delirifacient (20 page)

class.

And the brownback told the Cunt that he was being exceedingly theatrical and that the immaculacy of his desire to stage a show for the brownback was so intense its crystal had become transparent. And the Cunt said ah, what were the brownback’s preferences in matters of shows and theatre, and browncoat was in fact expecting this divagation and he replied that he had none not really but he still liked theatre better than reading books because books reminded him of the one book, book one, the great one that was eating his liver and sitting fatly on his kidney and whistling and refusing to come out and trace its ink across the brownback’s face and blacken his wrinkles and sculpt his decaying teeth into paragraphs so they could bite sharper and always one writes one’s best books using one’s own fallen dragon teeth. And the Cunt said not to fret about the book since it would starve on his liver eventually and would come out and lock the shadows in a cave, but it was interesting that brownback had a weak preference for drama over literature since this was an issue that the Cunt had grappled with repeatedly in the past without stitching up a proper conclusion. And only recently did he have his epiphany and now finally he knew why he consistently found the stage inferior to literature, why Shakespeare live was mostly drivel and embarrassing slapstick and rudimentary tumefied kinematics whereas on the page he Shakespeare was prone to self-induced foaming consumption, why the Cunt almost always felt guilty upon leaving the theatre, almost as guilty as if he had just ingurgitated a feuilleton or sold a moiety of his library and a quart of his progeny for a foaming racehorse. He had finally found it: theatre, as opposed to literature, had too much life. Life is mobility and creakiness and mostly the desire to remain alive (and sometimes even to take another’s life just to see how it bleeds… into the blender), and the Cunt held its life, theatre’s superior leash on life, radically against it; books depended on the reader, on the Cunt, for their Athena’s breath, he was their life and thus, as soon as he lifes them, they are –

like him – lifeless and sour and bloodless and pathetic and slow-burning and angry, infected by him and infecting him beyond the pettiness of his individual hatred to an hatred of cosmic and theogonic dimensions, and that is why he likes literature, better than theatre at any rate. And the brownback declined to investigate this new and brutal manhandling of Shakespeare for Shakespeare was uselessly fondled and seduced and violated in just about every grammatical thought he or anyone else had ever had and the Cunt was dionysiacally entitled to his savaging if he wanted it.

And the Cunt persisted in talking at the browncoat until he the browncoat felt he was only listening so as to weigh his brain with his skull and of course he was weightless at first such were the rules of the game but then the Cunt did not stop talking and the Cunt talked and talked and talked and the single point that was brownback’s position and reference point within the conversation became smaller and smaller and the Cunt’s drool – for the Cunt spat as he talked, and generously – finally wiped off the single pencilgray point that was brownback’s position and the brownback no longer had a position and consequently no opinion and no say and point from which to listen and such a situation was novel to him. And try as he didn’t he was incapable of computing his current situation and his brain could not see itself as affixed onto a nothing, within the conversation or outside it, it simply was not built for such thoughts for no one can conceive of nothingness not really one simply visualises blackness or blinding seraphic whiteness or screeching white noise but the brownback was well and truly a nothing dissolved in the Cunt’s discourse at that point and his brain was overflowing and his skull felt the weight of impossibility and the inner pressure hugged his walls and it became heavier and heavier and was expanding as the brain had decided to counter the nothing by becoming more and more of a something, an undeniable something, and the intensity of the brownback’s nothing thoughts electrified his skull chamber and proceeded to loosen the bolts holding the thoughts in their ineffectual cradle.

But just then as in Lear or just the opposite a storm of tridents incapacitated the tabernacle and the Cunt’s speech became nothing and could not be heard athwart the furies and the brownback hearkened the winds. And the great concert of winds called him out by name, the winds spelt out his name, glyph by glyph, leaf by horrible thump of fallen leaf. And the browncoat took the Cunt’s outstretched hand and with his uncut nails the browncoat writ upon the hand

“in his head there is a book – his book. in his book there may or there may not be characters.

if you have any feelings for his characters, he has failed.

if you have any feelings for his characters, you have failed.” And the Cunt did not read what was written on his hand but he licked at the writing and it had the sound of seawater and the Cunt nodded his head and fell asleep.

And it was time for the Cunt to serve his guest tea, and he brought out the scalding tea set and they bedrank of the tea. And the Cunt’s hands were wrinkled into formlessness, affixing the teacup as through osmosis. And the Cunt told the browncoat, whom he now referred to as his child, that all shall be forgiven his child, if only he his child would now swallow the saggy bread and drink the saggy wine and kiss the Cunt’s saggy hand. And the Cunt offered a new outstretched hand, and the brownback was expected to kiss the Cunt’s saggy hand, the scene of his the brownback’s writing. And brownback could not kiss his writing and he grew very nervous and he almost started sweating and he was driven to the edge, almost, of (having) a thought. And there was no ego scriptor in his signature so he was not equipped to deal properly with having a thought, the appropriate course being of course to abort it instantaneously and drink the amnion, and he told the Cunt that he the browncoat would rather moisturize a speeding bullet using his cerebellum than kiss himself into the offering. And Cunt Lev Tolstoi laughed at this and told the browncoat that they are of the very same texture, blood and ink, in fact the ink screams through the blood whenever the blood is spilt and vice versa, and if one drinks both at once one is cleansed of authority and remembrance. And the reason for seeking freedom and absolution from authority and remembrance is that temporal authority reheats the shackles of one’s allegiance to the current world and the current world is not consciousness but hay fever, and remembrance dilutes the barriers of the consciousness-ignited self against the onslaught of the temporal and the self is washed off by the temporal and is similarly absorbed by the world instead of ordering the world to conform to his moulds and facilitate the falls of consciousness. So was the Cunt advocating the abdication or removal of temporal authority and the flattening of remembrance in favour of thinking the atemporal the brownback wanted to clarify and the Cunt said his breathings were rather crude and left an horrid skid mark on his the Cunt’s mental pyrotechnics that made them sound forty years stupider but yes this was what he thought.

And Cunt Lev Tolstoi recalled, to neighed pangs of the browncoat’s infelicitous mirth, how once when he had been a young man his own father a nobleman had taken him to the circus and the young Cunt fell in love with the geriatric strongman who as it turned out doubledipped as the circus act’s sole clown and after some boring felines and some flightless pretties it was time for the trapeze act. And it was an highly complex trapeze act solo and no safety net for which the Cunt initially thought the trapeze artist an arrogant prick but then the trapeze artist commenced jumping and twisting and interlocking and skilfully flaying the air and the impressionable Cunt was won over absolutely. And after five minutes of careless mortality the trapeze artist performed his most complex trick and it was so impossible and homosexuality-inducing that the young Cunt burst into wild clapping and the whole circus had been silent except for the splitting of the dusty air by the trapeze artist’s sharp body and the clapping was so loud that the trapeze artist forgot himself and slipped at the most elementary of trapeze switches and fell to his death. And the young Cunt did not even try to suppress the most innocent and vernal gale of laughter his contrarious body would ever birth in the Cunt’s long bearded duration. And the Cunt’s noble father shielded him from the circus peasants’ gaze and wrapped him in his coat and sped him out of the circus tent.

And the Cunt summoned his youngest and it presented itself with diffidence and difficulty of balance and the browncoat nodded and the Cunt asked him what he thought and the browncoat said nothing and the Cunt said his youngest reminded him of his second. And his second had been such a long time ago. And his second was for eleven months, and his second had been an extremely precocious baby who grasped speech and facial expressions and could speak good Russian and fluent French and could laugh at the Cunt’s Homer, or at least the Cunt’s initially mendacious Homer, for his second would have none of the ad usum delphini fustian the Cunt had attempted to proffer; also he laughed at the Cunt’s improbable Oxford Anglo-Greek. And his second could understand, could honestly and truly understand humans and thoughts and ideas, and especially thoughts and ideas and was always fascinated and stolen by their incorrigible endlessness. And most of all the Cunt’s second was a thrall to death and liked to talk of it when others talked around it and the second knew dying. And the fully conscious second opened a window in the mansion two weeks before his first year and he did not even stare down or up but dead ahead and he stepped off the window-sill and he travelled three storeys and this had been neither accident nor blind children’s curiosity but knowledge and the Cunt knew that the second had known.

And the Cunt had always hated his second, before and after the window, and the second had always probably hated the Cunt, particularly during the window. But this nugatory hatred accunted for next to nothing in the grandiloquent scheme of things nor did it fashion the window of itself so the Cunt did not bother telling the brownback of it and the second did not bother leaving a note on asps and hatred and the brownback quite simply did not bother with anything at all.

And the Cunt offered the browncoat a position as maid at Yasnaya Polyana and money was good and the browncoat would sweep the Cunt’s rumblings and deliquescences into the fireplace and manuscripts would burn in the fireplace and burn in the Cunt’s gastric acidpouches and right would be right and evil would be evil and adultery adultery. But the browncoat felt he had spilt enough words into the variegated fireplaces at Yasnaya Polyana and bade Cunt Lev Tolstoi excuse him but it was time for the browncoat to sing in spit bubbles elsewhere and the Cunt was most serene and understanding for such was his noble way and he merely grew out his strong white beard as the browncoat weighed the book in his head using his skull and left Yasnaya Polyana with an elastic step and a ragged new oldnovel philosophy to chew on under the microscope lenses of the Moscow streetlights.

And of course the browncoat never got very far on such expeditions and he promptly fell into a manhole the very first chance he got. And he wafted back and forth inside the sewers and thought taking the ladder back up would be irremissibly cheating and he could not quite brickwall his mind on whether to follow the tunnel dominated by kitchen waste or the alley uniformly lit by the fluorescent corpses of small scavenger animals tired of scavenging, including what appeared to have been a five year old human girl once, or the passage that most unoriginally chose to decorate itself mainly with fæcal arabesques. And he stood in the fork in the sewer glancing at his options and choosing his sewer like a democracy elects its sewage, going by smell and the principle of greatest recyclability. And he pursued the alley of tiny animal corpses and the rats and the frogs and the crabs and the mudfish and the large green insects and the occasional pigeon had all chosen rather unusual stances to die in and death and decomposition made them all look very guilty, of their own death and of many other things the sewer had never truly cared about.

And the browncoat encountered a small man in the sewers, a man that lived somewhere under the southernmost outskirts of Moscow and had not emerged from the sewers for what looked to be many many years. And the man in the sewers was waiting impatiently for the timid flow of sewer water to bring him a copy of yesterday’s newspaper for it tended to float down to him at this time of day and the sewer man liked to be informed. And the browncoat asked the sewer man what he was fishing for, and the man from the sewers ignored brownback and narrowed his eyes onto the stream of sewer water, for he knew the declining magic of vision would accelerate the natural circle of life that rarely failed to bring him yester-day’s newspaper in exchange for the sewer man taking a weekly bath in the tunnel parallel to his, the tunnel of the kitchen waste which seemed to be the cleanest and the givingest and the most nutritious of all the tunnels in that area. And so brownback squatted near the sewer man and stared at the sewer water also and strove to keep his gaze strong and focused for as long as was conceivable but this was a most unrewarding vector for the investment of his idiosyncrasies so the browncoat asked the sewer man whether there was anything he expected or wanted particularly from the stream of water.