The apocalypse dawns on the horizon. Blackness. Glimmering blackness. Fish rise to the surface of the sea. The people gather on the deck.
Paracel walked straight down the stairs. She turned a corner into another corridor and bumped into a women coming the other way. The woman paused, apologised and continued down the corridor. Paracel stopped to watch her walk, one foot in front of the other a little too fast, so she looked as though at any moment the forward momentum would propel her SMACK, face down onto the linoleum floor. Turning away Paracel walked onward until she came to a set of stairs, missed the lip of the first step down and cracked her head open on the last stair as she slumped onto the floor below. Through shuttered eyes, blurred by the ache she could now see two women ahead of her, passing from sight around yet another corner.
Triam lives on a monsoon plateau. One could say that the monsoon has plateaued where he lives, forever blowing from the south west, forever bringing the rains, the wet monsoon. Everything is so so damp. Everything is so so wet. Because of this Triam goes about in a plastic raincoat, an emergency poncho of epic proportions.
You would be an illumination of a fantasy. You would be a channel between two tracts of land where aquatic cannibals feast on glittering flesh. You would be many. You would be few. You would be showering in golden fluids dripping from the mouths of your own monstrous incantations. You would be chanting through gales of sea winds birds flapping in your face fish slapping you with their tails. You would be speaking of scientific graphs but you would be screaming about statistical epiphanies that have been revealed to you by your own selves.
She woke the next morning tense with her own weight and awkward on her bones. As she eased herself into a cold part of the bleached white sheet that had not yet been stained by her nigh terrors, the ship shuddered a little. A tilt ever so slight, as though it was following the curvature of the earth. Her clammy hands rushed to the sides of the bed and clamped there, while the vertigo subsided.
The currents of the morning fish flow slip and slide. They jump and fall like butter off a knife that slides down
into the sea, a glimmering slick across the surface. The fish in shapes like a spinning cadence fly forward drawn by the warm currents ocean encircling flows and distances make easy by the fins and tails of the many. More than once they encounter others and slip through mingling with an abundance of scales and panels of light.
Soon, Paracel wakes again in her cabin. Lilting and rocking her head across the pillow until she could locate her surroundings in her memory. Aboard the ship Paracel found waking every morning somewhat unnerving, searching around for her bedside table and finding where the light coming in she would remember that the sun rose on the other side of her sleep in the Caribbean. Every morning when Paracel rose, she would walk out onto her private balcony, rest on the railing and watch the morning currents fill with fish.
***
There’s something about you. You should strip away those layers and layers of clean crisp shirts and hats and socks and gloves to reveal hard heated flesh. You should be inhaling that smoke dulling its colours in your grey metallic belly synthesising it into protein and rubber
***
Triam has many many things. He has personal belongings. He has objects that express his disapproval. He has things that express his contempt. He has things that one need not give a name to. Objects one cannot give a name to. He has inanimate material objects. He has sentient beings. He has things that are unspecified. He has objects for use in circumstances. Things for use in conditions. Objects for hearing things. Things that appear to be just one of those things. Objects that have a thing about them. Indeed Triam has many, many things (and objects).
***
You might ease off those tight brogues and tenderly tread along the lined patterns in the carpet in your socks. You might enter and exit with few or more people or stand silently in the corner grinding your teeth. But you won’t. Because your legs, are wheels now covering distances measured by the circumference of the globe.
***
Triam has in his special coat, many pockets. One of those pockets, is a pocket within a pocket and inside that pocket there is another pocket until there is a labyrinth of pockets that are all in each others pockets. Triam has these many pockets for his many things. He needs places to put all the things that he has, all the objects he has accumulated over the years. They all need their place. All these objects need a place to be put, and the things need a place to be allocated. There are exact systems of places and locations for things to be put. Precise openings and clear cavities. Triam has documents, files and charts, graphs and keys that locate each of these vague obscure places. There are certain pockets in Triam’s coat that perhaps are not on his actual person. Some cannot be detected on his material form, they are areas beyond woven threads and seams, beyond a pattern cut and shaped around his body. Some of these places are regions beyond the monsoon plateau, localities that cover plains that begin where the plateau ends, that tessellate down the mountain all the way to the sea. Inside Triam’s pockets there is much more than he bargained for. There is much much more. Inside each of his pockets is more than just a location, a spot on a map. Inside his pockets there is a glow. There is humanity incandescent and unbounded, except as they are bound by the additions of jewels to their eyes. The additions of clod of dirt, a smear of musty water, a few grains of sand.
The smoke easy was hidden on the 3rd deck of the ship. In between the pensioner patroned slots halls and the vast bowling alleys, where minxes roamed in golden cages Only seen at certain times of night after the other drinking spots had stopped serving scotch and gin and after the velvet curtains in the theatres had been drawn again the silken and besuited bodies would wander the halls, traipsing up and around, all laughing and collapsing into each other until they happened upon the secret smoke den, the place of easy late night leisure, the smoke easy.
Paracel would never walk with the others, she knew already knew their steps. She always arrived first and sat in the corner. And it was no short time before voices inflected in the smoke and whispered incantations promised to last until dawn brimmed into the room.
***
Somewhere, somewhere else on this ship – Oh no oh no oh lord oh wow oh lord oh oh oh oh. fuck, oh lord. Oh fuck – is Ted. This is what Ted says when he dances. When he shimmers and shakes. It’s what he says when he gyrates his numb hips in his metal wheelchair, when he flings his torso this way. Sometimes he grabs the arms of the chair and raises himself up, elevates himself to the chest height of all those wonderful fucking amazing babes surrounding him. But now he slumps down again and just jingles his foot while the blood runs back into his ass. There’s a tingling sensation in his legs, he can feel it. Oh no oh no oh wow, I can fucking FEEL IT. He yells and yells out over the loud loud sounds that vibrate his face. I CAN WALK. I CAN WALK. But the bass covers up his evangelical pronouncements. It gets right down into his throat and silences his shouts changing the structure of the vibrations in his larynx. He can’t walk and he cant shout so he thumps his fists against the arms of his chair, little beats of sweat jump off his forehead showering him in glowing salty rosaries, refracted through the laser lights. He watches the rumps of flesh pound and gride on the floor, emanating a wet hot heat. He watches this for a long time, watching how the energy emanates.
***
Underneath what is a vast quantity of paper. Under which lies yet more of the written word, stacked neatly in patterns is Triam’s collection of books. His novels, paperbacks, hardbacks, romances, maps, textbooks, exercise books, books of letters from lovers and instructional novels on how to reconfigure your pacemaker to receive bright signals from pirate radio stations straight into your heart. Amongst all these was the story of Eulalia, the speaker, the orator, the babblemaker and soulshaker. Triam, happening upon that book found himself drawn to it in unconscious kinetic memory of having picked it up in some other time and place.
Eulalia, she traversed nine lands in search of her own heroism only to find it hidden. Deeds done were laid before her, lands conquered and prices paid for treaties and accords, agreements and endorsements, acquiescence and covenants. Eulalia did not find such repetitions of quantity pleasing. She echoed her displeasure to their slavering jaws and soon after in the night they took her body and they tore it. They smoked her body like a cod until plumes of purple smoke rose from her organs and choked her.. They cut her body away, flesh caught on splinters of bone, curling at the edges with flame. Finally in one smooth unending motion the multitudes took up their swords and scored her head from her neck. They watched it roll down the hill to come to rest, staring in blank wonderment at the snow which then fell from the sky. The multitude took no pause in wiping their swords and making to move on from her flame sculpted form but no sooner had they placed one foot before the next, were birds engulfing their skies. Crying out from ledges and windowsills, balconies and turrets, casement and gabels. The glittering whiteness of their features, pricked with small black eternal eyes, the multitude were blinded. Sight of their new lands monumentally deprived.
The next warm and wet morning, Triam found his eyes choked with salt, borne on the monsoon winds from the sea. He used it to season his morning meal, no more no less.
***
Ted is still watching. And as he watches it increases, and he starts again, oh yeah, oh no oh oh oh wow oh lord, oh no oh no, and soon he breaks and shimmers and shakes again, rising in his mind upwards over the crowd circling. Closing his eyes he jerks and flinches this way and that, jolting against the multitude of bodies that twitch in response, pulsing harder and harder with the upsurge in sound. They throw themselves together at the wall of sound, their hot heated flesh wrinkling and stretching with each cadence. With each crescendo, cracks appear. And soon, inevitably they start to fracture. Breaking and crackling with heat they begin to heal together. Parts of each other bound together forged in the hot hot heated rhythm of the land they dance on. Sliced and mixed together they intersect in infinite ways bringing together new bodily inflections. Ted has legs now. Ted had more arms now. Ted is now more flesh than body and his body is a new landscape on the floor. A new shape of human flesh, a sea of pulp on the floor. Oh no oh fuck on wow oh lord oh wow. Oh WOW. I CAN FEEL IT BOY I CAN FEEL IT.
An ingenious combination of choral voices, hands raised towards glowing lights pulsing with the rhythms of our shared heartbeats. Thumping the air with your fists, I see you ride onwards laughing at epiphanies of amazement. Sweat streaks down glittered pastel facts impressed onto milk streaked walls. Rubbing against shuddering glass, rolling up against glo-mesh, lycra and sequins; a constant inability to see or hear brings forth and upwards an incendiary glow. Incensed by a whirligig progression of shapes and warnings you laugh louder. A shrieking mouthful of air punishes the pressure filled lungs of the many as we gulp at the fresh wind flailing through a broken window.
***
Still Paracel sits silent in her velvet corner, shadowed by the low light. Watching the smoke and liquor fumes combine into a mix ready for instantaneous combustion. Sliding under shirt collars and in between silken dresses and sticky night time skin. The infinite cellular combinations create a low murmur of perfumed magnificence and feeble bodies absorb it’s pungent strength.
Cued by the nearly dawning lights, Paracel raises her glass to her lips for the last time. She watches her hand, coils of smoke drifting off her hand down her arm, drawing her flesh into its powdery incandencence. She waits. The people see her form now, made of whispers floating towards them and they too wait and watch. Watch as Paracel mingles with all else, disappearing into warm vacant mists tempered by booze and lit by low lamps. Soon things are sliced by a bar of new sunlight from the dawn and the people shuffle away. Alone, Paracel’s rises and carrier herself in its new many cellular forms to bed in the cold light of the fluoro lit corridors.
***
Ted wakes sweat sticking his arms to his body. He wakes with a start and a wave of heat flays his face. He gasps and rolls over, out of the bed onto the floor. He drags himself to his chair and grasps upwards, sliding his numbness over the ground and then flipping himself around into the seat. He settles and sits for a moment, head spinning. He stares at the floor, at the light on the rich carpet. He looks up to the window. And out of the window he sees snow.
***
On the third morning Paracel woke from sleep still more clouded with troubles. Her eyes were clamouring for the light and yet her lids would not rise. She stood and with a hand still gloved from the night tore the sheets from her body, flinging them to the ground. She waited where she was, naked but for the gloves, staring behind closed eyes at where she knew the mirror still hung. Slowly she brought her hand to her eyes and felt for the impediment. Hard and crystalline, her eyes were encrusted, but not with the crumbling excrement of a night spent in terror but rather with multi-faceted jewels, infinitely reflecting themselves. As the light from the windows, rushed to her eyes Paracel could see behind her closed lids. Blue and green and red blending into an ecstatic performance of sightless wonder. She saw the deep midnight before day and Prussian marchers beating their feet against cold hard ground, gaining on a copse of trees, behind which stood an electric navy of landscapes. Sightless her visions showed her royal ice and powdery snow rushing over mountains and lakes and rivers, gullies and tributaries, watercourses and streams, rivulets and torrents, deluges and cascades, all forming new verdant estates fresh for capture by cardinals weighed down with stores of carmine and cherry picked in supple provinces. And she could see they carried with them wine from the stocks held in coral bays not far from here, and dark sanguine blood kept in pinkish light. All this was there before her and as she watched the caravan cross the plains she wondered as it started to know, where can they be so far from here?
That night Triam sat down next to Paracel. And they sat together there for a long time before either of them spoke. And then Triam said to Paracel. You called for me? Yes Yes, I did. And who are you? That is what I called you to ask. Yes. And as soon as Triam had sat down next to her, Paracel had felt a draught from somewhere. A slip of wind that had escaped from around the corners of a window. Can you feel that wind? Yes. Are you sure, can you feel it around your legs. Yes. It’s ever so slight. Its ever so thin. Yes. And after Triam had waited for those moments after he had sat down, he put his hand into his pocket and felt around. And inside his pocket he found a some things, a few grains of sand, a few flakes of salt, but nothing more. No there had been nothing more and it had only been the folds of his coat that had made it seem as though there was something there. Let me tell you. Yes I am listening.
You are a super fine string woven into a woman. You are an elasticated epiphany of glitter. You are a smoking gun from which has been shot chewing gum and multi coloured vomit. You are balancing on a rope made of your own disbelief. You are.
The girl beside him wakes and stares at Ted staring at the snow. She says, It snows everyday in this place. Every morning this cold wintery incandescence is in my eyes. It’s radiant. Ted? Ted? It’s sure radiant baby, it’s sure bright and radiant. Its radiant with heat baby. Heat heat heat, hotness baby its hot. hotness that blisters trails of flesh across salty tracts of land. Ted? she says. Ted? yes? I’m feeling good babe I’m feeling good. Ted? yes babe. And he draws out a blade, a glassy effortless blade. Calm but with swift decision he decapitates her in one smooth motion. One level stroke across her neck. Lying there she seeps, while blood and brine flow all over the sheets.
And finally incensed she says
“THIS LAND
THIS LAND IS THE BODY OF THE PEOPLES.
THIS LAND IS GOING TO BE RIPPED APART
AND WE WILL ALL GLOW LIKE FUCKING STARS IN THE BURNED HEAT, SALT MELTING INTO GOLD”
Calmer now she continues…
…and in the future things will tumble from the mouths of the many. Plural in their brilliance, a chorus of irreverent voices will rise from each of them. A polyphonic array of epiphanies will echo throughout the clouded skies. A new gust of wind will blow the door open and she will stand, caped and magnificent. She will be lit by the reactions of our vibrations with the sacred air. And the chemical iridescence will indicate no small feat of plural admiration. When I meet her I’ll ask her to call me Paracel.
