Night Mare Hunt: A Wunderkammer
Language for Animals VOLUME ONE (The Eonothem.§.2.❡.2.8.) Section One
Night Mare Hunt
(A Wunderkammer)
0
The following Night Mares were encountered not by this author via sleep, nor gathered via the sleep memories of others. Neigh, these mares were hunted and captured, pulled away from the ethereal sand dunes vaporously slithering through our cosmos, undetected by modern science, where such dangerous creatures freely roam. They are collected here not in the name of some new science, but as trophies, as busts of nocturnality that will—I am more than aware—now haunt me. I am cursed, as is this whole oneiric wunderkammer.
That is the price the hunter of Night Mares pays for glory.
1
You’re on an opulent river boat searching for a math textbook. The grand hall is decorated as if for a holiday ball, and you know, rather inexplicably, that it is in celebration of a notorious war criminal. The tables are set and the bar is sparkling and the stage is ready for the musical act. But the hall is empty of people. You fear this may have something to do with the stomach bug going around, and wonder if you have become infected as well. You intuit the sick history of microbial infestations festering within your textbook, a textbook handed down from generation to generation, from student to student. So many hands—in so many states of unclean, in so many illicit places inappropriate for the study of mathematics—all imprinting onto the pages their invisible pathogens, contagions now lying dormant within that nasty bend of papers toward the spine of the book, all waiting for you. Then, though you see the chord clearly ahead, your foot—moving of its own volition, unresponsive to your desires, sliding slowly through the viscous air—your foot catches hold of a chord leading to the stage, and you’re yanked down with such sudden spiraling force, like a jolt of electricity, into such a vertiginously dizzying plummet, that the ground rushes to your face, your arms unable to bre—
2
With a little hammer you bang on the head of an ostrich until it cracks open and blood spills out. Then you take a surgical tool designed to pry bone open and make a hole nice and wide. Then you scoop out brain matter, place it in a pail, and hurl it onto the interstate. Your in-laws are impressed. They take their daughter jewelry shopping and on the nightstand, just after sundown, your future rests grafted onto hers like a prenatal halo.
“This is what the prophets are always talking about over suppertime,” you say. Another thought too hard to come by passes through and then knock knock—
“Who’s there go away!”
Years ago, impatient with solitude, you invented a person to play with named Sharon. She knows you’re home.
3
Your shirt catches on sharp objects and comes unraveled shortly before you arrive to work a night shift at the coffee shop. Though you believed that you had quit that job nearly two decades ago, earlier that morning a phone call proved otherwise. The coffee shop is not as you remember it; the building is cavernous and cold and contains many secret corridors through which run many secret animals, evolved over time to live within the ecosystem of hidden coffee shop corridors. The protocols at work have changed drastically, but you are given a cursory rundown of what is expected of you, mostly in a jargon so specific to this cavernous coffee shop that it may constitute a new language. You receive a citation for being shirtless, that much is clear. Now, working alone, you try to take a customer’s order with pencils that keep breaking, and a line forms, winding through the dark architecture, disappearing into distant passageways. You try to make light of your predicament—gosh darn these pencils, were they manufactured with a different gravity in mind?—the customer, while quiet, is very angry, and begins listing your deformities, which have started to bubble up mostly around your neck. No one else in the line seems to care about that (though they are starting to poke at each other in the eyes with sticks), no one but one man. You are incapable of looking at his face, though you know he’s staring right at you, eyelessly. You realize, because of the docile color of his clothing and the gentle hum emitting from the face-area, that he means no harm, and is in fact quite sad, and so, feeling a sudden bond, you reach out, but before you can say anything, the customer you’ve been neglecting shoves a pencil in your e—
4
In the backyard, you begin to bury your family in a hole as large as your house.
5
You wake from a terrible dream on a lumpy sofa and realize that you’re in your childhood home, now located—as it always has been—dangling on the side of a cliff. You’ve always prided yourself on the fortitude that results from growing up in such a dangerous place. Now, though, you’re wary and uneasy on your feet. The whole house shifts when you move. You’re suddenly very aware of the inordinate amount of pressure this teetering exerts on one particular beam, visible out the window, a flying buttress of sorts, that helps the house stay perched. A loud knock on the door alarms you, but it is only a trio of repairmen wearing childish masks and carrying tool chests and rolled up hoses. You insist that they focus on the overstressed beam, but they ignore you and begin chewing violently on the furniture, climbing on it like large rats, ripping at the couch cushions with their enlarged teeth, clawing at the walls with their hairy hands. As you search for a particular tool, thinking you’ll do the job yourself, the repairmen become bloated like ticks. Their faces malform into something insect-like. You go to the television, knowing that if you turn it on, the lights and noise will frighten them all away. Only too late do you notice that, with all the swaying, and with the antics of the repairbugs, the wires around the television have frayed. When you touch the knob of the television, a surge of electricity chars your arm and renders you unable to move. The insects begin to feast on your flesh. The largest creature crawls onto your chest and burrows its face into your abdomen and cracks your ribs open. Its searching proboscis wraps around your lungs, suffocating you. You struggle to scream, scream, but no sound escapes, you struggle to scream and—
6
The ground shakes you awake, but the earthquake rumbles from within your eye socket, disrupting your vision. You struggle and are able to make out the scene before you: in the distance, a geyser bursts from bleached logs. A ferry full up with cars full up with people slouches too and fro in the ocean until riders begin to topple over the edge. They swim desperately for the shore, and some make it, running into the nearby woods. They surround your home, banging on the walls. Suddenly, they engulf you, and though you resist, they push you forward, towards a knot of barbed wire—
7
An old friend from college arrives, just as you were settling in for a nice mountain vacation. She comments on your skin complexion and brags about her best-selling novel. You remark, I thought you were studying to be an oceanographer? She retorts, Yes, I do that as well. She lures you into a small room, claiming she has hog-tied your dog inside and he will soon die. There is no dog, but she locks you in and begins to remodeled the house. In your small room there is only one window, with a view of only one sky. Airplanes rumble high above the clouds. They fly too close to one another. They appear not as passenger planes, but military aircraft, and then begin to drop their bombs on the city, where your family still lives. You hear the news report from a blaring television, and you hear your old friend laughing, but the information on the news report is inaccurate. Your old friend has used her technical know-how to tap into a far-right secret channel, hidden between the other radio stations (the television has rather casually become a radio), and the voice from this channel states that, though there were massive casualties, they were all overseas, and the planes have been destroyed by heroic Air Force pilots. But you can see, out your little window, that the planes are headed right for your little mountain cabin, which has fallen into disrepair, your old friend having long abandoned the house, and you. The earth shakes as bombs fall nearby. The news blares: the enemy has been nearly vanquished, but operatives hide amongst us, posing as librarians and teachers. The voice on the radio encourages men and women to rise up and slaughter these traitors, as the butt-end of a rifle tears through the door—
8
You hear the name of the wraith. You have no face. You attempt to communicate to your loved ones but your language is the language of the wraith; your words are the left path of thought, reference to no subject despite grammatical convention, warfare syntactics. In order to escape the confines of ephemeral ineffability, you carefully hold those fetal sounds and place them into the night mare’s gulping maw, a deep pocket of throat where words are made holy and swallowed, ruining your chance of escape. You have no name. You’re the silence of breath, not yours and not silent and not meaningless. This breath, somewhere unseen, is vital and aroused, tempted by your raw neck. You have no voice but more voice than face. Within oscillating degrees of not-being you try to articulate, before consumed by looming breath, and you try to speak, because you are not, or it is not, you—
9
We walk hand in hand like we used to. I become a gash, an unruly scene. My hands are dry with starlets. The weekend comes holy. It screams into your afternoon wetland. The boat sinks and we’re on it. You make me feel a dream again like I make you feel a dream: a tome for one laugh, a cackle really, the kind you do when you’re fainting before a waterfall, before a morning frenzy, before the minute strikes the match, fuse lit and membrane open. You enter the vestibule and round the corner: everything is an open window overturning the landscape, cars and smoldering bridges, the ruins we find of continents. After we’re worn, we take the beach and chuck pebbles into the ocean. A little knuckle pops into my sweet round cunt, endless faces and a sorrow that’s my mirror. You break a tulip and dance where the fireweed settles. A duststorm descends.
10
You’re normal and look at the page. It speaks not what you want but history as murderous symphony. You bite the side of your tongue; your mouth fills with blood. “I want to live in a world without history,” you say, but don’t mean. You want to live in a world with infinite histories. No one is nearby; you bleed within an awful history. The wraith arrives and expects you to speak an identifiable truth pre-located within sound. “It must come from a place,” says the wraith. “You must have a stance, belong to a school, concern yourself with an issue.” You become a nihilist and want to die. “We’ve had a good run,” you say to the wraith. “I live in a world that doesn’t want me; I don’t want it either. “Do something,” says the wraith. “Fight back.” But fighting is what brought you here. You decide to do something easy, like nothing, or something that doesn’t need you, something normal like death.
11
You open the door, unshowered, but there isn’t enough space to move. There are no trees. You eat worms off the ground and stack stones to find your way; your feet become calloused and you follow a deer. Though your back and knees are injured, you leap from log to log, wipe dirty hands on wet moss, bang your muddy boots against the side of a car as fog washes through the ravine, as snow melts into a white line like a diseased tear on the mountain face. You don’t swim in the mirror blue lake with me; we just stare and count the rain drops to a thousand or so. “Smiling,” I tell you, “even when you’re sad and it isn’t real, will help make you happy. Lie to yourself. Be a good boy. Cry and get it done with.” Time passes; I vanish. You find me at home tearing the bedsheets, walking in my sleep, filling glass bottles with vinegar and drowning ants. I spend too much money. “This is prison,” you say. Something beneath the tiles laughs and says, “You don’t know prison. You’re essentially king. The lonely king. The sad king.” “But monarchy is out-dated,” you say. The wraith asks, “Do you want to watch me fuck from across the room?” You crawl underneath a piano to get drunk and hope to reverse extinction with twenty-year-old mind games. The wraith teases,“A virtual shopping cart can never be full. Do you have what you need?” You calm and think about essentials. Then, you think about justice. Then, you think about revenge.
You have no skin and are unable to move. A white liquid, the fresh milk of the wraith, pours down from above, straight into your mouth, drowning you. You become livid.
12
You write down your secrets with an adorable pen on paper you live with, then journey to an undisclosed location, difficult to find. You bring a matchbook with nine matches and burn your secrets, then return home and begin creating more secrets. A year passes, and you are trapped in an eternal repetition of this pattern. You realize death approaches and, as retaliation, begin to boil water. You pour it into a ravine and pray for the beetles below. A wasp lands next to you. You again boil water, and wait… and wait… and wait—stop. Paranoid, you turn off all the lights and appliances, all the computers and gadgets, and sit within total darkness and silence. The silence is interrupted by a voice heard through the walls: a light-voiced woman maks elaborate and detailed plans for a party, and goes on and on about guest list. On and on and on. On and on and on. On and
13
A city lies below, in a dry canyon. You stand atop a fortress-like dam and see, this dam prevents the river from destroying the city. As sea level rises, the river water rises, rises to your feet, to your knees, washing over the dam, trickling into the city. You realize, as you investigate the perimeter, that the canyon is, in fact, a crater. The sun begins to set as the dam cracks. Water rolls in, uprooting the trees and destroying the general store. You flee to a basement. Peering through the small high window out onto the city street, you see a fence uproot from water rushing violently into town. The sound or roaring water is like the sound of barking dogs. The basement begins to flood.
14
Your jaw loosens and then falls from your face. You use the shards of a mirror to refasten it, which makes you incredibly nauseous, and the sudden urge to vomit overwhelms. Something bubbles up and becomes trapped in your throat, and sick little whimpers escape from your mouth. Unable to breathe, you wretch: a newborn baby falls from your open mouth. The ligatures of your jaws hurt, and have become nothing but broken mirror. You place the child in a cradle and hold your mouth open to entertain it. The little thing coos and grabs at you innocently, tearing off bloody slivers of mirror that had become your skeleton. The child waves in the air the broken jaw like a mirror. You try to speak, to ask for your jaw back, but the words become trapped in your gut, then, dislodged, your larynx. Unable to move, you watch as the child cuts and replaces its own jaw with glass—
15
A squirrel plays beside you. You take her and split her open, tongue the guts. A nearby train crashes, and when you go to explore the wreckage, you see that it was carrying cadavers; ribcages sparkle in the moonlight and gently, a mist of guts begins to rain from the sky. The ocean swells. A howling wind lacerates your cheeks with strange crystalline shrapnel, and you realize the salinated seas have evaporated and left only the salt to drizzle from the clouds. You wade through the sea made toxic by wastewater pouring in from steaming pipes. In the distance, miners caked in snow trudge down the mountainside, and a lumberjack executes criminals with an axe. The miners count to ten, and blow the top from the mountain—
16
Together, we find an egg in the unmowed grass, mottled with white flowers of snow shaken loose by a violent wind. On the roof, blown loose are twelve thousand flowers white like snow. Your foot nags on something in the yard as you gaze up at the swirling petals. Your yard is in the middle of the street. You eat the egg: break the rind, crack the shell, a ring of blood drops onto your lap.
17
You find a fault line and follow it in an automobile. Driving along the street, a pedestrian hits you. You exit the vehicle and go to her mangled body. As you hold her, with her dying breath she says to you, “Your soul is eroding.”
End Of Section One
A few entries here were originally published in Excuse Me Magazine.
Beginning Next Week:
Insert One: Against Reality
A Collection of Ephemera from 2009 to 2020. Trivial in Content, This Insert May Be Skipped By Those Uninitiated into Patience. Further Prefatory Comments Are Unnecessary.
Against a New Surrealism
A Manifesto
Discovered in 2009. Previously Available Only to Intrepid Spies. Authored by the Wordless Dictionary Society, a Scam Emergence if There Ever Was One.
Against Psychology
An Apology
Discovered Between 2012 & 2013. Previously Hidden Via World Wide Web. Author Unknown, but We Know What That Means. The Least Important & Most Involved Debasement.
Against Community
A Secret
Discovered between 2019 & 2020. Unseen by the General Public Until Now. Authored by the Editors, Under Duress. Please Send Help.