Please log in to recommend or discuss...
Gnawing a new nipple door into the afterlife, the first breaks free by annihilation. You’re left behind with the second and third, our rankings bumped up by one cage as the caretakers move each participant closer to the crime. As the new number one, you think you know what you will become. You’ve witnessed those before you protest violence with violence, face repetition with resistance, and then, as the last door closed on them with nowhere left to go but the inside of the cell, you knew them in contrast, no longer colored by gradations. You tell yourself you’ll answer the cubed microscopic view of Vantablack salt restructuring your cells with naked light.
The purpose of capitalism is to make more bodies. You, the new number one with your face like the city, the city we can’t remember where the queerest drug addicts argue on the street; you with your mutable proliferation of breasts smothering every revolutionary impulse; you, one cage ahead of me, laser scoping a red dot, red eye pinpoint of light aimed through a windshield chasing a dancer with untranslatable emotions. Moving and ephemeral or solid, her torture garden of outdated GPS drop pins in historical labia. Sickness is stillness. War is health. The city needs war to keep moving.
At this stage in our treatment, you and I understand the city has declared war on our bodies.
There’s a building outside our window that looks like a burning candle. You come to realize I am watching you closely as I take a shit in the corner of my adjoining cell. I tell you someday I am going to fuck this building so hard it falls down. I’m going to make my body a black cube and attack you like a gun with no orifice. I’m going to rescue you and kidnap the dancer and find the field that grows the war.
I tell you we’re going for a ride someday and there’s nothing you can do to slow this baby down. When I find the war I will break it into pieces small enough for us to swallow. This treatment plan is a metaphor for forced birth.
One cage ahead of me, you’re a motorcycle with a subconscious desire to fly. Your design screams for infection. I’m cold beneath you, endemic in the concrete. I inhabit spaces so brutal I've evolved into a sentient disease. When I disappear into the 1970s, I’ll take you with me to find the best cocaine-and-flower-patterned contact paper ever copied. I will make my body a white cube of salt that burns on your tongue.
Disease is a double agent in the war. I’m whispering to you, the new number one. The doctor is in. The doctor is in the walls. The doctor is in the walls of our cells and the clanging of our armored doors. When your mother comes to visit, you tell her you’re getting better and she says you’re such a good boy. I’m the only one who knows you’re lying. I can sublimate with the best of them. The doctor is in your mouth.
I want to cry for you and your soft sympathetic mother, but I can’t cry anymore since I came to the crystalline city of Vantablack salt. Black cubes like stacked cars propel a war nobody else remembers. Space structured around acceleration begs fertility of concrete. The city needs bodies to make more capitalism and we are not piled high enough to accrete a convincing geology. Time in this habitat is a moving microscopic image of the inside of my colon. Here I show you the wet slippery place where I look for you when you turn away from me in your cage.
You so often turn away.
As the new number one, you precede my silence with your clamor of slippery tears and a torture spread of imaginary geography: we are the map. I can’t cry anymore, no matter how hard I try. I watch you closely as I crouch and take a shit in my adjoining cell and try to feel you working your way out from inside. This view of the severe angles of your interior cell wall corrupts my emotions. Nobody talks about the war, as if you and I were two separate subjects in a compulsory study of sensory deprivation and sibling rivalry instead of a conjoined monument to progress.
I masturbate while I watch you, unable to come, wishing you were back here in my colon
where my anatomy could shape you properly. The number joke becomes distasteful and obvious in this context, an unintentional slander against your name. The real joke is that we’ve always been free to leave this facility any time we’ve wanted.
You can’t start a joke with the punchline. That’s like a nautilus trying to build a home from the outside of the shell inward, enfolding smaller anachronistic chambers before they exist in the logarithmic spiral. You have to tell a joke in the correct linear order. Two veterans walk into a bathtub. An invisible doctor and an overcoat walk out of thin air. A mechanic, a helicopter, and a commodity walk into a heist. Nobody talks about the war.
The doctor is in. The doctor is in the space between your body’s relationship with disease and the paranoid claustrophobia of a weaker mind, in the forced birth of shining wet places collecting like polyps in your bleeding mouth, in the air pockets of lifeless concrete where I conceptualize my rebirth as an apocalyptic infection.
I dream of the day when we run away together, brother, and redefine your pregnancies to fit the shape of a collective revolutionary orifice in sickness and in health. Our bodies will create a vehicle with a sleek Vantablack carapace that slides through the dangerous corridors of a city we’ve never seen except through our recovered memories, a city in queer time. In the trauma of my nightmares, it is constructed like a series of slipping cubes.
The doctor is in. The doctor is inside us, taking shape in our bowels. I mime him like a wild homunculus from my cage for your horrified edification, my limbs of shit writhing, kneading, and pleading with you to let me feel something. If I turn into a cube for you, will you let me cry again? Will you slip me back my health on the sly, dear doctor, like a drug deal? Will you let me come again, dear brother, and ooze evidence of how far we have evolved since conception?
Through clenched teeth of disgust you say it’s your duty to remind me that this is a voluntary study. It’s as if you presume a fellow doctor is a commodity, like a work of art. You can buy and sell me like one of your extraneous agents, but we both know disease is the ultimate secret weapon and birth is nothing but a cover-up. I can’t mend a mind that isn’t broken. Give me your shoes and I’ll show how much more I can collapse of the visible dark. Give me your hands and your credentials and close your eyes so that I may silently feed you the war broken down, the war broken down into pieces small enough for you to swallow, like a child or a bird.
You trust me because I inhabit a space so brutal it forces my body to mutate into a pure form of infection. I have built an architecture in my chest that blocks out all known spectrums of light. I have disappeared into the 1970s to start the third World War. All this theory goes to waste on weaponized health. Someday, you’ll hold the doctor I’ve stripped from my bowels in your hot sticky hands and smell what we are really made of.
I won’t take no for an answer. Get in. We’re taking this baby for a ride. The doctor is in the walls. The doctor is in the walls of your cells, your skin, your mitochondria, and you are free to come and go as I was once
free to come. Through you in this permeable exchange of places, ideas, and images I scream the words back into your face: this is a voluntary study. You're free, brother. Free.
In the city dark I penetrate the existing geographical radius of animal bodies. I’m endemic in the concrete. I grow an infection aimed straight at your mouth. Your red eye spies a dancer through the windshield, running and defying the GPS pinpoints on our moving map. I permeate the organism that binds us. We collapse under the weight of unmeasured geological time, under a dancer pierced by a thousand embryos like squirming bait aborted through every pore.
I become you by imitating your accolades and rank. You can smell me living in your house. I play and replay the recordings. You do not stop me. I shower. I undress quietly in front of your wife.
I become more like you by scraping a crowbar over the asphalt for three hundred miles. I play the recordings until someone dares me to stop. I’ve taken notes on how far I have to travel to make you quit following me for once and for all. I build a structure so relentless it sterilizes every fish within one hundred miles. I do not mourn our collective guilt.
I hire an actor that looks like you to play me in a movie. I leave you behind in your ordure-smeared cell as my witness. I’m going to open a door. I’m going to close it. I’m going to invert space so brutally that this building becomes the microorganism that kills us.
Pretend I’m the city. Pretend I’m your father. Pretend I’m a political system that thrives on reproductive proliferation like an embodied bomb. Understand I’m going to abandon you once I finish duplicating your cells.
Magnified photographs of the insides of our colons tunnel below the city in wet tubes. The purpose of the city is to increase the speed of war. I want to cry, but I can’t cry anymore, I can’t come anymore because the city has nothing to say. I can’t come because I’m made of concrete and disengaged from history. The city has no anus or mouth. When the city eats you alive you stay inside it like a magnified cube of microscopic salt.
There’s a building outside our window that looks like a burning candle. I mold my shit into the shape of you and ask if you think the building is burning at both ends. I laugh maniacally when you say you want to escape and burn it down. The doctor is in you. I mold my shit into a homunculus that looks exactly like you before you changed into a motorcycle.
I’m going to brutalize your surface so humanly it never ceases to bleed. I’m going to make a war so obvious it exposes all doctors as concubines in service of the great infection. I’m going to fuck this building so hard it falls to the ground.
By the time you realize we’ve traded places, it will be too late. You’ll have heard all my secrets. When I’m found dead in my cage, you’ll be the one disabled by guilt and a disconnected sense of responsibility for someone you never really knew.
There’s something I recognize in you as vulnerable and it compels me to confess everything about myself as quickly as possible, whether you care about me or not. I know it isn’t fair to you. You’ve tried in your way to be kind. You’ve been through Hell to make it to first place and now you’re so close to the crime you can taste it, except the doctor is in your mouth. You’re almost here, baby. Keep coming. You’ve almost won the birthday prize. The next step is the nude embrace of incomprehensible light.
The cage fits Kyle’s face like the one from the Orwell story. He made it himself after stealing the book from the library. Sam’s nervous about the thing. Usually she agrees with her man, but when he said to starve the rats, Sam didn’t have the heart to watch them suffer. She’s been sneaking them Cheetos and hamburger on the sly.
“I swear, if you’ve been feeding them,” Kyle says.
Sam giggles at the threat. She does that when she’s edgy. “I’m sorry, you sound funny. I can’t help it if they’re sweet on you.”
The cage is strapped onto Kyle’s face with three belts and two metal clamps. It looks like homemade armor for an elaborate Halloween costume. Instead of a single helmet, it has double compartments: one encases Kyle’s head, and one sticks out perpendicular from his face to hold rats.
Billy the rat is in the extension. He’s Sam’s favorite. She’s just raised the faceplate dividing the compartments as Kyle instructed. Not only is Billy nuzzling, interfering with Kyle’s ability to speak, but the apparatus itself presses Kyle’s jaw in such a way that his pronunciation is fucked up.
Kyle sits straight-backed in a reclaimed office chair in the middle of the small kitchen, gripping the arms with bulging knuckles. He figures if rats eating your face is the worst the libs can think up, he’s going to be ready for them when the torture starts. Kyle’s smart. He’ll beat them at their own game before they come for him.
“Ahhhh!” he yells at the docile and confused Billy. “Come on, motherfucker!”
Kyle doesn’t listen when Sam suggests he’s going too far. Kyle reminds her about discipline, and how he’s doing this for her as much as him. Of course Sam doesn’t admit she pampers the rats behind Kyle’s back, pulls them out of their cages and cuddles when he’s out. Billy’s used to human smooches. He bops Kyle’s nose and turns in circles, seeking treats.
Kyle shakes in the chair, growling out a challenge. He’s a sick vocalist. His band is going places. Sam wants him to be happy, wants to be true to the cause, but some of the shit he’s been pulling lately is making her paranoid. She’s not blind. She can see the country going down the toilet, how hard it is for two people to get by on her paycheck alone, how the younger customers sneer if you say so much as Merry Christmas. But the poor little rats never hurt anyone.
Billy’s puffing up now, trapped in the cage on Kyle’s face. Sam grabs Kyle’s shoulders. ...
