A Sick Gray Laugh, page 19
At first I was quite attracted to the notion of using real blood, perhaps gotten from the zygote itself. But there was something inappropriate about that idea. The blood was to come from the mother, not the zygote!
So I thought about this pregnant lady down the street from me. I see her each day when I jog. I’m not a wicked person, but I have to confess that I did have half a notion to steal the blood from her. It’s not that I’m bloodthirsty per se; it’s just that circumstances put me in a situation where shedding blood was an option on the table.
Another fact I offer in my defense: I was racking my brain to find a way to do it in the least intrusive way possible. Maybe I would hide in the bushes outside of her house and shoot her in the butt with a b.b. gun. Then, later on, after she went to the urgent care center or whatever, I’d check to make sure no one was looking and go over to where her blood spilled. I’d have a teaspoon and an empty pint of Ben & Jerry’s ready. That way, I’d know when I’d collected enough blood.
But this is where my (scant, residual) obsessive-compulsive traits became a blessing rather than a curse. My “constantly hiccuping consciousness” wouldn’t let me rush forward with such a plan. Rather, I spun it around my head like a chicken in a rotisserie. Over and over, and over and over, and over and over and over it went, as I evaluated its merits.
After about six turns around the proverbial spit, it occurred to me that my blood acquisition strategy was silly. Silly and, more importantly, risky. Sitting out on the sidewalk in front of Prego-Neighbor’s house, trying to spoon her blood into a Ben & Jerry’s container, would attract unwanted attention. And if I were arrested or locked away in a nuthouse, then I couldn’t proceed with the plans for my cult at all, and Grayness would continue to reign.
I briefly considered other ideas for obtaining Natural blood. I could go online, try to find instructions for how to draw it out of a vein, and then offer some bag lady fifty dollars for a pint. I could even drive to Louisville, infiltrate a hospital or abortion clinic, try to obtain access to their medical waste, and use the blood I found there for my ritual. I mean, the ritual called for me to buy scrubs and a surgical mask anyway. If I wore them as a disguise for this undercover work, then I’d really be getting my money’s worth for them.
But again, there were too many risks. Without a staff ID badge, my access to the medical waste would hinge on lax security. Even if I did find the cast-aside blood, getting it out of the facility would require an inordinate amount of stealth (and luck).
As my consciousness hiccuped and hiccuped, and hiccuped and hiccuped, and hiccuped and hiccuped some more, I finally realized that I had been overcomplicating things to an almost absurd degree. How quickly I’d forgotten the lessons taught to me by Professor Huysmans and his likeable hero, des Esseintes! The Natural World was inferior to the World of Artifice. Therefore, blood gotten from Prego-Neighbor would be boring blood! Blood gotten from a bag lady would be desultory blood! Blood retrieved from the medical waste of a hospital delivery unit (or a nearby abortion clinic) would be coagulated blood! And not just in the sense of being congealed into a semi-solid, but also in the sense of being glommed together in a common chemistry with every drop of blood that had ever coursed through a human vein!
No, I decided that what was needed for this occasion was Artificial blood. Perhaps some sort of high-end stage blood. I was willing to spare no expense, if need be, to perform this ritual the right way. I told myself that, when it came to defeating Grayness (which had already inflicted no small amount of damage on my physical and mental health), money was no object.
But the matter kept hiccuping, hiccuping, hiccuping through my head. I reversed myself (as I often do) and decided it wouldn’t be necessary to spend a lot of money on this. I wasn’t trying to simulate the birth experience with the sort of special-effects rigor one would expect from Tom Savini. I realized that no matter how weak or sniveling or acquiescent the man was, he would, at some level, still know he was a man and not a zygote. Hopefully, that memory would recede deep below the crest of awareness, but it would be there. Thus, there would always be a limitation to how authentic the ritual could be. Even if I had him shave off all his body hair before he arrived at my house for the ritual, I’d still see that he was six feet tall.
I could pretend he was microscopic, though (and, as the hours went by, pretend he was growing to the size of a fist, and finally to the size of a newborn). I’m pretty good at pretending. I’m not sure why so many people feel as if they have to stop playing make-believe games when they get older. They have no problem wasting hours and hours in front of the video game screen, but they would feel childish if they spent an afternoon running around their empty house, pretending to be Columbo or Kolchak the Night Stalker or Velma from Scooby Doo. I’ve created little mysteries to distract myself from an otherwise boring Sunday afternoon when the Cincinnati Reds are getting blown out, and I can tell you that these feel real. I knew that if I could achieve that sense of reality with a relatively silly sort of role play, I should be able to convince myself of the reality of the birth experience in my bathtub. After all, the degree of difficulty faced by the imagination is far greater when you pretend to solve a mystery. By comparison, birth is a far more prosaic occurrence, and because it is so prosaic (and therefore less exotic), it should be even easier to convince myself it’s real.
Then my mind hiccuped yet again as I realized the risk involved in simulating an activity as prosaic (and therefore ordinary and quite possibly Gray) as childbirth. What would be the point of crudely aping the Gray machinations of the flesh factory? Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that I went through all this trouble to create my innovative cult, and performed this ritual with exacting realism. Wouldn’t it be possible that, when I looked into my newborn’s eyes, I’d see Grayness churning inside of him?
To prevent such a tragic outcome, I decided I’d have to make the birth as abnormal as possible. Not only would I use fake blood instead of the real thing, I would choose as cheap and garish a product as possible. I would then proceed to pour it out into a bucket and mix vast quantities of glitter into it. That way, I would suggest to my newborn that he was entering a world that was both greater and lesser than the real world; a world that was a cartoonish nightmare.
Yes, this approach would be ideal. I wouldn’t stop with the blood, either. I’d toss glitter all over the bathroom, in the bathwater, and onto the fetus itself. I would pour a whole jar of it over my surgical scrubs. I would also place a pulsing red strobe light in the bathroom, and perhaps find a way for its flicker to coincide with the rhythm of the recorded heartbeat.
The addition of these sensory details would yield the desired psychological state in the submissive male. Presumably, his mind would be especially malleable in the hands of a strong woman (which, I think you’ll agree, I am). So part of him would want to believe this was real. His mind would start to drift into the realm of sex fantasies, which would mean he’d be dissociating from his actual surroundings. His eyesight would already be fuzzy after being stripped of his glasses. But, if I did this well enough, his remaining four senses would start to soften and blur and bend to my will, too. Thus, his mind would cooperate with its captor, and together we’d change my bathroom into a cartoonish nightmare (or, if you prefer, a nightmarish cartoon) of a womb.
Honestly, to me it matters little whether “cartoonish” is the adjective and “nightmare” the noun or “nightmarish” is the adjective and “cartoon” the noun. All that matters is that the ritual be saturated with both Cartoon Energy and Nightmare Energy, for these are the factors that would ultimately lead the submissive to embrace the transformation. As Thomas Ligotti has said, “Once you’re trapped in a nightmare—I mean a really good nightmare—nobody has to ask you to suspend disbelief in the horror that is about to overwhelm you.”
You may be wondering what would happen after my submissive emerged from the womb. Contrary to his wishes, I’d do nothing to satisfy his carnal desires. Instead, I would lead him, decade by decade, through his life. On day two of the ritual, I’d simulate his growth from ages one to ten; on day three, ages eleven to twenty, and so on. Perhaps I’d have him live until the age of ninety. This would give me an opportunity to use various bondage techniques to simulate the ravages of arthritis. I could, for example, weave a thin rope over and under his fingers, tie it off, and make him wear gloves on top of the whole contraption. I could force him to wear weights around his ankles, the way some runners do, only I would put one atop the other so he could only shuffle around. There would be a low-cost way to suggest the aging of the face as well. I could pour Elmer’s glue over him, so that when it dried and peeled he’d have a pasty, wrinkled appearance.
Maybe, when he was fifty, I’d finally give him the erotic beating he’d been wanting all along. That need not be expensive at all; I’d just take my leather belt and thrash away at him. From time to time I’d make sure the metal buckle got him. I’d let him whack away at his inchworm as I beat him.
But you see, even that exercise would have a hidden agenda. My goal would be to get the subbie to scream and scream, and scream and scream, and scream and scream again until his voice grew raw from overuse. And then, the next day (when he’d live through ages sixty-one to seventy), his voice would be hoarse and I’d laugh at him. I’d mock him and say he sounded like Grandpa Simpson!
On the other hand, I could have fun by going another route entirely. I could simulate his murder, at age four, by abusive parents. I’d don strange masks and play dual roles as both the crackhead mother and the meth-dealing dad. I’d bind my breasts so they wouldn’t show when I played the father, and I’d engage the subbie in some Breath Play to simulate strangulation.
And then, just when he thought the game was over and it was time to go home, I’d inform him that it was far from over. I’d say that it was time for him to be reincarnated, and thus back into the manacles and bathtub he’d go. And if he would ask me how many lifetimes he’d have to suffer, I’d say: “As many as you need to reach Nirvana.”
Yes, I just realized that would be another unique aspect of my cult: it would have more than a tinge of Buddhism about it. In this way, it could still be fueled by Moses Energy (at least, the energy of The New Moses, who claimed he was a reincarnation of the original) while at the same time breaking out into a completely Separate direction!
I would call myself The Great Incarnation Facilitator (or “The Great I.F.” for short), and I would make and break realities over and over, over and over and over and over, the way a Buddhist monk creates and destroys sand mandalas to illustrate the truth of impermanence.
Yes, I knew that’s what I had to inject into Grayness, a shot of impermanence—to remind it that it’s mortal and that it is better to surrender voluntarily than to be slayed by my onslaught of solve.
All that I had to do was find a willing victim.
7
Thanks to the Internet, even people in the Kentuckiana region can find willing partners for sadomasochistic trysts. Not only are there dating websites that match Master (or Mistress) to slave, there are also social groups that gather monthly to celebrate their erotic hierarchies.
As you might suspect, my knowledge of this community stems from my past association with Jake Wanser. During those years in which I was anxious to erase myself and found the idea of that erasure arousing, I joined such a group. That’s how we met.
I must say, though, that I encountered cognitive dizziness during my interaction with that crowd. It seemed to me that, ideally, the spirit of BDSM was a spirit of Separation (Master distinct from slave, sexual practices distinct from the mainstream, the id separated from the superego, etc.). I thought its energy should be Solve Energy.
When dead people fall through the bottomless black pit and flail their hands about in a futile search for some ledge or battlement they can grab onto, they generate a steady flow of wind that fuels the turbines of Separation. Those same turbines should be what fuels BDSM.
But the reality is that there is lots and lots, and lots and lots, and lots and lots of coagula in the mix. To speak of a community is to speak of coagula. To speak of people embarking on long-term relationships is to speak of coagula. When two couples exchange nerdy jokes with each other while they’re in line to use the spanking bench at a BDSM club, they are being coagulated into each other. The same tragic phenomenon occurs during the teaching of their Breath Play classes, the planning of their Christmas parties, and the hosting of their monthly potlucks (or rather, as they’re called in the Midwest, “pitch ins”). Attachment, attachment, so much attachment! Heretical attachment! Bane of solve! Father of Grayness!
Instead of tearing each other apart and ripping to shreds all social ties with the world, the kinksters instead seek to establish a counter-culture. Instead of smashing civilization, they emulate it. For example, they sometimes form households in which a Big Cheese (a Master and/or Mistress) lords over slaves. (Coagula! Ugh, Coagula!)
The Big Cheese of such a household will sometimes give it a pompous, self-congratulatory name. For example, when I was involved with Jake, we knew a retired Indiana University zoology professor with a special devotion to whips who insisted her patio home in Jeffersonville always be referred to as “The House of the Black Widow.” She also was known to call her slaves (three of them, two men and a woman) her “flies.” At kink parties, she made them wear nothing but cheesy-looking insect wings. She, on the other hand, wore an elegant black dress smeared with dust and cobwebs. Whenever she whipped one of them with a singletail, she’d manically yip “Sting! Sting!”
We also knew an apprentice plumber from New Albany who lived in a one-bedroom apartment he insisted on calling The House of the Eel (because he really dug using TENS units and electric fly swatters on the shrunken boobs of his sad-looking junkie slave). Sometimes there was drama between the two Houses, as when the plumber saw the retiree’s female slave wandering past him in her fly wings and gave her a little zap on the ass.
There’s an unspoken rule that you don’t poach slaves from other Mistresses and Masters. It happens all the time, mind you, but the point is that there’s an unspoken rule. And where there are rules (spoken or unspoken, observed or flaunted) you have a certain amount of order. You have mortar to hold up the bricks. (Coagula! Coagula! Bane of existence!)
Anyway, this is just my long, drawn-out way of explaining that I had no plans of looking for a submissive in the organized BDSM community. That would make the ritual doomed from its very inception. I would be inviting coagula into the front door! I’d be poisoning the well even as I was drilling it.
No, what I had to do was find someone on the outermost fringes of society. Someone who was estranged from their family. Someone who was friendless, and yearning for (or, at least, open to) his own self-erasure. In short, the kind of person T.N.M. would’ve recruited to wear the black veil.
I realize that the way I’ve phrased things makes it sound pretty fucking predatory. You may be thinking: Noelle has taken this turn because she has never truly made peace with the things she let Jake do to her. So, she is re-enacting that relationship—only this time with her in control instead of the man. Or perhaps you’re thinking: All this talk about the coagula of the organized S&M scene is a red herring; the real reason she’s trying to find a subbie who is completely disconnected from the community is that he’ll be less educated about the need to restrict BDSM play to activities that are Safe, Sane, and Consensual. He’ll have no other subbies to connect with for feedback. He’ll be isolated and therefore very weak. No one will have his back.
Or perhaps, you’re thinking: Noelle has taken this turn because she is no longer taking her oblong yellow pills. She’s reaching a new abyss of insanity. She’s turning out just like Philip K. Dick. This book is her VALIS.
As flattering as the comparison to Philip K. Dick might be, I take issue with the assertion that I’m going nuts (or, at least, that I’m becoming nuttier than I already was). Yes, I know I am mad. But, as I pointed out in the very first pages of this book, I’m taking much better care of that madness. In the past, when I experienced a worsening of my symptoms, I neglected my hygiene. I took a sick pleasure in going days without bathing. I let my body go, eating whenever the slightest desire tugged at my taste buds. Today that is not the case. I’m clean and trim and tan and smooth-legged and well-rested and healthy.
No, I am not insane. But I can see how you might think it so. Yes, it just occurred to me how such a misinterpretation could occur. It is very difficult for a layperson to distinguish between an episode of madness on the one hand and the onset of a Cartoonish Nightmare on the other. The closer I get to defeating Grayness, the more I’ll become saturated with Cartoon Energy and Nightmare Energy. Even though I haven’t yet procured all the necessary instruments for the ritual, these energies are beginning to swell up around me like a great tide at flood.
So do not despair. I am still taking my medication. I know that, to pull off this extraordinary victory over Grayness, I’ll need to have my wits about me.
8
After I wrote chapter seven, I took another break from working on this book. I don’t like taking breaks from writing. Doing so breaks my momentum. Even worse, it makes me feel like a loser, because I can’t be a prolific writer if I’m taking breaks all the time. (Now more than ever, one must be a prolific writer if one is to be taken seriously. If you’re not spouting forth books at a predictable clip à la Ol’ Faithful, you will be forgotten. Nobody cares about a geyser that goes off at erratic intervals. There’s no tourist attraction called Ol’ Fitful.)
In this case, however, the delay was unavoidable. I needed time to fully absorb the meaning of the strange imprisonment to which I was subjected after the 5K. Everything happened too quickly for me to understand, as it was happening. If I had so much as even attempted to document everything in real time, I would have had to resort to scrawling feverish, rushed, half-legible diary entries on scraps of paper. I would have had to hide those scraps from my overseers. I would have had to smuggle them out with me when I got out. Then I’d come back to them at a later date and try (with only mixed success) to reconstruct what I’d meant to say.
