16 Feb 2008

Liquid Paris

[from Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens]


In a district of Paris that peels off the Left Bank and drops all signs of French culture:

The air smells like a septic tank. The first thing we see are hundreds of reptilians with gnarled green skin hanging over jagged spinal columns, their eyes as large and vacant as space. Music like drone-trips in India swims across us from invisible musicians. Trees like smooth, featureless corpses stand around the field in neat file, their limbs blowing in the breeze.

I met Kilo while he was waiting tables at Ceci Est un RĂªve. He stood in a cold blue glow, surrounded by artifact statues—dream erotica, Mayan death sequences, liquid-bust of Nerval. He explained himself and what it meant to be a reptile—“We're hollowing out our own realm of consciousness”—I was intrigued by his flesh, so I took the trip.

A week later, I'm standing in a field that rolls like waves under a sky pulsing like an open artery. My friends and I stand looking like skeletons among the fleshed, our beady black eyes spinning nervously in their sockets. I dare not exchange a word with the reptiles around me. In fact, I can do nothing but wonder what dreamy circumstance has brought me here, away from the sedating Paris air and the comfort of a concrete reality. Soon they lead us into a cave and turn on a projector that sends light flickering against the walls. “To empty your head,” one of the reptiles tells me in garbled speech, “before acquiring new vision necessary first to exorcise primary one.”

“New vision?”

“It is what you’ve come for, is it not? I can feel your mind is ripe.”

The lights make my cortex soft and I start to experience mild hallucinations: shades of gray, rusted battleships floating on the ceiling. I stop being able to differentiate between my friends and the reptilians. When consciousness is adequately fragmented and the sun has set outside the cave, the reptilians make a stew that they claim will tune us to their vision. It tastes like battery acid with all the wrong herbs mixed in. After downing the rancid thing, this is what I see:

All males and females reduced to two shapes: protoplasmic rods and fat ectoplasmic spheres. There is a large orb hanging in the center pumping out trillions of the smaller shapes. The whole scene spins like bulbs in a disco lamp and zooms out to a domed, shadowed arena with pink fleshy walls. I zoom out further, fall through an ear canal, and see that I have just been looking at the inside of Max Ernst’s head—no brain, just a non-stop visual sequence. Or maybe the shapes are each individual thought-impulse encapsulated.

Somewhere in the trance, I mutter, “Remember to never be a reptile,” and fall asleep.
And what dreams I have! I am in Les Deux Magots eating jambon on a baguette—A waitress nudges me with a cup of coffee and whispers, "Si tu veux planer, je vais te montrer"—The sky is rotting with spoiled meat for clouds—Parisians wait in dark alleys with flesh dripping off their faces like candle wax. They murmur at me and grab at my clothes like cinema zombies. One of them says, "J'ai de l'asphysie visuel, couper pour injection,” then collapses into the cement—I sit in a small bistro and watch a piano man roll cigarettes of black tobacco with his right hand while keeping a bassline with his left. He lights up and falls into the melody like raindrops in a lake.

I wake up in the bistro of my dreams and find Paris asphyxiated, fragmented like the vision through the reptilian’s flickering lights. The bistro behind me fades into the ground. A man walks by with hot red pupils streaming out of his sockets and the air unravels like a reel of film, spinning in a projector as the movie ends.

I see a liquid Eiffel Tower evaporating in the distance…

3 comments:

Indigo said...

Wow! That's not a Paris that *I* want on my vacation plans, heh heh. You are really good at painting powerful images with words. Excellent!

Robert said...

more wickedness, sir!

Russell CJ Duffy said...

incredible images in these words. not like paris i have walked around though!