Diegeses Page 6

  Dead.

  The butt of the bayonet struck a rock, forcing it to twist, to open a zipper in Jeremiah’s face and empty out the Knowledge. Exodus of daytrippers. Curd ogled the spectacle of impossibly horrific Drama, mesmerized. Unlike his fellow apparatchiks, he made no effort to get away. It didn’t matter. They were all apprehended and sent home in a crate.

  Accordingly, Curd’s parents stood in the yard and looked at him, faces blurring/burning in and out of focus.

  But it was too late. It had always been too late. Curd had found his calling. Or rather, his calling had found him. Nobody could do anything about it. The dye had been shat.

  Next paragraph.

  Retreat to infancy. Images: orange carpet, bunk beds with red sheets beyond the white crib, a green piñata hanging from a thin chain, and on a blue shelf, Raggedy Anne and Andy dolls arranged in polite sitting positions. At night, the dolls’ faces seemed to change, somehow. To contort. Cave in. Difficult to tell if it was for better or for worse.

  Visual mise-en-scène interrupted by orgasmic bowel movements, loving embraces, harmless vomiting, and feelings of checkered security.

  Next paragraph.

  Retreat to the womb . . .

  We conclude with the following monochrome snapshot of a marvelous cocoon, dark and webbed and nestled between the mossy roots of a vast Ugandan rainforest tree.

  Mothman Sighting

  [Evening. A family—Dad, Stepmother, Brats—drives down the interstate crammed into the front seat of an entry-level luxury vehicle. Christian Rock on the radio. Dad wants Country. He fumbles with the touchscreen on the dash with cumbersome fingers, momentarily taking his eyes from the road.

  Stepmother: “Look out shitforbrains!”

  7-8 feet tall, reflective red eyes, jack-o-lantern grin, brittle limbs with joints that swing both ways, freshly molted wings, electricity dancing in the hollow places, etc.—it crawls out of a ditch and staggers across the highway.

  Stepmother: “Watch out shitbirrrrd!”

  Brats kick each other and kick their toys and their technologies and kick the back of the seat and the back of Dad’s headrest.

  Dad: “Knock it off you little shits! I’ll fuckin’ kill you shitbreathers!” He reaches over his shoulder and swings around his big hand like a flyswatter, hoping to hit a mark.

  The luxury vehicle swerves, but not enough.

  They collide with the mothman squarely, shattering its legs, and the thing endures the usual effekts: roll across hood, smash into windshield, tumble into sky, head smashes into aluminum roof, neck cracks, aluminum roof dents, wings swell and spread and flap uncontrollably from deep folds in shoulderblades, more somersaults, finally mothman is projected off of car’s tailfin. Everybody screams in harmonic unison. Dad stomps on the breaks with both feet in mid-swerve and the car flips up and over like a poker chip and it tumbles down the interstate for awhile before coming to rest and exploding into impossible white flames. Like all living creatures, Dad, Stepmother and Brats die alone, skin melting onto heavy-duty, fire-resistant floormats, organs pouring from residual mouths of gore.

  The mothman curls up in a ditch on the other side of the road and prepares to hibernate.]

  Wreckage

  When Curd was two years old (i.e., when Curd wasn’t Curd) he broke his leg. He didn’t fall out of a tree, off of a roof or ladder, or anything that has the ability to test gravity’s stranglehold on solid objects. He simply tripped over an exposed root in the grass and fell awkwardly. His father had been playing with him and witnessed the wreckage. He couldn’t believe it. The fall belonged in a cartoon. Legs weren’t meant to do that, to twist like that. And two-year-olds weren’t supposed to break bones. They were supposed to be resilient. When he was two years old his dad bounced him around like a basketball, tossed him around like a football, kicked him around like a soccerball, and his bones were fine. What the fuck? The little fucker had weak bones, apparently.

  It was the femur. Not a compound fracture, but bad. Cracked all the way through. Doctors had to put Curd in a twenty lb. cast that wrapped around his waist and covered both of his legs. He had to sit on his ass for four weeks and not move. He had to have his diapers changed every two hours, day and night, through a small hole in the ass of the cast—an almost impossible feat that required at least two people to accomplish. He thought he was being punished. He cried and cried. Nobody could help him; cognitively he had not reached a point where he could process logic. He was two.

  Shortly after the removal of the cast, he began to see things fall out of the sky and crash into the earth.

  The first thing that fell was a whale.

  The second thing was an elephant.

  The third thing was a brontosaurus.

  The fourth thing was a . . .

  The animals never fell near enough so as to endanger Curd, but he could see them clearly, even if he didn’t know what they were. They exploded with comic ferocity when they struck the ground and produced terrific earthquakes. As far as Curd could tell—next to nothing—adults seemed to disavow the wreckages, taking notice of them, but idly, and then forgetting about them within minutes. If, say, a hail of giant squid exploded onto the neighbor’s house, destroying it, the neighbors became violently annoyed, but within seconds they had returned to the business of life, stepping over and around the residual carnage as if it had been part of the house’s architecture from the beginning.

  “Du commencement,” said Curd’s piano teacher, Mz. Gerdes—flashbulb of a gleaming perm—years later, as he sat in front of the keys, legs dangling from a vinyl spinning stool, and stared out the window at some creature from some children’s fantasy novel he had read, racing to the earth like a flaming meteor.

  Official Sobriquet vis-à-vis the Media

  “Weird Menace.”

  In execution: “Once again, Curd a.k.a. the ‘Weird Menace’ established himself as a shining example of unbridled assholery, singling out and knocking over old people on the red carpet last night just minutes before the opening act of the Daytime Emmy Awards. Among his victims was veteran actor John Aniston, 145, who has played the role of patriarch/mobster/monster Victor Kiriakis on Days of Our Lives for the past 60 years. John had this to say: ‘He came out of nowhere, really, throwing elbows and so forth. In my case, he hammered on my knee with a cane until I went down. No doubt he stole the cane from somebody who needed it. It’s true what they say, you know. That bastard is a weird menace.’”

  L'homme de mite

  The long version of this vignette was lost in a stage reenactment of the accidental fire that burned down the library of Alexandria. In the distant future, fossilized scraps of the narrative were accidentally discovered by spacemen on a routine check of the shriveled Earth. The following document was culled and spliced together from those very scraps:

  In the interim, Curd spotted a mothman in France. In Eze. Always in Eze, although I barely remember it, it’s been so long—ancient iron bridge hanging over the gray tavern that slopes into the Mediterranean—quaint architectures carved into the mountainside, flames of vegetation, and down the road, Monte Carlo . . .

  It was at the roulette table.

  He was young and didn’t know the rules, tried to hand cash to the dealer instead of laying it on the felt like a Rolex.

  Reprimanded.

  Mothman across the table, a pretzel of dark flesh, staring at him with the technologized eyes, speaking to him with the static grin. Mirrors everywhere.

  History of mothmen as imploded hubs of electrical impulses, or memories that have escaped technorganic confinement and congealed into angry insect sphincters. Tracking shot of the Côte d'Azur . . . racing across the Mediterranean . . . one blue port after another, masts and lighthouses and basilicas and hoteltops . . .

  Accelerando.

  They incorporated Curd’s nocturnal, chitinous experiences into the soap opera. Eventually they ran out of ideas and incorporated all of his experiences, real and imagined, “human” and “
inhuman.” Meanwhile Curd wallowed in ignorance and fame. Inevitably the government commandeered Panthermodern Enterprises, the production company of The Idaho Reality, with the sole intention of weaponizing Curd. They didn’t know how specifically he might be weaponized since they didn’t know much about mothmen, which lingered more in the realm of fiction than fact. The force of the actor’s ego alone, however, if properly harnessed, might function as a capable means of total annihilation. It was agreed. Veins were opened and requisite palms were greased with blood/money. Soon everybody’s worst fears were accomplished.

  Then: raucous cheers and rancorous parades.

  Deft Characterization

  Inside the actor’s studio, Curd lit a rollie, leaned forward in his chair, and delivered a powerful crowdstare to the audience. “Let me tell you how I negotiate the role of Seneca Beaulac,” he said, eyes obscenely overweight and decisive. “It’s a secret. But some secrets are meant to be secreted.”

  Blinking, he slouched backwards and looked at the host of the show, the spitting effigy of his father before the War. And the onset of adulthood.

  Traumnovelle

  Curd placed the ribbed carapace against his cheek and said, “Things are getting weirder. Not sure what to do at this point. I feel . . . I don’t know what I feel. I feel unholy. Unmarketable. Membranous.”

  “Idaho,” said a voice on the other end of the line.

  “I think I might be a mothman. But nobody’s telling me.”

  Dead air. Dial tone. Static. Automated voice.

  Liminality.

  He observed the colored leaves of autumn spread upon the grass and then retired to the closest vanity mirror.

  Discomfort. Eyelash on his eyeball.

  No—something else.

  He pulled the eyelid aside like a curtain and inspected the terrain beneath the arid folds of skin.

  There it was.

  He used tweezers to remove it, disavowing the torque of his brain matter as it seemed to swivel within his skullbone like a broken Lazy Susan. It must have been in there for years. It looked like a dirty pipe cleaner, twice doubled over. Amazing.

  He dashed to the Orange Bathroom, long and thin and foreboding, and showed his mother. Horrified, she denied it, clutching together the lapels of her robe as she backed into a demolished shower stall. It wasn’t a hair after all. He inspected the unit and assured her that some portion of it was indeed hairlike. Mother began to yank on her tongue. He tried to stop her, wingtips twitching in consternation, eyes aglow. But it was too late. That story was over.

  . . . In the hull of the S.S. Misanthrope, a hirsute ur-man escaped from a window in Time and, bewildered, staggered towards him like a drunken synthespian. Curd dashed upstairs, outside. Blinding blue sky. He seized a long metal pole from the flybridge and hurled it over his shoulder.

  The ur-man’s buttersoft flesh suffered a mortal blow. A Jelly Result preceded the clank of iron curtains.

  Ad Lib

  Lately, accusations fell on the use of this curious appendage to dialogue that regarded selfhood and the chronic assertion of identity and individuality: “. . . the likes of which the world has never seen.”

  The Bureau of Me

  “I can’t live without you anymore,” said Hannah Harcourt, taking him by the wrist. “Please. I love you. I need you.” She pushed together her elbows and produced a fold of cleavage.

  Chestpiece of a stethoscope tossed over his shoulder, Dr. Seneca Beaulac gripped the lapels of a stiff, starched lab jacket and looked her up and down, disgusted, as if she were a fresh burn victim. “Fuck you, asshole,” he said after a long silence. “I haven’t seen you in, like, twenty years. Exactly twenty years, in fact. You left me. Remember? Skank. Suddenly you show up and want a dick? Fuck you! Period.”

  [It isn’t in the script. Nothing he says is in the script anymore. But at this point the director knows better than to interrupt. He can always dub and surrogate the scene and bribe Curd’s lawyers down the line. If he can help it, he won’t end up like the last six directors, nameless and blackballed, skidrowed at Curd’s sadistic whimsy. In the end, the actor always wins.]

  Harcourt’s cleavageline disappeared like seams yanked out of fabric. She stepped backwards, wounded, despite the verity of Beaulac’s claim, despite being married, many times, and in love, many times, with many other men, sometimes multiple men at the same time, but every time her suitors left her, one at time, unable to tolerate the persona, the mania.

  There was also the issue of narrative deviation.

  Beaulac sighed heavily and rolled his eyes. He put the bowl of a palm to his mouth. “Hey asshole!” he exclaimed. “Hey fuckhead! Can’t we just do a 1980s slasher thing? Jesus! For once I’d like to fucking kill somebody! Somebody give me a machete and a fucked-up face! I’m sick of railing broads! I’d rather hack ‘em up, fucker! Fuckin’ dumbass!”

  [The director flinches in the crow’s nest, slumps deeper into his seat. Curd is talking to him. Maybe if he just pretends otherwise things will work themselves out? Maybe Curd’s dialogue will somehow thread into the prescribed watercourse of the soapoperative? The onus was on Hannah Harcourt now. Could this idle bimbo parry the scatbombs of his word horde? More than that, could she make sense of them, i.e., could she convey to the audience that they were purposeful words, deliberate words, words worthy of sense and sensibility? Better if Curd just lifted up her dress and fucked her in the ass.]

  Beaulac gripped Harcourt firmly by the shoulder, spun her around and pushed her over a reception desk. He pushed her too hard and she slid across the desk and pencils and pens and papers scattered everywhere. Lineless, overweight nurses ducked out of the way as Beaulac ripped open his jacket—buttons flying—and hurdled the desk. He yanked Harcourt off the floor and cradled her in his arms in such a way that bystanders couldn’t tell if he was going to strangle or kiss her; everyone on the set froze in place and looked on expectantly, waiting to see what would happen as hungry cameras moved in from the four corners of the ceiling on trackless tracking devices. Abruptly the scene slipped into sheer metaphor. She parted the lips of her consciousness in an effort to address the issue, but he clutched her selfhood, and desire spilled from the technologies that irised open on the industrial underbelly of her mind. Constellation of pulsing cyphers. Theme songs ejaculated into the afternoon. Wind. The leaves rustled, at first, then lay still, hanging from the branches like moist washcloths. They vaporized as a tornado the size of Ohio ripped across the ass-end of Idaho. Cameras/realities imploded. Closeup on a viole(n)t objective. At that moment it occurred to Dr. Seneca Beaulac that the name of the scene should be “The Viole(n)t Objective.” Curd disagreed, preferring something more accessible, tenable, and above all, serious. He was a serious man, after all, and these were serious circumstances. He would not allow this character to drag him into the pit of absurdity and meaninglessness, in spite of the degree to which certain hirsute geographies would evade him, given world enough, and time.

  [Bald and bearded, the executive producer storms the crow’s nest like a deranged grizzly, moving forward as if pulled by a string attached to his Adam’s apple. “This is getting bad,” the director informs him. “I’m not sure what to do at this point.” The executive producer reprimands him sternly and presents several options, among them a viole(n)t objective . . .]

  Back in the Idaho Reality . . .

  [Three “synthespians” crash the set and “dogmatize” how Occam’s Razor hacked them like “geostationary quartz-stones” from the woodblock of the “Bureau of Me.”]

  SENECA BEAULAC

  (deadpan)

  Me. That sounds familiar.

  The executive producer, the director, and vast teams of overpaid, unwarranted writers rifle through the script in search of a potential hit. Something about what Curd said sounds familiar.

  The “synthespians” wear black “plainsuits” and “plainties” and they don’t have irises; pupils dance across spheres of “white fire” as they scan the room
. One of them lifts an arm and points at the sign around Beaulac’s neck:

  CLOTHES

  CLOTHES

  MORE CLOTHES

  He lowers the arm and then all three of them converge on Beaulac and attempt to stuff him into a large dufflebag.]

  Back to the Idaho Reality. Back to the Idaho Reality. Back to the Idaho Reality . . .

  [The “synthespians” collectively “gesticulate” in a way that produces an “abracadabra effekt.”]

  [Hannah Harcourt begins to play with herself. This offsets everybody, even the “synthespians,” one of whom “disavows the obscenity” with an “alien shriek” that reminds several listeners of a “tsunami of moths.” Beaulac punches the “synthespian,” silencing him, then slaps Harcourt, stunning her. The “synthespian”’s shirt comes loose and exposes a partially muscled skeleton. A terrific brawl ensues. Sometimes the superstylized fight sequences flashcut into graphic Roman orgies á la Caligula. Viewers and participants can’t discern whether or not the flashcuts are real, i.e., if they are happening within the diegesis of the The Idaho Reality (and thus generated by revolutionary special effects techniques) or the result of some spectral anomaly. Everybody begins to doubt everything, all of it semantic, ranging from the meaning of fleeting glances to the meaning of existence and the cosmos. The episode spirals into Molten Discharge by the time the police show up and flog whoever gets in their way. “Administration” called the cops and they have been told that Curd started it all. But he has retreated to the walls, the ceiling. With “beaklike” arms and legs he “scurries like a vermin” across “acausal regions” and there’s nothing anybody can do to stop him.]