contemporary writing – Purgatory Magazine

The Day

the fights, seriously what are they about

afternoon fatigue or …

that the day is small and boring so you set fire to it

day of wrath between couples is something other than

the storming of the bastille

or fights between friends

its the day the light the wind

you see me tolerating this

emptiness

and then

maybe something

maybe something is wrong

it was often day of wrath when we’d be skating around it was just so boring the day would never end. the time is 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 20.00 FINALLY NIGHT TIME

is anything wrong

just so many hours left of the day

Text: Fredrika Flinta

The crew in charge of putting the windows in hasn’t been by yet, so the boss man told us to stay at least a meter away from the end of the floor at all times. I’m wearing my hard hat, which is basically decorative. I am putting together trusses (these long rails they hang lights, speakers, etc. on at events). I don’t really see the logic in installing event stuff before they’ve even put in windows or connected the plumbing, but I am delighted and easily accept this disorder. To attach two trusses together, you connect their protruding “eggs” and hammer spikes through them. Then you slip a device like a hairpin through a hole in each spike’s end so it can’t slip out when the whole thing is suspended.

The trusses are steel, and the head of the hammer they give you is pure copper. The idea is that the softer metal will not damage the corpus of the truss. The hammerhead takes all the blows alone and ends up looking squeezed and crumpled from both sides in. I take my time with the hammering, while my bored colleagues shuffle around, kicking bottle caps and little stones in the room one over.

Two clean strikes and a spike is in, and two more for good measure. I am bringing these trusses closer together. The sweat pearling on my forehead is hot and cold at the same time. A lot of apes enjoy having a reason to hit something really hard. I am also enjoying the fresh warm air of the summer morning as it flies through the open walls into my face. The sun is rising with a mysterious rhythm. Small birds are singing seriously amongst themselves. The colors of the early sunrise have given way to a sparkling light that makes the world a crystal. Through its proximity to the night it conducts a dark energy, and holds my eyes in a cool vice grip.

The parking lot below us is shining in the dew. There is mostly empty parking, but also a few parked cars, company vans, and one larger truck that the trusses arrived on. These are all standing by a chain link fence, which separates them from the foundations of a pool complex that was long abandoned and now recently destroyed. The sunken pools have filled with murky water. I step over the trusses, drawn in by the light flashing in patterns on the surface of this water. Floating in it are some of these talkative birds, spinning and washing themselves.

I am kneeling now, leaning on my distorted hammer in the dust, closer than boss man said was alright to be to the edge of the building. There is laughter caught in my throat. I wonder if the birds have any concept of what is artificial, or if they accept their bathing spot without asking why or how it came to be. At the same time, I am watching them with the hungry intensity of a little cat, lusting after their quickly beating and minuscule hearts. My left hand finds the room’s end ledge, and I just keep leaning forward, so funny is the moment and so careless is my desperate reaching for these birds and so much is this light making me lose sight of anything other than the feeling of it in my eyes and in my head.

Suddenly, I am tipping out of the hole. My stomach drops as I become aware of myself. My right hand, still gripping the hammer, is leading my body in its fall.

A random strength overtakes me, and I swing the hammer backwards and over my head, falling back on my ass and losing my grip on it in the process. The thing goes flying out of my hand, crashing easily through a thin divider wall. I am lying now on my back and the rig chains are swinging above me.

“Fuck!” comes a voice from behind. Sitting up, I look for the birds. They are holding completely still, frozen, some even mid-flight. The droplets of water that they’ve been disturbing are hanging, round in the air.

“This fucking thing…” the voice says, accompanied by the sound of flesh slapping hard plastic. I rise to my feet, trying not to get stuck on how strange it is to see light holding still in water, marking definite points instead of rippling on its surface.

I dust off my coverall, also to check if my body is still there. I take off my hard hat. Turning around, the room is spinning a little. I can see the white wall and its new hole in front of me, but blurry horizontal lines are splitting everything, moving out in waves from the middle of my field of vision. Rainbows running up and down them, superimposed on everything I see. All of this makes it confusing to walk. As I take a step, I stumble.

“You’re probably seeing these strange lines moving right now” says the voice. “This movement is always there, it’s just usually hidden in the things around you moving. So you’ll get used to it again soon. This really wasn’t supposed to happen”.

I’m slowly walking, and the voice is right, I am getting used to the ripples. Like a passing fever. I come to the hole, and look into the narrow space inside the wall. There is a whiteblue light filling it. The rippling intensifies. I am reminded of a video I saw where someone unknowingly brought home something super radioactive and you could see his phone camera being destroyed by the radiation in real time. You hear him cursing the camera, not making the mental leap between his mysterious treasure and the adversely affected video quality. I wondered about him a few times after that, and whether he lived long after, or maybe the video was fake. But it’s always somebody, it’s gotta be one of us – the person in the crushed by a falling vending machine statistic, or the person who took home the warhead. Any of those could be you.

The blue light is flickering a little and I’m hearing fingers on a keyboard. Leaning my head into the hole, finally I can see a face, lit up by it, by what I realize now is a screen.

She is wearing thin rimmed glasses. I can see large blue squares reflected in them. Her eyes are focused ahead, and there are small blue squares in them to match. They are darting back and forth. Her expression is calm, and serious. I am standing very still, just staring at these four illuminated windows, as they are the only shapes whose sharp edges are not swirling all around.

“Fuck”, she says again. She leans back, breathing out. She snaps the device shut.

She stands up, sliding through the narrow space towards me. I move to let her out.

She emerges from the darkness and scowls at the sunlight. Her hair is long, and black, and hangs like a curtain, to her knees.

“You broke my machine,” she says. Her eyes fix themselves on mine. I feel excited by her gaze. She reaches one long hand out to me, and gives me a quick, hard slap across my cheek. It stings and feels good. Somehow, I understand that this will help everything stop moving, and it does.

“I am the arbiter of your fate,” she says. “It sounds more exciting than it is. I get paid just as little as you do. You were supposed to fall from that ledge today.”

I look over to the edge of the room, where everything is still suspended in the air. Then, I look back over at her. Her eyes are transfixing me. She rolls them up and down my body, with no particular affect. She is like the early morning sun. Inscrutable, and radiating something.

“68% of the universe is dark energy. 27% is dark matter. Only 5% is the kind of energy and matter that you can touch and see and understand.”

I still can’t really say anything. The look she’s giving me is piercing me like an arrow. She seems a little annoyed at my silence now. She sighs and sits on the ground, pushing hair out of her eyes. She looks at the device in her lap. It’s like a little PC, made of dark-grey heavy-duty plastic. She is about to open it again, hesitates, then tosses it aside.

“Whatever”. It hits the cement and makes a nice clattering noise.

“Do you remember when your aunt went to the hospital when you were little?”

I’m caught off guard, clear my throat, and finally manage a word. “Yes”.

“Well when you were there to visit her and you came into the hospital cafeteria, your family was sitting around the table, remember?”

“Yes,” I say again.

“You got to the table and pulled out the first chair, and you were going to sit, and then your dad said that it was supposed to be your aunt’s place at the table, and you were upset. So you said to your dad ‘She can just sit somewhere else. She’s in a wheelchair, it has wheels for a reason. It’s so you can move it anywhere you want to.’”

My mouth is hanging open as I try to process this information. I catch myself, close my mouth, and swallow. “I guess I did say that”. I’m extremely embarrassed.

“Well your dad thought it would be nice for your aunt to face the window, since she hadn’t been outside yet after the car accident, and her hospital room had other people sharing it, and her bed was furthest from the window in there. But you were tired, and cranky, and you refused to move for her. Actually, and I’m not sure if you know this, she was already in the cafeteria, and was getting pretty close to you guys, and she heard you say that. She was hurt by it, not a lot, but since she was in her weakened state. The adults silently agreed to just brush it off so there wouldn’t be a scene. Everyone had more important things to deal with. She never really forgot about it though, although she tried to.”

Blood is rushing to my head now. I’m devastated.

“I mean, I forgive you, like, you were a kid. Kids are fucking assholes. You didn’t really mean anything by it. But anyways,” she says, unwrapping a yellow lollipop that she has pulled out of her pants pocket, and sucking on it loudly,

“They thought now was a funny time for you to kind of pay for that. Or at least, maybe that you were ready to be humbled in a new and unprecedented way. That was just the briefing I got. The correlation between the brief and the fate outcome is always sort of vague. They can be more like suggestions, or predictions of how you might feel about the situation later, what it might make you think of or reflect on more deeply. It’s not so black and white old testament-y about justice. That’s not really what any of this is about. But yeah, basically I was supposed to make sure that you fell.”

I look away from her, back out and over the ledge. I remember how far the fall would have been.

“What if I had died?” I ask her. “Also, what, you were going to push me?”

She snorts, shaking her head.

“No. I don’t need to touch you directly to make things happen. That’s what this thing is supposed to be for.” She nudges the little PC with the tip of her shoe. “The odds of you dying were close to none, and even those of you being seriously crippled were low. Really, it was supposed to be about you experiencing the fall. System reset kind of thing. I don’t know. Whatever”.

I’m rubbing my face with my hands. She’s smacking her lips around the candy. Looking over at me, it’s like she can feel my self-pity. She reaches back into her pocket, and pulls another one out, handing it to me.

I accept it gratefully. It’s pretty large, and rectangular. Very yellow. I unwrap it, put it in my mouth. It tastes sweet and sour. The script on its label is in a language I’ve never seen before, and obviously can’t understand.

“Stole those from my last job. That one was easier. I don’t like these justice-y ones. I think atoning for your sins is corny unless it’s really your decision, and it barely ever is. This job was good. Old lady, she works in this candy factory for over forty years. She’s home one day, and I’m watching her sit at her table after her shift, and she’s tired, you know? Exhausted. Making these candies every day. So it’s my job to angle the sun through the window, so it catches the little glass bowl of them that she has in front of her just right. So her eyes are drawn to it, and she takes one in her hand, tearing up a little, and then on my monitor I can read her thoughts and she’s thinking ‘well, these are damn good candies’, you know? Sweet moment, for both of us. Nicest assignment I’ve had in a while”.

The candy is pretty tasty.

“I guess I wasn’t supposed to see you, huh?” I say.

“You definitely weren’t. It’s never happened to me before, or to anyone else at the office as far as I know. Your thoughts were reading strangely right before you went off-script, though. You were being like a little cat. And I guess I was distracted, I’ve been slacking off.”

I suddenly felt proud. “I always knew there was some kind of game,” I say. “I knew one day I’d be able to look through the walls”.

Her eyes narrow again. “Well I don’t know if I would call it a game. But yeah, ‘reality’ is a bunch of shit. Or at least, there’s more to it than you think. Surprisingly boring at the higher levels too, though, let me tell you.”

I reach for the PC and she stops me, smacking the ground hard with her hand.

“I wouldn’t touch that if I were you. We shouldn’t touch each other any more either. I actually didn’t even know we could talk or interact directly at all, but I’m pretty sure we should be careful about our like, particles actually getting too close.”

I’m disappointed, and pull away. We look at each other. She’s scanning my face, looking a little bit amused.

“I can show you some things though.”

She picks up the device, opens it, and motions for me to look with her at the screen.

“It usually doesn’t flicker like this, obviously. You really broke it with your flying hammer. But I think as long as I don’t try to do anything with our current environment, we can still scan around just fine. Just don’t ask me how any of this shit works, because I don’t know.”

“I also don’t know how my iphone works,” I say, “I just accept it as magic”.

For the first time, we smile at one another. “Okay, so check this out,” she says.

The screen shows a stack of dice. “I saw these dice on another job. It was this guy, he was a collector. He plays some kind of nerdy game. These dice were so tiny, like less than the size of your pinky fingernail. And they were stacked on each other like this, on the corner of his dresser, six high, without falling over. He was a big guy, too. And he walked by them every single day. And I thought, man, you know? All of your shit might as well just be levitating”.

She turns to me expectantly, hoping I’ll be amazed. I clearly don’t understand.

“It’s like, you guys are just magnets, walking around, biological electromagnetic fields. You are so bound up in the rest of the world’s movement that you can even stabilize things, like you can create inertia. Don’t you think that’s insane?”

I blink at her. She understands that no light is going on in my head. Her words are as meaningless as those on the lollipop wrapper. “You’re a channel, too. Concepts, ideas, feelings, destinies, pictures, songs, they move through you and in and out of you. Your vibrational frequencies can be high enough to sink ships or low enough to fold fucking origami.”

She is looking at me again as if she thinks I’ll understand. This time, she’s getting frustrated.

“Ugh, and you’re such sensory creatures. Not very advanced conceptual thinkers. Fine. It’s risky, since this thing’s kind of broken, but I’ll just show you”.

Before I can say anything, she’s typing something in, and the ground is melting around me. I am sitting in the same position, but waist-deep in water. And all around me, there are people screaming. And the ground is moving in great undulations around me, and I am in a room with round windows, and into these windows is spilling huge amounts of seawater. I hear her voice again.

“You… are sink- the… Titanic”.

Holy shit. A deck chair flies past me. The water level is rising, and I’m splashing around, going insane. I’m starting to scream, and it feels like I’m dreaming, until I realize it feels exactly like that. So the picture dissolves, and so does my body. My next view is from inside of the wall.

I am watching her from above. She’s sucking on a blue lollipop and watching something on her PC. It takes me a second before I realize that she is watching a recording of the olympics. An older one, in black and white. I’m thinking how she is very beautiful.

Suddenly, my hammer crashes into the picture, knocking the PC out of her hands, briefly extinguishing the blue light. She picks it back up, trying to switch it on, hitting it with her open palm. She is annoyed, and coughing a little from the dust. She begins to scream the same phrases I first heard behind me, as I laid on the ground, having just avoided my fate. As we approach the part where I leaned my head in to look at her, I snap back into my body, and we are sitting again where we were sitting before.

We just sit for a second while my head stops spinning. “I was reading your thoughts, you know”, she says. I say “in a small browser window next to your show?”. She ignores this.

“Since I made you see all of that, and the machine sent you back to this moment through the wall and through the near past, I was reading that thought you had just now. I mean, I was reading it back then, when the hammer came. Out of sync. So I kind of knew something was wrong, since it was impossible that you had already seen me. Lucky too, imagine the hammer hit my head. That would have been stupid as fuck”.

I don’t mind that she knows that I think she is beautiful. Especially the way she was watching the olympic games. So concentrated. I ask her what about it was so interesting.

“I like to watch people being very serious about things that make sense to them. Like running very fast or throwing something very far. The satisfaction they get from it is so pure sometimes. Maybe I was made of simple matter like you once, I don’t really understand the surveilled to surveillour pipeline, if there is one, even. I guess they tell you that later on. You probably don’t even know that you were here building the set for some kind of art show. Your team was gonna suspend a fake wall on that truss eventually, after the ambulance came for you. I have a lot more extra information about all of this than you do. Like, I can see the entire pre-existing yet still not entirely predictable shape of your life. And I can never forget how malleable the parameters of everything are. My life is pretty confusing, with all this matrix, dark matter, arbiter of fate shit, you know?”

I nod, though I’m not totally sure.

Finally, I ask her: “Why are you telling me all of this?”

And she says, “Well, I’m pretty sure I just lost my job”.

Text: Angel Hafermaas

Cerebral Palsy

Hello my name is Bartosz, I’m 23 years old, I live in Paris, France but my family is originally from Poland. My hobbies include painting, being on the internet, playing the piano, which I’ve done since I was 8 and reading. I have been disabled since birth due to cerebral palsy, which affects my motor skills. You see, when I walk, my right leg veers to the left, which in turn causes my left leg to do the same. But my biggest problem in life is that I can’t find a girlfriend because all girls see me as damaged goods. What’s especially difficult for me is that when I see a beautiful girl, I feel aroused, and I’m very ashamed of this. I also struggle with sexual desires; it feels like a wave that comes over me and I can’t distract myself from it, even when I masturbate (although it’s very embarrassing to admit that). Whenever I see a couple, I feel a mix of emotions: loneliness, envy, sadness, and boredom. Even my childhood crush doesn’t value me; she rejected me, citing my inability to provide for her and satisfy her sexually. I don’t know what, how, or why all of this is happening to me! I thought girls my age were supposed to be “woke”, that they would love me for who I was despite being disabled. But I guess now “woke” means all disabled people are evil. That’s where the term “woke” came from. Someone is out to get the disabled people of France, who were so demon possessed that they voted for Macron not once but twice! Because they “woke” up. They’re the “woke ones” (Obama woke them up). I guess many disabled people felt inspired by Obama. “Yes we can”, I admit it was a powerful slogan that inspired many in the disabled community but it did not help us, not at all. My mum once said to me if the light inside you is darkness, how dark is your darkness? Having a dark light inside you means you’re demon possessed.

A month ago I joined this Telegram group chat for young disabled artists and there was one guy who got nasty to me, because I wrote that I couldn’t sleep from all the messages they were sending (At that time I didn’t know how to use silent mode on my phone – why am I so stupid?). And then one girl I thought was my friend because she had complimented my painting once answered him, “Haha :D.” They were drunk. Drinkers. I want God to severely punish the members of this Telegram group, but I know that this guy received moral satisfaction from the fact that he was rude to me at night. And other members of the group took his side. I hate them!

Sorry, maybe my English is not so good, but it is much better than a lot of people I know here in Paris.

These last two nights I have had indecent dreams with the participation of one of the leaders in the local disabled youths organization, the one from Tanzania. I don’t know why I had these dreams. I have never had any sexual thoughts about men before. I didn’t seem to think about him, but these dreams started to push me to dream of him as a sexual partner. Although I know that he is twice my age and is married and has two daughters. He’s always been very kind to me now that I think about it. Today I decided to write him a poem and send it to him via email. I’m very embarrassed.

It has gone two weeks since I wrote the poem and still no answer. I guess I am never going back to the local disabled youths organization. Besides, I am turning 24 next month and that means I will be too old to participate anyway. Why am I like this? I can’t believe I sent him that poem. I am so embarrassed. Do you want to read the poem? Here it is:

“I have a lot to say, to tell you, you know

My heart goes out to you, I don’t think about it

My disability can wait, so that my heart can be healed

Can’t go on, need to speak my mind

Married early too, what a pity

I love you Tanzanian man, you did that to me

My disability can wait, so that my heart can be healed

Oo! Your love has stuck into my heart

Like a hot spear

Nakupenda sana”

Tell me, what have I done!? Maybe I shouldn’t have included the part with the hot spear. Is it racist? Does that mean I am racist now? Please, I hope he doesn’t report me to the police. What would my mother say if she found out I had been sending racist poems to one of the leaders in the local disabled youths organization? She would be very very upset with me. I am tired, I am tired of being an absolute failure. I don’t know how to improve. But how can I improve myself when the world around me is not?

I masturbated in an online sex chat last night, I am NOT proud.

I hate this world only because there is an unmeasured amount of debauchery, lust, and perversion in it. It kills me! Wherever you look, whatever you do, whatever you say, everything is transformed into a sexy filth. Am I the only one in this world who doesn’t like it? Although I HATE it all, depraved thoughts and many other childish ones often arise in my head. I have to constrain myself daily. My dad said to me the other day, “The absence of constraints produces only tik-tok nonsense, not real art, my son”. How can I make REAL ART if I can’t constrain myself? I would like to erase everything from the memory of this world, not only my own, but also from the memory of all people, but maybe it is better to just destroy everything. Yes, I think I would like it if everything got destroyed. No more lust, nothing more to constrain, no more failures, no more people, and no more cerebral palsy.

Text: Ian Memgard
Image: Juliusz Lewandowski

The Professional

“I’m a professional,” I say. “You can count on me.”

My reputation precedes me. I can’t tell what expression graces the face of the priest – if he really is a priest – on the other side of the confession booth lattice.

If I have one superpower, it must be my ability to readily and immediately accept the strangest situations without complaint.

The present: I’m dressed in widow’s black, and when I kneel before the confession booth, a veil falls across my face. “Father, I have come to confess,” I say. The shadow on the other side of the lattice inclines its head. “I’m about to commit a most grievous sin through nobody’s fault but my own.” The coded sequence of words that lets him know I’m one of them.”Tell me what I should do.”

Though of course I’m not really one of them, but they don’t know that. My private desire is to find my lover, the most powerful woman in the world, whose whereabouts are communicated to me in bits and pieces of fragmentary information that only the most cracked minds can correlate.

“I’ll tell you what sin to commit,” murmurs the Father through the lattice, in a manner indistinguishable from the general vague mumbling of the church’s insides. And he tells me about Marseilles, where a boat will take me to Egypt, to retrieve a document from a museum… A papyrus scroll in an obscure dialect of coptic…

I kiss the outstretched hand with its ring and rise from the velvet bench. On the way out I pass an old woman praying in the pews, the same old woman I passed on the way in… but now I see she’s not old at all, merely hunched over, and as I leave the church I perceive her in the corner of my eye, looking over her shoulder… an icy premonition follows me into the sunshine where the doors of the cathedral slam shut behind me and I walk onto the warm yellow plaza, where the pigeons scatter and fly at the sound of my clicking heels.

The past: “Trust me, I’m a professional,” I said to the diplomat. “I will deliver the results you want. I’m capable of doing this. I prepare for any situation. I satisfy the requirements.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“I’m glad we understand each other.” The diplomat stood with his back to me, gazing through the high windows at the sun setting over the turgid Thames.

“Do we?” he said with a curiously arch look on his face.

“Do what?” I said because I’d zoned out.

“Do we understand each other?” he said, and flung down a single white ladies glove on the table.

Horror. Her glove. He knows. I thought I was the only one who remembered. Are there others? And where is the other glove?

My future: I hide inside the hollow sarcophagus as the lights go out, one by one, at the museum; ancient dust sticks in my nose. I peek from under the lid and watch the guards start leaving. But the moon streaming through the skylight allows me to see well, even in the dark. I sneak past the glass cabinets and into the archives… and almost think I hear the jackals barking.

I remember the last time I saw her, her hand slipping between my legs, the other pointing at the sky.

“Is there a word for a person who flits from identity to identity without caring much about the skin they cast off, like a snake? I always used to think of myself as a sort of lizard in a woman’s skin. I enjoyed being a diplomat’s wife, sure, in its way, but not enough to commit to the bit to such an extent as to not irredeemably fuck it up.

That is, if committing lesbian adultery salacious enough to trigger a nuclear war can be considered a fuck-up.”

D-DAY, DESTRUCTION DAY: The meltdown of every nuclear reactor, the energy net going black; all lightbulbs exploding at once; trucks, unsteerable, crashing off bridges; airplanes dropping into the sea like dead birds; panic in Moscow, panic in Beijing, panic at the Pentagon. Clocks run backwards; the planes rise out of the sea.

DIES IRAE: The day of wrath.

The moon cracks into two like a dinner plate.

PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE: I PUT MY HAND ON HER HAND ON THE STEERING WHEEL. We cross state lines and drive into the desert, the other desert, the spring desert in bloom. Next gas station: 200 miles. And yet there is a house in the desert, for us to arrive at, a well to drink from. A gun is hanging on the wall, a gun and the horned skull of an animal. She lets her jacket fall from her shoulders, onto the floor…

EVERYWHERE AND ALL THE TIME, things happen, but not completely. The steering wheel, lacking your touch, remains unturned; the shot glasses do not slam down on the bar; the streets which you would cross remain uncrossed by you; forlorn, the cherry trees blossom and fade, unseen by you; and would-be-touched places on my body remain untouched – and perhaps it’s only I and these inanimate objects that sense it; me and your side of the bed, aware of your absence.

The past: Over the eaves of the houses in the Forbidden City a bright red sun rises. In the innermost basement I press my ear to the cold metal door of the vault. A clock is ticking… a matter of time. I sense my associates working away, their quick nimble hands, while the guards lay unconscious in the hallway, knocked out by a poison that’ll give them lovely dreams. Drooling onto the beautiful carpets…

My future: Lovely dreams. Reunion. “I always like to think about this,” I say to Irene in the dream.

“I like to think about this too,” she says, laughing and reaching both hands towards me. “As a matter of fact, I’m the one who’s dreaming it for us.”

A future: Degraded but not destroyed, we run an anonymous white van across the border with the fugitive gagged and duct taped in the back, hidden behind crates of bootleg DVDs, drugged and unconscious. We caught the man. We will deliver him and aim to satisfy. Yet the eyes of the heavy-set border guard, scanning us with boredom, suddenly catch on the scar that runs across the whole length of my partner’s face. “Step out of the car,” says the man, with his machine gun leaning on his shoulder. Every muscle in my body tenses in preparation for flight.

Moments later, I’m trapped inside a ventilation duct with my accomplice. She starts to bite her nails. “Don’t worry, I can do anything,” I say to her. “I’ll teach you to be professional, just like me.”

The past: “I’LL SEND YOU BACK TO OLD SHANGHAI.” He points his gun at me and I back up against the window. The streets are hundreds of meters below us, but the only thing running through my mind is the last phone call I had with you-know-who and my hand rises on its own accord to wipe a tear from my cheek. I’ve been very lonely, in a way, for a long time now. I’ll be the first to admit it.

“Scared to die, bitch?” the gunman hisses in Cantonese, completely misreading my emotions. The boss looks at him in exasperated embarrassment, but when he fires I have no choice but to take a leap of faith, backflipping through the window, and falling, falling backwards in a shower of broken glass… a difficult situation, but manageable, for a professional…

The present: The papyrus is in my hands, finally, fragile like insect wings. Cicadas chirp, jasmine makes itself known, and some miles away is the desert with its cupola of stars and long-sleeping sphinxes, but here is the city, with its street cries and honking cars, sounds streaming through the open tattered-curtained window into my cheap hotel room where the ochre yellow paint chips and peels off the wall. The raw dog bites on my legs itch and throb with pain under the bandages. I unroll the papyrus with gloved hands… although of course I’m not supposed to read it. My only job was to retrieve this object, not to interpret it… but my associates don’t know that I actually read Coptic pretty well as a result of my teenage incarceration in an Ethiopian Orthodox convent. They didn’t warn me about the dogs of the underworld. Out of ignorance, or on purpose?

They’ve nothing to fear from my reading this, anyway. Although it’s immediately obvious to me that the purported antiquity of this document is only a disguise for detailed plans for how to subvert North Korea’s forays into nuclear science – among many other things – such strategies don’t interest me, and barely register in my conscious mind. The signs I’m looking for are hidden deeper and must be read between the lines… a fly buzzes at my ear, insistent: one of those big juicy ones that leave throbbing red bites. I swat at it with my hand and stub my cigarette out into the hotel ashtray, shaped like a voluptuous woman in ancient Egyptian dress, where ash and fag-ends only half-cover the text REMEMBER ME? KISSES FROM CAIRO.

And yet, at the same time: Bethlehem will be free. We rush the citadel… always the same citadel…

always the same people rushing… but

AT TIMES: Doubt creeps in followed by despair. What if there are no more messages? What if what’s gone is truly irretrievable? Alone in this world and alone in all possible worlds. If that’s the case I’d rather disappear completely, myself, and wipe myself out of history, past, present, and future. Because each human being needs another one like herself.

THE MIRROR: Asking for guidance, I blow out the candle and study the signs in the wisps of smoke and they are not as fortuitous as I had hoped. My old enemy, the serpent, rises in the glass darkness. A bad sign. But why?

Much later: I lock eyes with the woman reading a newspaper on the patio of the café in Rome; her face half hidden by the newspaper, shaded by her wide-brimmed hat. I sit down at the table next to her, my back to her back, order a caffè corretto and open my own newspaper to the horse racing pages.

She says, in a voice that’s conversational but very quiet, “In about 55 minutes a small procession of nuns will come out of the church over there, come down the steps, and cross this plaza. There is one nun among these nuns, no different from the others, only the nails on her left hand are painted red. She’s the one.”

“I see,” I say and take a sip of my coffee.

“You will hang respectfully, discreetly behind, and when you see her take a detour, follow.”

“Understood.”

“By the way,” she says in her low, melodious voice, without turning back to look at me. “Don’t think we don’t know what you did in Cairo.” Coins clink on the table. By the time I turn around, she’s already walking away.

The future: I slip into my wetsuit and dive into the wreck. I’m a professional, I know what I’m doing, I remind myself. Slip into the cold water. Slip through the hole in the hull and haul my body into a pocket of air. The light of my water-proof, pressure-proof torch falls meekly against the rotting banisters, the cracking tiles, the death-trap corridors collapsing slowly under pressure. Somewhere, untouched by the water, a one hundred year old sea chart lies in wait… and I’m determined to find it. It might be the only sea chart unaffected by the “great delete” of 1948, where the Crocuta Islands were declared “illegal reality” and erased from maps and memories. Yet I know that if I only knew the coordinates I could visit them in my dreams. I alone will possess information that others would kill for. As I cross the cracking tiles of the sunken ballroom, haunted by the musty breath of drowned party ghosts, I contemplate the fact that forces of good and evil compete inside of me and admittedly they’re both strong — and yet I’m motivated only by a love so intense it verges on derangement.

There are footsteps in the dust. Has someone been in the wreck before me?

And are they here now?

Intolerable present: Remember Cairo? I’m writhing in my sweaty sheets; bugs crawl up the walls of the hotel room; the wounds sustained from dog bites, poorly disinfected, swell and throb, my legs grow hot as if with fever, brown blood stains the bed, my stench runs out of me like water. The bulb flickers and goes out. Only the desert stars and moon cast a light through the window and then there’s only window, no wall.

I find myself lying in the sand, between the paws of the sphinx, wet like a freshly licked kitten. “What happened?”

I have spat you out.
“You took me into your mouth???”

You’ve got real problems.

“It’s true I make rash decisions sometimes,” I say to the sphinx. Its shadow falls across me; the face of the sphinx only warm darkness. “And there were a few blunders this time. But I’m a professional. I know what I’m doing. You don’t need to worry about me.”

Do you remember the last time? Irene opens her eyes.

I shake my head.

There was something you were supposed to remember, about your lover who’s gone from this version of events.

My mouth feels dry. It’s hard to think. “There was something, wasn’t there?”

Wasn’t there?

“Wasn’t there?”

Again and again: … I enter the coordinates into my GPS and go east, through industrial areas and yards full of trailers where laundry hangs on clotheslines and black and white CRT TV sets mumble news stories in a sparking and buzzing language I don’t understand…

The beaded curtain rattles as I enter the mobile home at the dark forest edge of the trailer park.

A figure sits on the bed with their back to me watching TV. On the screen, a mushroom cloud rises.

I cock my gun, they turn.

PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE: SHE PUTS HER HAND BETWEEN MY LEGS IN THE CAR. ON THE DESERT HORIZON A MUSHROOM CLOUD RISES

It’s like I always say: TRUST ME, I’M A PROFESSIONAL: Collaborating or all alone. I’m thief, scammer, prostitute, spy; actress, agent, politician, vagrant; street-seller, beggar, Qing Dynasty concubine; I’ve seen it all, I have been everything. There’s no one like me, never was, never will be, and still I’m only part of a long tradition of eccentric women with a hatred for boredom, wage labour, and the marriage bed. And a love of — well, of love, of —

MY LOVE: Nuclear fission, immeasurable power, pure energy. Destroyer of worlds.

PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE: SHE PUTS HER HAND ON MY HAND ON THE STEERING WHEEL. We drive away from the nuclear testing site with a jar of radioactive sand held securely between my thighs. Inside the jar, new worlds are forming; new creatures spring into being, the spontaneous generation of life, universes multiplying, multi-headed, struggling to break out.

ONE FINE DAY:

A A

ARM IN ARM, WE WILL WATCH WATCHED WATCH

THE MOON SPLIT INTO TWO.

AND THERE WAS NO PLACE FROM WHICH WE WERE ABSENT.

Text: Zola Gorgon
Image: Pierre-Louis Herold

My Comedown

“For the sake of my health,” I think automatically each time I pour frozen peas into my instant noodles.

Then I lie in my sarcophagus, which is my bed when it’s covered in linen sheets, when the blackout curtains are drawn and it’s dark in the room like a soft grave. As the poisons leave my body, a throbbing lump of pain is formed behind my right eye, the size of a grape. Sometimes when it’s gotten really bad I’ve put a bag of frozen soy mince on my eye and felt it slowly thaw as I count down the hours. Time, my saviour. As long as the clock keeps going forward I’m not trapped in an eternal now which feels unbearable but which will be borne and over.

It could have been worse. 2013, after an illegal rave in an abandoned mail center where malicious hallucinations chased me and spoke to me, I took a sip of orange juice in front of the mirror and spat it out immediately. It felt like my throat was closing up. I thought I was about to die. It was the acid in the oranges; I studied my palate and throat in the mirror with my mouth gaping wide. I’d smoked and gurned so badly with my tongue against the roof of my mouth that it had filled up with blisters, which had now burst. Full of little burn holes, like Freddie Krueger’s skin.

Burnt. Everyone says they’re about to change, but they never do. The pendulum swings from action to regret. It does not go forwards, only side to side.

Mike often used to call me late at night when he was anxious because he was coming down. He partied loads, many days in a row, because his parents lived far away from the city centre and it was so expensive to travel home. I liked his calls, I was an hour ahead of him timezone-wise and besides I was lonely in that bourgie neighbourhood where I didn’t have any friends and it was so quiet at night. I brought my phone with me to a bar and drank wine there while I talked to him, like I’d gone to the bar with a dear friend. I was happy to soothe his anxieties. I’ve got to change the way I live! he’d always say to me, but the next week he’d call again.

In my head, I see visions of gross primordial creatures, like my visual imagination is trying and not quite succeeding at remembering how things fit together. It invents living beings from scratch with only the vaguest frame of reference. Humans with too many eyes and weird tubes in their skin, or little creatures that are nothing but these weird, fleshy tubes. It’s important not to get scared by what your own mind shows you, regardless of how nasty it is. There are things you cannot help.

It’s easy to fall into a self-analysis spiral and question everything you’ve done the previous night. For most halfway functional people, booze and drugs are a way to get close to other people in an uninhibited, unforced way, where social contact becomes more open, more honest, more positively emotionally charged, and above all more stimulating. You can say anything. Right then and there a space is opened for the meeting between two souls – so it feels at the time – but afterwards, once the meeting’s over, you bitterly regret having flaunted yourself, agonizing over ugly sounds made while laughing or if you’re bad at fucking. Better not to think about those sorts of things, because it doesn’t help to obsess over yourself.

When I was around fourteen my only friend and I thought all people who drank and partied were worthless bimbos. The funnest thing we knew was eating about a kilo of pick’n’mix and playing Playstation 2 until we passed out from the sugar crash. High school was a whole different story. Indeed. Because they told me I had ADHD and prescribed me a medicine which was a slow-release amphetamine. I was so depressed that winter that I couldn’t do anything. It was so dark and cold, inside and out, and every lamp shone with a sickly yellow light that gave me nightmares about evil incidents in obscure bowling alleys and rollerskating rinks. It hurt so much. “It” was nothing in particular. “It” was everything. Sometimes I took 5-6 methylphenidate pills at once, to have the energy to perform socially, like when my friends were celebrating their birthdays. I remember once, after such a celebration, sitting awake until 6AM while everyone else was sleeping, shaking with diffuse fear, writing rambling and paranoid diary entries about a guy we met on the bus on the way home. I wrote them in Japanese, looking up each kanji individually. It was important to keep my observations top secret. When you’re coming down, you can get all sorts of strange notions.

Methylphenidate is the worst when it comes to paranoia and anxiety during the comedown. Well, perhaps meth is worse – I don’t have a lot of experience with meth, but I definitely don’t recommend getting high on ADHD meds. They make you walk around like a robot, only talking about yourself with thousands of strangers while your heart remains ice cold and selfish. Later I started taking it just to be able to drink for longer without throwing up or falling asleep, and it worked so well I managed to give myself alcohol poisoning a number of times. Lying in bed and throwing up for days, unable to take a painkiller or even drink water, until Rhiannon came home to me with a bottle of Milk of Magnesia which tasted like mint and chalk.

My childhood friend and I took some kind of potent dark web speed which you had to wash beforehand not to burn your nostrils. 48 hours later we still weren’t sleeping but were both paranoid as hell with our hearts thumping out 120 beats a minute. What helps against a high heart rate? we googled. Or something like, “How to support your heart”. There was something about Omega3, or maybe Omega6. Canola oil has a lot of omega fats in it, so in the end we downed a couple shots of straight cooking oil each.

All’s well that ends well. 2015, in the depths of Deptford we dressed up for Halloween and snorted really lousy MDMA and then Zeynab and her psychotic girlfriend went climbing on the scaffolding on the house next door. Her girlfriend rushed in and told us Zeynab had a fall and “bonked her head” so hard on the cement floor that she’d lost consciousness.

“It’s cool, it’s cool!” said Zeynab and climbed through the window, then suddenly started cascade vomiting liters of hot pink Cherry Lambrini across the floor. We took her to ER and left her there, along with her psycho girlfriend, then Rachel and I went to a catholic mass, still in our halloween clothes, gurning. We thought it’d be a “funny thing to do”, but there we were, coming down in a congregation so warm and welcoming that we felt like villains. So when the socialist pastor offered me the sacrament, I said, no, just give me your blessing. Are you sure? he said so quietly no one else heard, and then he blessed my brow. I really felt it in me – that blessing.

Writing’s always possible, once I could draw, too, but I’ve forgotten how. What people write when they come down resembles what they write when mania fades. They pick fights with their own anxiety, argue with it, try to make deals. My friend showed me a text they’d written on a comedown, four tight, incoherent pages where they’d written about me, that we were obviously both in love with each other and may God let me read their thoughts. I really got the hint and we fucked the same night, but then I went home, and came down.

Swedish teens got pissed like they wanted to die. My friend threw up on Walpurghis night, about 5-6 cigarette butts. Those of my friends who were really mental – there were a few, and they really were mental – were put into psychiatric hospitals, always in the section for psychotic patients, because nowhere else had any space. They’d end up befriending the only other normal people in the ward which were the people selling coke and heroin.

The least you can do for yourself when you’re about to come down is taking a proper shower and then make the bed you’ll be forced to lie in. To come down is one thing, but coming down on twisted sheets, with the smell of cigarettes still in your hair, is really tormenting yourself more than you’ve deserved. Oh, and it’s lovely to have a few popsicles in the fridge. Eat a salad, perhaps, but let’s be real with ourselves about who we are and what we’re going to do. If we’d been the kind of people who pick salad over instant noodles I suppose we wouldn’t be lying here now, in the dark.

“I’m never going to drink again after last night,” Ian writes to me. But he will and I will too. Some are hit by a terrible sense of guilt whenever they’ve done anything debauched. You think you ought to be a certain way, act a certain way. During the comedown, you pray to God for forgiveness, but a week later you’re ready for the same thing all over again, you’ve already forgotten. I don’t understand why you even ought to be ashamed, what good it’s supposed to do. Shame and regret aren’t strong enough to make you change anything. Partying really can be a total riot.

Text: Zola Gorgon
Image: iStock

Süleyman (Svenska)

Süleyman, du kan inte vänta dig att jag ska hålla koll på vilken kille i ditt harem som för tillfället har din gunst eller inte, så kan du inte bara skriva mig en lista på vem som just nu är bra och vem som är dålig?

“Jag älskar dig!” sa han.

1. Det du åtrår, det bestämmer du dig för; det du bestämmer dig för, det blir din handling; och som du handlar får du skörda.

Först var jag tyst, sen vände jag mig om för att med kylig artighet fråga, “Ursäkta att jag frågar, men exakt vad är källan till din kärlek?”

2. Jag försöker att förstå saker som är väldigt svåra att förstå.

“Det är du, såklart, du är källan till min kärlek!”

“Jag?” sa jag, och försökte låta överraskad.

“Ja, du!” ropade han, och såg längtansfullt på mig, som ett barn som ber om något det vet att det inte kommer att få. Mitt hjärta började slå med ömkan och bestörtning och således blev jag tvingad att framföra charader så djävulskt osannolika att de skulle verka malplacerade till och med i en Shakespearepjäs.

3. Så som många djur tjänar människan, så tjänar varje människa gud. Utan hans godkännande kan inte ens ett grässtrå röra på sig.

27. Jag går vidare, jag triumferar på vägen.

85. Man ska fundera på allvarliga saker först när man blivit helt och hållet är besatt av Dionysus, och sedan nykter.

“Visst, jag älskar dig också,” sa jag och hoppades på att vara klar, att gå hem och få lite förlösande sömn. När jag såg in i hans desperata ögon borde jag ha kunnat gissa vad jag nyss satt i rörelse. Även de mest okunniga kan, som hundar, spåra lukten av åska. En rasande våg lyfte mig upp till sitt krön och bar bort mig. Oupphörlig och krävande. Stormen rasade vidare i dagar, i månader – ett helt år förflöt. Allt man vet faller bort om man glömmer bort vem man är, men jag mindes, och levde länge nog för att få se slutet. När jag lämnade ondskans trädgård genom flätade portar, slog mitt hjärta snabbare, och mina bröder omfamnade mig och hällde upp ett utsökt vin åt mig.

4. Bröder slog vakt om platsen där jag anlände. Från vad hade de fötts? Vad lever de på? Vad grundades de på? Vem har bestämt att de ska kunna dricka så mycket, o ni vise män?

Mina bröder, ert vin är för starkt för att man ska kunna dricka det ofta. Ändå kommer jag tillbaka för mer. Kom ihåg, mina bröder, att hicka som denna är en bevingad bön, som kan höras till och med på Baalbek.

Det kommer alltid finnas män som honom, eller jag kanske borde säga: pojkar som honom, som jämför sig själva med din storhet, och hatar det, inte för vad det är, men för vad de själva är eller inte är.

5. När jag tas emot av Änglarna, när kommer han då tänka på mig?

De kan avundas till och med ett barn. De pratar om förnuft, men är vansinnigt känslosamma. Må helgonen skänka dem artighet innan fallet.

6. Jag svär att jag troget, lojalt, och hederligt ska tjäna mina älskare och deras legitima efterträdare, överlämna mig själv åt dem med all min styrka och uppoffra, om det krävs, mitt eget liv för att försvara dem.

Det är kallt som marmor på tunnelbanestationen, tunnelns käkar är ömma och bortom dem måste havet ligga, där stormarna ryter. Hallelujah!

7. Avges ett löfte, så närmar sig bus.

När hans vänlighet försvunnit vägrade jag vika mig, jag var utan tvekan magisk och vidskeplig. Jag försökte bara visa hjältemod. Så vad ska jag göra nu? Jag avser att visa att min heder är mig mer värd än mitt eget liv. Kärleken förändras inte, men är ändå orsak till alla förändringar.

11. Marcus, Gud välsigne dig.

Jag vet att det är lättare att svara på böner från en man som har besvarat andras böner.

Gudinnorna Anath och Astarte slogs samman till en gudom, som kallades Atargatis.

Jag vet att det är lättare att svara på böner från en man som har besvarat andras böner.

Han Som Rider På Molnen. Fenicierna kallade honom Baal Shamen, Herre över Himlen.

13. Vad mitt namn betyder? Gåva från Gud.

95. Und wenn die Welt voll Teufel wär und wollt uns gar verschlingen, so fürchten wir uns nicht so sehr, es soll uns doch gelingen.

30. Vem? Jag? Heder, ära, och evig seger!

Närhelst sann kärlek visar sitt ansikte (och döden äntrar genom mitt fönster) kommer den att vara sitt eget bevis. Han ser minoansk ut. Han ser byzantisk ut. Han ser baktriskt ut. Jag gillar hans utseende. Det kommer inte finnas någon förvirring. Det kommer inte finnas någon förvirring. Det kommer inte finnas någon förvirring.

38. När armenier når toppen av klimax kommer de i kaskader.

39. Du vet, han hade verkligen kunnat rädda vår vänskap, återställa den till lycka och dygd – men det gjorde han inte. Ynkrygg!

62. Välsignade är de som sörjer för de ska komma att bli tröstade.

93. Medelst de vackra läppar som Skaparen lät mig besitta, så kysste jag med min mun: knarklangaren, bartendern, skaterkillen, arkitekten, målaren, diplomaten, och alla de andra också.

Men han som reste sig emot dig, och hade ondska i sig, Süleyman – honom skall du glömma. Men nu, bakverk med saffran, Süleyman. Du flyger som en hök, du kacklar som en gås, Süleyman. Den där hemliga formen, dina två ögonbryn, Süleyman, är som två armar på vågen som väger varje dag och natt. Vad är det, Süleyman? Dina ögon får alla våra hjärtan att svämma över med ljus.

Text: Ian Memgard
Översättning och bild: Zola Gorgon

Süleyman (English)

Süleyman, I cannot be expected to keep track of which dude in your harem is currently greenlit or not, so listen – why don’t you write me a list explaining who is currently good and who is bad?

“I Iove you!” he said.

1. What you desire, you resolve to pursue; according to your resolve, so is your deed; and according to your deed, so you reap.

I said nothing for a moment, then turned with icy politeness. “Forgive my asking, but what exactly is the source of your love?”

2. I’m trying to understand things which are really hard to understand.

“It’s you, of course, you are the source of my love!”

“Me?” I said, trying to sound surprised.

“Yes, you!” he cried out, and looked at me wistfully, like a child asking for something it knows quite well it won’t get. My heart began to beat with pity and dismay, and so I was forced to act out a charade so diabolically improbable that it would seem out of place in one of Shakespeare’s plays.

3. As many animals serve a man, so does each man serve God. Without His sanction not even a blade of grass can move.

27. I’ll pass on, I’ll make triumph on the way.

85. One should deliberate serious matters first completely possessed by Dionysus, then sober.

“Sure, I love you too,” I said, hoping to be done with it, go home and get some redeeming sleep. Looking into his desperate eyes, I should have guessed what I had set in motion. Even the most ignorant catch, like dogs, the scent of thunder. A tumultuous wave lifted me onto its crest and carried me away, incessant and demanding. The storm raged on and on, for days, months – a year passed by. All prior knowledge shatters if you forget who you are, but I remembered, and lived to see the end of it. Leaving behind the wicker gate of the Garden of Evil, my heart quickened and my brothers took me in their arms and poured me a delicious wine.

4. Brothers attended the place where I arrived. From where were they born? By what do they subsist? On what are they founded? By who regulated, can they drink so much, ye wise men?

Your wine is too strong, my brothers, to drink of it often. Still, I will come back for more. Remember, my brothers, hiccups like that are winged prayers, they can be heard even at Baalbek.

There will always be men like him, or perhaps I should say, boys like him, who take their own measures against what’s great in you, and hate it not for what it is, but for what they themselves are, or aren’t.

5. When I’m received among the Angels, at what times will he think of me?

They can envy even a child. They talk about reason but theirs is a lunatic sensitivity. May the saints toss them some manners before the fall.

6. I swear that I will faithfully, loyally and honorably serve my lovers and their legitimate successors, and dedicate myself to them with all my strength, sacrificing, if necessary, my life to defend them.

In the subway station it’s cold as marble. The jaws of the tunnel are tender and beyond must be the sea, where the storms rage. Hallelujah!

7. Make a pledge and mischief is nigh.

As his kindness ran out, I refused to surrender, no doubt magical and superstitious; nevertheless, I was only trying to be heroic. So, what am I going to do now? I intend to show that my honour is valued more highly than my own life. Love does not change, yet it is the cause of all changes.

11. Marcus, may God bless you.

I know it’s easier to answer the prayers of a man who has answered the prayers of others.

The goddesses Anath and Astarte were blended into one deity, called Atargatis.

I know it’s easier to answer the prayers of a man who has answered the prayers of others.

He Who Rides on the Clouds. In Phoenician he was called Baal Shamen, Lord of the Heavens.

13. What’s the meaning of my name? Gift from God.

95. Und wenn die Welt voll Teufel wär und wollt uns gar verschlingen, so fürchten wir uns nicht so sehr, es soll uns doch gelingen.

30. Who? Me? Honour, glory, and eternal victory!

Whenever true love appears (and death shall enter in through my window) it will be its own evidence. He looks Minoan. He looks Byzantine. He looks Bactrian. He’s got the look that I like. There will be no confusion. There will be no confusion. There will be no confusion.

38. When Armenians reach the summit of their climax it really does cascade.

39. You know, he really could have saved our friendship; he could have restored it to happiness and virtue, but would not. Coward!

62. Blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted.

93. By means of the beautiful lips that He who created me let me possess, I kissed with my mouth: the drug dealer, the bartender, the skater dude, the architect, the painter, the diplomat, and all the other ones too.

Now he who rose up against you, and there was evil in him, Süleyman – forget about him. Now the cakes of saffron, Süleyman. You fly as a hawk, you cackle as a goose, Süleyman. That secret shape, being your two eyebrows, Süleyman, are like the two arms of the scales weighing each day and night. What then is it, Süleyman? Your eyes flood all of our hearts with light.

Text: Ian Memgard
Image: Zola Gorgon

My Boyfriend

Watching him snort.

Maybe I should go back to my world tour.

I am stronger by it than the strong, I have power by it more than the mighty.

I’ve been provided, my boyfriend has provided it to me.

The place of restraint is opened. The place of restraint is opened to my soul.

His body is stretched out, the steps are lifted up, and so are my thighs.

I am weak and feeble. I am weak and motionless in the presence of my boyfriend.

I have stabbed my own heart in the making, performing things for my boyfriend.

I have opened up to myself every highway in town.

I have become a prince. I have become glorious.

I have been provided with what is necessary.

I have shot arrows, I have wounded the prey.

I have been provided with a million enchantments.

I smell the air coming forth from his nose; I am exalted by reason of this thing.

I have made an end of my failings; I have removed all my defects.

I am the Satrap of my boyfriend.

My poetry was so brand new that my boyfriend fucked me numerous times that night. Many people heard about it and wrote it down in their diaries. Afterwards my boyfriend said, “God can do anything – that is why carbon dating equipment works and that’s also why I can fuck you this much”. We used to live in peace for many months. Sheep played in every vale and valley. Then my boyfriend got bored. He held a conference and told all his friends about a coming war. He said the battles were, “flesh vs spirit, truth vs lies, love vs hate, sanctified angels vs demons”. The things my boyfriend told his friends really amazed me. When we got home from the conference my boyfriend pulled up a book that was lying in a pile with a bunch of papers on the table and showed it to me.

“Let’s look at this book”, he said.

I opened it and flipped through the pages one by one. I looked at him and asked, “Now what do you say?”

“Have you understood what the book is about?”

“It’s a book about claims”, I replied.

“Dude”, he said and patted me on the shoulder. Later on, after a few beers, my boyfriend started informing me about how to fill out claim documents by writing the cost of each warrant and it didn’t take me long to understand how it was done.

“Starting tomorrow, I am asking you to come and help me with my work”, he said and looked to see if I would accept or refuse. From then on, I became his great assistant in preparing claims according to travel application documents that came from the government. I did the work with great effort and care until my boyfriend was happy.

“Now listen”, he told me one day after praying for us. “Sit here and rest. Don’t worry because here you are at home. I will take care of you, and God willing, I will get us what we need.” I thought he was joking. It is painful to think your boyfriend is joking when he is being serious. This made him very angry. “Name the market where you can buy a boyfriend, and I’ll go buy a new one for you if you can’t take me seriously!” he said and slapped me across the face. I was so surprised. I thought his hand was stuck solidly only to my heart. It surprised me even more when he called me a faggot at mass. “So if you, my dear boyfriend, the person in whom I place all my trust, start calling me a faggot during mass, let me remind you being a faggot is not a disease! You know very well that when things go from bad to worse, you’ll be seeking me out – I am gone!” I ran away in tears.

Later that evening he took me out dancing. We had such a good time I completely forgot about what had happened. If I could tolerate being called a faggot at mass, I could also tolerate a slap now and then; just a moment to donate what the heart allows. Now, if you’re listening to my story, you’ll notice I talk about memories. Is it even possible to live without belonging to anyone? My boyfriend is an ill tempered man.

So, they say he’s a bad boy. Tell me, how bad is he exactly? People say he’s using me, and the lies they have spread have traveled all the way to Brussels, to Paris – from Paris they came back to Berlin, and from Berlin the lies even reached Tokyo! What is it with my boyfriend’s name? The clothes that he wears fit him very well and make him look good. When they see me walking next to him downtown, it troubles them. I reject the greetings of a bunch of clowns. What do they want me to tell them? After all, a person’s reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it. They criticize my boyfriend at night and during the day too. They do not get tired. They have disrespected my boyfriend a lot. I’m tired of these people, the kin of mosquitoes. They keep on gossiping with their friends and flatmates. Sure, my boyfriend’s conduct might be a little impudent, but his heart has never lacked principles. Has anyone else had this type of boyfriend in the last 8 years? I’m the only one, and this is my vindication, my authenticity as herald of our love. My boyfriend’s presence scares people. I don’t know why. I’m tired of telling people to leave me and my boyfriend alone, the way they left Jesus on the cross.

Text: Ian Memgard
Translation and image: Zola Gorgon

Love of my life

A friend told me that for her dad, transitioning to female meant being allowed to do whatever you wanted. I used to think the same thing about being a guy, that’s the way I pictured it. Once I saw a goth bartender smoking morosely, leaning against the counter, completely indifferent to me. It was as though the clouds parted above my head – divine revelation. The wrist of a louche goth bartender smoking – imagine possessing such a thing!

I thought: Thank you for smoking, thank you for not smiling.

Margaret Atwood said one good thing about guys: “My love for them is visual; that is the part of them I would like to possess.”

I sought the love of my life tirelessly in the mirror. Every time I remembered I couldn’t be that boy, I was devastated, as if I’d been given a hard right hook by God father himself. The point of the Quixotic project was to make the impossible real every day, for myself if not for others; to realize what being “a hot guy” meant to me and to take that into my life, that freedom –

To feel joy, to enjoy sex – to be allowed to do whatever I wanted.

Where’s the line between wanting to have and wanting to be? Do people figure that shit out on their own?

Of course, plenty of men were boring. I saw them… the men… on the street, or on the Ubahn, and I thought, I’d never want to be that one, it’d be just as bad as being me. And if I’d had to be myself but as a man – awful! I’d be short, and probably bald, like all the men in my family, with a genetic tendency to put on a beer belly and… no, that wasn’t what I wanted at all. And I know myself, so I’m sure I’d have had some sort of hang up about my cock too.

Actually I don’t have any hang ups about my cunt which is essentially perfect.

The hottest guy I ever fucked, I mean girls went home with him if he just talked to them on the street, he had a hang up about his cock too – his cock which was essentially perfect.

A trans feminine friend told me there’s lots of things men feel they can’t do. Fair enough – lots of men are scared of being fags, for example. I would have liked to be a fag. Gay men seem to like each other and themselves and to fuck without feeling degraded by it. No one really seems to love women; not heterosexual women, not heterosexual men, and not queers either – definitely not them, for whom being a woman is cringe and basic.

Scared of faggotry, yes – what scared men don’t understand is that fags are naturally cool and besides seem comfortable with each other and like they’re having fun, while lesbians and queers on the other hand spend most of their energy accusing each other of emotional abuse; constantly calling for retribution which will not arrive, as if the world was just, as if there was a judge or teacher who’d listen when you say what’s been done to you and dole out punishment to the deserving.

But since the people who’ve cemented their traumas left the game long ago, they only punish each other. No, it’s not as much fun to be fettered to the ground with a heavy, aching body and think about your marginalisation, as it would be to skate recklessly, do an ollie high above the setting sun – to suck cock in the gardens of paradise, before shame or misfortune.

No one knew what “nonbinary” was when I was in my late teens, fortunately, but I just refused to tell people if I was male or female, and so I lived in a true autistic one-person utopia. I loved not having to tell or to know, pure subjectivity. Then nonbinary people came along and crushed my dream by realising the project in the lamest possible way and I’ve never forgiven them for that.

The dream had something beyond that, not to put your finger on… rather to escape the finger, and the mortifying eyes of others. No boxes checked at all, rather than begging for a third choice, as if any part of your innermost soul could be validated by a form.

The joy in my life depended on how well I convinced myself that my fantasy was or would be real, to what degree it went from my dreams and into my understanding of reality. I was waiting for something good, for which I’d wait my whole life. Like awaiting the saviour. Is that what it means to have faith?

That faith is lost to me. I’ve learned a few things about men and they’re not what I thought; the woman who best can embody the glint in the eyes of a really mischievious faggot is a cool dyke who truly doesn’t give a fuck. Imagine seeing your face every day and never seeing anything, only what you wish it was. The wasted beauty of that unloved face. Instead of seeing yourself in the mirror and thinking – ah, there you are!

The love of my life.

If every soul cracked and the boundaries between the inside and the outside finally collapsed, no identity would remain, just a core of pure yearning too supermassive to fit into a human life.

At last you’re on the frequency of angels.

Text & image: Zola Gorgon

Husdjur

Jag går och jag kommer aldrig tillbaka säger jag. Han får något mjukt i blicken, går ner på knä och knäpper sina händer. När han gör så slutar det vara oavgjort, jag är den dåliga. Men det är det bara jag som vet. Han kan inte se min skuld. Jag är ensam i den. Det räcker för att jag ska börja längta hem till honom fastän han är rakt framför mig.

Familjen håller sig själv som husdjur. Familjen är liten som ett gatukök på stationen. Ska vi inte bara göra något trevligt istället? Säger han. Vi kan gå och köpa kött till din gryta. Det är sol och på vägen äter vi pho. Slaktarens händer är blodiga och vi får med oss en tung påse kött. Vi har gått i 40 minuter och nu är det långt hemifrån.

Jag kände mig vuxen för sex år sen när han tog mig med på ett seminarium om samtida kärlek där det var nedsläckt och tjocka sammetsgardiner bakom scenen. Föreläsaren sa att ingen idag är någons förstahandsval och jag tänkte att det inte skadade att tänka så om kärleken. Kände mig vuxen. Men för varje dag blir jag mer och mer som ett barn.

Jag vaknar i natten av att det luktar ben och tänker på skelett som smulas sönder, hur man ska sila buljongen, vad man ska göra av resterna. Jag tänker det är bra att han kan hjälpa mig med det.

Kan du inte se skapande på mig, som en film eller en bekant säger han. Jag får känslan av att det är något jag inte fattat. Livet är inte som jag beskriver ovan. Det är en värdig plats för en själ.

Text: Frutta
Bild: Lisa Vanderpumps Rose av Frutta

Tag Archives: contemporary writing