Shudder (31 page)

Natalie Breathe

Natalie woke up, took a deep breath and opened her eyes. Snow was falling gently behind the window and the air entering the room was damp, fresh, and crystal clear.

Natalie closed her eyes again for a moment, and after that moment passed she looked at the body that slept beside her.

Sheila's long blond hair covered half of her pillow and a few strands lay on her face, apparently without disturbing her in any way. As Natalie watched her lover with a soft smile of admiration, Sheila's small ruby mouth opened for a second, showing the lower parts of her glistening front teeth, before hiding them again.

Her eyes twitched and the blanket above her chest rose as she abruptly breathed in a dose of moist winter oxygen. Then she rolled over with a quiet grunt and her breathing returned to the regular rhythm of a person asleep.

With infinite care, slowly and quietly, Natalie slipped out of her bed, picked her nightshirt up from the floor, squirmed into it, and tiptoed to the kitchen.

It was already ten in the morning and the white winter daylight illuminated with its cold color the impeccably clean amber laminate countertop. There she made herself a cup of water with a spoonful of honey dissolved in it, drunk it, and opened wide the window above the dishwasher.

Time for some start-of-day breathing exercises.

She slowly let out all of her air, helping her body by pressing with her hands at the lower part of her abdomen. Then she inhaled, equally slowly, deeper and deeper, until her shoulders rose up slightly, and then exhaled again.

This she did now instead of smoking.

Her nightmare struggle for breath in the plastic bag of the Xemuists had changed her in this way. Now she appreciated every breath for the miracle that it was.

Some day the breath would run out again and then there would be no saving at the last moment. Until that happened, it was her duty to herself to enjoy this simple act to the fullest extent.

She heard a smoker's cough from the bedroom. Sheila was waking up. There was no more need to keep to the silent routine. Natalie switched on the coffee machine, flicked on the tiny kitchen TV, poured orange juice into two glasses and with them went to her lover.

“Mmmoooaaa,” Sheila said, stretching her arms with a delighted yawn, and fixed her sleepy gaze on Natalie.

“Juice, lover?” Natalie said, and pressed one cool glass against Sheila's warm arm. With a squeal, Sheila jerked away, then took the juice and both girls silently drained their glasses, communicating with their eyes.

“Thank you, lover,” said Sheila with her morning husky voice and put the empty glass on the floor besides the bed. “You're the best.”

“All for you, lover, all for you,” chirped Natalie, took off her nightshirt again and climbed back into bed.

Half an hour later, citing bladder related biological demands, Sheila finally escaped and went to the bathroom. Natalie lay on her back, with her hands behind her head, and marveled. So, this was what she needed. A relationship with another girl.

Everything fell into place once she followed this impulse. She was actually approaching some sort of harmony.

Of course, Natalie knew now exactly what events in her life had produced exactly what elements in her emotional and psychological systems, leading among other things to this lesbian harmony, and she did not mind knowing all that at all.

In fact, she preferred knowing it. It did not break the magic in any way. Although she was far from her Dad's levels of abstract reasoning, she explained this paradox to herself in her own words.

Knowing what makes a flower grow the way it does and how it's structured, need not take away any of its beauty. In fact, it adds another dimension to its beauty.

The magic of beauty is fragile and unstable and based on one not knowing things, only if one is afraid of the truth.

Thus, bludgeoning the Self into momentary disintegration though use of hired penises was no longer the sole option for the obtainment of at least temporary relief.

These days, stress stayed where it should be: at work only. Out of the office, life was no longer an obscurely threatening, crushing blanket of ugliness. At last not the crushing bit, anyway.

Natalie heard the water being flushed in the bathroom, the bathroom door open, and Sheila's soft feet head back to the bedroom. Then the sound of footsteps stopped. A lovely bare bottom appeared through the door, with an invisible head emitting muffled giggling.

Then the bottom disappeared and after a second, in which the doorway was empty, a naked leg appeared, its toes wriggling in a highly suggestive manner.

“Come here you,” laughed Natalie.

* * * *

Anton Think

Anton was lying face down on his sofa, his whole body lax and incapable of movement. He was in his fourth day of trying to not smoke.

Now that he was a lazy consultant, no longer chained to his office computer like a galley slave to his oar, he could stay at home and allow himself to suffer the withdrawal symptoms in peace. Currently, the symptoms consisted of total lack of strength, an even more total lack of mental focus, and an utterly total lack of motivation.

On the floor near him were three empty coffee cups, the remains of a slab of chocolate, two small hardened blobs of chewed gum on a piece of tissue, and a half-eaten apple, its bared innards already gone brown.

What he really wished deep down to see there, an ashtray and a pack of cigarettes, was missing. Perhaps this accounted for his semi-paralyzed state. The contradictory desires to run to the store and to hold out another day canceled each other out, producing his hazy stupor.

His brain was slowly thinking of a dozen things. Or rather, the things thought themselves in front of his unfocused inner gaze. None of them were good enough reasons to get up or even move his position.

He thought of Sheila, Natalie's new girlfriend. She was one good looking girl.

He thought of Natalie. She was also one good looking girl.

He thought of the Xemuists. They were some evil bastards, whose death was too good for them.

He thought of the Season Girls and he thought of the disappeared children.

Children. Baby snatchers. Bogeymen.

From time immoral people have accused each other of stealing children. Pagan Romans accused Christians of stealing children. Christians accused Jews of stealing children. Old gnarly witches were accused of stealing children. Gypsies too.

Perhaps this was all indeed some sort of timeless sin, which reared its ugly head in every epoch and every society.

Behind every pervasive myth there is always some grain of reality. Is it physical reality or merely mental reality? What hides behind the myth? Is it people stealing children, or people being paranoid about children being stolen?

Or, as usual, both the physical and mental realities reinforcing each other?

With a burst of determination Anton forced his right arm to move. His fingers reached the chocolate, broke off a few sizable crumbs and put them into his mouth. Slowly he chewed on them, the warmth of his mouth melting them quickly, and thought some more.

His thoughts appeared to be congregating on a more or less single topic. That was ground for a little celebration. He scratched his scalp with a tired forefinger.

Suppose all these myths of the dragon, or the god, or the king demanding a virgin to placate him...suppose all that really does echo some common archaic tendency, in which the jailed customers of Joshua's pedophile den was indulging? Maybe men in power always tended to have this earning for the young and innocent.

Or the young and broken. Perhaps both.

A sweating middle-aged man looks at a little girl or boy playing and he covets. Something in what he sees stirs in him a desire to touch, to use, to attempt, hopelessly, to join in this celebration of life that glows in every movement of the child, and once it becomes obvious that he cannot join it, that the magic does not work. He desires to break, to destroy.

Anton coughed loudly for a full minute. His throat itched like hell. A strange pressure hummed between his eyebrows. His solar plexus was warm and gasses rumbled in his stomach.

Abruptly, Anton jumped off his sofa and scrambled to get dressed. The objects around him, the furniture, the books, everything looked far too colorful and three-dimensional, and the space around the objects was no longer empty but filled with energy currents getting less transparent by the second.

Hands shaking with impatience, an angry scowl twisting his face, Anton buttoned up his overcoat. The last thing he needed was his chakras to open up. He didn't want to become an energy being. He wanted to stay anchored to his quiet life of lying on the sofa, reading books, drinking coffee, thinking, and yes, smoking cigarettes.

Cigarettes. He ran out of his apartment, and without waiting for the elevator, impatiently scrambled down the stairs and out into the street.

Five minutes later he was walking back to his high-rise with a composed and leisurely gait, slowly inhaling the luxurious smoke of a yellow Camel. His head felt very light and he knew that an idiotic smile was stuck on his face.

He knew and he didn't care.

He was firmly back in his world, and he was firmly his old self.

Looking at the dirty gray snow beneath his feet, he thought that perhaps the time had finally come to write a real dissertation. Something based on the whole Xemuist thing. Especially young Joshua and his specific dementia.

The revolving swastika for instance, symbolizes the eternal cycle of the world, life, death, birth, change of season, of generations. In a way, Joshua had also been acting out a closed cycle, by feeding his victims their own shit.

Only he was a Xemuist and what he wanted deep down was not to maintain the eternal balance, but to break it down once and for all and so he killed them.

Anton flung away the remains of his cigarette into the general direction of a rubbish bin and put his hands into his pockets. The cool winter air pinched his cheeks, two snowflakes landed on his forehead, the albino smiled.

All that was quite fine reasoning. This overlap between the symbolisms and goals of the Xemuist sect and Joshua's individual mental monstrosities. Maybe he could finally swing it and write a treatise on the overlap between collective psychosis and individual psychosis.

Good old Deus, with his practical turn of mind, would probably agree to help with the empirical data needed to satisfy the current wretched trends in academia.

Inside his apartment, he sat down in front of the computer, smoking a third cigarette already, and opened a word file to take down his initial thoughts on the future dissertation.

As usual, he ran out of steam after writing the first sentence, but he was no newbie to this sphere. Quickly he rolled himself a joint of real weed. He was finally able to return to the real thing now that he was no longer an office rat. The sword of Damocles no longer hovered over his pee.

No more random drug tests. Ever.

He dragged only three times from the spliff, for it was truly potent stuff, and tried to keep up with his brain. The children thieves. The virgin of the dragon. The swastika. The feces.

Suddenly he remembered that the ancient fear of the child stealer was connected with the child been eaten. Super—this gave him an excuse to use Klein's theoretical framework concerning the cannibalistic impulses of the second part of the human baby's oral stage.

His fingers danced over the keyboard, translating his thoughts into fragmented text.

A pop-up advertising gene-vat asses popped up. Automatically, without even any irritation, Anton closed the pop-up and added it to his firewall. Then his eyes bulged and he felt his face tingle.

He wriggled out of his chair and paced the room. He hadn't had an insight of this magnitude for a over a year. Maybe over two years.

His hands shook in anticipation and his mouth moved, trying the taste of the words that described the shining realization, which had lighted up his frontal lobes.

Gene-vat asses. Oral pathology. Cannibalistic impulses. Consumer society. Oral pathology. Gene-vat asses. How could he have been so blind?

He extricated another cigarette from his pack and lit it, his gaze roving over the carpet, the sofa, the empty cups.

If only one in a thousand Johns buying gene-vat asses crossed the boundary and ate it...if only one in a thousand Janes buying gene-vat dicks crossed the boundary and ate it...this would be a cataclysmic shift in the mass psychology of the whole civilization, striking at one of the pillars at its very foundation, the cannibalism taboo.

Before three years passed, the gates of hell would open wide.

Or at least wider.

Anton felt charged with electricity, nervously licking his lips he reached for his phone.

He would need one damn good computer program based on damn good a priori data to be able to predict at least vaguely the outcomes of the insidious revolution happening at that very moment in the homes of an unknown number of Johns and Janes.

He dialed Deus.