1
I emerge — heightened and cleaned, tingling, sucking energy, power, flashing with secrets from the sea.
I emerge from my purge, from asleep in the deep in the shelter of a fully submersible ship, powered by a keen blend of emotion and reason, and equipped with the power of invisibility, and the ability to shift locations in a blink of my bad eye. The ship claims to be male and calls himself The Truth.
He helped me find the mission: to cruise through galaxies, through pieces of space, stealing the pressures found in the forces of loneliness and hate and pain and desperation. These I suck into my receptive body; I turn and readjust them. Then they get tuned to music to be drawn through The Truth's speakers and broadcast all over.
We hit the surface of the water. The Truth breaks his waterproof seal to let the top back, a fresh melody flowing from his speakers and blending with the airwaves.
We hang on the edges of dawn, the music sweet like water. The sea rolls golden against the violet heat of a shattered fragrant morning brimming with the promise of a day so thick and ripe you could take a bite, so thick and ripe it could drive you mad.
The sea shines with the silky tones of The Truth. I whistle along.
I'm standing, stretching up my arms, and right away it starts. The stolen currents, the fractured and broken bits of energy, collating and colluding, charge through the air – sensing my emergence – magnetized by my conducted accelerations – to meet me.
My weakness is overload. The residue of so much pure emotion can cling and choke my lines, leeching, warp me, try to take over.
And then my sense of personal unity starts to break down. My parts try to split, go their separate ways, my existence stretching and diluting. Even The Truth runs slow. When I get too much. When I can barely help make the music.
And then The Truth seals up, and we go down into the sea so I can purge and release, let the music wait.
This time it was different. The purge was voluntary.
Not long after my last purge, not long enough for re-buildup, rumors of my past began to seep up from my memory. The dream faces of Dreena and Dolly and Dare pushed up on me from sly angles and perverted perspectives.
Agitated, I was failing in the mission. Sucking in joy and beauty and happiness, screwing up the music. We like to think our music can induce those states, but it can't work backwards.
Dreena, Dreena, Dreena. It had to have something to do with Dreena. I used to belong to Dreena. I believed everything I saw in her screens. Believed it when she said this is the Sea of Love. Jumped in when she said jump in. But The Truth saw something in me; somehow he picked me up on his radar, heard the music I helped make for Dreena, was ready for me when it was over with her, when I left her with the ashes of Dolly and Dare cooling.
With him years slipped by like moments, days lingered like weeks. It was all about the mission. But you know: the past is never really past. Dreena would have to pay, and me too in the process. Suck in all her hate in a single burst... What music that would make... I'd have to be clean to let it flow through. So I asked The Truth to take me down and he did. Sealing up, he set controls to filter my release into the sea for redistribution, for continuation of the circuit.
I suspended myself in a center of The Truth, then revolved there, surfing the wet silence, the pieces of denials, the terrors well placed inside me.
I let in some of the past, let Dreena fill me, a lurking fever.
I let in the ghosts of Dolly and Dare:
Dolly. So sweet - pressing against me – (kiss me; kiss me). But I let in Dare. Dare in the rain. Banging on my door. Begging me to let her in.
Ahh, Dolly... Are you rescued from madness now, sweet? Braided and barefoot, creeping through the bad old house on Lonely, looking for secrets, lured into your own nightmares – are you free from all that now, baby?
"We can't even tell the difference between ourselves sometimes."
I saw myself as I was then (what I'd done), what I still am, somewhere not too deep inside: the betrayed betrayer. After I lost the girls I was praying and only praying (to anything obscure thing) until just madness and prayer were all I could see.
I remembered hearing The Truth that first time, his blues cutting through the slinking, leeching bleakness and pumping me with something, with anything – an excuse to forget myself and everything I had and hadn't done, for just a little time.
Purging like that, I saw big expanding time splashed and cresting in front of me. I gathered and smoothed it in a ball that I put in a quiet corner of my heart – making noise.
And then I let it all slip away.
Only breathing then, restoring, regenerating, like never before.
Quiet then and moving with the beat of the sea, The Truth still and dark...
Until:
Slow, slow, visions of heat and light crept in. They eased toward me, softly pressed me, and then urgent.
Visions of a heat source pulsing and jolting in a silken space. Love love love, swollen echo of a word, flowing raw through the visions. The neverending shadows of the three Ds were muffled by the cries of some creature (her) calling out to me (was it floating in the Sea of Love?). The visions pulled me early to the surface. And now you see me – not entirely clean, but ready to take on too much, to answer the calls of whatever is calling me, to look for The real Sea of Love, and to maybe deal with Dreena.
Now I slide a fresh patch over my wild eye (the eye that's seen too much), and I dress. My clothes are of the softest gray fabric. Gray, because gray fabric is the softest. Gray, because gray reminds me of rain clouds, and of rain. And furthermore gray, because gray becomes me. Dressed and fresh, I link all the way with the visions, and they pour into me; I let them push Dreena below my conscious effort until I'm falling, gazing into mist. Crush of heat. The loneliness seeps into me, and I see The Sea of Love (or what seems like it), see some of what it looks like: exposed and tender, clear for moments, then murky, wild, churning.
I strain to see; The Truth croons in the background:
Don't rush
Don't hurry now
It's only love
You can only lose it...
I shake my head to clear the visions. They fall away and replace themselves with a map showing the location of The Sea of Love (maybe) to be fabricated, constantly roaming, yet oddly fixed, just so, just there.
I'm ready. Ready for cosmographing. And to try to face the past.
With The Truth, I can go anywhere, as long as the time is right.
2
In here a whispered electric melody, a tight buzz, fills the edgy compressed air. It's not hard to get in and not hard to get out but hard – impossible! – not to be seen.
Dreena rocks — in anticipation? — on razor heels to the back beat of somebody's lunatic rhythms.
She watches my progress in one screen and in another that of the golden creature.
When both screens fill with the same picture, that is, me in The Sea of Love (the real one, I think) with my hands around the creature's neck, Dreena disconnects. In a blacked out whisper, she calls the boys closer. They fill the frantic space around her.
She starts swiveling around again. Electric prophecy swans her brain, bounces off her inner skull. In her delusional divination she sees me on my knees, The Truth disassembled and reconstructed unrecognizably, the gold creature trapped and shackled and well used.
I can find lots of ways to use her. In here. To fan a fire to stop the rain forever. I'll introduce you to a new reality. Only the dark rays shine here, and you are dark enough, sweet.
She stops moving. Pushes through the boys and gets to the girls, and tells them, my daughters, to go and find me and take the golden creature away from me and bring it to her.
3
I'm whistling and singing, absorbed in the ride, in the streaking of The Truth through time and space. We pass through flash floods and trick lightning, through seas of broken dreams and sorrow and departed love, through seas of euphoria, through seas of tension and seas of pure sound.
All to get to her, to reach her.
Thoughts of The Sea of Love (just a drop!) tumble through my head, splayed and effusive. After a time, I feel a sudden lick, clever and cool, skid deftly up the back of my neck, a funny pulling of the skin. The Truth eases to slow, changes the music.
It's hard to breath. The air is cold and thick with static here. The sky has grown dark, splashed with silvery gleams.
We push ahead, step over an edge and pass through a drifting wall of time and space.
The air, building hotter, is laced with a fat, baited scent and ache.
Too close
To turn back now...
The Truth sings, urging me gently.
I inspire this new air, smoky and tinged pink beneath a darkening layer.
The Sea of Love? Maybe?
A shudder runs up from the back of my knees, making me blush.
The waters are changing like The Sands of Time: bubbling and pink then clear like glass, paling and smoldering in confessed agitation, mesmerizing me. Too much. Too intense.
I go deaf to everything except the noises she's making.
My head is spinning and thick, but thinks itself dangerously clear. Jump in. Oh the need to swim! But if I swim, how can I find he? She's not drowning. I'm drowning. I won't find her in the water. I have to find her.
Don't get lost...
We push ahead, looking for her.
Our sound is distant and blue to her. And she feels something like elegant to hear it. It cuts simply through her pain. She recognizes that the music only splits the pain, doesn't obliterate it.
The Truth becomes a blur to her finally, a speck in the distance, moving toward her, the sky a pale violet now. She hears the music louder as we get closer. But her loneliness is very bad, and her throat is so scorched, as she lies on the sandbar. She's blending with the sea, looking up, but not seeing the dusky clouds spinning and rolling, trying to distract her, to bring her back from lonelyland.
Ahh look. She's melting. Soon she'll melt away leaving just the essence of loneliness to feed on itself and live forever.
The Truth stops on the border of the water surrounding her.
Look at this water. Just look at the clarity, the reactivity, the curative potential, the lustrality tinged with blues. Look at it quizzically fixing, shaped in vapor, shaking and spinning around like music. Funny though, this liquid choir seems to be giving over to our music, just a little.
Look at her now, lock eyes on her. She draws herself up, holding her suitcase and trying to stand, all golden and exposed and parched, reflecting everything in her hair.
I walk on water to get to her. Feel the heat of her. She's blazing; I'm singing, stretching to reach her quickly. Bleary and flexing she tries to see me clearly. She stands in front of me numb, her body hot like hot candy, blending with the atmosphere. Her eyes (pools to get lost in) flash at me: Take me anywhere. I put my hand on her throat. Feel the crush, the heat, the loneliness forceful and clean, the violet of the sky deepening, the clouds spinning faster. And I'm pulling in the creature's hot loneliness through my hand.
She's breathing now, again. Becoming aware of herself again. Aware of the beauty of the sky, the hand at her throat, the man attached to the hand. I'm singing to her. Swelling the hope. She's falling up. The Truth backs me up...
We can go anywhere/ride with me/ride with me/ride with me/we've got plenty of gas...She answers with her eyes, falling into me.
Now I just pick her up and carry her to The Truth, and we rest for not very long at all.
4
I have daughters, dark daughters I've never seen. I don't even know they exist, but won't be surprised to find out. Vonica and Jiggle. Sisters? Twins? Not sure of the words for what they are. Identical, and almost identical to their identical mothers, Dolly and Dare. Dark eyes mirroring, faking depth, pretty, fat mouths, dark touchable hair. How to locate the strength I imagine under their delicacy, to test it? Not good questions to ask, necessarily.
My daughters are unleashed on Island City tonight, reveling in its ruins, armed with a bag of tricks and a camera. So charged up. So saved up and ready to go. Black silk slip dresses. High strappy leathers highlight the completeness of legs at the peak of legs. Pictures unfold in their heads. Enough time to have a little fun, before we have hers. She can see but she can't touch and if we bring back what she wants...
Twilight. Depraved and lovely, they stand, barely visible, on the street. Long nails lacquered black, fat mouths painted red, high cheeks, dimples, teeth like clean, shiny paper. Excited, and a little deranged, my daughters wait on the close edges of night to help it come on. They float on the breeze.
Children fly by, pieces of heat and light, little crowds, and all alone. Vonica moves her hands fast. Jiggle sings. Look at all the wild, painted orphans moving in, drawn by my wildest of orphans. All of them forever lacking in parental guidance. The kids laugh easy when little bits of visible music spin from Vonica's fingertips. Jiggle takes pictures. Children ooh and ahh, scatter and run. Vonica and Jiggle hand in hand skipping, high heels clicking. Hearts darkly thrilling. Bringing on the night.
Island City is cool but they can't feel cool. So hot, but part of the chill, part of the giddy, smashing breeze. They stand outside The Water Torture. Neon flashes blue against blackening blue of night, as it should. Pictures of that.
They move into the club, pretty little gusts. Suck in sweet and smoky haze, feed on boozy breath, on the scents of want and need and power.
Flexing, softly blinking, they tramp through the throngs. Black silk against completing flesh. The music pulses, trying to shock the crowds. The pain is rough/but not rough enough. Vonica and Jiggle sit at the table: brandy touching fat lips, smoke curling down new throats. Fooling the atmosphere, scanning the crowds. Saving up camera juice for just the right one. Jiggle swirls brandy, swirling the night. Ahh, there he is. A nice big boy with a nice big prick; he knows exactly what to do with it, pretty drunk, holding his liquor just right.
They read the outlines of his thoughts:
The pressure intense...won't hurt...let it go. One more night and then I won't have to do this anymore...the act consummated by the act...cop some strange...it's what has to be done, under the circumstances...can't hurt...
Picture perfect. Just the right one. My daughters smile and crush out cigarettes.
He's leaning over the bar, their perfect boy. They put pictures in his head right before they stand on either side of him, backs to the bar. "Are you all alone? Do you wanna dance, wanna dance, wanna dance?" Their voices make him drunker than he wants to be. My daughters stare ahead into the crowd with those eyes (Where am I in those eyes? Where do I fit into those eyes?). He turns from the bar, zeros in on Jiggle and grabs her wrist, wanting to snap it. That's the feeling she provokes. "Did you say something to me?" More demanding than might really be good for him. Vonica breathes in his ear. "Do you wanna dance?" Jiggle smiles. "It's a once in a lifetime chance, baby. Are you a winner, baby?"
He has his arms around their waists now. "Have you ever been in a sex coma?" he asks them. Then suspicious, "I never pay."
"Oh we can understand why. We should pay you."
They dance on the mirrored floor of The Water Torture, and the smell of my daughters is melting the guy's brain.
Getawaygetawaygetaway, an inner voice screams, but he's lost in silk and leather and hair so shiny and lips so fat and completing flesh, and he wants to see those teeth against his prick no matter what it costs.
Tell us what you want.
I want you to blow me together, both of you on your knees, right here.
No. Tell us what you really want.
I wanna get a room, hoarse and deep from his throat.
The right words. Jiggle takes a picture of his face when he says them. Lust: pure and so good.
The All The Way Motel. Zippy (their grandfather, on their mothers' side) gives them the key to room 3. The boy lies naked and dark against white silk, the room dims with a slow grind. The bag of tricks is open. They take turns with the camera. Flicks of tongue and juice rolling. Filling up on the lust, attempting to deplete it.
Are you good?
No.
Are you good?
No.
Are you good?
Oh god, yes.
Doesn't mean a thing now, does it? Doesn't help a bit. Tell us all your dirty little secrets. You filthy kid, look what's become of you. We won't tell; we never tell; it's not nice to tell dirtyboy secrets.
The camera clicks and flashes. The kid's mind is gone.
Say the words, they scream. Say the words before we break your heart forever.
Please please please please please please, he moans just before they wake him up again. They clear up all the fuzz, let him feel it, feel the pain, and now he's screaming, gone soft. Vonica waves her hands over him to fix that: now too hard, screaming with the pain of his own hardness. Click of the camera. Vonica hissing. The feminine hiss. His brain is fuzz again, so warm and soft. Gratefully he writhes as they shackle him.
Click flash tongue like juice sliding down the cracks teeth on his balls smell of juice in the air. Close your eyes, baby, so we can save you; we are here to save you, to sanctify you.
They stroke him with a thin whip, then stand back for a moment, Vonica aiming the camera, Jiggle moving her hands. The whip wraps tighter and tighter around the boy's neck. Nothing but blood now and spent flesh, blood and spent flesh against a dirty sheet. And pictures of that.
5
Deeper into the night we travel, sliding through worlds together. I'm talking softly to her, trying to tell her something about the world, about destruction and creation, trying to speak her language, deciding to love her, deciding that there's nothing else to do. Nothing to do but love her for as long as it lasts.
Can she to decide to stay or to go? – And what would it be to keep such a creature, and what kind of love am I talking here (and what kind of creature)? – I open my arms to her, my receptive electric arms, hoping she washes in and out of them steady and erratic like the tides. She is pulled by something other than me. Someone other than me? Someone or something stronger than me. She is like the tides. Making patterns on the shores. Secret codes scribbled on the sand, absorbed by the sea, witnessed by the clouds, coupled with the rain and the sea creatures. Dying to communicate. Her golden throat still bubbles lightly from the heat it contains. I can't go around with my hand on her throat all the time. Even with me she's blistering with loneliness, even though I have chosen to love her.
She feels better now. I start to take focus as she becomes more aware of me. Lavish pictures in her head evasively bloom. The music does it, tries to makes her feel it. She gasps a little and even spasms some.
When she looks at me now, it pulls a little thrill. She's floating on dark blossoms, and though she's not sure what she knows about kisses, she wants me to kiss her, or do something like kiss her. We're kind of caught up in the wanting of the kiss, and we miss the clouds, ringent and speckled and twisting frantically, fruitlessly trying to alert us to something I don't see.
The Truth slides up on the beach. We get out. She's walking more steady. Throat bubbling seems mostly to have ceased. The world is dawning on her, making her part of it by degrees. I touch her, touch the mirrored wristband – it feels like the nicest part of skin, the nicest skin ever. I want to see her in the rain, want to see her in clothes, see if her eyes change colors, feel something from her heartbeat other than loneliness... does she feel fear? Of me? I want to taste her flesh.
I wonder if I can break her heart. This is my girl. If she has a name she won't tell me... (won't tell me anything)...so I decide to call her Quench.
Vint meets us on the beach. Quench double takes when she sees him, then looks back at me, smiling funny.
Not long after I met up with The Truth, The Sea of Love was calling me (maybe the real one), luring me to look for it again. The Truth was okay with it. So we followed the little links I was getting, and when we got to a certain convulsing space in the sea I was hit by a pluming euphoria. High off that and ultra-tuned, I blasted myself into the water.
In a clear space of water, resting on a wide sandy underwater slope, I found a rusty, vibrating chest, about the length of my body. It radiated something at me which I sucked up, enhancing my high. I touched the chest; it disappeared and was replaced by a spotlight projected from somewhere, and as I fought a sudden urge to sleep a guy came grainily into clarity. He was thrashing, or thrashed. Shaking and rocking to a soundtrack I couldn't hear, he came crashing into full focus whipping and spinning spastic as he unified in front of me. He looked (looks) like me. His music must have been getting louder: his frenzy increased. Black leather jumpsuit, spiky metal collar. Slashing to the music, then moving out of the spotlight, then, in a switch, disappearing. And then he was falling against my body screaming in some crazy language. Holding him, I spun back to the surface where The Truth was waiting for us, the music from his speakers pushing freaky, new-dimensional crashings into the deep inky blackness, heavy with moisture from transparent clouds.
The Truth was quiet as he drove onto the same stretch of beach on the outlying island where I'm having this memory now. The moon was full. No breeze. The night was a struck match.
The kid had fallen asleep during the ride and was snoring lightly against my shoulder. Sometimes he trembled, and sometimes he moaned. I carried him to my place and put him on my bed. When I covered him with a blanket, he opened his eyes. They were a more mossy green then with bits of phosphorescent lime peeking through (not like mine which are a reflective black with gold specks). And I looked into them and fell asleep. Sounds of creation tore my dreams: polished green dust, lights shifting, motions and potions and rushing delusions starving to be.
When I woke up I was in the bed with the blanket on me, and he was standing where I last remembered standing and was staring at me.
"Look, I told him, why don't you take off your clothes and lie down." So he climbed in under the blanket with me, and we slept together for hours or days or weekends or weeks or whatever, and when we woke up he knew everything I knew, but I didn't know anything about him other than what I've already told you. But he's stayed here since then. He stays here when I'm gone, which is most of the time. I never invite him to come with us on the mission, and he never asks to.
"So it's true," he says, an arm toward Quench. His face is gnarled up, forehead creasing. He has on soft, worn, black pants and a tight, gray t-shirt, no shoes. "I though you were just fucking around when I dreamed this."
"Meet Quench, Vint. Quench, meet Vint." I ignore his bad attitude and hug his stiffened body.
"What the fuck do you mean bringing her here? Nobody comes here. Remember?"
"This is different. Don't you remember the dreams? Don't you know what this means?"
"It means I'm not enough. It means you aren't enough."
"This is good for us. You'll see. This is good for us. Let's just go to the fucking house," I tell him. He grabs her suitcase, tramps ahead of us to the house, slams the door on the way in.
We're in now. The suitcase is just inside the door, leaned against the shiny, black, tile wall. And Vint is slouched and reclining in a fading, overstuffed chair, headphones on, the frenzied music blaring in his ears leaking out into the quiet of the room, a thick novel (The Contract) in his hands. Forehead still creased and lips grimacing, eyes glued to the page, he pretends to read.
Quench has zeroed in on his book. Her eyes go to the overrun, metal bookshelves that line the wall on the other side of the room from Vint. She moves to the shelves and starts pulling out books; she pulls one out, examines it, sniffs it, runs her fingers down the spine, fingers the cover, fans the pages, replaces it, then pulls out another and repeats the process. She pulls out all my favorites, novels you know; you must have read them. If not, you really really should: Cult, The Dangerous Bedrooms, Though the Cracks, Darcy Kiss, Angry Dog.
Finally she moves from the bookshelf and back to me like she doesn't know what to do. I lead her to me and Vint's room, and we take a shower.
She's on me, pounding me with a fist, pulling my hair. "You haven't learned to communicate — you are perfect for this world," I say, holding her off. I had her sitting on the bed wrapped in a towel. I'm looking in the mirror, drying off, sliding on a fresh patch, and I spray on a little green cologne. In the mirror I see her jump off the bed — let the towel fall off — when the smell hits the air. It must have done something for her. If you could really see how she glares at me while I hold her wrists, facing her away from the mirror. I try to calm her with my voice. "Let's get something for you to put on. You need clothes to walk around in this world, even in times like these. You have to stop second-guessing everything you do," I lull, not sure what I mean. I let go of one wrist, then grab it back, laughing after she smacks me again, this time on the mouth. I hold up her arm and push her wrist, the mirrored band, to her eyes, to her face. Why such a small mirror? Ahh her skin, her skin. "At least you aren't lonely right now," I tell her, easing her arms to her sides, trying not to touch her, really, "are you?" I ask, letting go. She smacks me again on the face, and she's smiling now, almost mean, and I put me hand to her throat and turning her, push her against the cool glass of the mirror. I move my hand and turn her hard so she's facing it. I push her body against it with mine. And I'm whispering in her ear with my jaw clenched: "Is this what you fucking want? To be looking at yourself and looked at by yourself all the time? It's not the smell is it? It's that I wasn't just looking at you? Isn't that it?" My prick is hard, but I don't even want to try it, don't think I ever really want to be inside her now (it's not that kind of love). I keep her pushed against the mirror and thrust against her until my come drips down her golden back, and this seems to calm her too. And so I let go of her, and she's calm, and I rub my come into her back with the same towel that I use to polish the mirrored wave of her hair.
After I do her hair, Vint (who has been, of course, not missing any of this) brings me one of our shirts (soft, gray) and she's letting him put it on her, letting him do the buttons.
Quench and Vint on either side of me in the bed. I think they're asleep. Maybe not. I don't care. Hmm...this is comfortable. But I don't think it means anything. I just go through what I go through because I go through it. Through it. What do I do with Quench? I've chosen to love her. Like I chose to love Dolly and chose to pretend it was different with Dare. She can't even talk and I pretend this is love.
Hey. I'm still awake. Trying to feel something that doesn't just mimic something I've felt reading or looking in screens. Trying to feel what music makes me feel, but without music. But I can't even tell you my name. Can't tell you where I come from. Can't tell you the whole story here. Maybe I just don't know you well enough yet. I'm sorry. You seem like a nice person. Maybe not. I don't know. I'm not a very good judge of character.
Vonica and Jiggle are here. But I won't find this out until a little later. They are watching when I — bored — touch Vint and Quench. They touch me back, touch each other. Notice the state of the groan, the weight of the thrust, the bodies desperately measured, squeezed like triggers while we try to communicate somehow in the still, blended, blue-black predawn. I wonder if any of us are getting through, and at one point, just before Vonica and Jiggle slash into the room with camera flashing, whip flicking, flooding us with electric blue light, and go into the heart of Quench and find out what she wants and promise it to her and thereby convince her to go with them, I kiss Quench's mouth and then kiss it again.
