Autopsy of an Eldritch City: Ten Tales of Strange and Unproductive Thinking (17 page)

The Dark Side of the Moon
LP. The aesthetic misery you experienced deep within your soul when you realized that there was no longer any difference between the Great Sphinx of Giza and the tacky one that can be found outside of the Luxor Las Vegas hotel & casino; if the Devil is the Father of Lies, we may also lump tourist attractions amongst his progeny, for that was what the laser light show had reduced the original Sphinx to. The limo ride to the airport, “Miss the Girl” by The Creatures playing on the stereo system, your face up against the window, watching the world scroll by, thinking to yourself,
I’ve never cared for poetry. It’s not that I don’t understand it; it’s simply that I have little time for an art form that, generally speaking, strains too hard to see beyond the surfaces of things. I’ve always found the haiku to be a far superior method of poetic expression: short, concise, and direct. I look out the window of my limousine and I realize how an artist could easily see a potential poem in the various sights and sounds of the outside world. But when I look outside I only see objects that can be categorized: people, buildings, trees, sky, grass, rain. The track listing for an alternate version of the Talking Heads’
Fear of Music
album. So many things in this world of ours can be summed up with one word.
Your final conversation with Ithell: her angry accusations and your feeble denials, the slammed doors, the glassware being shattered, the black mascara running down from below her eyes like the oily feelers on the face of Great Cthulhu; the shock to your system that came after that, as if GOD had just injected a wartime Soviet mycotoxin into your nervous system (perhaps Kurov-DK, 2 tons of which had been made by the Soviets during the Cold War as part of their Biopreparat program; or even good old Anthrax Tau, the Illuminati-approved germ warfare weapon of choice for the flesh servants of the Lloigor).With her out of your life, why not go to Egypt? Why not pursue that most elusive childhood dream?  It was either that or die, flip or go to India. That seedy apartment with the Maxi-Pad lighting and the tattered
Nightmare Before Christmas
poster, the unmade bed, the naked female body next to you (on her left ass cheek there was a tattoo copied from the Seal that appears on the front cover of the Simon
Necronomicon
), you with a melancholy expression on your face, the fan girl flipping through Richard Dawkins’
The Selfish Gene
and reading aloud a passage she came across on page 133: “For instance, there are honeyguides who, like cuckoos, lay their eggs in the nest of other species. The baby honeyguide is equipped with a sharp hooked beak. As soon as he hatches out, while he is still blind, naked and otherwise helpless, he scythes and slashes his foster brothers and sisters to death…” (when you asked her why she had felt the need to read that particular passage aloud, she had replied, “What can I say? I just adore brood parasitism.” Then she had mentioned how yesterday she had spotted what she thought was a peluda in the laundry room of her apartment building, and you had had no idea what a peluda was and you didn’t really feel like asking her as it sounded vaguely like it involved some type of female sex organ but later on that evening you had looked it up in an encyclopedia and realized that the peluda, also known as the “Hairy One” or “Shaggy Beast,” was a mythological porcupine-like dragon that had been said to terrorize a certain commune in France during the Middle Ages, and that it had been denied access to Noah’s Ark yet somehow had survived the Great Flood, and you had idly wondered if such creatures made good pets). The girl with curious hair in a t-shirt that said “Zap-You’re Pregnant-That’s Magic” at your book signing at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square who claimed to be the lead singer in a witch house band named Hungry Ghost Realm and who gushed to you how your second book (
Globus Cruciger
) had changed her life, and would you like to go back to her place afterwards? The argument you had with Ithell one afternoon at MoMA, an argument that took place in front of Roy Lichtenstein’s 1965-1966 work
Explosion
. The joy that had coursed through your veins the day you signed that first publishing contract. The day you graduated college and you and Ithell decided to embark on an impulsive road trip, down Route 66, The Killers’ “When You Were Young” blasting on your car’s stereo system as loud as you both could tolerate, followed by Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way” (your favorite song, it appeared in the film
Casino
, the only thing you can remember about that movie). Finishing your thesis paper one foggy weekend, an examination of the Gnostic and Sufi parallels of Doris Lessing’s 1971 novel
Briefing for a Descent Into Hell
(your favorite book of all time, followed by Yeats’
The Celtic Twilight
). The jerk who tore photographs of supposed shape-shifting reptilian aliens from the Draco constellation out of some David Icke doorstopper (most likely
The Biggest Secret
) and taped them to your dorm room’s door. Listening to the song “Circle” by Siouxsie & the Banshees on your Walkman at the UMass dining hall while half-heartedly eating a sandwich with pickles and writing down the following sentence in creepy Slayer font on the cover of your notebook for ENGL-224: “Within my skull there resides an entire universe of pain, and I am not brave enough of an astronaut to explore it.” That gym class in high school where you all went out to play softball and it had just rained and giant fuzzy caterpillars were everywhere and one of the girls in your class looked at one of the caterpillars, then looked at her boyfriend and said, “You know, I just want to step on all of them, and I don’t know why.” The revulsion you had felt that day. Your pet cat Mitzi chasing her tail around and around and around and around (Mitzi was the only creature you knew who never judged you: she would sit curled up in your lap for hours, the sound of her loud purrs reminding you of that of logs crackling in a fireplace during the winter). Father Severin’s nightmarish sermon (one of many you experienced, and you weren’t alone in finding them nightmarish: Christopher Oz developed iridophobia from the infamous rainbow homily) where he had proclaimed to the assembled congregation that Hell is a circle while Heaven is a straight line, and the nightmare you had had that evening where you had begun to suspect that the Grand Design of your life was nothing more than the outline of an inverted V, the bottom horn of some metaphorical pentagram.
A soft voice whispers, “Beware the Womb-Doors.”
The cartoon strip you had cut out of the Funnies page that depicted a skeleton choking on a crust of bread. That pair of mannequin legs in the basement of your parents’ house that had haunted your nightmares for years, they had given you a bad case of the howling fantods because no one, not even your parents, knew how they had ended up there, and your sister had even gone so far as to claim that there had been some nights where she had spotted the legs moving of their own volition, as if they had been possessed by the spirits of Ormaoth and Emenun, their original archigenitors. That time you snuck into the rectory after CCD was let out and you spotted Father Severin seated alone on a bed, crying, listening to Smokey Robinson’s “Tears of a Clown” as he gazed at an old black and white photograph of a young girl with freckles on her face. Those rare
happy moments from your childhood struggling to break free, as if your mind is trying to unclog a recalcitrant amalgamation of fecal matter from the bowels of a toilet, the variegated recollections screaming across the penetralia of your bonescreen like a waylaid V-2 Rocket doused with psychedelic colors: struggling to play the allemande from Johann Sebastian Bach’s French Suite No. 5 on the family piano; the blue-skinned sphinx perched atop the six-spoked wheel of Pamela Colman-Smith’s “Wheel of Fortune” tarot card, a sword clasped in its paws and an Egyptian-style pharaonic headdress on its head (you even had a name for this sphinx, and that name had been Wallow, which had also been the name of the leather Abercrombie and Fitch rhinoceros once owned by Edie Sedgwick); Gor, the Brain from Planet Arous; a pleasant childhood dream in which you had come across a box of imaginary crayons, with colors such as “Autumn Rot” and “Night Rainbow”; the first time you ever ejaculated, in the early 1990’s, after happening across a full page reproduction of Mel Ramos’ 1967 painting
Hippopotamus
in one of your father’s Pop Art books, the image in question being a nude blonde woman resting atop the back of a hippo, only as you jerked off in your mind’s eye you saw instead a naked Kelly Ripa atop the hippo (this was back when Ripa was one of the stars of
All My Children
, a show you used to love watching when you were a teenager: the crush you had back then on Hayley Vaughan); Bernini’s sculpture
The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa
; Judy Garland singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” in
Meet Me in St. Louis
; Beryllium, your favorite element on the Periodic Table, whose chemical symbol is Be and whose atomic number is 4 and whose Atomic Mass is 9.012182 amu and whose melting point is 1278.0 °C and whose boiling point is 2970.0 °C (it also had 5 neutrons and 4 protons/electrons); Exodus 20:23 (“Ye shall not make with me gods of silver, neither shall ye make unto you gods of gold”); and how could you forget how you had adored lying down on your bed naked as a child and flipping through
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
, this edition being graced with the whimsical (yet sinister) illustrations of Sir John Tenniel? You had been especially fond of the illustration of the Dodo, and for your sixth birthday you had asked your parents to get you one as a pet, unaware at that point in your life how such birds were long extinct: oh, how you had cried when you had been told that the dodo had died out long ago, and no longer existed in this world, and it was at that moment in time that you first began to consider the possibility that maybe this world we live in isn’t the best of all possible worlds, for how could a world in which dodos no longer existed claim to be the best of all possible worlds?
Nostalgizing on one’s childhood memories is like handling a rose: while it is pretty to the eyes and often smells divine, one must be ever wary of the thorns prickling such recollections. For behind the radiance of nostalgia is a shadow that can never be forgotten.
The day you asked your mother, with tears streaming down your herpetological mien, “How can I be happy, when this whole world is burning? Who will love a boy who looks like nothing other than a desiccated pterodactyl?” (“Looks aren’t everything, my little bon-bon,” she said, somewhat pithy advice, you realized, even all the way back then).
Let it all go, let your identity scatter like the wind, cut away all the chains that hold you down, be they good or bad, pleasurable or painful, happy or sad.
The time your father took out the grill and began to start up a barbecue of some sorts in the backyard and after you had eaten your hamburger you had started digging into a glass bowl of ice cream when a bee had buzzed by your face and you had screamed and dropped the bowl of ice cream and this bowl had shattered on the stone patio, the shards of glass flying in all directions, the lumps of ice cream melting in the hazy summer sun resembling, in your mind, the final remains of some microscopic Heaven melting away to nothing. The first video game you had ever played, a home adaptation of
Pac-Man
, which had triggered a bad dream that night: in the dream you were gazing up at the night sky and the crescent moon had mutated into an enormous lunar Pac-Man, one who promptly began gobbling up all the stars in the sky, one by one, until Earth was plunged into an eternal darkness. Your first unofficial pet, a cockroach that your mother had promptly smashed flat with her foot when you showed it to her, a murder that disciples of St. Gulik would no doubt see as an act of the utmost blasphemy. One last neurological regurgitation before you surrender yourself to the Great Black Time of Kali’s Cunt, the tohu-bohu blackness of the Beginning: that year, probably your sixth or fifth (or maybe it was even your seventh) on this little spinning ball of despair that is our home, when, in a rare moment of theological rebellion, you decided to defy Father Doyle and make a circle of yourself. So you tilted your head backwards (easy enough to do, what with your freakishly flexible spine), and you opened your mouth and you took your tail into your mouth and you had just begun to bite down on the tip when your mother came in with your laundry and when she saw what you were doing naked on the bed she dropped the laundry and ran over to you and cried out hey, what are you doing, are you trying to swallow yourself whole? Knock that off, stop–

“Birth is ended, the holy life fulfilled, the task done. There is nothing further for this world.” —The Buddha