19th... Ough.

19.



Bobby awoke sweating. Needles coursing his veins. His chest shilling for a grinding machine. The carnage behind the cage of his bruised ribs, dead confused meat. He thought, Probably another heart attack…



Propping himself with the walls, he reached the window. He looked through a panel of stirring fog. Outside, no lichened shark of lodestar loomed — no starved companion winked, no shriveled necromancer crone hurling astonishing appeasements — also some untoward liabilities of a stilted wreckage, from the bottom of the cold abysm… I used to be a drawing professor, he mused. And often I drew on the blackboard, with colored pieces of chalk, olden muses sourcing up among the disparaged chasms like a bleak skerry, atolls of them, a chorus of witches forewarning of imminent doom… Behind tall stelae of smoke they predicted that I could do worse than stay safely ensconced on the loggias behind the huge lit panels where the scores were showed…

I was eighteen, before I went into business and bought all those abandoned stadiums which when the sport craze came, with the advent of color television, resold at a profit of millions…



Gravelly vulvas, he thought, while from the next bedroom Maximine’s savage snores reached his ears… He swallowed his explosive pill. His face bore an expression of bland despair. His eyes seeing nothing still but some dirty stationary cloud in front of them, or inside. He heard a dribble down the corridor. Marietska pissing…?



Nothing more to extract from those niggers, he thought. He heard a sob. A sob…? His own. Some privacy, he said. Extended his hand, found a thick woolen jersey. Seized it with a claw for a hand and he covered his face with it… In case another erratic sob chose to rise to the surface…



Diaspora, he thought. A sob with an attitude plops up from the dark stirrings of an unknown being living inside my skeleton… Would it switch on the amorous switch… No time enough. It’s already dead, just a bubble, ephemeral.



Inside the muddy well of his past, past each one of those new scary islands, some graphics still lived — Mironian, expanded into more orthodox landscapes, Watteaunian… His voice commanded, piercingly: “On, on…”



On for the very daggers of the scurrilous limbo of whom I must have been… Who knows. Is there a native soil of the soul…? Where you are yourself planted, as if having crashed in…? Before, bubble-like or thereabouts, also then the little plant that’s you starts to wither, in a hammering never-quite-made-out allegro (the piss, the Pisa, the pies, the pious…?) of booming, big chorale words…? No, you can’t decide which one to affix to you as the last fig leaf that holds together, albeit so fragilely, the dignity of your identity.



While woodenly unflinching (not yet so long ago) in front of a moaning apogee of prolific binges — binges of hemorrhagic choreography — which brought — with oh what galvanizing hermetism — sundry acquainted avatars off — off to changing frames of licketicut, licketicut — licketicut inter-sabotaging blobness…



How ticklingly they germinate, from cavernous guffaws too, four other severed fingers which hold, with rubber rings, medals made with cancelled money: epitome, your pate, of crazy uselessness — five or four senseless organs, eternally condemned, are throbbing sillily in a pool of tripe…



He fell, his right leg went totally numb, and failed.



“Bobby, are you all right? Are you crying, love?”



Maximine awake. Marietska deflowering him, or pumping his chest.



After that, they had lain back onto some irritated levers. Their reeling eyes had closed. All was fixed but the objective. What a joke, was it not…? At least for us: a sent projectile.



He smelled some fiercely burned stuff. He thought: look at the broads, bumping into mazes of piffling private koans…



Soon everything shall be over. By then — tomorrow, the day after…? — none of them could care less… He…? Ah, he was left behind. Homelessly oozing in the lurch.



“Be laid,” he curses, in his mind. You are my business no longer, either of you. Want to die in peace... Thus, following the fumous specimen of his mind’s fire, frightening the pants off his neighbors with the flaming unheard shout of: “Make way then; so that I go at once in a Heroic Course…!”



He strode toward a mere gunwale, no, much higher, a brick wall, mad to turn with it, about, away, gone, fairly reattributed himself with attributes of ethereality, when...



“Remember, Bobby?”



“Yes, oh, and how!”



Soaked smithereens of lurid, macabre taffetas of engrossing nauseousness… Our bilious, quarrelsome pairs of eyes were now, I should guess, totally devoid anymore of barren loyalty, and brimmed, brimmed-brimmed, with pugnacious animadversion, again absolutely unwilling to, to-to, to let any new pseudo-magician get, get-get, get emptily away with, with-with, with any boringly soupy, soupy-soupy, soupy customary routine of hers — of idle (criminal even) legerdemain, legerdemain-legerdemain, legerdemain for officinal control of our cracking skeleton, yeah, and other divers ukasic prolixities…



They stroke upon his bell. Stroke-stroke, stroke.



Angrily, taunted… “What did we do wrong?” “Are you asleep yet?” They tautened. “Bobby, are you there, Bobby?”



Bobby, remember all those niggers shilled for you — so you always bragged — always the fictional action going on elsewhere — yonder, on the pitches, past the tainted glasses of the loggias — while the real action went on inside you…? All those provincial citizens paying courtesy to the king embosomed behind the scrim, the screen, the screams, the terrifying images imagined on the reflecting glasses…



Bobby, Bobby, it must be a surfeit. Too much booze, too much blood pudding, too much calabash…?



Bobby, jilt us again, your inertia, you know how it thrills us... It shows you at your best. Dismiss us. We are done. The month’s over. The book too…



“Time to do up!” — they shouted — cryptic children, hopping with flying bows — hoping, with flying brows… But their expectations were crushed as he immediately let go, he fell demurely into eternal silence. Immured, no contact with the pounding exterior.



That — which, again, could had been interpreted through a broad spectrum of quite contradictory reactions — had, therefore, the wrong virtue of further confounding the floundering crew — those numbers, those niggers of fictional action always at the ready for his disposal…? Crossed gazes all around, good and vainly trying to decipher perchance what…? Reciprocal proddings, mimetic shadowings — of a colloidal nature alright, of a frothy soapiness which stuck to your brains, thus thickening them further out…



Then they piped, still, and his photographic ears grew by beats, like bats’s. “There is no all, no other…” — they faltered, leaning despondently against the collapsing metal of his melting heart — meaning: “…remedy…?”



No reaction. And their spirits were rusting fast. One of them, possessed by some slothsome slumberous faucet of wit, poured: “Up, up, you fucker, up indeed, up an expanding scree of leftover urchins… Plenty of oomph left in thee! Nigerians to do, Thais, Guatemalans, Gabonese…”



Urchins whose time-lapse levitations flatter your trite senses into, into-into, into acknowledging that, okay, okay-okay, okay, all right, that there’s virgin territory to… Unlimited constellations to map out, that’s what. With what, what-what, what, with sporadical exhortations, yeah, of cozening instruction, of… Where’s the harangue…?



Go on, rebyata, ahead, ahoy, hurrah! The unregretted instant has elapsed! Exult, you guys! The sublime repeated to exhaustion, wow! The mob spiraling, head over toes, higgledy-piggledy, like a massive turd flushed down…



Chinese shadows… Camera obscura… All those cut-outs, little caricatures, black puppets, count ‘em, all those niggers that shilled for you…? Niggers? Persons? Persians, no doubt. Getting on on the action, a piece of, and of your wives’ asses…



The ashen spies back, smoldering now with their lurid tidings… Maenads nine, all perfidious. They (them the roughnecks) shilled for you even in their fucking them (the wives) instead…? Yes, sir, plenty of grounds for divorce, mister Bobby, sir.



Your wives, the exotics… The Texan, toxic bitch, a tocologist’s specimen… The New Englander, later with a croup like a frigate’s..? The Vermonter, homely as a Vermeer…?



Did they ever leave in a huff, the roughnecks, the niggers…? What, who gives a damn…? They were dismissed, having worn out, exhausted their welcome. Mostly. Marooned someplace along the way. Atolls, skerries… Along the path… Did they croak there? Definitely…? Doubtful. Plus, for them, yourself the step up the ladder — the what? — the ladder, the ladder. Nasty prickles to an fro from my crazy own stapling cephalalgiae, faugh...! Let instead the dead moon prevail… Let it publish unawares which horrendous, sidereal coughing does it take to bestow the fruits of fleeting existence on — one-two..., one-two... — on, on-on, on… But now: the fatigue, the fatigue…, one-two..., the fatigue — my adorable, petty petit-mals... Let them approach and be mauled, yes? Yes? — yes?-yes? — yes…? One-two, and ah, how clear and perfect her twentieth, no, her twenty-fourth shape finally appeared to my misty eyes…



“Bobby, listen! Do you not…?”



She was not ruined — I remember brightly thinking. A virginal young girl. Such a vestal for the temple of my ecstatic chastity…!



Her great and wide-flaunted troubles — just as much as those deep and high-flown wishes of mine — once fixed, what do they become…? Bah, totally vulgar little concerns of one more poor devil going pigheadedly about his moronic business…



The spleen sets, invariably, the ennui… Whom would he stick this time with his palsied finger (bang!) in the bloody eye…?



While they were trying to fix the ring in his ears, fey time flew — fie, fell.



They thought they could be satisfied remedying, mending stuff, over what they guessed… Subdue if only, at least, his quiet thorns — as we are gazing at his shaky frame through soggy zigzagging gauzes — all these new soft thorns of flesh, blobs erupting — rejoice somehow, for it also may mean rebirth…



Suddenly, they (the blobs) throve and accrued in a sheer exercise of bizarre might… Then, of course, we must all have been really spurred… I believe we were exhilarated by and with that dizzy, dizzying expectation... What a scene: a painting by Brueghel: a kermis, peasants that dance… Behind the loggia’s grim scrim… All those niggers flailing, kicking… Bye and bye, though, the glut of their crude exuberance, by itself, came to betray an exhaustion gone wild… Frame after frame, a fanatic squandering of the last resources…



“He is vomiting…” “…or a heart attack.” “A sly possession, a furtive rattling satanic unseizure, disownment, a wide-opened anxiety allowed to rot into a gangrene…” “…a gangrene-gangrene, a gangrene of the spirit, of the melting tegument that sustains his assumptive presence…”



Hammers of the heart, the bantering throbs, illusorily wreaking murder, with the rest of the universe — its heart also giving franticly up…? In the frenzied, blundering suicide of the totally in-wound, engrossedly ingrown solipsist…?



The purr that poisoned itself — too long under our cloak, and we are showing signs of shellshock. Better look elsewhere… The women at the mirror, harpies.



The sniveling idiot at the window arrogated the blasts, monopolized the howls, and, regardless, via the undulating electromagnetic potentialities of the air, his bigoted, much-strained sermon went unheard. This side of that powered turbulence, the drones were entirely in command of themselves, in the dry.



“There is no love like home-love, and, while supplies for it last, why, there is the active thrust of that willed engine which can move a person to survive herself in spite of the most shattering contrarieties…”



“Safe, Marietska, after the good end of all, across the more bedraggling penumbrae of emotional metamorphoses…”



Are they talking like a silly dying writer would make them talk…?



“As for your frantic roars of raving reversion, Maximine, your shameful inducement of involutionary conversion, your deviate’s dextrogyrate pronouncements… Why, that sacrificial, dilapidating abandonment of yourself — so akin to the defeated fascist’s abject puling in his wake — which now has left so mangled — mayhap forever — your addictive dignity of which so much was always made by all of us, before you became that gagging insect rapt in holy fervor to attain, obtain the total blank, black snow of forgetfulness... Why, I say, Maximine, it is only natural in one’s mourning… It shall pass in two bits of a lambkin’s tail.”



They console each other already. Soft and damp, rags of moist flesh intermingled. Women, so resourceful…, isn’t it? But how better to check successfully that sweat that reeks already with the anti-therapeutic stench of the defeatist’s backwash…?

Mister Perfect dying so imperfectly. Vomiting, they said…?



From where I remained, vilely and trying — in painful dispersion — to beguile their diehard hard-set foolhardihood toward a belated understanding of its cruciferous nefariousness...



The worthlessness of it all. Efforts for naught, ridiculous.



Stop the undignified shenanigans, bitches to the end.



I did not sense any kind, albeit weak — as were the broken-in shackles of the repressed yearnings at my neck to enlist, to enlist… — and breathe, breathe…!



No acknowledgement, albeit faint, no, to my entreaties; no answer then to my placating cyclic search, but then again…, who else was there likely to meet me half way, if, until they themselves gave the proper orders, nobody could budge each from her own nailed childhood of dim reasoning, her own awkwardly starched infancy of movement, without, alas, turning for the worse, without, yes, calling — with her arduous act — all into an all around mutiny of unstoppable serialization…?



“His cells giving up one after the other, and the next, and the next… Until nothing obtains… A clear emptiness, so clean, at last.”



The drawings so meaningful… Mironian, Watteaunian, a conflation of sorts, amazing the pants off the young experts… But then the phosphorous, napalm, white Pete, the fuel burning slowly but down to the very marrow…



Taking sides, fast. For the winners. At the very least with the gorged pits of genocide — then with that glass-replicated providential summoning — over the deadening din of the meaningless, ubiquitous graphs on the analogous charts gone by all symptoms repugnantly autonomous… Above all, my salutary, orchestral clear call…



“Bobby the writer, rich!”



His wives, his girls, niggers of another hue. And they all wanted safe passage home. “After all, Bobby, you know, do you not, we each were but a link of limited spontaneity.”



“Has he...?” “Bobby…?”



They were distorted ice lumps bumping in lye, almost fed up of groping in the dark, blindly inveighing shadows that fleshed up.



“Ough, I am shilly-shallying, for sooth… Where’s my head…? Instead of cognac, I’m giving him to swallow what…?” “Is that lye, a bizarre perfume…?” “Something outlandish no doubt. He’s been gathering odd shits all of his life.” Both half asked-down into trashy lamentation.



Instead of brashly urged to my — by now well deserved, but who’s counting — sundry accomplishments — two hundred plus novels… A marvel of enigmatic research, and skilful pasting up… Seeing which, the piled volumes, one certainly must — dear mother — surrender this his impatient conviction without further reticences…



Know (and know tough: for a fate of a fact) that tomorrow — when jarring rhapsodies of flayed genomes will monotonously come to tear asunder the membranous, teratologically homeotic bubbles of your fluctuating body, to wreak a good devil of a havoc among the murky eidola that blatantly used to make up — oh, trivial atrophy! — the very bulk of your true followers… You, you — you-you, you repeated to exhaustion… That tomorrow the last frame must be —a must — a triumph of decay.



No exasperated stamina — no apt coalescence of the thirteenth hour — will then suffice to slough off the synergistic general gelatinization…



Vomiting indeed.



Vile and cornered, awry, driven berserk, immediately overcome by the common gushing output of many woggy somebodys turned a dirtier inescapable mass — under the bland hammering chorus of the stereotyped: it coheres, it coheres... — no instigatrice (dilutedly basking in the vitiating purgative hymn) will be able but to exorcismally up this last sorrowful ante, and (next, next!) permit — sort of garishly soiled: the soaring smokescreen of rocket-foil stabbing blindly — the sealing, the welding, the excruciatingly painful searing upon each pale arrival till, converted into another kind of wrecked ape, your previous face that at a slow pace grimaced the anthem, is now a chafing scratch that, to seasonally greet the marchers tries to speak louder and louder…



From my mouth — from their mouths (the replicas’) — only maggots.



Their voices and mine, immortalized on burning paper…



But sure thing, they (the exotics left to finally melt into definitive grayness) shall be too ass-tightly flabbergasted then to recapture and still release, in all its mystagogically rich transpositions, at a pinch even the least one among the amazing articulator’s marvelously labored old harangues — of such a painstakingly synchronized eloquence, too, as to make them plenty worth to be told and retold — many a dead time, what the fuck, no question about that — except that they (the owners, a foreign body called your present wife and her attorneys) had had them burn — making place for the new. She selling the house… Nobody, none of the nigger girls, demanding one of them packets of lies, not even aware of their own, so faithfully recorded, but who ever gave a shit…?



Though forbiddingly tough up till now, the notables today were shaken, so quaveringly near the crux of the action — a wrong nod, and seen forever in the villainous side of heroism — wow again! — but not a single one of his productions worth a try at the presses…?



“Bobby? Bobby?”



Fine, I am searching. He hoists himself for a last barfing and a last mewling. Back to you now…



What…?



Bobby. Bobby the writer. Dead.





20.