We lived glued to the ceiling, the hot, rancid fume of the everyday life steaming up and suffocating us. We lived at marble heat, the ascending glow of human flesh warming the snake-like coils in which we were locked. We lived riveted to the nethermost depths, our skins smoked to the colour of a grey cigar by the fumes of worldly passion. Like two heads carried on the pikes of our executioners we circled slowly and fixedly over the heads and shoulders of the world below. What was life on the solid earth to us who were decapitated and forever joined at the genitals? We were the twin snakes of Paradise, lucid in heat and cool as chaos itself. Life was a perpetual black fuck about a fixed pole of insomnia. Life was Scorpio conjunction Mars, conjunction Mercury, conjunction Venus, conjunction Saturn, conjunction Pluto, conjunction Uranus, conjunction quicksilver, laudanum, radium, bismuth. The grand conjunction was every Saturday night, Leo fornicating with Draco in the house of brother and sister. The great malheur was a ray of sunlight stealing through the curtains. The great curse was Jupiter, king of the fishes, that he might flash a benevolent eye.
The reason why it is difficult to tell it is because I remember too much. I remember everything, but like a dummy sitting on the lap of a ventriloquist. It seems to me that throughout the long, uninterrupted connubial solstice I sat on her lap (even when she was standing) and spoke the lines she had taught me. It seems to me that she must have commanded God’s chief plumber to keep the black star shining through the hole in the ceiling, must have bid him to rain down perpetual night and with it all the crawling torments that move noiselessly about in the dark so that the mind becomes a twirling awl burrowing frantically into black nothingness. Did I only imagine that she talked incessantly, or had I become such a marvellously trained dummy that I intercepted the thought before it reached the lips? The lips were finely parted, smoothed down with a thick paste of dark blood: I watched them open and dose with the utmost fascination, whether they hissed a viper’s hate or cooed like a turtle dove. They were always close-up, as in the movie stills, so that I knew every crevice, every pore, and when the hysterical salivating began I watched the spittle fume and foam as though I were sitting in a rocking chair under Niagara Falls. I learned what to do just as though I were a part of her organism; I was better than a ventriloquist’s dummy because I could act without being violently jerked by strings.
Now and then I did things impromptu like, which sometimes pleased her enormously; she would pretend, of course, not to notice these interruptions, but I could always tell when she was pleased by the way she preened herself. She had the gift for transformation; almost as quick and subtle she was as the devil himself. Next to the panther and the jaguar she did the bird stuff best: the wild heron, the ibis, the flamingo, the swan in rut. She had a way of swooping suddenly, as if she had spotted a ripe carcass, diving right into the bowels, pouncing immediately on the tidbits – the heart, the liver, or the ovaries -and making off again in the twinkling of an eye. Did someone spot her, she would lie stone quiet at the base of a tree, her eyes not quite dosed but immovable in that fixed stare of the basilisk. Prod her a bit and she would become a rose, a deep black rose with the most velvety petals and of a fragrance that was overpowering. It was amazing how marvellously I learned to take my cue; no matter how swift the metamorphosis I was always there in her lap, bird lap, beast lap, snake lap, rose lap, what matter: the lap of laps, the lip of lips, tip to tip, feather to feather, the yolk in the egg, the pearl in the oyster, a cancer clutch, a tincture of sperm and cantharides. Life was Scorpio conjunction Mars, conjunction Venus, Saturn, Uranus, et cetera, love was conjunctivitis of the mandibles, dutch this, dutch that, clutch, clutch, the mandibular clutch-clutch of the mandala wheel of lust. Come food time I could already hear her peeling the eggs, and inside the egg cheep-cheep, blessed omen of the next meal to come. I ate like a monomaniac: the prolonged dreamlit voracity of the man who is thrice breaking his fast. And as I ate she purred, the rhythmic predatory wheeze of the succubus devouring her young. What a blissful night of love! Saliva, sperm, succubation, sphincteritis all in one: the conjugal orgy in the Black Hole of Calcutta.
Out there where the black star hung, a Pan-Islamic silence, as in the cavern world where even the wind is stilled. Out there, did I dare to brood on it, the spectral quietude of insanity, the world of men, lulled, exhausted by centuries of incessant slaughter. Out there one gory encompassing membrane within which all activity took place, the hero-world of lunatics and maniacs who had quenched the light of the heaven with blood. How peaceful our little dove-and-vulture life in the dark! Flesh to bury in with teeth or penis, abundant odorous flesh with no mark of knife or scissors, no scar of exploded shrapnel, no mustard bums, no scalded lungs. Save for the hallucinating hole in the ceiling, an almost perfect womb life. But the hole was there – like a fissure in the bladder – and no wadding could plug it permanently, no urination could pass off with a smile. Piss large and freely, aye, but how forget the rent in the belfry, the silence unnatural, the imminence, the terror, the poom of the “other” world? Eat a bellyful, aye, and tomorrow another bellyful, and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow – but finally, what then? Finally ? What was finally?
A change of ventriloquist, a change of lap, a shift in the axis, another rift in the vault… what ? what ? I’ll tell you – sitting in her lap, petrified by the still, pronged beams of the black star, homed, snaffled, hitched and trepanned by the telepathic acuity of your interacting agitation, I thought of nothing at all, nothing that was outside the cell we inhabited, not even the thought of a crumb on a white tablecloth. I thought purely within the walls of our amoebic life, the pure thought such as Immanuel Pussyfoot Kant gave us and which only a ventriloquist’s dummy could reproduce. I thought out every theory of science, every theory of art, every grain of truth in every cock-eyed system of salvation. I calculated everything out to a pin point with gnostic decimals to boot, like primes which a drunk hands out at the finish of a six-day-race. But everything was calculated for another life which somebody else would live some day -perhaps. We were at the very neck of the bottle, her and I, as they say, but the neck had been broken off and the bottle was only a fiction.
I remember how the second time I met her she told me that she had never expected to see me again, and the next time I saw her she said she thought I was a dope fiend, and the next time she called me a god, and after that she tried to commit suicide and then I tried and then she tried again, and nothing worked except to bring us closer together, so close indeed that we interpenetrated, exchanged personalities, name, identity, religion, father, mother, brother. Even her body went through a radical change, not once but several times. At first she was
