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Midway through our mortal life I’d walked And found myself within a forest dark —Dante, The Inferno, Canto I
it emerges from the bottom of the pillowcase: an ant, curious and probing. This house appears to be full of them, and why not? Good eats aplenty around here.
We found the guy who “Right.” The sheriff clears his throat. He sees an ant on the floor and stomps on it. “Thank Christ. Where is he?” The deputy makes a face, half-grimace, half-plea. “He’s in the walls.”
Another high, wail of insanity curls through the massive house.
With a sigh and one more quick prayer (Jesus, don’t fail me now), she pulls herself out of her boatish Studebaker and walks over to the front door.
“I love you more today than yesterday,” she sings. “But not as much as tomorrowwww.”
The little girl has a mouthful of insects. A handful, too. Some of the insect cases have been smashed open, and she’s been sitting here among the glass, eating the bugs. Singing.
the girl’s aunt, a deeply unpleasant, haggish woman. Bettina hates thinking of her in those terms—men put so much effort into dehumanizing and diminishing her sex, she’s loath to contribute to the effort—but there’s just no other way to describe this particularly nasty specimen.
There’s an aneurysm crouched near her brain stem, waiting for the right time to pop—roughly three and a half years from now—after which she’ll leave behind two ex-husbands, a lizard named Comanche, and a humble little museum.
Because life is all about cycles.
Suck it up and deal with it, you old whiner. I’m so tired of that undervoice.
Don’t start thinking you’re special, Mary. Don’t start assuming there’s something unique about you. You’re old; that’s all this is. Besides, you know another word for unique? Crazy.
There’s an art to smiling. I’ve tried to learn it over the years, practicing in
the mirror (back when I could look in mirrors). Too much teeth and you look overeager. Too little teeth and you look nauseous. Too much eye and you look psychotic. Too little and you look lobotomized.
After he fired me, he laughed in this nervous way, like, whoo-boy-you’re-not-gonna-believe-this.
MARY. Stop that. Be Good. Their voices—the voices I give them in my head, I should say—are appalled.
There’s a corpse in the bathtub.
Back in my apartment, I have my sacred little bookshelf full of Loved Ones. It seems Nadine has her own sentimental real estate: a large bookcase jam-packed with books.
Not just any books, though. You can see from the spines, even at a glance, that all these books cover pretty similar territory: the occult, extraterrestrials, ghosts, demons, psychic phenomena,
books on mystical religions and Celtic, Roman, Hindu, Greek mythologies (appropriate, since cleaning this place is the so...
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Lack of sleep can cause all sorts of hallucinations. Auditory. Peripheral. People think they’re seeing insects that aren’t there. Marks on skin that aren’t there.”
No one sees me. I am invisible. It’s like I don’t even exist.
The laws of God I reject the laws of men I reject I KNOW ONLY THE LAWS OF THE DESERT it takes it will give it demands sacrifice blood is the way i am the punishing hand
i am the observed of all observers i am the observed of all observers i am the observed of all observers i am the observed of all observers i am the observed of all observers i am the observed of all observers
Ego Identity Begins with I I The Great Eye, through it, through me, through all things, what I see we see and who can prove otherwise mine are the only eyes with vision everything else is hearsay
The desert is cruel, but oh how that cruelty can be useful sometimes.
Mary, Mary, brain needs repair-y.
“Jesus. You’re gonna run away again? What are you, five?” And I can’t think of anything else to say, so I blurt out: “You owe me!”
Subterfuge.”
“Dante,” the old woman says next to me. She moved so quickly and quietly I almost gasp. “I don’t see great, but I do know these shelves like the back of my hand. You a fan?” “I’ve never read him.” “The greatest work of art ever written about a midlife crisis. Guess being middle-aged wasn’t any easier in the twelfth century.”
“basically, life … is life. Being human isn’t all that special. And an … identity doesn’t jump from body to body like some, some—” She waggles her thumb like someone trying to flag down a ride. “Hitchhiker?”
Hybristophilia
Things are only real in the sun. The sun burns things down to their purest, truest essences. Everything gets put into perspective. I’m safe in the sun.
The consciousness behind consciousness. The crawl space of consciousness.
I can hear the murmurs of the people interrogating me after they’d noticed I calmed down—but it’s a wah-wah, muted trumpet, Charlie Brown grown-ups sort of noise.
But even then, I was with you. You felt so alone because they tried to drive me from you. But I was there, waiting. You were just acting. You’ve always been such a good actor. You’re so good, you disappear into your role. But, Mary, that’s not you. You’re not quiet. You’re not forgettable. You’re not invisible.
“I guess I thought he was just—” “What, some serial murderer? That ridiculous, narrow-minded classification for the morbid rubbernecker?
And Burton’s father writes like a smart man trying to sound smarter. Which is just death.
You know what we all just really are? When you strip away the dumb expressions we all practice to try to look a certain way? Meat.
Good old Victor was the mayor now, and he’d played his part in keeping outsiders off Damon’s trail, but even he couldn’t stop this impromptu debriefing. No problem there; the house had plenty of quiet, private rooms where Damon could do with the woman (Meg, her name was Meg) what he wanted. In fact, Damon found it extra thrilling knowing it
But he was too curious. Midway through his work, after he’d sliced her fingerprints off, he left old Meg, bound but barely conscious, and went to spy on his brother and the sheriff through the crawl space. His beloved crawl space. He wanted to hear them squirm over his brilliance.
The Greek tragedies in his reading room would’ve ...
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Damon found it felt good to scream. It felt right. Now it was his turn to play the victim. To scream in horror and outrage at all the wrongs that had been done to him.
I indulged him in the self-pity; I was just so glad to have reached the end.
“Psychopomps.”
God, this book sucks. It’s practically unreadable. It’s pompous. And lifeless. And declamatory, in that way only theological texts can be. Phrases repeat and repeat and repeat, bleaching themselves of meaning, contradicting themselves when their orbits intersect.
Mortal life is but an act, and actors are the most loathsome creatures.
There is only the desert. The desert is pain, and what does pain demand but appeasement?
And do I even need them? That thought is so blasphemous it literally stops me in my tracks as I open up a panel to the crawl space.
“Of course I need them,” I hiss at myself. “They’re a part of who I am. Maybe the only part left.”
