Come to think of it, there were a couple of attempts on my life before the present catastrophe. But they didn’t succeed. No! I detected at once, infallibly, some substance aggressive towards me concealed in the nourishment coming down. Didn’t touch that delivery. Let it slowly urge its way wherever it was going — in its usual pulsions, just as when I have had my fill; untouched! No thank you. I could wait until the next delivery came down: clean, I could tell. Whatever my host had in mind, then, I was my whole length aware, ahead of him. Yes! Oh and there was one occurence that might or might not have had to do with whatever this aggression against my peaceful existence might mean. My home, my length, were suddenly irradiated with some weird seconds-long form of what I’d learnt second-hand from my host must have been light, as if some — Thing — was briefly enabled to look inside my host. All the wonderful secret storage that was my domain. But did those rays find me? See me? I didn’t think so. All was undisturbed, for me, for a long time. I continued to grow myself, perfectly measured segment by segment. Didn’t brood upon the brief invasion of my privacy; I have a calm nature, like all my kind. Perhaps I should have thought more about the incident’s implication: that thereafter my host knew I was there; the act of ingestion conveys nothing about what’s gone down with the scrap of lettuce or the meat: he wouldn’t have been aware of my residency until then. But suspected something? How, I’d like to know; I was so discreet.
The gouts of that agreeable strong liquid began to reach me more frequently. No objection on my part! The stuff just made me more active for a while, I had grown to take up a lot of space in my domain, and I have to confess that I would find myself inclined to ripple and knock about a bit. Harmlessly, of course. We don’t have voices so I couldn’t sing. Then there would follow a really torpid interval of which I’d never remember much when it was over…
A contented, shared life; I knew that my host had always taken what he needed from the nourishment that came on down to me. A just and fair coexistence, I still maintain. And why should I have troubled myself with where the residue was bound for, when both of us had been satisfied?
O HOW I have come to know now! How I have come to know!
For what has just happened to me — I can only relive again, again, in all horror, as if it keeps recurring all along me. First there was that period, quite short, when no nourishment or liquid came down at all. My host must have been abstaining.
Then—
The assault of a terrible flood, bitter burning, whipping and pursuing all down and around into a pitch-black narrow passage filled with stinking filth. I’ve become part of what is pushing its path there—that was where the nourishment was bound for all the years, after the host and I had done with it, a suffocating putrifaction and unbearable effusions.
Jonah was spewed by the whale.
But I — the term for it, I believe — was shat out.
From that cess I’ve been ejected into what was only a more spacious one, round, hard-surfaced, my segments have never touched against anything like it, in my moist-padded soft home space, and I am tossed along with more and many, many kinds of rottenness, objects, sections of which I sense from my own completeness must be dismembered from organic wholes that one such as myself, who has never before known the outside, only the insides of existence, cannot name. Battered through this conduit by these forms, all ghastly, lifeless, I think I must somehow die among them — I have the knowledge how to grow but not how to die if, as it seems, that is necessary. And now! Now! The whole putrid torrent had somewhere it was bound for — it discharges (there is a moment’s blinding that must be light) and disperses into a volume of liquid inconceivable in terms of the trickles and even gouts that had fed me. Unfathomable: I am swept up in something heady, frothy, exhilarating; down with something that flows me. And I am clean, clean the whole length of me! Ah to be cleansed of that filth I had never suspected was what the nourishment I shared with my host became when we’d taken our fill of it. Blessed ignorance, all those years I was safe inside…
My host. So he knew. This’s how he planned to get rid of me. Why? What for? This’s how he respected our coexistence, after even sharing with me those gouts of agreeable liquid whose happy effects we must have enjoyed together. It ends up, him driving me out mercilessly, hatefully, with every kind of ordure. Deadly.
BUT I’m adapting to this vastness! Can, at least, for a while, I believe. It’s not what I was used to and there’s no nourishment of my habitude but I find that my segments, the entire length of me still obeys; I can progress by my normal undulation. Undulating, I’m setting out in an element that also does, I’m setting out for what this powerful liquid vastness is bound for — nature’s built into my knowledge that everything has to move somewhere — and maybe there, where this force lands, one of my eggs (we all have a store within us, although we are loners and our fertilisation is a secret) will find a housefly carrier and settle on a scrap of lettuce or a fine piece of meat in a Beefsteak Tartare. Ingestion. The whole process shall begin over again. Come to life.
dreaming of the dead
DID you come back last night?
I try to dream you into materialisation but you don’t appear.
I keep expecting you. Because dream has no place, time. The Empyrean — always liked that as my free-floating definition of Somenowhere — balloon without tether to earth. There is no past no present no future. All is occupied at once. Everyone there is without boundaries of probability.
I don’t know why it was a Chinese restaurant — ah, no, the choice is going to come clear later when a particular one of the guests arrives! Guests? Whose invitation is it. Who hosts. Such causation doesn’t apply; left behind. Look up and there’s Edward, the coin-clear profile of Edward Said that is aware how masculinely beautiful it still exists in photographs, he’s turning this way and that to find where the table is that expects him. It’s his decision it’s this one. He’s always known what was meant for him, the placing of himself, by himself, through the path of any obstacles, Christian-Muslim, Palestinian-Cairene, American. He’s his own usher, shining a torch of distinctive intellectual light and sensibility to guide him. It’s not the place to remember this, here, but if you’re the one still living in the flesh wired up by synapses and neurons you recall his wife Mariam told that on his last journey to the hospital he disputed the route taken by the driver.
Edward. He stands a moment, before the embrace of greeting. His familiar way of marking the event of a meeting brought about by the co-ordination of friends’ commitments and lucky happenstance. It’s reassuring he’s wearing one of the coloured shirts and the flourished design of his tie is confirmed by the ear of a silk handkerchief showing above the breast pocket of the usual elegant jacket. Edward never needed to prove his mental superiority by professorial dowdiness and dandruff. We don’t bother with how-are-yous, there’s no point in that sort of banality, here. He says why don’t we have a drink while we’re waiting — he seems to know for whom although I don’t (except, for you) any more than I knew he would come to this place hung with fringed paper lanterns. He beckons a waiter who doesn’t pretend in customary assertion of dignity against servility that he hasn’t noticed. Edward never had to command, I’d often noted that, there is something in those eyes fathomless black with ancient Middle Eastern ancestry, that has no need of demanding words. With the glance back to me, he orders what we’ve always drunk to being well-met. He apologises with humour ‘I don’t know how I managed to be late, it’s quite an art’ though he isn’t late because he never was expected, and there can be no explanation I could understand of what could have kept him.