Spring 2007 (7 page)

A talkative, sober drunk. But wait–there is
something. There is something else I found in Welleran Smith, & I’m gonna
write it down. Something more from the diary/ies of Dr. Judith Darger, unless
it’s only something Smith concocted to suit his own ends. More & more I
consider that likelihood, that Darger is only some lunatic just happened to be
where these people needed her to be, but isn’t that how it always is with saints
and martyrs? Questions of victimhood arise. Who’s exploiting who? Whose
exploiting whom? Christ I get lost in all these words. I don’t
need
words. I’m strangling on words. I need to see Sabit & end this mess &
be done with her. According to Welleran Smith, Darger writes (none of the
“entries” are dated):

“I would not tell a child that it isn’t going to hurt. I
wouldn’t lie. It is going to hurt, and it is going to hurt forever or as long
as human consciousness may endure. It is going to hurt until it doesn’t hurt
anymore. That is what I would tell a child. That is what I tell myself, and
what am I but my own child? So, I will not lie to any of you. Yes, there will
be pain, and at times the pain will seem unbearable. But the pain will open
doorways. The pain
is
a doorway, as is the scalpel and as are the
sutures and each and every incision. Pain is to be thrown open wide that all
may gaze at the wonders which lie beyond. Why is it assumed this flesh must not
be cut? Why is it assumed this is my final corporeal form? What is it we cannot
yet see for all our fear of pain and ugliness and disfiguration? I would not
tell a child that it isn’t going to hurt. I would teach a child to live in
pain.”

Is that what I am learning from you, Sabit? Is that the
lesson of #17 and the glassy stare of those six eyes? Would you, all of you,
teach me to live with pain?

August 23, 2027

It’s almost dawn, that first false dawn & just a bit
of hesitant purple where the sky isn’t quite night anymore. As much as I have
ever seen false dawn in the city, where we try so hard to keep the night away
forever. If I had a son, or a daughter, I would tell them a story, how people
are @ war with night, & the city–like all cities–is only a
fortress built to hold back the night, even though all the world is just a bit
of grit floating in a sea of night that might go on almost forever. I’m on the
roof. I’ve never been up here before. Sabit & I never came up here. Maybe
another three hours left before it’s too hot & bright to sit up here, only
95F now if my watch is telling me the truth. My face & hair are slick with
sweat, sweating out the booze & pills, sweating out the sour memory of
Sabit. It feels good to sweat.

I went to Pearl St. & the Trenton reveal @
Corpus
ex Machina
, but apparently she did not. Maybe she had something better to
do & someone better to be doing it with. I flashed my press tag @ the door,
so at least I didn’t have to pay the $47 cover. I was not the only pundit in
attendance. I saw Kline, who’s over @ the Voice these days (that venerable old
whore) & I saw Garrison, too. Buzzards w/their beaks sharp, stomach’s
empty, mouth’s watering. No, I do not know if birds salivate, but reporters
fucking do. None of them spoke to me, & I exchanged the favor.

The place was
replete
, as the dollymops are wont
to say, chock-full, standing room only. I sipped dirty martinis and licorice
shides & looked no one in the eye, no one who was not on exhibit. #17 was
near the back, not as well lit as some of the others, & I stood there &
stared, bcause that is what I’d come for. Sometimes it gazed back me, or
they
gazed @ me–I am uncertain of the proper idiom or parlance or phrase. Is
it
One or are
they
3? I stared & stared & stared, like any good
voyeur would do, any dedicated peeper, bcause no clips are allowed, so you
stand & drink it all in there the same way the Neanderthals did it or pony
up the fat spool of cash for one of the Trenton chips or mnemonic lozenges
(“all proceeds for R&D, promo, & ongoing medical expenses,” of course).
I looked until all I saw was all I was
meant
to see–the sculpted
body(ies), living & breathing & conscious–the perpetually hurting
realization of all Darger’s nightmares. If I saw
beauty
there, it was no
different from the beauty I saw in Brooklyn after the New Konsojaya Trading Co.
popped their mini-nuke over on Tillary St. No different from a hundred
lingering deaths I’ve witnessed.

Welleran Smith said this was to be “the soul’s terrorism
against the tyranny of genes & phenotype.” I stood there & I saw
everything there was to see. Maybe Sabit would have been proud. Maybe she would
have been disappointed @ my resolve. It hardly matters, either way. A drop of
sweat dissolving on my tongue & I wonder if that’s the way the ocean used
to taste, when it wasn’t suicide to taste the ocean?

When I had seen all I had come to see, my communion
w/#17, I found an empty stool @ the bar. I thought you might still put in an
appearance, Sabit, so I got drunker & waited for a glimpse of you in the
crowd. & there was a man sitting next to me, Harvey somebody or another
from Chicago, gray-haired with a mustache, & he talked & I listened, as
best I could hear him over the music. I think the music was suffocating me. He
said,
That’s my granddaughter over there, what’s left of her,
& he
pointed thru the crush of bodies toward a stitchwork hanging from the warehouse
ceiling, a dim chandelier of circuitry & bone & muscles flayed &
rearranged. I’d looked at the piece on the way in–
The Lighthouse of
Francis Bacon,
it was called. The old man told me he’d been following the
show for months, but now he was almost broke & would have to head back to
Chicago soon. He was only drinking ginger ale. I bought him a ginger ale &
listened, leaning close so he didn’t have to shout to be heard. The chandelier
had once been a student @ the Pritzker School of Medicine, but then, he said,
“something happened.” I did not ask what. I decided if he wanted me to know, he
would tell me. He didn’t. Didn’t tell me, I mean. He tried to buy me a drink,
but I wouldn’t let him.

The grandfather of the Lighthouse of Francis Bacon tried
to buy me a drink, & I realized I was thinking like a journalist again,
thinking
you dumb fucks–here’s your goddamn story–not some bullshit hearsay
about chicanery among the snips, no, this old man’s your goddamn story, this
poor guy probably born way the fuck back before man even walked on the goddamn
moon & now he’s sitting here at the end of the world, this anonymous old
man rubbing his bony shoulders with the tourists and art critics & stitch
fiends and freaks because his granddaughter decided she’d rather be a fucking
chandelier than a gynecologist.
Oh god, Sabit. If you could have shown him
your brand-new tattoo.

I left the place before
midnight, paid the hack extra to go farther south, to get me as near the ruins
as he dared. I needed to see them, that’s all. Rings of flesh & towers of
iron, right, rust-stained granite and the empty eye sockets where once were
windows. The skyscraper stubs of Old Downtown, Wall St. and Battery Park City,
all of it inundated by the rising waters there @ the confluence of the Hudson
& the E. River. And then I came home, & now I am sitting here on the
roof, getting less & less drunk, sweating & listening to traffic &
the city waking up around me–the living fossil with her antique keyboard.
If you do come back here, Sabit, if
that’s
whatever happens next, you
will not find me intimidated by your XVII or by #17, either, but I don’t think
you ever will. You’ve moved on. & if you send someone to pack up your shit,
I’ll probably already be in Bratislava by then. After CeM, there were 2 good
assigns waiting for me in the green bin, & I’m taking the one that gets me
far, far away from here for 3 weeks in Slovakia. But right now I’m just gonna
sit here on the roof & watch the sun come up all swollen & lobster red
over this rotten, drowning city, over this rotten fucking world. I think the
pigeons are waking up.

Fiction:
Deadman’s Road by Joe R. Lansdale

Part One

The evening sun had rolled down and blown out in a
bloody wad, and the white, full moon had rolled up like an enormous ball of
tightly wrapped twine. As he rode, the Reverend Jebidiah Rains watched it glow
above the tall pines. All about it stars were sprinkled white-hot in the
dead-black heavens.

The trail he rode on was a thin one, and the trees on
either side of it crept toward the path as if they might block the way, and
close up behind him. The weary horse on which he was riding moved forward with
its head down, and Jebidiah, too weak to fight it, let his mount droop and take
its lead. Jebidiah was too tired to know much at that moment, but he knew one
thing. He was a man of the Lord and he hated God, hated the sonofabitch with
all his heart.

And he knew God knew and didn’t care, because he knew
Jebidiah was his messenger. Not one of the New Testament, but one of the Old
Testament, harsh and mean and certain, vengeful and without compromise; a man
who would have shot a leg out from under Moses and spat in the face of the Holy
Ghost and scalped him, tossing his celestial hair to the wild four winds.

It was not a legacy Jebidiah would have preferred, being
the bad man messenger of God, but it was his, and he had earned it through sin,
and no matter how hard he tried to lay it down and leave it be, he could not.
He knew that to give in and abandon his God-given curse, was to burn in hell
forever, and to continue was to do as the Lord prescribed, no matter what his
feelings toward his mean master might be. His Lord was not a forgiving Lord,
nor was he one who cared for your love. All he cared for was obedience,
servitude and humiliation. It was why God had invented the human race.
Amusement.

As he thought on these matters, the trail turned and
widened, and off to one side, amongst tree stumps, was a fairly large clearing,
and in its center was a small log house, and out to the side a somewhat larger
log barn. In the curtained window of the cabin was a light that burned orange
behind the flour-sack curtains. Jebidiah, feeling tired and hungry and thirsty
and weary of soul, made for it.

Stopping a short distance from the cabin, Jebidiah
leaned forward on his horse and called out, “Hello, the cabin.”

He waited for a time, called again, and was halfway
through calling when the door opened, and a man about five-foot two with a
large droopy hat, holding a rifle, stuck himself part of the way out of the
cabin, said, “Who is it calling? You got a voice like a bullfrog.”

“Reverend Jebidiah Rains.”

“You ain’t come to preach none, have you?”

“No, sir. I find it does no good. I’m here to beg for a
place in your barn, a night under its roof. Something for my horse, something
for myself if it’s available. Most anything, as long as water is involved.”

“Well,” said the man, “this seems to be the gathering
place tonight. Done got two others, and we just sat asses down to eat. I got
enough you want it, some hot beans and some old bread.”

“I would be most obliged, sir,” Jebidiah said.

“Oblige all you want. In the meantime, climb down from
that nag, put it in the barn and come in and chow. They call me Old Timer, but
I ain’t that old. It’s cause most of my teeth are gone and I’m crippled in a
foot a horse stepped on. There’s a lantern just inside the barn door. Light that
up, and put it out when you finish, come on back to the house.”

***

When Jebidiah finished grooming and feeding his horse
with grain in the barn, watering him, he came into the cabin, made a show of
pushing his long black coat back so that it revealed his ivory-handled .44
cartridge-converted revolvers. They were set so that they leaned forward in
their holsters, strapped close to the hips, not draped low like punks wore
them. Jebidiah liked to wear them close to the natural swing of his hands. When
he pulled them it was a movement quick as the flick of a hummingbird’s wings,
the hammers clicking from the cock of his thumb, the guns barking, spewing lead
with amazing accuracy. He had practiced enough to drive a cork into a bottle at
about a hundred paces, and he could do it in bad light. He chose to reveal his
guns that way to show he was ready for any attempted ambush. He reached up and
pushed his wide-brimmed black hat back on his head, showing black hair gone
gray-tipped. He thought having his hat tipped made him look casual. It did not.
His eyes always seemed aflame in an angry face.

Inside, the cabin was bright with kerosene lamp light,
and the kerosene smelled, and there were curls of black smoke twisting about,
mixing with gray smoke from the pipe of Old Timer, and the cigarette of a young
man with a badge pinned to his shirt. Beside him, sitting on a chopping log by
the fireplace, which was too hot for the time of year, but was being used to
heat up a pot of beans, was a middle-aged man with a slight paunch and a face
that looked like it attracted thrown objects. He had his hat pushed up a bit,
and a shock of wheat-colored, sweaty hair hung on his forehead. There was a
cigarette in is mouth, half of it ash. He twisted on the chopping log, and
Jebidiah saw that his hands were manacled together.

“I heard you say you was a preacher,” said the manacled
man, as he tossed the last of his smoke into the fireplace. “This here sure
ain’t God’s country.”

“Worse thing is,” said Jebidiah, “it’s exactly God’s
country.”