pool in your eyes and spill; my tubes have burst, your arm stuffs me, your fingers jab at the valve of my stomach; my acid burns you, and you will blister, fester, dearest child; I have lost my body; my body is thin, a mere membrane; I am too thin for organs, then suddenly I balloon; I am hugeous; my body fills the room, the odorous corner I now see before me, darling, the corner I believe is part of you. This cannot continue; it's too much, but it will only continue, my dearest, and if outrage and ecstasy were happiness, it would be mine to give you, in unstoppable proportions. But I can only look at you, my horror, hellcat, hideous queen: I am certain that once, in the past, we met; I am not certain we ever did.

FRAISE, MENTHE,
ET POIVRE 1978

Jared Hohl

NOW THAT WE'RE starving again, all of our stories are about food. Lionel likes to talk about the time he found a cheese cave and cut into one of the wheels with a pocketknife, then shoved his face in there and ate until his lips touched the rind. I tell him about Jake and Walt's diner in Ft. Madison, Iowa, how the tenderloins there were as big as a Frisbee. We don't speak of sweet-tasting things because we've been living off vintage fruit preserves for many months now and the thought of anything sugary makes us want to vomit. We're down to our last jar of jam and I tremble for protein I will never get and some mornings, after I wake up, I keep my eyes shut and my breath shallow and hope that Lionel will smash me in the head with one of his mallets and wrap me in diamonds and throw me into the Seine with the others.

Paris is empty, but we go on daily explorations anyway. Lionel wears laboratory goggles and thick welding gloves. He pulls his mallets from the carpenter's belt around his waist and swings them two-fisted into plate glass storefronts and apartment windows. We almost never find food. Back when we were a group, when Harriet and Claudia and that barbarian Sven Ronsen were still alive, we'd fill duffel bags with wigs and top hats and switchblades and emeralds and take it all back to the Odeon where we lived and where we performed our death plays.

HAMLET OR THE TRAGEDY OF SVEN RONSEN

THE SCENE:

Candlelit room in a 16th-century castle. Hamlet (Sven Ronsen) lies on the ground wrapped in a clean white sheet (he tells us he is too weak for shirts). On his chest rests a human skull. Hamlet/Sven Ronsen is feeble and debilitated, but slowly opens his eyes and, with great effort, achieves focus. He stares into the skull's eyeholes with meaning.

HAMLET

I can be ... to not ... to be. I can be.

A thin line of spittle seeps from Hamlet/Sven Ronsen's withered lips. A cry is heard offstage.

HAMLET

Pfff.

Hamlet/Sven Ronsen's eyes go dull. He has expired.

END.

In the days before Sven Ronsen, we were doomed. After the sun went green the plants died and then the animals began to die. When the bad news came, the French were ecstatic. A well-known TV show mocked the world leaders, portraying them as paranoid weaklings hiding away in hermetically sealed bunkers. Most of Paris was out dancing in the streets. Everyone made light of all the hubbub about conserving food. The city was still in operation and even a week after all that talk of doom, restaurants were serving fat ducks in cream sauce and bottles of red Burgundy. People laughed when the president of the United States appeared on camera eating a cockroach. Then the delivery trucks stopped coming in. When the fighting was at its worst I managed to save a street magician from a cleaver attack. The magician was Lionel. He showed me his stash of breakfast cereal. I met his girlfriend Harriet and her friend Claudia, a beautiful young woman with dark hair and brilliant green eyes.

We were very good at gathering food and managed to avoid the roving street gangs. We were silent at midnight, communicating with hand gestures, able to spot dented cans of tuna half-buried in the rubble, revealing themselves to us in winking flashes of moonlight. We scavenged and we hid. One night, Claudia was slashed by a child. He was vicious, possibly a gang scout. He caught her in the corner of the mouth with the tip of his blade and sliced an inch into her cheek. She looked over at us, her lips parted in shock, the gape of her mouth extended by the wound, blood trickling down her chin and her face distorted, a humanized jack- o'-lantern. I ran at the kid, but he was too fast on his bicycle. Harriet stitched Claudia as best she could. The cruel black thread interrupting her smooth, soft, face. After that incident the four of us holed up in Lionel's apartment. We decided to ration ourselves, to wait it out. We had no real plan. We were growing weak while Gary, Lionel's mynah bird, flew at the ceiling shrieking like a car alarm.

We lived off crackers and mouthfuls of stale water from the stoppered bathtub. Lionel performed tricks to help pass the time. He'd make giant pennies disappear. He'd hold out a cheap wand and Gary would perch on it and cough a lacy garter belt from his beak. Harriet and Claudia would occasionally put on dance performances, old timey vaudevillian numbers choreographed with canes we found in the back of a ransacked grocery. Between acts, we could hear the gangs outside, beating their bass drums madly. Once we peeked through the curtains and saw a doomsday parade, ex-government officials and television newscasters skewered on lances stolen from the Musee de I'Armee, the grand marshal an eighty-year-old woman borne along in the air like Cleopatra, keeping time with a human femur for a baton. Even when we began to starve we knew better than to go outside. We kept track of our last scraps of food in a miserly way. We built a toilet that hung off the window and dumped onto the sidewalk below. As our supplies dwindled, we made our rations smaller.

THE FOOD RAN out. We didn't have enough energy to stand so we attached drinking straws end to end so that we could lie on the floor and suck directly from the tub. We didn't bother with water rations anymore. It was pointless. We'd given up.