A boy romps by
himself in an asphalt playground at the foot of a drive-in movie screen. The
film casts monumental chiaroscuros which flicker eerily about him. Like mechanical platoons grinning on a
crumbling moonscape, cars are lined up facing the screen: black Mustang, green
Each car is anchored to a post by a speaker hung on a rolled-down window, and each is inhabited by skeletons, some staring eyeless through the windshields with their arms about each other’s shoulders, some tangled amorously in back seats, others hanging out the windows or perched on the roofs of the cars.
Suppose that you were a child who, as you grew more and more aware of what other people were like, began to feel less and less capable of assuming an appearance that would permit you to be like others. Suppose that, on the contrary, the more you compared your world with the world of others, and the more you compared your being with the being of others, the more you began to feel... disembodied.
You might begin to recognize in yourself an acuteness of which you found no example in others.
When you were among other children, you might find that they sensed your terrible difference, since you had not yet grown skilled in masking it. Your gestures, your face and your body might be marked by it like the body of a deformed person. The sympathetic children might avoid you out of fear of the stigma; the brutal ones might try to harm you. Your body then might become an instrument of shame from which you would try to sever yourself; more even than that, you yourself might begin to assume the monstrosity of your body.
Say moreover that you are a child who begins to be aware that something that happened in the past is haunting you. You’re not sure whether it was an accident or something done to you or something you did to someone else. Perhaps it was only something you witnessed. Nor, indeed, are you certain whether what is haunting you is a crucial incident which could be isolated and analyzed, or a series of invisible episodes, the residue of which begins to accumulate like layers of sediment, crushing and suffocating you.
Such a ghostly arrangement might have curious effects on a child.
It is near midnight, and the boy’s family have been asleep for over an hour. The living room is dark except for the bluish light emanating from the television screen. He stretches out on his side with his head propped on his arm and his eyes only a few inches from the screen. The blue rays sweep his form like searchlights.
His mother has warned him that the rays may damage his eyes if he sits too close, but every Friday night he watches movies this way because he likes to be encompassed by the images; he likes to be surrounded and cushioned by them in such a way that he loses himself, and the movies flash through his mind like dreams.
At midnight the screen goes black, and a strange sound is heard. Even though he anticipates the sound each time, it always produces in him a nearly physical mixture of fear and pleasure. The sound could be described as a rhythmical alarm overlaid with unearthly synthetic music. A greenish dot appears in the center of the screen; as it grows larger one can make out the rings of an oscilloscope twisting back and forth hypnotically. Then a robotic voice starts to speak in distortions and modulations that blend with the eerie music. The voice says: “Project ... Terror ... where the scientific ... and the terrifying ... emerge ....”
* * *
The skull has always been around. When I was but an infant it was already there, peeking over the edge of my cradle. At birthday parties, it bobbed in the air between the heads of my playmates. It was never absent from weddings, anniversaries, family outings, Christmases, Valentine’s Days or Easter Sundays. On Halloween I suppose it sulked, but there was no need: the skull’s luminescence transcended by far any children’s game of spooks.
I daresay it will loom above my tombstone when I am gone, laughing with that voice, part B-movie maniac, part shriek of the damned. That shriek which at times is so quiet as to be barely audible, and at other times is so piercing, so insistent, and so overwhelming, that it would surely drive any ordinary soul quite mad in time.
But I am no ordinary soul.
It’s true that when I realized that I was the only one who could see and hear the skull, I began to doubt my sanity. When it sprang out of closets and boxes; when it hovered behind doors; when it flew at my face, snapped at my hair, bit my neck and tried to drag me to the bottom of the Black Pond... yes, these were trying times. I could not ignore the skull; I could not understand it; above all, I could not live with it; nevertheless, the two of us developed a sort of pact. I began to see it not so much as a hideous torment, but rather as a secret companion, a witness, a conspirator, even... a comfort.
* * *
The seasons are always overflowing with colors that burn; poisonous flowers, consonant or dissonant with flowers that envelop you. Our plans and purposes replace you with flowering pod creatures. A clear sunny day can fill you with funereal flowers; a cloudy day can make you well again. Flowers that draw longing, sadness, insects with fragrance. A beautiful blue day: the flower inside the womb.
* * *
Damn your eyes, damn your eyes, damn your eyes!
All you boys who tormented me knowingly or unknowingly, Damn your eyes! I see you shrinking now; you are fading; you are faltering. As I become stronger, stronger than you had dreamed possible, your power over me sputters; the spell is deflected like the image of the Gorgon in the shield. I am the Gorgon now, and you are nothing but stone, shrunken stone, no bigger, and of no more consequence, than Hummel figurines.
Perhaps you three would like to join my collection. I’ll find a nice spot for you behind the glass doors, and you can reenact the tableau of the three wise monkeys: See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil.
* * *
I
I deny that I am made of the same substance as everyone else.
II
I have no awareness of my body; I can’t feel it.
III
I want nothing of this flesh nor of this earth. My flesh is contaminated: it crumbles to dust before my eyes.
IV
It may be fine to contemplate the ruins of civilizations, but who would care to contemplate the ruins of me?
* * *
My shyness is not charming or endearing: it is like a rack that telescopes my body into the shape of a radar antenna.
The eyesweep of others is like the beam of a searchlight: I pray that I will remain out of its scope, and when it rakes over me, its heat sears me.
Out of fear, I watch others only out of the corners of my eyes. Therefore, I do not see the graph of the face to help determine what thoughts may lie behind the voice.
Two ventriloquisms I must perform: the voice disconnected from the body, the body from the mind.
* * *
Science does not yet know how to read the expressions of the Fly. Its face is inscrutable as that of the Emperor Hirohito.
Beware the Fly that enters through a hole in the screen: it means you harm.
Man cannot abide the buzzing of the Fly. Above all the Fly is small and sees too much, with all those eyes. This overabundance of eyes is what leads us to be suspicious of the Fly’s intentions.
With regard to the laws of aerodynamics and decency, it is a heinous criminal. When sated with filth, it totters about recklessly, drunkenly; besotted with insect lust, it buggers airborne and in plain sight of the world.
This one waits upside down beneath the arm of my chair, sticking just close enough to the edge to see me. It is hungry. I can tell by its stillness. Malevolent stillness. I wither in its multifarious glare.
It is waiting for me to die; that much is certain. What’s more, it’s willing me to die, and I have little doubt, were it accompanied by a large number of its mates—a buzzing swarm or plague—little doubt such malignant waves of death-wish alone could finish me, in my weakened state.
Beelzebub: “I am legion.” When I die, I shall exhale through mouth, nostrils, ears, through every orifice and pore, a plague of flies the like of which has never been seen by human eyes.
* * *
Bugs Bunny falls out of the sky and lands on a cow’s skeleton in the desert. When he comes to, he doesn’t realize his body is embedded in the earth. His eyes remain closed, and only his head and arms are sticking out of the earth. Where his chest should be are the ribs of the skeleton. His gloved fingers feel the bones and play them up and down like a xylophone. Then he starts bawling because he knows he’s dead.
* * *
Perpetual shift of the painted eye: the shy street whore would not meet my gaze; her painted eyes shifted away like the eyes of black-clad girls in nightclubs; gazes that shift from one to another throughout the night, never meeting...
* * *
What, after all, is a human being? Improbable creature, accursed creature, miraculous creature, made of dust and water, heart beating and beating against dissolution. The pride, the nerve of it—to stand and walk about, viscera sloshing around like monstrous submarine debris. Pride of its bones.
One can almost see, as it walks about, ignorant of its own power and beauty, one can almost imagine its fragility, its plasticity, how at any moment it might disintegrate and splash to the ground like a balloon filled with water.
It is the not the body itself, but the form that interests us, that pleases us.
* * *
Under a green bower, the beloved body... goes away.
* * *
Flowers appear and disappear: nothing is ever known of them.
* * *
Reverie: a youth sleeps on an empty beach (at Sitges?
* * *
[Fragment written on the occasion of seeing, in Boybar, someone whom I have loved “from afar,” as the saying goes, for many years. I had never seen him there before and never expected to see him there in a million years, because I had placed him above myself and my world. And there is a sense in which, as much as I may loathe or delight in what it represents, Boybar really was my social world, the center of my worldly education. Now that I think of it, I imagine I had to place him in a world from which I was excluded (a world of good breeding, wealth, elegance, beauty, athletic vigor and ease): his image was necessary to me to maintain an idea of nobility which perhaps does not exist. Though at the same time I had sensed in him a deep sadness which I took to be a lovesickness. By chance I once saw a sketch he had made of a beautiful male profile, much like his own, which I took to represent someone he had loved in his youth or perhaps even a brother whom he had secretly loved. I felt extremely intrigued and embarrassed at the same time, as though I had unwittingly intruded on his privacy.]
Out of the hallucinatory dimness of the bar, you cruised into my view, like an angel descended to earth to walk gingerly and promiscuously among ignoble humanity, like a child swimming in the ocean, oblivious to the stinging hordes of jellyfish. You cannot imagine the mortification I felt on your behalf. You must have been as embarrassed to find yourself recognized as I was to have apprehended you. I have to thank my susceptibility to the divine, which I sometimes regard as a curse.
To my surprise,
however, no one else seemed to notice you.
Did I expect others to see the divine light emanating from your person
and to prostrate themselves or, more likely, to stand in line to corrupt your
purity like the Sodomites who beat their fists in vain on
At first, after recovering from the shock of seeing you, I wanted to rush to find you again, to greet you with all the grace and sweetness I have accumulated over the years, to assure you that (although I had not, and probably will never, master my overwhelming love for you) my motions toward you were inspired only by a kind of maternal tenderness, a wish to preserve you from harm, perhaps to spirit you from this place. And I wanted to assure you that I would never reveal your identity or try to importune you in any way.
But only a fool would trust in the purity of motive of human beings. I cannot even trust myself. How do I know that, once I had gained yours, my instinctive perversity would not cause me to seduce you, to degrade you, to desecrate the sanctity of your pure heart.
So I pretended not to know you. Even so, when you were forced to pass next to me and I moved aside slightly to save you the awkwardness of touching me, you seemed to go out of your way to brush the fine brown hairs of your arms against mine. Had it been anyone else, I would certainly have taken it as message, an invitation, and would have followed. But the pleasure of that contact, of that mere possibility of pure joy—that alone was enough for me.
I did not move.
____________