Dousing the Phoenix

Dousing the Phoenix

Section One: Doubting Thomas


Thomas had heard curates and academics lecture endlessly in the corridors of the museum.  Nothing had changed.  The constancy irked him pleasantly.  He smiled. Their words bounced off the cold walls in invisible, insubstantial waves, their rhetoric as sculpted as the marble pillars: art for another's sake is not art, art for one’s own sake is not art, divine sublimity for the sake of creation—that is art.  What pretensions!  Voices, windy echoing on the stone: whisper, shudder, consonant, vowel, unintelligible but for a word here and there—“definitive beauty,” “fixity,” “sublime transcendence.”  Pompous blowhards.  No matter.  He recognized the speech: recognized, remembered, knew, ignored. These words were not Thomas’s words.  He spat.

In a maze of winding hallways, Thomas slid through the exhibits.  There was nothing new about the path.  Familiarity stretched over his mind and sealed his passions with disinterest.  Statue of David, scrotum but no rectum, constipated I’d bet. Hasn’t shat for a thousand years—friend and lover to the armless, assless Venus de Milo—fertilizer of fallow fields. He doesn’t pass like me. Thomas passed by Dave. Sling slung over the shoulder, slingslung flaccid but stony hard—marble erected in impotence. Replica, anyhow.  Plaster marblemold.  Not even that accurate: l'homme ridicule.  Mike’s Dave stood on a raised platform, his plaster flaking.

Mockmarble crumbling plastershell behind him, Thomas pressed on to the Monet section, taking his usual seat, ready for what was coming. Beyond ready. He stared at the center painting on the West wall.  Always the center, always the West; that's how things were here.  It was a piece he knew—had memorized.  Hazy, sunset-shadowed parliament buildings stood motionless, trapped in a moment which craves the next.  Ever-approaching Night crouched on sinewy haunches, flexed to lunge, forever prepared and patient, waiting; the water which had once flowed and eddied now lay stagnant, the reflections therein unwavering. Still. But not for long.

He was just in time. Back storeroom of the museum. Wall-thumping. Curator. Panting. Woman there. Breathing. Thudding. Dull. Hardbreathing. Thud. Breathless bodies beat away the minutes at the usual hour against the wall behind the painting.  Thomas wondered what the licentious bastard thought of himself.  Hidden—virile, victorious, self-pleased—God what a curator.  He’ll be finished soon. Call you?  Fuck that. You’re fired. New secretary, same curator, same wall, same rattling Monet.  Same Thomas. The future is the present is the past; progress laughs at itself.

Laughter, echoing up from the dim wells of memory, at first muted, finally burst in his ears.  Such a long time ago.  Thomas was a student then, an avid learner with a passion for the arts, his arts, his words, others' words.  Going places.  An old Professor smoking a pipe.  Smokebillowing windwhispers — You’re going places, Thomas.  How far he'd fallen since. Laughter. There she stood before him, Vanessa, brilliantfaced, ringing laugh sighing again. Bright and wonderful, she had told him of every work the museum held; wonder-full and bright he had drunk her words. So long ago. Fondly the repartee bounced in wave and particle between them, Thomas and Vanessa, Vanessa and Thomas. They communicated above the world, he remembered, in what he liked to call amorous drippings of love-touched tongues—tonetwining tenor of adoration. L'ámour des enfants. They knew well their medium, and with one ear silently listened to the Starry Night, couched in quiet awe. Vincent, mad-eyed, still-listening to his mono audio, did not know how they admired him. He had loved, they had loved, and loved she was gone, a ghost, the first phantasm flitting behind that damned Monet. First, but not last. Curator. Usurping lecher. Thomas spat.

And now the same lecher who first had stolen her hid behind his Monet-hanging wall. Every day Thomas watched, waited, and listened—ashamed, alone—hoping to hear the bodies beating as he remembered, but always knowing that only every third day would the painting shake.  Penciled in by the curator; I’ll see if I can make time for you: scheduled, controlled, linear. Behind the framed painting she beds down with Procrustes.  He’s protected, a son of Troy. The plaster ceiling—crumbling, flaking—dusts the marble floor. Dusting marble? Never mentioned... Who told you the floor was marble? Limestone floor, limestone pillars. I will not lie, not intentionally.

He stood, still watching the shaking masterpiece: the painting still suffering sodomy, but not stillsuffering. The painted waters now rippled rhythmically.  Thomas wondered at this. Nothing immobile. All eroding. Water cutting rocks. Canyons thirty-thousand years in the making.  Ground stonesits motionless and indestructible, underground walls hiding sputtering, spurting streams, the siltful waters hiding nothing—only slicing into the solid rock, gouging granite gaps and crevices. Then nothing was ever still. Thomas grinned at his own wise conclusion.

Stillwatching, Thomas listened, still-listening, to the drumming against the wall, the beating, wordless language of lust. Almost finished now. Five minutes, no endurance. Way to ride, cowboy.

In the last throes, the painting fell, marblelimestonefloorbreaking.  The wooden prison lay splinterframed. Thomas ignored this. No frame.  Il se casse. Unimportant. Vanessa was all that mattered.  He listened to the last thud.
Thomas could not control. How could he when. It’s perfectly excusable that. I can’t be judged if. God help. Done. A seed—denied, ignored, suppressed, unleashed—is sown in stony ground. Self-pleasing figures standing around him, marblemade, unfecal, infertile.  Framed in preconception, unaware, or perhaps too aware, of the ever-cracking plaster-caste past, the voyeur slides into the shadows, vanishing without effort, knowing only the final spasm.  He will return, not understanding his momentary fulfillment, jealous rage welling up in his heart, an endlessly unsatisfied, unwitting student walking into hurricane force wind—wind invisible and insubstantial, full of animosity and spiteful power.


Section Two: A Subway Ride


Pounding the doors open, Thomas left the museum.  Lions, stony, lay couchant at the gates, suffering none to pass unheeded under their granite stare.  Immutable rock: dull, rough, and eternal.  Thomas cringed under their gaze, the shaking and broken painting-frame forgotten; he was obediently afraid. The sun blazed out from behind a cloud, golden-dancing on his shoulders, and a hollow anger woke in him—yawning, vacuous—unmitigated rage pulling and twisting his organs together and apart.  The saliva turned to bitter acid on his palate, and his stomach bubbled and churned and lunged in on itself, slowsucked into the surrounding vacuum of loathing.  There it was, laughing in the sky: the greater orb by day, brighter even than the Venusian body, heavenly sign of the museum world.  Sun, moon, stars—false idols and fabrications.  He hated their pompous existence.  He would escape it. Yes. There, the entrance to the subway.

Thomas descended the stairs to the station, wisps of stale scent dissipating up out of the opening in smoky-whispered silence, mildew-reeking incense of the underground.  The subway spoke.  With groaning, droning formula, monotonations rumbled.  A formless, grey-suited sea of faceless, colorless men and women flowed and ebbed with the train schedule, and Thomas sank into the currents, dissolving.  Awash in grey tides, he drifted.  Waited.

On a bench by a pillar, an old woman sat crying into her hands, black garbed, the sides of her veiled face contorted in lugubrious misery. Weep on, frailty.  The sliver of his wondering spurred on by imagination, Thomas watched her, that tiny fragment of another life observed through a fogged, foreign lens, fleshflashed and forgotten. Why would she cry?

Thomas studied her still: wondered, imagined, decided, knew.  Her sons had abandoned her.  No.  Never.  Husband?  Closer….  Another man.  Well!  Not old, actually—probably no more than forty.  Another man.  Used her.  Left her pregnant, alone, afraid.  So long ago.  Just like Vanessa.  Another man.  Used, seduced, left to womb-rotting loneliness.  False smiles and liewhitened teeth mollify the weaker sex: mollify and mollify.  Cycling rock-tumbler.  Thomas hated her fragile nature.

Trainscreech.  A tram entered the station.  Begin the flow.  The grey sea oozed and wavered, quivering as the cars emptied—trickled—a funnel effect slowing the osmotes at the doors.  One last droplet, and then.  And then.  The torrent, the flood, Thomas lost himself in it, scrambling to stay with the tumult of the tide.  Bodies pressed against him, crushing the air from him, and yet he was alone.  So many people.  A mass.  A furious swarm of locusts.  Greengrey now, the sea erupted in a cloud of buzzing, gnawing, hunger-maddened plague-bugs.  Greengreylocustplague humhowling around him: peaking, crashing, tornadoswirling: particulate updownaroundeverywhere, Thomas staggered, panicblinded.  Humhowling still, the swarm carried him toward the gaping, deepinhaling mouth of the train.  Swallowed.  To be swallowed alive!  Oh, Jesus.  And then if it consumes me?  And then if it digests me?

No!  Not locusts.  People.  Just people.  Slowly, tediously slowly, the swarm disintegrated; the greengrey air, once thick with beating locust-wings, fled on phantom winds.  The sweat beaded on Thomas’s forehead as he shook in spasmodic shivers of post-panic, adrenaline icing all but alertness.  Just people.  Grey amblers traveled un-swarm toward the doors—the metal, inanimate doors.  Thomas, again lucid, walked with the crowd into the car and stood, gripping a pole for support, watching the tide fill the space around him.  And waited.

Trainscreech.  The subway tram jolted forward, slowed, then another jolt—shakystarting to again cycle the stops of the circling tracks.  Thomas stood as still as he could manage, watching the lighted tunnel stream by outside the car windows.  Stillmoving, Thomas waited for his stop, idly watching the other passengers, seeing little out of the ordinary, numbed by comfortable normality.  Until.  Legless beggar.  Toothless, drooling, blackgaping hole wetting his beard.  Incoherent babble-moaning sirened from his mouth, the halfworded sputterings of an age-made mute.  Long, knotted, grey hair fell about the man’s misshapen face, his head wobbling from side to side as he made his horrible, drycracking gurgle.  He was vileness made flesh, patron anti-saint of the subway.

Waking once again from its fitful sleep, the vacuous anger returned—raw; a sour taste stung Thomas’s mouth as he shakily ingested the image, like beggar like sun.  Disgust and horror lumped cancerous in his throat—malignant—and his intestines shriveled into nausea.  Legless, rolling himself around on a four-wheeled, plywood board, the beggar made his way up the car.  Made his way toward Thomas, who, wishing beyond wanting, beyond even needing, to escape before the filth-ridden man could reach him, glanced in desperation at the route map.  Here’s the stop before mine.  Tell the next by the last.  Still-looking back towards the beggar, Thomas began sweating again, gripping the pole in knuckle-whitening terror.

Perhaps that beggar managed to reach him.  Perhaps they even spoke.  No matter.  There’s no sense in a dialogue, it slows the motion, and one does not wish to go in reverse.  Yes, seeing him crucified by his infirmity will suffice.  No.  Thomas saw the man mock-crucified—a sacrilege.  That which is unholy could not be made whole, and, like the beggar, Thomas knew himself wholly unholy.  Knew.  A crumbling, grey steeple, festering with maggotmold.  Holy.  He spat.

Trainscreech.  Sideways scuffleshuffling, Thomas shoved against the faceless grey out into the station, still spitting the sour sting from his mouth.  Pressing, crushing, the beggar!  Out!  He shot from the train, fighting his way through the crowd. Staggering, blinded by disgust, Thomas clawed through the crowd, choking and desperate for air.  Suffocating!  His body lashed forward with a violent shudder; the acid on his palate conquering all other senses, he doubled over and vomited.  Again.  His body seized and shook as he regurgitated everything within him, and a crowd gathered greymass around him, keeping their distance—amazed, concerned, horrified, enthralled.  Again.  Again.

At last a retch whipcracked his body so violently that he dropped to the ground, dry heaving.  Blood oozed from the corners of his twisting mouth as he lay convulsing in puddled putrescence.  Purgation.  The beggar was gone from Thomas’s mind, though hunger had taken his place.  Ravenous and violent, it tore at him.  So it is.  Expulsion, replacement.  Statue of David.  Defecation, regurgitation.  Whichever.  Whole.  Ingestions and digestions to be released on the world—idiomatic.

With the mark of his digestions scrawled on the subway station floor, Thomas stood, his head bowed and tiredsagging.  Exhaustion now coupled with his hunger, and together they writhed and copulated.  Better than nausea.  Thomas, sweatshaking but satisfied, dragged his feet to the stairs.

He ascended, leaving the city’s subterranean, circular frame behind him.  It was time to go home, time to go back to Mother, time to be Thomas.  Tears welled in his eyes as he thought of how long he had been away.  All day!  What a journey—through Heaven and Hell—Old Descartes looking on, like beggar like sun.  Soon, he knew, he would be able to speak freely—clearly.  His mother's house awaited him.  As it began, so would it end: dust to dust, stairs to stairs, home to museum to home.


And Then.


         I live with my Mother in a crumbling, rust-red house.  Or, rather, she lives with me—better: resides.  Rests, better still.  Beneath the damp basement floorboards she lies prostrate, engulfed in moist earth.  Old Mother Thomas.  Stiffened by death, in the sense that her body has long since ceased to function, she sleeps: wooden.  All around her the worms are stirring the dirt, wriggling past her.  Dead, under the rotting floor, she decomposes; in life she had decomposed over the floor.  Little difference—both were unwanted.  And unwitting.  She hadn’t much enjoyed life anyhow.  Except for her children.  Oh, she had many, many children, nursed each and every one at her breast, loved them, spoke to them as they suckled.  Mother.  A child’s first love, a child’s first sustenance, a child’s first words.  First ideas, experiences.  Gravitating to her teat, blind, mute infants had opened and closed toothless mouths, gumming for their Mother’s milk, but no longer.

           Now only I remain, my brothers and sisters lying with our Mother.  I must stay here, in her house—in our house.  I’ve left before.  Left my Mother, left her house.  Never for a long time of course.  Only briefly, in short spurts, and I kept in contact, writing letters.  I'd been away when it happened, in fact.  But now I stay here, to preserve their memory.  Trichinosis took them all; parasites fed on their innards, glutting themselves on ignorance, and they ceased, my family.  A horrid accident.  They stopped speaking, though they had never really spoken—to me, to each other—they died in silence.

Down into the muck they collapsed, mud oozing over their bodies.  And so I placed the boards over them.  Concrete would have been a travesty.  Why did I not bury them, as is the custom, in a cemetery?  Is that really any better?  Here they would always be as close to my body as they were to my mind.  Why should I keep my Mother's memory anywhere but her house?  That much, surely, she deserved.  To stay in this place, as in the Egyptian pyramids—an altar to her memory.  The priceless past, forever preserved in my own underground museum. 

         Now, always back to now, the house of my Mother is empty, save me.  Here I mind their graves and talk to them.  Yes, I’m always speaking—to them, to myself.  Damn it all, I’ve spilled water all over the floor.  Dirty water, caking dust-mud all over the kitchen tiles.  It was clean when it was in my little glass jar.  Sparkling, clear water, I watched as it sat on the table—watched it ripple and shimmer.  A slip of the hand and it fell to the ground, marblelinoleumfloorshattering… 

         I should mop it up—soak up this dust-congealing liquid.  No sense in keeping water without its being pristine.  Very well, then.  Remove this grey, gelatinous mess.  A brief pause from my narrative while I utilize Mother's mop.  How many times, how many times I've done so.  On to the mop.

           Perhaps I should dust as well, to prevent any tainted water in the future.  No.  There will always be dust.  Crumbled pebbles' pebbles.  Unto dust thou shalt return, each day of your life, wallowing in dull, dead flakes of skin.  It's sickening.  All this filth—corrupt, twisted, false.  On a lush hill, the shining temple of the Word of God rots from termites and age—a feast for the ravenous serpent, who crawls on his belly and consumes the only true eternal.

           But he did not always crawl, devouring dirty dust.  Before his curse, infinite eons had been spent conversing with God.  Infallible, smooth liquidity flowed in the Word, in the beginning.  Soundless, spherical utterances issued from the divine mouth.  And then.  And then the serpent whissperwound his venom into the world.  Descended to Eve, slithered to her marble-carved ear that she should hear his hushed hissing.  He touched the dust with his tongue, that he should make dust when it came time to speak of it, as it was, had been, would be, with God.  But when he spoke of dust, it did not appear.  Echoing the serpent's sound, Eve sinned with Adam.  Down to their bellies they fell; the ground split asunder, and the wrath of God thundered upon them.  They reeled in misery and shame, their faces hidden in the dirt, crumbling plaster. Adam lost the names which, through God, he had given all things. With a cracked voice, he slowly spoke new names at them, as the serpent had named the dust. The sounds leaving his lips in shrieking flecks of spit.

         What foolish pomposity this story harbors!  All this and that about David or the Tower of Babel, God's framework or the Serpent's.  Dan to Beersheba, the holy Whole.  My Mother always liked the beginning, though, quoting John 1:1 whenever she had the chance.  Plans this and unity that: marble and stone.  There was a time when I, too, embraced it.  So long ago, when there was the laughter.  Lost with her, so long ago.  When I thought I could morph and mate things and ideas, make them my own, create something new, something perfect.  And then?  And then.  And now?  I don't know—and then as well, I suppose.

           No.  Know.  And now, and then—the same to me.  Nothing immobile.  How could I let myself ignore it?  I fell from my past, but I never left.  But, then, has anything really changed? Yes. Everything.  Everything but me.  Everything but what I chose to see.  Another man.  Consumption and regurgitation.  The subway.  The museum.  The Curator, though his schedule told him otherwise.  Dust.  I cannot write so quickly as I must.  My mind flashes these images before me and I begin to understand.  How foolish I was to have missed them, distorting my sight no better than the Curator with his little black book!  Crying out that all is tainted, and then fearing those imperfections?  To call the Word false, yet grip to it, not believing my own assertions?  Be a man!  Sun and beggar.  When I thought I was sun, I squelched the beggar.  When I pretended to be beggar, I hated both.  Purity: extremes: the ignorant, Procrustean weakness.  Painting frames and water glasses splintershatter in my mind, but I am yet beginning.

All this time I feared those crowds—those people—when it was the tracks the tracks the tracks.  Above and below, frames and tracks.  Prettily packaged panting of young-in-love hearts, single sighted, echo in the statued halls of the museum, a far away sound, far away and long ago.  Intangible.  How could I cling to echoes so desperately?  A poet would say that I clutched at my own ashes—trapped, like a phoenix, born and reborn in the smoldering past.  I am no poet; a true poet would douse that phoenix, put out its hellish immortality. Now I’ve gone and made another hulking assumption!  What did I just say about being a poet?  Their words are and are not my words. "Words" isn't quite right.  There are many languages, not all of them written, and as many cages. My past speaks to me in silky nostalgia—spider-webbing Siren.

         Nous sommes des enfants. Cruel, twisted in innocence, children flail in their nightmared sleep, propelled by a moving sidewalk. One day we will wake. I am off. What will I find beyond Mother, museum, and subway, away from the sounds that I know, the places? I don't know. There are many tracks. Even the new route I take is another's old. The frame I crack releases me to yet another frame, a stronger frame. Here I am again, lost in my museum. Up. Up from my seat, and out once I am up, the sunlight warm on my face, warm for the first time in a long time. And then?  And then.