A Greater Monster Read online

  Time is imaginary space. How do I get from one moment to the next? Space doesn’t have direction, why should time? It’s a medium. Within which vibrations occur. It just is, not movement, no strand, just now.

  Time is—Realization: I could see nothing.

  I could see nothing.

  The room had vanished.

  No forms.

  No color or ground.

  Absolute zero.

  I was thinking, This is a vision, a vision of nothing. Nothing is recognizable … not my vision—I’m borrowing someone else’s vision. Whose? Who are you who sees this? A spirit guide? The spirit lives in me and is driving me. But … spirits can be liars or truthtellers … quixotic tricksters. What is this?

  My stomach was a black pit spiraling into a negative space, an aching hole where my cock should be receding like the tide into meaninglessness.

  Vacant vapid.

  The surface of my life felt fragile, like a tympanum, taut and ready to snap. What if there’s nothing inside to come out? Nothing, only air, no me in there, no life, nothing to become.

  Suddenly, in the clarity of a drug-dark high, I became aware of the emptiness of all things. Every single thing around me, surrounding me. All belongings, buildings, people, people are empty shells, behavior mapped onto mannequins precluding any possibility of truth by gorging at the trough of emptiness—what fills up the emptiness I can taste my fear the fear. I wanted to smash everything every single thing and everyone. Smash the walls the objects the people the air myself crack open the shell release the loneliness. But nothing is so dense and powerful a delusion. The irresistible pull of a black hole the ultimate greedy bastard my inevitable demise drawing closer so I fill myself with more death to get closer to it. Love is burdened with all the feces of emptiness, a vacuum. As empty

  as

  .

  .

  .

  .

  .

  And then I began to dissolve

  Everything was wrong. I had done something not quite right, but I wasn’t sure what. Bad things were going to happen to me. I had to try to follow along, play along, if I could just figure out the rules. But I had messed up somewhere. I didn’t know the rules.

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  I could sense them like crust at the corners of my eyes. I felt outlines, vague outlines of other people in the room with me, but I didn’t dare look right at them, I couldn’t move my head in that direction … were my eyes closed? I didn’t want to open them because I was ashamed. I could see one of them out of the corner of my eye, one of them was female. Smooth like a doll. Her head was a brown deer head. Doll plastic. Salvia. I knew her name.

  A cold glowing eye floated in front of me glaring with basilisk gaze—I threw up my hands to protect myself and the eye vanished in a jagged bolt of lightning.

  Heard a sound.

  Click.

  Slid apart to a place. That deer. A time to get up and move sideways around the room because I was supposed to, disapproved of I could see that.

  I was clutching the armrest—must’ve sat down again. Perspiration trickling at my temples. Oh, this was not good, no, I knew, my desktop exploded like a stick of dynamite Ispasmedontopofmydesk it was exploding wouldntstopexploding I stretched the bomb exploding I grabbed it and held it up.

  I could see its fat mouths poised to embed themselves into my body

  Hello?

  [“…”]

  Hell oh Hell oh

  [“…”]

  I tried to yank the thing away from my ear, but it wouldn’t let go. Sparks crackled out of the mouthpiece cascading fountains burning my hands, face. I realized I was shrieking. I shut my mouth the sparks vanished black fluid absorbed my consciousness, caught in spongy ether.

  I heard the sound of time out of my eye click-click-click-click-click trying to catch the present moment I could hear the flower of the metronome from the corner of my eye but I could not see it distinctly. It repelled my touch. Reality pivoted on a single point, I was spinning up and out like a tornado.

  I saw through the back and top of my skull. Two television screens face to face talking to each other. There. The metal desk. And my hands went through it to the molecules then the empty spaces full of waves and waves I was swimming. I was in the bathroom wanted to get out because it was so hard. But I couldn’t walk.

  Whiplash of wind howling through me. The withering glare of the ice mantis emptied my body of all substance. I sensed the fraud. All true calculations had been hidden from me. The mantis moved across my line of sight leaving a trail of cruel certainty in its wake, outline after outline of itself disapproving of me from the corner of the room.

  Motionless, they spoke with the utmost disdain and venom, You live here? We could not have come up with a better punishment for you than this. Your pleasures are shallow and false and nothing exists behind you but emptiness in your so-called civilization so you strain to fuck things, you know deep down you can feel it in your meat that all this pretended human creation will shatter, plunge jagged seeds into your flesh and grow a torture garden.

  Silence struck me like a blunt instrument. The stall door slit ajar. The sink—blotched with little lakes of water, a geography of disgust. At a urinal. The small dirty yellow tiles with streaks of rose over and over and over again the same dirty yelling tiles over and over and over again to infinity squares rotating reality clicking around in an infinite wheel I must follow it or I will be lost and life is the ring of the rungs of reality where I step off a world within a world within a world within a world and I needed to wake up because each world was worse than the next stay where I am right now I have to go back—the clicking rotating universe each one a fractionally different version of me I had to concentrate try not to panic stay in the right one or I could become one of the other ones instead I needed to stay in the right slot or I might not come back eyes closed eye saw rows of disapproving people one of them in the middle in the back a deer head of lucent brown they were all related to me and next I was swimming surrounded by liquid pressed against it I plunged through milky clouds diving through fathoms of ghosts. I could not breathe and I did not need to. Slices of clear-clear water.

  I saw this then this was the way it is, it always was. This I saw. This was the way it is, it always was. This place was divine. I was always here. I would always be here. And I will return to it. I will always return to it. It is behind everything haunting me. That other place had been a trance. A trance that seemed to last twenty-eight years. This I see now. This is the way it is, it always was. I imagined that world. This is what’s real. I imagined that world. This is what happens when I dream of being real.

  My skin peeled off to get away from me

  I touched my ears and they rang like toxic metal my teeth were grinding

  A place of phantom surfaces

  A knife sheep god eater and the twitching toads

  The people were beautiful and spoke a language incomprehensible machine chatter

  Gleaming iridescent white suits and strapless dresses blinding cocaine teeth

  Their laughter sizzled in my head and the scraping of rusty wire

  She (of rainbow hair) passed the needle

  He (with silver eye) passed the needle

  a drop of nectar glistening at the top a lambent drop trembling in light

  is me

  the slightest disturbance a slight gust evolves and swirls me into heaps endless and unnecessary

  as I turned to speak—vanished in a poof of dust

  Matter is the energy of perception with the sentiment of a pile of maggots

  My self soled in sagging burlap

  a chemical dancing on the tip of the iceberg

  the creative radiance grimaced

  Things were not good not good I was shitting bricks ripping hairs out my asshole felt like my intestines were going to blow fuck fuck fuck ah shitfucksssss

 
I felt myself being ripped apart inside my asshole chunks of my ass thrown across the bathroom spattering the walls my legs falling in opposite directions my body surrendering to the tile my face bounding off a surface warm milk in my mouth my tongue felt the topology tooth tooth tooth tooth? jagged edge my face was a jagged tooth my eyes they were closed they would not open I was tugging at them with all my willpower nothing the abyss no orientation no perspective abruptly swung open: my face was in the urinal I pushed back many bodies entangled with me we were all kneeling at the urinal I wriggled and all the bodies writhed around me a knot of little snakes nadouessioux nausea overwhelmed us and we vomited into the urinals before

  A beginning:

  In. Out. In. Out. In. Out.

  In. Out. In. Out. In. Out.

  In. Out. In. Out. In. Out.

  In. Out. In. Out. In. Out.

  In. Out. In. Out. In. Out.

  In. Out. In. Out. In. Out.

  In. Out. In. Out. In. Out.

  In. Out. In. Out. In. Out.

  In. Out. In. Out. In. Out.

  In. Out. In. Out. In. Out.

  Ensconced back at my pad. Wrapped in a blanket. Shivering dog-sick. Puke all over my shirt. Lips numb. Drifting in and out. So many threads of nothingness knitting through my head. Flipped on the poisonous afternoon TV. The television exudes a warm glow of friendship on lonely nights. An insect god waiting patiently for me to rot and decay. Quivered a lot. Smoked a bowl to try to calm down. Shook like Parkinson’s. Checked the locks on my door three times just in case. Unlocked one by accident the last time. Had to check three more times. Phone rang. Hot and aching. Lay on the sofa, ceiling fan going around slowly, so slowly. The original King Kong was on TV. Closed my burning eyes, sickness of commercials infecting my ears. I think I heard one of my babies on there selling home security. Home security. A house of cards. My job, the economy … there’s always nukes. A home is paper-thin.

  I was thinking: Why’d I do it, why? Every time saying, if this trip ends badly, I can handle it, but I forget every time forget I can’t control my brain, parts of it shut down like in a dream that dream where I was talking to him—not thinking he’s dead, just talking to him, not saying this isn’t possible, this is a dream, don’t think it—what was the last one? … indistinct characters … can’t seem to look them in the face—a warehouse? The office. Right, typing at a computer … dead fucking father … run over like a deer in the road—I can hardly picture your creased face, that stupid outfit you put on for the “traditional” dance competition, leather headband stuffed with turkey feathers, feather anklets, beaded wristbands, looking like a sad-ass mascot doing a competition for fuck’s sake about tradition … had to marry a white woman didn’t you and move us into a log house so you could still feel full-blood that’s why you never could look me in the eye, saw me as iyeska the day I blew up, it all blew up the scholarship the hell I’d go back to the shithole rez no more speak to half-breed cuz I was going to be better than you and you knew it.

  Closed my eyes. Pounding hangover. Couldn’t sleep. So fucking tired, but my brain was wrapped in barbed wire. All I could do was groan and feel like I was going to die. Even my tears were afraid to leave me.

  I blinked, looked up. The ceiling light was contorted into an angel of death.

  Suvé. Suvé. Swedish and quintessential. That summer after college in Europe … my big black backpack … the creaky old youth hostel in the Alps—way up at the peak of the peaks. Nothing around but cliffs and snow and space. Meeting over dinner … talked ceaselessly until it was late, everyone asleep but us. Insects of all kinds zwinged around the ceiling lights, and the chill air sluiced through cracks in the rickety walls. What did we talk about? Pine Ridge, I told her about Pine Ridge and how it was the poorest place in the U.S. and about Wounded Knee and fry bread. I wanted her to see me as special. The one time I told anyone about being Oglala. She just listened, didn’t act like it made a difference one way or another. Her tattoo—a peace sign inked in tie-dye on the back of her neck. I love the symbolism of it, she said, whether it’s genuine or not. She wanted to believe it had meaning. Sitting across from each other at a rough-hewn picnic bench … she held out her finger and a monster dragonfly landed on it. The insect preened its eyes for what felt like forever. When it finally flew away she asked, What do you feel when you’re in love? and I remember thinking I don’t know, I don’t know how to answer that, so I just answered without thinking, I want it to be over so I can fall in love again. She had to make a call so we wrapped ourselves in wool blankets and stumbled out into the moonless dark to find the sole payphone in town that stood a hundred feet away down a dirt trail toward the cable car that went up to the top of the Jungfrau. We found our way to it by using our feet to tap for stones lined along the border of the trail and squeezed into the phone booth. She pulled the door shut, and the ceiling light went on. One cube of light amidst miles of pitch-blackness. She was close enough that I could feel the warmth of her breath as she spoke. I leaned my back against the glass wall as she slid a card into the machine and punched a number. For fifteen minutes, I contemplated her long glowing hair flipped back from her forehead like wings and listened to a song I couldn’t understand then or ever.

  I stroked my slippery hard-on and pictured all the women I wanted to fuck, one after the next falling onto my dick, falling into each other, through each other, becoming one large, arbitrary, beautiful woman who I realized was nothing, and she vanished, and I was fucking myself, and my dick was abraded. I lost it, I lost everything, and I melted into a hole, folded into myself.

  My face in the mirror. I looked tired. Thin and brittle. I rubbed my eyes several times. Opened my mouth, front tooth chipped to a point, throbbing. Should get that capped immediately.

  I turned on the water and let it run, steamed up the mirror.

  The need to buy something uncurled in me like an erection. I would feel better if I just gave in to it.

  “Show me what you like,” I said to her. The super-hot salesgirl. Perfect oval face like a supermodel, perfectly straight lustrous platinum hair with swathes of blue not found in nature, and perfectly round tits not found in nature either. Jeezus.

  She turned, walked to a display. I followed. “This suit,” she said, pulling it off the rack. She stood at my side and held it up in front of us. “It’s from Perils of Money. This is the most fabulous thing I’ve seen in a long time. The cut is very cool—a sixties Fellini influence, narrow Italian lapels—and the fabric is amazing. Feel this.” I touched it as she held it out to me—very plush and light. “This is a thin, lightweight velvet. The contrasting lapel and collar is felt, but this velvet—it’s about the same weight as cashmere, and it’s so exquisite. It’s just the most fabulous thing. They make some nice pieces.”

  She looked me directly in the eyes.

  “This is beautiful,” I said.

  She held it up to me, evaluating. “You’re about six foot two? I think it might be perfect.”

  I took it from her hands. “I’ll try it.”

  She led me to the changing room, which was a frosted acrylic cube mirrored on all four sides, open at the top. “Let me know if you need anything,” she said and left. Tore off my clothes and tried it on. Like a hipster fucking James Bond with money to burn. Checked the tag. 4k. Jesus, an entire paycheck. Burned all right. Back out.

  “Let me see,” she said, taking me in. “You know, they made a limited edition of twenty of these, and each one is a different color. It looks fantastic on you. You look fantastic. I wish I could wear that.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  “Congratulations. You look so hot.”

  I handed her the plastic as she presented her sweetly smiling face as if it were a gift—felt it down to the pit of my stomach. She disappeared. I wandered down the excessively wide, winding staircase to the cashier’s desk on the first floor. My gaze skimmed the surface of the luxurious interior design until I found her hair, then her thick lips—a vaginal exaggeration
—before settling on her precise upturned nose (also probably done). “Here please.” I signed on the touchscreen, watched my virtual identity vanish and the jacket folded neatly into a box debossed with the store logo into a semiopaque rubber bag and into my hands. I slid my business card across the counter, “If you’d like to get dinner … ?” She smiled and nodded with the painful artificiality of an airport food court, had already moved on.

  I left, could barely breathe, my throat filled up. My cock ached hard as a gravestone. Followed the sidewalk, walking rootless, wandering past the yuppie slutpads of the Gold Coast. The homogenous brick facades gnashed at the blue tongue of sky, drooled out the black tar street. I entered a convenience store only to be flayed with blaring music—Jesus, it was fucking Christmas. The aisles were pathways in a robot brain. Tinselism. All fucking commodity cheese. I felt myself cleaving in half, bifurcating, axed along my axis. My stomach chattered like a bag of popcorn kernels in a fire. My face. This much stubble? I was back in my bathroom and not sure how I got there. But the day before … my thoughts hit a wall. The razor. I wanted to shave but watched my palsied hand attempt to hold it. Not so much. My face. Hadn’t I shaved already? My usually flawless memory was twisting out of my grasp like an eel. I needed a good steak dinner. And some sleep. Something to settle me down.

  I opened my eyes.

  “Did you get some dust in your eye?” she asked.

  I blinked.

  I was in a room. Windowless. Eggshell white and rectangular. The ceiling was high. I sat on a sofa upholstered in expensive oatmeal linen, the back rectangular, the seating deep. The floor was polished white concrete. It took me a moment to recognize my living room.

  And Sasha. Half Dutch (her mother), half Jamaican (her father)—she claimed—the resulting gene mix being nothing short of astonishing. She lounged opposite me in the pool of my red loveseat like a mermaid, with two pillows propping up her waist and one elbow on the armrest, waves of brown hair cascading across her chest. Her dark eyes drew me in, bounced me back, pulled me in. Her eyes absorbed everything yet were impenetrable. A thick envelope sat on the coffee table between us.