Anonyma Page 4

  Loving him is a large, senseless feeling. I fall in this deep-pink passion, swelling breasts at the suddenness, the violence. At once I would flee and succumb to this advance. There is love and hate in it. Struggling against the quiet nausea of submission, weighed down by the immensity of him, he slides me forward against the upholstery, twisting me on my stomach.

  Those who build a world of objects can only love like this. He removes his black clothes with startling swiftness. I await his disaster of intimacy. Penetration, and the ache of a hideous heart. He yanks my hair back, disheveled, a sweeping pendulum of strands. The madness opens up in him. His cock is hard as stone. He shoves himself inside of me, his pale prisoner, holding me down in ecstasy.

  The black celestial hue resumes its lividity.

  He is rocked back by a vision of clouds traversing the cosmos. Cocks and roaches and kings of old worlds, arms lifted in oppression of pleasure, lips of death pressed against their hearts. Awakening from this vision, transfixed by my gash, he hears me choke out, “The gash in me is as the eye in heaven.”

  Sickness seeps into me, awake in the multiplicity of love. Vulvic magic turns and pulls him back, a scorpion coach down ice cold halls. A finger to the face, with venom gloves in the mouth and then the slit. They are the slaves of dreams and greying shrouds. Voiceless vermin chew at their toes. A mouth appears and closes in the darkness. Laughter echoes off of the empty plates. I never wanted to be part of this dark magic.

  His fever is strangled by the festive night. He holds my soul against my own desire, drinks from the holy gash, as red as madness-- a sea of concentration in womb-glass. He continues his gothic recess, tongue writhing in and out of me. He pours the blessed milk of moons over my breasts, dreaming of fetal wonderment, petals, ash, and oak. My skin glows blue and then white, womb water bursting forth from her netherworld. He takes some in his mouth. Worms leave the milk through unviolent effort.

  “I am a mortal on a slab,” he whispers, lacking the will to know the magic night. I await the birth of a mother mist. Thirsty wings, devoid of light, beat in the corner. A mountain’s glowing fire glows from the nearby window. Moon rays fall on my breasts. The crystals on the sill corrode and burst, amethystine shrapnel lodging into them.

  There the motions grow, man to woman, letting dismay wash over a broken womb. Cradle not his madness in that den of life. I no longer want to know love in ashes, guiding the improbable with a grey worm mind-- aloof and afoot in the muted crawl with no part to play in this mud—no dreams of clenching or regret.

  A thousand eyes and mouths sing out, an explosion in Dionysian space, sound covering us with the weight of an opaline shroud. I whisper, through the pain.

  “The gash in me is as the eye in heaven.”

  I fill myself with the lightness I once new, while dancing. A blossoming, frothy feeling in the hands and legs. It will not be long before I am mangled, unfinished. Before he breaks my body with magic. He twists my head around, running his tongue across my teeth and down my throat. I feel some dark design crest in his energy. Folds of black cloth curl betwixt cunt and sadness. The night is luminous. Moths swarm against the window. I watch them in a haze of hunger. He can almost feel another time against his chest. Another name on his lips. This I have known forever. Holding back his own stream of horror—of tears—he reaches around, holding my breasts, riding harder.

  The silhouette of time stands by the door. He cums inside of me, his voice a burnt husk of memory, crying out from his lost internal wilderness. Pausing a moment, he pulls out, pressing his head against my back.

  “I love you,” he says quietly.

  I know he is not speaking to me.

  VII.

  I get that sense under false light. That I am as unnatural to them as the ceiling yellow is to the stars. An invention—no—an abomination of men, forged in-hand for uses guiding them toward their own impatient stardom.

  He bought the dress for me. The perfume, the necklace. All his tastes. I speak no opposition. They are beautiful. More so than I feel worthy to wear. I think rather that these items wear me, and I am no more than a warm hanger.

  He rages. I can never know why. Pacing back and forth, he begins to let out his usual exasperated sighs. This is before so many things. The time before my education, so I speak. I ask him what is wrong.

  Nicholas remains quiet, pacing from the camera to the midway place in front of me. Continuing to check in the viewfinder, he clearly isn’t satisfied with what he sees. I shift uncomfortably.

  “Don’t move.”

  “I thought maybe if I put my arm here?”

  “Be quiet.”

  He stands, with one hand on his hip, scraping at the loop of his belt. He approaches me, looming over—his shadow cast over my head and chest. He closes his fist and delivers one hard punch to my face.

  The force is enough to drive me into shock, but not enough for me to black out. The pain- the pain is beyond comprehension. I lift my hands to cradle my nose, but he shoves them back in place. Blood gushes from my mouth, where I bit down on my tongue.

  “Stay where I have you.”

  This is the strongest I have ever felt fear inside of me. I struggle to contain the guttural shaking brought on by the assault. Nicholas stands behind the camera, peering into the viewfinder. The tell-tale clicks commence, and I am staring into space, speckled by aura. I will not move but fly over this mess. It is the first time I fly outside of myself to escape the pain.

  Nicholas says he needs me in this way. That I have some unspoken thing in me, reflecting in the unlit pool of time. I know better—know that there is nothing so brilliant in me that could pull the shadows out from unknown places. Not to sing, or laugh, or dream. No—I am, in this agony, without magic of my own. But I raise up a little thing in me that lives as purest magic.

  ▼

  I am Anonyma. A falsehood through a lens.

  Washing in ashes, choking on the fumes.

  Posing with dead bodies, defiled by rotting fingers.

  Thorned wires cutting into my naked skin.

  My legs beaten dead with hammers, with hands.

  The cult. The cult. They are a cult of madness. I try to avoid the fetid dwellings of his acolytes by the twisted morass on the outskirts of the city, no matter how often he insisted that she make nice with them. Coreya is more intelligent, more corrupt. More knowledgeable in the lore and twisted ethics of the book, able to quote sections at length and uphold herself in every exchange.

  Coreya wants me with her in the evening. She means to walk under the moon in hatred, cursing several victims with their names. I am not afforded my own, and yet this is what she asks of me. To accompany her in this dismal affair. I have had enough of quiet despairing as I paste on smiles. Enough of false compassion for these—sickly and inbred.

  Coreya is a freckled ghost. Always hopping and skipping and cutting toes from toads, and other such natural horrors. I would not say I hate the girl, had I a decade of distance to remove her from the here and now.

  I envy women of that kind. Are they in on the torment, or merely too stupid to know what is being done to them? How can they see themselves as willing participants when all evidence points to the contrary? And yet, here I am. A willing participant, but without joy. Without the free spirit of the inimitable cool, outspoken girls around me. I am not one of these.

  This is where Nicholas Bezalel fails in his imitation. And it is that—imitation of higher art—a higher man. Von Aurovitch was no man of pomp and circumstance. He had no harem of devotees. None that he would allow within his realm of living. It is true that he had his admirers. Mostly among the intellectuals in the art community. Those obscure few who saw the depths before madness took hold and left him to his hermetic decrepitude. Not even historians know here his end occurred.

  Nicholas wants to be a hero. He wants this dark princehood in art and magic. He will not have it. This, I know. Because one without magic shows his hand. In this case, exposing his throat. We are in
a war of languages unknown, and he is losing at a faster pace than even his brilliant mind can recognize. He thinks himself a man of absorption, but he has no stomach for this kind of learning. There are those things that remain unreachable to the eyes and minds of men.

  I tell him I love him, and the heart blood pours through the soul’s umbilical. Up into the ether, blackest blackest blood. When it spouts, I hope they will not think less of me. I hope they will understand love, and this love, without disappointment.

  He has in him all the self-aggrandizement and obsession of the worst of accolades. This he hides masterfully, beneath a façade of reason. Or logic. Artifice, in its most loathsome form. He sets himself above all others, save for Von Aurovitch. Fancies himself the prodigal son. This will be his folly, and his finality. It betrays all that Von Aurovitch believed. I am no true fan, he says. For I cannot name every brush stroke, every sculpted mass, every creature! I cannot recite the passages in the adapted tongue. I cannot even hypothesize as to the inner thoughts of the blue lady. This, I tell him, so that I can let my ribs heal from the last. I know her through her eyes, even without the original to examine. The blue lady, her pain, her suffering—might Von Aurovitch have been such a horrid man as this? Or was her pain something deeper? Something of her own lifeblood, her own making? I will never know. One can only know themselves, and even this takes a degree of sorcery.

  There is little to be said of love in a feeble body. It is a repulsive, pulsating heap of disgrace and shame in the human sphere. Expectations? How might I have them, if they do not lead to a shadow, to a grave? They are lowered so quickly in an afflicted youth. The black cloud of dreams shields the golden possibility- that life, in all its glory, is possible to all, regardless of condition. But is this true? I think so. Though one will struggle, struggle to the end to see the clearing. The eternal blockage-doubt- will lead the feeble-bodied astray. Because it is all we here in the human sphere. All we know. That life, as it should be, is a foreign luxury, unavailable to us because we cannot reach, we cannot breath as the others. In this, we are the other. With only a dream that other worlds linger in the dark distance, calling us home.

  He penetrates me from behind, and I remember why I stayed. There was not a drop of magic in the world so potent as his touch. No matter the mass of evil in it, the persuasion, or the looming agony.

  He smashes the book into my head. I fall into the vase, shattering it and myself over the marble. A single shard leaps up in eccentricity, lodging itself daintily above his stomach. He pulls it out. The telephone rings. I stare, breathing and blinking and breathing and blinking, as he walks over and picks up the receiver. With the eerie calm, he asks who is calling.

  “It’s your father,” he says, holding the receiver down to me. My father is dead. He laughs and hangs up the phone. I lift my bleeding arm from the floor. As I open my mouth speak, Nicholas wipes the blood away with his kerchief. Every touch turns my stomach black.

  At the root of all things was love, despite the difficulty. Our most valued moments where those of a sitting silence. Merely being together in that most basic state of togetherness. No words, no worry. Only presence and acceptance. I hope, in that moment, that such a thing is possible with my daughter. But this is the dream of agony that stirs up after dread-soaked dawns and memory play.

  VIII.

  I see myself as darkness in the lightest eyes, and this is the trick of the grey soul—to blind the innocent. But was I innocent? Seeking out such majestic, elevated company? Not in the same way as Coreya, or the others. Not to be cradled and launched into artful prestige. Only to love and be loved. In this way, perhaps I was more selfish than even they.

  His incantations brought applause. I thought nothing of it until returning home. A small child cradles a dead kitten, screaming of the “bad noise” from the woods. Repulsion, shame become my waking realities. The smells, the sounds, the emotions—always descending to the great black morasses I have yet to escape.

  I fail. I see myself from the outside in. This is why I fail. I wake up, thick with milk.

  He wants to tear the heavens from my eyes. The crown from my soul. I have not even come to know these things within myself as I should have.

  Do I hate him? I will have to think on it. No—I don’t believe so. I have made little room for hatred in the soul corrections of age. I cannot even piece together his face in my mind. I see nothing but an odious blur of white and yellow, hovering where his form and features used to be.

  I could awaken within myself, a living woman. Awaken, and walk out the door right in front of me. I shatter mankind over myself like blue beads.

  Breathing in black smoke was never a desire of mine, but I make note of the creeping urges that return, like so many bugs out from the subterranean mist.

  My cheeks are sunken in now, --deep, deep. Jaundiced, anguished, delirious from the noise. I imagine blood as powder, contemplating the movement of ruin in a flash of red dust. He knows how I abhor the primordial slime. Where eyes are masks, not mirrors, and the dead things creep unto the light to sip-sip-sip it to oblivion. These are the halls in which I am left behind. I can barely remembered when I danced.

  I escape to the palace of no-man, where they bow to me. Spectral walls close in on all, but not without caution. The vivid body, disemboweled as a majestic thing, Pussy swollen from the constant pounding. Living in the glow of the false reflection—self on earth, alone.

  I ask too many questions of eternity, he says. I open my mouth to reply and it is met with a closed hand. I think back to the day I found the strength to leave him to his world of ice. His face—pure pallor-- stone in a sea of white flakes, raining down as gently as my peace had come to me from nowhere. I had in me a dormant resolve, set on fire.

  The enigma that was Nicholas Bezalel had calcified, attaining some archaic permanence that was impossible to break. The once jolly glint in his eye suggests constant mockery. His smile, although stunning under the stage lights and as wide as ever, decidedly sinister-- pallor and the gauntness cheeks, all haunting. One would assume that twenty years had passed, rather than eight. What I once regarded as his transient darkness had become a permanent fixture. Undoubtedly his idealism remained, but whether or not it had taken an insidious turn, I simply cannot know.

  But don’t I?

  He presses the thin knife to the skin beneath my breasts, between my ribs. The skin flinches at the touch—cold metal, a finger of dark fortune, sliding from place to place.

  “Is this the way it should be?” he asks. Nothing falls from me. Not words, but terror. I know this court of chaos—his mind in ecstasy. It is no place for me to be safe. I have never felt more powerless. More alone. He drops the knife to the floor. “Keep it,” he tells me, and leaves the room. I feel my mother, my grandmother, the great mothers of unconscious time screaming.

  He walks around in the daze of loving me, but believing this as it is would be a mistake. I think like this, in permanence, because some things thrust in my direction can’t be real. Am I not in dread of life as much as he? Did I not stand aloft, before the markings, accountable as myself? Did I not love Von Aurovitch as much as he? Did I not see that he loved me, and decide the same for my own reasons? The blame for evil must be put upon the self as much as outward. I would have walked away, had I had a mind for preservation. I spin and wretch and revel with this chaotic heart of mine. There is dead sound there. An absence of love where I say that it is so. Will I not pay for this as strongly as he will for all he does? Some fates are intertwined in devastation, but not doom. There may be some living purpose to the gross entanglement of hearts. Even with the spouting of black and the dribbling of hateful blue. I am Anonyma. The every-girl. I see and I have seen and they will, too.

  Clouds gather in the corridor of daydreams. I am suspended in pink foam again. I have no need for such conversations. Words are confusion. The tools of deep mistrust. I whirl in worlds of silence in my heart. Touch and touch alone as seeds of feeling. When we sit in ways
like this, I have no doubt. No fear. In his eyes there was forgiveness. In quiet arms, eternal peace.

  Is it Nicholas? Could it be? Or some strange mirage of man? A fit of the old master’s hand and mine, conjuring up some figure from the deep?

  Nicholas wishes to penetrate the higher essence if my existence. To drain me of that magnificent unknowable element that I do not know myself. An earl of falsehood, tongue-tangled in the eruption of black locks on my head.

  I live in a colorless anxiety, envying golden death. All doves rot under the eye of time. I have not traveled lightly.

  With a reliance on God because I cannot rely on myself in this weakness, I ask only this. That I be reborn in my skin as the strongest bird of fire—that I may emerge from this dust, all I was ever meant to be. The seed of this state is buried deep. I know it lives inside, somewhere, though years of journeys seeking outward led me astray. I come to the wall of the abyss as close to the bottom as those perilous times. How it has come to be again, I have no idea. I hope that I will not need to know all of that. I do hope I can remember how to climb out.

  He spits into my hair. Then the rest of them follow suit. The warm tendrils of goo run down over my painted face. I would cry out, but this is my predicament. It would not make sense to many, why this continued. But they do not know the prescient stink of loathing when it faces inward. That is not to say that there is no resolve, pounding out from the inner chambers of my chest, screaming. He will not prove it to the earth. He will not prove it to the stars. He will not prove it to the spirits lurking over. They know my name.