Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
OKAY YOU FUCKERS. Imagine this:
He's a man who's falling along a really tall skyscraper in NY(see) JACK
There's a girl looking up at the sky at the base of skyscraper "DD"
There are your 2 views.
DD is walking home. She feels rain pouring down on her. The skies pissing again. Punishment for what she's done. AIDS diagnosis irrelevant. I can fuck whomever I want. I'm going to go home and kill myself. I don't care if I'm bitch with a clit the size of the MOUNT Fuji. If I want to spread then I will spread like butter. She thought about butter. Her mother rubbing it on bread with a black eye. Her victimizer snoring in the other room. It's too late now. She looks at a boy kissing his girl. Bitch. I could make that boy happy. If only I wasn't a beautiful atrocity. My smashed womb. The dead baby in my toilet. The cum stains on my lips. Fuck the world. Fuck me.
He's falling. They say when you jump off a building the world slows down. Time stands still like a dead clock. He can feel a strange, smooth elegance. What an elegant way to die. What beauty in its decadence. They say suicide in Japan is a right of passage. He remembers the dying child. Its body like African diamond. Sinkable as the Titanic like a black hole in a distant galaxy. Its body withered in the Luanda sunshine. The hospital bed creaking. The snakes outside glistening. He took the photograph for the magazine but he never knew what happened to the child. The black boy that made his journalist career. Or was it a girl? Does it matter now. Not long to go now. The ground's getting closer.
DD YOU GOTTA CHILL. LET'S SWING. I WANT TO CUM INSIDE U BABE. SOON BABE :) I PROMISE. I'LL BLOW YOU. HOW MUCH??? 500. OK, HOW SOON U BE HERE BABE? TWENTY-FIVE, THIRTY. OK BABE, MY COCK IS BIG FOR YOU. I AM WAITING. She snaps phone shut. She coughs. And then she sees it. Grey and invisible. Starchild. Come to me. Let's dance honey. The child has no eyes, it is growing like a sad flower. It watches as she stoops to meet. She whispers, beckons to it. Walk inside me. Come back into me and let my heart strings erupt the echoes of my fucked soul. I am a delicate flower, play with me, the child sings telepathic. DING DING. BABE, I WANT TO BE INSIDE U. SOON. SOON YOU WILL FEEL MY BIG, HARD COCK MOVING INSIDE U. She clutches her stomach. It is a footprint inside of her. Startled and stillborn. Its remnants down the toilet. A soul in the shit. Screaming.
He remembers nothing but everything in an instant. Five hundred years pass silently. He feels anger, like he wants to break Mozart's fingers with razorblades. Why have I done this? I could've been President or at least a pope of Africa. He thinks of his ex-wife, her ice white nail polish glistening like the blind woman at an orgy. She was fucking hick. No, she doesn't deserve this attention. His first kiss. A corvette. Deborah's red soaked pink dress. His golf glove. No, what should he think about in his final ceremony? God. The meaning of it all. The Monkeys. No, no, no - this isn't what I wanted. I want to die like an Egyptian emperor (sic.) He thinks about the past. All the words of every novel he read spew before him like a vomit filled sea of indifferent impotence. The erection he had for Miss Hubert in 3rd grade. The sexual torment of a fucked dick. The click of a camera. The dead African child.
See when they told her she had the VIRUS the first thing she thought was fuck I guess I've got to fuck 10 guys not 5. She needs the money. Gotta pay the bills bitch, even if ur dying. There's a saying in the night game. 5 blows is 5 guys you're never going to see again. You see a lady likes to remember every man she fucks. She has a way of remembering. She remembers their breath. Not for his stench but for his memory. She remembers every man who never remembered her. She likes it that way. It makes her feel sensual. There was this one. He smelt of fish. And another, airports. But her favorite - a one she always liked to think about, he smelt of her grandmother. She liked this one, it made her feel like her mother was singing to her under the moonlit filth of Harlem.
He didn't want to be a spectacle. He wanted it to be over like an injection. But these were his final moments. The last ticking of a clock before its batteries run out. He thinks about the man he would become. A gum stain skeleton. Broken bones smashed like a hot dog. Maybe a child would pass him and look at him and think god, another dead bird. He thought about flying. He was the first man in his family to fly. But was this how the devil fell? When he drifted into the underworld. He thought about the church. The holes the shafts of light penetrated through when the old man clutched ahold of his ball sack and told him to suck the serpent. He thought about all the birds he ever saw. My they were so good at the art of falling, so much better than him. To him - he even failed in death.
The little thing was faceless. But she knew it could've grown eyes. He held her as he fucked her quickly. Fiercely. He was one of those guys whose mothers never kissed them. And when he kissed the bottom of her back it was like being cut open with a carving knife. But she wasn't thinking about him or his smell. She was thinking about the child that swirled around her toilet bowl. YOU FUCKING BITCH YOU LOOK AT ME WHEN I CUM INSIDE YOU. BITCH. FUCK. She couldn't look at him. Not in his eyes. And as he beat her while injecting himself inside of her she felt like she too was swirling inside a toilet bowl. Only this bowl was filled with the waters of sadness and the excrement of human dreams. How could it have been so invisible? Like a piece of glue fastening a child's picture of their perfect family to a classroom wall. She never learned not much at the school. Only not to go to school. He pulled on his clothes as she lay on the bed like a piece of worn clothing. Tonight he would not wear her anymore. He would be her last dresser. Her skin sweater would need no more visitors to find its fit. She was walking to her own pool of water, the one that drained all through the city in the tears of everyone's lost Eden's.
What had he seen in that child? That pathetic excuse for a human. The walking corpse. Its listless eyes dead and soulless. Its skin painted black. They put make-up on it before they took the photographs. A final insult to its perverted memory. He could remember the flash. The expressionless face. The smile he wore as a disguise when he took the picture. This will make the cover. The way the child was frog marched back to the coffin bed where it laid. What did it think when the lens was painted at it, the exposure calculated in the winter heat? What did it want? Some water or something more? Something ancient. A kind of understanding between a tiger and the living animal whose inside it is eating. He remembered the dead tigers he photographed in China. Their god-like eyeballs. The honor they died with. He remembered the color of the tiger's eye. Would they see the same color when they examined his on the cold pavement? Would they bring tears to people's eyes? Could he at least be granted a few horrifying gazes in his final embarrassment.
She fell to her knees. She was looking down into the water. She wanted to find something human in there, in the silver water. She thought of the smile her child would have, its first words. The sights its precious little eyes might've seen. The blue sky of Central Park. The songbirds. Its playful first steps. The way it would grow like a tree. This was her tree. Her roots lay dormant in the cobwebs of her diseased womb. I could not carry you my child. I just could not carry you. God give me strength. She had lost God too. When you feel penetrated by a thousand penises, God loses confidence in you.
That was it! That was what he saw. He saw nothing in the child. So what did the world see when they called him a genius? What did they see in its eyes that he couldn't? Maybe it was like a piece of pretentious modern art. Maybe they saw what they thought they were supposed to see. The illiterate western guilt of the problem of the tropical underworld. The fake guilt they were supposed to carry for living easier lives with Mercedes cars and refrigerators. He had shaved one time before his final journey. And when he looked into his eyes in the opaque mirror he saw nothing in them too. A kind of lurid death wish, a burning desire to become invisible. Why did the child carry nothing when it had endured brutality? When it had been raped and beaten and its mother's eyes carved into water lashes while the soldiers buried themselves within her? What had she felt? Hadn't she felt anything? Don't animals cry when we silence their heart beats? He could feel the ground reaching out to him like the hand of a demon. It had a kind of inevitable allure like a naked woman who had opened herself to him. He was ready now. Prepared. And that's when it struck him. A deeper realization within his soul. An explanation he needed more than anything else. That the child was him.
She put her hand on the handle. She was ready to let go now. The room she had prepared for her little girl vanished from her mind. She extinguished it like a cigarette on an ashtray. But something kept her from flushing it away. The same thing that made her so eager to fuck as many men as she could. The same longing that her lonely body craved to fulfill night after night, cock after cock - kiss after kindness. When she was a child an old man with a harmonica pulled her onto his lap and said "D I will show you how pretty you are." He pulled her up to his face and kissed her sweetly on the lips. She never stopped kissing him even though it had only lasted a few seconds. Every man carried his kiss upon their lips. It wasn't a sexual kiss. It wasn't even love. It was a kind of universal completion a crying child seeks all their life. After that kiss, her life was completed. Everything that happened afterwards didn't even matter. And as she thought about his kiss, his gentle, cracked lips upon hers - she realized she couldn't do it. She couldn't flush away the one thing she had made her whole entire life. The only thing she had ever really created from her own broken, used bucket of a body. And searing within her intrepid consciousness, a toilet bowl of its own stinking endurance - she knew she was with her. They were holding each other without touching one another. As one but departed. And all around she could hear the child's heart beat. Loud. Deafening. A screaming concert of joyful cries like the first cries she sang when she came into the ugly world.
The child looked nothing like him but it was crying on the inside. Just like he was. When an animal cries it doesn't spill any tears, it simply shatters into a million pieces. And as it shatters, the glass cuts into its organs and it bleeds to death from within. He cried because he carried a terrible secret. A horrifying memory. "You will never tell" shush now, shush now. When you're young, you're so delicate. He wasn't even angry. He was crying and no one ever heard him. He could feel the shrill air pulling him down like the force it took to lift off into flight. Like a human rain, he was falling faster and his pulse quickened, turned on by his imminent demise. We're all being penetrated, every moment. Life is a constant weeping womb of penetration. A celebration of incision. Whenever he used to sleep with Diane, he would close his eyes. She didn't like it when he wouldn't look at her. She wanted to be appreciated like a painting. But he would not open, not even as she did for him. He couldn't bring himself to look into the eyes that still starred at his crumbled bloodbath, the eyes of excitement. An anal afterlife. His scrawny childish body shivered as he crawled back outside the box and lifted his trousers to break out into a frenzied walk through the pews. That night he told himself not to cry. But he couldn't help remembering the flash of the camera. The embarrassed boy in the pictures. An enduring testament to a tortured infant. The memories of the devil. They say the warlords will rape a virgin child if they've contracted sandulela ngculazi. The child would always be him and he would always take the photograph. The fucking picture that eyes would leaf through in comfortable working toilets while they discharged the food they preserved in their refrigerators.
She scooped up the water in a carton of milk and put it in the fridge. It would stay there forever. Her last contribution. A faceless child that would cry out even without a tongue. The paean of the fetus child that was sparked in all of her dreams. The night was biting cold and she could smell something new. A scent that stopped her and rooted her to this spot. This pavement crack that had endured a million footsteps in its short time it held up this electric city. She felt the lips of the old man. The scent of her grandmother. The feeling of being completed. She listened to the sound of the heartbeat erupting through the bowels of the city. Not once did she have the desire to look up. To realize. To see.
Now that he was complete he was ready to go. He was ready to be broken. It is few men who are shattered on their own terms and their adjusted timeline. He took in one final crust of breath into his lungs. In this one moment he was complete and in an instant he would become entirely separate. A glass masterpiece of pieces that could never be put together again. All his memories would be pulled apart like the energy of the Big Bang. He would never feel any more fear, any embarrassment, any tinge of regret. He would be free.
And in one joyful instant. As his head met hers - they were completed. They were one. As two completed souls become broken in a fraction of a second - they shared the most intimate of partnerships. The art of dying. If one could freeze time, you would see one human - half of it standing upwards, the other half falling down. A miraculous reflection of our own unhinged nature. Neither of them had ever met each other until now. And under the circumstances, no introductions were necessary. Men had always wanted to be on top of her. This would be her last. And he had always been falling, from the moment he was spurned into life. For this is how a human being moves. This is the journey their first steps take them. The terrible need to move. To move within another. To move into a new world. To move into each other to let someone else move to, into their own eyes. As one great mechanism of movement, falling into each other. Ruining one another.
But where are we moving to? Where does the water flow towards?
There was no honor in his suicide. And no interest in her death. When the news reporter took the photographs, he knew they could never run. He hung the negatives and looked up at them wondering what had led to this strange and unfortunate meeting. He thought how these two souls could've passed each other on the street and never known they would meet again. But deep down he knew that he didn't care. That people jumped all the time and people died every second. One point eight in fact. But of that eight of a human? What kept them from being whole? He didn't care enough to follow his thought stream, there would be new bloodbaths to photograph and his lens was waiting to capture them.
The night her baby had been conceived she was fucking an older man who preferred to listen to rap music. As he stabbed her like a knife penetrating meat - she found herself feeling his heart beating with the rhythm of the music. And her heart beat with him in a beautiful syncopated movement. While their union had no love, at least it was in time with the music of creation, at least it had rhythm. And the song goes "I got rhythm. Who could ask for anything more?"
Before he jumped he looked out at the city. And he saw a plane sailing through the clouds above him. People were so stupid, they have to pay for a ticket to fly, he didn't even have to pay a dime. And as he jumped out, into the blackness - he stopped crying.
What connected them? What allowed them to be human? They cried and no one heard them. They cried when they came into the world and they cried leaving it. They never stopped crying. And the sound of their tears was so deafening, so loud that no one could hear it anymore, our ear drums had tuned it out. We cry so long, we cry so much that no one remembers what it sounds like. We just think it's static.
All the men she ever fucked were fucking her. All the people he ever photographed looked into his lens. And all these people watched them touch each other, head to head - in the final moment they engulfed each other in penetrative unity.
Now they were invisible. Just water in the toilet bowl of death that is flushed away with each movement. And no one could see them, not even themselves. They were like a fetus moving through the sewers of heaven. Maybe that was the way they were supposed to look, like nothing. Or maybe there was something more to them, something hidden in all the shit.
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