Текст книги "Damned"
Автор книги: Charles Michael «Chuck» Palahniuk
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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 15 страниц)
By this time my hands were the hands of a stranger. I could see my bare, blue feet, but they belonged to someone else. As blue as Goran's veins. In a glass pane of the door, I could see my own face reflected, my image framed by the frost of my breath condensing and freezing on the small window. Yes, we all appear somewhat absurd and mysterious to each other, but that girl I saw was no one to me.
Her pain was not my pain. Here was Catherine Earnshaw's dead face haunting the wintry windows of Wuthering Heights, blah, blah, blah....
That waifish me, reflected in moonlight or streetlight, I watched her pulling her fingers away from the steel handles, her skin peeling away still clinging to the metal, leaving the whorls and palm prints like patterns of frost. Abandoning the wrinkled road map of her lifeline, her love line and heart line, I watched this strange girl, her face grim and resolute, walk on frozen stick legs to retrieve the key and save my life. This girl I didn't know, she pulled open the heavy door, her hands sticking once more, tearing away yet another thin layer of this stranger's fragile skin. Her hands, so frozen they didn't bleed. The metal key froze between her fingers so resolutely she was forced to carry it to bed.
Only in bed, smothered between blankets, drifting to sleep, did her skin thaw and the girl's hands began to bleed quietly into her clean, starched white sheets.
X.
Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. Please do NOT get the idea that I'm some Miss Trollopy Van Trollop. It's true that I've read the Kama Sutra, hut why anyone would bother to attempt such revolting gymnastics remains largely a mystery to me. In regard to sex, mine is a kind of complete intellectual understanding with no real aesthetic appreciation whatsoever. Forgive my uneducated distaste. While I know what organ stimulates what, the bizarre, sordid business of phallus and orifice interaction, the exchange of chromosomes required for procreation of the species, I have yet to grasp the appeal. Meaning: yuck.
It is no accident that I segue from a scene in which my group is confronted by a towering nude giantess to a flashback in which I, myself, am undressed and exploring both my interior and exterior environs without the usual protective layers of clothing or shame. In the enormous, exposed figure of Psezpolnica, no doubt I feel an affinity, perhaps an admiration for any female who can present herself with such apparent lack of self-consciousness, seemingly in complete disregard for how she might be judged and exploited by her audience. Having masqueraded one Halloween as Simone de Beauvoir, I guess I'll always be a bit de Beauvoir.
The satire of Jonathan Swift remains a staple of English-speaking primary education—including my own—but it's usually limited to the first volume of Gulliver's Travels; or, in very daring and progressive classrooms, strictly as an illustrative example of irony, students might also read Swift's classic essay "A Modest Proposal." Few teachers would risk introducing the second volume of Lemuel Gulliver's memoirs, his misadventures in the island nation of Brobdingnag, where looming giants capture and make of him a household pet. No, it's far safer to present children, those powerless, diminutive children, with a narrative in which a giant is taken prisoner and manipulated under the control of tiny beings whose sole reason for not murdering him is their fear that his gargantuan corpse might decompose and threaten the overall public health.
It remains unknown to the majority of children that in the kingdom of Brobdingnag, in the second volume, Swift's picaresque travelogue does get a tad bit tawdry and dicey.
These are the salacious tidbits one learns when bothering to do the supplemental reading for extra credit. Especially while spending Christmas vacation naked, alone in an otherwise empty residence hall. In the second volume of Swift's masterpiece, once the giant residents of Brobdingnag capture Gulliver, he's presented at their royal court and is made a kind of mascot, forced to live in the queen's apartments, in very intimate proximity among the very gigantic ladies-in-waiting. It's these ladies who pleasure themselves by removing their clothing and lying together, sharing a bed while our hero is compelled to journey the peaks and valleys of their way-naked bodies. Writing in the guise of his narrator, Swift describes these women—the most-lovely female aristocrats of their society, who would appear so charming and appealing from a distance—as in fact constituting a swampy, reeking Gehenna in actual up-close physical contact. Our minuscule hero stumbles about their spongy, damp flesh, encountering monstrous pubic thickets of hairs, inflamed blemishes, vast cavernous scars, pits, knee-deep wrinkles, stretches of dead flaking skin, and shallow puddles of fetid perspiration.
And yes, it's duly noted that such a landscape depicted by Swift bears a marked resemblance to the actual terrain of Hell. This spreading landscape of noblewomen recline in their afternoon languor, expecting, really demanding that this teeny shrunken man bring them to pleasure. All the while, he stumbles and reels in disbelief and utter disgust of them. Overwhelmed with sickness and horror, exhausted, our enslaved Gulliver is forced to labor until the giant women are satisfied. In all of English literature, few passages can match this one of Swift's for its descriptive bluntness and unwelcome, masculine crudity.
My mother would tell you that men—boys, men, males in general—are too stupid, too easily found out, and too lazy to ever succeed as truly gifted liars.
Yes, I might be dead and rather imperious and steadfastly opinionated, but I know the blunt stink of misogyny when I smell it. And that it's very likely Jonathan Swift found himself the victim of childhood sexual abuse, and was now venting his rage in the passive-aggressive avenue of fantasy fiction.
In his own unhelpful way, my father would tell you, "A women eats to feed her pussy" Meaning: Anything we do to excess is in compensation for not getting a minimum amount of sexual gratification.
My mother would say that men overimbibe alcohol because their penises are thirsty.
Really, being the offspring of former-hippie, former-Rasta, former-punk, former-anarchist parents means that I'm bombarded by no end of earthy truisms.
And no, I've never enjoyed an orgasm of my own, but I have read The Bridges of Madison County and The Color Purple, and if I learned nothing else from Alice Walker I learned that if you can help a woman discover the curative power of manipulating her own clitoris she'll serve as your loyal devotee and best friend forever.
That said, I stand before the Serbian demon, the towering nude tornado woman known as Psezpolnica.
First, I shuck off my remaining penny loafer and place it at a safe distance from the giant. I pull off my school cardigan, fold it, and settle it neatly on top of the shoe. Unbuttoning the cuffs of my blouse, I roll the sleeves back to each elbow, all the while gazing up the length of the giant's hairy legs, looking skyward to see her shins, the knees, the muscled naked thighs, craning my neck to see the Brobdingnagian mons pubis beyond.
A shrill whistle splits the air, a whistle as loud as a fire siren. On the ground, resting near my stocking feet, Archer's severed head looks up at me, the lips still pursed. "Hey, little girl," the severed head says, "whatever you're planning, don't do it...."
Reaching down, I grab Archer by the long hairs of his blue Mohawk. Carrying the head as I would a purse, I step up onto the arch of the giant's foot.
Dangling from my hand, Archer says, "Getting eaten hurts like hell." He says, "You don't have to do this..."
Transferring the blue hair to my teeth, I bite down, gripping the Mohawk as a pirate would a knife as said pirate climbs the rigging of a ship. In that manner, I climb the copious leg hairs of the giant demon Psezpolnica, scaling the fleshy ridge of her shin. Like Gulliver, I navigate the wrinkled skin of the demon's knees, then continue grasping the coarse body hair, pulling myself ever higher along the giant's thighs. Glancing at the distant ground, I see Babette and Patterson and Leonard, all of them with their heads tipped back, watching my ascension with their mouths gaping open. Looking around, from this height I can see the distant mother-of-pearl shimmer of the sperm ocean, the steam rising off Hot Saliva Lake, the perennial dark cloud of bats that hover above Blood River.
Swinging from his blue hair, gripped between my clenched teeth, Archer's head says, "You're crazy, little girl, you know that?"
Still climbing, I skirt my way around the wrinkled folds of the labia majora, hauling myself, like Jonathan Swift's worse nightmare, through pungent thickets of curling, dense pubic hair.
Above me hangs the foreboding cornice of two enormous breasts. Between them I can discern a chin, above that a rolling pair of chewing lips, and one blue-jeaned leg of Archer's, still shod with a motorcycle boot, dangling out a corner of the giant's mouth.
Even though my knowledge is largely theoretical, based on years of witnessing naked family friends on French beaches, I do know my way around the adult female genitalia. Clinging to the abundance of lush hair, I locate the clitoral hood and deftly manipulate the sheltering skin, thrusting my arm within to find the retracted organ of such fabled womanly pleasure. On this scale, merely brailled blindly within the warm enclosure of the clitoral hood, it feels to be roughly the size and shape of a Virginia ham.
The severed head of Archer watches my actions. Licking his lips, Archer says, "Little girl, you are sick...." Smiling, he says, "The bitch monster ate me so, hey, the least I could do is return the favor."
Retrieving my forearm from the warm depths of the fleshy hood, I take the hank of blue hair from my mouth. Holding the head so that I gaze directly into Archer's green eyes, I say, "Take a deep breath, and make yourself useful," and I stuff the grinning, salivating head deep into the hooded depths.
For a beat, not much occurs. Above me the vast mouth continues to masticate the cud of Archer's body, his blue jeans and boots. From below, the trio of Babette, Patterson, and Leonard stare, slack-jawed. Something stirs, moaning and slurping like a ravenous beast, moving within the skin of the clitoral hood. Then gradually, the giant's lips cease to chew. The giant's breathing deepens and slows. A warm pink glow suffuses the acres and acres of skin, a great landscape of blush covering the giant's face, chest, and thighs. A shudder, tremulous as an earthquake, shakes the towering body, and I'm compelled to grip the pubic hairs more tightly lest I plummet to the fingernail fields far below.
Pirates and masked highwaymen and kidnapped wenches.
The giant's knees begin to tremble, to weaken and buckle a little. The labia become more pronounced and highly colored, flooded with fresh blood flow.
At this point, I reach into the fleshy hood, where the hardening clitoris threatens to eject Archer's slathering, slurping noggin. Grasping the hidden head, I pull it free.
In the open air, slick with the juices of female passion and drooling wildly, Archer gasps a huge breath. His eyes dilated and crossed with pleasure, he shouts. His lips webbed with the noxious fluids inherent in adult sexual congress, Archer shouts, "I AM THE LIZARD KING... !"
At that, I stuff his head back to do hidden oral battle with the stiffening, engorged clitoral tissues.
The giant looks down upon me, her eyes also glazed with orgasmic ecstasy. Her head lolling loosely on her neck. Her nipples jut, the size and hardness of sidewalk fire hydrants, the same bright red color.
In the blue-jeaned leg which remains dangling from between Psezpolnica's lips, the severed leg of Archer, clearly outlined within one denim pant leg appears the sizable bulge of a male erection.
Looking up, I meet the giant's loose, sloppy grin with my own cheerful, competent smile. With one hand gripping the pubic hair to maintain my position, my other hand holds Archer's head within the confines of the slippery clitoral hood. That's the hand I risk waving in a friendly gesture while I shout, "Hello, my name is Madison." I shout, "Now that we've met... would you mind very much doing me just the smallest favor?"
It's at that moment the hood retracts, the fully erect clitoris popping free to make its appearance, ejecting Archer's eager advances so quickly that his slimy, delirious head plummets, trailed like a vivid blue comet by a broken stream of spittle or vaginal mucosa, tumbling, falling, rocketing to land with a hushed splash amid the loose fingernails far below.
XI.
Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. Don't take the following as a scolding. Please regard what I'm about to say as strictly constructive feedback. On the plus side, you've been running one of the largest, most successful enterprises in the history of... well, history. You've managed to grow your market share despite overwhelming competition from a direct, omnipotent competitor. You're synonymous with torment and suffering. Nevertheless, if I may be bluntly honest, your level of customer service skills really suck.
My mom would always say, "You can trust-Madison to tell you anything about herself—except the truth." Meaning: Don't expect me to instantly disassemble and leave you simply awash in revelations concerning my deep, personal self. Go ahead and chalk up this reticence to some deep, secret shame on my part, but that's not the case. I may not have been educated beyond the seventh grade, may be insufferably naive and lack solid workplace experience, but I'm not so desperate for attention that I feel compelled to share my most intimate, inner blah, blah, blah.
All you need to know is that I've seen beyond the veil. I'm dead, and in my own admittedly limited life experience, I'd wager that the best people are. Dead, I mean. Although, I'm not sure if anything since my overdose counts as "life experience."
I'm dead, and I'm riding in the cupped palm of a towering giant female demon as she strides across the hellish landscape, just burning up the miles. Accompanying me are my newfound compatriots: Leonard, Patterson, Archer, and Babette. The brain, the jock, the rebel, and the prom queen. Ergonomically speaking, traveling nested within an enormous hand is infinitely comfortable, combining the contour of a Singapore Air first-class seat with the gently rolling feel of a drawing room berth on the Orient Express. From this height, comparable to the cattle level of the Eiffel Tower or the top of the London Eye, we pass various landmarks. And not a small number of condemned A-list celebrities.
The football jock, Patterson, points out the most important locales: the Steaming Dog Pile Mountains... the Swamp of Rancid Perspiration... a meadow of what could be heather but is actually a luxuriant growth of unchecked toenail fungus.
Riding along, Leonard explains that Psezpolnica stands exactly three hundred cubits tall. Our hostess-slash-SUV is the offspring of angels who gazed down from Heaven and fell madly in lust with mortal women. All this history, Leonard says, comes down from no less a source than Saint Thomas Aquinas, who wrote in the thirteenth century that these angels appeared on earth as incubi—these revved-up, way-horny divine superbeings. The angels did the Hot Nasty Thing with mortal women, and giants such as Psezpolnica were conceived. The horny angels themselves were cast into Hell to become demons. Before you question the bullshitty way this scenario sounds, Saint Thomas Aquinas is nowhere to be found in Hades, so he must've gotten something correct.
Likewise, when earthly men lusted after angels in the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, Leonard says, God gave them a good thrashing. The full pillar-of-salt treatment.
No, it's not fair, but it would seem that the only immortal being allowed to indulge in a dalliance with mortals is God Himself.
Sorry about how I keep using the G-word. I guess old habits do die hard.
"Keep it up," Patterson says. He cuffs Leonard on the back of the head, adding, "You fucking heretic!"
"Such language," Babette says. "Why don't you just take a dump in my ears!"
Riding along, Archer waves down at a couple demons. Shouting at a hulking blond man with deer antlers sprouting from his head, Archer says, "Yo! Cernunnos, my man!"
Whispering to me, Leonard explains that this is the dethroned Celtic god of stags. He says our Christian devil is depicted with horns as a snide dig at Cernunnos.
Archer flashes a thumbs-up at another demon, this one in the middle distance, a lion-headed man listlessly eating a dead lawyer. Archer cups one hand around his mouth and shouts, "What's up, Mastema?"
"The prince of spirits," Leonard whispers to me.
This entire time, Babette keeps asking, "What time is it?" She asks, "Is it still Thursday?" Sitting off to one side of the enormous palm, her arms folded across her chest, impatiently tapping the toe of one dirty Manolo Blahnik, Babette says, "I can't believe there's no wifi in Hell...."
Our vessel, our hostess, Psezpolnica strides along, her features still lit with a soft postcoital smile.
Her smile is matched only by Archer's, his entire body regenerated, from his blue Mohawk down to his black boots, his grin so wide it shoves his safety pin almost to one ear.
Far below, a withered old man shambles along, leaning on a cane, dragging a way-long beard. I ask Archer if he's a demon.
"Him?" says Archer, pointing at the old man. "That's Charles fucking Darwin!" Archer hawks a gob of spit, which falls, falls, falls to land near enough to make the old man look up. When they make eye contact, Archer shouts, "Hey, Chuck! You still doing the Devil's work?"
Darwin lifts one withered, veined hand to flip Archer the bird.
As it turns out, the way-fundamentalist Christian creationists were correct. How I wish I could tell my parents: Everybody in Kansas was right. Yes, the inbred snake handlers and holy rollers had more on the ball than my secular humanist, billionaire mom and dad. The dark forces of evil really did plant those dinosaur bones and fake fossil records to mislead mankind. Evolution was hokum, and we fell for it hook, line, and sinker.
On the horizon, outlined against the flaming orange sky, a building takes shape.
Craning his head to look up into the vast, floating, full-moon face of our sated giant, Leonard shouts, "Glavni stab. Ugoditi. Zatim."
To me, Leonard says, "Serbian." He says, "I picked up a few words in my advanced-placement courses."
The building in the distance is still partly hidden below the curve of the horizon, but as we draw closer and closer, it rises to reveal a sprawling complex of wings and complicated renovations.
As I started to boast earlier, really the best people are dead. Since I've been in Hell I’ve sighted just oodles of notables from throughout history. Even now, peering over the edge of the giant's palm, I point out a tiny figure and say, "Everybody, look!"
Patterson shields his eyes with one hand, holding it to his forehead like a salute, to cut down on the ambient orange glare. Looking to where I point, he says, "You mean that old guy?"
That "old guy," I tell him, just happens to be Norman Mailer.
You can't turn around in Hell without elbowing somebody important: Marilyn Monroe or Genghis Khan, Clarence Darrow or Cain. James Dean. Susan Sontag. River Phoenix. Kurt Cobain. Honestly, the resident population reads like the guest list of a party that would make both my parents cream. Rudolf Nureyev. John F. Kennedy. Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner. John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin. A permanent Woodstock. Probably, if he knew the networking opportunities hereabouts, my dad would immediately gulp down rat poison and throw himself on a samurai sword.
Just to schmooze with Isadora Duncan, my mom would pop open the emergency-exit door and bail out of our Learjet midflight.
Really, just looking around, you feel a twinge of pity for the poor souls who succeeded in getting past the Pearly Gates. One can't help but picture the lackluster VIP lounge in Heaven, a kind of nonalcoholic ice-cream social starring Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mahatma Gandhi. Hardly anyone's idea of a "with-it" social register.
And, yes, I am thirteen years old, fat, and dead—but I am not overcompensating in the same manner as insecure homosexuals who constantly trot out Michelangelo and Noel Coward and Abraham Lincoln in order to bolster their own fragile self-esteem. True, being dead AND in Hell seems to suggest that one has committed the double whammy of Big Mistakes, but at least I find myself mingling in very, capital-V, Very good company.
Trotting along, still borne aloft in our giant's hand, we draw closer to the complex of buildings which now appear to spread far beyond the horizon, covering acres, even square miles of Hellish real estate. Along the outer edges, the buildings' perimeter consists of postmodern pastiche, a collage of styles borrowing heavily from Michael Graves and I. M. Pei, with an assortment of laborers already excavating and laying the foundations for an ever-spreading series of additions ribbed to suggest the undulating forms of Frank Gehry. Within this outer margin stand concentric circles of older additions, like the rings of a bisected tree, each inner ring identifiable with the fashion of an earlier era. Adjacent to the PoMo sections rise the boxy glass towers of the International style. Within those lie the campy futuristic spires of the Art Deco, then the Period Revival of Victorian times, the Federal, the Georgian, the Tudor, Egyptian, Chinese, Tibetan palace architecture, Babylonian minarets, all of it comprising an ever-widening history of building. Even as the edges expand, covering land almost as rapidly as the Great Ocean of Wasted Sperm, at the same time the buildings' ancient core is rotting and collapsing.
As Psezpolnica stands at the buildings' outskirts, from this height we can see that the oldest, inner portions, predating the Etruscan and Incan and Mesopotamian, those lowers and chambers at the center have crumbled to decayed wood and clay dust.
Here, this place is the nerve center, the headquarters of Hell.
Leonard shouts upward, "Ovdje."
At this, the giant stops walking.
Snaking away from the outermost walls of the building, way-long queues of people stand waiting in line. Literally, no exaggeration, miles of the damned. Each queue leads to a different doorway, and every so often the people in a line step forward as someone enters.
Leonard shouts, "Prekid." He shouts, "Ovdje, please."
Hearing this strange Slavic babble, I wonder how close it comes to the language of Goran's thoughts. The cryptic, mysterious lingo of my beloved Goran's memories and dreams. Goran's native tongue. To be entirely honest, I'm not certain from which war-torn homeland my Goran even harkened.
And yes, I've sworn off hoping, but a girl can still carry a torch.
As we approach the tail end of one long queue, Leonard says, "Spustati. Sledeic."
Babette says, "Is this even the same year?”
Only in Hell do you wish a wristwatch included the day, date, and century functions.
At this, Psezpolnica sinks to one knee, leaning forward to carefully, gently lower us back to the ground.