Posted on September 17, 2005 at 23:30:21.
mon*stros*i*ty 124
By M Satai
mon*stros*i*ty 124
The bus pulls into the underground station and by now everyone is already dead.
A young music student in jeans sits with her blonde head on the shoulder of a slumped businessman. A 30ish woman is bent over a lap full of sales projections with a thin blue drool on her chin.
The gas was released into the coach somewhere along the turnpike and death followed relatively quickly. No one suspected a thing: within minutes all the passengers drifted off into a sound sleep. There were some sounds of loud snoring followed by gurglings, soft strangled moans, and death-rattles. But, generally, most died quietly in their sleep and without a fuss.
A young mexican girl has her head against the window, blank brown eyes staring at nothing. Beside her, a bald banker with blue lips and a hardon looks as if he just dozed off with a pen in his hand.
The temperature has been turned down to just below zero and the men employed in unloading the bus wear biohazard suits and masks. Most of the “passengers” have defecated into their underwear and the stench can be overpowering. There is also the issue of residual gas still lingering in the coach even after the ventilation system has been re-opened and the poison dispersed into the generally polluted atmosphere along the interstate.
A 20-something paralegal is lifted out of her seat. She’s lost one of her pumps and the crotch of her pantyhose is soaked with urine. The dark-haired young guy who took the seat beside her falls over until his forehead strikes the seat in front of him.
The work proceeds quickly and efficiently: the dead are processed in this way every day. It’s all routine.
Sleepily, I watch from a seat near the back. A woman with frameless glasses is taken off next. Then, another limp blonde—her freshly-washed hair is passively reflecting the shine of the reading lights.
There’s a People magazine in the aisle. It’s opened to a fashion photoshoot of six celebrities in nearly identical white evening gowns. All of this seems relatively humane.
We’re talking about February 9 at this point, a Monday. I’m in the office. It’s a sunny day, but cold, at least this morning it was cold.
I bought a coffee from a Starbucks on 8th Avenue. I went to the office, read my email, and drank the coffee.
People, in general, I’ve decided, don’t interest me very much. I’d prefer not to bother with them at all. If someone says something I don’t agree with, I pretty much just smile politely and look someplace other than their face. Its too exhausting to try to convince anyone of anything…and even if you succeed, which you almost never do, what’s really gained, anyway?
Everyone, it seems to me, is much too small.
One day, and this is one of my sincerest wishes, I hope to be so apathetic to others that it won’t even occur to me to make statements like the preceding. In fact, I barely have any interest in making them right now. I barely taken any notice of others.
I can’t read a book or look at an artwork that doesn’t follow the vagaries of my own mind in real-time, right now, simultaneously to what I’m actually thinking.
The internet is the closest thing to the perfect artwork. When I’m websurfing I am creating in text and image the almost-perfect simulacrum of my own moving mind: but the moment the session is over the “artwork,” like all artwork, is dead. Even if I could record my online sessions, the result would be an irrelevant artifact.
Im not interested in looking at anyone else’s art or reading anyone else’s text. I can’t imagine who’d be reading this. I’d be afraid of the emptiness and hunger of anyone who’d be reading this.
It’s not a question of having said anything interesting. What’s interesting is what someone might say next. The fact is: no one ever really says anything interesting .
I’d put a photograph here, if I could: maybe it’d be a photograph of two dead light-bulbs.
Only a monstrous text can be the verisimilitudinous product of a monstrosity—a kind of false (auto)biography of noone possessed by a multiplicity of cracked voices.
That’s a thought that I think while walking up Columbus Avenue in the cold sunlight this afternoon—about 45 minutes ago. I’m on my way to buy a Jim Thompson novel. It’s crowded in the bookstore and I feel a nauseous dizziness. I’m floating behind my dark glasses. I slide my credit card across the checkout counter: the entire exchange takes place without a word, or with only a very few.
Here’s a thought that I think while walking back: When I use the word “I” it means everything (and everyone) looked at, inner and outer. I is an unassailable masturbatory citadel that self-destructs in a cataclysmic eruption of multipicities.
When I get back to the office to write the preceding couple of paragraphs, someone comes by with a “correction” to some piece of work I’d previously done. I listen, more or less numbly, talking quickly and softly in response. Its very quickly clear to me that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She’s only trying to make her mark. I had once thought this woman was attractive, had even considered fucking her, but she looks fat and unpleasant to me now. Her mouth sags a bit to one side, as if in prelude to the years to come, and her hair is an unstylish wave of thick brown nothing. As she’s talking, I sip water from a plastic bottle: these sips of water are like sanctuaries. With each sip, I close my eyes.
When I open my eyes, she’s still there, talking.
This is how it is to interact with other people. They stand there, making noises, talking to themselves and I’m not listening.
I correct her version of the work, assure her of my continued cooperation, and send her on her way. I sit back, pleased and relieved that she’s finally gone, and at how I’d “handled” the situation: by which I mean, I dealt with her as vacuously as possible.
One ought to write exclusively about one’s (self) as (un)self-consciously as one can. Such a text might have the effect of a seemingly chance collision of multiple speeding automobiles on a complicated freeway—a fatal accident that keeps on growing outward from its increasingly unapproachable center at which there is certainly not a single survivor.
Sometimes I forget: don’t explain anything. But most of all: don’t explain your(self). Trying to explain anything is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. You will always be ignorant of anything you don’t already know. No one “learns” anything. There’s nothing to learn. You just recognize stuff. “Oh yeah,” you say to yourself, “I always thought that.”
On a freezing cold morning, after a night of debaucheries, you see a naked girl, maybe 20, 21, chained to a lightpost along a pathway in Washington Square Park. She’s been raped repeatedly during the long dark hours, stoned, beaten, etc. Someone who once owned her, or some nomadic police authority, captured her and chained her up here to die.
She’s in terrible shape at this point, blue, bruised, trembling uncontrollably, maybe only a few hours away from death. She begs, almost incoherently, and through chattering teeth, for help in a language that’s probably chinese.
These are her death labors.
Not only is it unlawful to help her, but you have no desire to do so. Besides, such sights aren’t unusual. There are others like her all over the city, dead or dying, offered up for the amusement or usage of passersby. They are sacrifices to necropolis--a kind of food for the city.
You watch her for a while, her long pale legs, her quivering blue tits, her bare feet plunged in the slushy snow…and you sip your hot coffee and idly finger your half-hard cock through your pocket with your free hand. You think about other things: work, food, television.
Maybe, before you move on, you flop your dick out from your fly and piss on the poor girl’s frozen toes.
--That’s all the human warmth I can spare, sweetheart.
Walking against the crowd in Times Square, you get the sense that you could put two bullets into each of them, one in each head and one in each heart, and they’d still keep coming forward with an unsatisfiable appetite for your intestines.
It’s 4.59pm and I’m on the 5pm bus waiting for it to depart the station of this city of the dead. All around me, people are reading their newspapers, brainless.
Outside the window now, a police cruiser parked on a concrete island. The policeman that was once inside has been assassinated: his decapitated body lies against the grimy brick wall of a soup kitchen, stripped and disemboweled.
I don’t consider any of this a nightmare: what I consider a nightmare is not being able to describe in all its amoebic immensity that which puts the terror on my face.
We are passing a large, clean, well-kept building: the Senator Frank Lautenberg Railway Station, which I can easily imagine is a complete fabrication. Instead, the building is where the bodies are placed in cold storage—the naked bodies of thousands of attractive young commuters kidnapped and executed in transit.
Project A: it’s possible, of course, that we’re all being drained of life-force by the government as tribute to some alien race. You can consider it a life-tax, and everyone must pay.
It’s 5.21pm and I’m sleeping: that means, the government has come to collect it’s toll. As I sleep, the life is drained out of me.
When I wake, I feel refreshed and light and filled with positive energy. It’s the feeling one has, paradoxically, when one is relieved of life. While “asleep,” I’ve been re-programmed to enjoy dying when I wake up again.
That’s what it means to hope.
(I write this hours after I saw it: a helicopter hanging in the air overlooking the turnpike as if guarding not us, but against us. . Was it something that I was supposed to forget: something that I remembered just now by mistake, in spite of the conditioning?)
He sits, upright, in a wooden chair. Dead-faced, he’s typing on a keyboard in a rented room.
To erect a corpse in the place of any author, a writing corpse, that is the goal, if a goal can be articulated, before the rotten mouth opens and a terrible all-consuming airborne plague is communicated…
He’s a carrier, you see, doesn’t suffer from the disease himself. He’s immune…
I eat a chicken patty sandwich for dinner: the chicken patty is old, the roll is old.
Now, its hours later, and I’m sitting at a small desk in front of a wall of whitewashed bricks as I type these words.
It’s 9.05pm.
Tonight it’s warmer than its been in weeks: 41F. Ive changed my socks and underwear for the first time in 3 days