Published 2023.05.11
Your name is Arctus. You don't know why you are making the effort to position a headshot office worker in a pile of debris that you just made by knocking the legs off a chair and chipping a desk into shipwreck driftwood. You know why, and you lie. You know the causes of death - headshot times two hundred, wall lining as in a military drill, reddening anguish and squirming fear, their hands behind their heads. You punch out a bulb. You are nearly two meters tall. You're older than the Earth. You have never known death, just millions of years of primordial couch hibernation. You have known anticipation, and you have known disappointment. What you are working for now is to create an unanticipated but anticipatory set dressing. If this were a cinematic experience, this would be an elaborately choreographed desperate struggle. Power fantasy. Anticapitalist warfare. Class struggle. No struggle took place, this is why you have to create a frame of struggle. Put a little human pulse into it. Embody, humanize the subjects, selectively breed the visual results of their behaviors, discover the morose, hard-breathing pug named Survival Drive. The surrender was immediate. No one bomb-dived off a windowledge. No one begged you to spare their family. The stock graphs on the walls get cut with pocket knives. The upward curves, perpetual if you want to digress, are segmented into laminated strips of gauze. The mummification of the death-fearless, the exclusively speculation concerned. Materialist, material-less. You cannot build a tomb to the economist. The economist wears the death mask of the sickly boy-pharaoh who didn't live to see his tomb carved into the hill. There are no jewels in the economist's death mask. There are holes with pictographs of riches. And the pictographs fear their own erosion, a crown no king assuredly wears, eyeing the concept of a pitchfork-armed crowd that hasn't yet stormed his garden of omens. The crowd came with the garden. There is no flock of black crows flying over the pristine pond. The pond tries to trick light to produce the blackness of the crow. Rent-out success. Loaned crown. Sublet palace. The future opens its vanity mirror, carved of cubic zirconia, and it fears its own face.
Selling oneself is a dirty business; the mosaic of my ordinary advertisement has a wicked geometry, many wicked geometries. For hire, one Claribel Organum, from the eponymous one-woman school of theatre. For a well-negotiated price, I say you may have an above-standard character actress in your employ, wide range, willingness to do anything for any amount of time if properly and regularly compensated. Willing to be limitless if absolutely required. I have assembled a list of my characters for the interested parties over the years, although requests usually dodge any existing personae coming into use, even for long-time buyers. I await instruction with a blank expression, self-nullified. I then present myself, with the request made and an initial payment delivered, to the client so the client can judge whether the performance is satisfactory and proceed to do business thoroughly if all is well and we are mutually prepared for whatever comes next. This ancient profession is not dishonorable, although humanity's great Rome once had a sociological tendency to lump upstanding actors like myself in with prostitutes. Although prostitution is an inoffensive business I wouldn't mind if absolutely necessary, no, I do not sell this body. I instead sell things that are not Claribel Organum, using the mind and body of Claribel Organum to realize them for the client. They call me by this name, Claribel, when contacting me and considering my services, but I am a myriad at heart. This present persona exists to sort out my characters and take unpleasant "breaks" from the services, in the transient moments where I am not doing my job. The job in question always extends from dusk to dawn and far beyond; as long as there is payment of some kind which I consider adequate, I shall continue the act. For however long I am to work, I very much act, waking in the manner of the requested persona, sleeping as they do in "real life," acting in broad daylight and sinister twilight alike, playing every facet of the character as I interpret it. Such is the way. One who knows this about me should find my explanations of the situation I am about to enumerate the details of easier to follow. Okay, I am at work. Let's work now.
You are here with the woman you, at present, call your girlfriend. She stands by the side of your granddaughter. Your granddaughter is not here. She is far away. This woman is loyal to your daughter, and she labors only for your kin. This entire spectacle is carried out according to your granddaughter's instructions. You have been allotted some liberties, but you were asked not to mow down the walls. A discharge of extra bullet holes is fine, and a thrown sofa dent too, a thrown receptionist desk dent too, a thrown watercooler dent too, and a dent from a severed head that missed its landing on a stick is fine too. One of your most unpopular opinions, amongst the mortals you harbor as unassuming friends, is that a head on a stick and fish wrapped in seaweed caught between chopsticks form an M-rated and PG-rated visual equivalence continuum. You have seen wars across the centuries. You stretch your limbs, and wrap them around the one you keep company. The year is 2017. The month is May. This is New York City. During the ushering of photography, now shuttered and printing, you stood on top of the Tower of Liberty and captured a daguerreotype of yourself. By then it was technology of seventy, eighty years ago. You would like to believe that it was not a stately portrait, neither a presidential portrait that hangs on the walls of White House, but a stunt for sought attention. The long exposure, the resistance to coming down, meant more individual examples, more individual lives absorbed in the woman above. You created a common, but individual record. The mass of individual astonishments and misunderstandings. No one was the only one. You appeared in newspapers. You were happy no one was the only one, because you wanted no one else to be the only one. You had enough of it, as the widow of the misprinted Word of God. You have lived in this city for a century and a half. During the roaring 20s, you dropped several relationships with other women out of reluctance to fuck. It was good with your widow, but you had enough. What would Emilia think? Emilia would love the lie. But she would think of it as the restoration of humanity, the drama of loss restored to those who have made themselves into sacrificial lambs. A world with no Big Bad Wolf. A world with no nefarious megacorporations. A world where all riot is the barometer for the state's strength. Those who dreamt of this absolute stability died soullessly. You are trying them in absentia for the negligence of death. Avoidance of community service, disrespect of the death-eating soil, parole with a leg chained to Charon's boat. Drawn and quartered by the cart of the Dullahan. Credit card-carrying circus freaks. Processes that exist purely to be processes. Ambitionless. What would Emilia think? She would be disappointed. So she would want you to restore death.
I am Arctus' girl; in this performance, I have been familiar with Arctus for a millennium, having gradually become attracted to her over the course of many years until the impetus of an incident permanently separating her from a devoted partner, a tragedy if there ever was one, struck their loving relationship and invited me out into the open, where Arctus became increasingly opinionated on me. We wandered through blooming fields together underneath the wisps of once-overaccumulated clouds, cuts into the sky. We sweetly conversed over fine wines with indescribable aromae and eventually fell into one another, intersecting outlines on sheets of paper. We primarily bonded over a long-term Claribel interest, the opera, which we would attend and occasionally compose collaboratively, myself writing librettos while Arctus set them to music and contextualized them within arrangements. We watched modernity unfold while caressing one another through thick clouds of smog in overblown settlements, watched New York City blossom into a rafflesia. There was beauty to it all because, even though we both agreed we were too ugly to "really" touch, our contact with the world was total, and we took great joy in each other's company. Today, we have transformed into a more proper couple, but the narrative still stands. Although many observers beyond this relationship claim that I am a hire of Arctus, paid on an annual basis since around 1989 to pretend to such a narrative of long-standing attachment, and many observers beyond just those total skeptics claim there are vast inconsistencies, I can affirm the truth of the narrative so long as it functions as reality, and I am indifferent to the opinion of anyone but Arctus as long as the real 'Claribel Organum' moves along from day to day. That is my present persona, Arctus' favorite out of the many I play. There are three extant operae we wrote, well-received and occasionally performed in the present, just as there exist no buildings at the addresses of our former residences, looking as if there never were any.
You open the window. You thought ventilation would prove the job done. There is not enough metal in the air. What flows into the vacuum of the atmosphere is not bloodied enough. You decide to split the difference and punch a face in, slosh around the remaining vessels. Fresh blood. The first twenty minutes after death and then the first forty eight hours after a disappearance. Face found on a milk carton. The body unburied. Eyes wide open. You were a witness to biblical violence, but choose to stay away from damage to the eyes. Some old ick predating the invention of taboo. Milky white shell. Red earthquake cracks. Rolling bong fish tank filled with tie dye. Disgusting. Hypnotizing when live. Beautiful when live. Disgusting when seen as a structure, a process, a compound, a replicated blueprint, a basal organ. Beautiful when live, disgusting when dehumanized. You come here to bring proper end of life to the willing dead. It's more ferric now. More has been bled. Succulent rust. You consider the sadism of turning the water to blood, refilling the water cooler with blood. I decide against it. It is disgust enough for me to maneuver around bendable mannequin-men. Men who weren't saved by the bell, who couldn't ring the bell. Some cannot maintain a pulse, and when asleep, appear dead. Pulseless, they were put into coffins. In their coffins a string was lowered. When tugged in panic, a bell overground would ring. Here, they could scream as the bell, make themselves aware of the mechanisms of death, already entrenched in pure concepts, in pure speculation, in avoidance of life. They didn't. They couldn't will to scream as the bell. You look over to Claribel. She is on her knees, dutifully forming a rat king at the foot of a fire exit. A circle of corpses, tangled by their hair, a blood trail of exit wounds in the outline of empty space between them. She has soft hands. You want to bring your face closer to hers. You do. You remind her of lifelessness with life still lived, immortality with progress, the state you two have found yourselves in. You abide by her smiling back at you. It is genuine. She hates genuine. She is tired by genuine. Both of you prefer fake. Fake but purposeful. Fake but entirely lived. Maintaining a character is a life fuller of exceptions. Your fear of death intermixed with imagined, unhad fears of death. While she tangles the rat king, you lay corpses limb on the windowsill, facing the direction of the wind, the numbness on their faces twisting into desire for an auto-defenestration tightrope. Rest easy breezy. Die long and hard.
'Bureau Hotel,' a phrase which begins far too many paragraphs written in the last century, is the context for such drastic measures. Arctus and I spoke quietly of this for several nights before its true inception. There was buildup, as a kettle whistles shriekingly with the water's boil. The kettle here continued to whistle; Arctus removed it from our stove and found it only halfway full. We made tea regardless, and each of us drank half a mug. Thereafter a mirror had steamed up, and we brushed aside the mist with cloth. There was a change in the next couple of days. Having left from the New York house Arctus has given me a secure place within, we then allowed ourselves an overview of the context beyond just 'Bureau Hotel' for the actions we were about to carry out. Augustenburg-ex-Navashino had said, "It's a reasonable conclusion to I that the Mexican-American War was disastrous, especially with regards to territorial exchange, was it not?" There had been palpable emotional instability manifest, and her mood had likely been altered further by the gaze of television cameras broadcasting her every statement live for an audience, yet her statement stood, the conglomeration of calls for blind justice as retribution for the atrocities of war, flames engulfing other flames in rapid succession, thereby becoming what the economist calls 'growth' and depositing charcoal where apartments once stood. No comment on the landlords; they fled quickly enough to survive with only the consequences of smoke inhalation - on top of the carcinogenic impact of their respective exploitation-financed cigarette habits and the marginal contributions of a comparatively higher-classed cigar's toxic bouquet - to bog them down. Anyway, a taxicab passed us by earlier today, for we had forgotten to pull away from our most recent kiss to give it a signal. For that reason, we walked quite a few blocks, the process of walking occasionally becoming sprint pace as our watches, matching, ticked time away and caused time to become noticed, entering our spotlight, increasing women's velocity. No time remained at any point in our curve of acceleration and deceleration to stop by a hole-in-the-wall spot serving decent joe from subtly chipped mugs, their permanent scars of wear on proud display. History's drinkware is naturally resilient when faced with a restaurant dishwasher told by a higher-up without much explanation to sanitize it until polished; I reckon that the Mexican-American war has gone squeaky clean. Restore the dirt; a cuppa joe served out of Texas with one's little finger perched on Baja California would be quite posh. Augustenburg-ex-Navashino has always had a discriminating taste in all sorts of beverages. Were the water wrong to her, she would have another city's delivered to whichever apartment she had rented near the local BH headquarters by the gallon. Not a soul dares question it, and no one dares convince her to settle for Dasani. The relative simplicity of a clean kill and the pleasures it brings her are now familiar to me at once, because upon our arrival, a ribbon of gunfire from myself met them. It was history's dirt. We are clearing the way for her. When no more ammunition remained, the stabbing began, and when the stabbing became tiresome, the asphyxiations began, and when the asphyxiations exceeded our brutal limits, everything was over. I would like to imagine it went like that, at least. It had to have been messier. It had to have been more real.
You are accompanied by women in black. They mostly stand back. They were ordered to get the bulk of the shooting done and retreat. They could not exit the perimeter. They can sit and have a tinfoil-wrapped picnic on the floor entrance panels that give the stairwell purpose. The stoppage point of a manual climb. The shaft of the elevator hidden by the cabin roof. The roof of the world hidden by the spiral of stairs. The dome of the festive snowglobe, marking the occasion of a pagan ritual. A Re-Nativity. They are the Magi. They bring the gifts of sandwiches and bottled water. They share them amongst themselves. King Herod had slain the infants of Jerusalem. Jesus could not hide. They return to the site of celebration, and they pass around their regrets. They understand you understand this. You understand they understand this. At least their role, not their costume changes in the interior theater of your head. They are here with The Ecarlate Company. Your daughter provided them to your granddaughter. Your granddaughter provided them to Claribel. They address you as Lady Arctus when you pace the stairwells, the stepladder embedded in the wireframe cage of a Wicker Man. The Wicker Man of the spiked fence. Those who bit the barrel of the border guard rooted into the ground like a methhead, or a Japanese Imperial holdout, or both. A Japanese Imperial holdout methhead. This building is ten-floored. Twenty people per level. Undense, completely in opposition to Manhattan waving at it from the other shore. A conceptual building. Real, standing. But with no permanent inhabitants. And no permanent misgivings. No memory long enough to marinate into a grudge. No time away from home to better render home. New York City, as the former center of Bureau Hotel, was overrun by Californian and Midwestern transients. The center is now Eastern Siberia. Your granddaughter sits on that throne after multiple armed coups in her name. Out of the two you much more despised Silicon Valley. Microdosers. Telephoneers of the Hindu tapestry. Logotype and iconography classes modeled on imported goods. 40 years pass, and a self-devouring mythology of image will form, inexplicable, lacking a source. Flat graphs. Life as animated by the stickmen from signs forbidding parking, keeping you wary of playing, risk-learning children, seemingly unkillable. Your daughter is Bathys. She is two thousand years old. You watched her from afar when she was a girl. She had an older sister. Her older sister was unrelated to you. Her older sister impersonated God. She got what she deserved. Demented, hollowed, in a rocking chair, moored in her castle on a volcanic island. Your daughter, her primary interest is fashion. She designs the frameworks of self-esteem. The ego boost derived from a branded product on your body. She became conscious of this. Her last runway show consisted of garage sale cardboard boxes full of attachable components. Plastic clip-on glowing ribbons, fresh snow white on 4PM sundown faux-twilight blue. Pins, some militaristic, false valor. Floral patterns to be applied through cloth stencil bases. Pixel-perfect embroidery on a metallic mesh. The audience were the participants. They were handed base garments in the dressing room. Shirt, dresses, dress-shirts, blouses, cardigans. The door from the backstage to the runway. The runaway's edge, as if a cliff's edge with all of the gold in the world about to be rammed off into the unblinking sea, populated by exchangeable trinkets. Discovery through play. The invention of color theory. The invention of symbolism. The invention of dissonance. The reinvention of wheels. The humanity of concepts. Not this flatness.
I, as she says I have been for ten centuries, once asked Arctus sometime between 1890 and 1990: "If sent back to the city of Rome in the second century Anno Domini, backwards from the present day, what would be your immediate course of action?" Time travel, being an impossibility, was a frequent topic of discussion between myself and her for at least a few years at this point, perhaps as a manifestation of her regrets, perhaps as a topic of commonality, given that it was supposed that we had both lived through many eras and encountered many situations, but had the misfortune of being unable to experience them all. Unsettlingly, I cannot find any records of myself from before the early 1400s, but Arctus has always explained to me, to me, Claribel, that the records were destroyed in an unfortunate accident resembling a stochastic version of the burning of the Library of Alexandria. She never gives me any detail, because I start to cry. Her answer to this question, most reliably datable to 1990, was "The whole day would be spent with Emilia, Clari. Then, upon nightfall, I'd hold my daughter while she would sleep. The sky would be free of thunder, and the birds would cease their song to settle down beside us." The Bathysine mention took me by surprise; she had previously mentioned that she found it painful to discuss Bathys Augustenburg in my presence, so my immediate response went "No, that won't be necessary, my love. You don't need to tell me if its painful. By the question, I moreso meant what elements of history would you meddle with, what would you modify in the interest of your amusement." "Oh, it's much simpler to me now. Give me a year." "One-hundred fifty, Arctus. Right down the middle." "Alright," she began, "with that in mind, the following would be my course of action. I would, first and foremost, do irreparable damage to the Bishop of Rome. I would go out of my way to protect the heretics from the office's successor, using force if necessary. I would foster the development of a truly pluricentric Christian world and ensure a greater degree of division in Europe than anyone could've anticipated when foreseeing the fall of Rome. I would sculpt my own Christian history. It would be quite fun to get a little hands-on." I thought on this for a while, considering the Gnostic states Arctus'd bear witness to, and I realized that the world she, hypothetically, wanted to create was one that would suit Bathys, that would simplify the spread of Islam upon its emergence in later histories, that would leave Europe a more stimulating environment for her daughter, that would, perhaps, maintain many, many wells of potential for her sake, the sake of the dead girl's. "Oh, Arctus. I would be a little more subtle, personally speaking. Picture this, and presume that, before this chain of events, I have already memorized several versions of the standard Greek text of the Bible. I come to terms with my predicament, having been sent back in time, but I shed all traces of modern identity and immediately blend myself into Roman plebeian society as best I can, striving for little more in life than a proper scribal education. Sometime later, with that secured, I make my way to Alexandria, where I associate with a nascent Christian community, pretending to convert, practicing total method acting, as you know I can do. I become the scribe for a small community in the city, and I sweet-talk a priest into allowing me, despite my greenness and inexperience, to copy the Gospels. Once I'm given the go-ahead, I insert the Longer Ending of Mark exactly as recorded in later editions of the New Testament, but I suddenly disappear with my copies, leaving the community stunned that such a devoted convert could abandon them so quickly. Little to their knowledge, my top priority all along was to make my way down to Oxyrhynchus holding those altered copies as swiftly as possible, and to throw them away so that, many centuries from then, Biblical scholars will discover my maliciously altered second-century copies in the city's archaic discards and question everything they have ever learned about the textual history of their beloved book, all while I, in my eternal life, look on from afar, cackling." Arctus just sat there and looked at me like I was crazy.
Your daughter has a reputation. This whole family has a reputation. You've heard: South American-style cult of personality (not enough drug smuggling), Middle Eastern theocracy (not entirely wrong). Free Sicily never went broke. The flight America-ward was prompted by excess regulation of riches from the island on the Bureau Hotel-dominated mainland. Cosa Nostra began in Bologna. Captured collaborators of Cosa Nostra cut and froze baloney, shifting location of pizzo-taking, razed fields of choking import wheat and suicidal Mussolini rice best growing in the North of the country, bombed pizza ovens, to Naples, not Central Italy. Your daughter had invited the Arab invasion, in a ploy for prosperity. Do not hunt the Ottoman, tell the Ottoman atta man!. Wrong. Tunisia never fell under the Ottomans. It was fragile. You wish to state you ignored historical continuity to retain the flavor of the joke. You wish to correct yourself: you don't miss (the arrival of) Tunis? Don't snore in the company of North ((s)nore-fph)) Africa? You feel idiotic. You think this would be much less strenuous if the ethnonym were preceded by an indefinite article. Arabia, Arab. Tunis, Tunisia. Muhammad, Baphomet. Inevitably the Arabs passed through, and nominal European-ness was restored. Catholicism arises. The Catholic ruler? A Muslim, her and her seat in Palermo. Saturn and Bathys. Swiss and Icelandic. Converted by the Strait of Tunis. Choiceless but to tangle the Augustenburg name with the men of the cross and the myriad martyrs. Their twin children wear candles on their head and hand out cuts of meat in the city of Syracuse on the Feast of St. Lucia... of Syracuse. They disappear from Palermo to another shore or another inland pass for St. Rosalia, St. Stephen, St. Lorenzo and St. Gennaro. Brains build patterns. The miracle of teleportation, performed on the days of the inexhumable and incorruptible, is one pattern. Turquoise Catholicism is not Latin American Catholicism. It is Catholicism with hate for Catholicism. The brain builds patterns. Stability, active policymaking, wage increase is one pattern to sainthood. Every politician who can be held to her promise is supernatural. The Emperor bleeds on the treadmill, a dartboard for dagger-and-claw cyan nuns. The miracle that happens and is no longer just wished for is a non-miracle. A saint is only its icon. The story of saints is anti-authoritarian unrest, reflective of the black winds of death and despair that were blowing. And yet the top of the saintly structure was The Monarch which insulated the room to become a Dutch oven for the scent of human blood sausage, emanated onto the plagued, beak-masked streets from beyond an inviting door held open by heavy object (doorstop rock, doorstop woodblock) and the boulder-pushing wind. If you want to feel Sisyphus' work, he's most productive during tornadoes. The saint is the dream of salvation after a king is toppled. The king is the saintmaker. The dream of a saint is the kingmaker. Infallible. Capitals are archetypes: Saint is anti-King, king is Saint, saints are worshiped in hopes somebody kills the current king. There are no Catholic saints if the king is fair. The king is a Muslim. The saint exists to kill the Catholic.
Arctus has a descendant to her name. Are we to ever marry, as we are yet to despite the apparent length of this journey undertaken by the two of us over these tiresome centuries, through many houses and many trails walked to find places to build houses, across many rivers and beyond many potential safe havens, I will therefore have a stepdaughter. By the name Bathys Augustenburg is she known. Quite an excellent woman, she, oddly enough, was once a client of mine, but more often than not was she decisively not a client. More often than not, Bathys Augustenburg preferred the lack of character acting to the presence thereof, but it must be clear that I have somehow known Arctus longer than her daughter, and that the business ties between myself and herself, that is myself and Bas-or-rather-Bathys, are more brief. They must be more brief for the sake of this. The assignment does not allow longing. The assignment primarily allows for activities like the current event, the now, the murder of the uninnocents, consecrated by imagined popes for the creation and eventual destruction of new Holy Roman Empires, outside Rome, of course. Rome is fallen. This is a reminder that Rome is fallen, that the collateral of Rome, the fifth generation of the Alarie family minus Mariana herself, that is, my lover's daughter, then the one who embraces forgetfulness, then the one of a half-imagined cult of personality who advises the modern rule of France. Out of these three, the one I know best is the daughter. This makes relations easier, not harder. Not harder by any means. Claribel is the name of a stepmother-to-be, not a wicked one, but a kind one. Is that so? I must tell myself.
Earlier you were eating with your girlfriend. Zebra hardwood chairs, crop circles in tree rings, creaky legs, out of town timberworks in a decommissioned aircraft hangar, probably one of several generations of diner seatings. You did the lobbying, Bureau wouldn't have the foresight. You saved the military semi-sphere from total stasis, re-industrialized it. What you don't save shaves off another decade of this nation's culture clock.Everything in America is new. The qualification grade for "historical building" is half a century and some exposed drywall, maybe asbestos. Too broke to exterminate the carcinogen. White-and-red checkered trivet. Rug red. Cross your eyes and see spirals kind of mesmeric red. May in NYC is moderate. Height of spring in most of Europe. Winds blow the past onto coastal outposts. She is a peculiar kind of cute. Peckuliar. Peck on the cheek. Seagull flies in for ice cream, lips fly in for face-sides. Cheesecake on a teaspoon, fitted with a slim, crooked butterknife. You hold it up to her lips. She closes her eyes. Doesn't lean in. Won't be lusting for it. Get it near up to her nose. Haum, mm, "it tastes quite good". Adorable. No, that's not your word. That's your granddaughter's word. Flummoxing. It's confusing. It's embarrassing. Love is 90% embarrassment. What's so hot it needs linen support is tea. Green, with honey. You were never much for sugar. Sugar cannot close the wound, any wound. You ignore the temperature. You are not sure whether this is an act of masochism. Endurance can be strength. It can also just be endurance. You're holding the mug by the oblique, flat bottom. Once you broke the bottom of a mug with one finger as a party trick. You called it a rain check. Granted, it was upon yourself. You believe you were justified in your colorful, albeit conservatively literal interpretation of the phrase. The bottom is the support against the contents being immediately depleted, washing the world, one spin of the strangely Dharmic "Who Wants to Have a Good Harvest?" game show's main mechanism. Thus you checked for the capacity of a mug to rain. You proved this. You ignore the handle, and you expect her to dip her face in it. You don't expect that. You expect her to purse her lips. You realize that, too, is too much. She uses the emptied now-teaspoon that you served the cheesecake to fill and sip. Dual purpose, but also quite literalist. You kind of wanted her to do both. Cake off spoon, face dipped slightly in mug, alternation. You tell her that. You feel she is a dork for playing along. Later you are dealing with corpses. This kind of lovey-dovey scene appears opposed to the act of dealing with the dead. Have you softened? Life and death in perpetuity, life and death all the same stream. You cannot escape Samsara, even if you cannot reincarnate. Even if you have lived since before the Sun was an ovular vessel sunk in the final ocean which eats even land, under which all surface in rain turns to the lost city of Atlantis, the Celestial Dome, and you have never once forgotten your name or been a field mouse that impressed onto the wounded tiger to be eaten, you have seen things die. You have seen rise, and fall, and downturn, and prosperity, and gilded ages, and smarmy excreta of ages too, and empires, and the great cities turn to mere villages along the Via Aemilia, and those villages ravaged by the Plagues, Justinian, Black, Antonine, typhus, Spanish. Death falls out of order. The constancy of death, the blur of death, constructs Samsara. The Biblical grows weaker with retelling. Hero worship is a depression which we trepan in the skull. Emilia would've said something like that, you think. Every path is stomped out by the horse. The shore of departure for every pyre grows grass and it is grazed by the cow. Immortal life kills history. You cannot take to heart what has been learned in repetition over millions of years, the circular Mappa Mundi of vices, islands and stains on continents where archetypes lurk. You spin the world's wheel again. You are not entertained. Engage Samsara - live every life in Hell for a year or a century less, pass between lessening worlds of torment, find the end only in diminishing care. You had named that road in Central Italy after her. The connectivity of civilization is a mausoleum turned well-trodden path. She would hate to be iconized. You lay her name to rest and vanish under the horsetracks. You lay her name to lose dignity under the tides of trade. With every passing year, a world of torment lesser than the last, the temperature in the Hot Hell of the Boiling Cauldron a centigrade less. You feed a girl cake. But you know damn well why you can even feed her cake right now.
That night on the rooftop. You remember why you have hung onto Claribel Organum. Almost biologically fused. All humans have inhaled and been composed of spacedust, pangalactic, billions of years in age, at some point. You are younger than spring and older than Abraham. She has inhaled things from when you were still young. She has the particles of your insignificant youth relived in her veins. You lived in a clouded dream world. Liminality. Then you were on another Earth, one of three. It was last year. You remember it quite clearly, your granddaughter's last words to you, before she once again made contact to involve you now. Goodbye, Grandmother. So she said, and leaped backwards as a monochrome rainbow off the rooftop. Grid cut out. Dark hair disappears into dark. Bioluminescent glow of a farcical primordial sea. A kind of Sargasso Sea, a sea unbounded by land, named for the seaweed which grows within. This is the Sea of Mermaidens. She tried to undo something she couldn't. History first as tragedy, then returning not as farce, but as a polarized facade. Imaginary blacklight. Not exposing waves and frequencies which were already there, but fabricating the results of secret seeing. A fabricated elemental discovery with an eternal half life, eternal as long as its host, whole-being-as-mitochrondia, wishes to expend power. The whole head, grey matter, flesh, as just a skull. The whole body as a molecule. A droplet in a nuclear coolant acting as the whole of Chernobyl. To remove the history of removal, to lose loss. Mermaids lie at the bottom of the rising sealevel, up several levels of windows. Their facsimiles, eyes closed, float up with the currents. Neither sleeping nor waking. A transmigrational kind of look.
"Why haven't you remembered that this hasn't happened?"
The words your granddaughter said. The trigger of that magic. Mermaids had not arrived to The Deep, the Second Earth. Hunted away billions of years before its make, now thrust from fanciful hypothesis to disruption of order. Your older sister lives out of her bath. She had become an imitation of the species betrayed by the seafaring states of the very first empires and unifications to have been. Crushed undermast and underwood by ships. Hunted with poisoned harpoons. Your granddaughter was trying to retraumatize you with history. The first cardinal sin of your dynasty. She wanted you to pull out. Hong Kong of The Deep was not something you should have risked your relationship with Claribel for. You, rheumatic, mental, stubborn as inflexible joints, mad as the demented pretender, fancied yourself hip. Your daughter, depressed. Your daughter's monstrous companion, in hibernation. Torn family grieving. Up the staircases, Claribel ran, and you fell back onto the roof, and not into the sea, even though you wanted to fall into the Potemkin village of that hypothetical ocean, the mirage of uncomplicity, bloodied palms of our grandmothers undone by the handwipes at every table. She was not anywhere near. Your granddaughter must have given away your location. Fifteen or so minutes before she attacked? It had to have been before I saw her stand on that rooftop. "This challenge which myself is presenting yourself comes with one caveat: it is unchallenging. The victory is absolute and claimable only by myself." And you hear those words again: the incantation, and the words she bid adieu with. Arianna had set you up. It was not the first time she had done this, but most of the damage was sponged up by her, the harm self-inflicted, sick for a month, pale, light-sensitive, while you had your lights off for five minutes and walked. You've fallen for this before. Do all Zeuses want a Prometheus, as all great thieves seek to be caught?
Claribel arrives to find you limp. She is grabbing your face, she is screaming your name. Her fingers stab hurtlessly, mermaids live unlivingly, the sea flows unflowingly. There are no currents. There are no lakes. There is no ocean, and yet there is an ocean of blood inside you. Boiling blood reanimated. You focus. Her fingers don't stab. She is not an illusion. She is not a hypothesis. She is not an idle thought. She is someone you had sworn to, to be kind to her and to be fair to her, and she is attempting to rouse you from your sleep and hyperventilation of ancestral atonement. Just because you compose her with small traces of you intermixed with starbirth and asteroid fall, just because your youth is in her veins, does not mean that the blood does not outweigh the reminders of youth. The pretense of youth that lead you to participate, to think that almost anyone is fair game, that you are to be sociable and to be a fierce opponent & example to your granddaughter, and that you can better ready her for the terrors of it all. You age, but you do not decay. You age, but you do not lose hair. But you are from a time where neither haircolor nor eyecolor mattered. You are a body with similarities, but you are a body born into the wrong context. You have walked higher realms before there was solid land. And you are not from any world concretized.
She is from this world. She is from this time. The particles of youth inside Claribel have been replaced with material that is meant to play part, and not interlope or subterfuge. You cough awake, rheumatic stasis subsiding, the perfect swerve out of the visage-facing wall of an L-shaped coffin, to rise at a 90 degree angle. First you are farcical. You are the shadow of the facade, the history that is undone which was done and cannot be unblemished, the natural order of it all: history returning as farce. You possess the shadow. You are informed by the shadow. You spout: "Miss me?" It's not a joke. She has been here for ten minutes in all disorder and worry. And it is your fault this had to happen. You are uncool at that moment. You know you should have pulled out. And you cry, not iridescent, but mere saltwater. A drop in a Mediterranean lake in a desert of laughs. Your first line was the Caspian Lowland Desert, far from the Sea. And you tell her, in honesty: "I quit. It's just not time for me to be doing all this like I have a place in this world right now. My daughter is damaged. My grandchildren are damaged. I don't know why I'm showing my face here. I should just be with you and be happy. Quietly. I'm just a lonely woman. You absolve my loneliness. I like you. Let's go home." You speak in simple words. You speak in simple vows. To be true, and to know yourself for who you are.
Worthless bodies hit the ground harder. I would know, for I always land soft around Arctus, yet I also tend to land soft when alongside Bathys. There is no honesty to be had here; were I honest, I would not have become an actor; I would not have a reputation as an actor, for the legitimate display of emotions is achieved by goallessness and ennui, neither of which befit me. I suppose, however, that honesty might work here. There is something I need to inform Arctus Augustenburg regarding her daughter. Bathys Augustenburg, a responder to impulses, whose impressionism is eternal, I cannot sing her praises for I am bound by contract to another. She does not finance me, whereas Arctus does. Arctus, despite her overall benevolence, has placed me in her second-person; I am entrapped in a locket, but as a Victorian Englishwoman would hold onto a locket. Victorian Age lockets, in that horrid countrry of England, often signified a funeral. Another prior day, sometime before Arctus announced today's plan, she eased me into it with cheesecake off a teaspoon. She held tea before my face, a mug before my mug, such that I could sip. She had moderately sweetened the tea, which was a Darjeeling. Darjeeling, indeed, was first planted in its namesake region in the Victorian Era by East India Company men. There was something dissatisfactory about this to me, despite its excellent flavor; now I realize that this was some kind of ritual, trapping me in a locket. Bathys, having never done such a thing, has allowed me into her life. We first met in the nineteenth century, or really 18 June 1815, immediately following the most famous event of that day in the Western world. I had been commissioned for membership in the Swiss Guard by those who knew of my centuries of service. I was inseparable from Ramona Dolor, a young woman from Mesoamerica who very quickly signaled her intent to defect and kill the current holder of the Spanish crown (which she has done twice), and Antoinette Geissler, a French girl who came to watch over Lady Bathys' daughter, Rico Eisenberg, in much later years. Attended to by Lady Bathys amidst mass stabbings and countless gunshots, everything began to die down in order before she spoke a word. Until then, she simply stood there silent. I recall the cyan hair intimidating me, demonstrating a legacy of brutality. Bathys was known to have spoken many times to the Napoleon under whom we served valiantly, yet we collectively reckoned she was far from fond of him. Her voice, however, shocked with calm and collected demeanor, and I began to call her 'Lady Bathys,' to her exasperation. We shifted our allegiances with little coaxing; we were dissatisfied with the pay and wished to join the emergent Sicilian Royal Army. It was a few days later, though, when I had my first truly meaningful interaction with Lady Bathys: "You're overqualified," she asked, and I replied "What of it?" I was not in any character, so my attraction shone through brilliantly. I blushed, wondering why such a perfect being with so many attributes I desired - the countenance of an angel, the daringness of a demon, the ruthlessness and willingness to tear down cities with bear hands of a revolutionary, the measured responses of a counterrevolutionary, the regality of the Age of Absolutism we had both lived through, the pompous yet nuanced pride of a war heroine - would even consider me 'qualified,' and, impulsively, told her, "You make anyone who isn't as beautiful as you appear underqualified. I haven't the slightest as to what to tell you." Lady Bathys appeared confused, but I'm sure she realized my initial attraction to her, a married woman. For many years, our relationship consisted of halfways, arriving at conclusions in some regards but not in others. She saw me in the nude from time to time, myself having been reminded to put her undergarments on. I knew Lady Bathys wanted my good looks and felt something perhaps deeper for me, but development took many, many years from thereon out. She would come to hold me at Augustenburg meetings, telling me the first time she did so, "I dare you to be embarrassed and trail off. Be serious. Even when I am creating opportunities for you to feel like you're on cloud nine." I was, of course, embarrassed. Essentially, I melted. My melting, furthermore, appeared _worth something._ Her arms wrapped around me, I knew that she, married to the monstrous Saturn Thebes, another woman whom I admire greatly, could not go any further; that is, I thought I knew this until she did. I was allowed to perform duties alone with her, which she denied to all others in her employ, and her kiss sent tremors through my world every time I received it. Speaking with Saturn, I knew that she knew and I knew that she allowed the affair to continue, but it has never been made official. Nothing about this has been codified into a marriage, even after our deeper doings. We've made love, yet Lady Bathys never invites me to imperial weddings of any kind, at any place, for any reason. She does not respond to my proposals for an additional marriage, for she knows that odd jobs like these can still separate us, and this brings me joy no longer, for her Augustenburg daughters look on and laugh when in our presence knowing everything between us is out of wedlock. Ridicule does not befit me; I am a sincere woman by all counts. I winter through these hard times by taking whatever I can get, and what I have been given in my time with Arctus, despite all the cheesecake and tea, amounts to nothing. Worthless bodies are unable to express their love fully, yet I am not a worthless body. For that reason, things between myself and herself will be over soon. I will leave Arctus behind and turn down the next payment she provides me with. I will destroy my ties to all that restrains me from love. I wish to marry Bathys Augustenburg.