The Radioactive Bride, page 19
Seconds pass, the woman looks out of the trailer window and sees the two dogs, trained to survival, quickly scuttle toward the Baden landfill, until they vanish behind the first towers which lean on their foundations of rags, junk, and old spare parts. Down there, a little on the left, she seems to see a grey-silver rainbow arching between the molecular burners—the great nibblers of the past. It looks like a scythe blade, actually, or a giant meat cleaver ready to drop down on what used to be, what still moves, breathes, in that graveyard, under its flying horizon shaken by the flapping wings of the cloacal gulls.
Cowards! So be it, she mutters in her thoughts, we need a special menu…piglet roast. Of dwarf. After all, we have to celebrate. I’m going to have a real man around, now, and a lot of bags of sweet potatoes. But now let’s think about the kids.
««—»»
“Mmm…smells good!”
“What’s that?”
“Mom, mom, Monet slapped me!”
“Be quiet, and don’t touch anything; wash your hands, change your shirt and then sit down at the table. You little piglets!” Syrena groans, brandishing a wooden spoon toward the empty heads of the three kids. Ingres, Cézanne, and Monet—the abusive one. That’s right, Armand named them like his dancing donkeys. “Come on, hurry up. Special menu today…”
The woman has set everything properly, even though it is not Sunday. The good dish set, enameled cutlery—Mister Skeleton’s wedding gift—and Armand as centerpiece: arms and legs cut off and an apple between his teeth, nicely roasted. You can no longer recognize him, after the treatment; his wife worked hard with the Metzelder carver, then she seasoned the poor devil with pink rosemary, mustard icing and an abundant dose of her signature spicy sauce, purple like a priest’s mourning. It only lacks a pretty circle of chopped sweet potatoes, all around, then the picture would be perfect. Dwarf stew à la Corse. The tiny man still seems to be looking upward, toward the fan blades, with his little blue eyes goggling and sucked out by the suction cups of the oven’s 750 degrees. He lays on the silver platter, the one with Syrena’s mother’s initials on the edge: L.B., one of the early stars of the Suprême: Lady Blackbeard. Too bad she croaked untimely, trying to strangulate her husband with his own guts after ripping open his belly with her teeth—she had caught him in bed with an Egyptian contortionist, a pearl necklace around his stout neck and a radioactive kiwi up his ass. Heart attack, right in the thick of it. A real badass bearded woman.
“Good! I want more!” Ingres, the youngest, brays.
“Don’t choke on it, eat slowly,” his mother commands, cleaning the orange gravy off her beard; thick like mortar.
“Fuck, you have to buy more of this shit!” Chubby Cézanne jumps on his seat, struck down by wet taste-bud rapture, before getting another slap on his neck by his rough brother.
The she-bison groans, “Hey, is that a way to talk? If your father was here, you’d see…and if you don’t quit fighting, you two, I’ll put you in the oven.” Then, she stops a moment to think about that, her fork two centimeters away from her mouth and a piece of her husband’s ear down in her belly, melting away like foie gras, releasing an acid broth of deep mocking. But.
Goddamn, and who knew dwarves were so tasty? You’d never believe that! she thinks, then beginning to eagerly watch, with predator eyes, her own offspring; Armand’s kids. Same breed, same meat. But they must be even tastier, when they’re little. Who cares, I did them and now I can gobble them up…they’re my stuff.
Syrena crosses herself, gets up waving her red-orange beard over the tits which have worked so much and have now surrendered to gravity, letting themselves be sucked in toward the floor like giant dried plums. Milk, day and night, she remembers, suck, suck and suck…they never had enough. Dwarves as hungry as wolves, how the fuck can they eat so much and stay so little? I used to have breasts straight and taut like a boat prow, and Mister Skeleton drooled over them. Time for a makeover—thanks to poor Armand’s savings: she well knows where he took his stash—hard as marble…and a crackerjack dinner.
“So, kids, let’s do a funny game. Dad is coming home soon: let’s hide in the kitchen, so we pop out when he enters to scare him, okay? Come on, piglets, come with Mom…”
As Cézanne grabs his mother’s hand to join her in the game, the Bearded Woman cannot resist and pinches the boy’s fat ass, a nice protein pudding, and she eagerly licks her lips.
“Come on, sweetheart. Let’s hurry.”
SANS FIN CENTRE
A white mandala, a cosmos of one, without center, cables of geometries, an Ouroboros with two woman heads shoving their tongues into each other’s mouth to infinity; salty tongue and scales of mint and mango sliding down the throat; old life tasting only like glue; an electric umbilical cord and a jump into the pharynx of a kaleidoscope of flesh, and then down to the bottom of a doll of electricity, without blood and menstrual cycle, taking your hand and pulling you down. Pissing imagination with a never-empty bladder, extinguishing supernovae, riding toward yourself on the back of a phosphorescent five-legged vulva, slicing the unnecessary with a meat cleaver. If you want to wear that dress of inexistent velvet. If you get yourself attached to the no end ventilator.
A white mandala, an orgasm of one, without walls of flesh and muscle, without hunt or tender tubes; a heretic Ouroboros, your head biting the tail of a virgin, her taste as you want it, as you think it; dunes of bodies, the perfect lines of Raffaello and the crooked horizon where you tied the sun, pressing its scorching belly on the cables, continuously red and orange. Death of yellow. A slingshot allowing you to shoot seeds of people, as many as you want, into this still-empty land; the first green offshoots, the buds of breasts and eyes still raw, and just beside it, all the hectares of what you buried: white dirt, there, rubber crosses and the dogs you thought were digging in hunger.
A white mandala, a trip of one, without engines, without hurting bones or shoes; an impossible Ouroboros with a hundred tails and heads, a concentric maze, the green tangle of boxwood, regular hedges. The testicles of rounded bushes and unending turns. Yours, the doors; yours, the turns; and then back and forth holding tight to the rope of forever, the hank unfurled once and for all.
If you want to wear that dress of inexistent velvet, if you’re going to suck on electric milk—prickling your tongue—from the silicon nipple of the no end, of even-sided immortality: a giant processor looking like the black monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. If you’re going to press start, hanging your useless body in a sub-zero warehouse, to let your brain grow paws.
««—»»
Montpellier—Sans Fin Centre
“Please, Monsieur Degritte, sit,” says Dumand, the creator of the whole electric Nirvana circus. “So, are you feeling ready?”
Degritte keeps shaking his head, animating for a moment the lifeless tufts of white hair survived to seventy-five springs. He is one of those guys whose necks are garnished by five-thousand-credit ties, beard always groomed, and walking cane with dilitium family crest…and a bayonet concealed inside of it. An elegant man, with a luxury denture in his mouth and a lot of dead bodies on his shoulders—not making him hunchbacked in the least. He has never answered to anyone and has always slept eight hours a night; no nightmares with long-tongued ghosts, clinging to the edge of consciousness, pointing their finger at him. How could they come to break his balls, after all? He had all their mouths shut with a nice concrete cast, when they were alive. That’s why he managed to become one of the most powerful builders in Montpellier. His palaces and innovative structures have embellished the center of the old rotting city—everyone is forced to admit as much. Nobody, though, is eager to put their nose into those once-alive foundations; now become part—cornerstone, perhaps—of a dead layer where rectangular, six-foot blocks of concrete are piled up.
“I don’t know…it’s the whole idea of living without a body, that’s a little…isn’t there any other way?” the old motherfucker replies, perplexed, squeezing his cane as though it were a lever capable of lifting destiny. Well, it did work a few times.
“I see, but as we explained…bodies aren’t dismantled: we keep them all in Area Zero. You can always reclaim yours…turn back. We have a twelve-months minimum contract, but beside that, it’s always you who pushes the start and stop buttons of the whole thing,” Dumand explains, pulling out his cutting-edge demiurge charm. But with that psycho sneer on, he looks more like a binary version of doctor Frankenstein, or a thin positronic Buddha charming mechanical cobras, men on the borderline and encrypted accounts.
“I understood that, that’s not the point,” Degritte interrupts him, annoyed. “I don’t like the idea of floating in a sparkling fish-tank for brains. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter by now…I’m about to croak—the prion disease came quicker than a banal tumor…better your electric Nirvana than straight to the Almighty, who I’m afraid might be pretty pissed with me. Paris is well worth a mass, you say that here, too, don’t you? So, let’s proceed with that start, dear Dumand, I’m in your hands, or better, in your circuits.”
««—»»
The post-Uxor Prometheus doesn’t need all that useless meat. Muscles are destined to fail. Eden, Walhalla, Nirvana…no: more…beyond all those. Getting back on Earth like a heretic, bastard Bodhisattva to do as you please, with a cock of pure light between your legs? No…more, better… Giving birth to a hand-drawn planet, sculpting victims and executioners, having pleasure without end, laying down on the circumference of yourself like a sated electron, only for a second, waiting to give shape to the next drive. A brain-God, autochthonous, powerful like the centrifugal orbits of Astabek II.
««—»»
Monsieur Degritte’s Nirvana.
Start. The system loads user configuration, his wishes, turned into electronic imprinting and predestined combination. Primary cables stuck into Monsieur Degritte’s brain lobes, like transparent harpoons on the scattered back of an already-canned tuna; they begin their fluid exchange: give and take. The fluid in the tank begins broiling; the coils of small bubbles rising toward the surface look like the hair of that old brain, laying on the bottom as a soft rock, carved by alien, circular currents. Nirvana begins opening a breach, and that soft inanimate rock—an eyeless, bodiless mind—can push the doors of the heretic megalopolis of its own imagination, enter it with all the pores of its senses open wide by steady electric impulses and inductions of chemical sperm, the glue of the electric Creator, a secret formula, fertilizing the void and making squirt out of zero things of iron, plastic, meat, making it as full and true as possible.
And now old Degritte can see again. And never things have been so clear, vivid, not since he was exploring reality with the mighty headlights of age sixteen.
Legs, too, are as good as new: they spring. He begins running along a road without turns and nothing on either side…yes, a bridge…ready to be swallowed by the open mouth of a sneering woman, laying belly-down like a uterine sphynx lowering her head to lick her audience. His heart pumps rich blood everywhere; capillaries glint with quicksilver.
Goddamn, that Dumand really knows what he’s doing, Degritte’s brain thinks. Then, he is already inside that damp mouth, he rolls on the tongue hopping upon it before continuing toward a throat dripping honey—or something sweet and thick anyway. Time to jump down the pharynx and get below, where he wants to go. Degritte holds his breath and throws himself down feet first, soon sliding and tumbling down the big bend of the esophagus. No stomach or intestines on his way to reach the destination, the matrix, the pulpy Holy Grail of femininity, passing inside it, through it. Splashing around and biting the tender burrows greased with mucus, like a one-centimeter-long shark. That’s how he wanted her, how he wanted the heretic biology of the titanic woman now containing him like a toothy virus: and Nirvana executed. Degritte stops an instant, to listen to Janis Joplin’s One Night Stand. Right, because now his ears are perfectly working as well—and that music, diffused by the membranes of the giantess’s body like in a shopping mall, penetrates his senses, leaving holes all around like a shotgun blast. Joplin’s voice pours inside of him like a flock of vibrations, making his imaginary guts wobble. What a marvel.
Then the apex comes, triggered by the slide into the red placenta pool, inside the elastic frame of the uterus, where Degritte throws himself to float on his back among icebergs of frozen, ground Cloud 5, glittering azure masses with a sharp head, polished neck and chest, and a fat underwater ass, down there, covered in a layer of seashells with open mouths. Sucking and spitting fluid—placenta wine—they work as the engines of those psychedelic rocks-to-be-licked. Degritte’s acid icebergs can move in schools; or they can join side by side, crumble form a dryland, a shore, a beach where you can lie down beneath that curved, purple-and-blue sky, held together by a framework of veins, overpasses of blood. And wait for a new, red high tide—to sink again into that crawling broth.
But the old man wants to complete his trip right away. He holds his breath, vertically dives, darts to the bottom, to open the water-tight hatch of her cervix. A strong suction, a lab tsunami, being sucked into the conduit, gently pushed into the warmest machineries of the woman; holding on to the velvet hem of the vagina corridor, going through it while looking up, like watching stars in the summer, letting newborn woman juice drip on your face, under the urethra cave, studded in nozzles. A multiple clitoris. Then, the light of the day, at the end of the tunnel…time to pop out, between the smooth pyramids of the giantess’s spread thighs, like an anthropomorphous dildo. Light. Her skin smelling like jasmine.
Damn, that Dumand is the real deal! Degritte thinks—the man who designed the Palais d’Exposition of Montpellier, admired all around the world back then, and now turned into a horrid assembly line for mass rat-skinning; a factory of protoskin suits against the Uxor rains. I could do that a thousand times, without end, the old man repeats himself, satisfied, as he counts all the teeth in his mouth and bulges his blood-watered muscles, all those cells thought by the system software, together with all the other bricks of his imaginary world. While the old man’s physical brain is making evaporate the liquid substance of the fish tank canning it.
««—»»
Montpellier—Sans Fin Centre
“Are you leaving me this son of a bitch?” Mesar Pantelic—aka the Cardinal—asks, dragging by the hair a man who looks like he’s just been run over by a truck. He has been caught by security in Server Room3, as he was trying to connect a Mutant system to the machines. Industrial espionage. Broken bones, smashed face. “He has spilled the beans already: he was sent by New Moon. We can do whatever we want with him…”
“Do what you wish with the body, but we need the brain: we must run operation tests on the Black Nirvana…those sadistic guys of the Argentine government have already taken seat to watch the show. They’re sucking chalices of adrenaline one after another. If everything works out right, today we’re getting ourselves a very nice deal,” Dumand replies, a million-credit smile glinting on his fangs.
“I don’t need a corpse,” the Cardinal grumbles. “Dead meat, deprived of the light of pain.”
“You’ll get all the complete bodies you want, my friend, don’t worry…fresh, alive and screaming as you like them. But now take this idiot to Experimentation Area and hope he doesn’t croak before you get there; damn, you really fucked him up…we must prepare him quickly, those guys are waiting. They’ll begin freaking out with all the shit they’re quaffing,” Dumand orders, waving his hands to hurry up the operations. “They can’t wait to admire next-gen torture.”
Preparation for the electric Nirvana requires zero scalping of the subject, with a Metzelder precision saw; the skull dome is then uncorked like a sparkling wine bottle thanks to hydraulic micro-suction-cups; next step is extraction of brain matter, the most delicate phase. For the Egyptians, it was simple: they pulled everything out of the nose with little hooks; but for electric Nirvana, the brain must present itself perfectly whole, sealed, and continuously pumped by a lito-oxygenizer. Best solution, in these cases, are always the expensive, microscopic Z2 plesodroids: electronic spiders with light alloy shells, eight retractable legs, clamping laser carvers on their snouts for jaws. Then, system connection and immersion in a tank, which at Sans Fin Centre they call Clear Chamber. Finally, the start, black or white; two very different trips, both unending.
««—»»
The stranger’s Black Nirvana.
Start. The system loads user settings, his worst nightmares, anguishes and phobias of the subject are turned into electronic imprinting. The stranger’s brain, installed in the Clear Chamber and immersed in its alchemic amber-colored fluid, begins receiving transmissions from its Black Nirvana. The man opens his eyes and all other senses, guided by the hypnotic radar of the machine; he no longer feels pain. His bones, broken by the Cardinal’s mastiffs, seem to be fixed, magically welded. But what kind of glue could do all that? He touches his nose, then his fingertips run on his forehead and on his jaw. It can’t be. His face, squeezed like a lemon by those bastards, feels brand new. Smooth, young skin—no blood. Sure… I’m dead and this place, smelling like rust, is where you end up. A Purgatory, something like that? Doesn’t seem so bad, after all. He is in front of a door, padded in red leather, with small glass lozenges sewn on it; they don’t reflect anything. You just have to approach, and you are already on the other side. Jesus, what the… The stranger stays there, his mouth open, and his last words drip from his lips, crashing into crumbles around his naked feet. Where are my toes? A small bug in the software…
The man’s electronic eyes are seeing the stairs of an old building, an ancient wrought-iron spaceship: the intricate cage of an elevator with a folding metal door, decorated by pointy laurel leaves, clattering back and forth, inviting him in. Hesitating, the stranger walks through the threshold of that strange cage, which Monsieur Degritte would have easily recognized: a Stigler metal elevator—high-class stuff, old school stuff. Those things came back in fashion about thirty years ago, conveniently modified. You need a coin, though, to start the elevator and discover its destination, the right floor.
Cowards! So be it, she mutters in her thoughts, we need a special menu…piglet roast. Of dwarf. After all, we have to celebrate. I’m going to have a real man around, now, and a lot of bags of sweet potatoes. But now let’s think about the kids.
««—»»
“Mmm…smells good!”
“What’s that?”
“Mom, mom, Monet slapped me!”
“Be quiet, and don’t touch anything; wash your hands, change your shirt and then sit down at the table. You little piglets!” Syrena groans, brandishing a wooden spoon toward the empty heads of the three kids. Ingres, Cézanne, and Monet—the abusive one. That’s right, Armand named them like his dancing donkeys. “Come on, hurry up. Special menu today…”
The woman has set everything properly, even though it is not Sunday. The good dish set, enameled cutlery—Mister Skeleton’s wedding gift—and Armand as centerpiece: arms and legs cut off and an apple between his teeth, nicely roasted. You can no longer recognize him, after the treatment; his wife worked hard with the Metzelder carver, then she seasoned the poor devil with pink rosemary, mustard icing and an abundant dose of her signature spicy sauce, purple like a priest’s mourning. It only lacks a pretty circle of chopped sweet potatoes, all around, then the picture would be perfect. Dwarf stew à la Corse. The tiny man still seems to be looking upward, toward the fan blades, with his little blue eyes goggling and sucked out by the suction cups of the oven’s 750 degrees. He lays on the silver platter, the one with Syrena’s mother’s initials on the edge: L.B., one of the early stars of the Suprême: Lady Blackbeard. Too bad she croaked untimely, trying to strangulate her husband with his own guts after ripping open his belly with her teeth—she had caught him in bed with an Egyptian contortionist, a pearl necklace around his stout neck and a radioactive kiwi up his ass. Heart attack, right in the thick of it. A real badass bearded woman.
“Good! I want more!” Ingres, the youngest, brays.
“Don’t choke on it, eat slowly,” his mother commands, cleaning the orange gravy off her beard; thick like mortar.
“Fuck, you have to buy more of this shit!” Chubby Cézanne jumps on his seat, struck down by wet taste-bud rapture, before getting another slap on his neck by his rough brother.
The she-bison groans, “Hey, is that a way to talk? If your father was here, you’d see…and if you don’t quit fighting, you two, I’ll put you in the oven.” Then, she stops a moment to think about that, her fork two centimeters away from her mouth and a piece of her husband’s ear down in her belly, melting away like foie gras, releasing an acid broth of deep mocking. But.
Goddamn, and who knew dwarves were so tasty? You’d never believe that! she thinks, then beginning to eagerly watch, with predator eyes, her own offspring; Armand’s kids. Same breed, same meat. But they must be even tastier, when they’re little. Who cares, I did them and now I can gobble them up…they’re my stuff.
Syrena crosses herself, gets up waving her red-orange beard over the tits which have worked so much and have now surrendered to gravity, letting themselves be sucked in toward the floor like giant dried plums. Milk, day and night, she remembers, suck, suck and suck…they never had enough. Dwarves as hungry as wolves, how the fuck can they eat so much and stay so little? I used to have breasts straight and taut like a boat prow, and Mister Skeleton drooled over them. Time for a makeover—thanks to poor Armand’s savings: she well knows where he took his stash—hard as marble…and a crackerjack dinner.
“So, kids, let’s do a funny game. Dad is coming home soon: let’s hide in the kitchen, so we pop out when he enters to scare him, okay? Come on, piglets, come with Mom…”
As Cézanne grabs his mother’s hand to join her in the game, the Bearded Woman cannot resist and pinches the boy’s fat ass, a nice protein pudding, and she eagerly licks her lips.
“Come on, sweetheart. Let’s hurry.”
SANS FIN CENTRE
A white mandala, a cosmos of one, without center, cables of geometries, an Ouroboros with two woman heads shoving their tongues into each other’s mouth to infinity; salty tongue and scales of mint and mango sliding down the throat; old life tasting only like glue; an electric umbilical cord and a jump into the pharynx of a kaleidoscope of flesh, and then down to the bottom of a doll of electricity, without blood and menstrual cycle, taking your hand and pulling you down. Pissing imagination with a never-empty bladder, extinguishing supernovae, riding toward yourself on the back of a phosphorescent five-legged vulva, slicing the unnecessary with a meat cleaver. If you want to wear that dress of inexistent velvet. If you get yourself attached to the no end ventilator.
A white mandala, an orgasm of one, without walls of flesh and muscle, without hunt or tender tubes; a heretic Ouroboros, your head biting the tail of a virgin, her taste as you want it, as you think it; dunes of bodies, the perfect lines of Raffaello and the crooked horizon where you tied the sun, pressing its scorching belly on the cables, continuously red and orange. Death of yellow. A slingshot allowing you to shoot seeds of people, as many as you want, into this still-empty land; the first green offshoots, the buds of breasts and eyes still raw, and just beside it, all the hectares of what you buried: white dirt, there, rubber crosses and the dogs you thought were digging in hunger.
A white mandala, a trip of one, without engines, without hurting bones or shoes; an impossible Ouroboros with a hundred tails and heads, a concentric maze, the green tangle of boxwood, regular hedges. The testicles of rounded bushes and unending turns. Yours, the doors; yours, the turns; and then back and forth holding tight to the rope of forever, the hank unfurled once and for all.
If you want to wear that dress of inexistent velvet, if you’re going to suck on electric milk—prickling your tongue—from the silicon nipple of the no end, of even-sided immortality: a giant processor looking like the black monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. If you’re going to press start, hanging your useless body in a sub-zero warehouse, to let your brain grow paws.
««—»»
Montpellier—Sans Fin Centre
“Please, Monsieur Degritte, sit,” says Dumand, the creator of the whole electric Nirvana circus. “So, are you feeling ready?”
Degritte keeps shaking his head, animating for a moment the lifeless tufts of white hair survived to seventy-five springs. He is one of those guys whose necks are garnished by five-thousand-credit ties, beard always groomed, and walking cane with dilitium family crest…and a bayonet concealed inside of it. An elegant man, with a luxury denture in his mouth and a lot of dead bodies on his shoulders—not making him hunchbacked in the least. He has never answered to anyone and has always slept eight hours a night; no nightmares with long-tongued ghosts, clinging to the edge of consciousness, pointing their finger at him. How could they come to break his balls, after all? He had all their mouths shut with a nice concrete cast, when they were alive. That’s why he managed to become one of the most powerful builders in Montpellier. His palaces and innovative structures have embellished the center of the old rotting city—everyone is forced to admit as much. Nobody, though, is eager to put their nose into those once-alive foundations; now become part—cornerstone, perhaps—of a dead layer where rectangular, six-foot blocks of concrete are piled up.
“I don’t know…it’s the whole idea of living without a body, that’s a little…isn’t there any other way?” the old motherfucker replies, perplexed, squeezing his cane as though it were a lever capable of lifting destiny. Well, it did work a few times.
“I see, but as we explained…bodies aren’t dismantled: we keep them all in Area Zero. You can always reclaim yours…turn back. We have a twelve-months minimum contract, but beside that, it’s always you who pushes the start and stop buttons of the whole thing,” Dumand explains, pulling out his cutting-edge demiurge charm. But with that psycho sneer on, he looks more like a binary version of doctor Frankenstein, or a thin positronic Buddha charming mechanical cobras, men on the borderline and encrypted accounts.
“I understood that, that’s not the point,” Degritte interrupts him, annoyed. “I don’t like the idea of floating in a sparkling fish-tank for brains. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter by now…I’m about to croak—the prion disease came quicker than a banal tumor…better your electric Nirvana than straight to the Almighty, who I’m afraid might be pretty pissed with me. Paris is well worth a mass, you say that here, too, don’t you? So, let’s proceed with that start, dear Dumand, I’m in your hands, or better, in your circuits.”
««—»»
The post-Uxor Prometheus doesn’t need all that useless meat. Muscles are destined to fail. Eden, Walhalla, Nirvana…no: more…beyond all those. Getting back on Earth like a heretic, bastard Bodhisattva to do as you please, with a cock of pure light between your legs? No…more, better… Giving birth to a hand-drawn planet, sculpting victims and executioners, having pleasure without end, laying down on the circumference of yourself like a sated electron, only for a second, waiting to give shape to the next drive. A brain-God, autochthonous, powerful like the centrifugal orbits of Astabek II.
««—»»
Monsieur Degritte’s Nirvana.
Start. The system loads user configuration, his wishes, turned into electronic imprinting and predestined combination. Primary cables stuck into Monsieur Degritte’s brain lobes, like transparent harpoons on the scattered back of an already-canned tuna; they begin their fluid exchange: give and take. The fluid in the tank begins broiling; the coils of small bubbles rising toward the surface look like the hair of that old brain, laying on the bottom as a soft rock, carved by alien, circular currents. Nirvana begins opening a breach, and that soft inanimate rock—an eyeless, bodiless mind—can push the doors of the heretic megalopolis of its own imagination, enter it with all the pores of its senses open wide by steady electric impulses and inductions of chemical sperm, the glue of the electric Creator, a secret formula, fertilizing the void and making squirt out of zero things of iron, plastic, meat, making it as full and true as possible.
And now old Degritte can see again. And never things have been so clear, vivid, not since he was exploring reality with the mighty headlights of age sixteen.
Legs, too, are as good as new: they spring. He begins running along a road without turns and nothing on either side…yes, a bridge…ready to be swallowed by the open mouth of a sneering woman, laying belly-down like a uterine sphynx lowering her head to lick her audience. His heart pumps rich blood everywhere; capillaries glint with quicksilver.
Goddamn, that Dumand really knows what he’s doing, Degritte’s brain thinks. Then, he is already inside that damp mouth, he rolls on the tongue hopping upon it before continuing toward a throat dripping honey—or something sweet and thick anyway. Time to jump down the pharynx and get below, where he wants to go. Degritte holds his breath and throws himself down feet first, soon sliding and tumbling down the big bend of the esophagus. No stomach or intestines on his way to reach the destination, the matrix, the pulpy Holy Grail of femininity, passing inside it, through it. Splashing around and biting the tender burrows greased with mucus, like a one-centimeter-long shark. That’s how he wanted her, how he wanted the heretic biology of the titanic woman now containing him like a toothy virus: and Nirvana executed. Degritte stops an instant, to listen to Janis Joplin’s One Night Stand. Right, because now his ears are perfectly working as well—and that music, diffused by the membranes of the giantess’s body like in a shopping mall, penetrates his senses, leaving holes all around like a shotgun blast. Joplin’s voice pours inside of him like a flock of vibrations, making his imaginary guts wobble. What a marvel.
Then the apex comes, triggered by the slide into the red placenta pool, inside the elastic frame of the uterus, where Degritte throws himself to float on his back among icebergs of frozen, ground Cloud 5, glittering azure masses with a sharp head, polished neck and chest, and a fat underwater ass, down there, covered in a layer of seashells with open mouths. Sucking and spitting fluid—placenta wine—they work as the engines of those psychedelic rocks-to-be-licked. Degritte’s acid icebergs can move in schools; or they can join side by side, crumble form a dryland, a shore, a beach where you can lie down beneath that curved, purple-and-blue sky, held together by a framework of veins, overpasses of blood. And wait for a new, red high tide—to sink again into that crawling broth.
But the old man wants to complete his trip right away. He holds his breath, vertically dives, darts to the bottom, to open the water-tight hatch of her cervix. A strong suction, a lab tsunami, being sucked into the conduit, gently pushed into the warmest machineries of the woman; holding on to the velvet hem of the vagina corridor, going through it while looking up, like watching stars in the summer, letting newborn woman juice drip on your face, under the urethra cave, studded in nozzles. A multiple clitoris. Then, the light of the day, at the end of the tunnel…time to pop out, between the smooth pyramids of the giantess’s spread thighs, like an anthropomorphous dildo. Light. Her skin smelling like jasmine.
Damn, that Dumand is the real deal! Degritte thinks—the man who designed the Palais d’Exposition of Montpellier, admired all around the world back then, and now turned into a horrid assembly line for mass rat-skinning; a factory of protoskin suits against the Uxor rains. I could do that a thousand times, without end, the old man repeats himself, satisfied, as he counts all the teeth in his mouth and bulges his blood-watered muscles, all those cells thought by the system software, together with all the other bricks of his imaginary world. While the old man’s physical brain is making evaporate the liquid substance of the fish tank canning it.
««—»»
Montpellier—Sans Fin Centre
“Are you leaving me this son of a bitch?” Mesar Pantelic—aka the Cardinal—asks, dragging by the hair a man who looks like he’s just been run over by a truck. He has been caught by security in Server Room3, as he was trying to connect a Mutant system to the machines. Industrial espionage. Broken bones, smashed face. “He has spilled the beans already: he was sent by New Moon. We can do whatever we want with him…”
“Do what you wish with the body, but we need the brain: we must run operation tests on the Black Nirvana…those sadistic guys of the Argentine government have already taken seat to watch the show. They’re sucking chalices of adrenaline one after another. If everything works out right, today we’re getting ourselves a very nice deal,” Dumand replies, a million-credit smile glinting on his fangs.
“I don’t need a corpse,” the Cardinal grumbles. “Dead meat, deprived of the light of pain.”
“You’ll get all the complete bodies you want, my friend, don’t worry…fresh, alive and screaming as you like them. But now take this idiot to Experimentation Area and hope he doesn’t croak before you get there; damn, you really fucked him up…we must prepare him quickly, those guys are waiting. They’ll begin freaking out with all the shit they’re quaffing,” Dumand orders, waving his hands to hurry up the operations. “They can’t wait to admire next-gen torture.”
Preparation for the electric Nirvana requires zero scalping of the subject, with a Metzelder precision saw; the skull dome is then uncorked like a sparkling wine bottle thanks to hydraulic micro-suction-cups; next step is extraction of brain matter, the most delicate phase. For the Egyptians, it was simple: they pulled everything out of the nose with little hooks; but for electric Nirvana, the brain must present itself perfectly whole, sealed, and continuously pumped by a lito-oxygenizer. Best solution, in these cases, are always the expensive, microscopic Z2 plesodroids: electronic spiders with light alloy shells, eight retractable legs, clamping laser carvers on their snouts for jaws. Then, system connection and immersion in a tank, which at Sans Fin Centre they call Clear Chamber. Finally, the start, black or white; two very different trips, both unending.
««—»»
The stranger’s Black Nirvana.
Start. The system loads user settings, his worst nightmares, anguishes and phobias of the subject are turned into electronic imprinting. The stranger’s brain, installed in the Clear Chamber and immersed in its alchemic amber-colored fluid, begins receiving transmissions from its Black Nirvana. The man opens his eyes and all other senses, guided by the hypnotic radar of the machine; he no longer feels pain. His bones, broken by the Cardinal’s mastiffs, seem to be fixed, magically welded. But what kind of glue could do all that? He touches his nose, then his fingertips run on his forehead and on his jaw. It can’t be. His face, squeezed like a lemon by those bastards, feels brand new. Smooth, young skin—no blood. Sure… I’m dead and this place, smelling like rust, is where you end up. A Purgatory, something like that? Doesn’t seem so bad, after all. He is in front of a door, padded in red leather, with small glass lozenges sewn on it; they don’t reflect anything. You just have to approach, and you are already on the other side. Jesus, what the… The stranger stays there, his mouth open, and his last words drip from his lips, crashing into crumbles around his naked feet. Where are my toes? A small bug in the software…
The man’s electronic eyes are seeing the stairs of an old building, an ancient wrought-iron spaceship: the intricate cage of an elevator with a folding metal door, decorated by pointy laurel leaves, clattering back and forth, inviting him in. Hesitating, the stranger walks through the threshold of that strange cage, which Monsieur Degritte would have easily recognized: a Stigler metal elevator—high-class stuff, old school stuff. Those things came back in fashion about thirty years ago, conveniently modified. You need a coin, though, to start the elevator and discover its destination, the right floor.
