Chemistry of Offensive Breath 5th, 6th, 7th...

5.


Coralline found at last the homo haunt of the day before. She entered the stinking dump. She sat and asked for tea.

She was sipping the scalding brew and dared put the question to the crumpled superannuated waiter. “Do you know if Willie the jackal is around…?”

“The slob usually comes in around eleven… If he’s not traveling for one of his jobs…”

After a while of waiting and a few more cups of tea, Coralline needed to piss. Monkey the waiter showed her the way to the pissing place. She found it pitch black and so hot that she was soon pouring with sweat. There was not a crack anywhere through which a chink of light could get in. She didn’t know where to piss. Soon she heard the nasal music of barrel organs, the sound of bells and cymbals; the wild party had again commenced… Willie the jackal must now be at the house. Somebody opened the door, the light poured in… Now she saw the hole on the floor where the juices were meant to flow… Willie’s silhouette appeared cut against the shimmering smoke… “And were you asking for me…?”

“First hold the door ajar, that I might see where the jet is due, ok…?”

No other preliminary courtesies, then. Now they were fast friends. She pissing and farting in front of him, he taking his dong out to do some of the same…

Back at the table they conversed unimpeded by the unalloyed racket; on the contrary, they found themselves rather helped by it, for their tête-à-tête bordered the conspiratorial. The flecked enamel of plates and mugs had no clout whatever to reflect their reddened resolute faces. Willie the jackal, who had always pretended that he rode everywhere and usually at a good clip, now was keeping straight and quiet, stiff as a rod. No sloppy commemorations of past glories, riding into semi-abandoned villages and sowing chaos pell-mell, storming a barn and holding court in the lousy apex of his exploits, making the farm drudges stagger up to him, the idol — the idol with his intercrural icon beckoning abreast, to be fondled and pawed and licked and adored by everyone, and mercy save whoever was stumped in his abilities to worship, for forthwith his head would be stamped on, for the Willie had a scimitar and, with a single flight of it, the neck of the offender would get neatly sliced, and everybody else among the gang would jump for joy and start a soccer match… Quaintly inspired, the two teams, in poised symphony, would shoot and score, and whoever had been nominated the prince (for Willie the jackal according to himself would always be declared the undisputed queen) would fetch his wherewithal with both hands and exploding the staggering expectations in the charged atmosphere would fling himself into the pitch, splendidly personified as the great redemptive remedy of an action all craved, ailingly, to a body — namely then, and plainly, what he did, he would hold his balls in a ball and with the teeth of the severed head he would castrate himself… However, it must be said that almost every time Willie explained those heroic deeds of his and his gang, many made fun of them… Often, especially when tipsy and with a handgun over the counter, though many struggled to cough some awkward spark of cynicism, nobody dared in the upshot do other than stir queasily and silently… The haggard hunch was that nothing short of terrifying was bound to ensue… The creep would surely shoot whoever doubted his malapropisms of a silly braggart…

Be it as it may, now he was sober and surreptitiously counting some advance money…

Coralline was saying: “Remember, roulotte number four. Enter unannounced. Get under the elephants, in between the studs, the props for the cages, where the big turds are gathered, the stink, only flies and bugs go and stay there… If you must ask, ask for Chuck the Chink — Twig Withy is only his nom-de-scene. Burst apart the flimsy door and bang with the bat his two legs, smash his knees to smithereens, and probably with that he’ll be finished showing off his freaking elasticity, which is such an irresistible sexual jailbait, I mean, attraction to both male and female… Go in and don’t look at him, he’d mesmerize you, you’d be a sucker the moment you saw him at his most seductive, he’d do some of his tricks and contortions, he can fashion himself in a jiffy into either an anal or vaginal dildo of throbbing flesh, be careful above all not to be enamored on the spot… And previously don’t attend to his act… Go and take a dump when he is in the central stage, in the middle of the arena, with all the spotlights caressing his suave shenanigans…”

Willie said: “Are you taking me for a sap…? I know how to take care of myself, worry you not a damned bit. The sneaky deed shall be sneakily done. Word of a jackal. He’s never been known to bungle a chore.”

She was faking a cold, she held a scented little silk handkerchief to her nose almost non-stop. She was paying for some pastis (Pernod, Ricard?) for she knew that the disgusting concoction tasted and smelled as mouthwash. With that she hoped to forestall some of the overpowering stench coming from the scatter-toothed mouth of the surely carrion-munching jackal.

“Well, what a scatterbrain that I am, my god, I had forgotten, I must be off!” Coralline leaped. “I must give our strategic studies the kiss of death for now. Call me once you are done; you well know the number, ha-ha.”

She was off, a little bit hobbled by a rebel heel who had splintered in her anxious adventure in the damp crapper. Piecemeal, her awkward steps resonated in the sour boardwalk following the river… She was thinking hard… In the meanwhile, unbeknownst to her, maybe due to the fact that perihelion currently occurs in early January, close to the winter solstice, her shadow hid and scampered, eloped with the shadow of a franticly movable tree, perhaps a discarded plastic Christmas one… Both shadows, in the shade of some clouds, could at last blessedly melt in delicious agony, they were having the sense rather of a Greek aorist, denoting that which once happened, and still continues to happen, pointing to a condition of feeling not limited to any time whatever…

She peered behind… Unquiet, as if assaulted by a sudden premonition of doom… Where was her fucking shadow…? No, no Sun. Had it set already…? Morose, she mistrusted even herself, her senses, her floating after-soul, her feminine intuition, all that…

Anyhow, that certainly was no time to joke… After such a momentous decision… Woodenly, she censured herself, jokes coming forth from recalled shows… Lousy, lame, keen-less… Some senile jests huskily knitted by creepy comedians — sick, poor, unbalanced… Drooled when nothing else comes to mind… Or is permitted by the turd-sucking censors…

I’ve drunk to much of that frog swill, she told herself. And sat on a bench above the river. Being and nothingness, that is the question. Hate to put a crimp on such a paltry single phenomenon, but what matters is the limitless tending upwards and onwards for all time towards our presents ideals fulfilled… Something like that… Screw the consequences…

The phone in her gabardine’s pocket rang. It was Chuckeline, her mother-in-law, well, the affable woman who used to be… She was phoning to ask if she could put her in. She was in town for a very grave matter. She had been here since the day before yesterday. Now she had quarreled again with her son. She felt much better with her ex-daughter-in-law.

Of course, Coralline said she (and probably was true) that she was delighted to have her at home. That she was going to call Nina about it. That she herself would be back shortly. That thank god she’d call. That she was always welcome, that she should come to her house first think. Skip visiting the bastard, he was such a pain in the ass…

She no longer felt winched and winded like a bloody loser jade… She with some elation peered high at the starry night, at which the shepherd’s heart does also take so much pleasure, indeed not, as the tyro might fancy, with any impure heart — imagining the houris and all the other extraterrestrial whores sown here and there in the coruscating planets — waiting to lasciviously dance just for him and his sheep makeshift lovers — all upright now in one common fate, saved (the sheep, for the sheep — unlike the wolves — somehow always get save, thanks to sacrifices and ceremonies and such balderdashes,) saved therefore the whole bunch, or how do you call it, the horde, the herd — but with a pure one (heart,) seeing himself and them tender lambs and lambettes as a bevy, a flock, a quacking fleet of angels aloft…

She called Nina now. Thank goodness she was in. “Listen, Chuckeline is coming… Make the spare room ready for her… Ah, she’s told you already…? She’s in better terms with us than with her rotten bastard of a son… Listen, I’ve met the palmist…, the sweaty palms mind-reader, the cookie of fortunes, whatever, the pestering silly old woman you were so jealous of…? She’s no old woman, she’s a stupid homo tough who the other day saw one of my cards in a flash and memorized the number… He says he translates the numbers into letters in lighting speed… Automatically… A warping of the mind due to his line of work… A professional distortion… A cop or something, a spy, looking for mysterious clues, and people trying to blow us up… To blow us up, to blast us to heavens… Naughty you are… He says our number spells GIRLIESCUM… I said: does it…? How nice…! He said: I choose always words with “dirty” meaning, if you know what I mean, like this they are much easier to imprint, nothing clicks into the brain so well… A stinking revolting putrefied bully… With sweaty palms, as I say, like shaking not a hand but a stagnant little pool of phlegm with five hideous lizards capering inside… I’m joking about him trying to pass for a magic palmist and having such noticeable palms…He says I only sweat and itch when relaxing out of the job (meaning he wasn’t pursuing me for no filthy blackmail — talking about filthy, you should’ve seen his nails!) He says, when on the job, trust me, I’m cool as a mackerel. I said: you too…?! He’s very stupid, he doesn’t get the joke. Anyway, he won’t annoy us anymore… Now he’s sure we are just a couple of dupe broads only intent on getting some tail and not on trying to undermine the principles of our hallowed democracy… Plus I gave him a check of $25 for the spies’ circle or their syndicate’s charity… I don’t know, but… Whoever cashes that check, he’s not coming back for more. Well, I guess in this hallowed democracy of ours we all have to go on buying little allotments of tranquility… By the way, I’m so late because a friend of a friend of a friend had her head under a steamroller… You bet she died… Chutney of brains and bones, seasoned with dogshit… Okay, we went to the undertaker and he’s is putting a fake head on the trunk, a wax affair, made-up with all the chichis, no qualms whatsoever, the bitch never looked so good before the steamroller rumpus, the steamroller bash, brain-bash… Ha-ha, yes… I love Chuckeline, she so gracious, and genial and amiable… Yeah, I think so too… Well, honey, see you in a few… Bye…”

Coralline drove to a mall. She needed the bathroom once more. She had to empty all the that frog-spit swallowed in the pigsty with the putrid jackal. She bought a book and went into the clean stalls. Quoting or quasi-quoting none too queasy now (au contraire) the equally hallowed Marx: After food, clothing, cover, and cunt…, a commode. A commode is the fifth commodity. As price opposes value, so the higher the price the lower the value (be it of something or of somebody,) and so the future of the West and the quality of commodes is interlocked. As the East gets more and more refined in its shitting practices so the value of dung itself devalues, and…, eh…, she was stumped, damn, always strictly limited and defined as to form and duration. In fine, the human condition was inescapable. Next she bought two little gifts, one for Nina and for Chuckeline. A darling little figurine of a gruesome monkey pushing and shoving some well-proportioned naked fountain nymphs for the senior woman, and a Japanese iron cudgel supposedly used in older folkloric times as an eminently reusable ass wipe for samurais. Indented or smoothly notched at every fraction of an inch, it was assured in the prospectus attached to it that it could even wipe away the tiniest of mustard seed, plus it had a set of cymbals at the bottom to indicate that the wiping had been successful. The wiper would shake it to show that the universal assumption of his skill was justified and the congregation rejoiced at such heroic and advanced achievements. Of course faqirs and other lowly castes had to be content using their fingers and washing them afterwards in the public well. Coralline for a harmless amusement made the cymbals clang, the dainty clangor brought her back, sweeping a the purview of few centuries which could be viewed as steeped and bathed in wells of essentials… One must always calculate from available precedents if willing to enter into the great ages of the so much pined-for gigantic conflicts nowadays…

The stupid cow-like cashier, a Negro fat woman, only answered: “Uh-huh…”

Uncommitted losers, she wasn’t going to cry for them when the cataclysms came.



6.


As she was driving herself home Coralline was thinking not about the charming notions of the last decaying egghead whose book she’d bought at the shopping center and later had been lightly scanning while comfortably sedent at the stall, sat or sitten on the clean commode — not therefore about how the massless Dirac fermions are pulled by magnetic fields in such a quaint manner that they gain a dynamic of their own, very much like precocious orphan bugs who, once embedded in some godforsaken rug, have to deal with the vicious raw material of the hither-and-thither crazily pulling-and-pushing rotten membranes of “what’s there,” each of them poor bugs singly at it, whether ready or not, gnawing and humping away, as if imbued with the undue burden of a raw impelling force on their own — the philosopher was picturing them in his mind, was going so far even as to transform into one of them tiny vulnerable bugs, outcast, ill-clad, uproariously grouchy and yet plenty plucky in the face of so much corrupted interlocking of so many piled-up adversities in a dizzying maelstrom of confluences of battling inimical territorialities, where shrugging guesses follow hints of confusion, and the gristles of the noses, and chewers and suckers and tendrils and tromps, and hoses and antennae and so on, get farther and farther afield, sniffing, exploring away, impelled by the hidden force of life, impaled by the kicks of blind, stupid, repetitive, mistake-prone, neither-rhyme-nor-reason, horror-tale, nowhere-bound evolution-driven eagerness, until, without warning or clue, here it is the ultimate blow, the hammer of death suddenly falling, all in the short instant of a bug’s existence… The tragic total sapping of so much vitality in the passing step of a half-drunken anguish-ridden broad going back to the console, not, mind you, to read about something enlightening as, say, a thick volume on Egyptology, where the first few chapters are conflated first in a single very palatable and easy to swallow paragraph, but to serve herself another shot…

No, Coralline was thinking about the loaded conundrum of the scorching wayfarer as a tottering old geezer… Thinking in a word about the gutsy fun woman who used to be her mother-in-law.

While at the helm of her smooth vehicle, Coralline was repeating formulae of gentile greetings: Charmed I’m sure… And: Hope you haven’t been sick… And: The family good…? And: The winter of the West, the victory of materialism and skepticism plainly suit you, and how becoming you those black rags with understated pearls on top… The convoluted way one uses when one talks even when trying to explain the easier of every day’s tasks... Telling her: Don’t mind me, I must be looking a wreck, such a terrible day, the shops a madness, the girls at the counters stupider than ever, I’m winded and winched like trumped-up jade… And: I was there when it happened, the cruel cops frisking the sluggish clown, who was nonetheless carelessly foisting grins on the scandalized audience, the cruel cops only pretending to frisk, in fact sticking him full of tiny poisoned daggers, conniving with the higher authorities to stamp all fun away, burning the circuses, sacrificing the strippers, prohibiting the smokes and the shots and the snorts…

“Hi, mama,” she greeted, kissing Chuckeline thrice on the cheeks.

Dear elder, juicy older lady, her eyes were wet with affability and judicious joy. They kissed next on the mouth. Nina was fetching a few extra aperitifs. She, Nina, was behaving a bit oddly, as if stuck-up, looking down on her betters. Did she know that not so long ago they (the two stylish mistresses) had even dallied together in a bit of harmless sex…?

Well, what can you do, affinities impose themselves, and the proximity of familiarity… They had hit it on… Once, the second year she had been married to her perjured son, the two of them, Chuckeline and Coralline, had taken a summer vacation together… And had Coralline learned, and has she been glad! And was her mother-in-law a vast source of good news! Many perks indeed were gained thanks to her seniority, both under the lofty sails of the cruiser and already in the island mountains. Chic hoary hairs open many otherwise obdurate doors — the guards thinking (if at all, bunch of stolid sticks-in-the-mud) that what the hell, that person shall anyway be presently, either straight away or in so short a duration that it doesn’t pay to interrupt one’s dumb somnolence. After all, is not like she (the bitchy crone) is going to enjoy for that long her privilege, her exception to the rules, her exclusive new knowledge, or whatever… While, in sparkling contrast, for a young comely person (like myself, thought Coralline,) due to what trick in the enduring transition from the general to the particular phase of evolution, being scapegoated, alas, is only the norm. The vain shareholders in your existential surrounding toss you out, revengefully, and you’re no longer CEO even of your own vital trajectory. You depend on so many malicious fags, the uniformed ones above all, such assholes, such pains in the neck. For us, the young and wonderful, all becomes so up-hilly and rocky and difficult…! Now irrupts cheatingly at play the universal animus against youth (especially as in my case when added to money and beauty,) boom, there it is, a dragon of hatred, raising its ugly pate, green monster, the envy, and then, of course, the suspicion that that marvelous person, already so blessed by the diverse deities, now will to top it all know too much — too much too soon from the obtuse arcana freighted maybe with radiant spills of meaning, and from the total hermetic machinery of power — and that’s unacceptable by all accounts to such a cowardly sold-out society — built exclusively on envy… For us so many doors stay closed, so many secrets undivulged, so many mysteries uncrackable… That’s where getting safely in tow behind, I mean after, the old distinguished woman, faintly, though securely and effortlessly, blazing a path of discovery, is so crucial! Excellent (and educational indeed) vacations all told, yes sir, not for this scrumptious time (not ever!) the millions of dreary hours spent in listlessly yawning, in depressing ennui, in suicidal immensity, in ponderous boredom, feeble caged moneys, psychotically itchy, full of tics…, depletedly, and suddenly rushingly, scratching your genitals…, obsessive, combing the short hairs ensconced in your nostrils…, clearing your throat of sticky undiggable phlegms…, slowly falling to pieces, and plunging into the well of despair, of spleen, of melancholy, of despondency, of etcetera, and etcetera and etcetera… All this family slow shit dripping morosely, such morbidity of thoughts, you are fed up with everything, but especially the idle fucking, and worse, the inane fucking around, and you want to kill them all, or end it all, and kill into the bargain (what a bargain indeed!) yourself, your fucking self too…

“How are things, mama! Coming back, I was recalling our mountain vacation. Such a delicious, divine little junket, no…?”

“Some people regarding whom you always more or less took for granted that they had kept the acquisition of a certain native intelligence, in a new light how they appear to really be peculiarly driveling dickheads, do they not, dear…?”

“Mama, I’m concerned, what is it…?”

“I’m here for Jippie. He’s having some bouts of dementia; I’m afraid the blasted disease will soon become irreversible unless we do something (and fast) about it. Would you believe that our doctor refuses to apportion Jippie with some so-called forbidden hard medicines…?”

“The bastard!”

“I’m told than in the dumps of the city specimens are available… With a bit of expense, of course, and after investing also in some resourceful research… Contraband stuff, illegal, and so on. Something very good, surely, or else why would they take so many pains to hide it from even us…?”

“Indeed! The criminal multinationals, the pharmaceutical compost piles, the sneaky politicians, I don’t doubt it for a sec. Poor Chuckeline, how right you are!”

“Anyway Jippie’s mind’s a mess. It never was anything much to speak of. But now, dear, deteriorating fast, his brain all blemishes, focuses, islets, lacunae a go-go. Gaga all the time, poor darling guy. I said, I must do…”

“Go-go, gaga, gummy, waiting for Godot… The guy gone in the noggin, his goosecap at loggerheads… Such talent, you shame us all. Ha-ha. Dear, you always had a way with words!”

“Pas vrai…? And wait for next livraison… Justement… Yesterday in the plane I was thinking, boy, wasn’t that Beckett off the mark!”

“Ha-ha, poor guy, why?”

“Wasn’t he who said there’s more pricks than kicks? Well, I had nothing better to do… The novel by that Frenchman too silly…”

“Which Frenchman…?”

“That faggot Céline…?”

“I love Céline!”

“Well, he has a woman’s name.”

“What’s wrong with that, so do we!”

“Not the same, you devil, you.”

“What about the Chinks, they all got idiotic pet’s names. Or like prick’s names, or like dildo’s… Dong, Chung, Fong, Gong-Gong…?”

“Exactly, that I was thinking… You pricks, always so male-centric! More pricks than kicks…? Give me a break, you must be daft! While there is only roughly half of the population with pricks, everyone kicks the bucket, therefore there is at all times not only more kicks than pricks but roughly the double!

“Double your pleasure, though, of course, he might have said the contrary…”

“Ah…?”

“I mean Beckett, gratuitous bastard, aren’t they all the same…?”

“Ah. Now you’ve set my brain a-dancing, naughty girl! Maybe he had it right… Maybe he said more kicks than pricks… I ought to spank you.”

“Please! Refais-le-me-le…!”

“Ill-starred maiden who kicks against the pricks!”

“You got that right, ha-ha!”

“Plus listen: And the sapiens hath said in his heart: There’s but meaning, the rest is past time…”

“There’s but meaning, the rest is past-time! How deep! Did you read it today?”

“Yeah, one of these days. I’m about halfway in the booklet by that faqir who comes down from that very high standpoint, where there is no longer a valid moral reason for condemning any practice, be it (the instance of intertwined happening) lost wherever, whether in the future or the present, or the pluperfect if you will…, and argues that in every case, when we are told about the suicides of the so-called past, none of them hold water, every case winched and tricked and a damned ascription, how you call it, an anaphylactic (for instead of helping and boosting the live intricate tissue suddenly proves toxic), and apocryphal, scriptoid added much later by the manipulators of time, which is non-existent by the way, for only space is extant, space as a smashed and slit bleak painting of a rough surface called inter-universe…”

“Wow! You’ve got to pass me along the how you call it, the reference…”

“But of course… But anyway, as photons have no mass but can still feel the gravitational pull of the Sun due to their dynamic mass, likewise the neurons… If…”

“Isn’t embarrassing to see the trite depressing melodrama of humanity…? The masses accepting with resignation the victory of blood and instinct (for true it is, isn’t it, that, as the guru explained, people don’t imagine life to be worth living without war,) while the illumined machinery studies stars in distant galaxies…? Who of both camps is in the wrong…? I was reading in a magazine just yesterday, I think, that a group of teamsters in a Detroit factory have taken but a bit of some new ultra-thin material called “graphene” — slivers of graphite, mind you, with the wideness of just an atom — and stretching it with tiny pliers and so on have been able as it were to paint a new universe… Meaning that in every atom a potential new universe lurks! The mind reels, doesn’t it? Inflexible jerks criticize personal foibles, but are the rotten at the core institutions which automatically select individuals who never gainsay the lies put forward by the same never analyzed institutions… All needs to be overhauled, and no less the same cosmos which we deludedly assume holds us, when it might well be, without being too skeptically solipsistic, that in each of us… But of course, you are right, Jippie’s case is even more outrageous…”

“Dear, and no shit. His mind not a pretty picture, the least one can say… Brooking no word of advice, waiting for no protestation that would inconvenience their self-appointed task, damned wrecking-balls of the edifices of the soul, the religiously afflicted cells proceed to scatter the leaves of the great book of Jippie’s mind, proceed to eliminate at random, with coarse doodles and oblique frantic lines, a big deal of the perfectly legitimate words they meet with as they fall raging down the rapids of their crazy spree… Only their mute hoarse sardonic laughter is able to catch up with this disastrous avalanche… The painting of the universe in Jippie’s mind now a bloody shambles, my pet…”

“You depict the symptoms with such poetry!”

“One must, or falls a-prey of despondency and madness. Bemoaning fate’s military-like treacheries serves no purpose. Protecting the synapses, make the dendrites more able to withstand insults, that’s the only ticket to fleeting salvation, my friend…, an elusive, illusory respite, what else can we hope for…?

While Chuckeline rhapsodized, Coralline thought in passing about Jippie, Chuckeline’s non-entity of a husband, a humble, rich, wriggly, drool-y sort of guy, putative father of the retarded bastard I married — well, all things considered, maybe not so putative after all… Both of them reticent pansies, and with a brain to match, full of fuming stercoraceous holes…

Sternly, her ex-mother-in-law cited from Horace or from somebody about supposing the shame she must endure among the rather worthless bunch of ignoramuses who must be holding the prohibited nostrums, energumens with no counsel worth its salt, scum-headed fellows who once they took her gold coins and slunk away, much as cursed replete bleeding hyenas would do, down to their pretentious hut or hole in the mud, Jippie’s medicine safely in her hands, they next would blow all the hard-earned moneys in cheap no-account whores no doubt, and whiskies and whatnot, golf-clubs, fur stoles, mono-place airplanes, leisure submarines, impertinent appurtenances the miserable never knew how to handle properly, soberly enough, and never (no, god forbid) in the service of humanity, now possibly afflicted with a new brain-liquefying pandemic of intergalactic proportions or so…

As for Jippie’s plight, who knew; not that the deterioration was too noticeable, as she had already said, but funerals and inheritances and additional taxes cost lots of money. That’s why.

“Anyhow, honeydew, I wisely consulted with a consummated sage and he recommends those pills… Those pills, willy-nilly, fall-who-may… Extract of abyssal fish electricity…, mixed with so-called abusive substances…, and the hell if I remember what else… He wrote it down here in this chit… Capitis dolorem remediat torpedo nigra viva inposita eo loco… Ache of head is remedied by the black abyssal fish when alive is posited upon the freaking place… Numbness ensues which purports indubitable healing…”

“Listen, mama love, a shifty acquaintance of mine, a worthless thug, also a fairy, he’s at my service, for little silly peccadilloes like that…”

“Oh really…? If you could make him…?”

“I’ll call on him tomorrow, think of it as done.”

“Poor Jippie! He was always so fond of you. He’d worry that little crooked worm between his legs to death, for days on end, swimming in piles and piles of your dirty underwear, that he would filch from the hamper…”

“Devil Jippie, shitty guy…”

“And now with his awkward malady; unpresentable, you know…?”

“I do; he was always so scarecrow-y, always unseasonable, fashion-wise, you might say…, but now, I imagine, it’s got to be much worse…”

“Dear, if you only knew! A prairie-wide spate of prominent outright inconveniencies… A rapidly shrinking brain, a diabolic mechanism by which brain cells are damaged, inflammation occurs, nerve impulses that are passed between cells during routine activities like learning and memory become totally toxic, a chronic neuro-degenerative disease that, instead of triggering the formation of memories, triggers fickle impulses that inflict irreparable injury on neurons and disrupts the neurologic and cardiovascular functions. Those hazardous cells, as the bigoted rider that rides down-hill straight to his grave, have an incredible arrogance, their misanthropic hubris grows every hour at least a few audible notches, too confident in their victory when the all-out attack on neurological functions has been splittingly sounded. Understanding this mechanism, my sage proposes in consequence a strategy of chemical preconditioning in order to induce adaptations in nerve cells that would perhaps enable the cells to better withstand toxic attacks and thus prevent injury and insult. I said: Quite, I get you, preconditioning allows the nervous system to experience stress and this experience make it more resistant to future encounters with stress and the damage it can trigger… He said: Take that nasty villain, glutamate, an amino acid that normally acts as a neurotransmitter… I said: Isn’t that what the Chinks put in their disgusting concoctions…? No wonder they all appear to be so brainless…”

“And boneless, you might have added… Except that all of them are each a single ambulant dick… They look like dicks, they act like dicks…”

“Quite. But anyway glutamate overly excites the hapless neurons, those neurons that were more happy enjoying their rest, unawares, hanging ten for a min, causing damage and death wholesale among them, a process yclept excito-toxicity. Then the crooked branches of neurons that carry impulses toward the body of the nerve cell, the dendrites, and the places where impulses pass from neuron to neuron, the synapses, say, altogether now, what the hell is happening here, are we deranged, ma’am…? This they curiously inquire, heaving with the pangs and rattles of agony, and the diseased Jippie, or whoever the cripple be, who is attained with that sanctimonious plague, mad as a hatter, in his enraged head, he shouts all sort of dirty foreign words; you have to put him in isolation, into a cork-walled and mattress-walled room, until death doth make him freaking pipe down…”

“Though how humane and considerate the touch of the many mattresses, indeed.”

“It seems that in lab studies brain cells are bombarded, wait a minute, with diazoxide and memantine, drugs used in ischemic heart disease, and in strokes, and blockers of glutamate receptors to boot… I hope I have the notes well arranged; however, all those concepts of sneak blitzy attack to the exposed vulnerable little silly body, how dreary and horrible, don’t you think…? Furthermore, as the sages say, lab studies show also that elevated levels of PAF promote beading on dendrites and wound, as with tiny Injun’s arrows, the synapses, this after a series of bursts of synaptic activity similar to those that appear involved in learning and memory… I tell you, you tell me, how bitchy can nature get! Jippie’s thing characterizes itself especially by swelling and beading and loss of the spines of the dendrites… The brain shrinks awfully, I’ve already said that, and that malignant fellow PAF, platelet-activating factor, which is a compound that promotes inflammation and plays the role of the ubiquitous clown in the brain, can be produced by neurons and takes part in the workings and other shenanigans of synapses… Immune cells gone bonkers, producing it during the unmanageable mirroring inflammations… If you happen to have it in the industrial magnitudes that Jippie carries it, them, him, hers, whatever…, the point is: that zero learning ensues, and zero remembering also…”

“Everything’s so awful, darling.”

“Bummer, you know; what else can you say…?”

“Damn, tell me about it… And my head’s aching also… Listen, to change the subject…; since coming home and recalling the famous nights at the island mountains… I’m a bit frisky…? It’s a long trip from the shopping center, know what I mean…? Again in my mind the travelogue of dreams, of polished bronze dreams… Feelers of pleasure, buzzing, twinkling, with such vigor and stamina… Up! Brazen bronze feelers of pleasure, up, up, up! Shiny feathers of her snatch, preened, tongue-preened…! That I’m telling myself, darling, aloft, while driving, driveling almost, in a cloud, enmeshed in vapors of lewdness, and, dear mama love, who, but who, such a long trip, the thighs so tight, who, the juices flowing, the brain showing again the dreamy picture, the nose, who, the nose smelling the salty sourly…, the buds tasting…, yeah, who could resist it…?”

They embraced, so captivatingly…

And now Nina also came. A threesome…

And now Nina also came… And now Nina also…



7.


The bell at the door rang. “You-whooo…! Maximine am apparat…!” Maximine yelled from the landing behind door.

Nina went to open. For once she was beaming. She was also a bit tipsy. Today there was a party, a farewell party for Chuckeline, a farewell, and also a till we meet again, soon, we hope, party, as Coralline had put it. Champagne was flowing.

These last three weeks had been, as they say, momentous…? In Chuckeline’s pocket there was at least a year’s allowance of the magic electrical pills…

Chuck the Contortionist Chink had been maimed for good…

Regarding this last item, Maximine, upon being appraised of it, had suspected something…, “something fishy,” she said, but she was given to peruse a little notice in a blog assumingly kept by a circus employee… An elephant, a she-elephant in musth, had crushed Twig Withy’s legs, and not by any means, no way, any sort of dirty trick… And next the issue became wrinkles and dry skin, and itchy peelings in the inner linings of the orifices, and not due against undue, or ethical arguments for imperative analysis against laissez-faire justice for the leisured classes, or formulaic trial and harsh process against sundry dastardly misdeeds…

Now everyone more or less found herself willing hostage to the intoxicating fumes of good wine and good pot. Halting on many tongues the words of great fashion-makers, plus here and there, scattered for balance and façade-building and good taste, also the name of a striking philosopher or two had to pop. If the construction of the last sentence jars somewhat, if it sounds a bit Germanic, maybe it has to be with Coralline’s readings of late. Spengler, Nietzsche, Fichte, Brahms, Listz, Arcimboldo, or whoever the Kant…

She just crushed a numb winter fly with her hand. “Ach, es klebt Blut an meinen Händen…,” she said. Nina, her vacant air of the unversed blond melted away, her doll’s face now tinkling and sparkling, mirroring perhaps her soul’s innate bend for rioting now reawakened, or let’s say her inborn genius for partying, hmm, reignited…, laughed her head off. “Is that French…? All the French are faggots,” she said.

Nobody objected to the blanket indictment. Whether the reason for the lack of any challenge to the statement was that all of them agreed to it or not, who knows. Consciences were abdicating their right to moderate. Every silly phrase could be construed as something else. We, that is, they were overwhelmed by a tremendous feeling of exultation. There were tacked up on one of the walls a few very distressing photos of elderly people and housewives and babies, who, after they had been fired upon by our heroic unimpeachable troops with a few rounds of white phosphorous shells, were rotting in situ. A murderous substance built in principle to burn through metal bunkers, now had been hurled at them and had melted their skin and flesh in a tick. A screen of fire that couldn’t be extinguished with water had enveloped them all of a sudden…

“Wünsche und Hoffnungen können durch aussen kommende brutale Geschehen plotz vernichtet werden… Man, and how true!” Had commented Coralline.

And now Maximine was talking about the igniis fatuous ensconced in the fabric of the soul of even the most slavishly submissive and least arrogant of god’s children.

A very young girl, a neighbor, a close friend of Nina’s, talked about her dream. “Strangely out of date,” Chuckeline said, “More likely to have been dreamed by somebody my age…”

“Maybe archetypal, then,” the giggly girl said.

A tenuous blanket of deadly radioactivity was hovering above every surface of the globe, the sphere, the planet indeed… Planet, shrouded traveler of the desolate asphyxiated firmament, as the grim sickle-carrier, spitting bezoars of hatred, tawdry sorcerer, surveyed the utter destruction, everything poisoned, barren, trodden down by the exterminating pall, wretched, heinous, every ex-organism nothing but a discarnate flaw on the sorrowful ruins… A hobbled planet indeed, enveloped in a dull fine kill-all matte shroud of lethal dust…

Nobody gave a damn whether the deadly pall now inerasably lurking above the doomed Earth, instead of the lively and lovely polychrome atmosphere of yesteryear, should’ve been really gray, rather than purple or maybe greenish… No, too late. Past time to talk of fashion and color tones… Too drunk everyone.

An immense sense of euphoria suffusing the sisterhood… “I’m gradually leaking away,” Nina said, for after laughing so hard for so long she at last noticed that, by tiny bouts, she had been pissing herself over and through. She put the bottle back on the shelf and went to fetch a towel, or perhaps she went to change her underwear…?

The pretty neighbor, who worked in the city’s tax office, said she had never had so much fun in her life. That sisterhood is life. That men are lice, lying lice, of course. “Steer a careful course clear between the realms of lice and the realms of fleas. Women are much cleaner,” she concluded.

She, her name was Naveline, was almost 21. A circumspect wisp of a girl, she nonetheless packed a wallop. Her breakfasts were gargantuan, full of fortifiers, and vitamins, and special muscling chocolates. “Those pesky teasers, the Aztecs,” she said, “reserved the whole crop just for the warriors…”

“Warriors, eh? It must have been the heroin of yore,” commented Maximine.

Naveline added: “A handful of cacao beans could buy you the services of a courtesan, or of eleven skunky whores, your choice…”

Most of the party laughed at the quip. The bacchantes were all at the edge of inner collapse. They were recruits for the next battle of the naked ladies. Everybody was starting to shove and elbow everybody else…

Feeling randy, Naveline corralled Coralline and tried to woo her, “What about those terrifying photos? The pathos, not true? It eats at the fabric.”

“Huh…?” Said Coralline, perhaps too far gone. “Ah, sorry, for a moment I thought you meant that he, the Greek fellow, was taking a sandwich to the factory, and then I though he? whom? which Greek worker? and which factory?”

Naveline groaned. “Beware a woman scorned, and cave canem also,” she hissed, feeling as holy and justified for mayhem as another selfsame warrior.

Satanic Coralline ignored her. She went to another cluster of chicks talking animatedly about Duchamp’s Goss Selavie, a woman of weight and circumstance — a bit bitchy, but how can you command any respect without bitchiness, I ask you…?

In a strangely strangled voice the elder of the party, the honored granddame, nonchalantly tossed apart all those cluster bombs and Molotov cocktails, and viciously attacked…

“That faggot, Voltaire!”

“I love Voltaire,” jumped again Coralline.

“Well, he’s flaunting a highfalutin’ chick’s name also, doesn’t he?”

“Is it…?”

“What…?”

“A female’s name, Voltaire.” And without giving Chuckeline space for a retort, Coralline continued, apparently in high dudgeon, or at least peeved: “If your son wouldn’t have been a faggot himself, maybe I would have a precious daughter by now. I would’ve called her Voltaire…” She said, and added, as an afterthought: “And her sister Céline.”

“Well, bully for you!” Spat the stately matron.

“Are you two crossed…?” Asked, a bit concerned, Maximine.

Nina intervened, dismissing the spat. “Lovers’ spat,” in a mellow voice she dreamily recited… “I’m lost in a reverie of harmonious womankind sailing in the vaginal interstices of the music of the spheres up above among the milky tit galaxies,” she certified.

“He’s adopted,” Dropped the elder statewoman, deadly grave, as somebody who, not drunk this time, drops a bomb.

“Who, Molière…? I mean Voltaire…?” Coralline was ready to jest.

“Dick,” answered the beautiful dowager queen.

It was a shock. Unbelievable. Coralline sputtered: “Dick’s adopted…? Your son…? But he looks so much as Jippie the wreck, I mean, sorry, his father…”

“The guy’s so mean! Now it stands to reason. Coming from a background of degenerates…” Manifested, somehow highly vindicated, Maximine.

But Chuckeline said, and somewhat solemn too: “He’s adopted. An uncle of him had him, or rather a courtesan he knew, the uncle, Jaffie…?”

“Jaffie the uncle is the dad…?”

“Yep.”

“Is he also rich…?”

“Nope, not any more. Spent it all on whores, then he died.”

“Another hero gone to greener pastures…” Epitaphed Coralline.

“Viridis is the name…” Stepped in Maximine.

A bit shrill Nina inquired: “The name of what…?”

“The name for green, meaning also strong, vigorous, full of stamina and possibilities, all fresh.”

“And very fresh he was with the ladies, too.”

“In fine, the fresh to the fresh…” Re-epitaphed Coralline.

Finished Chuckeline: “…pastures.” Then added: “And how appropriate too. He had a yen for fritillaries, and guinea-hen flowers, adobe-lilies, crown-imperials… The lot of the fritillaria family… Alas, his only humanizing trait.”

“Well, if we ever visit his grave, we know what to put on it.”

“A period, if it has snowed,” quipped, classically, Maximine.

The general laugh was curtailed by Chuckeline’s continuation on the same theme, a slight variation perhaps: “The day I came to the city for Jippie’s pills I told Dick. He’s old enough to know.”

“In his bloody forties,” bitterly interjected Coralline.

“He went bananas, he protested his raped innocence. I said, you are too old to be raped. He said he had always felt unloved. He said, and yet now I still feel more unloved. He said, I’m going to commit suicide. He started crying… I told him, spare me the touchy shit… He heard the word shit and became scandalized. I said: I said spare me the touchy shit, hypocritical bourgeois old fascistic lady…! People like you make me sick! Always bringing down the world to the level of beasts! He childishly banged his head on the wall, said he would retire forever into some dismal crypt to live with corpses… I said creep is the word all right… He went for a broom… Shitty boy… I hoofed it out of there faster than if I had a sniper at my tail…”

“But… But what about Jippie…? Didn’t the two of you… Couldn’t you two… I’m at a loss…” Coralline stuttered, “is he impotent…?”

“Don’t think so, he loves all kinds of animals…”

“Gross!” Shouted Nina. Maximine remarked: “Here come again the green pastures.”

Said Chuckeline: “Never had sex with him.”

“Grosser!”

“Miracles were needed to bring me to submit to the flingy hangy stringy thingy of his…”

“Grossest!”

“A piggie’s…”

“Eeek!”

“…and grunting after the fragrant flavorsome truffle of my cunt…”

“Weee…!” We all, that is, they all exulted.

“…if ever he touched me, the stark fabric of my soul felt torn apart by two contradictory instincts, the instinct to flee, the instinct to kill him.”

“So dramatic!” Said Nina.

“Well, dear, everybody goes through the same quandary…” Mollified Coralline.

Plus, more words of consolation poured from the two others… The four of them felt bolstered by each other’s company. Plenty of kisses and hugs were exchanged.

True, today’s the day Chuckeline goes back to the sticks… She is due to board the plane at a tick or two before midnight and skedaddle among the clouds back to the prairie… She has to nurse the wretched idiot Jippie — she’ll do it at arm’s length, surely, and through the mediation of the help. She has to tend (much more a-near and lovingly this time) her spate of lively manly horses… Duty calls, it can’t be antedated, you know.

La fidélité au devoir… (how goes the faggoty ditty…?) …est fatale comme l’orgueil de la menstruation est fatale a la fidélité…? How does it go…? Hanged as a hangnail (the horror!) now if we know.

It was only quarter to nine.



8.