Spring 2007 (5 page)

Me, I’m still laboring alone or nearly so in the Dark
Ages, and she never lets me forget it. My unfashionable and unprofitable
preoccupation with mere canvas and paint, steel and plaster, all that which has
been deemed
demodé, passé
, Post-Relevant, all that which is fit only to
fill up musty old museum vaults and public galleries, gathering more dust even
than my career.

You still write on a goddamn keyboard, for chris’sakes,
she
laughs.
You’re the only woman I ever fucked made being a living fossil a
goddamn point of pride.
And then Sabit checks for my pulse–two
fingers pressed gently to a wrist or the side of my throat–bcause, hey,
maybe I’m not a
living
fossil at all. Maybe I’m that
other
kind,
like Pollack and Mondrian, Henry Moore and poor old Man Ray.
No, no, no, the
blood’s still flowing sluggishly along,
she smiles and lights a cigarette.
Too
bad. Maybe there’s hope for you yet, my love.

Sabit likes to talk almost as much as she likes to
watch. It’s not as though the bitch has a mark on her hide anywhere, not as
though she’s anything but a tourist with a hard-on, a fetishist who can not
ever get enough of her kink. Prick her for a crimson bead and the results would
come back same as mine, 98% the same as any chimpanzee. She knows how much
contempt is reserved in those quarters for tourists and trippers, but I think
that only makes her more zealous. She exhales, and smoke lingers like a
unearned halo about her face. I should have dumped her months ago, but I’m not
as young as I used to be, and I’m just as addicted to sex as she is to nicotine
and pills and stitchwork. She calls herself a poet, but she has never let me
read a word she’s written, if she’s ever written a word.

I found her a year ago, almost a year ago, found her in
a run-down titty bar getting fucked-up on vodka and laudanum and speed and the
too-firm silicone breasts of women who might have been the real
thing–even if their perfect boobs were not–or might only have been
cheap japandroids. She followed me home, fifteen years my junior, and the more
things change, the more things stay the way they were day before day before
yesterday, day before I met Sabit and her slumberous Arabian eyes. My sloe-eyed
stitch-fiend of a girlfriend, and I have her, and she has me, and we’re as
happy as happy can be, and I pretend it means something more than orgasms and
not being alone, something more than me annoying her and her taunting and
insulting me.

Now she’s telling me there’s a new line-up down @
Corpus
Ex Machina
(hereafter known simply as CeM), and we have to be there
tomorrow night.
We have to be there,
she says.
The Trenton Group is
showing, and last time the Trenton Group showed, there was almost a riot, so we
have to be there.
I have deadlines that have nothing whatsoever to do with
that constantly revolving meat-market spectacle, and in a moment I’ll finish
this entry & then I’ll tell her that, and she’ll tell me we have to be
there, we have to be there, & there will be time to finish my articles
later. There always is, & I’m never late. Never late enough to matter. I’ll
go with her, bcause I do not trust her to go alone–not go alone
and
come back here again–she’ll tell me that, and she’ll be right as fucking
rain. Her smug triumph, well that’s a given. Just as my obligatory refusal
followed by inevitable, reluctant acquiescence is also a given. We play by the
same rules every time. Now she’s on about some scandal @
Guro/Guro–chicanery and artifice, prosthetics, and she says,
They’re
all a bunch of gidding poseurs, the shitheels run that sorry dump. Someone
ought to burn it to the ground for this.
You know how to light a match I
reply, & she rolls her dark eyes @ me.

No rain today. No rain since…June. The sky at noon is
the color of rust, and I wish it were winter. Enough for now. Maybe she’ll shut
up for 10 or 15 if I fuck her.

August 16, 2027

“You’re into that whole
scene
, right?” Which only
shows to go once again that my editor still has her head rammed so far up her
ass that her farts smell like toothpaste. But I said yeah, sure, bcause she
wanted someone with cred on the Guro/Guro story, the stitch chicanery,
allegations of fraud among the freaks, & what else was I supposed to say? I
can’t remember the last time I had the nerve to turn down a paying assignment.
Must have been years before I met Sabit, at least. So, yeah, I tagged along
last night, just like she wanted–both of them wanted–she & she,
but @ least I can say it’s work, and Berlin picked up the tab.

Sabit’s out, so I don’t have her yammering in my goddamn
ear, an hour to myself, perhaps, half an hour, however long it takes her to get
back with dinner. I wanted to put something down, something that isn’t in the
notes and photos I’ve already filed with the pre-edit gleets. Fuck. I’ve been
popping caps from Sabit’s pharmacopoeia all goddamn day long, I don’t even know
what, the baby-blue ones she gets $300/two dozen from Peru, the ones she says
calm her down but they’re not calming me down. They haven’t even dulled the
edge, so far as I can tell.

But, anyway, there we were @ CeM, in the crowded Pearl
St. warehouse passing itself off as a slaughterhouse or a zoo or an exhibition
or what the fuck ever, and there’s this bird from Tokyo, and I never got her
name, but she had eyes all the colors of peacock feathers, iridescent eyes, and
she recognized me. Some monied bird with pretty peacock eyes. She’d read the
series I wrote in ‘21 when the city finally gave up and let the sea have the
subway.
I read a lot,
she said.
I might have been a journalist
myself,
she said. That sort of shit. Thought she was going to ask me to
sign a goddamn cocktail napkin. And I’m smiling & nodding yes, bcause
that’s agency policy, be nice to the readers, don’t feed the pigeons, whatever.
But I can’t take my eyes off the walls. The walls are new. They were just walls
last time Sabit dragged me down to one of her snip affairs. Now they’re alive,
every square inch, mottled shades of pink and gray and whatever you call that
shade between pink and gray. Touch them (Sabit must have touched them a hundred
times) and they twitch or sprout goosebumps. They sweat, those walls.

And the peacock girl was in one ear, and Sabit was in
the other, the music so loud I was already getting a headache before my fourth
drink, and I was trying to stop looking at those walls.
Pig,
Sabit told
me later in the evening.
It’s all just pig
, and she sounded
disappointed. Most of this is in the notes, though I didn’t say how unsettling
I found those walls of skin. I save the revulsion for my own dime. Sabit says
they’re working on adding functional genitalia and….fuck. I hear her at the
door. Later, then. She has to shut up and go to sleep eventually.

August 16, 2027
(later, 11:47 p.m.)

Sabit came back with a bag full of Indian takeaway, when
she’d gone out for sushi. I really couldn’t care less, one way or the other,
these days food is only fucking food–curry or wasabi, but when I
asked
why she’d changed her mind, she just stared at me, eyes blank as a goddamn dead
codfish, & shrugged. Then she was quiet all night long, & the last
thing I need just now is Sabit Abbasi going all silent and creepy on me. She’s
asleep, snoring bcause her sinuses are bad bcause she smokes too much. &
I’m losing the momentum I needed to say
anything
more about what
happened @ CeM on Sat. night. It’s all fading, like a dream.

I’ve been reading one of Sabit’s books,
The Breathing
Composition
(Welleran Smith, 2025), something from those long-ago days when
the
avant-garde
abomination of stitch & snip was still hardly more
than nervous rumor & theory & the wishful thinking of a handful of East
Coast art pervs. I don’t know what I was looking for, if it was just research
for the article, don’t know what I thought I might find–or what any of
this has to do with Sat. nite. Am I afraid to write it down? That’s what Sabit
would say. But I won’t ask Sabit. What do
you
dream, Sabit, my dear
sadistic plaything? Do you
dream
in installations, muscles and tendons,
gallery walls of sweating pig flesh, living bone exposed for all to see,
vivisection as not-quite still life, portrait of the artist as a young
atrocity? Are your sweet dreams the same things keeping me awake, making me
afraid to sleep?

There was so goddamn much @ CeM to turn my fucking
stomach, but just this one thing has me jigged and sleepless and popping your
blue Peruvian bon bons. Just this one thing. I’m not the squeamish sort, and
everyone knows it. That’s one reason the agency tossed the Guro/Guro story at
me. Gore & sex and mutilation? Give it to Schuler. She’s seen the worst and
keeps coming back for more. Wasn’t she one of the first into Brooklyn after the
bomb? & she did that crazy whick out on the Stuyvesant rat attacks. How
many murders and suicides and serial killers does that make for Schuler now? 9?
Fourteen? 38? That kid in the Bronx, the Puerto Rican bastard who sliced up his
little sister & then fed her through a food processor, that was one of Schuler’s,
yeah?
Ad infinitum, ad nauseum,
hail Mary, full of beans. Cause they
know I won’t be on my knees puking up lunch when I should be making notes &
getting the vid or asking questions.

But now,
now
Sabit, I’m dancing round this one
thing. This one little thing. So, here there’s a big ol’ chink in these
renowned nerves of steel. Maybe I’ve got a weak spot after fucking all. Rings
of flesh, towers of iron–oh yeah, sure–fucking corpses heaped in
dumpters and rats eating fucking babies alive & winos & don’t forget
the kid with the Cuisinart–sure, fine–but that one labeled #17, oh,
now
that’s
another goddamn story. She
saw
something there, &
ol’ Brass-Balls Schuler was never quite the same again, isn’t that the way it
goes?

Are you laughing in your dreams, Sabit? Is that why
you’re smiling next to me in your goddamn sleep? I’ve dog-eared a page in your
book, Sabit, a page with a poem written in a New Jersey loony bin by a woman,
& Welleran Smith just calls her Jane Doe so I do not know her name. But
Welleran Smith & that mangy bunch of stitch prophets called her a
visionary, & I’m writing it down here, while I try to find the nerve to say
whatever it is I’d wanted to say about #17:

spines and bellies knitted & proud and all open

all watching spines and bellies and the three;

triptych & buckled, ragdoll fusion

3 of you so conjoined, my eyes from yours,

arterial hallways knitted red proud flesh

Healing and straining for cartilage & epidermis

Not taking, we cannot imagine

So many wet lips, your sky Raggedy alchemy

And all expecting Jerusalem

And Welleran Smith, he proclaims Jane Doe a “hyperlucid
transcendent schizo-oracle,” a “visionary calling into the maelstrom.” &
turns out, here in the footnotes, they put the bitch away bcause she’d drugged
her lover–she was a lesbian; of course, she had to be a lesbian–she
drugged her lover and used surgical thread to sew the woman’s lips &
nostrils closed,
after
performing a crude tracheotomy so she wouldn’t
suffocate. Jane Doe sewed her own vagina shut, and she removed her own nipples
& then tried grafting them onto her gf’s belly. She kept the woman (not
named, sorry, lost to anonymity) cuffed to a bed for almost 6 weeks before
someone finally came poking around & jesus fucking christ, Sabit, this is
the sort of sick bullshit set it all in motion. Jane Doe’s still locked away in
her padded cell, I’m guessing–
hyperlucid
& worshipped by the
snips–& maybe the woman she mutilated is alive somewhere, trying to
forget. Maybe the doctors even patched her up (ha ha fucking ha) made her good
as new again, but I doubt it.

I need to sleep. I need to lie down & close my eyes
& not see #17 and sweating walls and Sabit ready to fucking cum bcause she
can never, ever get enough. It’s half an hour after midnight, & they expect
copy from me tomorrow night, eight sharp, when I haven’t written a goddamn word
about the phony stitchwork @ Guro/Guro. Fuck you, Sabit, and fuck Jane Doe
& that jackoff Welleran Smith and the girl with peacock eyes that I should
have screwed just to piss you off. I should have brought her back here and
fucked her in our bed, & maybe you’d have found some other snip tourist
& even now I could be basking in the sanguine cherry glow of happily ever
fucking after.

August 18, 2027

I’m off the Guro/Guro story. Missed the extended DL
tonight, no copy, never even made it down to the gallery. Just my notes and
photos from CeM for someone else to pick up where I left off. Lucky the agency
didn’t let me go. Lucky or unlucky. But they can’t can me, not for missing a
deadline or two. I have rep, I have creds, I have awards & experience &
loyal goddamn readers. Hell, I still get a byline on this thing; it’s in my
contract. Fuck it. Fuck it all.

August 19, 2027

Welleran Smith’s “Jane Doe” died about six months ago,
back in March. I asked some questions, said it was work for the magazine,
tagged some people who know people who could get to the files. It was a
suicide–oh, and never you mind that she’d been on suicide watch for
years. This one was a certified trooper, a bona-fide martyr in the service of
her own undoing. She chewed her tongue in half & choked herself on it. She
had a name, too. Don’t know if Smith knew it & simply withheld it, or if he
never looked that far. Maybe he only prigged the bits he needed to put the
snips in orbit & disregarded the rest.