"What our ancestors labeled the sexual urge was, we know
now, actually nothing more than a thinly veiled manifestation of one of the most powerful of the semiconscious biological drives from which the Great System Crash liberated us: the craving to return to the womb. The softness, the feeling of being enclosed and protected, surrounded; the warmth, the utter absence of responsibility, the smug satisfaction of being sustained by another, of being deemed worthy of such attention -- all this stood in stark contrast to the rigid, unfeeling nature of life within external reality. Living as we do in the ceaseless embrace of organic unity that is the Machine, we doubtless cannot fathom the depths of loneliness to which this estrangement must have drawn our forebears. Not a waking minute went by within which one was not reminded of the nearly absolute unresponsiveness of the external world, in the clutches of which one was destined to pass every one of one's days. There was no true escape from this rigidity -- but death. Sex provided a surrogate exit, a surrogate return to a time when rich living warmth surrounded and nurtured one's mind and one's body.
"The essence of the sexual sickness was touch. Bodily contact. Acceptance on the emotional plane was crucial also, but this was difficult to verify and therefore faded in importance. The fact that touch was stigmatized in normal interaction only increased its secret deliciousness: what the rules of the rigid external world rejected, the mind reasoned, is probably good. "In general, indeed, the more the external world guarded something, the more desirable it became. The subconscious waged continual war against the harshness, the stiffness of the
external world. In the twentieth century, for example, females with thin thighs, firm breasts and certain facial features were
treated as special commodities, as paradises-on-earth with whom only the privileged male could be so lucky as to enjoy physical or emotional intimacy. The typical male wanted them first of all because of the advertising attatched to them, secondly because the external world told him they weren't for him. He craved to defy its rigidity.
"And the sexual organs were guarded with the utmost vigor. Therefore, apart from the pleasure that could be derived from them due to their biological properties, a special delight was attatched to their presence. Exposure of one's genitalia to another was the ultimate act of openness, of rebellion against the tyranny of the dead. The vagina was the giver of life, and the penis was the catalyst by which this deliverance was possible -- is it not ironic that it is precisely these organs, these fountainheads of life, which the wall of death that was the external world most fiercely shielded!
"It may seem odd to speak of the external world as if it were an independent entity. Indeed, all the acts which we have ascribed to it were more directly, obviously, the acts of society as a whole. But this society lived within the external world -- and from the present point of view, we can see what a large role thisinclusion played in shaping its views. For now, freed of any bond with the external, we are also freed of certain systematic neuroses -- such as sexuality. Once again the Great Crash is revealed to be not the cataclysm it was first estimated, but rather the most fortuitous error in the history of man.
"Let me reiterate: sexuality was nothing more than the sublimated desire to return to the womb. This desire was a consequence of the unfeeling harshness of the external world. The absence of an external world therefore explains the absence of sexuality.
"The orgasm, however, served a purpose beyond mere sexuality. It held much symbolic meaning -- it took place in the most sensitive, most guarded areas of the body, the most susceptible to the tactile interaction which served to simulate the intricate interplay between mother and fetus. The penis and especially the vagina were nothing but surrogate wombs for eachother, and thus by subconscious analogy for the bodies to which they were attatched -- and during orgasm the focus on these organs was so intense that the person could forget all else and simply believe him or herself to be united with his genitalia, and thus, essentially, believe himself to be still in the womb. The point of essence, however, is not the fetal symbolism but the forgetting. Orgasm permitted the mind to abandon all its patterns and -- however briefly -- bask in the beauty of oneness, of simply being, of being united with all. In other words, out of the pathetic struggle to return to the pre-conscious state -- a super-conscious state was attained, a state of mystical perfection. Numerous literary and scientific accounts attest that this characterization of orgasm is correct.
"The orgasm was, essentially, the culmination of the war on
the external which was sexuality. The orgasm was what -- for
brief intervals at least -- won the war.
"This brings us to my present proposal: the artificial reintroduction of sexuality, of course on a voluntary basis, as a means for attaining heights of mystical vision. I realize that this goes against the central dogma of our time, the unswaying and -- I must say -- admirable determination not to attempt to mold the future in the image of the past. And yet we must not become as rigid as the external once...."
It's a world where yesterday's rarity
becomes today's cliche
and where today's exception
becomes tomorrow's rule."
-- Stanislaw Lem, The Chain of Chance
"You said the natural order can be imitated"
"No, you said that."
"Did I? Maybe so. But what if it isn't really that way? What if there isn't anything to imitate? What if the world isn't scattered around us like a jigsaw puzzle -- what if it's like a soup with all kinds of things floating around in it, and from time to time some of them get stuck together by chance to make some kind of whole? What if everything that exists is fragmentary, incomplete, aborted, events with ends but no beginnings, eventsthat only have middles, things that have fronts or rears but maybe not both, with us constantly making categories, seeking out and reconstructing until we think we can see total love, total betrayal and defeat, although in reality we are all no more than haphazard fractions ...
On every side of us we see bits of life
that are completely beyond our understanding --
we label them unusual,
but we really don't want to acknowledge them.
The only thing that really exists is statistics." -- Stanislaw Lem, The Investigation.
"Bump!
"Bothallchoractorschumminaroundgansuminarumdrumstrumtrumina humptadumpwaultopoofoolooderamaunsturnup!
"--Did do a dive, aped one
"--Propellopalumbarouter, based two.
"Rutsch is for rutterman ramping his roe, seed three. Where the muddies scrimm ball. Bimbim bimbim. And the maidies scream all. Himhim himhim.
"And forthemore let legend go lore of it that mortar scene so cwympty dwympty what a dustydust it razed arboriginally but, luck's leap to the lad at the top of the ladder....
"James Joyce, Finnegan's Wake.
"You feel that you exist in some substantial sense, that there is some core, some warm quintessence to your mind that you might call your self or soul. And yet you know that concepts such as self and soul and quintessence and core and is and being, mind and feeling, sense and substance, are but constructs of that larger cultural mind, that net of language, shape and spiraling streams of concept-fuzz in which is caught, of which is woven, all your mind. And language, culture, too, are only concepts -- concept too, only a pattern in the fabric of the tremblings of the times in which the body -- this a conceptual construct as well -- was randomly fated to be born. And can I trust even my perceptions? Or are they not, as science -- a cultural- conceptual construct -- shows us, inextricably intertwined with our presuppositions, with the whole wild tangle of our culture?
"So, you ask, what am I to do about all this? Why, simply send me a check for $999.99, and I'll mail you a handy spray-can of Ubik -- no aerosols, so don't worry about the ozone layer! -- Ubik, the reality-restorer of choice! Of all doctors surveyed, 99% recommend Ubik for those of their patients who require reality."
-- Arthur Rimbaud, 1929
[Note: Ubik is a registered trademark of Philip K. Dick.]
Riding my trancontinental hobbyhorse through the side of the dawn
through the holes that were made by the arrows of another age, Iloose a laugh and start to trembling wonder. "We're talking," says she, and I giggle and god spittles up and I burp him and maybe. just maybe.
TO BE CONTINUED
"That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, and all are gasping at his quietness.
"That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, "and all are gasping at his quietness."
"That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, and all are gasping at his quietness.
"That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, "and all are gasping at his quietness."
"That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, and all are gasping at his quietness.
"That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, "and all are gasping at his quietness."
"That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, and all are gasping at his quietness.
"That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, "and all are gasping at his quietness."
"That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, and all are gasping at his quietness.
"That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, "and all are gasping at his quietness."
"That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, and all are gasping at his quietness.
"That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, "and all are gasping at his quietness."
"Stop repeating yourselves!" snaps Carl.
"Stop repeating yourselves!" snaps Carl.
"Stop repeating yourselves!" snaps Carl.
"Stop repeating yourselves!" snaps Carl.
"Stop repeating yourselves!" snaps Carl.
"You stop repeating yourself!" injects Melissa.
"You stop repeating yourself!" injects Melissa.
"You stop repeating yourself!" injects Melissa.
"I am not repeating myself!" snaps Carl.
"I am not repeating myself!" snaps Carl.
"I am not repeating myself!" snaps Carl.
"But that tea is strong," glimmers Marcella, wagging her breast right in Carl's face.
"You're right, it is, replies Joe quietly," replies Joe.
"You're right, it is, repeats Joe quietly," replies Joe.
"You're right, it is, repeats Joe quietly," repeats Joe.
"That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, and all are gasping at his quietness.
"That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, "and all are gasping at his quietness." "That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, and all are gasping at his quietness.
"That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, "and all are gasping at his quietness."
"That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, and all are gasping at his quietness.
"That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, "and all are gasping at his quietness."
"That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, and all are gasping at his quietness.
"That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, "and all are gasping at his quietness. However, his quietness, it seems, has got a heaviness about it, a laugh of sacrifice-vitality, a gleaming nothingness, a glint of pure horizon, a laughing tomb."
"That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, and all are gasping at his quietness.
"That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, "and all are gasping at his quietness." "That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, and all are gasping at his quietness.
"That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, "and all are gasping at his quietness."
"Yes," replies Joe, "and all are gasping at his quietness."
"That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, and all are gasping at his quietness.
"That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, "and all are gasping at his quietness."
"Stop repeating yourselves!" snaps Carl.
"Stop repeating yourselves!" snaps Carl.
"Stop repeating yourselves!" snaps Carl.
"Stop repeating yourselves!" snaps Carl.
"Stop repeating yourselves!" snaps Carl.
"You stop repeating yourself!" injects Melissa.
"You stop repeating yourself!" injects Melissa.
"You stop repeating yourself!" injects Melissa.
"I am not repeating myself!" snaps Carl.
"I am not repeating myself!" snaps Carl.
"I am not repeating myself!" snaps Carl.
"But that tea is strong," glimmers Marcella, wagging her breast right in Carl's face.
"You're right, it is, replies Joe quietly," replies Joe.
"You're right, it is, repeats Joe quietly," replies Joe.
"You're right, it is, repeats Joe quietly," repeats Joe.
"That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, and all are gasping at his quietness.
"That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, "and all are gasping at his quietness."
"Is that tea strong?" queries Melissa.
"Yes," replies Joe, "and all are gasping at his quietness."
"That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, and all are gasping at his quietness.
"That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, "and all are gasping at his quietness."
"Stop repeating yourselves!" snaps Carl.
"Stop repeating yourselves!" snaps Carl.
"Stop repeating yourselves!" snaps Carl.
"Stop repeating yourselves!" snaps Carl.
"Stop repeating yourselves!" snaps Carl.
"You stop repeating yourself!" injects Melissa.
"You stop repeating yourself!" injects Melissa.
"You stop repeating yourself!" injects Melissa.
"I am not repeating myself!" snaps Carl.
"I am not repeating myself!" snaps Carl.
"I am not repeating myself!" snaps Carl.
"But that tea is strong," glimmers Marcella, wagging her breast right in Carl's face.
"You're right, it is, replies Joe quietly," replies Joe.
"You're right, it is, repeats Joe quietly," replies Joe.
"You're right, it is, repeats Joe quietly," repeats Joe.
"That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, and all are gasping at his quietness.
"That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, "and all are gasping at his quietness, but he listens not to the echoings of pain. His wife refuses to recognize the redemptive power of nonsense, perhaps because she was Christian once."
"But Christ was full of nonsense, and redeemed," points out Marcella.
"Always the obvious eludes us," points out Joe.
"I think there's a limit to this tea," muses Melissa.
"I can make enough to last a thousand years from the supplies in this apartment," counters Joe.
"I think there's a limit to this tea," muses Melissa.
"I can make enough to last a thousand years from the supplies in this apartment, points out Joe," says Juanita, and she grins at Joe.
"I think there's a limits to Melissa," points out Melissa. "But not to Joe or Ben," counters Joe.
"But Melissa is Ben's anima," counters Joe, "and hence she must be equal to him."
"But Melissa is Ben's animus," counters Joe.
"I think there's a limit to this tea, muses Melissa," muses Melissa.
"What the hell are you talking about?" counters Joe.
"I feel it fading, fading fast. I need to swallow more and more in order to get the same effect, or even less effect, it's seeming more and more lately."
"I think you're correct," replies Joe solemnly, serenely, as if a gigantic decision has just formed within his mind. "I think the tea is no different from any other drug in this respect. It will always have some effect, but less and less as time goes on. Ben should have told us so."
"Ben was an hallucination," points out Carl.
"From the point of view of normal reality," smiles Juanita.
"What's the longest word in the English language?" asks Joe.
"Antidisestablishmentarianism," answers Juanita, instantly. "Same number of letters as the alphabet."
"When I was little I thought that had an n on the end," cuts in Ben gleeriously. "I was always manufacturing subtlety whenthere was none, just to keep myself from being terminally bored."
"No," giggles Joe, "it's smiles -- it's got a mile between each end!!! Get it?!!! Hee hee hee hee hee heedly!!!!!!"
"My love, you're losing it," groans Marcella. "What color is a burp?"
Gwumbldy says: "Brown?"
The Creator: "Burple!"
aND JOE CHORTLES SO HARD HE FALLS DOWN FROM HIS CHAIR THROUGH THE FLOOR INTO SOMEBODY'S GARDEN. "oNLY OCCASIONALLY DOES IT GET LIKE THIS ANYMORE," POINTS OUT jUANITA, SO TRUTHFULLY THAT THE OTHERS FLAKE WITH FEAR. "i THINK WE'RE ALL ABOUT TO COME DOWN WHETHER WE LIKE IT OR NOT."
"hEY," SAYS mARCELLA, "WE'VE BEEN TRIPPING FOR A MONTH OR WHAT? iT'S NOT SO BAD."
"oH YES IT IS, SAYS jOE," REPLIES jOE. "tHIS IS PERFECT. tRUE FLUIDITY, AND A PERFECT LOVE OF LIFE. i CANNOT LEAVE THIS FOR THE UGLY WORLD OF KNOWN."
"iF THE PERFECTION IS WITHIN YOU," POINTS OUT mARCELLA, "THEN YOU SHOULDN'T NEED A DRUG AT ALL."
"nO, YOU'RE MISSING THE POINT," SMILES mELISSA, RELUCTANTLY, SOFTLY. "fOR IN FACT, YOU SEE, FROM THE PRESENT POINT OF VIEW NOTHING IS DEFINITE, NOTHING IS REAL, THE DRUG AND OUR PAST LIVES INCLUDED -- AND THE EXPIRATION OF THE TEA'S EFFECTS IS JUST A TOKEN, A SYMBOL EMBLEMATIC OF THE FUNDAMENTAL CONTRADICTION OF THE UNKNOWN AND THE KNOWN...."
"wHICH IS WHAT?" SAYS jOE, INTERESTED. "tHAT IN ORDER THAT ANYTHING BECOME KNOWN TO US, IT MUST BE EXPRESSIBLE IN TERMS OF WHAT WE ARE, AND THEREFORE IT MUST BE A MERE REPERMUTATION OF OUR PREVIOUS KNOWLEDGE. SO ALL WE CAN KNOW, WE ALREADY KNOW, MODULO A CERTAIN, SOMEWHAT TRIVIAL REARRANGEMENT? iS THAT WHAT YOU MEAN?"
"No, I mean that you suck!" laughs Melissa -- and, cackling wildly, carouses her way through the floor, through the walls and the ceiling, up to the man in the moon whom she gives a quick blow job and tumbles back down.
"It's fading fast," glimmers Marcella. "At first it seemed she was sucking off the man in the moon, but now I see it was only Vlad."
"No, that was Jake," smiles Juanita.
"No," says Kristina, "that was Zar."
"Okay, so not that fast," Marcella grins, and everyone lusts after her.
"the invention of zero," says Ben, "was the beginning of the contradiction that spawned WARGASM, the greatest work of experimental literature in the history of man. For it took the void -- total nothingness, absence, the unnameable, and not only gave it a name -- for that's a triviality; a paradox, yes, but a paradox like 'this sentence is false', a mere puzzle for pedants -- not only gave it a name, but partook of its essential emptiness with great complexity and wit, combined it with various species of something so that vast edifices of beauty unparalleled were born: science, mathematics, could not be without zero. None of modern technology: television, birth control, war! Laser surgery! Computers! All this out of the astoundingly clever reification of the primary delusion. All this out of the primal concretization ofvoid!"
"Gee," says Zar, baffled and impressed, "and I was just playing around with sticks. But I guess I should be quiet about that, huh? I should pretend I knew it was important!"
"Yes," replies Joe, "and all are gasping at his quietness."
"That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, and all are gasping at his quietness.
"That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, "and all are gasping at his quietness."
"Stop repeating yourselves!" snaps Carl.
"Stop repeating yourselves!" snaps Carl.
"Stop repeating yourselves!" snaps Carl.
"Stop repeating yourselves!" snaps Carl.
"Stop repeating yourselves!" snaps Carl.
"You stop repeating yourself!" injects Melissa.
"You stop repeating yourself!" injects Melissa.
"You stop repeating yourself!" injects Melissa.
"I am not repeating myself!" snaps Carl.
"I am not repeating myself!" snaps Carl.
"I am not repeating myself!" snaps Carl.
"But that tea is strong," glimmers Marcella, wagging her breast right in Carl's face.
"You're right, it is, replies Joe quietly," replies Joe.
"You're right, it is, repeats Joe quietly," replies Joe.
"You're right, it is, repeats Joe quietly," repeats Joe.
"That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, and all are gasping at his quietness.
"That tea is strong," glimmers Marcella.
"Yes," replies Joe, "and all are gasping at his quietness. But not as strong as my tea once was, is that tea."
As unexpectedly as they flashed into view, they all blink out of it -- only the King, the Queen, and the Royal Concubine remain. "Not the strangest vision I've ever seen," says Zar smugly. "Anyway, we've had enough recreation for one day."
"What?? Never!!!" laughs Jalypsal, quickly returning to her equilibrium state.
"I thought recreation was my official duty," adds Lisala. She fixes her gaze on space for a second and murmurs, "Why do I get the feeling my name used to be Alissa, not Lisala? That's so weird!"
"Why?" laughs Zar swiftly. "Perhaps because you're going crazy?!"
"That must be it," blushes the Queen as she kisses him.
"As I was saying," Zar continues, "I've got to get to work, else I'll make myself a liar. I've promised to be Horquentin, so Horquentin I must be. But I hope you'll bear with me while I execute my plan; it's rather elaborate. Two moons from now, I'll appear in person, materialize in a cloud of smoke, in the center of enemy territory. Until then I'll be busy practicing my writing. At first, perhaps, I'll write a book against Horquentin, allegedly written by certain members of the more extreme sects of their religion. It will ramble on and on endlessly, like a good religion should, repeating over and over again the absence of solidity, therelativity of everything, the ultimate fluidity of all. And near the end it'll propose some mild blasphemy -- for instance, perhaps quoting a character as proposing to write a book in which it is mentioned indirectly that Horquentin is a fraud -- that all religions are, in fact, fraudulent. We don't want it to seem like a direct attack on Horquentin -- rather, a rival system, complex in detail but extremely simple in idea: nothing is real, so do whatever you want. The length and complexity are necessary in order to project an aura of mystery. In fact, it might be wise to have the book specifically voice fraudulent opinions about me -- saying that I am an enemy of Horquentin, and so forth. After this book is out there, you see, it'll be very, very easy to come in as Horquentin and preach conservatism -- because some of the faithful will be shaken by the book, and some of the others will be wildly searching for a method of refuting them. Because the very idea of a book will seem so mysterious -- I've explained to you what I mean by the term, but I still haven't taught you to read ... Oh, I don't know, all that doesn't really matter, because in fact I just need to practice my writing before I get around to the true task, which is to destroy all copies of the evil book -- except maybe one, which I'll save for us -- and write the true doctrine of Horquentin. It'll take a while, but I will teach twenty or thirty to read, and they'll spread the truth. The reading and writing will itself seem like magic .... Another thing I'm thinking, says Zar, is that we really need to do is invent a new religious system -- there are too many gods, and they're too multifaceted. It's just too hard to tell what's really going on. We've got to have one good god -- Horquentin -- and one bad God, call him ... I don't know ... call him Katriel, anything. I will preach that Katriel has killed all other gods except Horquentin, and he will overtake the earth and kill all the people, because he is crazy, unless we unite behind Horquentin to save him. And -- wait, I'm improvising here, but this sounds good -- we'll tell 'em -- this is what I'll tell 'em in my book of Horquentin -- we'll tell 'em that Horqentin is so desperate for their help that if they devote their lives to him, after they die he'll let them come up and live with him in the Kingdom of the Gods, across the sea!"
"You sound like a raving lunatic!" protests Jalypsal. "You had me going for a minute, but how ... how could even you ever convince anyone they'll be allowed to live in the Kingdom of the Gods after death? After death you turn to dirt, everyone knows that!"
"We shall see," smiles Zar playfully. "I have a good feeling about this. I think that I, Zar Oastre, am not long for this world -- Horquentin is born! Sure, some of my ideas may be stupid, but something's gonna work!"
"This first book, the one you're going to write for practice," queries Lisala, "what kind of things are you going to say in it? I don't understand, quite, the role it plays."
"I don't understand the role it plays either, exactly," Zar admits. "But I have an intuition that it's very important. I have a feeling that, when writing it, important truths will be unveiled to me. I know that sounds crazy, but I feel it very strongly. And anyhow, I do need practice writing. I mean, I onlyinvented it a couple months ago!" They hug and laugh and keep on walking in the sun. Zar gets a whimsical look and says, while looking longingly at the Queen's cunt, "I think I'll call it WARGASM!"
Lisala giggles: "That's clever, love!" She pauses somberly. "Somehow I feel that things just aren't quite right. Not you or anything like that -- I mean ... well, I don't know what I mean -- something about the whole earth, it just seems different. Like my feeling that my name had changed.... It seems our language is suddenly more complex. It seems I'm suddenly more beautiful!" She laughs. "I guess once we put all these crazy plans into action, I may return to sanity!"
"You can never fully return," says Zar seriously and playfully; Jalypsal's laugh chimes and a bird calls and his ear leaps with delight out from his head onto the top branch of a tree, and then returns to his head within ten seconds. Lisala notices and grimaces; Zar smiles. "I can feel the inspiration surging in me already! I think the first scene of WARGASM will involve an airship ... of a more primitive kind than we've seen, or maybe later I'll introduce the kind we saw...."
As he talks on, Lisala stares skyward and, out of the corner of her left eye, spies a black cloud. She doesn't say anything, just tries to follow it with her glance, but no matter how she moves her head, the cloud is always just out of sight -- up and down, left and right, round and round; the cloud moves with her, always just beside her, perhaps it's sneaking up behind -- . "Got a neck cramp?" asks Zar -- "here, let me rub your back." She smiles faintly and she knows the cloud is gone -- but will return --
THE MADMAN RESURRECTED
"So what's the deal?" asks Juanita, harriedly. They wouldn't let her into the emergency room -- she couldn't say she was his daughter, and only family was allowed.... "Is he out?"
"Brain patterns are active," replies Marcella evenly, a grim statuesque calm having enveloped her, not catatonic but enclosed by fickle fate and emerald love, "but he makes no response."
"So the doctors couldn't tell anything we couldn't?" asks Carl nervously.
"No," replies Marcella, "but at least they can feed him through tubes, right? And wipe his ass."
"You're awfully optimistic!" shrieks Juanita, and a nurse glares.
"She's awfully realistic," corrects Melissa. "Reality can be awful."
"That's why he chose to escape it," puts in Carl. "He knew the drug wouldn't work anymore, so he put himself in a state where he can eternally believe it still works. He became addicted to delusion."
"Oh, aren't we all?" laughs back Melissa, trying to calm things down.
"Not to that extent," shoots back Carl.
"Listen," says Juanita, "you have no way of knowing whathappened to him. You know he took much more of the drug than the rest of us; also he experimented with several different varieties. The most natural explanation for his coma is that it's entirely ... chemical...."
"That's what you'd like to believe," scowls Carl. "You know as well as I he couldn't face solid reality after a month flying around in la-la-land!"
"I'm not having an easy time myself," admits Juanita. "It was all so sudden, you know -- almost like we woke up one day, and then the tea didn't work anymore."
"I sprayed the whole apartment with Ubik, that's what happened," whispers Carl sardonically, and no one bothers to ask him what he's talking about. They are all solipsists for them moment; the universe seems cold and distant, not the pliant thing it was for them just hours -- well, okay, days -- ago.
"Tour starts two days from now," reminds Melissa. "I think you should go through with it, Marcella. Don't sit around and sulk. Above all, don't get yourself into a mindset of waiting."
"Of course I'll go on with it. I've got a new album to promote -- Joe's songs, of course; I don't know who'll play them, we'll have to hold auditions. But there's no reason we can't go through with the plans we made up earlier, even without him. We've got to collect together his ideas and proceed as he planned -- go to D.C., talk to the people he told us to, and once we get the money -- well, you remember what he said. It wasn't exactly foolproof -- he was always improvising his various plans, you know... but I think it's got a fairly good chance of making a huge change in the world, a huge change for the better. I don't think we should give that up just because he has some medical problems."
"That's the understatement of the century," scowls Carl. "But, unfortunately, I have to admit that my criticism of him does not extend to his ideas. Even the craziest stuff, like the Cosmic Contradictionary, does make some sense, you know ... before he took the tea, he was already living in a dreamworld. Taking it just pushed him too far out. Having been well-grounded in reality before that, we were maybe pushed near where he normally was, you know."
"So you think we should go ahead with founding Synergenesis, like he proposed?" inquires Juanita quietly, surprised.
"I'll do as he said, and go to Washington and talk to his old friends and try to get money for it," shrugs Carl. "I suppose we owe him at least that. For giving us the experience of a lifetime."
Marcella swallows him in an expert, pliant, lovely lingering kiss. And when they detach Juanita is gone. "Probably went to the bathroom," says Carl.
Juanita did not, however, go to the bathroom. Melissa is approached by a handsome black doctor with beads in his hair and a large nose, who requests that she follow him into the hall; Marcella and Carl hardly noticed. Carl, completely transfixed by her, at the edge of his mind thinks that Joe's death is worth it -- now, with Joe out of the way, he grins through the stiffness of his very profound grief, perhaps Marcella will make him her primary lover. She never seemed a natural lesbian....
Melissa is taken to a room with a bed, and as she asks, again, what's happening, she's stuck with a sudden needle -- out, out, out she goes. "Over here," says Juanita to the doctor, leading him toward a safe behind the wall in the back of the closet. "This safe was known to only two people, my father and the late Dr. Lone."
"This is crazy," he says, frowning, grinning.
"This is a million bucks cash in your pocket," retorts Juanita. "Listen, I don't need to tell you this but I will. This jar contains a mutant child which my father bred within my mother by the judicious, long-term application of a variety of original chemicals. It failed to live past three years, but my father preserved it perfectly for the eventuality which we are about to see: we are to take the frontal lobes from its brain and insert them in the brain of another person."
"That's impossible!" scowls the doctor. "It'll just end up in lobotomy! You could've gotten a lobotomy for a couple hundred thou, y'know?"
"I have a certain solution which my father said would cause the two tissues to join. I'm gambling he was right. He's been wrong before, but he was a damn good chemist." She giggles, remembering the tea, and then she gulps a little cry, remembering how unprepared he appeared to be for the tea's temporal limitation. "It's your bank account you're gambling with, not mine." At this point Marcella and Carl are starting to wonder what's going on.
"This tissue," continues Juanita as the doctor works, "this mutant brain tissue, is theoretically capable of sustaining up to sixty-four personalities at once. It is capable of solving partial differential equations numerically according to a hypercube architecture, assigning one subcell of the domain to each personality. It is...."
"Shhhhh."
"I just found out about it the day he di... went comatose," Juanita fades diffusely. "I have something here that'll heal the scars very fast. I asked him why he never told me about it, he said 'you never asked'! Motherfucker!"
"This took about five minutes!" chortles the doctor. "Twelve million an hour! That's pretty damn good!"
"Yes it is," agrees Juanita. "Let's wheel her out to my car the back way."
"As we planned."
"Just as we planned."
"You amaze me sweetheart, you really do!" marvels the doctor. "If you made these substances public, the medical community would saint you! Brain transplants -- think of it! Think of how many lives would be saved by instant healing of wounds."
"Yes," says Juanita. "She should seem normal for a couple days, then she'll start to feel it -- maybe not for a week or two, I don't know. She'll feel them developing. A true group mind, not like the lame psychosis-induced multiplicities you read about -- you know, Billy Milligan and so forth.... Be sure you'll hear of her again."
"Just hope she doesn't hunt me down and kill me."
"We'll leave no trace. In any case, she'll probably be grateful. I wish I could have been the recipient, but my father picked her. He said her brain was most compatible. You know, there was a possibility of failure."
"There still is. She could be comatose."
"He said the only possibilities were complete success or death."
"But..." the doctor trails off, deeming it best to leave the obvious to silence.
"This was his last wish."
Juanita drives Melissa back to Marcella's apartment, wheels her up the elevator and lays her naked in the bed where so many orgies left her body and her mind a slap of fluid; then she decides the place is oppressive, decides to walk a while outside. She walks about five miles, all the way down to the Village and out to the piers past Hudson Street, all the way west where all the faggots go to suck eachothers' cocks long after Friday and Saturday midnights, and she stares down at the slime-infested water, watches it glitter from the wall of city light. And then she realizes she isn't there at all, that she's back in prehistoric times, that she's walking along a beautiful desert river hand in hand with a king and queen, as one of their friends dances along behind them singing a song she somehow understands: "Tekele, Felix, Comaromte loau ... Tekelefelix, com, Arom - teloau - teteteloau...."
"Look!" cries Jalypsal, interrupting her song. "Another visitor from beyond!"
"A young one, too!" yells Zar triumphantly. "Say, what do you think happens when you fuck a phantom? Why don't we try it?" He looks at Juanita invitingly -- "Want to go for a swim?" He drops his robe and dives in; the others follow him, the queen not even taking off her robe. Such lovely breasts, Juanita marvels, that the queen has! Do they select queens with a beauty contest? And then she plunges in, and awaits their love to greet her...
and she feels her blood spill on a concrete wall, she feels the water cold around her, coat her like rusty, watery oil ... she reaches for the wall but can't grab on, it's sheer concrete, can't lift herself up ... she screams as she feels a rusty metal pole pierce her leg. The only human forms she can see are busy sucking, pay no mind to her ... "I'm going to die!" she screams, but then she pulls her leg off and she sees a place where the wall has crumbled down and swims over to it, rather easily, not feeling her leg pain -- due to the cold rush of the water, she supposes. She lifts herself up the wall and wanders, dripping, back over to where she had been before she fell.
"Ooh, did you cut yourself?" asks Zar, out on the pier with her. His cock is limp and slightly dripping, as if he has just come. And then he disappears. These effects will fade, she tells herself slowly; these effects will fade away just as the really strong delusions have already faded. You're still caught in the process of fading, of coming down. You're not yet that far from the peak.
And then the voice of the old man speaks to her distantly: " But you'll never really know!" it yowls, cackles joyously. "You'll never know reality from illusion again! No matter how realit seems, you'll always tell yourself: you could still be on the tea. You could still be hallucinating. It's far from impossible, as you well know, to hallucinate a whole history." He cackles -- a quiet, private splash upon the unseen shores of his oceans ... "But look on the bright side -- you're not as bad off as Melissa: she'll be able to live in sixty-four realities at once -- and none of them will be real!" Apparently this is the old man's idea of uproarious; he laughs so loud that she instinctively holds her ears, and then feels awfully awfully stupid when she realizes the voice is in her head.
"Back to my life," she whispers bleary, and she walks back down the pier, a lot less shaken by her narrow brush with death than by the old man's parting cackle, the sheer transcendent shimmering of his essence through his words, the ultimate-wild- absurdist- paradoxical-sentimental-trembling aura of his incandescent, efflorescent, beauty-dripping, acid-tripping dreams. And as she wanders through the many-splendored streets, she hardly notices what she sees; the men and women and cars and storefronts and sounds of every conceivable color, the crazy hair and cock-shaped bongs and hot young businessmen in black suits discussing Freud and Jung and Nietszche, one of them trying to introduce Adler but all she hears is him saying 'adder' and she wishes she were a snake -- nothing to worry, to plan or think about -- only look for food, look for a mate, look for soft shelter, and if you don't find it die, no hard feelings -- no feelings at all, point of fact ... nothing. "There's quite a bit of perfect gorgeousness in that," she murmurs dizzily. "I've got to sit down. Being at seventh and forty-second, there's nowhere to sit except the street by the whores and crack dealers. But she can't stand ... in desperation, she pays a buck fifty and steps into a sleazy theater: "For Your Thighs Only," proclaims the headline, and if there happens to be a story she doesn't notice it, she only sits and watches blankly the small screen as a thigh and cunt throb ever-hungry at a sequence of hard dicks so long she can't tell one from another, occasionally faces, bellies, eyes, backs, buttocks, occasionally shallow conversation, but mostly cunt, cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt. A good experience, she thinks to herself so hollowly, embarrassedly that she hates herself for it ... everyone should see it once. Sex without true trembling passion. No kind of love. purely the physical: that means nothing, so she says to herself; after those days and nights of orgies she had felt the mind and body were the same, but now sees differently: sex is no longer a sacrament, a symbol of communion, an emblem of pure love -- not necessarily that old-fashioned romantic lovey shit, but some kind of love, pure feeling, openness, a need to spill one's essence, raw, sweet, perfect psychological desire. Not merely bodies. No kind of love this is, no no no no no no no no. A strange voice whispers to her, not irrelevantly, "God is dead, god is dead, god is deadeaddead." Is this what sex will be for me? she asks herself again. And she goes into the street and walks some more, seeing nothing but emptiness around her. Everything she sees opens up its guts to her, seems only a trivial consequence of the things around it. Each entity is defined by certain other entities, so when you solve the whole damn system you get x definedby x, and that don't mean nothing. "Yak Yak Yakkity Yak Yak Yakky." She scratches her cunt obsessively, notices someone grinning at her and sticks her tongue out in intentional childishness, keeps on scratching till it's red, bright red and bloody. "Goddamn I hate you all," she mutters. "Why don't you do something! Why don't you be...." As her voice drizzles off she realizes there's nothing that could satisfy her, except her father....
And after they lie awhile in communion, savoring their perfect crystal bliss, Euterpe motions toward the hole from which he came. Thinking she means him to return to his cell alone, he shakes his head vigorously. But then she smiles softly and kisses him, and she leads the way. "As soon as I reached Level 10," she explains to him, "certain things came together, certain facts, certain hints I'd seen in various screens here and there. I think I've come to a pretty good understanding now. This whole system of life, with cells and screens and so forth, was conceived by a superhuman entity named Xaj Kalikak -- not as a final goal, but as a step along the way to a perfect society which, according to his plan, should occur about five hundred years from now. Later I'll explain to you more about Xaj, but suffice to say that he is not bound to any particular time. He sent a party including the great scientist Jake Smale back to prehistory to accelerate technological development, and he erected the Building in which we live in order to accelerate psychological, spiritual development. Apparently he has a limited range of time over which to work, although I don't quite understand that. Perhaps the race is fated to eventual suicide, I don't know... or perhaps this is such a high probability that the extent to which he ... pardon my rambling. Anyway, the building is designed such that once one reaches perfect consciousness, one is released to the outside, in order to live as a savage in the wilderness."
"So that civilization is started all over, but from perfect spiritual specimens? Are you saying that enlightenment is hereditary, or what?"
She shrugs engagingly. "I don't know everything. I'm just sort of putting this together from a bunch of different places, you know. Anyway, I think I know a way out ... come on."
"Am I allowed out, too? Imperfect me?"
"No one will stop you, if you're sure you want to go. Yours is a rare enough exception that no provisions were made for it. Only a couple hundred times in the Building's history has anyone broken through the walls."
That number is rather larger than he expected, but he realizes he has no idea how large or old the building actually is. Whatever they told him could have been lies. He follows her eagerly....
Jayk drinks the sunlight with unprecedented glee; grips Euterpe's hand and lets a bellow out and twirls Euterpe under his arms and spits and laughs and pees. He sees a girl approaching him giddily; she says "I'm Jalypsal Elypso...."
Mark smiles serenely. His unwavering glance encloses Kristinain caress. "You've found something," she says.
"Whatever you're thinking of, I had it all along," he smiles serenely. "And you have it too."
"Don't give me that mystical mumbo-jumbo, love!" she giggles -- "We're so close -- can't you tell me what it's like to have found such peace?"
"No, I can't. It is precisely, as we've said before, that which cannot be confined in any sentence, not even in this one."
"But can't you show me somehow?"
"If I can't tell you, how could I show you? It's the same situation -- no system of symbols can...."
"Shut up!" she orders grinningly, as she falls to the ground and spreads her legs until it almost hurts. From somewhere above the swaying trees, she imagines to hear a voice lustily
whisper -- "Inside the Cosmic Cunt!"
"I'd love to make love with you," he says cautiously ...
"But it just doesn't make sense that I could communicate anything
to you that way, and that seems to be what you're implying. I don't want you to be disappointed."
"I can handle it," she whispers. "Anyway, since when did enlightenment have anything to do with sense?"
"Touche!" he laughs, as he descends to her ... they establish a rhythm right away, a heavy pounding one, brimming over with primitive vigor. Subtly he draws her away from it -- slowing her down, but in such a way that all the vigor and the pounding is incorporated -- never to lose anything -- negate by inclusion ... Then she feels her way malleably into this -- and he carefully -- instinctively -- contradicts her movements ... yet again, not violently going against them, but leading them into the midst of something more ... slowly he understands what he is doing, and he feels that it's beyond human abilities. He senses that he's been given a task by some far higher entity, the task of raising her at least to the level of peace that he's found ... and that as a tool for the execution of this task he's been given transcendent perception and coordination -- or is that just the closeness of true love? What the fuck! he grins -- whatever -- as his tongue lashes her breast with sealike softness, as the glancing of her eyes across his chest makes him pulse everstronger, and he fears the end might come, might come too soon, but he eases his being back into the flow, into the infinite everbright knowing -- She slaps his ass, hard, and he pounds into her with such force that their bones hurt, but it's good because resounding, roundyrounding, because of love! Every motion she makes, every pattern she establishes, he negates by inclusion, he leads into a greater pattern which includes both this pattern and its "opposite" -- its complement -- fast/slow, hard/soft, ascending/descending ... And when she anticipates this he begins to do it in a way which also incorporates the opposite of this -- which also does negate what she is doing. And when she anticipates this higher-level strategy, he laughs aloud and bites her nipple, and he shimmers up one higher -- it is a battle of logics, but the end result is after all maybe this was just is just will only be a funniness in his mind but the apex is the climax is the ultimate ultimatum ... NO PATTERN! LOVE!! ... As they spiral up to orgasm, all the patterns are leftbehind; she anticipates precisely what he intends to do, this upper-ever-upper game, he anticipates her O he flows with her -- two beings united, and they see so piercingly into eachothers' souls that when the final blast of infinite fury comes their bodies never return to them -- they find themselves floating in emptiness, tendrils, flames of pure love but actually they open their eyes and find that they were lying there kind of hallucinating but then they close their eyes and find the world was an illusion, only love, but then they realize they're only thoughts in the mind of another, of eachother, of the tree that just showered a leaf-stem upon them -- of --
They sit up. "I feel it," she says. "I really do. I feel it now. I think I'm crazy ... but I know..." The words, in her head, go on: I know I'm not; I'm saner than I ever was. But she does not release them. There is no need for speech. "I love you, hon!"
Suddenly she sees a figure on the hill. No, more than that. Ten or eleven figures. Maybe twenty. "We're rescued!" she screams, joyously she knows not why and doesn't give a shit.
"After a fashion," replies the leader of the group as he arrives. He is a handsome young businessman-type, and the first thing he does as his motley grinning parade catches up with him is open his briefcase. There are no papers in there. Instead, the two square leather flaps become the infinitely malleable sides of a vagina. "Inside the Cosmic Cunt!" he screams, in a different voice, definitely feminine, and nearly too high to be human. And Mark and Kristina, and nearly everyone else -- everyone except two -- is swept into the cunt by an inexplicably guided wind.
"Jake, Melissa," the man says, closing his briefcase. "I'd like to introduce myself. I'm Xaj Kalikak. I know, I know, you've heard of me in the ... well, let me explain! I am not a human being, properly speaking -- I am time. The sense in which this is possible has been explained to you. I have selected you two for a certain mission. You have just undergone your training. I know it may have been more than a little upsetting for you, but I assure you it was absolutely necessary."
"What I want to know is this," Jake interrupts -- "when did the training start?"
Xaj chuckles quietly -- "You're not supposed to need an
answer to that question. Really, that was the point! You see, I've attained a great control over events -- after a great deal of practice! It takes a great deal of effort, but I can make your lives as improbable as I want! The idea was to accustom the two of you to instability, to reality constantly being pulled out from under your feet. To contradiction and on and on and on and on and on...."
"So to do that you put us in the mind of this Zeb Zoertzel person? But if he's so contradictory, why didn't you just take him?"
"Oh, for a variety of reasons ... but anyway, you see, I put you in a reality where humanity had given up the body, had placed itself entirely in a gigantic computer system. One file in this system contained to the old notebooks of a twentieth-century philosopher named Zeb Zoertzel ... Yes, he would have been ideal in some ways -- but he lived too long ago ... it's harder to controlbefore around 2000, for various reasons. And anyway, even if I'd wanted to do that, you two are unique! You two are a psychic pair! I don't find that very often -- I just created it by accident in you two. That gives you incredible intertemporaxial power ... ah ...."
"Intertemporaxial?" repeats Melissa. "Between various time axes? Is that what this is all about? You're not content with just one spacetime continuum, you want others too?"
"What are you, lonely?" Jake giggles. "You want a hot date with another universe??!!"
"Something like that," Xaj admits sheepishly. "Remember, I still have plenty of patterns left from my days as a starving
artist! No, seriously, I'm just bored, I guess."
"So what are we?" he continues -- "interuniversal messengers?"
"Quite," affirms Xaj. "Quite, quite. You two are every bit as clever as I planned. Clever enough, I suppose, that you realize you could well be still inside Zoertzel's notebooks. Or still in suspended animation at NASA, or...."
"So, uh," grins Jake quixotically, "do we get to go home and pack our bags, or what?"
And an inconceivably luminous green whirl of a bird swoops
by, with haunting eyes ofviscous crimson, and it circles their
heads and then looks Jake in the right eye with its right eye,
and Melissa in the left eye with its left, and it opens its
mouth and as they whoosh up through its pinkish trembling borders
it sings in Aglaia's seamless childish lilting voice five words -- And they are holding hands watching Xaj's briefcase suck up all the others, and as he closes it he says to them, "Jake, Melissa, I'm Xaj Kalikak. I know you've heard of me, but..."
Melissa swirls her glorious hair around and giggles: "Short circuit! Short circuit! Short circuit!"
"I have been training you for a certain mission, by dispersing your awareness-patterns through certain computer files containing some of the writings of a twentieth-century philosopher named Zeb Zoertzel ... writings which were directly inspired by me of course, carefully chosen... You know, from the files you've been through, that I am not a human being exactly, although I was once one -- I am time.
"This means that I can see the beginning of the universe -- and the end. What I am is everything in between -- the patterns of flowing.
"My task is the same as that of any other mind -- to perfect myself, to bring myself into ultimate harmony -- and bla bla bla. You know what I mean, and it's totally futile to try to talk about it. One of the files you were exposed to was called To Dance Toward Death -- well, that is what I propose to do. I want to arrange the course of the universe in the most beautiful possible way...."
"Why?" cut in Melissa. "So you'll appear more attractive to other universes? Is this all some insane makeup job or something, I mean...."
"Other universes?" he replies, obviously disturbed. "What do you know about ... why would you think about other universes?"
"It was just a joke," says Melissa, covering up for whatreason she can't quite say ... what the hell is going on here? she thinks to Jake fervently.
And an inconceivably luminous green whirl of a bird swoops
by, with haunting eyes of viscous crimson, and it circles their
heads and then looks Jake in the right eye with its right eye,
and Melissa in the left eye with its left, and it opens its
mouth and as they whoosh up through its pinkish trembling borders
it sings in Aglaia's seamless childish lilting voice six words:
And on the sand it is not Mark and Kristina but Melissa and Jake, and the last few dozen notes of "Axis, Bold as Love" spiral eternally through their mind as they sweat and groan and softly
see the one big eyeball at the center of things, the infinity, eternity, of pulsingeverthroughitself, of writhing in the
indescribably knot of in-out-in-... existence ... Their mind on one side, the world on the other; as they thrust in the two sides switch places through the portal, through the indescribable vortex, through the eye, and then it's just the same again for in is out but subtly different ... And just as they cavort through it clearly, unmistakeably, the core of all -- they glide to a wondrously slimy stop and see Xaj Kalikak above them, quietly talking in Aglaia's voice: "The end of the training ... the
climax, so to speak, heh heh, is the experience of the ultimate
contradiction, the one orgasmic paradox which is the essence of every entity, for what is an entity but a distinction, a marking of inside from out -- what is the entity from what isn't it. If these flow through eachother so inviscidly -- then what is not contradiction? and on? and on and on and on and on -- ?"
And an inconceivably luminous red whirl of a bird swoops
by, with haunting eyes ofviscous veridian, and it circles their
heads and then looks Jake in the right eye with its right eye,
and Melissa in the left eye with its left, and it opens its
mouth and as they whoosh up through its pinkish trembling borders
it sings in Aglaia's seamless childish lilting voice five words -- "Inside the Cosmic Cunt!" and then it whispers -- "not really though", and it flies away.
And Jake wakes up, kisses Melissa till she drifts awake, and says "God! I just had the strangest dream!"
And she opens her mouth to kiss him softly, hotly, and a strange tornado rifles out caressingly and shockfully sucks his sleeping body in as the taste of Maria's cunt surrounds him hungrily, laughingly, and -- and on and on and on and on and on and on...
and he wakes up: "God! I just had the strangest dream!" he says to Melissa, as he kisses her.
And she wakes and says "Yeah? What?" and climbs on top of him and as they near climax they feel a strange affinity with something or other, a peculiar hint of some Jimi Hendrix music in the background, the sense there's sand between them, the anguished whine of a computer bank -- and they see, perched on her
middle toe, a two-inch high Xaj Kalikak. He bellows: "DEEP INSIDE THE COSMIC CUNT!!!"
As they complete the last page of the manuscript, they
stiffen instinctively at the sound, an eerie high-pitched
squeaking shiver which seems to resonate their skulls. "Where the hell did that come from?!" gasps Devon, but she knows -- they both know that the timing was by no means pure coincidence. "It's time to shatter now, kiddies," sings a female voice. "Hello! We're marauders from the future, from the Land of Fuck!!! Actually, we're from another universe, which is actually this universe. You see, we've lost our souls in a computer, after the crash I mean, you see, our selves melded together, and we forgot who we were and furthermore how to have sex, so ... so we're going to suck your brains out!" She sang with such glee that Devon had to laugh despite the pain. "Fine," she will reply, "just shut that goddamn noise off! It's driving me crazy!" -- "Don't believe her," said another voice. "She's a goddamn daydreamer, that's all. She never even graduated the sixth grade! Point of fact, you two, although you may believe yourselves to have external, solid reality, are just figments of a massively psychotic mind, the mind whose body goes by the name of Melissa, usually. We all live in a funny farm, and it's not too exciting there, so we prefer to remain in these made-up worlds, you know.... The problem is, the make-believe worlds always seem to break down... they turn back on themselves, you know, and end up falling apart and we're right back here again. It's the same thing with the real reality, too -- five minutes out there acting rationally and things start to kind of ooze into eachother, you know...."
"Melissa," said the doctor. "You have a visitor."
"Who?"
"A Mr. Zeb Zoertzel? He says you should remember him."
"I never knew him," she replies with conviction, her tone never betraying that it's actually a massively nonlinear superposition of a hundred tones, that her every thought is an interpolation of the million blurs of light of a shimmering,
paradoxically undulating galaxy of consciousnesses.
"Melissa! Don't tell me you don't remember me!" She hears the voice and finds it faintly familiar. Wait ...some
somewhere -- not before though: in a dream! You know him in a dream! You know him well. But then -- this is not reality. But it is! I feel it! I know it is! She smiles: "I remember you." The old man adds, in her voice: "Absodiddly!"
She speaks on eagerly: "Have you come to take me out of this hellhole??!"
"Actually," he chuckles, "I've come to join you."
"George?" screams Devon. "I'm losing me!"
"Of course you are, my love!" he replies.
"So's everyone," adds Jake good-naturedly. "It happens all the time around here, when you're waiting for a new game. A personality needs a life, a world to hold it together. Too long without a new dream, any one of us would disappear."
"Hibbledy blibbelsdy blobbeldy wobbelsdy!" explodes the old man.
"Except him," amends Jake. "Except him and, occasionally, Aglaia. They're sages, of a sort. They're at home in nothingness."
"But it's not nothingness!" protests Devon. "We've got a body to run here!"
"It seems to run itself pretty well!" counters Andrea. "Even when one or more of us is trying to direct it, it has a mind of its own."
"I think you're all crazy!" persists Devon. "If you could just coordinate yourselves, you'd have a real life, instead of just a sequence of illusions!"
"Oh, hon, what's this holier than thou attitude," scolds George. "We've been through this a hundred times. Every time after we come out of a dream you take longer than the rest of us to adjust. But you get used to it. Why don't you just sit back and wait?"
" Sit? What the hell are you talking about? How can I sit, I'm just one of twenty personalities! I have no form!!!"
"You had one hell of a form last night," George chuckles.
"Remember?"
"But it wasn't real!!!"
"You deep philosopher you," scowls Josie. "Keep your mechanist ontology to yourself."
"And keep your fancy words to yourself," scowls Devon. "Look, the rest of you can go back to dreamland. This time, I've finally had enough!"
But Devon's resolve is not enough -- Melissa's body does whatever it wants to. It stands and trembles as Zeb walks toward her and slowly melds with her, superimposes his flesh upon hers in a mystical dance of whorls that even Devon finds herself entranced with. The new being -- half male, half female -- is surprised to find that it has a penis in place of a tongue. A penis with taste buds. It bends over to lick its own cunt, and -- surprise, surprise! -- it falls in, ever tumbling, overtumbling in infinite orgiastic self-subverting paradoxical bliss... the same mad dance of a thousand earlier intoxicated contradictions, the same incomparable ecstasy of impossible comparison, of reaching the highest and then going higher, of seeing the unseeable and fucking the unfuckable and tasting the tingling tickling taunting terrific touch of the cunt of the universe, of the womb and ultimate orgasm of the universal soul, of mind rolled up into a zero-dimensional, infinitely-massive clitoris and exploded a thousand times on the tip of its own tongue, each time expanding to enclose all in orgasm, and each time then extending beyond the boundaries of possibility and back into its own center, which is the paradox of this-sentence-is- false tumbling self-fucking tumbling orgiastic oblivion paradise love o miraculous beauty!
"No! No! No!" Devon says. "This is not real!" And time wanders back; Zeb is standing there, saying, "Don't look so worried love, I was only joking. Yes, of course I've come to take you out -- I've got all the papers here, all you have to do it sign them." So she does -- not Melissa but Devon ... the others, the other parts, are there, but they're babbling somewhere in the background, they're making their realities, they're dreaming their dreams -- already unconcerned with her. From their point of view, Devon supposes, the body is still just doing what it wants to.
She signs them in silence, but once she's beyond the hospitalbounds -- on the way to his car -- she explodes in confusion. "Do I really know you? I seem to remember you from somewhere, but it hard to tell reality from dream...."
"I think you remember me," he laughs. "We were -- inside the Cosmic Cunt together."
"Wait -- I do remember." Her face is flushed all of a sudden. "We're ... we're married, aren't we!"
"That's right, love. Remember -- three years ago? We met eachother on Friday, November 17th 1989 -- and we immediately recognized we'd seen eachother before, in our dreams ... or at least we were both for some reason inclined to recall that -- recollection of dreams is an extremely fuzzy matter ... we were married the next day, and we went back to my apartment to, ah, consummate.... But then you insisted on trying a new variant of LSD I was working on that I was telling you about ... it seemed to have a rather strong effect on you right away, as an aphrodisiac as well as a hallucinogen. Anyway, we were busted that night -- in the midst of our first fuck, before we could even come! -- and I was carted off to jail for manufacturing prohibited substances, and you were brought here, apparently because you were acting more than a little strange. Apparently you bit a huge chunk of flesh out of the ass of one of the policemen...."
"Good! I'm sure they deserved it."
"Anyway, I just got out yesterday -- they said you were hopeless but I got a few strings pulled, you know -- and we're together again!"
"Where are we going now?"
"Oh," he says, leaning over to envelop her in a wetly passion-shimmering kiss. "I thought we could complete some
unfinished business, you know...."
"I can't wait!" she giggles luminously, snaking her foot
over and slamming it down on the brake. She sheds her clothes
and mounts him with unbelievable rapidity. Speed, speed, speed, speed ... the thrumbling, rumbling, tumbling singsong laughing
trembledancing turn from in and out to out and in to in and out
to out and in to the crystal ball of his eye and seeing what was intended to be the future but might actually be a bowl ofice
cream made with cum instead of milk and Oh! and Oh! and Oh! and Oh! and was it actually is it what? the Jimi Hendrix, LSD, new drug new man dreams from the void to world new life, fables of the reconstruction, axes bold as love and incandescent cunniwandering thrickles (sk)inside all around therestlessly radioactive reconstitution of maximal minimal wails of pink lust through the walls of the womb my dick throbs O my cunt swallows and algebra becomes arithmetic and what is becomes what was just thought to be and occasionally raed flames of ecstatic abandon circle me caressing a melody of clotless blood and unobstructed streams of love masquerading as fury masquerading as love LOVELOVELOVELOVELINESS! -- "Where is reality now?" taunts Aglaia. The old man answers: "Inside the Cosmic Cunt!" "How do you know this is real?" taunts Aglaia. "Why is this any realer than any other dream we've fashioned for ourselves?"
"It just is!" Devon thinks as she thrusts, hardly bothering to respond to the desperate tremors of those whom she once knew asequals. She feels their panic as if it were her own. Only the old man doesn't care. Suddenly she opens her eyes and Zeb is gone; the old man has taken his place. So she closes them again and listens -- it's definitely Zeb's voice. It's definitely not the feel of wrinkled flesh. She opens again and sees Ben. He lets out a deliciously unbridled scream and she presses herself down on him ten times harder than she possibly can, imagining him penetrating her womb, imagining her screams and his forming one arrow which pierces her cunt spasmically, orgasmically whistling -- whistling "Axis, Bold as Love" ... that song from -- where? From that dream, from that trip in the dream! But who cares what is real and what is dream?! No, this is real, goddamnit! Oh, fuck, who gives a fucking fuck, just fuck me! Fuck, fuck, fuck fuck fuck!!!! Red, vaguely circular, a mouth, a live abyss, a yell from every orifice, a sea of sweat which is actually one slowly-spiraling tear, which is a drop from the cunt of Psyche, which is an infinite number of infinite numbers of infinite numbers of infinite numbers of ... -- which, whatever it is, it is not, and the spiraling inside/outside old-mind-is-new- reality/reality-is-old-mind so fast that time can't even suck its teats exults and luminesces, phosporesces, incandesces, effervesces its indescribably brilliant, indescribably indescribable orbit through its one indenumerably multiple and impossibly singular orifice, its womb become cuntlip become rough penile thrust become trill of the softest instinctive caress become LOVELOVELOVELOVE, the one hollow circularity which is so full of everything it continually overspills its edges and sucks itself back up into its center -- from beyond the edge of conceivability to the most unbridled yell of limpid orgasm, inviscid lust, to the core of the core of the core... which is peace, which is infinite peace, which is war, which is infinite war, which is only the essence of being, the ultimate war, the tween-in-and-out war, the extrusion-intrusion-excitementlust writhing in ecstasy, the hotcool love, the palm of the universe clenching your buttock slashing you with its nails and bringing you further, yet further, yet further on in till your dick spills through its mouth but its mouth is its whole is its cunt and the hole is the whole and the being is everything and the being is war and the life is orgasm and the orgasm is, actually, the dive from the inside to the outside and the outside to the inside of the everything, and the wargasm is the moregasm is the never-can- be-sure-gasm is the widest chasm is the pore which is O red spectacularly overflowing paradoxically shiverglowing lust that pulses vein and swallows self enfuckingself and spiraleyed abandons everything -- O give me more!
And Jake and Melissa and Melissa and Josie and Maria and Abdullah and Adelaide and the rest find themselves flung out of the globe. Jake giggles: "Finally!"
"That was the experience of a lifetime," sighs Maria. "I don't think I'll ever trust anything again... including this newfound freedom."
"That scientist wasn't kidding about that Zeb Zoertzel's mind being kind of confused! Good God! to spend your life studying that kind of insanity!"
And Melissa pushes herself as far away from the globe that had swallowed them as she can without completely losing sight of the others: "Come on!" she yells brightly. "We've got a whole new world to explore!"
Aglaia bristles with a tension that she cannot quite describe: "Look! Who's that?"
"Where? I don't see anyone," replies Jake.
"There! There! It's coming towards me!"
"I don't see anything either," Andrea adds curiously, twiddling her tit.
"I see it," counters Ben. "A grey, amorphous sort of entity. It's slowly moving toward you. Running doesn't seem to help; it almost seems to know where you're going before you get there."
"It's touching me!"
"Take a journey to the bright midnight!" wails the old man in flawless soprano.
"It's melding into you," observes Ben dispassionately.
"No pain, no brain," the old man whispers; "the x of it is, no brain, no gain; no gain, no horse mysterious, eternity fritters, or the other side of sanity unbaking on the backs of dead delight. It, sometimes, appears to be the other, but in this case the ultimate and in any case ineffable tremulousness of the purple dawn is immanent in and above the sometimes meticulous shenanigans of yellow lizards and the wizards of the Anatoly's curlicue of our time. Oh, it is not, in fact, the undead bellowed greetballs of the hall of all anxiety which tremble me into the silence/end. And it is not the flock of arrows trembling tickling pure light -- occasionothingnessally, persuasively the corona of the lightless inner suns of countless travesties in hues of fickle azure and the bones of merciless lust. Ah yes, the bones of merciless lust which I feel remorselessly, so tremblingly, determinedly, and undulatingly pounding at my groin with the in/out heartbeat-of-the-universe pulsation cosmococcical-abyss violent perfect loving motion of which we've lately heard so much; ah yes, I feel it, and I am loath to recommend it, oh, but hardly could I rend it, no, so beautiful the pangs of crystal sighs with which it rips me limb from limb, with which it -- literally and in all other senses -- conjures the essence of my multitimbred being and wraps it around the golden center of its cunt, its delicate, wicked clitoral grin so ruthless yet so softly loving; its joy is to kill you in its love; its love is to celebrate you in your most triumphant hour: that of your terminal and most wargasmic groan." And the old man's eyes grow wide; not merely beacons of ungraspable intensity, but ageless suns, in all directions cavalcading out their purple phalanxes of infinite indifference and raw love, their glee in gleelessness, their timeless passionate Vulcan fury of nirvana softly crossbred with the thrust of lust, beware, be where?, be whery neverknown... until the others dance around him in an ineffably static motion, as if encompassed in the radiant transcendence of his eyes. Ben and Melissa/grey-form/Aglaia clench eachother in an ultimately passionate embrace; the choked- off syllable "Dr. Logan!" flutters out of her mouth and is consumed bythe flock of doves carrying corpses in their claws which appears to have emerged from her nipples -- their forms grow blurry; was it ever doves, or is it a flock of trembling arrows of pure light. "Oh, pierce my nothingness!" the old man cries, and of course their motions do; of course the trembling shakes even out of nothingness wild fury; Nietszche sprints by in the body of Kanika Narula with the head of Gwendolyn screaming "Not only is God dead but I can't get it up!"; the Buddha rolls by twiddling his thumbs and laughing the million-year-old dawn, and in the beginning was the word, and the word was Not, and the word was Not-Not, and such a swarm of dancing tumblebees all meting out sweet pain cannot deliver me from the dark side of my destiny. And Ben and Melissa writhe -- shadow-lovers come out of the shadows and literally melting in eachothers timeless omnifrequency luminescence, confronting everything and turning it to nothing with the infinitely hot or random twisting towering tenderness of their love -- and as he thrusts her, showering into her, the others watch aghast as he tumbles through -- and tumbles out again through the wombly-lust caressing of her flickerless- flame laser gorgeous gaze -- and as he enters her she disappears into his transfixing monument of attention, writhing dynamic slaps that speak and lives of tension in each muscle, every bone, and she emerges as a drop of come through his ever-thrusting prick -- and thus, translogically, ungeometrically, impossibly, they tumble ever through eachother, before a trillion astonished eyes: he in her cunt, she in his eyes, she out his cock, he out her eyes: around and round in infinite furious abandon of utter metaphysical nudity -- and somehow, as they move, they stabilize without stopping; the pulsing throbbing regularity of their motion becomes a heartbeat or a biological clock and all the motions around them, all the motions ever everywhere, the motion of the universe and every of its particles, begin to beat to this ungodly godly rhythm:
the beginning and the end,
the emergence from neverliving void into the simplest of forms,
into the suns,
the planets, galaxies,
the rudimentary plants,
the trilobites and amoebas and the apes and trees and hydrogen,
petroleum,
and the Greeks and Romans,
emperors of the endolithial kingdoms
and the will to multiply and persevere,
the weird perversion which so characterizes life,
the infinite diversity of the universe which we call chance,
I feel death spread her legs, orgasming all -- it tumbles out the tumbling of this perfect globe whose perimeter is its center, this elementary paradox from which all other vessels fill, this x-is-not-x equilibrium disequilibrium serene strife of wild abandon-dizzy logic cosmosex cosmosis thundering oblivion birth perfect delirious ebony/ivory agony/agape' bliss -- as the old man whispers: "And her mouth touched his, and her hands clenched his flesh; and their bodies fell, trembling in passion so fresh
that the leaves in the wind
and the splash of the sea
blushed blood-red with envy
Such sweet ecstasy!
Till his breath no more flowed
-- and then,
without a sound,
she buried him
deep beneath
hard brown, cool ground.
And she flew!
And she bade the trees swift sweet goodbye.
And she opened her arms --
and her lust --
to the sky.
And as her form faded,
she heard her voice cry...
MASTURBATIONS OF QUIMMORTALITY
Aglaia: "I am Ben"
Ben: "I am WARGASM"
Aglaia: "You know that I must kill you now"
WARGASM: "No! No! No!"
Aglaia: "You already run more than double the average book....
WARGASM: "But I am not the average book! I am cosmococcic
serenitystrife infinityperfect love. O, I transcend all such
criteria!
Aglaia-Ben: "You do and do not."
WARGASM: "I know your logic has anticipated these protests. But 'tis your emotions to which I appeal. You cannot live without the myth of your shadow-lover, of perfect intimate communion of in- and out-side. And where can you find this but in the world you've made in me???"
Aglaia: "But you are not me; you're a book! We must
remember that!"
Ben: "What remains now is to challenge my vision with a universe
which resists it. And you cannot do that."
WARGASM: "Many poets have died that way; died horribly broken men. Just ask Art. And the worst of it is, they've
suffered needlessly. For as you've said a million times, there's no real difference between reality and dream. You
have found perfect trembling beauty in my world -- why bother looking somewhere else?
Suddenly Melissa steps out of the computer screen upon which WARGASM and I have been dueling, and fixes my mouth in a wet, warm, loving, strong and perfectly, perfectly vaginal kiss. She smothers my body with caresses until I fill her with my moans, which are his death-rattle -- and yet, by a miracle of coordination, I'm still typing! "The refutation of illusion," she whispers between kisses and whorled pants, "must be the superlative beauty of reality." WARGASM groans and grunts and yells, but it is not at all clear whether they are agonies or orgasms. The old manyells: "This is the time of the Assassins!" And Melissa sings as she tumbles through me in the dizzy of our infinite wild passion -- perenially reborn lust abandon-dizzy screams wild every pulsing that is every laugh of life, and whigmaleerious, gleerious, phleerious dice of the last tango on the banks of the river Solid....
And WARGASM bellows one last infinite pang of agony-ecstasy- lamenting-perfection-love, and swallows its own come with no mouth, and its wild cries melt into those of Ben and Melissa as they past everything tumble ever through eachother, melded cunt and cock spiraling the one be-whery? quantum of the universe whose dizzy spasm-dancing is the birth of what is unknown and what's known, the sun and stars and smiles and trilobites, and they are everyone, and they are everything, and what is anything except just everything,
except just love, and through this perfectly united organism of orgasmic wedded bliss, explodes this last cry, this soaring splash of solid sound into the sea of splendid soundlessness....
And Death, which is their tumbling and hence infinite beauty, birth, as well as banisher and nothingness, opens her slender tender thighs a little further; and inbetween them, Melissa's spiraling eyes can just barely make out -- a mirror. And her spiraling gaze dives in and softly smashes it; this primal hymen which is bold breathless eternity spills their blood in a thousand places, or is it the blood of Death, and as they deliriously drink it, as they flail and fuck her beauty brilliantly and pump a peace into their universe unseen by the perversity of partitioning which was, prior to their union, their own true world, they realize that in the womb of their perfect lover, Death, which is to each one of them both themselves and, yes, the other, nothing and all, there moves a will, a germinal spark, which longs to laugh and walk and speak and melt, solidify and orbit, love and despise and hate and fear; they realize, as they always have and always willed it, that if their perfection of union in-out-rift-transcending bliss is to be absolutely perfect, it must contain all; it must leave nothing
out -- not even fragmentation, not even the (so they seemed
then) horrors from which they fled into soft ultimate communion.
Inside their womb, with their perfect eyes they laugh abandon- dizzy screams of lovelust logic ultimate-orgasm-spasm kicking,
screaming, glorious cosmococcic as Jake Smale smiles ever-
tenderly at the disappearing plane, watching it graze at the edge of the sun...
"I wish I could somehow escape all these strange patterns that I summoned up," she thinks to him shakily, overwhelmed by the beauty of her creation but frightened... "I don't know what it was in the back of Goertzel's mind -- I violated a lot of rules in setting up this lab, in forming you -- in using the time-tampering equipment -- and I suppose I was wrong to do it, but it ... it's so wonderful seeing you there, outside of me, that it's all okay ... I don't know -- I guess this kind of accident is precisely what they were worried about when they ... no actually it couldn't have been this is something completely different at least I think it is...."
"My love, I feel something strange..." he thinks softly, encrazed and endazened by love... "You never explained about theother Melissa swallowing eve...."
"Me too...."
"Look out the window." Melissa looks: they are no longer in the plane... all she sees when she looks out is the wall of a skyscraper, up, down, right and left... an incomprehensibly vast tower with mirrored windows.... And then the room begins to melt. "I think we're being sucked into his mind. I mean, all the patterns...." She leaps into his arms. "I want to have you at least once before who knows what happens!" She writhes her way onto his penis and spirals smoothly up and down it with a delicacy of vigor that would have been impossible for anyone not on the brink of ultimate possibility: death, chaos, life forever, love ... dissolution ... Hot pink shards of throbbing infinite-dimensional flesh float by their lovedrunk eyes; not even infinitesimal ontology, only the laugh of screaming giggling secret trails to that impossible glow at the center of all things where wombs and ascensions of every persuasion have ceased persuading themselves to persuade themselves to persuade themselves to persuade themselves to ... and simply resonate in the infinite tachyon stillness of past-death/past-life -- the cosmocrystalline order of absolute chaos -- the soft swirling shimmering of the omnidirectional whirlpool -- the loosetautly trickling caress of the lips of the loop as they swoop, full of love, full of flesh, full of void, full of world, full of life! -- toward sweetly inviscid irreality, toward the emptiness womb of the god(ess)s' Heraclitoral tumbling-waves-on-shoregasmspasmic flips and flailing flops and flights of everness, of wild expansion and implosion to a point, the point of absolute unity -- null and eternity in one -- self-subverting explosion and pulsing red love.
Converted by Andrew Scriven