Spring 2007 by Subterranean Press

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.