Colony
For three minutes, the whole world is green, a throbbing pulse of underwater grass. Then my depth perception dissolves into a flat canvas, and my co-workers look like 2D animation drawn by minimum-wage artists in Korea. I can smell scientific theories the way I smell my memories: relativity is sugar mixed with a dissolving chocolate soufflé, and all the lovers I’ve disappointed remind me of overcooked salmon simmering in burnt coffee and impossible expectations. I experience four cyclical deaths every day: lavatory, office politics, televised Internet, and dreamless sleep. I can’t even drive myself; it’s my wife who has to explain that cars aren’t computerized seeds of death holding together the infrastructure of a faulty CPU. Partitions are real; social divides are inseparable; no one in the world sees what I do. And what do I see? The doctors told me that brain imaging had revealed a colony of tapeworms in my brain. Seventy of them, a whole family, feeding on the folds of tissues that weave the tapestry of my CPU. They must have been starving before they used some unknown enzyme to break through my blood-brain barrier. I’ve been advised to have them killed. There are drugs to decimate them. But I feel guilty. They have a right to live, even if it’s at my expense. My wife insists parasites don’t have souls. But I have to believe they do, because if they didn’t, what would it mean for me? I suck bliss and inject sorrow into the earthy hues of my deaf wife who insists she loves me with her lips. They’re dry with strips of flesh peeling off and she licks them intermittently. I can sometimes hear the worms describe her as a cosmic irregularity that disappears with the swells of gravity. They want to eat my cochlea to re-establish balance. Since their arrival, I’ve experienced emotions as sound: depression is cathartically cacophonous; love is ominously quiescent. Regret drums lightly until the ululations become frustrating and drown everything else out. I sometimes spot old friends who tell me about their unlived lives, and we play chess with our unfulfilled ambitions until my wife asks who I’m talking to. Everyone, I tell her, as though air molecules had ears. I wish I could converse with electrons so they’d act as translators to the tapeworms. I’d experience their fear at the impending apocalypse, Armageddon being my eventual death, a neurological explosion that translates to darkness and inactivity. There’s no way to save them. They have no future hope. Yet they cling. So I cling. And the universe is a flat and green frying pan where I cook the omelet of my life at an old café that serves brunch sunny side up.
Unreflected
An autopsy of time would expose midnight at this LA rave as a buildup of greedy seconds poisoned by impatience. I’ve often wondered what it’d be like to split my brain open, unraveling my memories like noodles that’d squirm because I’d boiled them too long. Melancholy weaves her way around my noodle and I split into a million different versions of myself.
I’m attending the event because an old colleague is catering and I’m assisting. The theme is Locust, or hunger, a charitable masquerade pretending to empathize with the impoverished and destitute. There’s thousands who’ve starved the whole week to gather at this factory on the outskirts of town and smoke exotic herbs to alter their perceptions. Many of the women resemble spirits with all the smoke around us, rippling into thin, meandering mirages. What would a lifetime with any of them be like? I spot a Chinese girl who’s statuesque enough to fit into Roman porn if she had chipped breasts and an ivory ass. She notices my glance, approaches and introduces herself as, “Ella. I combined the Spanish words for the feminine and masculine the.”
“I’m Will,” I reply.
She shakes my hand. “Tell me a secret.”
“Why don’t you go first?” I suggest.
She simpers. “I’ve lost my reflection.”
“What do you mean?”
“Let me show you.”
She pulls me into the girls’ bathroom and points at the mirror. I see my ugly self and twenty girls behind, but no Ella.
“I thought I was dead at first,” she says. “But I still had to eat and shit, so I figured I was alive.” I stare to make sure she’s real. She is, and I’m hypnotized by her skimpy dress and lean legs. For a second, I wonder what it’d be like to bite them — frail, fragile, like a gaunt strip of quail. She asks me, “Do you think I’m beautiful?”
“How long’s it been since you’ve seen yourself?”
“A year?” she shrugs. “I don’t remember how I look anymore.” Her skin is pale and the veins in her neck are vulnerably bulbous, throbbing with platelets and plasma. The excess plasma makes her ponder, “Do you have parts of yourself you hate seeing? I remember when I was a kid, a swarm of bees stung my arm till it was a bloody strip of bumps.”
“I kill bees whenever I can,” I reply.
“Why?”
“Because the taste of honey makes me sick.”
She asks me eight more questions, but she doesn’t really care for answers, more in love with the questions themselves than her token boy of the moment. We spit through vodka shots; she wants to dance, tells me she picked me as her date for the night. “Impress me,” she says. “Or make me weep.”
The confused expression on my face makes her laugh and she confesses she used to be a runway model traveling the globe, shuffling through French, Turkish, and Japanese lovers. “I dated a guy with the biggest knife collection in the world.” She twirls her wrist in a slashing motion. “I made sure he was miserable while I was with him.”
“Why?”
“I do it to every guy I love. It’s their punishment since I know it can’t last. What’s your passion?”
“I used to be a chef,” I answer.
“But?”
“But I quit after I lost my sense of taste and smell.”
“You don’t smell anything?”
I shake my head. “It was the dumbest mistake of my life. I had to try every exotic food, ate something in India that nearly killed me.”
“There’s no such thing as a mistake. Only discontent after the fact,” she says.
“I was too greedy,” I reply, feeling dizzy.
She slaps me in the face, takes me to the bathroom. The mirror rises up like a barricade. Neither of us is reflected. I turn to her, shocked. She laughs and says, “It doesn’t matter what you’ve done if you can’t see your reflection.”
“But I want to see.”
“Then shatter the glass with your fist.”
When I hesitate, she smiles. “You never told me a secret.”
Before I can answer, she turns around. A second later, she’s vanished. I can’t see her anywhere.
The Death Artist
I’d come across the troupe after I lost all my money investing in a Beijing-based company that sold weather. They promised thunderstorms and sunshine. Climatology, they were called, like some rock-star inspired cult with pagan deities. People were queuing to be proselytized, and I was one of the first to be chosen, then sacrificed — my hundred thousand dollars became a granule inside a frigate of waste and, after they went bankrupt, I wandered China in a daze. I met a circus act of expats who’d also lost their way. They were performing in a pedestrian underpass. It was Iris with her self-immolation, her ‘Christmas tree of conflagration’ stunt, that made me beg them to recruit me. “Barry here can freeze his whole body. Tammy has pubic hair longer than her legs. What the fuck can you do?”
“I can die,” I replied.
They laughed and were about to dismiss me. But Iris stared and asked, “How long?”
Long enough to live. I wondered those seconds before death — does she feel my desire? Does she know I stare at the way fire meanders across her wrist, the way the oily crevasses reflect in her mastoids and the sharp accents of her clavicles? She reminds me of a charcoal painting with her chaff knuckles and her veins resembling broken pipeworks mired in corpuscles — a symbiotic car crash of mitochondria and guts.
She talks like an airport intercom messenger. “Paging Milton. Go drown yourself.”
Iris locks the glass cage. A makeshift audience has gathered. I’m vying for their attention, competing against their cell phones. Water mixed with green tea leaves explodes out like a fusillade. I drown and die; the cage releases the water.
Resurrected by CPR, I drink 60 % proof er gou tou and stumble around camp. I enter Iris’s tent and ask, “When was the last time you made love?”
She replies, “I need fire to get aroused.”
“Burn us,” I tell her.
Her eyes gleam. “A lot of people think they can handle the heat.”
“Burn us,” I say.
She sets her arms on fire, her lips curling. Sweat beads on her forehead and it crinkles in delight. She puts a match to my pants. I smell embers like they’re dead hope and I can see the blurry mistakes of my past.
“You want me to stop?” she asks.
I shake my head and the fire consumes us, greedy rivets stumbling over one another to get higher. I press my fingers against her bony back, her spine feels like bolts. She shivers and she’s crying from pain. Her tears whet the fire. “You’re insane,” she says.
The pain is becoming unbearable, the heat a scorching machete ripping my calves open. “Best way to quench passion is to kill it.”
“Who killed yours?” she asks.
“My bosses, friends, my ex… you?”
She sucks in the smoke. “Me.”
“Let’s kill you then.”
“How?”
I grab her hand and run towards the water tank.
“I’m not like you, I might not come back,” she says.
“It’s easy. Just swim towards the light.”
“What light?”
“The one you see when you blink and your breath stops. Ignore all the voices calling out to you pretending they’re the people you loved.”
“Who are they?”
“Death herself,” I answer. We jump in and lock the cage. Water bursts out, quelling the fire. I kiss her and swallow her burnt breast. There’s desperation in our fingers; every sense is acute in our race against the end. She closes her eyes, exhales, bubbles run up her face; I draw the last air from deep in my stomach. The water is cold, but it’s a fiery death.