Diegeses Read online

  ACT II

  It smelled like shit. No, something else. Roadkill. A corpse. An old corpse, one that’s been decomposing and rotting for months. Otherworldly stench. Beyond swinefunk. Impossible for the senses to negotiate. It hit Curd in waves as he approached his office in a vociferous flow of foot traffic. Dryheaving, he looked around to see if there was a culprit, a dead elephant, an exploded sewage pump, something. Something big and bludgeoned. But there was nothing.

  Outside the office entranceway, beneath a careworn gray awning, a brick wall oozed pus from a constellation of six apertures that resembled deep sex wounds. Curd studied the anomalies carefully. He sampled the pus and rubbed it in a tiny circular motion with thumb and forefinger. Felt like snot, the way it coalesced into small, hard balls.

  He went inside.

  Mz. Hennington was writing something on a soupedup Admiral typewriter. She typed so fast Curd could almost see the sparks shooting from her knuckles as a flurry of cyphers darted across the VDT looming over the keys. He hung up his coat, stepped behind her, and placed a hand on the satin fabric of her shoulder. She froze.

  [Whiteknuckled spectators. Skewered pianists hunched onto the bloodspattered keys in weird pieces. Eyes scraped out.]

  “Something’s wrong,” he said, playing with a lock of her hair.

  She didn’t turn around. She sat stiffly in her chair and replied, “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know. It’s bad, though. Baaad.” He took her by the arms, pulled her to her feet and ran his palms, slowly, with mild calculation, across the bridge of her ass. Mz. Hennington cocked her head. Smirked. Curd kicked the chair aside and pulled up her skirt and yanked down her panties, throwing her off balance. She broke a heel. Apologizing, Curd locked her elbows behind her back with the crowbar of his forearm, pushed her down onto the desktop, cheek to cherrywood, and fucked her. Slowly, tenderly, accomplishing a fine rhythm. Then rough.

  [Atrum vir astrum procul vos tergo procerus fenestra.]

  As he neared climax, something welled up in him, something other than the proverbial rich substance. A sound. A distant cry . . . for help? Possibly. Thrusting harder and harder, he glanced around the office, looking for a source, an origin . . . And the sound evolved into another creature, from steady, meek whimper to ardent, profound screech. An inhuman screech. A static screech, emanating from his core, rattling the framework of his sensorium. He panicked, but not enough to call it quits. He finished the job before collapsing sharply onto his knees, pain shooting up his thighs, into his groin, and then he toppled over, head smashing into the floor as if flung there. The screech retreated, dimmed, culminated in a kind of soft monkchant. Then faded to zero.

  The last thing Curd remembered was the taste of it. Putrid. Metallic, electric.

  [Cryptoconchoidsiphonostomata.]

  •

  “There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with you, Mr. Curd,” said the doctor.

  “Curd,” said Curd.

  The doctor scrutinized a clipboard. “Ah yes. There you are.”

  •

  The coffee tasted good. Usually it tasted like diluted oil. But he actually detected a kind of nut or stuntnut flavor, and the aftertaste was ok.

  He sat by himself at a corner table and looked out the window. He brought a newspaper with him, opened it to the business section, the stock market subsection, and laid it out in front of him so that he didn’t look like a bum sitting there drinking coffee without purpose or interest in the goings-on of serious men.

  Outside a team of construction workers held up traffic. They seemed more interested in holding up traffic than fixing the street; if they thought a vehicle might try to glide around them too quickly or aggressively, they piledrived a canny hole in the vehicle’s path, sometimes railroading it, but usually just exacerbating the already pronounced frustration and anxiety of drivers. Textbook civilization. What caught Curd’s eye was a pair of outrémen across the street. He could barely see them from his position, and he had to lean over and twist his neck to get a clearer look.

  He pressed his nose against the glass.

  The outrémen wore standard exile-ready attire. One could have easily mistaken them for flâneurs at first glance, but careful observation revealed certain nuances and enhancements about their persons that gave them away. They stood about nine or ten feet apart, like two gunslingers itching for a draw, eyes round and loud, hands at hips with fingers spread and trembling, thigh muscles flexing beneath the crylove fabric of their trousers.

  This went on for awhile. For nearly half a cup of coffee.

  Then the outrémen staggered towards one another, trading words. Curd couldn’t be sure if they were friendly or hostile, or even coherent, and on a few occasions the outrémen cried out and emitted haunting growls. They moved forward in a broken lurch. Mild interest threaded into raw fascination when, for a moment, Curd suspected they might merge, and kiss; their tilted faces came closer, as if on rails, ensuring no other outcome than lips on lips. He was about to exclaim, “They’re going to kiss!” but he caught his breath, almost choking, feeling like he had swallowed his Adam’s apple.

  Calmly, the outrémen feasted on one another.

  It began with a simple nip, a minuscule portion of flesh that the outréman on the left removed from the cheek of the outréman on the right. A thin curve of blood spouted from the wound like water from a drinking fountain. The injured outréman paused philosophically, contemplating what had happened, perhaps, but showing no sign of pain or suffering. He returned the blow tenfold. His mouth opened to an impossible angle, like the jaws of a reptile, and he grabbed his assailant by the neck and chewed off half of his head.

  Quickly the encounter escalated. They consumed each other with increasing ferocity. Sometimes they devoured their own bodies; as one outréman worked on his partner’s intestines, for instance, his partner rolled up a sleeve and sunk prehistoric teeth into his arm like a chickenleg. And when their teeth fell out, they used their hands, gouging out handfuls of flesh, ripping off fingers and limbs. Even when they ceased to look human, curdled on the sidewalk in a heap of quivering tissue and gristle, odd tendrils reached from the residue and lashed out, fighting to the bitter end.

  Nobody noticed the gorefest; people passed by or sidestepped the outrémen as if they were dead signage.

  Curd turned his attention to the café. It was empty.

  Curd turned his attention to his coffee. It was full.

  •

  It took him several minutes to get shitfaced. He ordered a beer and a bottle of absinthe and drank them as fast as he could, pausing to burp, gag, and swab his mouth with a bartowel.

  Thoroughbred intoxication hit him like an uppercut and his shoulders dislocated. He slouched over, dizzy, deranged, a certifiable asshole, pupils dilating and contracting, pupils swallowing his eyeballs, irises, whites and all . . .

  “Mooom!!!” he cried into a payphone.

  “Sergio? Is that you?” said a voice.

  “Moooooom!!!”

  The line went dead.

  He hung up the phone and hailed a smartcab, bellowing for a driver to pull over.

  “You’re still inside the bar,” said the bartender.

  •

  Everything was normal, more or less, except on those rare occasions when people imploded, flesh folding into flesh, into a tertiary nodule, then disappearing into a vaporized bead of blood.

  •

  Curd bought a hot dog from a vending cart. No matter what happened, there were always hot dogs. He had lived on them as a child, partly because it was all his mother could afford. But he liked them. Then and now, hot dogs had always taken him away, allowed him to forget about the hardships, if only momentarily, of day after day after dayafterday . . .

  •

  Wrapped in a damp towel, Mz. Hennington slid on goldrimmed bifocals and went to the kitchen to get something to eat. She opened the refrigerator. Stared inside. Closed the refrigerator. Opened the freezer. Stared inside.
Closed the freezer.

  She went back to the bedroom.

  “What’s with all the sausage?” she asked. “There’s, like, a million hot dogs in the fridge. And beer.”

  Curd lay in bed fingering a revolver. “Lips and assholes.”

  “What?”

  “Lips and assholes. Like I said.”

  Mz. Hennington unwrapped the towel and held her breasts in place with a forearm as she bent over and picked up her bra. “I’m going to work.”

  Curd rolled onto his stomach. “That’s what hot dogs are made of,” he mumbled into a pillow. “Lips and assholes. Residua. Detritus.”

  “Did you say Plotinus?”

  “What?”

  “[Pleasure and distress, fear and courage, desire and aversion—where is the seat of these affections and experiences?]”

  “[Idaho?]”

  Mz. Hennington fastened the bra. A deep line of cleavage sprung to life. Hurriedly she slipped on panties and hose and a lavender garter belt. “Aren’t you coming?”

  Still facedown in the pillow, Curd muttered something inaudible. He continued muttering as Mz. Hennington yanked up and zipped a snug business skirt into place and buttoned a cream blouse to the nape of her cleavage. “I can’t hear you,” she said.

  Curd rolled over, arms splayed out on the bed. In one hand he gripped the revolver firmly by the barrel. “I’m not going to work today.”

  Mz. Hennington’s smooth white calf muscles flared as she stepped into sleek high heels. “I’m going to work,” she repeated.

  “I’m never going to work again,” said Curd. “I want to see if things will get done and if I’ll still make money if I don’t do anything.”

  Mz. Hennington sighed. “I’ll just have to do everything myself. I want a raise.”

  “No,” Curd beckoned. “I don’t want you to go either. It’s an experiment. Come back to bed. Let’s just see what happens. Take your clothes off. Let’s stay here and see what happens. Take your clothes off.”

  “But who will do the work? It’s only us. It’s only the two of us.”

  “Maybe the work will do itself. Get your ass over here. Please?”

  •

  “I could use a cold beer.” Curd took a sip of the beer in his hand. “Ahh.” He sat up in bed and leaned against the leather headboard.

  Mz. Hennington tried to bite him.

  He pushed her away. “Knock it off,” he said. “I’m done. Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe we’ve been having too much sex. Anything in excess is bad for you, right? Even water. And we’re made of water. So is the earth. Water, and magma.”

  A dull groan escaped the slash of her mouth. She leaned in and snapped her mandibles together.

  “Cut it out.” Curd pushed her off the bed. She hit the floor hard. He turned onto his side and blinked at a portrait on the wall. It had been hanging there since he moved in. Former occupants left it behind; they nailed it to the wall with railroad spikes. Curd would have needed a crowbar to pry it off, and he had never gotten around to the job, even though he disliked the portrait. It was a Picasso. Authenticated and original, according to the label in the bottom corner of the frame. Title: “Pour Roby.” It was just a rudimentary sketch, a doodle of a face that the artist no doubt produced with a few flicks of the wrist. A squiggle of hair loomed over two swollen eyes, peering innocently to the left. The nose was a long, thin, semidistorted U, and only an upperlip defined the mouth. One ovular curve for the chin and cheeks. And beneath the face, Picasso’s signature, slanted, and backwards, like a mirror image. The more Curd studied it, the more he hated it.

  On the touchstone third attempt, Mz. Hennington made purchase, biting into Curd’s kidney region and claiming a chunk of flesh. Stringy and elastic, it came off like latex.

  Blood left the wound in steady, powerful surges.

  •

  In the dream, he’s a computer salesman. There are no clients.

  Telephones are illegal.

  He must travel from door to door, coldcalling innocent homeowners.

  Most of the homeowners turn him away. The ones that let him in invariably want to buy a computer; they express this desire in highpitched, enthusiastic tones.

  Just as an exchange is about to take place, however, he invariably lifts the product over his head and smashes it on the client.

  The client screams and begs for mercy.

  He continues to smash the client.

  He becomes familiar with the sound of cracking skulls and bones. But there is no blood.

  Blood is illegal.

  Then he stands on the edge of a long diving board that dips halfway into the deep end.

  No water in the pool.

  At the blue bottom is a pile of green seaweed. It glistens with moisture in the white sunlight.

  In his headspace, the quillbone of rhymed poetry . . .

  •

  The desktop was smooth and bogus. He had requested real wood, pine, but they sold him a plastic desk stained with fake wood finish. They told him it would be better this way since real wood didn’t last and had to be lacquered and relacquered all the time. “Plastic lasts forever,” they concluded.

  He put his ear against the desktop. It resounded like a conch shell. Tall, distant waves broke against an ivory shore.

  Outside, thunder merged with turbines, exhaust pipes, the exigency of acceleration.

  He focused on the radio. Light Classical. An adagio. Careful strings and soft woodwinds. He imagined a clichéd pastoral landscape: placid green savannah, tall trees with leaves rustled by the breeze, blue dome of sky—a landscape hanging on the walls of countless motels . . .

  His eyelids weakened. Vague trace of a smile.

  His eyes closed.

  A metallic voice abruptly interrupted the music: “This program is brought to you by the Bureau of Me. Pardon the interruption. This is a test.”

  Rainbow of barcodes. Ringing noise.

  •

  DMV. Disgruntling Metaphysical Victimization.

  Curd sat in a plastic bucket seat waiting to renew license plates for a vehicle he never used and didn’t work. He wasn’t even sure he owned a vehicle anymore.

  It began as a harmless yawn. Even Curd was surprised when the yawn, after reaching its ostensible peak, refused to diminish, to taper off and disappear, rendering his mouth the aggrieved slit worn by all occupants of the DMV. But the yawn grew wider, and larger, in synch with a lump in his throat that seemed to be expanding, worming its way up and out of his mouth. Furiously he tried to swallow the lump—image of an Adam’s apple twitching epileptically—but nothing could be done. He felt his jaws extend. He felt his teeth rattle in his gums. Momentarily he thought his jaw might snap backwards, like a mousetrap, and consume his head, unleashing a strangled, flailing tonguebeast. Such an absurdity was impossible, though, and Curd knew it, so he turned to the man sitting next to him, an unassuming migrant worker filling out an unassuming form, and buried the yawn in his chest.

  Something wet splattered onto the linoleum floor of the DMV, spit there like a cosmic pinch of tobacco.

  INTERMISSION

  “In Time, Reality fails. It dries up like a mushroom in the sun, and we have no choice but to develop the Technology. There is an infinite spectrum of alternate realities. In the best realities, mankind approaches perfection, utopia, the epitome of social rest and relaxation; in the worst, mankind is devolved, zombified, fiercely aggressive and murderous—if nothing else, estranged. We give mankind what he wants. Like the Engines of Night, Desire makes the world turn,” said a figure.

  “One man in the company of Selfhood. This is not an Ideal Grindhouse. This is the beginning of Cellular Discord,” said a figure.

  “And yet he is the Rub. The Idaho Reality threatens to consume Metaphysical Infinity. Without him, Paradise loses. With him, Paradise loses—but by a considerably lesser margin. As with everything, this is a matter of degrees and intensities. He must embrace the [ __________ ] within himself. He is, after al
l, entitled to shit on the world, despite overt plebiscitary roots. His soul putrefies in the Dumpster of Immanence. He exhales stardust and doesn’t even know it,” said a figure.

  [This crucial and lengthy string of dialogue and exposition is garbled by a thousand insect shrieks.]

  “Consuming one’s flesh is an underrated act of attrition. One shouldn’t consider the prospect of Certain Doom in these troubles times. Nor should one underestimate the Cluck; entire legions of meaning and innuendo reside within that beakmade commotion. The Idaho Reality awaits us like a nightmare in the closet. Yes. Man is a sublimely vast and menacing terra incognita. We must come to terms with this Machinery. The pistons, the cogs, the stickshifts—they point in one direction: Oblivion. Tomorrow I will find a way to construct an omelet without the use of eggs. Today, however, I must harvest momentum. Soon I will close my eyes and it will be dark, ” said a figure.

  Last words. THEN THE BRACKETS COLLAPSED, INNERVATING THE HUMAN AQUARIUM.

  Slowly the Bureau of Me glided across the sky.

  ACT III

  “Hello?”

  “Who did you say you are?”