J sat alone facing the window. He was unsure of much of his past. He was momentarily concerned that his memory had been the victim of a giant erasure by forces unseen or abuses of the body unremembered. He knew that he was in a flat. The floorboards were warped. The white paint of the walls crawled to the floor one flake at a time. Any sense of purpose in his life was merely an embryo in his cerebellum. An orange sun was arching into the clouds in retreat. Crows cast glum squawks. He picked up a dust-covered envelope from the old wooden table beside him. One of the table’s legs was a human femur ringed with a luggage tag. He opened the envelope and saw that it was addressed to a long dead drug dealer whose name he recognised. It was a bill for services rendered for sexually related e-mails and the dealer’s name was Pablo Cortisone. All J could remember was that Pablo had endeavoured to distil a new and fantastic drug that he could not remember the name of. J had wondered how he had appropriated Pablo’s flat with its piles of dishes and bong water-stained carpets. A long-dried bloodstain sat in the middle of the lounge room carpet.
The window was open and it seemed to beckon J in his drug-induced stupor; except he couldn’t be bothered moving. An ancient foreign film flickered on and off in the lounge room. The tube gave out and popped the sound of television death like falling rubble. As he continued to contemplate the beckoning window, he could see the couple in the flat across the courtyard of the block having what appeared to be a hell of a time dislodging a banana from a crack in the wall. They were in skin-tight body suits the colour of their flesh, which seemed to suggest that this was indeed a bizarre form of sexual activity.
J shifted in his wooden chair in awe, wondering why this couple would descend into such a strange lifestyle. Perhaps it was the lack of emotional connection in their relationship. Perhaps they were fucked in the head. Sometimes their faces contorted into symbols only recognised in the Necronomicon, which J was forced to read in secondary school. He took a swig from an old beer, a cigarette butt catching in his throat. As if by psychic amplification, his soft grunt caught the attention of the couple. They looked over to him with wide eyes and invited him to participate in their little ritual with slowly curling forefingers.
J strode across the courtyard that united the block with aggressive clouds coursing above. Mercury’s radiation throbbed within their grand design. He was invited into the couple’s flat. They introduced themselves as Rosemary and Ectoplasmic Billy. After this vaguely uneasy first contact, the three started to chat about their favourite music as they sucked on placenta milkshakes. Billy had the eyes of a beckoning deer, Rosemary the face of a Commie spy. It was agreed that they all loved Alvin and the Chipmonks and the psychosexual power underlying their songs. J enjoyed the grotesque African art that dominated the couple’s digs. He felt slightly dizzy with the inertia of reflecting hangovers.
Middle Eastern drum and bass pounded from the stereo as Billy and Rosemary wheeled out their favourite and most preserved corpse from the pantry. From the mouth of the body they took three hits of speedballs laced with various potent opiates. The body may have been Pablo’s but he was unsure. Valleys of joins – the result of crude plastic surgery – lined its face and was bemusing in its fleshy puzzle.
That day was a blur of corpse violation, the sounds of the screaming heads of a thousand starving Africans and the sub textual beat of one of the songs J had written for his band, The Jizzbuckets. He had only just remembered his scattered and lost compadres of the sonic assault that was his old band. Heavy, low thumping bass, fucked up beats and a killer crash of bowel-thundering noise. It was the first time J had made it with the deceased and it felt good. Billy had retrieved some crusty white faeces from the body with a pair of tongs and placed it in his mouth. He grinned, his mouth full of necro-dung. Rosemary rode the cadaver’s erection with glee, her eyes ablaze with Cold War madness. The body had been modified to accommodate cybertronic moving parts under the skin. They were translucent digital cogs that motivated some old muscle. Sometimes the waxy skin would undulate or smoke. J was particularly excited by the occasional flickering of an eyelid that would reveal a milky, rotting retina.
As the glans penis of the corpse erupted with black synthetic mucus, a waking nightmare occurred to J as he fell from the couple’s huge bed. The eyelet of the corpse’s urethra drew in J’s brain cells like the vortex of a black hole and made the door knock. The spectres of a million beer-swilling homophobes came tumbling into the boudoir.
“Hello,” they all said in unison, “we’re here to promote our masculinity.”
J felt some ethereal element of himself fall from his body as he joined the Million March around the room. Somehow, the spectres wanted a bit of the action. With Rosemary, of course. Her lycanthropic teeth glared with whiteness. Billy’s greasy hair flung sweat onto the ceiling. He grabbed a bass that was playing music backwards as the satanic query of: “How will I be eternally happy?” boomed out from somewhere. The cork ceiling twisted into an annelid spiral and dropped flakes like a midsummer snowfall. Rosemary wrote in her diary and Billy grabbed one of the homophobes – J was amazed he could see them too – and with the bass, ploughed through the crowd, swinging it over his head. The courtyard collapsed into a yawning salt mine. Together the homophobe and Billy smashed a plate glass window and threw themselves cut and bleeding into the mine. The other ghosts fell after them like suicidal lemmings. Their screams reverberated well into the night. One tenant put a complaint in writing to the managing estate agent.
The next morning, J had found his spirit returned to his body and Billy back in bed. Rosemary awoke with a feline smile and fingers raking through hair. They sat in silence. Why had they leapt? Why had Stanley dumped Granita? Who would have thought that a bass could scream in such a high pitch?
“Who gives a flying frog in a rainstorm?” was the collective response of the million dead as they arose from under the battered tiles of the courtyard. They dragged dead spirit corpses with them and the trio joined in. They poured into the streets. Emerging from a bar, Les Playcool provided background music on a portable harpsichord. Never had such a feeling of pure unadulterated joy run through J’s loins. He was re-awakened. He knew, once again, that music would become his passion thanks to this massive psychotic experience. After downing a bottle of Cinzano, he grabbed a passing girl and kissed her. Streamers and confetti began falling from the sky as magnificent fireworks flared in the background.
After a night of almost militant celebration, everything around J evaporated. He stumbled back into Billy and Rosemary’s flat. They were comatose, clutching the corpse they had grown to love. Perhaps Pablo had found love and warmth after all. J kissed them all on the forehead and left them to their dreams.
Inflict Kafe Gavani On The World
Comments on this chapter (2)
Add your comments on this chapter - Registration not required!
What people are saying!
“wilfully shocking stench of prose... artistic brutality”
- Godfrey Redburn
“Bizarro World meets the good bits of Tropic of Cancer meets Star Trek,
and they all hang out on Andy Warhol Day at the Playboy Mansion!”
