On the Third Day, Boulder (barrier)
VI.ii. The Roasting Spit, Calm Before the Still
Calm Before the Still — or — A Bit off the Deep End
[“Come clean, you dirty thing!”]
Whiskers of bristles tickle them about their backsides and genitalia. They try to grab hold but disconnected fingers fumble in the chill current to no avail. They can’t help it, but they don’t feel like laughing, they feel like a fussy air of unpleasantness sticks to the gestalt of experience, they dislike the sounds of laughter coming from them, a sextet of queer vibrato voices, from soprano to baritone, from bestial to beautiful. Only just out of tune, cents apart, and they’re trying to unite in octaves, but always faltering, degrading into harsh oscillations of rich and complex dependencies. { Your wings do not stretch as far as mine. } — { But I cannot be plucked. } All of the grave cacophony heard through far too many ears.
“Stop, Pipphantasmannie! I can’t stand it!”
[“We’re almost there, baby, we cracked through the shell and we just need to get us into the yolk!”]
She’s an anthemic melody now. Brilliantly composed in a common vernacular, she comes across as both simple and terraforming, rolling and lolling about their body, dense with moisture and appeal, skin wishes to touch other skin. Voluminous in molecules and spirits, she jiggles about his arrhythmic seizures, taming them to her single-minded purpose. Their flitting skulls clack and twitter inside the breadth of their widened mind. They cannot discern which parts of themselves are tensing, ballooning and billowing, but they are coughing up all of their inspiration and expelling their organic experiences into the cusp of a suddenly vast abyss. Here an abyss, there an abyss, always an abyss if not an abacus. They draw the figures that move the levers of the world off of Atlas’ weary spine, for he is now so old as to be forgotten, his immortal mind rotting in his far-too-physical maggoty corpse. Why did it take the humans so long to break fire?, asked the butler to Promethus.
Her song shudders on top of them, stripping them of their breathing for a moment, and water seeps in with their composite orgasm, floods in through their screaming mouths, suffocates them so that all of their spider eyes flash wide open — scintillating quivers of mangled lightning bolts captured and frozen mid-streak — they feel as though their lives are about to start running in reverse…
No. That stops. And they are a centaur standing on an open desert plain, a luminous metallic domed citadel set off against the horizon, glazed in the orange-amber of a sunset.
“Have we made it?”
[“We are close. Gaea is with us, baby.”]
“Do you know what we do now?”
[“No. Yes. Not exactly. This is your journey from here. My job was to get you here.”]
“Come with me.”
[“I don’t think I’ll be able to breach the core with you.”]
“Come with me, let’s try!”
[“I don’t want to, baby. I’ve done what’s asked of me. I want to go now.”]
“Pipphantasmannie, after all we’ve been through, you’d leave me now in my most dire hour?”
[“I’m not who you think I am, so just consider me a figment of your imagination. Those from whom my fragments were annexed will be there for you when you return.”]
“…” Further pleading on the topic became moot as Pipphantasmannie imploded softly into a puff of sparkling violet steam leaving just wisps of vapor and glinting condensation.
Alone on the horizon on all centaur fours, inaction feels to have run its course. The final prompt of his world had been placed here, a lumpy pile of ceramic dishes smashed angrily on Christmas’ kitchen floor. Because it was just money. Because it was alive when they found it. Because they get a lump in their throat whenever they think of grammaw in her pearls and tortoise-shell reading glasses on a chain around her frosting frizz. And how her bathroom smelled like band-aids and bleach, and how they and their cousins were caught swashbuckling with chunky potty brushes, and how… and how… and how until all words fail, crumbling Christmas cake of gingerbread and spice, discarded and dessicated behind sofa seats against floorboard heating vents, how if they were that dry they would definitely want something to drink, and quite suddenly in this vast arid expanse, they miss the fresh running water, even if it ran rushingly for southerner climes with them stuck life-rafted in it.
The surface of the construct is so smooth and opaque that it feels like nothing. They run their fingers over its perfection, but as they try to press in, it resists with the hardness of onyx . Up and up it goes without blemish or entrance several trees more high. They test its integrity at their convenient centaur height once around the entire structure. Perhaps if they could just get a better view, they thought… But hmmm! Isn’t this odd? It seems that it has three humps, each larger than the last, and if everything is so symmetrical, then it would appear that half more of the object is hidden from us, buried underground. So our in might be under! Our out is certainly around, wouldn’t you say? I would, jolly so, I would. I would like to play a bagatelle in hopes that it would raise up this sadly fallen structure in a call to arms, or a how-do-you-do-nice-to-meet-you-ciao-and-toodle-oo sort of thing. Lilt away, maestro, if I remember the gentle croon of my old wet nurse Pippi duTroisBrois with her paps a-thwappin’ merrily for me to squeeze, Ol’ Man River.
Old man timber,
I’m chipper all the day.
Old man trouble,
He jus’ keeps rollin’ away.
Oh no, did you get a splinter in your eye when we crashed through the barn door, or… Ladies and gentleman, it is my pleasure to share with you on this great eventeenth of Somenumber in the year of our gay lord, Maximus Pumpkins, Un-unnert and Unditty-un, that everybody’s favorite invisible friend is here — may I welcome to the stage: Steve! Steve come on up here. That’s right. Come on up. You have to go around the… watch out for the…! No, it’s okay. Nope, all a part of doing business. Props, reset stage three for the old man sketch, check the… no, leave it, hey! Just leave it, Steve, they’re coming to get it. They’re coming to get it. Right there, yes, that’s them. I know it’s not handicap accessible, of course I! You seriously think I don’t know that? Hop on over here, Steve. We can get you something for that leg! Ha-ha! Welcome to… That’s not the right old man sketch, I’m going to… go take care of that, kill ’em, Steve, you’re on.
“I’m Wiemi, my name is Wiemi. Milo, is that you? You’re older than I last remember you.”
In here we have a saying: We’ve seen the brochure but we’re afraid to fly. Been there, haven’t done that. Damn, it’s good to see you, Steve. I’ll be right there — I’m coming! Give these guys a hell of a show, Steve. I think they’re pretty excited to be here, considering! They thought they were just homing in for some imaging and then hello! We got the good stuff :)
“It’s Wiemi actually, my name is Wiemi. Okay. So, hello, I am Wiemi. Milo was my first… friend, I made him up when I was a boy growing up alone with my grandfather on his sacred tribal land outside the village where I was born. I’m not really sure what else… okay, he’s coming back. Milo’s coming back, here he…”
Thank you very much, Steve! Steve, everyone.
Wiemi, over here a quick second, so in your Zemblan Wakandan paradise (Oh, Wakanada! Perjurous and Freed!) — (Get back, this is too close.) — (We’re not even near the…) — (Normally it’s fine, but given this degree of activity, we need to stay farther back.) you can go back to being the one-legged beggar prince, but here, we do Steve. It’s not your Catholic paschal play, but it’s canon at this point, the traitor is Steve. And Steve is Tyler Durden. And that’s the trick. Everyone thinks it was about the boulder set up to block his remains in the cave. The trick is that there was never anyone there. The Romans dragged a dead man into the desert and buried him. And then they spread stories of his resurrection, mostly to confound the gangsta ring of apostles, and it was no secret that they were all tripping over each other to be the first to hit the shelves with the Real Gospel according Jimothy Fucktank or Jeronathon Caruthers.
Lo and behold! When confronted with the jest of an empty tomb, they began to prevaricate in writing about him having corporally returned from the ulcerous beyond, as if they had taken sup with him a fortnight hence!
So they didn’t just buy the gag, they then put it directly on clearance. I saw Jesus! Me too! Jesus blessed my baby. Jesus kissed my baby. Jesus and my cousin got high, once. You can get anything you want @ Alice’s Restaurant. And once they started coming, they didn’t stop coming…
Like their relentless horde of brainless zombies, they would only swarm harder and faster once their heads are cleaned off. The peons, the dustful, the ingrates, the pocketless — misery shall inherit the earth. Firstborn of the dead and stillborn of the living while his amniotic sac had baked into the summer clay. No golems stood up from the desert that season.
Pilate’s wife had claimed vivid nightmares about taking part in the killing of such an innocent as Jesus { Just look at how pale and ashen his skin is! } — { It’s the palmolive, Oyl, you’re drinking it in every Sabbath. } — { Free booze! } But it’s worth recalling that the supernatural was quite literally the only card that the plebian had in their deck, and the only avenue that led to minor influence with elite males. Also bear in mind that it was not a simple card to play, so her conscience wisely got to her.
So, here’s where we get to you, Steve. Are you following me so far? Just nod. kk. See, our problem is that we haven’t gone into the beehive yet. It may look like we’re inside, but we’re still just traveling the surface outside, waiting for the best angle of reflection for our opportunity to enter the hive by splitting. I think they believe that only one of us will emerge inside the hive while the other remains here, stationary, measured and observable in the desert horizon. They’re acutely aware that there’s room for four armed warriors in the belly of the beast.
“But what they ain’t ready fer is two-of-us come rollin’ in, guns a-blazing: pah-chew, pah-chew, pah-ching! That last one’s fer tha Badge! Woo-ha!”
Now you’re tuned in and speaking my language, Silverado Steve!
“Git mah shotgun and ma hoss, and…”
Whoa, whoa. Grab the shotguns and hitch the Trojan Centaur to the nearest fencepost, boy, we’re goin’ in! Yee-ha!”
“Where’s my poncho, crew? Sombrero?”
Magnífico, hombro.
Douse the houselights. Close all the museum doors and clear the hallways. Quiet on the set, orchestra pit strike up the phonograph.
“So… you know how to get in to this impregnable fortress, right?”
No. But watch me, and do what I do.
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