By C. C. Parker

... Part 1 ... Part 2 ... Part 3 ... Part 4

- - - - - - -

Discourse On Illusion Part III:

The aliens came in the winter. 

Harriet was ready for them.  She had her bags packed.  She kept them near the door, always.  She had always known that they would come, and that's why she needed to be prepared.  It frightened her to think of not being prepared.  For if she was not prepared, wouldn't they smell it on her?  Wouldn't they be able to sniff the half assed earthling blood pumping through her veins?  They would grimace.  They would laugh at her. "You naive human," they would say in a voice that was impossible to understand, which is exactly how they would want it.  I would, she thought.  If I were the superior being, which I am most certainly not, I would shove it in the faces of those who were beneath me, which there are none. 

It was no suprise that Harriet hated who she was.  She was insecure about being human.  She did not like it.  Not one bit.  She thought the whole human race was a cluster of self-dignifying idiots; of which, unfortunately, she was one.  It wasn't her fault, she suspected.  A hand had picked her from a space litter and dropped her off on this terribly wrong world.  She cursed them daily, loudly; whoever had done this too her.  Whether it had been God, or gods; which was a pretentious thought on all of our parts.  Why would a God, or gods, create such a foolish, insubstantial lot? 

Harriet wasn't quite sure how she'd gotten here . . . but it didn't matter.  She was here.  That's what mattered, and that's what got her so mad in the first place.

Her life on Earth hadn't been terrible.  Some might say it was good life.  She'd had a fine husband, Harry (wasn't that nice: Harry and Harriet), who'd passed on 5 years ago, two kids who gone on to have fairly respectful careers,  Davey, 49, was in the pharmaceutical game.  Linda, 46, was an elementary school teacher.  Both lived far away.  Both called Harriet once a week.  A ususal converstation:

"Hi Mom."

"Hello."

"Are you taking care of yourself?"

"Why should I?"

"Mom.  You need to take of yourself."

"Why don't you mind your own damn business?  I'm in perfect health.  When it's time to go, let me go in peace."

"Don't talk like that mom."

"I'm tired."

"We're all tired.  It's been a long year."

"Yeah."

"Would you like to talk to one of your grandchildren?"

Davey had two sons and a daughter.  Linda had one son.

"Okay."

A break.

"Hey grandma."

All the grandchildren were in their 20s.  Zach, Davey's oldest, had a 2 year old daughter of his own: Christina.

"Hello."

"Hi there."

It didn't matter which one she was talking to.  It never did.

"How're you doing?"

And so on. 

The conversations rarely altered.  It was always the same hollow concern.  There were also cards on the holidays, with the same thinkless sentiments.  Harriet knew that her children, and children's children, suffered from an impending guilt that caused all this. 

Of course it had been worse since Harry's death.

 

Still, for all their concern, they rarely visited. "Too much going on," they'd say. "Too far away."

Harriet was pretty used to being alone.  Harriet liked being alone.  It sat well with her.

When she did have the family, things had been different.  She gave in for a long time, behaving in an orthodox manner. 

The changes may have seemed slight on the outside, and none of them knew exactly how or why it was happening, but Harriet, mother-wife, seemed to be going, well, crazy.  They would catch her lying the couch, talking in her sleep.  She would talk about these creatures who had come out of the sky.  Even when she was awake, she would mention it.  Gradually she became worse; more distant.  It was gaining on her, this madness, and there didn't seem to be anything they could do.  When and why was this happening?

It had been in the night.  The children, who were 13 and 16 at the time, were in bed.  Harry, who worked construction, was to get up in the early morning, and so, as was the case for most of her life, Harriet was alone. 

It sat well with her.

Anyway, she went into the front yard.  She stood out on the porch.  She was smoking a cigarette, the last of five, which was all she allowed herself in a day, and as she did this she liked to look into the sky, look at the stars, view the infinite, the black, and . . . something fuzzy, way up there, moving quickly, unlike anything she'd ever seen before.

At first it was a feeling, almost a sickness, like nausea, moving through her body, into her stomach, and than something else, like pleasure, focusing on all the zones Harry rarely bothered with anymore.  It began as a tingling sensation.  Her legs started to tremble slightly.  There was some heat being generated down there.  And than a flood came over her, mimicking the flood that was excreting from her legs.  She put a hand down there, pressing two fingers through the velvety flaps of her vulva, and always keeping an eye on the fuzzy thing, which, by her own calculations, was gaining size very quickly.

It wasn't long before they were hovering over the yard. 

Harriet was moaning.  She felt embarrassed.  Not because of the blinding white light that was illuminating the entire yard, house, neighborhood.  She was afraid of . . . What if her husband came out here?

You see, this was the very metamorphosis that would change Harriet for the rest of her life.  This was going to make people respect her, not that she would care all that much.  She would talk like a crazy woman for a while, not completely certain that anything had happened at all; this was normal in most cases (doubt being a very standard human emotion).  Her ramblings would go on like that for a while.  Her family would suggest that she get help, and for some time she would listen to them.  They would put her on medication.  She would read books on the subject.  She would draw pictures of crazy eyed aliens and show them to no one at all.  She would create her own religion out of the whole thing, as many had done before her, and as many would do in the future, and she began to feel like a chosen one, realizing that what had happened to her had happened for a reason, and she was different for it  . . . she was different.  Eventually, she would sever herself mentally, spiritually, and than morally, from the rest of the world.  All the human wonderments would go out of her.  She would talk against God and government, deciding that these creations were mere deviations of man's futile mind.  She would grow angrier, and people would see her as just another crackpot.  They would stray from her (or tell her, "too much going on.")  She would barely cry at her husband's funeral, and not even try to justify her lack of emotion.  She just would not cry.  She would start to see that humans were plastic creations without mind.  She would dream dreams that were retrospective realities; events that had happened on the night of her evolution.  Most of these dreams were symbolic.  They showed her landscapes of emotion, runic in design, and she realized, on waking up, that she'd seen and felt, these things before.  She would also dream about them, with their lean, shimmering bodies and large, melancholic eyes.  She had seen pictures of them before.  She thought the people who had drawn them were crazy.  She would draw them herself.  People would think her crazy too.  Weren't there only a handful of those who had touched them, had been touched, had been fulfilled, felt the sex of tiny fingers probing, and were made to see the visions of beauty, visions of truth, soft toned visions with the delicate textures of opalescent flesh.  She would want to be like them, be with them.  She would try to kill herself, twice.  She would eventually see that she was not insane, and the rest of the world was.  There was not a Bible to this religion, yet a deep feeling, deeper than faith maybe, that assured the believer that they, not Jesus Christ, would come down the Earth once more (they had been here before), to take it's believers away.

And now was that time.

She was standing on the porch just like before.  It was the same porch.  It was frigid cold outside.  Her hands were buried deep in coat pockets when she saw them.  Quickly, she removed her hands, and began to wave frantically.  She knew they couldn't possibly see her from up there, but she waved anyway.  Her heart was beating terribly.  The excitement, not all sexual like the first time, surged through her frail old woman's body; she shook like a hungry baby shakes when it sees the tit closing in on its grateful lips.  She shook frantically.  It was fearful.  She thought her heart might explode; and that made her calm down.  She needed to collect herself.  It was time.  She calmed herself.  She looked through the screen door.  Saw the suitcase sitting there.  A tear dragged itself from her right eye and reached down her right cheek.  It was time.  IT WAS TIME.

The spaceship, which looked nothing like the things seen in movies, carefully approached Harriet's front yard.  It swam down from the sky, shifting like opalescent plasma, giving off heat, light, energy.  To Harriet, who had gained much study in the possibility of such things, was not surprised to see that it didn't shift about like a clumsy ballerina, but rather floated like a moon jelly, drifting through ocean black waters, glowing majestically, illuminating the space that surrounded it.

Harriet was pleased at the sight, and weakly, she waved at it.

An organic portal was made.  It looked to Harriet like a great vulva, the sides of vertical pink puffiness (like pussy lips or clouds reflecting a sunset) opening gratefully, a shaft of red light swarming in motes that exited like flowing cells (of blood) or bees, collecting and separating, separating and collecting, always pulsing, and never keeping its form, gaining mass as the thing came open.  The inside, or what she could see of it through the redness (usually during one of the random separations; the light seemed confused, as these were little beings with even smaller minds) looked ribbed (like the inside of a comfortable counterfeit cunt) and wet (strains of wetness bobbed from the roof, pulling themselves to tautness, until breaking off and slapping the floor with a resounding echo that made the brain feel near to madness). 

Harriet, opening the screen door, and never letting her eyes leave the thing, grabbed her suitcase.  She stood with it, looking dumbly, and waited.

The portal was opened wide.  The ship swirled behind it.  It was near to blinding this close up.  The red motes (or whatever they were), flowed from the portal in a trickle, and approached Harriet casually, until there were two rows on either side of her (they made slight red walls of themselves).  Harriet felt like a queen.

And than it happened that the portal opened wider. 

Harriet saw them; and remembered them.  They wore thin shadows at their feet.  Their bodies moved angelically, while long fingers probed ahead.  Limbs extended across the many thresholds of that ribbed floor.  Wetness dripped like saliva from the roof of the portal, and dribbled over their angular bodies like sperm.  They looked like they were swimming inside of a radiating yellow plumage that emanated from cells that were alive on the outside of their bodies.  They were as naked as anything could possibly be, Harriet decided.  They had adjusted themselves to their emotions, she concluded, dissolving anything that was useless (fear, guilt, ect . . .), and that's why they looked the way they did.  They were ghosts of themselves; souls without true bodies.  They were celestial; bodies turned inside out over time.

Harriet wanted to be pure like that.  And maybe she could be (over time).             

They exited the portal one at a time, skirting the opening with their backs, numbering six in all, six in curved formation, backsides against the light, and looking at Harriet with their wet, insect eyes.  The eyes, which were more than windows, and from the alien's point of view (aside from what Harriet perceived), scrolled through bits of data, strains of information, declaring things like usage of human type, mind of human type, DNA of human type (aside from what Harriet perceived, which was squat), unfolding the existence and non-existence, describing what she was, not who she was, and what she could do for them.  If Harriet could only perceive what they were perceiving, she would think twice about her religion, because they (and the eyes held this info as well), could care less about her soul.   

The aliens were quite exacting, and fearful of nothing.  Harriet was right about a couple things.  They couldn't feel fear; and they most certainly couldn't feel guilt. 

In this formation, they approached her. 

"I am a friend," she explained.

Silently, they surrounded her.

Harriet showed them the suitcase.

One of two aliens in the center of the formation took the suitcase from Harriet and hurled it away.  It slammed against the side of Harriet's house, and broke open, scattering the contents all over the yard.

"I guess I won't be needing that," she explained, feeling foolish.

One of two aliens in the center of the formation took Harriet's hand.  The hand felt wet and cool, the fingers surrounding Harriet's frail hand completely.  The alien who had hurled the suitcase took Harriet's other hand.  They guided Harriet to the center of the formation.  There were three of them to either side of her.  They did not look at her.  They looked ahead, toward the ship.

Harriet thought she might say something but swallowed the prospect immediately.

They moved ahead, eventually falling back into single file, Harriet still at the center.  The red motes followed.  They slipped into the cunt like entrance.  Spermy drops fell away from the ribbed ceiling.  Harriet could feel the drops on her head, getting into her hair.  Since she had hair, and clothes, the drops wouldn't, couldn't, slip down the length of her body like she would have wanted them to do.  She watched the drops elongate and wind down the backside of the alien directly in front of her.

Their movement ceased.  The walls of the first corridor opened up around them.  A yellow substance lay in congealed clumps around the perimeter of this new entrance.  The ribs in the floor separated, smoothing themselves out.  The first corridor did not look like the inside of a cunt anymore; it didn't look like anything all.  The yellow substance, dissolving, becoming gaseous, began to eat away the old walls . . . from the new entrance out, the slick, spermy walls vanished.  What lied behind it was a purple vastness, as if there were a black lighted sun turning above a dead world.  Harriet hadn't felt any movement, but she was certain they had taken off; a long time ago in fact.  Time was queer here.  Everything moved laggardly, like good sex.  Looking into the purple room (if it was room at all), she felt time vanish, could almost see it vanishing, and in realizing this in herself, noted that she was making the separation between this world, and that one, complete.  It brought a smile to her face.

The aliens ushered her into the space.  Harriet looked up and saw the universe twisting in front of her eyes.  She felt microscopic.  The stars were glorious.  She realized that she was closer to anything inside of herself than she had ever been.  The vastness, like God, but not God, held her in a trance; she imagined runic designs owning her brain.  She was pretty sure that this space was the space of her dreams.

The aliens had broken up.  They moved like angels.  They shifted through the space as if there was a maze that she couldn't see.  If this was someone’s brain than whose? Or would she ever know?  A cinema of visions were made possible to her through holography, severing thought images with ideas, pushing and probing, taking over, distorting everything that she felt (or dreamed she felt).  She did not notice that the two leader aliens were at her sides again, holding her arms in a lock.  She could not move.

Harriet realized that she was trying, with difficulty, to free herself; or maybe not.  Maybe she enjoyed seeing the horrible things they were feeding into her mind (after all, when it came to aliens, Harriet was a damn idealist).  It was too much like a dream-nightmare.  The ecstasy of horror was made clear to her; and the horror of ecstasy.

I am naked, she thought.  I feel sooooo cold.

She struggled against them.

Holographic walls appeared.  They started very far away, and multiplied, moving inside, always.  These new rooms and corridors, of which she would never realize, raced toward her. 

The aliens held her up in the small white room.  There were no doors or windows.  Everything had filtered down to this. 

"*%*%$&%(&^(%$#^_(_+!" Harriet cried.

"&%(^$&^%(&)^*%*!" One of the things shrieked.

Oh my God, she thought.

She looked down.  Something metallic was writhing between her legs.  Sharp instruments pinioned her against the fronts of the two aliens who held her; two points digging, digging into her thighs.  They broke skin and slipped rapidly to the bone.  "*%*^(!" She screamed.  Another alien, who's eyes sounded digital behind the obsidian sheen (she could hear the devious clacking), stepped behind her.  The two aliens who were holding her stepped aside, yet continued to hold her in place.  The third alien entered her tight asshole.  His cock (if that's what it was) expanded rapidly inside of her.  Harriet could feel her guts, organs, fluids pressing against bone, fat, skin; she was breaking apart.

The aliens had come millions of miles to perform this task; and they would do many times over if that's what it took.  They had learned a long time ago: Never trust a human.  Humans, aside from the Yilordew on Jerg, were the most idiotic of races.  The aliens, rapacious by nature, discovered the planet on a freak 5-thousand years ago; they made quite an impact, obviously.  Through their observations, humans were also a worshipful lot who were lousy at internal musings; they knew very little about themselves, because they were too busy putting faith in obvious failures. 

"*%*(^*%*&%(!" screamed the alien whose Aximonk was consuming his victim's insides with acidic secretions.  He was pissed. 

Harriet felt betrayed.  She felt betrayed by her dreams, faith, and humanity in general.

What had they taken the first time? 

Harriet wondered this, remembering the way her body felt that first time.

They all turned into eyeless pricks before her own eyes.  The thing between her legs shuddered, and removed itself from Harriet's body.  Her cunt dripped from tong-like incisors in its metallic mouth; they had severed it completely, cleanly.  All of her wrinkled sex was captured (cervix, uterus, clitoris, etc . . .).  The alien  who had entered her from behind had helped exhume these things; and it finished by exploding inside of her.

That would be one less idiot, they decided.

And the "fucking" ship hadn't even left the ground.

They placed what was left of her on the porch; right next to the suitcase.

"%*%(*^*%*," one of the aliens snickered.

"**^%*&^(^*."

The giant gland rose sexually into the sky.  Harriet's broken body watched as it took off, but nothing registered in her mind; nothing ever really had.

- - - - - - -

Laggard, who was a very popular band, was setting up their equipment. 

The drummer had one of these sets that looked like a cross between a N.A.S.A. moon crawler and a metallic katydid.  He sat behind the set, adjusting tones, tweaking sound, stomping on the bass pedal, which quickly reverberated through the whole place.  He smiled at the bass player, a gangly dumb looking fellow, who was pulling up the low E with two fingers, fixing a boom boom each time the bass drum groaned.

Kids fixed their eyes on the band.  They swayed their freaked out heads and jelly minds to the thrum of low E and bass drum beats. 

The guitar player, a smallish fellow with a little boy's haircut, tuned his guitar in the corner.  He rarely looked up.

Two boys had come in early.  They were completely stoned out of their minds.  Strangely, they liked watching Laggard set up, because nobody did it better.  They sat on the dusty floor, where there carpeting had been ripped up, and traced designs with their fingers.  Fuck off, one of them wrote.  The other had traced a cartoonish face with eyes that more resembled heavy breasts.  "That looks like a woman's torso," the first boy said.  They traced legs and a vagina.

  He snickered.  "What about the head?" 

"This one's decapitated."  He snickered again.

More people showed up.  They all knew it would be a while before Laggard played anything that resembled a real song.  Some people hung out here all day long.  Some people never left.  A girl with shocks of blue paint streaked through her bleached hair passed a crude looking bong with felt pen inscriptions and designs covering the glass. 

Everyone was nicely stoned. 

Some people had taken acid.

They waited.

The drummer was smiling behind his set.  He was always smiling, and that confused a lot of people. "Hey," he said to the bass player, who had stopped thumping the low E a long time ago.  "Let's try a little jam."  The guitar player, who had finished tuning his violet colored Gibson, nodded at the drummer.  He said, "All right."  Turning on a Crate stack, the guitar player strummed an E; the bass player naturally plucked the Low E.  The bass drum kicked.  It sounded like heavy breathing, but a terrible heavy; something strenuous.  The guitar player stopped playing the chord.  He began to riff out.  The band followed quite easily, obeying temperamentally, accenting the ego of the guitar player's stride.  The sound that emanated was, well, neurotic . . . a perfect sound . . . flawless.  The guitar player strained his eyes against his fingers, which danced adroitly over the strings, resuscitating every note that had lain dormant in his mind.  Everything was nervously orchestrated with pop efficiency. 

Laggard, finishing its 5 minute improvisational piece, went back to adjusting their instruments. "The snare isn't tight enough," said the drummer, who stood with one hand against a hip, the elbow cocked outwardly. "What do you think?"  He asked the guitar player.  The bass player, who was a novice, said, "I think it sounds fine," and they looked at him indifferently.

The bass player shrugged.  Fuck them, he thought, and went on to slap the low E.

"Won't you stop that," said the guitar player. "Can't you see were tuning our instruments up.  Maybe if you tuned your instrument you wouldn't sound so God damn sloppy."  His eyes were like ice.  The bass player was starting to resent the guitar player. "That jam," the guitar player went on.  "It sounded to me like your timing was off."

"My tuning was fine," the bass player said.

"No.  It wasn't."

"Whatever."

The guitar, not unlike Judas, wanted to be a pop star.  He was very willing to do whatever it took to become famous, rich, adored. 

Judas wanted to be a pop star, and he became one.  He lost quite a lot of friends, but he had betrayed them all, and that went without saying.

The guitar player was very much that betrayer.

There was a comradery here, among the bands, the kids.  They had turned out a thing that was mostly good, and the guitar player, The Guitar Player, had decided that it was in his best interest to take what he could get and then move on.  If the rest Laggard decided to stay on in this stagnant place, finding lesser denizens to fiddle around with, then that was their problem.

He could easily look into the eyes of the Redeemer and whisper, 'fuck off!'

The guitar player tried, with some difficulty, to see the thing for what it was:

There was a lot of blood coming off the mountain.  The hole, at its vortex, could nearly feel the screams wasting its thinning sides.  If He was here, then He was going blind.  If He was here, then He'd better get on.  There was a whole world out there, and if He chose to stay then that was His damn problem.  The only thing He should worry about saving was His time.

The guitar player believed that the hole was a hole.  A state of nothingness.  A thing that couldn't be saved, because it was nothing to begin with.

Why bother?

The guitar tuned his guitar once more and strummed.  The sound that came was near to perfection.  Now that was something.              

The kids, most of them 13, 14 year old girls crowded around the band.  The lights went out.  There was only this blackness.  The guitar player smiled in the dark.  The bass player stroked the low E.  The drummer made his high hat sizzle and then kicked the pedal at his feet.  The kick sent a message to the soundboard, where a balding gent in a tank top, who had been outside drinking beer during the preshow,  fiddled with switches and knobs.  His muscles twitched terrifically beneath his thick tan skin.  He was a muscle-bound Wizard of Oz, tweaking arrangements with an efficiency that developed into tangents of layered pop psychedelia.  The sound was good, and each time the drummer kicked the bass drum pedal, a brilliant flash of white light would engulf the band.

A lot of people didn't like Laggard's attitude, especially the guitar player, who seemed like a real prick, and the drummer, who was always grinning inhumanly for no apparent reason (the bass player seemed okay), but it was difficult not to be somewhat impressed with the show they put on.  Unlike Gravy, who was tired three chord riffing and shouting (basically primate music), or Milton's Weathervane, who played textured intelligentsia and were not all accessible in a pop fashion, Laggard played, music that people could groove to, dance to, obsess over (which was the idea), and generally like, whether they said they did or didn't.  When Laggard played everybody was in the room.

A kid on acid watched from above the crowd.  He sat on a low shelving, thinking he was floating.  His insides trembled, and he thought the crowd of people was merging.  He looked at something else.  On the other side of the room.  A picture someone had painted.  A convoluted array of images.  The acid gave them symmetry, flexibility, profundity at all once.  The paint still looked wet to The Kid.  It was starting to freak him out a little.  He turned his head quickly away.  He watched Laggard perform for a while, and he could see the insecurities in their faces.  Strange, he thought.  He listened to the music.  The music did not flow, yet struggled on.  The Kid decided that this was not good music to listen to on an acid trip.  It didn't put him on a bad trip.  It was nothing like that.  It just sounded bad.  Everything seemed predetermined, dishonest in a way.  Acid was very good at realizing disguises.

The Kid floated off the shelving unit.  Careful not to get trapped in the crowd, he stepped to the back of the room; and then outside.

The night felt cool, clean.  He felt relieved.

- - - - - - -

As Poot wandered the streets alone, he thought very deeply about the things that had gone on.  He felt hurt by them; and a little relieved.  He did not like following.  He was not a follower.  He was not stupid, even though they treated him as such. 

Poot had always harbored mixed feelings about the crusade, about Him, and tried to define the movement as clearly as his mind could.  It was realized, by Poot, by a few of them who were extreme in their secrecy (for fear of being exiled yet again), that the mind could not, would not, think as clearly as it had in earlier years, because, and it was obvious, He, their leader, had taken away something, replacing it with something else.  Some would call it brain washing, because that's exactly what it was (but only some would admit it).  When the meetings were called to order in the old church, when the merging took place, when He began to speak, grave changes took place in the psyche. 

Poot was not a hateful person, and yet, he had felt hate.  The feeling was alien, but it was most certainly real.  The desire to bend, to warp, to penetrate the weak minds of the Creators was in him.

It took some courage not to find a house even now.  He looked at them as he passed and he could feel the drug that he needed.  It was their will that he was taking, and he'd learned not to care; need is all that mattered. 

The Creators had just as much a hold on them as they'd had before, or worse; and that was the real shitter.

The Creators had sent them out, turning them into these slight beings; but they had never taken something so precious as their will.  The Creators, who decayed rather sluggishly, and who were always decaying (the village had been a fresh corpse when it was formed, yet it was still a corpse), were a weak humanity, but harmless and unknowing.  They came here because it felt right at the time.  They had no idea what they were getting into, and Him, the one they called master, the one with THAT VOICE, captured the minds of the ghosts at their weakest.

Who was He, Poot wondered? 

A gross feeling came over him.  He looked again to the houses and felt sick with this desire.  THAT VOICE was always tempting him.

He could only recall parts of his becoming.  He remembered his parents and the things that severed them from him.  He remembered seeking something that more resembled his feelings and arresting himself to the new way. 

There were many gray areas.  It resembled amnesia, this feeling.  Parts had been extracted from his mind, and he knew the Creators had not extracted those parts.  It was THAT VOICE, something bordering between holiness and wickedness and all the gray areas in between.

It horrified Poot that his mind could turn on him like that.    

But it had.

- - - - - - -

Theodore wrote:

I feel as if I am going insane.  I don't want to believe it, but do I have a choice? 

I am looking at things from underneath, or inside, or instead from a place that is from nowhere.

I ask myself everyday: What am I doing here?  Can I get anything out of this experience?

I have always thought I could extract something from anything that existed.  If there is a place, a person, or even some thing, if I am able to submit myself to it for some time, there is a treasure. 

Am I the only one passing through this?

I have never understood darkness, like the blackness of charred bodies; the remnants of a baby's corpse; the frightened eyes of a rape victim; sex fitting over the face, the body, as a device, a weapon for the world to see, to beware; machetes inside cunts; the white, maggoty look of an overdose victim; the soupy stool of a child Jewess, awaiting the gas chamber; the sores on an AIDS victims body; the look of children who need food and who don't possess the correct faculties to obtain it . . .

I am going positively mad.

I'm afraid my will is slipping.  I'm afraid I will be in the village forever.  I'm afraid they will . . .

What?  Crucify me?

I am afraid.

I'm fairly certain they know.  It's in the way the men look at me.  It's in the way that the woman want me.  Everybody here is starved.  Even the animals look emaciated in the eyes.  There was tower once, in the middle of the village, and it still stands, but look at it now; it is another remnant: gray and rotten.  I went to the library; the only one in the village.  I looked at copies of The Villager captured on micro-film.  I have traced the decay as far back as it can possibly go.  I have viewed the decline and fall . . . they had never been happy.  They have been destroying themselves from the very start. (I worked in a morgue a few years back.  I needed the money, and, quite honestly, the prospect intrigued me.  Given the opportunity to work with the dead, I took it; and I still remember the looks they gave me.  There was this vacant look, unlike that of an invalid or the severely depressed, but a look that was completely vacant, as if the life force had been taken out of them (and of course it had)  It was a very cold look, and it permeated the rest of the body with the same look, or feel; vacancy . . . nothing.  There was nothing there, and that wasn't too hard to believe, considering these were deceased folks.  I came to know that look pretty well.  It greeted me day in and day out.  I became obsessed by it, nearly needing it, because it proved how alive I was, and I could always go home with a wide smile on my face.)  They had been destroying themselves from the very start, and through that destruction (considered, by me, in my own mad opinion), had adjusted themselves to no life (which is, they had managed to sever some part of themselves.  I'm not sure if this . . .) no life. ( . . . a soul.  How?  And why am I the machine to record this information?)  It is a feeling,  and what I have been enveloped in (without my consent I assure you) has been a series of terrible emotions, layered and mounting, separating me from the outside world, feeding on me, FEEDING, because it senses (as I too sense), that I am the last human alive in this town.  I feel it wants to be saved.  I feel it wants me to be that savoir.  I am not a martyr; never have been.  I just wasn't to fix my boat up and get the fuck out of this place.

It's like quicksand beneath me, and I am going mad.

- - - - - - -

Annabel discovered the little ghost sitting on a bench in the business district of the village. "Hello," she said.

The little ghost looked extremely scared.

"Hello, I said."

The little ghost looked at her. "Hi."

"Watch doing."

"Resting," he said.

"Oh," she said.  "Have we spoken before?"  The ghosts rarely socialized outside of their own small circles.

The little ghost shrugged.

"Probably not," she said.  "What's your name?"

"Poot," he said.

"That's a funny name.  Where'd you get a name like Poot?"

He shrugged again.

"I'm Annabel.  I'm resting too.  It's a nice night."

Poot didn't think so.  He was being too introspective to enjoy the night

Annabel detected there was something bothering Poot.  "Where's your group?" she asked him.

He shrugged a third time.

"You can talk to me.  I promise I won't tell."

"How do I know that?"

"Because I've left my own group," she whispered.

"I see," he said.

"Are you an outsider too?" she asked.

"I suppose I am now," he said.  "An outsider to outsiders."

"Me too," she explained. "I guess I have been for quite a long time."

There was silence between them.  Then: "Do think it has gone too far?" It was Poot.

"I do."

- - - - - - -

The Kid, who was feeling the very baseness of shame, went back to the at the fringe of the park, where he knew the tree would be. 

"Tree," he said.

Nothing.

"Tree," he said.

Nothing still.

It was daytime.  The Kid could see that the face had not filled in with new growth.  It was still very much the same face.  Maybe it would always be there, or maybe it was just a figment of . . .

"Tree!" He screamed.

The trees eyes opened, warily expecting to see its own creator, who was a boy with a giant knife. "Well hello," the tree said.

"Tree!" The Kid screamed. "I want my mind back!"

"What do you mean?" the tree asked The Kid. "I never stole your mind."

"But you did."

"Did not!"

"Did!" The Kid felt angry.

"You've flipped," the tree said.

"Something's wrong with me," The Kid said.

"Something's wrong with everybody," the tree explained.

Truth was, The Kid's mother had caught him masturbating, and he thought very seriously about murdering her before she told anybody else.  Luckily, he'd been whacking off to a Penthouse, which was a first (God, reality was getting strange and stranger), so she saw it as a usual adolescent goof.  Still, the guilt pangs took over the mind of The Kid, AND HE'D THOUGHT SERIOUSLY ABOUT MURDERING HER . . . more serious than he'd ever thought of it before, and that was crazy . . . CRAZY CRAZY.

"I can't get you out of my mind," The Kid said.

"Don't," the tree explained.  "You want a blow job.  You come to me."

"Don't you see," The Kid said.  "It's made me outcast.  First in my mind.  Now in my mother's mind.  What next?"

"You know your problem," the tree said. "You don't know how to live."

"It's my mind.  When God was handing out minds, he gave me a bad one."

"Kid," the tree said. "I think you have a beautiful mind."

"How in the hell do you know?"

"Look," said the tree.  "You came back, and I'm still here."

"So?"

"I'm just trying to help you out," the tree explained.  "Some people need a little push."

"Maybe you pushed too far," The Kid said.

"How far is too far?"

"I don't feel so good," The Kid said. "Like I'm coming apart.  I don't feel like myself anymore."

"Not as frightened, huh?"

The Kid left the tree, the face.  He wouldn't be back.  He didn't feel like he needed to go back.  Whatever that part of his life held for him, The Kid was finished with it. 

It was in the park that The Kid's life had changed.  It was in the park that The Kid's life would change again.

With feelings of elation, he'd left the tree behind.  The last thing the tree had said to him turned over in his mind.  He moved through the park, lighter in step, winding down trails that penetrated the depth of a wooded landscape, growing leaner, darker, guiding him in. 

There was a voice:

"Hey?"

The Kid turned toward it and squinted his eyes.  How far had he wandered?  The pond, the tree, the rest of the park were back there somewhere. "What?" He said.

"I said 'hey.'"

Sitting on a stump was a man, bedraggled, with a forty bottle of Big Bear in his hand.  One leg was crossed over the other.  His unshaven face was smeared with streaks of dirt.  He looked like the angel who had fallen from grace.  His voice was soothing.

"Do I look dead to you?" He asked.

The Kid wasn't sure what the bum meant.

"This is some good shit." The man lifted the bottle. "Makes you feel warm on the inside.  But it's only temporary, like most illusions.  You believe in illusions don't you?"

"Yes," the kid whispered.  Now I do, he thought.  Now I do, he wanted to howl.

"Then what are you doing here?"

"Just walking."

"Where to?"

"Home, I guess," The Kid explained, realizing now, in front of this vagrant, that there was no such place.  Not home.  Not anymore.  The illusions had switched on him, and the world became absurd by it, but the absurdity, the strangeness of it all was quite a beautiful thing.  He couldn't really go there, home, because he felt changed; and the change was good.  He didn't feel anything for home.  He didn't question its validity in his life.  He couldn't explain; nor could he erase it.  The Kid couldn't talk about these new revelations with anyone from that other existence.  He couldn't, especially in mind, return.

"Are you sure?"

Was the bum reading his thoughts?

The Kid tried to get a good look at the bum's face, but it kept changing.  He would see eyes; and than pits.  The lips, once wet, became dry.

"Drink?" The man asked.

The Kid wasn't sure what he was thinking, how he was thinking, but he took the bottle from the man without questioning the germs, the disease that might be living on the lip, in the liquid, transported by the man's saliva, and waiting to find another, purer host.

"Who are you?" The Kid asked.  A bum, a man . . . What?  The Kid thought.

"Name's Henry."

"You sleep out here?" The kid could see the beaten up sleeping bag behind the man, laid out on the soil in a copse of skinny trees.  There were beer bottles, food wrappers, a couple soaked books, and a roll of toilet paper."

"Sometimes," he said.

"Doesn't it get cold out here?"

"Sometimes."

The Kid took another drink off the bottle and handed it back to the man-bum.  Man-bum.  How absurd. 

The beer tasted like shit to The Kid, but he felt like he could drink more of it.  A lot more.

"Where are you really going?" The man-bum asked.

The Kid shrugged.

"Seems to be the case with a lot of young people in this place.  No direction.  You go to school?"

"Yeah."

"Learning anything?"

"Not really."

"Too bad."

The Kid thought about moving on; or going back.  Instead he just stood there, silently, waiting.

"You go to church?"

"My mom's Catholic."

"You believe in Jesus."

"I don't know."

The Kid wondered what the man-bum was getting at; but he didn't wonder for too long.  He decided that he would go along with whatever it was the man or bum was trying to get at.  It was true that this was a man.  When he searched for the eyes and found the gray, the blue, the opalescence, The Kid thought he might be more than a man and little more than a bum.  There was a great amount of inquiry in the way this man spoke; the bum side of him had learned to look deeper and more clearly into The Kid, examining his mind and soul rather than the exterior semblance, which was awkwardly built, and sought a more foreign knowledge, which was The Kid's alone.  The man side, which was strong and abrupt in questioning The Kid, appeared filthy; the bum must have been more cleanly than this.  And the sides met in a center that bordered on something holy, and this was a part of the man-bum that made The Kid appreciate the questions he was asking.  As the tree had guessed at who The Kid was, the man-bum let the Kid himself do the guessing.  The Kid liked this.  Very much.

"Are you seeking passage?" The bum asked.

"Passage?"

"Don't know," the man asked.

The Kid felt confused, yet it was this confusion that needled its way into his brain, discovering the clarity that was there.  He was seeking passage.  Everything in life was beginning to represent a passage.  What else could there be?  How else could one realize that they are alive?  A little guidance is all The Kid needed.  Guide me, he nearly caught himself saying, trapping the words in his mouth like a nervous mouse.

"I know a place," the bum said, and took a healthy pull from the bottle of Big Bear.

"Where?"

"It's a church.  Not from here.  In the village.  Do you know about the ghosts?"

The Kid thought about it.  The man-bum was full of riddles.  He seemed to rise up from a Christian drama, stealing away the garb, and exposing the thing for a tragedy.  In the religious order of things, the man was fearless, and on an orthodox level that was insanity, but the bum managed it okay, and the man was a host to the sprit inside.  If there were lies, The Kid could not detect them, and in the last 4 or 5 minutes, the time spent here in these woods speaking with the man-bum, his mind twisted in and out of vast body made up of depth and beauty; The Kid felt like he was fading from one world, and making his way into another.

"I'm not sure," The Kid said honestly.

"They are beyond you, and have left back what you have already determined as too confusing.  This is limbo.  Up ahead is truth.  All the lies are behind you.  Hear my voice."

The Kid did.  The Kid could. 

"They are different than you.  You are superior to them."

The Kid looked in the man's eyes.  He believed everything that the bum was saying.  This clarity was emerging, something he'd never realized, and now that he was realizing it he felt like he could go on, could change, could grow.

"Where?" The Kid asked.

"The church?"

"Yes."

The thing in the woods that was not quite man, not quite bum, lifted an arm, a dirty finger, and guided The Kid into the darkness.  "That way," he said.  "You won't be able to miss it."

"Thanks," The Kid said.

The thing smiled

- - - - - - -

Discourse On Illusion Part IV:

"Doctor," Nick said.  "Everything is going wrong.  We are going to lose this man."

The Doctor looked at Nick and grunted.  "You really aren't a doctor."

"I am."

"Calm down.  Watch me work."

Nick looked into The Doctor's sterilized hands and saw the veins there.

Nick was learning to be a doctor.  He wanted to be a doctor.  He wanted to help people.  His intentions were good.  He wouldn't have signed on with this lunatic as an apprentice if he'd thought The Doctor was a lunatic at all, but before  coming here, into this isolation, among the cruel sterility of sharp hardware and mechanical devices, he would have thought twice about what it was he was doing.

"This is immoral," Nick said.

"Let me decide that."

Nick asked: "Where's the nurse?"

"Out."

"Out where?"

"Out getting her face examined."

Was there a nurse at all?  Nick wondered at that, because if there was, he had not seen her. "We could sure use the help in here?"

Spirals worked revolutions in a room that warped the imagination.  The place was on a hill, isolated from anything, trapped in trees and darkness. "We get our patients from down below," The Doctor had told Nick when he'd first arrived at the shoddy establishment. "We offer them things at such a cut rate they would be insane to resist.  Anything for under a thousand dollars.  Of course," he added, "we don't treat things of minor severity.  We only offer the worst of the worse a place to heal.  These hands," and he had lifted them before the apprentice, "work miracles my son."

Nick thought the doctor was mad.

And now, in a room of swirling dimensions, The Doctor's long, insane face, looked at Nick, his mouth falling open, closing, saliva wetting his bottom lip, and screamed, "IT'S TIME TO OPEN HIM UP!"  He lifted the sharpest instrument he had, and it gleamed in the room where the lights delivered great brilliance.

The man, who was near to death with a terrible disease (of what nature Nick was unsure; which was one of many ills The Doctor consented to), looked up at them.  The emotions emitted from that face, swelling in contempt and fear, shaking, the skull shivering beneath the declining warmth of the face.

"God damn it," Nick said, but The Doctor didn't quite understand what was going on. "Give him a sedative.  Can't you see just how frightened he is?"

"He'll be fine, " The Doctor remarked, lowering the instrument to the man's naked body.  He made that first incision, cutting along, down, the sternum.  The white flesh opened up like a purple flower; and the man's eyes clouded over in an expression that related refined pain.

"Do you know what your doing?" Nick asked.

The Doctor was going to drive Nick, and the patient, to extreme levels of insanity (in the patient's case: Insane pain).  Nick looked at the patient, and momentarily felt his pain, but it was more like an emotional darkness obscuring everything that survived outside of this room.  The room itself was beginning to represent the world; it was the only thing any of them could focus on.  The Doctor, who was an enigma, at times bordering on revelation, controlled the dimensions, the very flux, of the world they were surviving in. 

The patient himself depended on the doctor's silent advice;  temporarily, and quite possibly forever, the patient was powerless.  This oscitancy rendered him helpless, forcing him down a cool throat of great darkness with death at the bowels, leering up, intimidating.  Swells of sadness and memory confided in him. "Remember what you are," they remarked. "And remember that death is all around you."  He tried to weep, but could not; the ducts about his eyes had dried up long ago.  He tried to move his fingers, yet all the concentration of his body was focused on that single incision of which seemed to be separating him from the safe womb of his sickness, making him feel for the moment, and yet numbing him far beyond the horizon of anything he had ever felt before.     

Could he understand exactly what pain was?

The patient's thoughts on pains had long ago devised a plan to block it out completely.  When The Doctor had come to him, it was with the assurance that he could get better; but The Doctor, once getting him alone, displayed changes in himself that swelled outward in waves of disillusionment.

The patient was very sorry that he'd agreed to this treatment, which had cost him very little (financially) but had cost him a great deal in other, more important, forms.

Nick touched the patient and felt a small shock absorb into his own skin; and then a greater shock.  A display of pain and confusion warped Nick's mind and spread throughout the room.  He had opened himself up too far, which was bad for him, because he was only an apprentice in all this; he had seen many, many patients in the face of death.  He felt like he, too, was dying.  He felt like it was his spirit that was being ripped to shreds. "Stop!" he screamed at The Doctor, pretending to strike him, yet realizing that that was impossible.  In this room The Doctor could pretty much do what he felt was necessary, and Nick wasn't about tamper with such things.

The patient felt that his body was reaching a climatic point, and the beyond would come in physical waves of necrotic breakdown; and still he would be conscience of this.  The hole that had been opened, through which the disease could not escape (the patient realized that the disease itself might have been a fabrication of his greatest fears, and survived only in his head), was very slowly expanding, exposing his insides, spreading across his bones, feeding on the naked region of his skin . . . and it made feel very sad, pain aside, that this was happening.  It tormented him.

"My God," Nick said. "His face is . . . "

"It'll go away," The Doctor explained.

"And the cut."

"You see?" The Doctor explained.  "I only began what he had considered all along."

"It's opening him wide."

The Doctor explained, very casually, that this was the cause of "great emotional strain," and "the wider the patient is opened, further divulgence could take place.  This particular patient had been suffering from great emotional strain."

"But your a medical doctor."

"I only cut him a little," the doctor said.

"Look."

Nick and The Doctor looked down at the patient.  The cut had made its way up to the patient's throat; down to the patient's penis.  His eye were terribly huge.

"Back up," The Doctor said. "He's about to turn himself inside out."

"Jesus Christ!" Nick screamed.

The rest was indescribable.

- - - - - - -

The Villager could not quite determine the reasoning behind his own existence and looked for something to weigh his loneliness against.  There was a terrible weight sloshing around in his stomach that questioned everything he viewed, felt, thought.  It was only rational of him to decided that there should be something, someone, he could reach out to, communicate his ideas to, but so far he had little luck in determining life outside of himself.

He had been walking for miles.  His body grew weak beneath the heat of the sun, and like in a desert, the night's were unbearably cold.  He shook his hands at the sky and cursed.

But who was he to understand loneliness?

Weeks, months, maybe even years, had passed.  All he had was time to think; time to weigh the big questions on his sloped shoulders.  His head continually filled with new wisdoms; and he could not share a one.

Was that loneliness?  The inability to share ideas.

The feelings in his stomach would also spread down to his cock, and he would stroke it in hopes of understanding passion, a variation on loneliness; and sometimes when he was passionate with himself he was happy in the empty void of the world.  But afterwards he would be filled a great sadness, as if these secrets were meant to be shared with another.

Was loneliness the separation from one's nature? 

Or a crawling into it?

Maybe it was nothing at all.

The Villager shuddered at this last thought.