You are dead. Of course, it takes a long time to believe that. You've died so many times you think that you must be alive. You have to be alive to die, that's how you figure it. Eventually it dawns on you that's not it at all. Only if you're dead can you keep on dying, and then, after a while, you just stop thinking about it at all. Neena is sitting in her room as the first stars begin to appear on the monitor behind her, which displays a purple sky of impossibly vivid beauty. She's already put on the white fishnet stockings and the white micro miniskirt, the 5-inch silver platform sandals, and the elegant white satin elbow-length gloves with the forty-five tiny stain buttons running up to each pale elbow. She's wearing a corset comprised of the ribcage of a murdered teenager which has been laced tightly enough to reduce her breaths to tiny sips, like a deepsea diver hopelessly conserving a limited supply of oxygen. Her breasts, enhanced by surgery and indelible inks, are cupped inside the cruel corset by the skeletal hands of the two children she shall never bear. Her left nipple, as is the custom, has been appropriately pierced. Earlier, her geisha-corpse makeup was applied by her japanese transexual maid and now her hands are lying uselessly in her lap as she faces the coming endless night with no personal expression whatsoever.
"Are you ready?"
"No," she whispers.
"Then come."
Someone, unseen in the corner of the room arrives, finally, after much labor, at a shuddering climax. Neena takes the hand of the undertaker who is dressed, predictably, in formal black. On his face, he wears a mask of black silk, as if he were afraid to breathe the molecules of death floating in the air of this place. His eyes are entirely abstract. He will never fuck her, never, not even after the passage of a thousand years.
Neena rises from her chair, unsteady from past abuses not even fantasy can quickly and completely heal. She moves, still dreaming, towards a door that seems always to be opening into some new nightmare from which she is forever too disinterested to wake from. She tells herself that she will remember this time, just this once, but she knows that she has already forgotten everything that is about to happen.
Time does not exist. There are no clocks or watches here. But whether this is by edict or simply because such instruments are irrelevant, it is impossible to decipher. No one is born and no one dies. No one ages or, if they do, it happens at such an incremental level that you cannot see it happening, like seeing only one frame of a bullet captured on film in mid-flight towards the innocent lover it will murder. There is no coming here and no leaving this place, never a time one wasn't here and never a time one won't be here. It's an immortality, of sorts, she thinks when she feels the life draining from her toes for the millionth time and hears the distant, polite, slightly bored applause of jeweled hands that have never touched a thing that had its origins on earth.
In the hallway of this subterranean complex Neena stands by the wall to let a gurney pass.
It is not uncommon to see victims being brought back to their rooms at any hour of the day or night or wheeled down to the surgery for unnecessary and futile operations. The attendant pushing the gurney is almost invisible. Neena has to look closely to see him or her; it is usually impossible to tell their sex. The stylized faces of the attendants are all set to approximate the same dreamily expressionless mask of implacable indifference that might be seen on animated mannequins, if such a thing were possible, or the manifestations of someone’s archetypal rendering of moon-people, drawn left-handed, which is even less possible. This latter idea, being so unexpected, momentarily confuses Neena and she suddenly feels dizzy.
She tells herself not to look, but she looks anyway. They have purposely denied the girl the dignity of a sheet to cover her abused remains or the terrible cruelties suffered upon her body in order to enflame the passions of whatever guests might be strolling the halls and to serve as a constant reminder to the regular inhabitants of this section of the
mansion. The blonde girl on the gurney is naked, except for a pair of red high-heeled ankle boots. She has been cored through the middle, where her navel once had been, by what looks like what must have been some kind of huge, minutely machined screw-bit. Whatever had done her in had left an absence at the center of her being that seems the perfect symbolic representation of a woman who, for one reason or another, could not satisfy her need to be filled.
There is a look of horror on a blood-speckled face that has a delicate beauty that puts Neena in mind of a cross between the white garters she was wearing and french vanilla cake. She licks her lips, unconsciously, more or less.
They are taking her off to be repaired, supposedly, or to be altered, or to be fucked by one of the necrophiles who pay handsomely for the privilege of abusing a pretty and terribly disfigured corpse. They come to the gates in limousines and private jets, in helicopters and aboard yachts-or so that is the rumor that sifts down to this place deep inside the earth, which could be hell, but is not. It makes no difference to Neena. She has her own fate to fulfill, and she must hurry to her appointment corridor that leads even further into the mansion.
Tonight Neena is to be poisoned at dinner. She has suffered this before, perhaps; she can not remember. She has lived so many lives, died so many deaths. It is impossible, after a while, to distinguish one from the other. She enters the formal dining room, which, on other nights could be a prison cafeteria, without introduction or fanfare. A butler, dressed formally, motions her towards her place at table, where at least eight other exquisitely dressed guests sit chatting amiably about nothing much at all as they will when anticipating the imminent arrival of dinner.
She is inadequately and inappropriately dressed for the affair, that is immediately apparent, her coutere in shocking discordance with the others, and this has been effected, quite obviously with the greatest premeditation and the greatest artifice without any concern except for eliciting the most outrageous contrast possible within the boundaries of the inherent laws that rule this particular scene. She blushes, but no one sees. She sits as the chair is slid beneath her by the officious and indifferent butler and is somewhat relieved that no one so much as glances in her direction to acknowledge her arrival. You can always depend, Neena thought appreciatively, on the cultured to behave in this way in these potentially awkward situations.
Neena self-consciously lays her left hand near the napkin upon which rests more silverware than seems necessary, or possible, and finds a correlation between the white delicacy of her fingers and the exquisite thinness of the china, which appears to be made of bone sanded to an excruciating near-transparency. She finds herself questioning, in spite of herself, if perhaps she has come to the wrong place after all, her alienation from the others at the table is so perfectly, if unnaturally, complete, and although everlastingly grateful for it, she finds it dizzying.
She knows, intellectually, that her fears, in this one area, are groundless and that although affairs are random and there is nothing to believe anywhere, one can have a faith, of sorts, in the unerring bureaucracy of the mansion, as monstrously impersonal and all-inclusive as it is, even of the principles of opportunism and quantum mechanics. Nothing, here, ever happens by sheer chance. And if Neena has any doubts at all, which she often does, it is only one pole of a continually oscillating psychic state that holds her in place, torn apart in constant agony, between insecurity and a childlike trust in which she loses all sense of personal identity.
The initial toast poured into a tall, beautifully hand-blown flute, she lifts the pale gold wine along with the others, and does not understand the words offered in benediction, spoken as they are in a tongue that is completely alien to her, although she has at least a passing familiarity with eleven different languages. No one, quite expectedly, touches her glass, but the others, touched, sing like a flock of small, bright, migratory birds in dead trees. She brings the flute to her lips and kisses the pale light of an autumn afternoon in the room of a woman who has overdosed on tranquilizers because she could not bear to grow another day older. There is the clear black ticking, each tick seemingly separated by a long breath, of an ever-present, but wholly imaginary clock, and Neena wonders, but only briefly, if with that one sip, she has already been fatally poisoned.
The soup course is first and Neena lifts to her painted mouth a spoon so impossibly light it may or may not be obeying the laws of gravity. It tastes off, of course, and maybe because of that Neena doesn’t hesitate to bring a second weightless spoonful of the thin and elusively flavored soup to her lips. She feels neither hurried nor compelled and either would defeat the purpose, which is to surreptiously slaughter her without her knowledge while she is totally aware of what is happening each and every suspenseful step of the way.
Several exquisite intermediary courses follow, some or all of them poisoned, and Neena knows that each and any one of them could either by itself, or more likely cumulatively, deliver the lethal dose, although either way one fork or spoon she rises will certainly be her last, and it could be any one. The sense of expectation is atrociously delicious.
The conversation had been going on for some time now, and it moves in and out of Neena’s awareness without leaving any lasting impression. They are talking about politics at the moment, but the figures of whom they speak are entirely unknown to Neena, although obviously of such prominence one could not possibly be unfamiliar with their names. The events of which they speak, which in context could only be of great historic and cultural importance, mean absolutely nothing to her and while those present at table discuss these matters in great depth and complexity, Neena can’t help but note that they don’t seem to be taking any of it seriously at all, as if the discussion were only an elaborate and intense kind of adult parlor game.
A woman turns form the conversation to gaze briefly at Neena, her plucked eyebrows raised in amusement. Her stylized, striped metallic eyes look Neena up and down, pass a mute judgment of general disdain, and then she turns back to the red-haired hunter seated on her right, and says something about the brutal last days of an emperor of an outlaw corporation. The burning on Neena’s lips and inside her mouth, which up to now may only have been incidental, the result of too much cayenne pepper in the third course, perhaps, has intensified to an uncomfortable degree. Neena stays her hand on its inevitable course to the water glass for as long as she can, no longer than thirty seconds, if that, and finds herself drinking with convulsive swallows, in spite of her efforts at discretion. The water, she knows all to well, is also poisoned. For the moment, everything tastes fleetingly of chlorine, bring back memories of a pool, her father, an underwater seduction, and a death she hasn’t time to remember. Neena also knows what the result of her impulsive act will be, and yet she is still surprised at the blossoming of pain across her chest and along the inside of her throat, an incandescent glow like an overexposure to interior radiation. One of the servers, the one whose duty is circumscribed by this sole function, refills her glass silently and automatically.
The party goes on around her uninterrupted. One guest or another, a fork or glass raised to a bright convivial face, glances her way, sometimes looking and sometimes not, as they exchange words with the guest seated to the right or left of her. The atmosphere is intimate; candles have been lit, if they haven’t been lit all along, or perhaps the lights have been dimmed, or Neena is suffering a “brain accident,” all of these, or a combination thereof. A woman, who may have been particularly chosen for the resemblance, leans forward and says to Neena, “Can you imagine an aunt doing this to you, or could it be a dear friend with unrequited lesbian feelings?”
The main course, Neena suddenly realizes, has arrived, and everyone has been eating for some time. She presses her fork into the thick white meat of some kind of deepsea fish, the kind that lives in pressure so intense it has evolved with its vital organs on the outside of its body. She hesitates, almost, to spear the flesh with the three prongs of her fork. Neena chews slowly, meditatively, savoring the sauce, and each and every time she swallows the poisoned meat she does so with the sense of putting a period at the end of a sentence.
There is talk about a Brechler symphony, about a church massacre, about someone’s dyed hair. The Times is mentioned, a movie about the Lasky incident, endoscopic surgery. Kroner, juniper, Los Angeles, casualties, epidemic bread, Kroner again, snow, skin grafts, nanobiology, and elective mental breakdown-fragments of these conversation snag her attention like barbed wire at the edge of consciousness. The first of the more severe stomach cramps abruptly folds her in half and it takes all of her will-power to delicately place her fork down on the napkin as etiquette requires and yet she is certain that in spite of herself she has laid it on the wrong side of her salad knife. The second savage pain causes her to disturb her wine glass with her right hand, which has suddenly and ominously, become incapacitated. “Always,” she hears someone sway, the asexual fashion designer seated across and one chair to the right, perhaps, “the color of orange at 4pm in Andujar.”
When Neena opens her eyes again, she cannot see quite right and there is no sight in her left at all. She is having a lot of trouble breathing; to be more accurate, she is gasping dreadfully, and her mouth has begun to foam. The conversation, occasionally, now includes her situation, which has become the topic of a more general and rather technical discussion of dosages and effects and suchlike.
“One must mix carefully to get all the desired effects and still you must make sacrifices…A good deal of this has taken place over a period of several days duration.”
An older woman, Neena has seen her often before, interrupts her own conversation to turn to her solitiously. “Are you quite alright my dear? You might want to redraw your lipstick.”
Neena is chilled with a sick sweat and she is suffering from uncontrollable tremor, but she actually manages, to everyone’s surprised delight, four spoonfuls of the desert course, a creamy brulee, noting with disembodied regret the aftertaste of cherry almonds. She tries to smile, absently, when someone on her left pretends to ask her opinion of that new athletic satire causing such a stir among the Estraud faction, but is really examining her skin for the beginnings of morbid cyanosis. Neena feels her heart trigger into ventricular fibrillation which in turn triggers her flight response but she is far too disoriented and polite to do much more than vaguely excuse herself and half rise from her place at table with a gesture of elegant resignation, which she makes with her as yet only partially paralyzed left hand. The floor comes up quickly and when she revives to a state of semi-consciousness, she is lying on her side and convulsively vomiting, as if giving birth, by mouth, in a burning flood of blood and mucous, to death itself.
One ridiculous platform sandal has come off and her skirt is hiked up over her right hipbone, revealing the g-string bisecting her perfect ass. She can feel the garters have partially unsnapped on the back of her right thigh and the fishnet stocking adorning that leg has worked itself a few inches down the back of her very white flesh. The image would be aesthetically complete, she believes, if one of her breasts were exposed, but the only way that will happen now is if someone reaches down to expose her like this, which she knows won’t happen. She is aware of all these details, and several more besides, in between each violent contraction of her gastrointestinal system.
“Designer poisons are necessary,” she hears someone say. “You can not get such a rainbow plethora of reactions from any one poison alone.”
“Magnificent,” another voice says. “She has turned quite blue.”
“Death occurs on a variety of fronts,” the first voice points out somewhat pedantically, and unnecessarily. “There is the collapse of major organ systems: respiratory and circulatory, for instance. It is a catastrophic assault on the entire body from within. Quite painful-and yet remarkably…”
Either the sentence isn’t finished-or Neena cannot hear it. She would have been interested to hear…to apprehend that remarkable adjective to describe her death, but, like so much else, it is not to be. Instead the next thing she hears is this:
“I note the blood from her anus.”
The voice belongs to a female, it is both enthusiastic and insinuating.
“Yes, major hemhorraging from there as well. She’s quite ruined, I’m delighted to say. A biohazard. Dangerous to even touch; I wouldn’t recommend trying.”
Neena hears nothing any more. Her mouth is locked open and her eyes, lids fluttering, have rolled back for good. She is crying, quite literally, tears of blood. Her fingers are curled into tight fists, and her nails puncture her palms. That is a secret, however, that no one will ever know, for her hands will be opened by no one, ever again. Her poisoned lips have turned a color that, mixed with her lipstick, gives every suggestion of offering a kiss form which one cannot hope to survive.
Neena’s rapidly diminishing boundaries of concern leave little left but an awareness of the shutting down of internal processes. There is a distant and off-handedly sad awareness of a team of men in white protective clothing, complete with masks, surrounding her, of disinfected machinery, and impersonal breathing devices. She dies without so much as a shudder, her body already locked in spasm, more than dead, she is beyond desire, dangerous, untouchable. She feels nothing, as usual, except what might be felt from the post-conscious knowledge that no one is interested in her any longer and that the wreckage of her body has been lifted, deposited, and is now being wheeled unceremoniously from the dining room in a grey cart marked on all sides with the warning sign for toxic waste.
She will be dumped into the chopping cold waters off the Jersey Shore sometime late that night, pumped through the bilge system of a tanker carrying chemical and radioactive waste from various secret and underground medical and technical weapon facilities along the east coast.
Meanwhile, the guests in the dining room enjoy mints and rattlesnake-blood aperitifs.
* * * * *
This was Part I of a novel-in-progress. Part II and III are posted at Jack Maniac´s Maggotlife, and I hope to update these pages every other Saturday until I have exhausted every possibility for outrage I can think to indulge.