Posted on September 17, 2005 at 23:32:16.
mon*stros*i*ty 2109
By M Satai
mon*stros*i*ty 2109
On the train, 8.12am, February 10…riding through the deadvilles, the netherwoods of the outlying areas. This is the future: empty streets, empty houses, empty backyards, empty factories. Outside the necropolis, the suburbs have been reduced to deserts, crawling canker sores. These blighted areas have been re-inhabited by the scattered survivors of pornacalypse who’ve yet to be rounded up. Once in a while you see one, standing dazed by an old swing set, naked from the waist down. They watch with blank faces the dead trains passing into and out of the city.
Arriving in Penn Station, New York, at about 9am, I see a group of young girls, six or seven of them, poptart-types, huddled together against a tiled wall in a quiet area just off the main concourse. A rent-a-guard in a filthy, homemade uniform waves the muzzle of some kind of automatic weapon at them.
--Watcha got’em for?, a businessman in white-face asks.
The guard grins, toothpick clamped between tight, stained teeth. He indicates the pile of confiscated boots, Nike’s, Doc Martens, Avias.
--Criminal footwear. No toes exposed. Not a sandal among them.
The dead-faced businessman laughs, takes a bite from a sloppy breakfast sandwich. Infertile eggs. Pig.
The doomed girls, barefoot, keen loudly in despair, hugging each other in their bulky parkas and funky fake furs. At their stripped feet lie their piled belongings: backpacks, pocketbooks, department store bags, athletic bags full of haircare products.
--We didn’t know, one girl pipes.
Blonde-hair pulled back in a perfect ponytail. Small-town cheerleader type.
--We’re from Pennsylvania. We just got in. It’s snowing there.
Turning from the guard, she looks in mute appeal at the businessman. But he’s worst than the guard: the dead face expressionless in white pancake. The only sign that anything inhabits that portrait of total apathy he calls his face is the glint of sadism like a wire cutter in the black holes of his eyes.
The girl’s lip trembles.
--Please, she says in her daddy-please voice. Don’t hurt us.
The businessman checks his watch: breakfast meeting with Price-Waterhouse at 10.30am.
Sobbing, whimpering, moaning, they hide their faces against each other’s shoulders like bird’s against a bitter wind from noplace as the guard raises the weapon to his hip.
clackety-clack-clack-clack
Sitting in an office chair, feet up on a bookshelf, I look out the window: it’s 10.44pm.
Maybe, I think, I’ll do some push-ups.
So I do: I do 15 push-ups. It’s easy. I could have done quite a bit more. What I really need to do is more aerobic exercise. Walking up the stairs out of the subway this morning, I was pretty winded.
If I had to run, from the zombies for instance, I’d have a fucking heart-attack before I cleared 3 blocks.
This is how our lives are lived: second by second, heartbeat by heartbeat, squirting out the hormones, breathing in, breathing out, and at the end of the day another pile of papers have been written on or another cinderblock has been stacked on top of the cinderblock just under it.
In the elevator banks, big men in green jumpsuits talk loudly and self-importantly into walk-talkies. They are the only physically fit ones on the premises. The rest of us, the office cattle, grow weaker and weaker from the neck down. We pass like ghosts, or white acolytes, genderless, tending some arane god through the overlit hallways.
Opening a dictionary at random, my finger presses on the word: fare-thee-well. Who knew that counted as a word?
I’m bored—and yet Im too tired to actually do anything but write this sentence. I guess I’ll try more push-ups.
I pick my nose.
Amazing how, when you’re bored, you end up doing something like picking your nose. With nothing else to do, you suddenly realize how much gunk and crust is inside your nostrils, how uncomfortable it is just to breathe.
Look at Glamorella, outlaw socialite, strapped into the glory-chair: the tiara of wires on her pretty head, nipple caps on her pretty breasts, stimulators on her pretty fingers and toes, needle-probes inserted under the delicate skin of her pretty thighs, wrists, insteps, throat, labia, etc etc.
She’s ready for another session, in-between scenes.
Elrod, the hacker bastard, likes to set the digi-volume to just below 2.8 and watch while Glamorella, minus all her Vogue and Gucci and Park Avenue accoutrements, goes through her passion over and over again, erotically crucified on the Golgotha of every State-induced sex-rape fantasy she’s ever had.
Its bad news for the poor girl, shaking and smoking and pissing herself after only 45 minutes, that Elrod has written a particularly nasty piece of malware enabling him to program into her ordeal a few of his own twisted fantasies of blowtorch love.
Elrod keeps it going for hours and hours: he likes to keep it going, he says, until he sees their toenails shatter.
I’m on a train at 5.57pm and waiting for it to leave the station out of Newark. The car I’m in slowly and unfortunately fills up with commuters. Is it really necessary, one asks oneself, that there be so many completely unnecessary people in the world?
Its Wednesday, February 11. I’m sitting in front of the whitewashed brick wall again. Its 7.41am.
Last night I fucked her sitting up on the bed, holding her hips, using her like a fuckdoll. She was dancing in a strip club, brain zeroed out on drugs, her body pierced and tattooed. On the stage, she writhed in an oiled-up, masturbatory version of a burning at the stake. Tiny silver g-string, nipple rings, she was taking going-nowhere steps on big lucite platform heels in the hot lights…
Sleep, sleep, and a dream of ants, two ants and an ogre with an axe…
I wake up, slightly nauseous, dress, have a small cup of espresso. I sit down here.
The writer, gaunt and haunted, sits in a straightbacked wooden chair in front of a desk too small for anything else but the keyboard and a high-intensity desklamp. Only the desk surface and what lies in it’s immediate halo is illuminated. The rest of the room is in total annihilatory blackness. If you so much as stick your foot outside this little charmed circle, it may very well cease to exist.
The writer sits and stares at the keyboard, at the cursor blinking, on-off, on-off, on-off. His hands above the keys don’t move, the fingers frozen in caution. He does’t want to incriminate himself.
The interrogator somewhere in the darkness, We have ways down here of making you talk…
Everyone talks in the end. Tapes of pigs squealing.
The writer, bent over the keyboard, fingers hammering away his latest confession: a story about the invasion of a small Missouri town by necro-space vampires who need the chemical energy released by decomposing human flesh to stimulate their own imperialistic reproductive drive.
It’s a sunlit window with a thin white curtain hanging over it: outside, among the bare trees and slushy dead lawns, birds are singing.
Nothing personal. The writer says it like a mantra. Nothing personal. The drill touches a raw nerve. Nothing personal
Even the scream, especially the scream, is disembodied.
A long day of errands follows all that…in each shop someone trying to sell me some overpriced trinket or other. Each of the shopkeepers trying to survive the pornocalypse. In one such shop, a horrible looking woman resembling a dog with orange skin tells me how her sister is looking for a boyfriend.
--She looks 10, but she’s 40. It’s so hard to meet people nowadays, the dog-woman says.
I agree with her.
--Yes, yes, so hard to meet people these days, I smirk.
This is a bad hair-day for me.
That was yesterday.