“The butterflies below the volatile vault fluttered their wings more slowly, like wind-up toys when their interior spring releases, until they fell to the floor, by the thousands, and rotted there almost instantly. And when the ragged keratin blackened and molded, we saw that the insects had skeletons and skulls, but their bones as fine as needles seemed to be made from the same blinding quartz as the tomb in the navel of the earth. After their aspic flesh scattered into the air, their bones crumbled too, each in two pieces, each piece in two fragments, each fragment in two granules, each granule in two sparks, violet and orange, each spark in two white bits of dust like ground sugar. In a few moments we were enveiled ankle-high by fine sand, shaped in waves, glowing in places with miniscule crystal.
“ ‘Nothing, nothing exists,’ The Albino uttered slowly in the deafening silence. ‘We are thin spiderwebs, inflated and torn apart by the wind. We are the fringe of interference on a soap bubble, multicolored, wet, despairing … We are mites in the skin of the soap bubble, laying our eggs and dirt … Our world has no weight or sense. We are simulacra of the unreal, itself in turn a simulacrum. This stage of the unreal becomes opaque and real only when seen as a whole, from the top end or the bottom, page after transparent page. But there is no top or bottom, and there are no eyes to see from that perspective. Page over page over page, our world is a book made of onion skin. And this skin has veins, and nerves, and glomeruli of stinking sweat.
“ ‘The people of old knew, and said, that every world is a book containing a book, and inside every Gospel is a Gospel. Once the sun stopped for an entire afternoon and another time shadow took ten steps back. Another time, everything was still, and pastors ate without eating and birds sang without singing … And Jehovah appeared in his pillar of cloud and fire, unexpectedly, between two pages of a pastoral as it happened, like a bookmark, one of those made by little scholars, decorated with stitches … It wasn’t time that stopped and turned back, but the long fingers scanning the pages, turning back to a passage they found dear.
“ ‘We are children and reproductions, but whose, whose? We are written in calligraphy, with gold and feces, but for whom? Who reads the poor story of our lives? Of course, only Him, the Writer. And he reads it once, in the moment he writes it. For the duplication of worlds is a process of writing/reading, as though an umbilical cord connects them, and through the cable, simultaneously, reading and writing cross from both ends, because if he blows his Spirit through the tube, inflating our bubble of soap, we, in turn, reflect his face in its curve, and through the tube we can see his zirconium larynx. And whoever swam against the terrible current of blessing, climbing like salmon toward the source, would escape the balloon of illusion and cross the cord that connects us to His mouth and His lungs. He would settle there, in the alveoli. He would multiply there madly, in Abraham’s breast. He would metastasize in the liver and balls. He would fill the Hierarch with the anarchic swirls. The god would die in unimaginable pain, and his howls would shape the deicide’s eternal crown.
“ ‘For all of us, at the end of time, murder and eat our God. Otherwise we could not become him, we could not be in him and he could not be in us. Devotion, therefore, is murder. Prayer is crucifixion. Love is torture. Adoration is strangulation with the wide hands of cherubim. Limitless pain is the deisis of our lives. That is why all gods were hacked and maimed and hung up by nails. Fra Armando has shown you the way of unification, I have shown you the way of dismemberment, and no one tells you: Choose!
“ ‘We will invent the being that will invent us, but not from pure light. Our world is no diamond. In the earth, the dead and crystals shine and reek. In our guts are worms, in the worms are guts, and in their guts are worms. Even the divine Dante pissed foully on the bark of the oak tree. But the humble prostitute delicately places an iris in the vase of earth. Thus the Creator will be man and light, and also woman, black and slave, with the mind of an angel and the heart of a bitch. This is the only way the hemispheres, schizophrenia, and paranoia will be left behind, and the sexes, man and woman, will annul each other, and the powers, master and slave, will become one, and wonder of wonders, good will be corrupted by evil so that it sparkles stronger, and evil will rise through good so that its darkness increases, and at their meeting, and above them, where they will arch out of themselves and come together, they will become identical, light and dark, in a single, ecstatic word:
BLINDING.
“ ‘Blinding!’ the crowd shouted, just as, minutes or centuries before, they had shouted, ‘mineymoe!’ I shouted with them, feeling the roof of my mouth go numb with fear. Meanwhile, The Albino transformed. The skin of his face, pale as one forever dead, now became transparent. His groups of facial muscles became visible, red and striated, and held at the ends by white tendons. Rings of flesh dilated and contracted around his eyes and mouth. Then we could also see through his muscles. His brain appeared through its phantom of mist and wind, phosphorescent green, and the seams of his bones were violet. Toward the end of his speech, even his bones became smoky, and then they went clear like frozen water. His brain, irrigated by black blood, pulsed under its glass bell like an immense toad. At its base, the pituitary gland glowed like a sapphire grain. I watched its slow and slovenly migration to the surface, on a peduncle like a snail’s horn, until it came through his brow, where it opened, the blue eye between his eyebrows, in a triangle that could have been divine, if the tip weren’t turned toward the earth. Monsieur Monsú’s neck and arms also became transparent, covered with crystal scales. A fascinating monster now stood in front of us and spun its hippopotamus-skin crop.
“Melanie, dressed in fantastical fabrics and fluttering her great wig of ostrich feathers dyed the color of carrots, passed to the front, holding a paper bag in her arms. She emptied it onto the floor and began to assemble, with the awkward dexterity of a child, the bizarre machinery of rods, indicators, bolts, pinions, and cuffs of a metal that shone dully like aluminum. She placed Leon the crystal, withered now like an old mushroom, on a stopper of spiraled lamé. Engraved tubes, metal strips, and electrical conductors in colored plastic connected various parts of the machinery. How could the bag have held all these parts, the entire assemblage? Where had Melanie gotten the syringes, the blades? The blue oxygen cylinders, with rusted pressure gauges, rose up like out of nowhere.