The Cave – Sam Pearson
February 21, 2025
When my PhD cohort invited me to go on this trip I uncertainly said yes. This period isn’t really my cup of tea, but the journey sounded compelling enough, if not too dangerous, that to not go would be a certain faux pas in the table etiquette of “life” – whatever that means.
Like I said, I specialize more in the middle to late Byzantine period. There is a certain fondness I have for cutlery and armor of this time. But given the location, and the nature of the expedition, I thought there was a certain attitude that could be understood from an exploration of a deep, dark cave, that could correlate to the fantasies I have of my chosen window of study… If it exists only in fantasy I am fine with that. The artist within me beckoned to go.
Jack is what I might call a friend of mine, a close colleague. He specializes in this period. He was alerted to the cave by a professor from Goldsmiths he’d encountered on campus, who was visiting briefly for a lecture. Since this professor, who doesn’t really need a name, is a distinguished scholar on the subject, Jack and he spent many evenings together. First, to have a drink, which was fruitful enough to warrant a dinner the following night, which the professor told him would provide a more hospitable atmosphere for the information he had decided he was willing to share.
Apparently, many years ago, when the professor was working on his first biography, a call was received on his main line in which a madam who resided in Chelsea asked to speak with him. She, being connected somehow to a friend of the professor’s mother, had been alerted of his promising mind and impressive nature of study. She of course was the keeper of a certain piece of property which had been passed down in her family for generations, in the south of Germany, the contents of which possessed a historical value non-disclosed to the academic community.
Being that her property possessed a vessel that had held many important manifestations of power, she, when in the company of trusting clientele, read: rich associates, would disclose this information in tales that had the splendid quality that makes gossip impossible to resist. Therefore, the friend of the professor’s mother couldn’t help but mention the bright scruple and his work to the madam.
When she took a visit to Goldsmiths and read a published dissertation being held in the library by the young professor she decided he may be able to help her understand the power her possession could be holding.
The professor visited the cave (which sits in the rear of her farm under a boulder next to the hairline of a looming German forest) many times throughout the course of his study. The madam and he developed a close studious relationship.
She had a son who inherited the property at some point during the professor’s career, a relationship with whom the professor maintained and therefore continued along with unlimited access to the property, unsupervised even – considering the love he’d made to this hole almost forfeited any legal holding her naive aristocratic heir could even fathom ownership of at all – in other words, the professor had a key.
Now, like I said, the professor, having been very smitten by my friend Jack’s dedication to the subject matter affected, decided it would be only fair to share with his burning mind the stimuli which the cave emitted. Almost erotically, the professor fantasized the sensation Jack might feel upon his first visit and the idea of this and how the sensations may look on Jack’s handsome features pleased him.
The third night the professor asked Jack to meet him at the Chelsea Hotel, where he was staying. An eccentric choice, if for no reason other than the amount of stops between him and our institution, where they shared a drink in the lobby bar. The last night the professor did not have much to say, he merely clinked the ice around in his glass and looked at his shoes for the most part, besides a few bursts of conversation on history which Jack took to come across as very subdued, almost suspiciously non-affective in contrast to nights previous.
Jack made attempts to inquire further about the cave but the professor maintained that he would simply need to see it for himself and to share too much information prior would be a discredit.
Once the professor returned to London he shot Jack an email in which he explained the nature of the expedition. What was made clear was that the property housed a cavern which had been used by many different European empires and kingdoms over the years.
The professor also made it clear that there was no indication that knowledge of the cave was transmitted orally or if the cave was merely discovered and rediscovered again like a magnet by these forces at play. And, given the property’s distance from any nearby town, the historical artifacts that resided in the cave were not disclosed to the public either.
Instead, the cavern had been taken over sometime in the eighteenth century by the madam’s ancestors, the seller remaining staunchly unknown to her records and could not be fished out of the German apparatus with the help of the young professor either. Therefore, what the professor was planning to share with Jack was a completely non-excavated site that contained artifacts that were of an immense value. Jack was free to visit, and the professor maintained that he did not want Jack to feel like a stranger within. Ultimately, he was being welcomed kindly to see with his own eyes something withheld from those of the “world” and he shouldn’t feel like he owed a debt of any kind to repay the professor for this at all.
Which is why Jack felt comfortable mentioning me on a later phone call with the professor, vouching for my own scrupulousness, and our close relationship, to which the professor being of a notably free-spirit, obliged enthusiastically.
We decided it would be sometime in the end of March that we would visit, four or so months out from where we were in the weeks following the evening at the Chelsea Hotel and we marked our calendars.
Our flight was to Frankfurt, which is where we met the professor, for an introductory dinner at Gustav. He shared with us his excitement being that it had been several years since his last visit, almost a decade. And that he was curious to see how the contents of his secret hole had held up.
Jack thanked him again for his hospitality which he obliged kindly, insisting it was only right to pass this location on to a new crop, so to speak. We would meet in the morning and take a train to Stuttgart where we would rent a car and drive to the location somewhere in between Sommerberg and Reichental.
Jack and I shared a nightcap in the lobby of our hotel and retired as early as we could to accredit the morning’s voyage.
Entering into the Schwarzwald I began to feel the sensation known as “butterflies” and the mood in the vehicle accompanied this. Music was played at minimum, a classical playlist, and conversation was terse, erratic and out of pleasantry and not inquisition.
Entering the timeline we had been prepared for, intellectual energy constricted inwards in each of us, and being of the disposition we are, we felt fine with that. It was not for social motivations that either of us had found ourselves here and the professor knew there would be much to discuss once we were inside.
We could not enter that afternoon, nor visit the entrance, since it was in the properties dorsal and could not be reached by car. The sun would be too low simply when we arrived and time could only be usefully spent on settling into the cabin which sat near the entrance to the property, off of the main road.
It was surrounded by trees and a wide moat of field. There was a separate barn that had been repurposed as a tool shed painted a pleasant shade of lilac. The house itself was a typical to the region fluorescent beige with timber trim.
We cooked steaks and potatoes with a loaf of bread, all of which had been left in the freezer by the professor on his last visit and enjoyed a case of beers left behind in the fridge.
That evening the professor spoke of his birth, during a bombing in which his family had been forced to shelter in the tube, sparking his lifelong curiosities. He spoke of the Fuhrer with an air of detachment, as if he were a metaphor for the nature of power and depersonalized from his political atrocities, for if it weren’t him, it would have been another. He was not sold on the myths of unique brilliance in regard to human evil but rather on the banality, so often referred to in the critical sector of academia, not so much wielded as implicit within the German people, and the West in general.
Hitler was but an icon of aimless will to him, and being that he’d devoted his life to the study of his following, of his army’s machina, it was as if the Fuhrer were an acquaintance of a bygone era and nothing more.
Having heard of my window of time and study, the professor mentioned that there was evidence indicating that the court of Rudolph I had visited the cave in its early political history. Not sure what else he could offer me, he relented, assuring much would be made clear tomorrow.
A beat –
The entrance was not how I imagined it. To describe the idea in my head, I can conventionally rely on the cave as a motif. Jagged rocks, a hole or a gap. But in actuality the cave was more locked away than that, behind a steel door in the side of a miniature cliff, which I took as the boulder, covered in mossy grass, and thus a prisoner.
With a turn of the key Jack had mentioned, the steel was dislodged from the natural and we descended on a set of metal stairs. You can imagine the surprise I felt when the stairs pivoted and we descended the opposite direction and so on and so forth, realizing we were using the unit of flights as measurement here. As we did so, the walls of the cave moved away from us, where they had initially pressed directly against the iron railings, until eventually they left our sight.
The professor intoned that the lights were at the bottom of the well and that our flashlights might be useful for this part of the journey, which he didn’t need to tell us since we were already reaching for them.
Before our descent the professor had locked the door behind us, as a matter of secrecy, which he assured we could understand given the nature of the content. And so I wasn’t sure how far we were down or how far we were up, from the depths. The steel had slits in the top region similar to the mask of Hannibal Lecter, and the light provided by such lasted only so many steps, or, convictions – the temperature lowered with the passing minutes and we continued in silence. Like in any cave, the sound of drips syncopates from a sonic abyss – or, as Neil Young so eloquently termed once, an anonymous wall of digital sound, meaning; everything.
The cave, in anatomy, is the ear, or the anus, and the spirit an eavesdropping widow. Or the ear is the mouth, and the anus is another. What can it hear when we assume its immanence…
I counted fifteen flights when we finally reached the bottom, a landing made of plywood that extended only a few short feet like a doormat before turning into solid earth.
The professor hastily disappeared into the shadows and proceeded for many steps, how he could do this with his eyes-and-eyes alone I was not sure, before a flash of light left us blinking for a tedious moment before setting us in a cavern more spacious than I’d imagined – a large reliquary lit by tungstens hanging in a row over a path from the ceiling leading 60 meters or so until bending behind a pillar of rock and, from the looks of it, descending.
The path was elevated like a spine passing through a rib cage, and the walls of the cave were more or less rounded. The professor said to Jack and I, “It’s good to have new blood here.”
Jack remarked how massive the system was. I agreed, adding some back pocket knowledge or something or other, based on the size of the stalactites, er mites, I’m not sure.
The professor awed and grinned, and patted us each on the back. He asked if we had any issues with small openings or any claustrophobia to speak of. Neither of us did and so we continued along the path.
For sequences like this I tend to move into God mode and listen to the sound of my steps and watch the clouds of breath escape the heads of our party. Imagine drips accompanied by gravelly footsteps accessorized with occasional sighs or grunts, minor dialogue from the professor, underscored by a synthesizer:
Using my digits I look around and inspect different offshoots of the main reliquary or rib cage and occasionally glance at bits of the cave that splinter off into dark oblivions.
Our path is well lit and along it I find hammers and pickaxes I am free to wield, as a kind of foreshadowing, to which I resist. Being that I’m a person here, and since I’m in a secluded tunnel with two men, I find that to pick up a tool or weapon could pre-maturely set off a chain of events that I’m not prepared, or, er, willing, to deal with before unlocking the mystery at hand… In other words: I trusted that if the time came when something extraneous to my physical capabilities was necessary, the sequencing would allow for me to acquire it.
We walked for a long time before reaching an area where we had to get on our stomachs and crawl through a “birth canal” to reach the final tea room on the other side. The professor warned us the crawl was long and the canal would become very constricted before we reached the other side.
There may be moments where we could acquire the sensation of our lungs being almost crushed, but he assured us that with peace of mind and relaxation we would be able to reach the tea room.
It was true, there were bits that felt like being squeezed through a Chinese finger trap, only less giving, and with the flashlight attached to my head I was only able to see the soles of Jack’s hiking boots which reminded me of windshield wipers with the physicality of his crawl.
The drips, ricocheting, persisted here and the sounds of my own breathing took on a rather external character. This lasted for about ten minutes before we reached a final landing to an elevated reliquary toward which we ascended a small, almost vertical slope, using a piece of rope that was tied to something over the ridge.
Once on top I was surprised to find myself in a steeple where the pews were lined sparsely with figures. There was stained glass at the front of the hall, lit artificially with tungstens from behind and so, not that radiant. The pews were adorned with the remains of Nazi soldiers, the Reich, in other words – some completely skeletal, some mummified, and each in uniform, black coats with red swastika bands. At the front of the congregation was an altar which held a small gold dagger, the significance of which was proclaimed by the professor as the Dagger of Rasputin, purchased not so distantly ago from a certain Georgian individual…
The professor explained, “This is a holy place. As you’ll soon find out.”
Jack and I listened intently. Drips persisting.
“The men you see here did not die here, they were brought. The mummification was done by my late friend’s mother.
“She took the bodies and embalmed them in the cabin. The other ones, the skeletons, they are made bare because it’s important that there be some contrast here. But what you see before you are real life army men, boys dead by the blade…
“However, some of them are older than the second Great War indeed, some of these gentlemen date way back, even to your own window, my friend, and have been redecorated to accompany our period, transitional as it may be.
“What you’ll find here is not so much an artifact as it is a text. Although, yes there are artifacts here.
“The text is not written but felt. In doing so you will need to undergo meditation here in the pews….
“You will have to sit for a while, it may be dark when we leave.
“There are more rooms but I cannot show you them until you have meditated for a long time. Do not be scared of what you may encounter, this is a spiritual place, and none like any other you will have visited in your life….
“I promise… It may become difficult to leave, but I will ensure it remains a possibility so long as you are willing.
Not really sure what to make of the professor’s explanation, Jack and I took a seat. The professor assumed a seat in the first pew, strangely close to one of the corpses. Jack and I took a rear pew at a distance, and at the farthest edge was one of the skeletal Nazi’s with a large black leather hat, riding boots, a military jacket, yet no pants; which led it to much resemble a fashionista. We looked at each other, eyes wide with incredulity, shrugged.
Not long after I closed my eyes were my ears met with a numbing frequency, and when I opened them to gauge my surroundings again was when I realized that I couldn’t really blink, although I could move my eye lids – what appeared was that regardless of if my eyes were open or close, which I could tell using my muscles, my vision was fixed firmly in the reality of the tea room.
I scrolled to my left to see Jack seated, eyes closed, breathing. The professor sat statuesque where he was. I moved my head around and scanned the room, but my actions did not become felt on Jack and the room remained stagnant. Even when I got up and walked around, which certainly made noise given the gravel, Jack and the professor remained silent. Breathing…
I stood there, back in my pew after pacing around a bit, I took my seat back from next to Jack and tried to close my eyes although nothing changed. I was still here, I entered God mode, which I’d left during the birth canal and tried again, still nothing…
Drip…
After repeating this, the walk around, a few times, my vision somehow faded to black and when I woke Jack and the professor were speaking. I glanced at them for a minute, but when I tried to leave I could not escape my meditation. My eyes were closed, or so I thought, but I could see Jack and the professor (still sat with shut eyes) and hear their words, however their lips remained sealed:
The professor explained a “he” had spent the night here at some point, although it’s not certain why. It was just observed by the owners of the property, who let the soldiers do as they pleased, for what else could be done.
The professor and Jack spoke of the text, but I could not understand, which meant that they had altered their syntax somehow to where the structure of words became a completely un-followable cloud, like a distorted and animated jigsaw puzzle and I fell into black again.
The next time I woke I was alone in the tea room: I stood and paced. I called for Jack, the professor. But all I could hear was the ricocheting. An anonymous wall of digital sound. Suddenly, a burst of light sprang through the stained glass and shattered it and the room with a reverberated 808 boom, which wallowed in my ear canals like a deep belch on benzodiazepines.
We fell to pieces.
My vision elongated and the corpses flew away like cocktail napkins on a detonated airliner into a white fiery mist. I was mounted to a piece of rock being sucked into the birth canal but my vision fades here and for a moment I hear the sound of crunching.
To move forward I press W. I see with my fingers, and I climb trees with mere conviction. Once on top I can run along the branch and leap to an intersecting other, and so on and so forth, scaling for miles across forest. In urban settings I do this on the ridges of apartment buildings and skyscrapers, my body takes on a mind of its own and I climb with but the conviction I’d mentioned earlier, I am a squirrel with the banality of a few clicks.
On a more memorable excursion I am out for a “stroll” in Chinatown and I decide that the ground has lost its favor to me, so I begin scaling walls and peeking in windows. At the top floor of one tenement building I stack myself in the window and gaze in to see a group of men lying about on various wooden surfaces under a reddish glow.
Their bodies are wet and I realize the men are in a sauna because the window I am silhouetting on is warm to the touch and has little bubbles next to the sills.
A man lying in the center of the room on his back has a towel splayed over his groin although the towel is quite wet and his groin appears stiff. He’s sweating profusely and his pits are curlicueing into tight little knots. His eyes are closed and the men adorning him and himself seem dead. I see it twitching underneath the cloth and I can’t help but feel agitated by that, in some way.
The air outside is cool and I decide that I’d be better off inside, gently creaking the window open by pressing my palms firmly into the glass. I duck my head down to my shins, place one leg through the gap first, followed by my shoulder blades, and my other foot curves through behind me like a slurped noodle.
I quietly press the window closed behind me, it makes a little noise but not enough to disturb my new company. I disrobe and grab a seat underneath the window sill, facing in between the thighs of the man on his back.
It seems like hours go by as I sit watching the men breathe. The man in the middle is twitching and twitching, his feet are shaking, and I feel he is asleep. I continue to watch as he orgasms all over his stomach in the middle of the room. When he does so he wakes and sees me there looking at him, says nothing.
I crawl to him and help him wipe off while he looks into my head. I am watching him from behind my nasal plate, and after I finish wiping him off I gently open the window and leave the way that I entered.
I scale up to the roof and take in the view, the triangulation of power that is, and the little plumes of exhaled carcinogen emitting from each little building. The city looks like a frozen tundra, of international style, and it’s quite chilled here. I take the stairs back down from the hatch in the center and as I’m exiting the front door, which by my calculation is either going to put me on Mott or Doyers. I hear footsteps quickly descending the stairwell.
I land outside, but before the door has the chance to close behind me, the man from the center of the sauna is approaching me, fully dressed in a Columbia sweatshirt, jeans.
He gazes at me intently and I feel… something.
“How did you get in there?” He asks.
I told him I came in the front door, cautious to share with him my capability.
“That’s impossible. The door was locked. The room was at capacity.”
“What are you all doing in there?” I ask.
“What it looks like…. It’s a sauna.”
“Then why should it matter if the room is at capacity?”
He looks away for a moment, down at his feet, his hair still wet and his face slightly flushed. He’s brunette, his hair is cut into a nice boy-pixie and his eyebrows are full and angular.
He has a little black stubble dotting his chin, big pink lips, clean teeth, his skin is really smooth….
He glances back up at me and looks slightly disappointed before shrugging and taking a few steps out into the street…
“I think I know how you did that.” He says.
“Oh yea?”
He smirks at me, turns and begins walking.
Bill can’t stand when I’m out past eight, and the sun is beginning to set in the early autumn sky. But nonetheless, I can’t shake the feeling that there is more to uncover here. After we take a left, he presses me into an incline, and nuzzles his face into mine: I feel a warm lake rising from a drain in my root chakra, like a clogged bathtub with a running faucet somewhere in the ether of my gut, pressing into the roof of my urethra: I shove my cock in between my legs and clench.
His lips are like cold water balloons filled to the amount of a tincture or two, only where the rubbery would be in that scenario, they are fleshy and soft. My tongue licks over the smooth film holding his capillaries, and he bites me, to the point where I want to head butt him but I don’t, and instead, I moan and lift my leg up, so my thigh is resting on his hip.
He’s grabbed me there and has my fat squished in his fist, my lake is rising and he’s grinding into it, like an ocean liner against the shore of a parochial pond. I pull away and begin to sob, as foreplay to my emotional gush which is coming in… right.. Now! Oooph.
The drips land all over the toes of his sneakers, beige suede air force ones… Sorry. Their yellow and glittery goo composes the frame and as he stands there, his air forces like the root of a great African tree soaking in a monsoon, my feet come down, one at a time in light brown leather bebe shoes, they’re kind of like a kitten heel, sort of awkwardly, angular, at first.
A beat –
The man’s not really mad, which is nice, and the breeze picks up a strand of my hair and blows it flirtatiously in the brisk wind which tickles his cheek and we laugh. He squeezes me close, blush.
“Can you tell I had to go.”
“I can feel it seeping in my socks… er, and between my toes …” He lifts a shoe and presses it down with a chuckle, a wet squish coming from in between the folds of his skin, hysterical laughter on my part, forehead on his collar bone …
“I’m Shane.”
“Alicia…”
“It’s, uh, nice to meet you.”
“Yeah you too…. Um… This might be kind of weird, but, like, I feel like I’ve seen you before…. Um… Have I ever, like, seen you around?”
“Shit, I dunno.”
“Yeah, it’s like, how do you ever know if you’ve seen someone or if they’re like someone you imagined…”
“Do you want some boy?”
“What?”
“Like, some heroin, I just scored some, and we, like, could do it, like if you want.”
It sounds cliché but I answer with: “I’ve never done that before… Um, okay.”
Shane walks me to Columbus Park and we sit on one of the little benches in the gazebo. He pulls it out of his pocket, a little off-white baggy, and starts crushing it up on his phone, which has like a cracked screen so some of the powder is getting stuck in the glass… but he rolls up a twenty and hands it to me, and I snort a line off of it.
I’m not really sure like what to expect but I feel like my mind go blank, like I’m falling into a really really deep sleep, and there’s like some grin wiping over my face and like my vision is going blurry and I see a bunch of Chinese people playing cards and doing Qi Gong, and like car horns, and people yelling in Cantonese or Mandarin because I can’t really tell and Shane is hunching over and putting the bill to his nose and then I’m rolling, leaning back on the picnic table, and the table is cutting into my spine like a big stone blade.
Metaphorically, I’m at a wedding by a lake in the woods, somewhere like New Hampshire in the springtime or whatever, and I decide to walk away from the glowing plaza hosting our reception in a suit or like a dress, I don’t know, and I’m headed toward the lake.
There’s not really much to romanticize or whatever about my thoughts or feelings before plunging myself into its depths and floating to the bottom, where there is a bouncy house filled with ghosts of, like, drowned children, playing. I pull out a blade and pop the inflatable, sending us, the ghosts and I, floating violently to the surface in a cloud of bubbles.
Simultaneously, Shane and I are like two employees of a high end furniture store raped and murdered by a vagrant on the clock, in the back of the showroom, on some sofa, where no one can see.
But whatever, I don’t really know what’s going on but when I come out of the nodding Shane is commanding me, he’s trying to leave the park and I’m like on the ground like I can’t get up and the ground is like goo, functionally, yet emotionally a really soft pillow, a warm embrace, a childhood pet at the foot of my bed on Christmas morning. I’m like really fucking happy.
A beat –
His house is on Grand Street and Eldridge or some other tributary and is like a street facing glass box in one room, and then spirals up in a stairwell toward the backside of the building where there is a shanty terrace and a second much less remodeled bedroom. The kitchen is lofted over the front entrance of the main glass room and is really more like a kitchenette, and although walls block the view of the front glass room there are little slits in the bottom corners of the wall, like air vents, with gaps wide enough to view what is going on, the glass fogged.
I’m on the terrace smoking a cigarette. The sky is blue, like a deep lilac, an early sunset, and the trees are barren. There’s an abandoned school bus in the parking lot below and I’m like throwing my cigarettes at its boarded up windows. I’m like, still high kinda.
At some point here things are going to get a bit strange, and like I may lose touch a bit. But he’s in the kitchen next to the counter looking through the slits in the bottom of the wall at the fogged glass windows in the bedroom and the windows are only fogged to the level where people can’t see in but the top half is clear and from where he’s looking he can see everyone’s faces pass by.
A microphone connected to the street with a small wire that’s nestled on the underside of a pipe is listening to the passing conversations when he hears what he’s been listening for.
Ronny and JJ are outside, loading, and it isn’t but a few seconds after he registers this and it hits him that the glass is shattered with a hammer and the two men are crawling in through the shards.
I’m still smoking on the terrace when Shane comes up behind me and grabs me by the waist, and it isn’t a few seconds after I think about that and why he’s holding me that Ronny and JJ are stepping onto the terrace with their pistols drawn. Ronny shoots and Shane throws me in front of him and I catch a bullet in the side of my gut, to which I crash to the ash covered astroturf and begin looking at a seesaw toy in the corner covered in dead leaves and rainwater.
JJ shoots Shane in the head and he falls in front of me, his face glazing over, blood pooling underneath his ear, swimming toward me. JJ shoots me again in the face, and all I see is something, I guess blood, pooling up in my eyes which looks like a fingerprint. I lay there for a while and enter God mode where I see myself lying on the terrace a few feet away from Shane, my face isn’t that bad, like I’m missing a cheek, but other than that I’m like fine…
The screen is pulsing with red fade out effect and my heart rate is blasting softly over a frequency, ringing, in my ears I guess, from the bullet that lodged into my face a few seconds ago. I roll over, and stand up and go back down. I’m looking out at the school bus, and then I tip and fall over the balcony.
Days go by and nothing really happens, I watch the sun go up and down and up and down. I’m just in someone’s derelict parking lot, existing, not too different from a ghost. Eventually I lose interest in that and my body is able to get up again and so I walk back up to the terrace and use Shane’s t-shirt to bandage my face and go into the bathroom.
You may be wondering how I’m still narrating this for you, and that much will be made clear, but first allow me to explain how I took a shower and washed my hair:
Soap, is a slather, this much is true, and similar to that, my life, or whatever you want to call it, is capable of being rinsed from the effects of reality similar to the way shampoo pools and coagulates in the wavy folds of my wet threads until I place them under the faucet and let it all wash away.
Therefore, it’s not out of the question that the previous sequence ended with the description of the house, and Ronny and JJ do not exist, or do not exist yet, and rather Shane came and found me on the terrace as I was putting my cigarette out in that dead-leaf-covered see saw toy…
He grabs me from behind by my waist and begins rubbing my belly, I’m feeling that heaviness again in my gut, and he’s massaging it which is causing me to ache in my sexual region.
Turns me around: hoists me up and carries me to the bed.
Being schizophrenic is not a disability, as you may want me to believe, but rather it is a network of co-existence in which I inhabit the world itself in its truest form.
My name isn’t Alicia and it isn’t Alex, like you may have guessed by now, but I am something different altogether. Alicia is a whore, yes, but she is also a busy girl and she is getting ready for an interview. Today she’s speaking with her agent, and to do that she needs to be clean, which means she needs to have washed her hair and her face shouldn’t have a hole in it. So it doesn’t.
To go back to Alex for a minute, you may be wondering what the professor and Jack saw in the cave after they concluded their meditation. Well – they saw me. But I was still deep in my consciousness.
The professor suggested that he and Jack break for the night and that they could retrieve me in the morning. Well, they did, and didn’t. When they came back I was crushed under some rubble, smooshed, for lack of a better word, by a falling boulder next to the fashionista reich skeleton. It’s unfortunate but sometimes this must be done. Being that my “soul” now lacked a vessel and was sort of floating in mid air waiting for a new host, I chose Jack, who was disturbed to say the least.
He didn’t understand how we could have let this happen, the Professor and he, but I was dead, but not really, Alex was flattened, that’s all. I hope I’m not giving you too much here so that you can’t chew.
But he sobbed and sobbed, distraught, really, would be the word, and the professor did the best he could to comfort the sobbing me, but ultimately he was more attuned to the implications of what this could mean. The professor had heard of what happened in this cave, and yet, he understood, from the Madame, that of course it was very rare, and in his tenure this was a surprising first.
That being said, he knew there was a protocol that needed to be followed and so he made the arrangements. The professor and I carried Alex’s body all the way back through the tributary and up the stairs, which was a considerable amount of labor considering the weight that first had to be lifted and the residual weight, stiff in rigor mortis, the old me, that needed to be carried to the car and driven back to the house.
Alicia walks down the street confidently and people turn to look at her. She’s got the gift, so they say, and she wields it graciously if not indulgently at times, because who wouldn’t.
Bill meets her on the sixth floor of a building further west on Grand Street, his office, which is like a casting couch next to the window surrounded by art books, fashion magazines, Madonna’s infamous Sex. Alicia’s like sipping her coffee with her legs crossed and Bill is leaning out of the window lighting a cigarette and then pacing around the room, drinking a glass of orange juice.
Alicia’s like taking a cigarette out of Bill’s pack and lighting it, still feeling a little groggy from the heroin and being shot and everything, Bill’s like asking about the shirt wrapped around her face.
“It’s nothing.”
“Sure…”
Alicia’s like crossing her legs the other way and Bill is wondering why she was gone for so many days and now is back here with a shirt wrapped around her face.
“I’m like … trying new stuff out, okay?”
“If you’re cheating on me again I’ll fucking kill you, you know that right?”
“If I were cheating on you again I would have fucking killed you first to save us all the trouble.”
Bill is laughing sort of dignifiedly, “Yeah we’ll see about that.”
I can’t stand Bill, but fucking him once a month is better than paying rent, Alicia is thinking.
In fact, I’m surprised he hasn’t asked about his face yet.
Bill is pacing around the kitchen and I’m looking at him from the couch, the smoke blowing in my face. I don’t know what the fuck it is but I’m still like really fucking high and this doesn’t even feel like heroin anymore, it’s like psychedelic paralysis and my head is pulsing so dramatically, like an iron mallet struck appendage, Bill is bending over in the cabinet looking for something but also looking at me, like at little intervals and his gaze is really tripping me out. He’s like grabbing something… I’m like recrossing my legs and that root chakra feeling is kind of returning, like my bladder filling up so dramatically, I’m like a nervous pisser and my gut is kind of itching of weight.
His head is like bobbing around and swelling and turning yellow, like hot yellow, and then orange and then pulsing back to yellow again but he’s getting so red and angry in the face that his head is actually bright red and really swollen and his veins are pulsing, he’s like totally off his fucking rocker. This guy is fucking crazy.
A beat –
When we arrived the madam was waiting for us. It was a surprise to me, Jack, that she was still alive. In fact, she wasn’t supposed to be, and yet she was never really given a title, for there was too much to do, so it’s unclear if she were the madame at all. But nonetheless she understood the process that needed to occur which was, crudely, to fill a tank with acid and throw Alex into it, after which we drained and bleached the bones. Sitting by the fireplace that night, the madam stitched together some alterations on a uniform from the closet and placed me underneath it, however the uniform was strangely unidentifiable but resembled that of the allied forces, only twenty first century.
Those old, or rather, young, bones were propped up in a rocking chair, the orange incandescence of the blaze casting over their ivory finishings, the professor applied spirit gum and rubber cement generously to the joints and painstakingly glued each tooth back into its socket so as to create a “smile” effect, and before I knew it the sun was up and I’d been asleep on the couch and coffee was served and we were preparing to place Alex back in the cavern.
Alicia is getting seriously freaked out by Bill. She’s like trying to decipher whatever tongue he’s speaking in and what he could be fishing for in that drawer. In a few moments her questions are answered in the form of a camcorder and Bill is walking toward her: “Do you want to see the most fucked up shit of your life?”…
Alicia, thinking back on the whole episode with Shane, Ronny and JJ is a little concerned as to whether that will ever be possible again, “Sure.”
Bill sits down next to her on the sofa and pulls up a video on the camcorder, plugs the device into his computer, which is connected to a projector that faces one of the side walls of the room.
“Shit.” Bill gets up to close the blinds. On the screen, a woman crying and praying in Arabic as she points the camera out the window:
On foot, a score of American soldiers are approaching her home… Cut –
Screaming and crying, there are two kids in the room with her now, banging and gun fire at the door, the door swings open and the Americans shoot her and the kids in a hail storm of bullets, the camera falls on the ground. An American soldier picks up the camera and films the bodies:
The mother and the children are Swiss cheese covered in strawberry jam. The Americans are laughing a bit.
“Fucking turn this shit off – where did you even find this?” Bill is cringing a bit, sort of aware of how it’s “too far” or whatever – “like eBay.. well like, my friend got it on eBay.”
Alicia is having a flashback of Shane’s body on the terrace, his blank face staring back at her – the life having been snapped out of him so quickly, before he hit the ground even, it looked like he could have been dead for years already, the amount of peace on his expressions.
Alicia fantasizes about zooming into the hole in his forehead, a cavity enmeshed in the gooey soft, and still warm, tissue that she loved so much in Shane. Simultaneously, she’s recalling being on his bed, the one he threw her onto, with a plomp before mounting her on top. His lips on her jugular vein, his teeth digging in gently, the chills going up and down her spine. Her legs constricting his pelvis, her thighs almost squishing his frame. His – influence on her…
Snap back to Bill, Alicia is disgusted. She’s getting up as Bill reminds her that she has to speak with John later about the trip to Miami.
“Fuck the trip to Miami!”
Alicia slams the door.
Jack is like a friend of mine, yes.
We met one day in a lecture, he was sat next to me. Art history.
When my PhD cohort invited me on this trip I uncertainly said yes