Jawbone

by Mónica Ojeda

But sometimes I think a story, even if it’s made up, can say things that are true. In my opinion, that’s what sets the best horror stories apart from the worst: they achieve a true form of fear.

That only works in literature, where words are like Russian dolls, or as you said in class, a kind of “mise en abyme” within our own imaginations. I think now I understand what you meant: words open inhospitable and invisible doors in our heads, and when those doors are opened, there’s no turning back.

The unknown, I was saying, is obviously always terrifying, but the horrific, that which truly petrifies our organs, is what we halfway understand: it’s close enough that we should comprehend it, but nevertheless, we can’t. I’ll explain: when you don’t understand something, you always have the hope of understanding it in the future. But what do you do when something that’s been in front of you all along suddenly reveals itself as unrecognizable and impenetrable? The horrendous, I mean, is not the unknown, but that which simply cannot be known.

And here’s the interesting part, Miss Clara: white horror resembles cosmic horror in terms of that mystic sensation. White, as you said in class, represents purity and light, but also the absence of color, death, and indefinition. It represents that which merely by showing itself anticipates terrible things that cannot be known. It’s such a clean and luminous color that it seems to be on the verge of becoming cloudy, on the verge of reaching its perfect pallor. In other words, white is like silence in a horror movie: when it appears, you know that something awful is about to happen. This is because it can easily be perverted and contaminated. In fact, one of the disquieting aspects of the color white is that it is pure potential, always close to becoming anything else. Do you understand? The contrast between the best and the worst that white brings to the imagination is so great that it gives me chills. That’s why the experience of white horror is that of dazzling blindness—the fear not of what’s hiding in the shadows, but of what’s revealed in the brilliant and desaturated light and leaves us speechless.

That chapter you made us read from Moby Dick, about the whiteness of the whale, was so important for both Fernanda and me. All the signs we had overlooked in the stories and novels we had read suddenly acquired new meaning: from Melville’s enormous whale to Poe’s and Lovecraft’s Antarctic explorations; the Arctic, where Shelley’s creature escapes; the man whom Chambers describes as a “plump white grave-worm”; Bram Stoker’s White Worm; Machen’s white people; the white color of ghosts and corpses … The totality and immensity of the void are condensed in that maximum light that doesn’t refract any color. Lovecraft’s mysticism has to do with the void; that’s how white horror is related to cosmic horror. What I like most about his stories is that his gods—his ancient, primordial beings, his enormous creatures more powerful than the human race can imagine—are nothing at all like the gods of the religions we know. They have no human characteristics, therefore, they are terrible, but not because they represent evil. They aren’t Beelzebub or Lucifer. They aren’t malevolent. They do not exist to tempt us or to drag us toward the darkness, like in Christian mythology in which we are the center of creation. What’s interesting about Lovecraft’s Elder Things is that they cannot be understood within that framework. When the idea of good and evil disappears, all that’s left is nature and its violence. I think if there’s only one God, I mean, one Elder Thing, an eternal, omnipotent creatur...

There’s something that unites pleasure with pain and fear, don’t you think? I don’t know exactly what it is, but it has to do with the hole that swells in our stomachs when we’re on the verge of falling. What I felt that night was something like that: the vertigo that makes you lose your balance and at the same time makes you more aware than ever that you are a body and that one day you will die. It’s funny, but most of the time we forget that we’re animals made up of organs that seem right out of a nightmare. The heart, for example, is a hideous organ. It’s always there, beating, but we never think about it because if we did, we might learn to fear it.

Yes, it’s true that I lied a little, Doc, but now I’m telling the truth. I always end up telling you the truth. I’ll tell you what I think: I think everyone’s wanted to bite someone at some point in their lives. No big deal. Sometimes ladies see a baby and say: “I’m going to eat you right up,” and couples even say “I want to taste you!” Right? You know they do. We all play at biting because it’s reeeally instinctive. And what are we? Animals! So the biting thing, or that feeling of wanting to consume the people you love, is more normal than it seems. We all experience that desire. So it doesn’t have to be a lesbian thing or a sexual thing. It’s another kind of instinct completely, right? It just so happens that most people don’t end up really biting anyone, because they don’t want to hurt anyone and because they’re afraid of seeing themselves as animals.

The immense truth of the void. You know it well, don’t you? Of course you do. Of course you know it. You know that girls who dream too much end up sick in the head, but now you’re going to learn something important. Be happy. This is the color of fear. Milk white. Death white. God’s snowy skull. Welcome to the volcanic jaws of my house. Let us dive in.”