I OFTEN BURN WHITE HOT AND
DRIFT LAZILY ACROSS THE STRATOSPHERE EMITTING PIERCING SCREAMS JUST
LIKE THE REAL SUN!!!
-- Pokey The Penguin
And so the little white mouse spent the next year in a daze, the world
spinning around him as he stood absolutely still, his heart
fluttering, seizing, and then fluttering again. The thesis he'd
started since returning to The Kingdom Of The Eagle, on hold. His
eyes unblinking, heart fluttering. Nights spent drinking alone,
guts burning, a shriek welling up in his little mouse chest. A
shriek that was part despair, part horror, and part white hot sodium
hatred. Heart fluttering.
And so the little white
mouse went to the doctor and found out that the irregularities in his
pulse were due to stress, and that he should cut back on the
cholesterol, and that he should just calm the fuck down.
And, head buzzing with
terror and rage, one day a few months later, he went and met the Kitty
Cat by a river and he asked her if they were still friends. And
with her
ears pressed back against her skull, she acted as if she were the
offended, heartbroken party.
That's when the little
white mouse lost it.
He accused her of leading
him on, of sending out signals. The way she always purred when he
was near, the way she contentedly kneaded the couch and floor when they
watched DVDs together-- how, whenever she wore a little collar and bell
that he thought looked good on her and that he said made her look sexy,
she would wear that same collar and bell the next time they got
together, and then the next time, and the next time. And when she
wore another new bell and collar that he liked, she would wear that
outfit over and over as well. Until she always wore bells and
collars that he personally liked, that he always said made her look
hot, whenever they got together-- which was
almost every day of the week, for at least a few hours if not the whole
day.
And they planned their lives
around their meetings, adjusted
their schedules in order to maximize their time together every
day. And
when she couldn't make it, she'd phone the night before and
apologize. And when he couldn't make it, he'd do the same.
And she always told him how smart he was, how talented he was, how
funny and cool. And her eyes would sparkle whenever she saw him
and she'd smile a gigantic Kitty Cat smile, and her tail would twitch
as she'd
giggle and wave and blush. How could she deny that something
deeper was happening?
And she, ears back and tail
slowly sweeping back and forth-- she said that she just didn't think of
him that way, they were
just friends.
And then it was the mouse's
turn to flatten his ears against his skull.
He told her that she was as
guilty as him, she for leading him on and he for believing in her, for
having some hope, for trusting her and for falling in love. And
that's when he told her that fucking everybody already thought they
were a fucking couple because they were virtually an inseparable pair,
and that she'd been behaving both publicly and privately like his
girlfriend for years now-- with of course the exception that he wasn't
allowed to even touch her-- and how dare she act like she was the
victim here when she spent almost every single day of the week with him
for what's been going on years, since he came back to the Kingdom Of
The Eagle and since she also took up with the Eagle in his Kingdom.
And if they do spend that
much time together then their relationship was fuckedup and unnatural
and absurd and pointless and bullshit like in Archie Comics, and maybe
there was something deeply wrong and sick and ugly with both of them.
And he yelled at her and
yelled at her. He raged, his teeth bared, his voice hoarse and
splitting. And he realized that he'd never ever hated anyone as
much as he hated the Kitty Cat. Hated her for leading him on and
manipulating him
and taking advantage of his kindness and generosity and loneliness
because she fucking damn well knew how lonely and vulnerable he was
because she'd been so close to him for so many years and knew him
inside and out.
And she said that she was
just a little Kitty Cat and that she was still trying to figure out how
to be a Grown Up Cat and that she just didn't know what she was doing
because she just didn't know. And that she was so far beneath
him, that he was so much smarter than she was, that they weren't equals
and could never be, that all those years he was the thing that had kept
her sane, and that they could never be on equal footing, ever.
And he said that was a load
of bullshit, that she wasn't just a little Kitty Cat now and hadn't
been just
a little Kitty Cat for years and that what she was saying was just a
lame
bullshit excuse that she got from reading too many Archies and Young Adult
books where boys and girls co-existed in absurd, impossible Platonic
Relationships which were always either bullshit or the result of a
warped, immature, unrealistic view of human nature propagated and
bought into by naive asexual fools who have lost touch with what it
means to be truly human, and that if a male
doesn't want to fuck a female he's always around that's because he
finds her physically ugly, or he's gay or asexual-- because every guy
deep down inside wants to fuck all his female friends unless he finds
them repulsive, and if he found them repulsive they wouldn't be his
friends-- and she should have known all this because that's what the
world is made of and has always been made of, and even though right
now she's trying to pretend that she's innocent, she's not innocent,
even though right now she's trying to pretend that she's naive, she's
not naive, even though right now she's trying to hide behind a
transparent facade of stupidity, she's not stupid. And how dare
she pretend to be that stupid, pretending to be stupid like she thought
the mouse was stupid, it
was an insult to both her and the mouse.
And that they were equals
and that for her to think that they weren't was also bullshit and a
lame excuse and an insult.
And the Kitty Cat just
looked angry, her fur standing on end and tail puffed up.
And the
little white mouse wanted so badly to see her break down into tears and
start sobbing. But he knew she knew that's what he wanted.
So she wasn't going to cry, she wasn't
about to give the mouse the fucking satisfaction, because she wasn't
stupid. Despite what she was trying to let on. So she just
looked at the little white mouse as if he were beyond contempt.
Something she could just swat away. Play with until it
died.
But she wasn't going to bother.
And the little white mouse
told her that he could barely even stand to look at her, that the very
thought of her made him sick.
And then she looked at his
stunned and plale. As if
her heart had just broken and broken and broken and broken.
Shattered. As if-- what? Like something unnamable had just
been felled by a death blow.
And he realized what he'd
said, how he'd hurt her, but he didn't care. Maybe now she would
finally feel some
of the pain and betrayal that he felt.
And he told her that she was
at fault, too. That if he was to blame she was to blame,
too. That she must take responsibility for this mess. That
he wasn't the only guilty party in this, oh no. That she was also
culpable. She was a tease, she led him on, etc., etc., etc....
And the little white mouse
ranted and raved in this way for quite a while, getting louder and
louder while people walked by, looked at the two of them, and nervously
hurried on. And the Kitty Cat started looking more than a little
scared.
Backing away tiny Kitty step
by tiny Kitty step, eyes widening with increasing fear, she tried to
say something but he wouldn't let her.
Instead he begged her to be
his friend, told her that he hated himself and that she was perfect for
him. He said she was perfect for him in every way and she said
that's pretty hard to believe after all the names you've just called me
and things you've accused me of. And then he asked her what could
be done, what could she do,
he do, what's left, is anything left, what can we do? And she
said that there was nothing that could be done. Nothing.
And so he said
then that's it it's over, well then if I never see you again it'll be
too soon, goodbye.
And he walked away.
And she walked away.
And at one point as he was
walking away, he turned to look at her.
She wasn't looking back.
And the months passed as the
little white mouse drank himself into a stupor.
Eventually, he phoned a
wizard friend of his and asked him how much it would cost to put a
curse on the Kitty Cat.
"I want her to suffer," the
mouse said. "Suffer like no other being on this planet has ever
suffered before. And will ever suffer again. I want her to
feel nothing but pain and misery for the rest of her life. And I
want her life to be long, so the suffering seems as if it will never
end. Death is too good for her. How much will that
cost? I'll give you two hundred bucks."
"Uh, I don't really think I
want to do that, Mouse," the wizard said. "Besides, I'm really
more into trying to make the world a better place right now,
okay? You seem like you're slipping over into the dark side of
the force."
The mouse looked at his
bottle of absinthe. He'd been drinking it straight from the
neck. The bottle was half empty.
He usually managed to go
through one bottle every seven to ten days.
"We'll talk," the mouse
said. "I'll give you three hundred. We'll come to an
arrangement."
The wizard hung up the phone
and the mouse called him an ornery selfish cunt, and then the mouse's
heart
stopped beating. And then it flutter-started again.
So the mouse went out for a
drive, and morning found him sitting on a bench on top of a hill,
looking at the sky and crying.
And days later found him
surrounded by people and sound and shapes spinning, turning, and sweat
on the floor and sweat on the walls, light and music pounding into his
head and why the hell is he even here and just don't put down your
water, hang onto the water bottle, just don't put down the water-- just
watching them dancing twirling jumping losing themselves in happiness
and drugs, envying them and their lack of self-consciousness, the fact
that they can all blindly mingle and mix and don't really care who they
grope or fuck, envying that they don't actually care enough about their
collective futures to stop gobbling drugs and dehydrating themselves
and so they
all actually will all
actually have good memories of their youths
instead of sadness, anger and repression-- envying that they actually
have interesting music to listen to not all the guitar power pop all
the jeanjacket skid metal all the radio pabulum the mouse had to endure
when he was their age or all the country and western shit that the
parents tried to force down his throat, Dad always listening to the
oldies channel and nowhere decent to actually buy any real music in an
underpopulated backwards town where the best thing you could ever hope
for was Queen and the Eagles and Kiss-- and even mainstream radio stuff
like Pink Floyd and New Order were considered strange and exotic by the
unwashed and conservative under-25 set-- and
then, yeah, the '90s came and all that there was was sadness and losers
plunking and skronking on guitars and whining about something
indecipherable or women playing pianos and whining about their
uteruses and being raped, but it's all about the lyrics it's all about
the fucking poetry of the fucking words. That deeper, heartfelt
meaning.
Envying that they
actually have a lot more than he ever did and he had a lot, envying
that they're all going to throw it all away because they don't know
what they have; envying that in ten or more years they're all going to
be standing here envying all the people they see dancing, whining about
how much they envy this new batch, how they all have so much more
than we do, and
envying how they are
going to throw it all
away. And closing his eyes and smelling the sweet, sweet
resin smoke of
a passed around youth he could have had if he hadn't been such an
uptight loser and geek-- but he didn't-- didn't have it-- because he
was such an uptight loser and geek. And losing himself but never
really, truly losing himself, and what the hell....
Nights of curdled
phamakognosis percolating in his broken mouse brain, heart chugging,
stopping, dying, rebooting itself as neurons reconnect in temporarily
exciting but ultimately futile and empty new ways. (Wanting the
language of the world of eternity to fill him at least once,
to connect him at least once with something larger than his own
delusions and massive ego, wanting something more than this present
moment's infinity of half-remembered regrets.) And sometimes he
remembered how nighttime was his friend when he was younger, younger
and
sleeping, brain not flickering through random connections, cells dying
and new dendrites growing in random directions as light pulsed behind
his eyes just like those migraines he used to have where he'd see
colours and shapes but feel no pain-- and feeling no pain, physical
pain at least, but not the real pain dulled but still there in the back
of whatever nightmare of short-circuiting physicality and language that
passed for his soul. Each experience an epilogue. And
remembering in bed now (now, or maybe later) shivering and holding his
legs up to his chest, brain-sick and reaching for blackness,
out of his depth clawing the ice, remembering (if this was a memory and
not really happening one lonely
night in the present moment) while doing this (remembering) once loving
the blackness, darkness of night where in his youth, at least he was
young once, right?-- where in his youth he would think night sweet
night I'll sleep and then in the morning... and what do you know, in
the morning it really would
all be better-- or at least seem
better. There was a time when nighttime sleep promised some sort
of temporary respite. Not like now. If there is (or was) a
now. What with the buzzing in his head and the dreams (when he
dreams, when he just doesn't shut down like a computer switched to off,
something that, yeah, sometimes he's grateful for-- a little bit, at
least-- but still ultimately scared of because the infinite nullity he
lapses into on those nights seems, just maybe, to be a little too much
like death), those awful fucking dreams: of the Kitty Cat, of
course. Sometimes the dreams are sexy little vignettes that make
him burst with joy: she's here with him, and there they are making love
and together and living a blissful storybook life-- only to wake up
bleary, eyes burning, trapped in the aging flesh of his body. And
he's just no good for the rest of the day after that. Mopey,
defeated, mind wandering back to that little taste of paradise his
subconscious had given him and then quickly snatched away with the
first rays of the sun-- presumably as some sort of vague, malevolent
punishment meted out by himself to himself as a reward for,
essentially, just being himself.
In other dreams, they would
fight, he would scream at her. Or they would be a happy couple
and she
would then betray him in either subtle or not-so-subtle ways.
This would also result in wailing and screaming and gnashing of
teeth. And these would be the times, coming back to reality after
having these dreams, that he would catch himself moaning and crying and
thrashing about in bed, briefly aware of the intensity of his nocturnal
activities before snapping awake, calming his limbs, finally closing
his mouth and letting the neighbours have a little bit of peace.
(Once he thought he felt her
hand against his face. It turned out that he'd merely been
sleeping in a funny position and his right arm had gone numb and draped
itself on his head. When he realized what had happened he grew so
angry with his arm he slammed it against the wall of his apartment,
slightly cracking one of his knuckles.)
And other dreams were
violent and murderous-- he would awaken his limbs clenched with
rage, shrieking until his throat was raw and everything tasted like
blood. The less said about these dreams, the better.
One night the little white
mouse, slipping out of time and into something a nothing new, howling
like a wind tunnel late into the night, early into the morning, smeared
the ten-disked Sefirot onto the blank wall of his computer room with
his own shit, screaming with the completion of each mystic circle:
"Keter!" (and slamming his head into the ring, trying to force his head
through the wall), "Binah! Chochma!" (trying to fistrape twin
simultaneous holes in those two eternally resistant spheres).
And then punching a hole in the wall where Chesed should
be. Gnawing tracks in the face of Gevurah with his big rodent
teeth. And then a ghostly silence within him for the scrawling of
Tifereth. But: Netzach, Hod and Yesod gleefully flung into place
from a fastball distance ensuring maximum precision and minimum
splatter. And convulsing with festive cachinnations while
delineating a begrimed Malkuth.
And then finally, smeared
all
over with his own shit, falling a stinking ball to the floor, wailing
amidst furious clusters of latenite neighbourious poundings from both
sides and below,
his voice torn and horse, bawling over and over to no one, a venomous,
shredded "EIN SOF! EIN SOF!! EIN SOF!!!"
And coming to him from an
open window, agitated, sleepy, enraged:
"AAAAAAAHHHH, SHAAADUP!!!"
Fill in the blank, moving
forward one sip at a time-- and take handfuls of pills in the morning
to cut the pain. Calmly flowing through glowing day after glowing
day, the radiance of your own purity radiating from your smile, parting
the seas of silent majorities in malls, downtown streets during
lunchtime, university hallways, government offices, computer rooms,
grocery stores and adult video stores-- all the while thinking to
yourself: I am not a god, I am but a man-- a mouse, rather, ah
yeas, sorry-- and I hate this planet, must leave this planet, destroy
this planet, somehow, all life, yes, heh heh heh, all life must indeed
perish....
One day, weeks later (or
maybe earlier, who knows?), he invented a game. It was a game
with no name, but it had a definite purpose. Although as far as
purposes went, he refused to even tell himself what it was. But
deep inside he knew. Even though the game was ultimately less a
game and more like an uncontrollable Tourettesian twitch, a kind of
self conditioned behaviour pattern. The game was this:
At certain times throughout
the day, the little white mouse would find himself wrapping his right
paw around his throat, and squeezing, gently at first but then with
increased force, until the world around him seemed to glitter with
strangeness and beauty. Eventually, as his brain cells began
dying, the world would eventually become tinged with a serene blackness.
Usually, playing this game
ended with him trembling and feeling like there was food caught in this
throat, and gasping for breath. Occasionally even vomiting.
And he would think about
their final meeting, and how he yelled at
her, and yelled and yelled. And he would play those moments
over and over in his imagination until he felt like dying.
One winter, after
getting into his car, starting the wipers to brush the snow from the
windshield and listening to the howling wind while staring at the heat
gauge and mentally willing the needle to creep up towards warmth, wind
blowing ancillary snow not swept aside by the arc of the wipers causing
him to feel as if (through the illusion of a sky suddenly there at the
periphery of his vision, eyes fixed downwards) a hand placed over his
eyelids had suddenly been removed with one deft motion allowing him
full vision for the first time in his life-- right then and there it
hit
the little while mouse. The Rapture had happened, secretly.
After all said and done, at the rollover to The Year 2000, the idiot
promise of an uneducated but powerful splinter sect of
backwards-thinking Christians had been vindicated-- and all the good
people had indeed vanished on the Day of Judgment while the unworthy
had indeed remained left behind to rot and counterplot in a
poorly-written LaHaye and Jenkins soap opera. And that it had
happened
the precise femtosecond that 1999 became 2000.
But (a-hah! here comes the
Joke!) no one had noticed this
glorious event because everyone was all still here. Turns out
no one had
been judged worthy for Elevation Unto The Eternal Heaven Of Our
Saviour, each and every being on this planet
forever beneath contempt in the eyes of the Lord. And so when the
auto-Raptural ascension mechanism had robotically kicked in and the
Holy Vortex opened
up to suck the worthy all up into the Light of the Real Sun, no one
made the grade-- not one single, solitary entity had been found to be
pure of heart and selfless and kind, or even in any way even a little
bit nice and not a completely useless shitfucker. And so it
happened and nobody noticed because everyone,
believers and heathens alike, were all equally garbage in the eyes of
the
Almighty.
And the little white mouse
wrapped his right paw
around his throat and began squeezing, gently at first but then with
increased force, until the world around him seemed to glitter with
strangeness and beauty. And then, at the edges of his vision,
bits of the serene blackness.
The needle of the heat gauge
crept upwards a hair, and the little white mouse, paw crushing his
windpipe, laughed a little bit. It was a strangled, gagging
sound. And he let go of his throat, and pounded his paws on the
steering wheel, crippled by glee, and felt for one brief moment at home
in the world....
And here followed those many
months spent being chased by green wheels, hooked to screens by vast
networks of pulsing tubes, eyes burned red and glowing by images of Jap
girls and synthesis. Tumbling back and forth through time, he was
une
souris andelusia slicing up eyeballs ah ha ha ho, scrying holy texts ah
ha ha ho,
trying to find something, some meaning in any of this, and finding
nothing. Ah ha ha ho. Or maybe he did this before?
Ah... uh... ho...?
("Une" being the feminine
form of "un" and mouse always being gendered feminine in French... good
gosh, that
sometimes made him feel positively unmanly-- what with all those tough
suggestive masculine cultural images out there-- just get over it, play
some football with the guys-- manliest thing of all, working up a sweat
with all those greasy muscled guys-- emotions are for queers-- buy a
rifle and kill some deer-- race cars around the track-- get wasted on
cheap beer and talk about yer conquests, movin' on, plenty of fish,
tattooed girls in tight dresses and cowboy boots hanging around
poolhalls and bars snapping their gum and reeking of cigarettes and
trailerparks, just walk up and say hey wanna get laid every one in
thirty'll probably take you up and you might not even get chlamydia or
married maybe, just get over it like a man and have a good time with
all yer manly pals, after all bitches, they're all whores anyway right,
mouse, don't be such a pretentious goth artfag acting like you still
love her got feelings of an almost human nature cast off
smoked to the butt drowning in the gutter or stretched out on Thomson's
cross of the missing t, raped by Golem-100, intestines around a pole--
the reverse of which, by the by, is 001-Melog, a villain in the old
Guido and Henson comic strip the mouse had drawn when young, Guido
being a loud-mouthed annoyed monster with Henson his equally annoyed
and vocalizing penis peeking out over the edge of a beige loincloth--
and having adventures, the two of them tripping thru time n space and
never quite beating that demented inverse-Bester creation, the mouse
having been exposed to Alfred's work at a very tender age, before even
Joyce and Burroughs-- although it was years later that he'd discovered
a similar one-eyed creature in the pages of Arthur Suydam whose best
work still (in the mouse's estimation) was a Cholly & Flytrap story (C&F also being the
source of Suydam's one one-eyed talking-penis creature) more than
heavily inspired by a longish chapter in the history of Cobalt-60 by
the late and sadly-missed Vaughan Bode whose cute, soft and cuddly Bode
Broads urged the mouse from smoothe boyhood to a manhood of hair
sprouting on his desperate little mouse-paws alone in the can while his
parents frantically pounded on the locked door while he, ahem,
quite frantically pounded on, ahem, something else--- the seeds of
2-Dimensional Complex sewn early in the still-mylenating pulsing gray
goo of the little white mouse-- as well, as, perhaps, just maybe, now
that I think about it, the seeds of wanting something, deeply desiring
something, a person or an image, or fantasy, that can never, ever, no
matter how hard he tried, ever physically be, a masterbatory ideal
never to be lived up to, and so was doomed,
therefore, to remain, just maybe, forever out of reach... because even
though she made him feel like he was living at the edge of the world
with her smile, she never really, in an important sense, really ever
existed anyway, at least not in the concrete form that the mouse needed
her to inhabit in order for him to remain whole, her to remain whole,
and not just a flickering imaginary built out of interactions with
someone who, while, yes, real and manipulating him, could still never
be what he wanted her to be because she just wasn't what the
collectivity of his desires was starving for, just maybe.)
And maybe all this
idiotic stuff happened before his revelation of the Rapture. It
would actually make a lot more sense if that turned out to be the
case. However, in all honesty, after a certain point, though, the
order of events didn't really matter. He was like a nihilist
Billy
Pilgrim
come unstuck in time and there was one day where he actually did reread
Slaughterhouse Five
and was struck by the beauty of the Tralfamadorian philosophy
of focusing on only the good parts of life. After all, if all
time was immutable and everything happens simultaneously and from birth
to death we're all always already immortal, frozen like bugs in amber,
then all you have to do is think about the good parts of your life and
your eternity will be bliss. Of course if the good parts all last
forever in this 4-D bug-amber universe, then so do
all the bad parts. And for every eternity where the little white
mouse and the Kitty Cat are sitting forever in the mouse's car, talking
about their dreams and hopes, the mouse feeling an infinity of joy,
that
moment where he told her that she
made him sick, that also lasts forever too. And the hatred and
pain of
that eternal moment vastly overwhelmed the beauty and bliss of any and
all good times he'd ever had with her.
And so, paw around throat,
glittering beauty, bits of encroaching serene blackness. Etc.
And the blackness consumed
him, and a hum filled his head, and when the light returned he was
standing in his bathroom and the hum in his head was the hum of the
lightbulbs above the mirror. He was looking at his own face, and
it was either before or after all other befores or afters, and he left
home
and went and met a spikehaired female troubadour who shook his hand,
smiled at him, and told him that language was a virus from outer
space. And then he met with a bald old man who wanted to put his
penis inside his rectum, like he wanted to put his penis inside
everything-- the bald old man had been dead for many years-- and he
told the mouse that reality was a disease of language, and then this
German Nazi guy came over and told the mouse that language was the
house of being, and some croaky old dude in a fedora said: "Nova
heat coming in fast, dig?"
(And then there was that
weird dream he'd had where he was alone in the changing room of a
giant underground swimming pool complex and he was putting pencil leads
into his penis. One at a time, he would slide the pencil leads
into himself and watch them as they vanished inside his body, and he
would marvel at how easily the pencil leads slid up into himself.
So then he decided to try larger and larger objects, first actual
pencils and pens, one at a time, up they would go into his penis and
he'd said to himself: "Woah, where the hell are they going?"
And so up would go more and
more pens and pencils-- where exactly was he getting these things?--
and then he tried long butter knives, and spoons. And they'd just
slide up there smoothe as silk, and there would always be room for
more. He was an empty vessel that could never be filled.
And when he awoke, the following song was going through his head:
Clang clang clang went the trolley,
Ding ding ding went the bell.
Took a whole lotta tryin,
Just to end up in Hell!)
And the mouse didn't know
where
he was, really, but there was a French guy with crazy hair telling him
now that hey Mr Bojangles there was nothing outside of the text.
A delirious, petite redhead for whom all texts were skin and all skin
was a text discussed hokusai manga with a fat, warbling man wearing
overalls and an accordion. And act so that there is no use in a
centre, this old lesbian
grandmother interjected while a skinny man almost completely covered
with hair sat on a throne and said "yes, the difference is spreading"
while taking a long, slow drag on a big fat joint the size of the
mouse's neck. The hairy man simply, slowly, calmly laughed as
above him numbers counted out one two three four five-five six-six
seven-seven eight-eight. And there were other people there,
too: Some tall skinny brit dude with a cheezy eyepatch over his
right eye, an old composer of chance operations who only had one shirt,
a Japanese fellow with really long hair and a couple of laptops who
through some vague synaesthetic process unknown to the mouse smelled
like static whenever he passed by, a talking eyeball with a tophat, a
bitter woman chewing on big fat long cigars, three little kids sporting
rifles and briefcases filled with plastic explosives, a very literate
dog, some
nerd with big ears and buck teeth or maybe when you looked at him
through the corner of your eye it maybe seemed like he had a paper bag
over his head or something? A bald man with a t-shirt that read
"23 Skidoo." And
the other bald old man, the who wanted to-to-to
put his penis into the mouse, he was drawing pentagrams on the ceiling
in menstrual blood. But, ultimately, whatever keeps the rifle
outta yer mouth at the end of the day, right?
Right?
Right?
It was some sort of party in
another
dimension and there was really awesome food and lots of great booze and
party games that felt like the birth of the universe on an infinite
white-line black-square grid (or maybe white-square, black-line like
some sort of No board?) that also felt like this prematurely
air-conditioned supermarket, and there were all these aisles. And
there were these bathing caps that he could buy that had these kind of
Fourth of July plumes on them that were red and yellow and blue.
And he wasn't tempted to buy one, but he was reminded of the fact that
he had been avoiding the beach. And then he found himself in this
prematurely air-conditioned supermarket and there were all these
aisles. And there were these bathing caps that he could buy that
had these kind of Fourth of July plumes on them that were red and
yellow and blue. And he wasn't tempted to buy one, but he was
reminded
of the fact that he had been avoiding the beach. And then he
found himself in this prematurely air-conditioned supermarket and there
were all these aisles. And there were these bathing caps that he
could buy that had these kind of Fourth of July plumes on them that
were red and yellow and blue. And he wasn't tempted to buy one,
but he was reminded of the fact that he had been avoiding the
beach.
And then he found himself in this prematurely air-conditioned
supermarket and there were all these aisles. And there were these
bathing caps that he could buy that had these kind of Fourth of July
plumes on them that were red and yellow and blue. And he wasn't
tempted to buy one, but he was reminded of the fact that he had been
avoiding the beach. And then he found himself in this prematurely
air-conditioned supermarket and there were all these aisles. And
there were these bathing caps that he could buy that had these kind of
Fourth of July plumes on them that were red and yellow and blue.
And he wasn't tempted to buy one, but he was reminded of the fact that
he had been avoiding the beach-- but at the same time he was still
standing still in the bathroom listening to the lightbulbs hum,
realizing that now-- this now both then and to come after having been
face to face with she
who'd ripped through his absolute terror field with her
adamantium claws-- is the time of interpolated cut scenes, re-used
footage, and text cards flashing on
screen... slow music... each card reading:
WHY DO YOU WRITE *30*?
Spotlight on the mouse alone
on stage:
"I-- I don't know."
(Ghostly, bit of an echo maybe, heightens his alienation, dramatic
effect.)
WHY DO YOU WRITE *30*?
"I said I don't really know
any more. I-- I mean I used to, I think b-but now I'm not so
sure."
WHY DO YOU WRITE *30*?
"Look, I just-- I dunno--
I-- why the hell am I here anyway a-and why do I feel a sudden urge to
whack off into my hand over the comatose body of girl I love as she
lies prone and dying in a hospital bed with tubes coming out of her
flesh?"
WHY DO YOU WRITE *30*?
"Would you just fuck off
already, whoever you are? None of this makes any sense.
Just leave me the hell alone."
IF YOU SEE ANY OF THOSE
BAGGY PANTS
IT WAS HUGE
CHUCK THE HILLS
MR BOJANGLES I REACH YOU
IT IT IT IT IT IS UH
LIKE THAT
CRAZY EDDIE CRAZY EDDIE
CRAZY EDDIE
I FEEL THE EARTH MOVE THE
TUMBLING DOWN THE TUMBLING DOWN
EVERY MAN AND WOMAN A SCAR.
HA. HA. HA.
ASSHOLE.
The mouse, looking down into
himself, shat glittering jewels and muttered with awe:
"To fuck and to be fucked, I
swallowed all the trigrams and, by Delta-S, my God, I'm full of stars."
And then standing in line at
a grocery store behind a small, greasy man who was purchasing dozens of
bags of Cheezies and dozens tubes of KY jelly. And the mouse
standing behind this small greasy man wondering just what was it this
guy was intending to do with... uh... all those bags of Cheezies and
tubes of KY. And the guy giving him a look like there there there
tasty boy, your time will soon come soon enough-- and didn't it almost
seem for like a half second like the dude had, like, almost a fucking
beak?
And then the mouse began
wondering if somehow he hadn't gone mad, remembering that time at night
when he'd been walking alone in the dark down the street because that'd
been a particularly literary evening and so he wanted a snack and so
the
darkness finds him munching on a tube of Pringles and haunted
by wolves and there was
this rustling sound and he saw a shape moving alongside him and then
towards him, a black shape because of the angle of the light under the
streetlamp, and it looked like a cat of some sort and he braced himself
for a confrontation because he knew it just had to be her, so he walked
along and the shape moved alongside him, tracking him, following his
every step, and then right as he was going oh god oh god oh god to
himself don't let it be her not here not now, it shot towards him and
he jumped and stopped and looked at it and walked towards it thinking
okay let's get this over with and when he walked up to her it was only
a black garbage bag being blown by the winter air, a trick of the
night. (And this other time, a dream, probably, right? With
the mouse
alone in this cave of toilets. First he'd been in a huge field
of grass and then he started to fly upwards into the clouds, and the
next thing he knew he was in the centre of the sun. And in
the centre of the sun was a cave of toilets, a thousandmile bus station
washroom in the form of a gigantic maze. And he was alone,
and the lights were florescent and buzzing. Stalls inside of
stalls inside of stalls; his footsteps echoing down strange corridors
of cold blue tile; public showers with broad flanged dripping Freudian
nozzles; urinals arranged in circular, rosette patterns; this huge room
the size of a football field-- and all the toilets here were all built
into each other and to use them you'd have to climb into them and lie
back down, and while comfortably reclining you'd open up and all that
shit would just slide right out of you smoothe and clear and sexy,
dig? And the mouse,
realizing that this is
the core, the truth, the soul of humanity: a foreverness of porcelain
and a bacteria
smell
like your hands get when you piss all over them and keep them wedged
for safety and fermentation between your asscheeks for months on
end. This is
the meaning of life. Yeah, it's all gotta be a dream-- can't be
real-- no
washroom this infinite and beatific could ever be sculpted by humanoid
fingers.
But what about-- well-- if
not human-- there still is that, that possibility-- of-- of-- no one
has totally ruled out the unknowable whims of that unspeakable
intelligent designer....
And as he walked, he found a
strange structure of wooden stalls, like outhouses, except that the
outhouses were all on scaffolds and reached up to the ceiling. So
he climbed the scaffolds to try and reach the top. If he was
going to drop a load he may as well do it from safety of being above
it all. After all, the holes in each seat were perfectly aligned
and there were holes in all the ceilings of each stall except for the
stalls at the very top-- so whatever came down from above would plummet
32 feet per second per second through all the stalls and the holes
below. And then into the cesspit located deeply in the
bowels of the cave of toilets in the centre of the sun.
(Don't wanna be in that
bottom stall, kid. Don't wanna in fact be in any stall 'ceptin
the top... 'lessin o'course you swing a might towards the
phrenofaecophillic. Which, given the way the bee bumbles these
days... hm....)
And when he reached the
top-- oddly not out of breath, but strangely horny-- he opened the
first door he found, pulled down his pants and, looking at all the
holds underneath him, smiled contentedly boner and all, and sat down.
And, as he felt himself
loosening up, he noticed some graffiti carved in the wooden door in
front of him. The typical fuck yous and for a good time calls,
and some stuff that he couldn't read no matter how had he focused, like
he was trying to parse a 4-dimensional language he could only barely
recognize as language and also couldn't even really see cuz it was
zipping in and outta space.
And right next to the
writing
that was so weird he couldn't even really be sure that it was writing,
he saw:
But it was only a fantasy
The wall was too high as you can see
No matter how he tried he could not break free
And the worms ate into his brain
-- Lao Tzu
And the little white mouse began to scream.) Or that other time
he'd b-b-b-been walking again at night
alone
unloved along the sidewalk listening to Solo Piano by Philip Glass
caught between kriti and
bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk
and he saw her waiting at a bus shelter alone looking downcast and he
thought fine then I guess I'll have to talk to her, but she wasn't
looking at him and he waved at her telling her hi what brings you here
heh heh, trying to make it into a joke but she still ignored him, and
the closer he got to her the more she shifted shape and dimension until
she melted into shadows and had never been there at all. Leaving
him thinking that he'd been dreaming, filling him with an urge to run
away from the shadows screaming. But he hadn't been dreaming,
and so grab the throat and wait for the flickering blackness and later
wake up to a new world of sitting alone and staring at gnarled
theological texts, eyes glazed over with a dulled expectancy--
expectancy of what? Hope maybe, a direction? Naw, he'd
given all that up a long time ago. And now, what, like, decades
had passed? Or was he moving backwards in time, tracing line by
line, claw across page, eyes panning
Barth and Tillich and Ricoeur and Brueggemann and Augustine and Caputo,
and,
and.... Until one fine day he hit upon Thomas J.J. Altizer's
Christian Atheism with its philosophy of affirmation through negation
which dragged the infinite down (or maybe even elevated it up to) the
level of a SWANS song. And while reading Altizer sermonizing
about his
conversion to Satan and the subsequent birth of the death of God, the
little white mouse felt himself teetering on the edge of a cliff, and
so he started laughing. And he laughed and laughed and
laughed. And replayed those last few moments with the Kitty Cat,
felt shame and rage and horror and grabbed his throat and
squeezed. And he felt alive, alive in the
glittering blackness blotting out his vision, full of panic
and stars, wanting to scream, dizzy, thinking that
maybe was there, maybe, something in that water? (Put myself inna
particle accelerator and see what comes out me flying into panic and
fields maybe even fucked up the ass by the Higgs Bosun become a part of
something unmentionable and transfinite maybe just get cancer yeah sure
shit that'll happen no Dr Manhattan for me.) Did I put down
my water back there, when I was back at that rave, or was there even a
there there? (I feel like I can count the electrons inna
stopsign.) How much am I drinking? (My eyes.) My guts
always hurt
now and my shit is black as tar and smells like burnt matches.
Sure sign of an ulcer....
And morning found him
sitting on a bench on top of a hill, the glittering hyperillusion
of passing time fading, sucking on the neck of an empty bottle of
cannabis vodka, looking up at the sky with blank eyes, slowly mouthing
the words: "Omega greater than zero. Bakery. Thought you'd
like to know. Organ music. Rosebuds."
When suddenly behind him:
"Hey kid," it was the Eagle.
"You again."
"Havin' girl troubles?"
"It goes deeper than that,
you rotten cocksucker. You know that."
"Skirts, dames, frails,
p'feh-- they ain't worth the tampons they're printed on." (Which
actually didn't make a hell of a lotta sense, really, and the little
white mouse wondered if, while ebbing in and out of states of
quasi-unconscious pretension, he hadn't misheard the Eagle.)
"I can't believe that," the
little white mouse said.
"You believe what you want
to believe, kiddo."
"I will."
A long silence. And
then the mouse said:
"You've just been playing
with me all along, haven't you."
And the Eagle laughed.
"You let me think that I'm
free, that I've gone places, and yet I always seem to find myself back
here with you. I even fragmented. Back in 30.EPILOGUE.64:
October 15, 2003. 'The Mouse And The Eagle, part 15: The Clarity
of .'
I fragmented. I fucking fragmented."
"You think you
fragmented. You only wanted to fragment. You played at
fragmentation. Back then, you were whole. As whole as
anyone is whole, anyway."
"I'm not whole. I'm
broken," the mouse said.
"Well, maybe now you
are. But only a little bit. You've just had your first real
taste of fragmentation. Your first real, bona fide honest
to
shit breakdown. You gave up, totally. Even way back in
1999, when you were having a bit of a crisis and you were sick, it was
just a teensy crisis and you still had some fight left in
you. But not this time. This time it was almost a total
shutdown, and you wandered around, staring and mumbling for almost an
entire year. Did it feel good? Your little vacation from
reality? Are you all rested now and ready for the next stage of
your degradation? Because what that was, what you're in the
middle of right now, I can guarantee you it
ain't nothin' compared to what's coming next."
"Fuck you."
And the Eagle laughed.
"Why do you write *30*?" the
Eagle said.
The mouse's blood ran cold.
"Fuck..." he said.
"And now you're all
paralyzed and drowning," the Eagle said. "Poor you," the Eagle
said. "But what are you complaining about?" the Eagle said.
"When you let me sit on your back, you always knew I was a scorpion."
"...you."
And the Eagle laughed.
"And now you're all junk
sick and shivering," the Eagle said.
The mouse didn't like where
this was going.
"But what are you
complaining about?" the Eagle said.
Not one bit.
"When you let me sit on your
back, you always knew I was a monkey. See, see how that's clever,
George, the way I changed that to mean something else, but still also
something
sort of the same? Smart folks, we do stuff like that. We're
subtle. And quick to anger."
And the Eagle laughed again.
"And when you let her play
with you," the Eagle said. "You always knew that she was a Kitty
Cat."
And the mouse screamed and
lunged at the Eagle and hit the Eagle on the edge of his beak.
The
Eagle's beak was as hard as a rock and the little white mouse sliced
open his right paw. Blood dripped on the ground.
And the Eagle laughed.
"Feel better?" he said.
And then the little white
mouse changed.
He roared with rage and
grasped the legs of the bench on which he had sat. Grasped the
legs and roared and shrieked and bellowed. Muscles straining and
bulging, eyes flashing holy red fire.
And then the bench rocked
back and forth as the bolts that held it fast to the concrete
strained. And then the bench raised slightly in the mouse's paws
as the concrete around the bolts began to fracture and split. And
then with a mighty noise the bench was over the mouse's head and the
mouse ran howling towards the Eagle who stood there stunned as he
received a beakfull of bench, the impact of which sent him flying
across the field, crashing through trees. Down the hill.
And into the windshield of a parked car whose alarm instantly klaxoned,
filling the quiet morning with panic. As the Eagle, shocked and
awed by the blow, rolled off the car. Onto the pavement of the
parking lot. Shook his head, and slowly. Dizzily.
Climbing up on hands and knees. And then propping himself onto
the hood of the car. Closed his eyes, opened them. Focused
on the mouse who stood there, now. Panting and gasping with pain,
the bench discarded, furious eyes pinning the Eagle. A low sound
rumbling from deep within the mouse's throat.
"Good one," said the
Eagle. Standing now, steadying himself.
And the little white mouse
took one step forward.
"It's too bad that's all
you've got," said the Eagle. "Too bad you didn't envision
yourself as a far less impotent animal."
The Eagle dusted himself off.
And the little white mouse
tried to wish himself into another form.
"It's a little too late for
that," said the Eagle. "Cry you mercy, I am the law."
And the little white mouse
charged the Eagle.
And the Eagle calmly took
one of his talons, and picked the mouse up by the tail, and tossed him
up into the air and, just as he fell, just before he hit the ground,
caught him again in a talon and dangled him in space.
"I ought to swallow you
whole," said the Eagle.
"Then why don't you," said
the mouse, ears ringing, blood rushing to his head.
"I ought to slam you against
a rock."
The little white mouse said
nothing.
And then somehow time passed
and the little white mouse, sitting alone in his apartment with a
hangover
and a sour stomach, realized that he was no longer hanging
by his tail from the Eagle's claw. Or maybe he'd actually been
swallowed whole. And his head sure felt like it'd been slammed
against a rock.
The little white mouse went
to the bathroom and threw up for a while.
And when he'd wiped the
vomit from the tip of his nose, he thought about how much he hated the
Kitty Cat now, and how that hatred would probably always rage like a
dwarf
star in the centre of his chest and would never go away. And he
steeled
himself up for another exciting day of dullness and anger in the cold,
blank lie that passed itself off as the "real world." He looked
out the
window at the enveloping daylight and tried to squint away the fiery
acid pain gnawing at the back of his right eye. And he hated and
hated
and hated everything so much he felt utterly paralyzed inside.
(Like something unnamable
had just been felled by a death blow.)
So he walked away from the
window and towards one of his many bookshelves and, screaming, swept
armloads and pawloads of books onto the floor of his
apartment where they sat in piles until, still screaming and howling,
he kicked the piles across the room. Then he picked up book after
book and hurled them all one at a time at the wall. Then he tried
to kick over his television set which was too large and heavy to move,
so it just made a TUNG sound and he felt a dull pain spreading into his
toes.
And then the dull pain
quickly turned into a sharp pain and the mouse hobbled onto his couch
and feet sliding on books, threw himself onto the cushions and, holding
his foot in his clenched paws, rocked back and forth, bellowing:
"FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK…."
(He would later be told by a
doctor that he had broken the pinkie claw on his right paw.)
And when the pain finally
ebbed into a dull broken-bone ache, he stood up once again,
contemplated negotiating the chaos he had made, and, shuffling slowly
through scatted and bent books, made his way to the doorway of his
apartment where he opened the door and limped out into the hall.
Closed the door and locked the door behind him. Limped away from
the door and down the hall. Then down the stairs to the main
floor where, bearing down on the sunlight streaming through the
streaked pane of
glass that separated him the from the hyperreallity of spring, he
opened yet another door, and emerged into a fresh, bright, newly-mown
world.
He missed her so much, felt
so guilty for how he'd treated her,
remembered all the good times they'd had, tried to forget the way she
smiled-- and red light flooded his
eyes from inside his eyes.
It was like "Lovesong," it
was like "True Faith," it was like "The Loneliness of Lift Music," it
was like "Another You."
He ached for erasure, Lacuna
Inc.
and all that. Eternal sunshine of the
spotless mouse. His legs trembled.
"Yes," he said. "I
have decided that I will no longer be insane. Having
transmigrated through chapel perilous, I will no longer be erratic and
unfocused and reactionary. I will no longer behave as if I am
nuts, certifiable, desperate and schizophrenic. I will move into
eternity and release. And man tha ha ha meao being mkeas from an
chair communicates opera to a chair communicates som ha ha ha
ething-- and so is thus a kind of text. I will be fine and
okay.
"I will become a responsible
citizen, giving my all to the
group while elevating myself above the muck in penance for what I once
was. Yes, hah ah ha-- I will care, or at least pretend to care,
about the fortunes of others. I will give them my all and turn
belly up when my number is called. I will do this because I have
decided to become sane, in light of all circumstances. Yes.
Sane I will be, forever and for all.
"Alpha and omega, I will
give them the morning star.
"And when all becomes white
light and lakes of fire, when the phials of necrosis and void have been
opened it will be my
face they see sneering
down above them from the
clouds, the last image burned into their godforsaken, foaming brains
before the coming of
the howling void. And there will be no more death, no more
sorrow, no more crying. No more pain. For the former things
will be passed away.
"Yes. From hereon out,
I vow to see clearly and to be sane.
"Surely, I come quickly."
And so, tracing the sign of
the dollar in the air with one calculating paw and the other paw
secretly clenched trembling and hidden, smiling a serene, inward smile,
the
little white mouse returned to the world.
He loved Big Brother.
