Seventeenth...

17.



Back from the brink, Chuck awoke. I’m crashing, I’m crashing…, he thought, still aloft. We are being poured down. A sea rimmed with a jagged range. Hiatal, ourselves, a funnel spiraling to the abyss. Rhapsodies of clunky noise, and then on a plate of metal, offered, uncooked.

A whale from Damascus, a dolphin called Damocles. Abyssal fishes for the candle-lit dinner. “Double serving for thy friendly costumer the shark, please.” He’s willing, he’s rutting, he’s a crotch-happy-slick guy with hunger and transgression in his mind. How suitable. His teeth like phosphenes of a fireworks-ridden night. And in a tense wait… Who’ll devour the rest of my choice bits…? Who must, on musth with mustard, and in competitive thrust, like slavering hyenas, or else on a first arrived first served leisurely plan…? Who’ll recover (lovely expression, my pets) the carrion, who’ll wrap himself and run with it, who’ll adhere (good word too, soft soothing “willingness” is there somewhere folded in it as well) them odd morsels to the frothy lining of his womb…? Who’ll finally digest and integrate…? In whom shall definitely steep and to better vistas be witness my blanched bones, my unequivocal wrist, my still warm beliefs, my enhanced links, my virginal cockatrice…? Am I due now, transmogrified, metempsychotic of sorts, at the real shrine of the faithful, the just…? Buddha, with Buddha’s navel blinking at the fore, satisfyingly at court, presiding, smiling his devious smile… With a devious smile erasing the eyes, only the neighs being allowed to be left. Mellifluent, he parts the waters: “—The ay-sayers at my left, the nay-sayers at my right…” The horses saved, the elephant-crushed Chinese up for reloading: failed shot, fell short, try again, do better next time…

How symptomatic, he thought, eh. For a Chinese to dream dreams so Chinky flavored. Buddha-boudin, decreeing the shape of things coming. How quaint. Archetypal, maybe. From every somatic opening, my spiritual culture juicing away like mucus from a snail when broiled, edged finally that far off side of life… Yeah, jump in to the populously clogged sewer of the ages, vile gastropod… Crashing, ah, euphoria, where’s my hatchet that I my add to god’s act…? Crashing… How easy with a shell so friable, my friend.

He heard a mocking snort above his back. He was coiled, folded inside himself, boiling with terror, pretending he was mending the heel of one of his boots…?

He glowered at the image of himself in the mirror. Shrilly he insulted his double, a rude racial epithet. He got up, stood on his hands, with his arms for legs he strode up to the low terrarium where the critters were squirming. Looking at them, upside down, with the leaves of lettuce the canopy of their sky…, he remembered. Ah, yes. His second dream had been much more pleasant.

A quasi paradise. The spiders big and colorful as birds, only their pincers and stings ominous… You could pick them up by the scruff of their necks. The parrots on the other hand were small as butterflies; and then smaller: as ladybirds; and smaller still, and a lot flatter, like seeds, like samaras, though still colorful, still alive, still beaky, still talkative, in tiny, not disagreeable little voices… What were they saying…? “Pick yourself up by the scruff of your neck.”

Also, the women, so free, naked and shaved, their nipples perking out, their fallocryptic clitties so prone to putrescibility when in the polluted cage of lowly planet Earth, so jollily protruding here instead, and healthy looking and even garrulous, also parroty…? Clits claiming to be able to plead for their good taste at and in and of and with everything…? Giving tongue at being given tongue…? Come and have a taste. The thrill of it all.

But the men, aggressive as always, hating anyone’s success, coveting the neighbors’ sundry shriveled possessions, is that it, exactly like at home…? No, not in the least. You are totally wrong here. Men are all regular Joes, good-humored, and sensitive, and altruistic. They go to all kinds of lengths to make life most enjoyable for everyone concerned. At a pinch, they are only envious (healthily emulating, arch-praising admirers) of the others’ WebPages and the exuberant poems in there posted by each and everyone, for, yes, you bet, every guy’s a dedicated poet and artist indeed.

—But, hey, who works…?

—The drones do.

—The riches, the leisure, the electricity… Where does it all come…?

—Just as now, the drones at it all day, hidden, synergastic, all together now, producing the goodies non-stop. Nice problem-less beings without none of your foreshortened proclivities, like aiming to improve, or to catch up, or die in the intent… No, provided only with long-term purposes of accomplishment for the task at hand… Successfully neutered from all out-of-the-way ambitions… How convenient, don’t you think…?

—But let’s say, one of them had scuffed his toe at the foot of a heavy cutting machine… It bled…? Were they also neutered out of blood…? No bloodstained rags? No sickening unhygienic pouring of ugly infectious substances…? No cobwebbed slivers of bone protruding form the truculent breaks…? No whirling and squawking in pain…?

—Not at all, not at all.

—What about food…?

—Arrows.

—Arrows…?

—For duck hunting, rabbit hunting, mushroom hunting, snail hunting, and such. Ah, and the women are so fetching. And their spit is curative. And we commoners are allowed to stall and lollygag for as long as it so pleases us… No pining, no repining, all little bosquets of pines… With birdies in them, parrots, butterflies, spiders… Eden again, but improved a great deal. No misgivings, no lightning storms, only good sandwiches and cold frothy stout…

The phone rang.

Chuck lithely walked on his hands up to the kitchen table where the phone rested, feverish, shivering. Maximine wanted to know was he endorsing or not his attendance at tonight’s feast. She assured him that the night when her Jag broke down and she had to spend it in his bed, he had sworn to his obese gods to keep doing right and now she was suspecting him of meaning wrong, and thus she was recriminating upon him that he had not only not RSVPed but not even bothered to maybe unvirgin the nicely wrought envelope? Wouldn’t he otherwise have phoned her, risibly commenting on the ludicrous new chapter of Bobby’s published work?

He said: “Count me on, dear, and sorry. Too busy traveling exotic. I’ll tell you all about it. As to what concerns the party forthcoming, I can only guess and hope that it’ll be a doozy and a whammy and whopper, though surely withal not up to my dreams.”

Maximine assured him: “It shall without a doubt be much better, you silly boy. Considerably, even sidereally, past your wildest. Poor Coralline will be there. Wait for the shock of her life. It’s got to be fantastic. She thinks the Thai’s in prison. In fact she’s with child. Huge…! She looks like a skeeter knocked up by an elephant.”

“Oi-weh, bitchy-witchy. Though it’s true it promises to be grand. I’ll be there. I’m just selecting my wheelchair de luxe…”


18.