Are You Loathsome Tonight?: A Collection of Short Stories

  Are You Loathsome Tonight?

  Poppy Z. Brite

  For Ramsey Campbell,

  Master of the Form

  Special thanks to Clive Barker, Connie Brite, Dale Carter, Jennifer Caudle, Sarah Champion, Rich Chizmar, Alan Clark, Matthew Coyle & Peter Lamb, Richard Curtis, Bruce David, Christopher DeBarr, O'Neil DeNoux, Christa Faust, David Ferguson, Larry Flynt, Michael Ford, Amelia G, Barry Hoffman, Steve Jones, Cait Kiernan, Ed Kramer, Christie Lauder, William J. Mann, John Newlin, John Pelan, J.K. Potter, Robert Skinner, Craig Spector, David Sutton, and Peter Straub. May the microscopic spiny catfish of the Amazon never swim up your pee stream and lodge itself in your urethra.

  Introduction

  Peter Straub

  The inspiration of killing that man came to me out of the blue on the day I realized that one of my two different lives was making me crazy.

  Poppy Z. Brite never really goes where you expect her to. While circling over certain common themes, she is waiting to sink her teeth into her obsessions. Every fiction writer worth reading for more than the sake of a momentary distraction hovers over the chosen territory in precisely this manner, hawklike, obsessed, awaiting the opportunity to plunge.

  Until the moment inspiration settled its divine hands on my shoulders and pushed me out of my frame, I had been proud of my little balancing act. No other girl in my school could float like me—that's what I said to myself. No boy could, either. Pride like that wraps a blindfold over your eyes and plugs your ears with wax.

  The simple sexual act is different from eroticism; the former is found in animal life, whereas human life alone admits of an activity defined perhaps by a “diabolical” aspect, aptly described by the word eroticism.

  —Georges Bataille, The Tears of Eros

  I am control and the uncontrollable.

  I am the union and the dissolution.

  I am the abiding, and I am the dissolution.

  I am the one below,

  and they come up to me.

  —"The Thunder: Perfect Mind,” in The Nag Hammadi Library

  What does not partake of consciousness is not human, and yet even an ape can grieve.

  See that half-naked girl smoking a joint on the riverbank between two guys wearing nothing but their grins? See the girl on the back of the Harley with her arms around the mountain-man? That's me.

  And here I am in my Junior English class, raising my hand to inform the dazzled Mr. Froelich that Their Eyes Are Watching God, a novel by Zora Neale Hurston, progresses through constant reference to a particular organic metaphor.

  In this one I appear to be dead but have been merely rendered unconscious by a drug administered by the saintlike Denny Watters, who died of gunshot wounds three days later; this is me dressed up to go to the prom with Tommy Deutsch, who got into Brown on early admission.

  This is the limousine that drove us around all night. Our driver thought we were disgusting.

  This is the hovel I went to after I ditched Tommy Deutsch, and these are the people who lived there: fat, fantastic Toomey, his lover Jerome, and Jerome's female hanger-on, Hilly, a succubus. Their band was called Duino Elegy. About an hour after I took this picture, we were resting up in a huge tangle on their mattress, and I remember thinking that Jerome would be much nicer if he settled down and stayed gay all the time, like Toomey. Jerome had the perfect body for a gay boy, almost like a girl's body. Next to Jerome, Hilly looked like an evolutionary dead end.

  The Daoist is listening for the mystical voices, which rise in him and sing in his viscera. He visualizes ethereal breath produced by the distillation of the juices of his entrails: it is at the paroxysm of the organic and at the lowest and most quotidian level that the body is decanted, that matter is transmuted into essence and that sublimation takes place. But this is made possible only because the organic functioning is sacred: because the inside of the body, where crude secretions are developed, is the vessel of delicate spirits.

  —Jean Levi, The Body: The Daoists’ Coat of Arms

  In a world where the body's crude, functional secretions speak of sacred essence, the tissue of social interactions and the stabilizing consensus of judgments derived from these interactions dissolve into weightlessness. When the literally internal is recognized as the literally central, a radical democracy asserts itself on all sides, and we occupy an egalitarian universe. Persons of the deepest conventionality, persons absent of any insight whatsoever, carry within themselves a quantity of divinity—of access to divinity—equal to that within the most enlightened. Everyone occupies the same spacious rung on the food chain; everyone is a potentially sacramental meal.

  The same can be said of narrative, also of the version of narrative known as history.

  During my year and a half at the State University, I followed my old pattern of living half in banal light, half in rich darkness. No one suspected, apart from the few other students doing the same thing, and most of these were girls who knew how to keep their mouths shut. To maintain two separate lives, you have to tend your fences.

  It wore on me, though, it undermined my assumptions. The death of an assumption always breaks your heart. No sooner did I exchange a complicitous glimmer with a classmate in Art History 101, whom twenty-four hours before I had glimpsed in the tropical atmosphere of the hidden universe, than our mutual project seemed shallow and misguided. These doubts concerning my authenticity came to a head late one Saturday night when a girl named Abbey Pullman materialized beside me. Slinky, darkly gorgeous and corrupt to the core, Abbey Pullman came from New York City, and she existed within an aura of private schools, family trusts, and discreet holidays in detox-rehab facilities supplied with chefs instead of cooks. Abbey put her heart-shaped mouth to my ear and whispered, “Sweetie, do you have a beeper number for that sexy little beast you saw talking to me last night?” I packed my shit and got out of there the next day, sorry.

  "All three saw a young child on the altar, and when the priest started breaking the Host, it seemed to them that an angel came down from Heaven and divided the child in two with a knife, and collected his blood in the chalice. And when the priest divided the Host into several parts to give Communion to the people, they saw that the angel was also dividing the child into several small parts. And when, at the end of the Mass, the hermit went to receive Communion, it seemed to him that he alone was given a part of the bloodied flesh of that child. Seeing this, he was filled with such dread that he screamed and said: ‘My Lord, now I really believe that the bread which is consecrated on the altar in Your holy body and the chalice, that is to say the wine, is Your blood ...’”

  Believers, particularly in earlier centuries, confusedly understood God's sacrifice as a prodigy of abominable grandeur, and were quite conscious of the bloody fragment of divine flesh that descended into their stomachs in the guise of the Host ... The child slaughtered by the angel, his flesh cut up into small bloody bits ... reflects this profound attraction-repulsion toward the sacrificial mystery...

  —Piero Camporesi, The Consecrated Host: A Wondrous Excess

  Certain cities and certain moments in time offer themselves to the imaginative eye. New York; Calcutta; Los Angeles; Shanghai before the Japanese invasion; the Sarajevo of 1914, in which a boy named Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Ferdinand and Countess Sophie; 1918 New Orleans, where a murderer calling himself The Axeman advised the readers of the Times-Picayune that he was “invisible, even as the ether that surrounds your earth"; 1967 London, where in an Islington terrace a failed actor named Kenneth Halliwell committed suicide after murdering his lover, the playwright Joe Orton; Jeffrey Dahme
r's Milwaukee of 1993, glistening with the multiple snail-tracks of his obsessive progress; any place and time elevated by a distinguishing act of violence. Or any city, like Amsterdam, receptive to such an act by reason of its tolerance of what elsewhere is condemned as deviation.

  I had a gig in Boca Raton where I put on a headset, dialed numbers all over the country and said, “Hello, Mr. (Name), I hope I have not reached you at an inconvenient time. You have been selected to participate in a nationwide survey, which will take only a few minutes of your time. After you have answered a few simple questions, you will be eligible to participate in our Grand Prize giveaway.” I was living in an A-frame in Aspen with a ski instructor who had to snort half a gram every morning just to get out of bed. I transferred to Barnard, and this uptight guy in the next apartment paid me $100 for every Harlan Ellison first edition I could steal from the Columbia library. I took a bus to Montana, talked myself into a job on a local newspaper, and, you could have fooled me, married a rancher. When Gainesville got risky, I took a bus to Palm Beach, where I screwed up big-time and almost went to prison. I worked in a Minneapolis massage parlor, where I rubbed peppermint oil into guys’ backs, dipped between their legs, ran my fingers over their balls and asked if they cared for a relief massage, which of course they always did, never mind the extra $35, you never saw so many bananas yearning upward, and when at the last moment the bananas did that thing where they locked into their yearning, they were filled with an essence having nothing to do with humanity.

  At that moment, I attended to the descent of the sacred. I watched the muscles in the arms and legs stand out like ridgepoles. I observed the arching of the back, the tightening of the face as the inner man flew toward the surface. It was an effort, it was a labor. The body struggled toward a violent surrender. There were groans and curses. Then at last the inner man came leaping from the body, flowing from what seemed a bottomless well.

  After that, most of those guys turned right back into assholes.

  The Gnostic texts known as The Nag Hammadi Library were unearthed in a cave near the end of 1945 by two brothers, Muhammad and Khalifah Ali, from the Egyptian village of al-Qasr. They were looking for sebakh, a particular kind of soil used as a fertilizer, but instead discovered a tall jar, which they imagined might hold either treasure or evil spirits. Frightened but hoping to find gold, they shattered the jar with a pickaxe and discovered that it contained rolled-up manuscripts, which they brought back to their village.

  Some months earlier, their father, a night watchman for the village's irrigation fields, had surprised and killed an intruder. In accordance with the tradition of vendetta, he was murdered the next day. A month after the library had been brought to al-Qasr, Muhammad Ali was told that a man who had fallen asleep near his hut, in fact an innocent dealer in molasses, was his father's killer. Muhammad, Khalifa, and their mother attacked the sleeping molasses dealer, murdered him, and dismembered his body. They removed his heart, cut it into sections, and divided it amongst themselves.

  After the murder of the molasses salesman, the police often visited Muhammad's house. He blamed the library for his difficulties and lodged some of the volumes with a Coptic priest. His mother burned others for fuel. Some were sold for pennies to neighbors. A one-eyed local criminal named Bahy Ali managed to buy up most of the remaining texts and brought them to Cairo, where they were eventually acquired by the Coptic museum. In the meantime, the substantial Codex 1 had been smuggled out of Egypt by one Albert Eid, a Belgian art dealer who feared its confiscation by Nasser's new government. Eid hawked the Codex to the Bollingen Foundation and the Bibliothéque Nationale, to no effect. In 1952, after Eid's death, the Codex was acquired by the Jung Institute and presented to Carl Jung. Later, it, too, passed into the hands of the Coptic museum in Cairo. The next twenty years were a disgraceful, ignominious battle between rival groups of scholars. All of this is par for the course when it comes to sacred objects and sacred texts.

  Gnosis is a knowledge possessed of a revelatory force and rooted in a recognition of one's true self.

  The night before inspiration told me that I had to save myself, find salvation, by bidding farewell to my false life through the murder of that man, I dreamed that I was embracing the corpse of the Savior.

  Not long ago, Poppy Z. Brite ruffled a feather or two by publishing in her newsletter a lengthy meditation on the subject of an erotic encounter between herself and the mortal remains of William Burroughs. Burroughs, one cannot but think, would have been delighted.

  At the center of its anarchic heart, the idea of narrative yearns simultaneously for wholeness and fracture. We begin in one place and time, we shift to another. Roughly, imperiously, we shift back. We catch up with ourselves, or we do not. It is satisfying when we do, but better, far better, when we scrap thoughtless versions of coherence. Jokes, anecdotes and shaggy-dog stories undermine lazy expectations, so let us sprinkle in any number of bafflements to the humorless. For the literal-minded, let us float the suggestion of a “theme": the “theme,” say, of “possession.” We may safely assume the failure on behalf on the literal-minded to recognize that every encounter with a text represents an act of “possession.” As the reader devours the text, the text inexorably colonizes the reader, who is, unlike the devouring text, altered by this process, in large part by means of that truest, most infallible expression of “theme,” the detail. As a result, every vibrant detail contains an erotic component.

  There is much more in eroticism than we are at first led to believe.

  Today, no one recognizes that eroticism is an insane world whose depths, far beyond its ethereal forms, are infernal.

  ...Eroticism is, first of all, the most moving of realities; but it is nonetheless, at the same time, the most ignoble. Even after psychoanalysis, the contradictory aspects of eroticism appear in some way innumerable; their profundity is religious—it is horrible, it is tragic, it is still inadmissible. Probably all the more so since it is divine.

  —Georges Bataille, The Tears of Eros

  “God is in the details,” wrote Flaubert, who once took the time to have a pharmacist named M. Homais take in the billowing of Emma Bovary's clothing before the glow of a wood stove.

  Here are three details from these stories:

  It was a semi-automatic pistol with a six-inch sighted barrel and a checkered grip of heavy rubber, nearly three pounds of sleek steel filled with little silver-jacketed bullets like seeds in a deadly fruit. ("Saved.")

  It was like some enormous steaming bowl of stew, full of glistening meat, splintered bone, great handfuls of tubes torn loose from their moorings, and everywhere the rich coppery sauce of blood. The sewer smell of ruptured bowel rose in shimmering waves from his body. ("Saved.")

  In the streets, the harsh reek of exhaust fumes was filled with a million subtler perfumes: jasmine, raw sewage, grasshoppers frying in peppered oil, the odor of ripe durian fruit that was like rotting flesh steeped in thick sweet cream. ("Self-Made Man.")

  In “Vine of the Soul,” a shaggy-dog story, the crowd on a street in Amsterdam moves in the “peristalsis” of waste through the intestines; “In Vermis Veritas,” a bubble of pure inspiration written as an introduction to a graphic novel, presents the rapturous meditations of a “connoisseur of mortality,” a highly conscious maggot devoted to the piquant memory-sensations embedded within “the translucent rose of fresh viscera, the seething indigo of rot” of those who died fearfully and in pain. The maggot is a reader for once gloriously empowered to stand in the place of the writer.

  Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’

  hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me

  suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed

  in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing

  but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,

  and we are so awed because it serenely disdains

  to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.


  —Rainer Maria Rilke, “The First Elegy,” Duino Elegies

  translated by Stephen Mitchell

  I dreamed of embracing the dead Jesus in that Tomb, no more than a cave, actually. His small, wounded body seemed extraordinarily beautiful to me, for it registered every trace of his journey toward crucifixion: the hard calluses on the foot soles, the legacy of anger written across the forehead, the harsh, knifelike furrows at the corners of the eyes, the grime embedded into the folds of the knuckles. And, of course, the wounds.

  I touched every inch, every micromillimeter of his body, and under my hands, his body spoke. The language in which it spoke was Braille. His body was a sacred text. By slow explorations of my fingertips, tongue, eyelids, lips, by awed, sensitive tissue of my cheeks and my nipples, also the aureolae and undersides of my breasts, also by the delicate kiss of my labia, I read of an abominable grandeur.

  His body was sturdy, banded with muscle like the body of a mule, a peasant's body, its Mediterranean complexion tinged with the green of a Levantine olive. His coloring, lightest on the palms of his hands, darkest about the knees, elbows and scrotal sac, was that of a meal prepared over a desert campfire, and the smell of his flesh suggested sand, blazing sun, smoky cookfires built on the sides of salty lakes.

  That was the most erotic dream I've ever had, even though it was all about knowledge.

  Braille is a two-way street.

  Transfigured, I woke up to a transfigured world.

  The world is a corpse-eater. All the things eaten in it themselves die also. Truth is a life-eater. Therefore no one no one nourished by [truth] will die.