On Eternity’s Road
1
In the reception at the clinic off Rue de Eternité the pace was relaxed, almost leisurely. The older man in the reception with facial features worn under the relentless gnawing teeth of time still had a full head of grey– or was it more towards the white spectrum?– short-cut hair. Hizaki was sure this was the right place. The sign at the door was simply a big white cross on a square black background, which gave him a flash of a star-less night in a half-forgotten burial ground for the war-time dead. The innocent façade revealed nothing of the dark secrets indoors, save the ominous black-painted steel chimney that reached into the sky.
This was where people came to die. Hidden in the maze of alleyways in the 14th Arrondissement of central Paris, it was known all about Europe as the place where people went in through the big wooden double-doors and never again came out; dispersed into the already polluted atmosphere of Paris, their bodies returned to the earth, to nature; their sufferings terminated; and now before the reception he stood in his ugly red- and white dress with needless detailed embroidery whose purpose alone was to enhance the sensation of 18th century aristocratic taste, a bourgeois decadence utterly derailed; a big fluffy skirt that made his otherwise quite small buttocks seem almost as wide as a bed.
The old man was scribbling crabbed notes on yellowing paper from a golden scroll; but as he noticed Hizaki’s presence, he looked up, eyes full of utter boredom and resignation. His eyes they seemed to want to shrink into his head.
“And what might we do you for?” he asked with a voice weak and trembling, as if frightened, but it was definitely not Hizaki and his wide buttocks that he feared, it was something else, something general.
“I want to die”, Hizaki stated plainly. The atmosphere of this reception was oppressive, but he could not tell if it was all only the work of the old man with the whitening hair.
“Go in to the waiting room”, the man replied shortly.
WAITING ROOM it said on the door to the left, and Hizaki proceeded to open it gently, for this was a place of silence. The sounds of the city seemed unable to penetrate the walls and windows. One could hear a pen fall to the floor in some room hidden behind a homely timber door, on which sat a sign saying WELCOME, jotted down by colour crayons, like the work of a child or a liberal youth group.
There was only one other person in the waiting room, a young woman with scars on her wrists and music tranquilising her via earphones. She looked like she was sleeping, eyes closed but still revealing movement, surely that of dream, Hizaki reasoned. Maybe the waiting time was long.
Soon he was proved to be wrong, for a nurse appeared in a strange pink outfit more like something out of a fetishists closet, with wide mouth in an amused grin and thick red hair teased up in the back, and Hizaki thought there was something familiar about this person, but he failed utterly to connect the woman to any clear memory.
“You there,” the nurse said – voice was strange, dark, almost with a manly quality, but it could surely not be that it, like himself, was just a man in women’s clothes? – “come with me.”
And Hizaki followed in silence. He wondered why no one had asked him who he was, what his name was, who they were to notify.
“I know what you wonder,” the nurse said, “but we do not care who you are, where you come from, we ask only to know why you want to die.”
Hizaki said nothing. He was led into a small well-lit room with orange wall-paper and a paper lamp in the roof emitting a warm yellowish light. It made him think of his childhood room on the second floor of the old family house. He was told by the nurse to sit down on a chair, and did so in silence.
“Why do you want to die?” the nurse repeated the question.
“Because I am getting old,” Hizaki said, “soon I will no longer be beautiful. My face is sagging from the rottenness of age. Without my beauty and my agile fingers, my reaction time is getting worse, what worth will I be to anyone? I wish not to be a burden upon the people close to me, and to the people which I care about. Therefore I have decided that the only reasonable reaction is that I… am better off dead, for their sake.”
The nurse nodded and left the room. The patient, who now had applied to die, was left alone in silence for a while.
2
He was lying in a comfortable bed with fluffy covers and a radio by his side, playing the music he had always so much cherished: it was Beethoven, Bach and Satie, Mozart and a long list of other dead famous 18th and 19th century musical prodigies, conductors with mastery of the arts, and this music in him instilled a mood of dread coupled with a placid acceptance of fate. It was best this way, no doubt he had, he must die, for he was soon to be no longer of utility, no longer of value, a parasite to society. There was nothing medically unsound with him, and he was not even old – next month would bring his thirty second birthday – yet the weariness of life had been creeping up on him for years and years now. It was always the same boring rituals that had to be repeated. Guitar practice took its toll and his arms were sometimes troubled with fleeting pain as he played. Knowing he might not be able to keep on doing what he loved – and that he would no longer be a beautiful aristocratic vampire-fetishist any more – he wanted only to die while he was at his height, at his most beautiful and respected. He wanted not to turn into an ex-celebrity, a forgotten drug-addicted hidden away in his degenerate lover’s mansion.
The nurse came into the room.
“This is the drink which you have to swallow,” said the nurse and gave him a big plastic container with a thick plastic straw sticking out on top. Though the container was not transparent, he could see through the straw the white liquid inside, which seemed to have the consistency of a milkshake.
“It will put you to sleep,” the nurse said. “You’ll just start feeling a little sleepy, before you know it; all your troubles will have faded away. No one will even know what have happened to you.”
Hizaki looked at the container for a while, puzzled, unsure of what he was going to do. Did he really have to die? Then, an image appeared in his head: Kamijou at his bedside, with tears flowing down his cheeks, telling him he was no longer of any use value. Crocodile tears, he knew the shallowness which prevailed all their souls, he knew the thoughtless inconsideration by which he would be flicked aside by the person he had used to fancy his most beloved should he ever become less desirable and less useful, and at that thought, he put his lips around the straw.
“You must finish it all.” The nurse smiled, and again he thought that there was something familiar with those eyes, that face and those quite big teeth. He had seen them somewhere before, and just as he fell into slumber, he recalled a moment – but disregarded it as hallucination – wherein he had shaken the hands of a man with just that hair and those eyes and that face.
3
Hizaki had not expected to wake up again, but he did. At first he thought it was the land of the dead, or hell, or heaven, or wherever the dead people go; for Hizaki believed in a land of the dead, he believed in the immortal human soul, foolish as he was and plagued by bourgeois romanticism, but when he noticed he was still in the very same room and that the attending nurse was still that strange person with the fluffy red hair, he realised he was not dead at all. Did it just fail? Where they going to try again?
But hitting him like bullets from a sub-machine gun came reality bursting into his bubble of inexcusable self-pity:
“We have given you a drink that makes you unable to die – what they’d call immortal. Nothing you do will ever kill you. You will live forever. You asked for death and to be banished from this world – we give you eternal life and suffering. You ask us for solutions, and we give you all there is: struggle, torments and horror. You wanted an easy way out, to get out, jump off the sinking ship: we put you into the storage space, we blocked the exits, we turned you back onto the only road; and you will thank us in the end.”
Tears wallowed out of his eyes.
“Cursed for eternity.” The nurse left the room.
;__;
Last seen: August 2009
Another fucking Summer.
The walls are closing in and whatnot. It is cold and wet here, and nearby the churning masses of a sewer, more like a river, of green glowing frothing water is passing by. And this is as far as you can get from reality at any given time. An inconsistent morass of imagined adventures, of faceless shallow characters with no depth and no qualities of any worth, a pastiche of a rose-tinted memory brought back from the past that never was in a cloud of nostalgic euphoria.
And when thus one encounter the images of closeness and connection, that which exists only between the other – anything not-me – it becomes again clear that any attempts at anything is a waste of time. Any muscle movement is a waste of time. The bitterness from inside grows, soon to engulf everything in flame, a narcissistic derangement, or the opposite, a self-loathing trip to memory-land, the pasture is always greener on the other side of the river; for always the present appears dry and uninteresting, an indeterminable period of waiting, a waiting for what, one asks oneself, but there is no answer to be given, no hope to hold onto, no reason to bother. Everywhere those sick little runts that scurry back and forth like rats, like dogs, rabid and manic chased by their misdirected instincts, sickness and vileness all around; over there, a politician, telling lies now once more, and there, an economics professor, jotting down his diseased mind on paper, soon for that to be rewarded; and there, those people that are not me, always going about their little adventures.
It is the eternal enigma of the external, of the other; that which happens behind the closed doors and beyond the reach of my eyes, in the corridors of loss and loneliness where only my mind plays at repeat the morbid scenarios I envision. Behold, their touch like a leper’s kiss, their eyes empty yet their voices vibrating with emotion, faked they say, probably that is no exaggeration, and like puppets they dance mindlessly to the piping that through time and space perpetuate itself, the ceaseless reverberations of the mind’s electric pulse, oh, will they ever stop—and there, at the street corner, a little set of stairs, they sit in a row, cigarettes in mouth, discussing their imbecilic triviality heralding their vanity, so to say, a figure across the street, in the rain with umbrella in hand, sing to himself his mother’s bed-time rhymes, and in through a door he vanish, to his life, his little universe, distant and lost.
Drifting through the void that surrounds us all, a void filled with mystery, uncharted dimensions, twists and turns along long empty corridors ending with that bright-green emergency exit-sign, one contemplates the nonsense for no reason save that one cannot help it. Two people meet and caress, kiss, their lips they touch, sickening, yet, confusing; how to react to such a sight, what do they feel as they do that, nervous? Are they shaking to their bones, are they filled with happiness? Tricked by the human bodies home-manufactured drugs, seduced, sedated, tranquilised from the horrors that surrounds them, the fighter-jets that roar past a distant memory then, in that moment, a unity, a strength, that of the union between them, how I regret everything I have ever said and done, everything was always just a mistake.
Moment of Clarity.
The trees are moving in the wind that gathers its strength over the lake where waves rise and fall like backs of monstrous serpents here and there crowned by white manes. If I were to open my mouth I could surely taste the water; that polluted algae-rich water; a hint of iron, like licking the steel of a street lighting pole during a cold winter. The wind is quite chilly, even though it is June. The sky is covered in clouds, ominously dark with lighter specks. Someone comes up to me from behind.
“Admiring the view, eh?” he asks innocently. We are standing on a small wooden dock that has seen better days. Some huddled shapes are scurrying across the street behind us in anticipation of the coming rain.
I say nothing.
“Looks like there’ll be rain.”
He states it plainly. There’s no feeling in his voice. “We better go inside”, he adds. I turn around, and his bespectacled visage radiates a kindness hitherto unknown to me. Thus I follow him up on this the day of judgement.
From the balcony of his flat the view is spectacular. The city is eerily quiet and there is scarcely a soul out on the streets. It’s nearing noon according to the clock on the wall in his living room. There is no furniture in his flat. His kitchen lacks everything apart from the basic fixtures. There are no dinner plates, no table, no chairs and the floors and walls are devoid of everything, even dust, as if set apart from time and existence itself. He stands next to me as we spy over the empty city during this the last breath of existence. A car or two roll by on the road below, driving recklessly in a battle against time, a battle where time always has the upper hand, this unstoppable force that stabs the seconds into our flesh. We are fortifications under endless siege. An old woman runs by, shouting the names of what must be some relatives she is desperate to find. If we could see through walls we’d see families and friends and lovers and all the population huddling together, waiting, waiting for that unimaginable horror that they know will come, and they know that when time stops they will have regretted everything.
“There’s a certain romantic air to it,” he says, smiling, and the way his mouth moves as he speaks those words it is enthralling, exciting, a piece of art so wonderful, “even though it’s all so final, it is also as if there never was a day before, all the sins of yesterday are forgotten and pardoned today, all the crimes are undone.”
“Are you not afraid?” I ask. I have to ask. He seems to take it so lightly.
“Why would I be?” is his damning reply, and with a majestic move of his arm, he clears away some rain drop that stained his eyeglasses. “There’s nothing to fear, not here, not now.”
Speechless and confused, I look down from the balcony. We are fourteen stories above ground. The view sure is nice, but the landscape is bleak. It’s early spring, trees are green and yet… there’s something in the air, something sinister.
“We’ll be all right”, he adds. He puts his arms around me from behind. Whispers in my ear: “There’s nothing to worry about.”
And when so it happens, the unthinkable that presents itself as the roar of a hundred jet-fighters flying over the city, and the earth trembles and the city falls into darkness as electricity cuts out, in his embrace the ultimate security, even in the last moments, before the whiteness of eternal winter come to slain all that is colourful and rich, everything that is optimism and hope. And in its wake the melting snow reveal scorched wastelands, in a second spring the rippling stream zigzag through the skeletal remains of an extinct life form.
What do the blind really see in their dreams
Vapid dreamers soon bored with the conventions of conspiracies and masturbatory self-insertion fantasy found themselves walking in single file towards the tall factory chimneys that like the legs of God penetrated the clouds well into the stratosphere. As they walked up the road through whose cracks grew nettles and black mushrooms they sang eerie songs blaring forth their optimism for the future in no uncertain terms. Over there, beyond the barbed-wire perimeter fence, they could be shaped, engineered, into the perfect machines, the new worlds artists, critics and philosophers, the arbiters of truth and decency, every last one full of the most exotic intoxicants.
Voodoo Smile
From hazy dreams he awoke to the incessant whispering of children. Shrill obnoxious voices calling out for sacrifice, for blood, and he knew it was all that books fault, that damned volume that looked so much like any pseudo-religious mumbo-jumbo you could pick up at the nearest bookstore, discount price and all. But it was not your average quackery, it was something more, that volume whose covered purported it to be a scientific inquiry into the history and development of some voodoo-religion. Every other page was written in a crabbed penmanship, interspaced at random with drawings of religious symbols, open chest cavities and what he could think of as nothing but torture manuals. Those horrendous annals were written in a tongue unfamiliar, but it might have been some form of degenerate Latin, perhaps, he hopefully thought, it was just the cursive that rendered it even more alien than Arabic, he was certain no human hand could have made those lines, could have carved them deep into the thick paper with such elegance…
The voices where whispering again. An entire kindergarten of dismembered child voices speaking, sometimes screaming, shrill and sharp like the edges of a chef’s most cherished knives, sometimes they started singing in uncanny unison demanding of him sacrifice, demanding the blood of all his friends, all mentioned by name, and at each name in their voices he sensed a hunger, an animal thirst, insatiable and impossible to resist forever. They were ever-patient and this was already the third week since he bought that book – curse that book, damn it; fruitlessly he had tried to chuck it into the river, but as he stood there next to the roaring traffic, he found he could not do it. He wanted to, he tried to, but he could not make his muscles move in the appropriate way, it was as if he was under a spell, under the control of something else.
He pleaded to the voices of the children singing in chorus for their monstrous bloodlust to be satisfied to leave him alone, to let him sleep. Chatting between themselves the daemon children, as obnoxious and unnerving as real children, finally agreed to go silent for the rest of the night if he promised to bring them at least one sacrifice by tomorrow. He were to leave the body in the basement. Not having slept more than three hours for the entirety of the past week, he caved in to their demand, he agreed, he would do it, he would do everything they wanted if only they let him alone for now, let him sleep and rest, and he let his resistance go, he let that force invade his mind and his body like maggots and worms and bacteria invade a decaying body. Tomorrow, he would do it, yes, he’d take that knife and visit one of his useless vile friends – what good are friends to you when you can never sleep? Their voices as annoying as those damnable daemon’s; kill them all for just a moments rest—
Don’t care.
No one cares. There’s no reason to utter a single syllable. All for naught. And the chav scum comes and goes from their flat, they ought to be eviscerated like fishes; the ventilation spreads the sick smell of cigarettes. Destroy…
Digging (Part III)
Towards a planet far-off from the human realm our loyal steed, our dear space-travelling plesiosaur journeyed, its eyes like yellow lanterns illuminating the eternal night of the interplanetary voids; and soon, we saw it, a dark planet far from any star, heated by an enormous network of thick pipes, where wide avenues cut valleys through an immense urban jungle of well-lit building blocks rising like trees and rock fragments sharp and tall out of an algae-covered swampland, where the plants grew thick and sinister with a hint of forgotten prehistory. Lamps shaped like glowing pale-blue-green fishes of never-before seen kind lined the tree-lined boulevard that eight lanes wide and nearly car-empty cut a straight line from the park where we softly landed towards the extravagant Hall of the People, wherein the Room of Concubines – all scantily clad young men with hair like peacocks and eyes lurid with lust for the most obscene and base – we found the man we were looking for, Priest of Sector Nix-17, Yueki-al-Kirrei, under whom the forces holding animosity towards the Evil Ones and their wicked Natural Order were organised.
He was busy, he told us, and we were sent to wait in his Waiting Room, whose grand veined rock walls were polished smooth and slick and covered with textile hangings red and yellow, interrupted here and there by portraits showing the wholesome shapes of the rulers of other galactic sectors. In the lofty ceiling there unravelled a vulgar panorama of nameless perversions and forbidden sinful pastimes. We sat silently on a cosy massive sofa in the light of live candles, blood-red in phallus shapes, and waiting patiently for the Priest to be done with his rectal inspections, and indeed soon we stood face to face with this handsome person. He told us it was not yet time for attack, but that for the time being, we could stay in his care, if only we too don those strange outfits and submit to his sexual harassment. The price was not much to pay, indeed we found the premise alluring and exciting, so we accepted his offer, and he jokingly inferred after a loud and shrill laughter, that we’d have to learn to walk in heels, for this was no place where men’s feet were spared.
The Horror at Barter’s Beach
»Do you think it is really dead?« the tall kid cautiously asked as they stood before the beast that lay prostrate on the rocks a stones throw from the beach. It was a hideous form, dark-brown and clad with fine yellow hairs. The body was at least fifty feet long and had a series of strange appendages protruding from the most confusing places.
»Of course it is dead!,« the short kid said. »Do you really think it would lay here, thrown up on the rocks with its belly open, if it were not?«
There was a big rift down the middle of the thing, a cut that appeared more like the work of some sadistic murderous claw than the work of sharp rocks; it cut right through at least two of the appendages, revealing a strange white tissue that had the soft mushy consistency of maggot mucus or porridge, and from these wounds it poured out in vile-smelling tracks winding their way down the bloated belly. It was brown, but it was not a normal brown hue. It was the brown of a drowned human corpse in late stages of decomposition.
»We should go…« the tall kid said.
The short kid could not let his eyes off that hideous thing.
It had a head, a horrible head like that of a horse, a head on the top of a thick neck with a long yellow-white mane down what must be the spine – vertebrae poked out of it in places – which was about four feet long. After that begun the fat body that had the form of a thick maggot, a body divided into abnormally uneven segments, some short, some long, and from several places protruded stumps of bone coloured in shifting pink and white. He could not let his eyes off that hideous form. He was spellbound.
The tall kid, frightened by this horrific scene and the unknown monstrosity they now stood face to face with, wanted to go away as quickly as humanly possible.
»Let’s go already!« he shouted. But the short kid, who, with his ugly dog-like face and features frozen in a peculiar horrified gaze, did not seem to hear him. The tall kid decided he would have to go and get help.
He was gone no more than ten minutes, but when he returned, the short kid was nowhere to be found.
*
It was another ten days before the short kid was found. The smelling corpse of the rotting sea creature – the likes of which no scientists had ever before encountered, and tissue samples from which were returned revealing no known relatives or even similarities to anything previously known – was eventually towed out to sea by three local fishing vessels. It was when the big vile body was tumbling on the water that one of the fishermen aboard caught a glimpse of the jacket covered with colourful sports logotypes. They immediately stopped what they were doing, got in a dory and went off to inspect it closer.
The short boy was dead. His face was pale blue. Doctors later determined he had died from asphyxiation. In his lungs were found a large amount of the anomalous mucus from the beached carcass, and his eyes were bright red with some inflammation. Something else was peculiar: his eyes, they no longer had any lids. He appeared to, by all accounts, have walked into the monstrous thing and asphyxiated from the rancid fat oily white flesh as he let it engulf him! What happened to his eyes, no one ever knew, but it was not the only thing that was off: inside his body, he had no liver and no kidneys, despite this there were no scars, no incisions, and his face was forever constricted in a final display of horror, as though he had seen eternity and the fate of humanity and returned from the uncharted black abysses from which no one can return sane. His funeral was held with a closed casket, because no matter what the diligent men at the funeral home did, they could not get that open mouth to close, they could not make that twisted expression of ultimate fear and desperation go.
