excerpt
“Habeas corpus . . .” The bulk of Buttivant is behind him somewhere, praying
in Latin. Which becomes other tongues, thick and throaty. The sonorities
go droning on and on, right through his heart, his thorax.
The chair starts sliding into a horizontal position and at the edge of his
vision he can glimpse Mister K. wearing a microphone headset. His voice is
oddly flat, his fists are clenched.
Lucas can only look up, into the black hole overhead. His inner ear is roaring
with an echoplex of distant detuned voices, drowning in mutual overlap—
Westway music room / dub reverb / his father roaring at the nurses /
mother bawling out dumb classrooms in her sleep / dry voicings in damp cottage
kitchen / the swirl of tidal chatter / digit digit / the quibbly nowhere men /
let us pray /nuke the luke, boys… Images flicker through the air, but he can’t
quite shoot them down with his eyes, they’re too fast. The black aperture overhead
is trembling, enlarging slowly.
His skull has become a flickering moviedrome.
The room was a cardboard theatre of stiff crude figures, those people were
all fat puppets, several worlds are on collision course. His yellowing voice
makes an annunciation for the benefaction of hot virgins: “I’m a projectile
vomited at random stars.”
Foggy light fills that dark aperture. Is that a pair of human heads silhouetted
against the rim of the circle? Luminous mist swirls into the chamber, he
glimpses Pauline and Nick, siamese twins chained into their cannibal kissing
act . . . Why won’t they wave, wave him up on beams of approval, but there
they go gorging each other, he’s trembling, bumping around down here, trying
to rise above himself, he can’t help it.
But another face is up there on the rim, beckoning through snowflakes,
ashflakes, extending a slender arm, loosening her veils, releasing her golden
torrents of hair for him to ascend. He’s tied to this launch pad, which is burning
him with its icy latticework, to watch Katie’s eyes glowing as her hand lingers
around her breasts, between her thighs . . .
The essential Lucas, released from the drab fluff of his clothes, will become
an illumined being, a flood of liquid light, fluxing to the nearest transfiguration
of the flesh, to that female object, but the smoke, the smog thickens, fattens
its odour as he begins to rise into it on this massive unsteady jet of power.
The smoke clears . . . A nazi valkyrie has overcome his girl, has become his
mutant wolf-girl, half-hiding her fat cock with a dented helmet, he’ll have to
levitate right through herm, through sweetish larvae and the swollen muddy
polymorphs and their flicker of limbs . . .
Manolis Aligizakis 