Our ancestral people of this land took something with them that has altered more the psychic landscape than the physical one. Their sense of doom is palpable and it tells their story in a way that artifacts can’t. Their contribution to the world lies in pockets of poison gas underground, that white swath beating at the door with the swollen fists of the unhappy dead; it wisps under the cabin window sash, animating that season’s psychos in a spark of electrified crackling fat that’s so irresistible they must drag their bones out the door, into the world outside, to launch the projects their meticulous notes and research have been building toward all winter long… Our town spit so much volcanic phlegm into the vapor in a veldt that sealed the town from the sky, that what you call “fog” is really just toxic blinding rage fading to white. It infected the consciousness of our town so much that people didn’t see it anymore; it seemed like just so much fog overhead. The land was not to be trusted. Its climate had the potential to make those teetering on the edges of decency spill over into murderville. They sought to put more artifacts in the ground for future excavation. Earthquakes came to blow off a little steam, columns of smoke from Hell loosened up wells of fog stored deep in the ground. Psychos tried to plug up cracks with bodies, cloth, whatever’s at hand. Stem the flows. The more bodies the fewer earthquakes, is how they saw it. The killer hippie forest sprite Herbert Mullin killed to prevent earthquakes — and why wouldn’t he? Earthquakes, after all, are horrible disasters. He observed, rat-like, that earthquakes coming from below the surface of the earth indicated a residual animosity on the part of the native people who were hounded in this part of the state centuries ago. They had planted poisonous fog in the ground in the absence of any solid, real-world artifacts like pottery or sarcophagi in order to punish modern humans (descendents of the warlike New Englander meatheads) when it all got unearthed in the age of modern development, in the age of leveling the trees and digging around the beaches, escaping from pockets deep in the earth, seeping into the atmosphere and infecting everybody’s consciousness… hooo boy!… Every word was a possibility flickering along the wall in blue person-shaped shadows. The psycho itched all over with the voices of possibilities and winged creatures beating their wings below his bed.
The moon rose tiny and quiet in the beige night sky. In the vagueness before dawn I sucked on a piece of ancient gum in my sleep. Seth woke me I’m fucking thick for you he sobbed. Allow my passion to interfere with your progress… Opening my eyes, he raised me to his level, inching me neatly over his cock. After a minute I said I’d rather put it in my mouth, letting my gaze fall to the floor where my hand traced the path of rain on one side of the windshield… My eyes saw foggy and pale and I stooped over to drain his hilarious rage. Suck fuck sick again. Barf it up and the streams will flow to heaven on a song lit like a purple cloud. Please shut up I heard myself say. I went into the bathroom. Did not come out for several hours. His breath billowed in under the door toward me as I sat on the sink pondering my fate. Is it cruel to live this way? Why did they all choose me? Love me so much, hold me so tight? What’s so fucked about me that makes them so luvey, so cummey, so angry they can’t stop smiling?… A middle-aged man in a button-down shirt motioned for me to follow him into his car. We arrived at a sparsely furnished apartment in black lacquer and mauve. When he was in the bathroom I cautiously peered into the refrigerator for something to eat. Bottled water, a bag of muffins, a jar of mayonnaise. I found a packet of fast food hot sauce and squirted the contents anxiously into my mouth. He came back and asked me if anybody had come to the door before sidling up, making a raspy coo at the bottom of his throat as he yanked my sweatshirt over my head. Later, after consuming more and more packets I found between cushions, I had a spicy headache throbbing in my aching throat. He had me bent over the arm of the couch, his palm held against my back. Birds flew from their lawn-chair perches, chirping outside the sliding door as he pulled out. Streams of cobwebs engulfed the room. He gagged a little on his abundant pleasure then retreated into the worn embrace of his creased trousers… There was always a kernel of ecstasy at the center of atrocious mischief, the annihilation seed that makes the pearl… sleeping sleeping sleeping… I can’t wake up by myself anymore; somebody has to be there to open my eyelids for me and force some sun into them — but I don’t wake as if surfacing in a lake; I cry up, snap up and throw a fist in the direction of onlookers. I burn my bed in the campfire and stomp into town.
By the early hours of the morning the rockabilly girls were passed out on a pallet by the dead fire. They seemed interchangeable to me, bony and malleable with just a touch of death. They want me to teach them, I will.
Textured drywall, paint holidays… revealing on closer inspection images in plaster cloud formations: debauched ceremonies at cocktail parties, couch cushions that tasted like sweat, an overstuffed ottoman that doubled as a coffee table. All bad things. One evening there was a girl passed out on the couch, her face wedged in where cushions met, shutting out the light to keep from barfing all over everyone she was so grossed out. Inquisitive gazes kept her there. All kinds of scented candles and voices were present. A cordless phone pulsed and was answered. In hushed tones. The pizza was here. Cut carrots, endive, and radish were dipped and consumed. Rattan bar stools were pulled out and pushed in to accommodate one or more pairs of stuffed Dockers. The air was thick with ground bone, sugar, and oil. Small fires sealed icy fists in coalpits in each corner of the balcony. Inside thegirl brought her hands up to her hot breath, separating the perpendicular cushions in front of her face; found some nickels, crumbs, and a passage to the other side of the house: an angle high in the Tudor rafters of the vaulted ceiling in the back bedroom where a ceremony was in session, a rite of passion. There stood several dark cloaked figures around an unmade daybed. When she crept closer she could see that they were only half human, their flesh ended where the cloaks began like ceramic doll faces stitched onto cloth forms. She circled around above them and could see a ring of frantic fists pumping away at cocks set off against black velvet. The object of their affection lay braced against two such staffs, her own hands powerless to resist the urge to yank on the display around her. Smoke seeped up from the corners of the room, let off from the convolution of carpet staples doubling over folds at the baseboard. Every time a clock chimed one blew a load on her skin, each sizzling and evaporating on contact into a small puff of orange smoke. They marked her, leaving amorphous, raised stains, curdled clouds that despite superficial beginnings, penetrated the exterior layer to eventually mark her very being. Several seeds of hate chimed and etched an indelible longing into her soul and she was altered forever, bearing these badges of annihilation like dashes marking out the seconds of an hour, notches traveling toward 0. The participants soon dissipated and she was alone; the force from the impact of the chimes caused her sight to be drowned out by a black cloud that overtook the room at intervals matching every heartbeat. Her ears were closed to the outside. She heard no sound but the hot suffocating hiss of blood tracing the confines of her veins. Her body remained untouched but for the curdled marks on her flesh, pressing in on her from all sides. She was imploding… There are better places to go than the forest. Grocery store aisles were mind devices assisting a systematic forgetting of forests and their harbors of wickedness. Kim and I went to one in the middle of the night on Thanksgiving when nothing else was open. Nobody else was around. Even the guy who worked the register was away in another part of the store. We were hanging out, looking at magazines, sitting below an aisle somewhere in the back. She grabbed a box of granola bars off the shelf and threw one in my lap and sat and watched me while I ate one of every flavor. I brushed my hand across her knee and she swooped in like a rare storm. She had a habit of dissolving right in front of my eyes. And at this moment I felt her fading away slowly, falling out of view.