To Wallow in Ash & Other Sorrows Read online

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  The rays of the sun burned heavy on Lee’s eyelids and he struggled toward being fully awake. His stomach felt like it might burst if he stretched out too much. This worked in conjunction with his entire groin area throbbing desperately in need of relief. Groggily, he stammered towards the bathroom to help undo this urine-based pain. After peeing for what felt like forever, he greedily swallowed down a cup of lukewarm water and headed back to his bedroom, hoping to sleep off some of the pain and maybe remove the subtle spin of the room.

  Stumbling back through his living room, he caught something out of the corner of his eye. On his cluttered coffee table, sitting on one end like a monolith, sat a black, VHS tape. His place was a mess, but he knew that he hadn’t put that there, or at least he didn’t think he had. A shiver ran through him and he approached the tape. It was unlabeled and there was no case anywhere. He had a VHS player in the basement somewhere and his body tried to tug him back into the warm nest of his bed; it tried to convince him to do it later. But he had to know, what the hell was this?

  Lee got himself dressed and headed down into the damp basement, his head throbbing with every heavy step. As he reached the bottom of the stairs, his socked feet chilled from the cold concrete, bits and pieces of the previous night came rushing at him. He tried to catch them, but the flashes came and went without pause, without consideration for his current state of being. But then the picture started to reveal itself. As he removed the VHS player from its damp, brittle cardboard box, he remembered Sonja. Well, he never forgot Sonja, but he remembered her from last night. “Could that have been real?” he wondered.

  As he walked back up the stairs, VHS player in hand, he contemplated the bizarre shadow-memories that were coming from the black in his mind. He wasn’t sure if it was possible, it must have been a dream, but he could feel her warmth on his face, in his hands, as they talked and drank the previous night. He’d had dreams like this before, but it felt so much more real this time. Maybe this is what happens when you black out with a heart heavy with sorrow, with grief; but then again, it wasn’t like that was a new experience for him, either.

  Hooking up the VHS player to his, thankfully outdated, tube TV, Lee pondered the possibilities of having done drugs last night. It hadn’t happened in a long time and was a rare occurrence, but it wasn’t totally impossible. Maybe he drank too much, did some hallucinogen, passed out, and had crazy real dreams about her. Or maybe he was losing it. What if she had been there? He pushed the mad idea from his mind and popped the black tape into his ancient, top-loading VHS player, while he tried to piece together the evening, the actual evening. He hoped his ancient player still worked, that it wouldn’t ruin the mystery tape.

  The TV opened to a blue screen, which transformed into static for several seconds. Suddenly the screen went black, as auto-tracking lines warped and skipped over the picture. There was a dull humming sound coming out of the TV speaker that in turn warped and warbled before resuming its constant drone. On the center of the screen was a blotchy swath of tan. The video came into focus and the grainy film stock betrayed Lee for a moment, as he struggled to recognize that he was on screen. In the low light, there was the shining, sweating body of a hairy man, past his prime.

  What struck Lee, immediately, was that the man in the video was straddling a woman. It was hard to tell through the poor quality of the video, but he appeared to be sitting on her stomach with his knees pinning her arms to the ground. Neither appeared to be wearing any clothes, and on further study of the hazy markings on the woman’s ribs and chest, he recognized her as Sonja. A tremor forced its way through his body as he realized that he was the man on top of her. He recognized the protruding belly, and surrealist tattoos on his own legs and arms as matching those of the man on the screen.

  In the time that he took to notice these things, and the moments of shock and disconnect that followed, the droning hum got louder and more intense. Almost as though it was building to a crescendo, a crescendo that would never come. With hollow eyes, screen-Lee picked up a brick from off screen, raised it above screen-Sonja, and smashed it downward, into her face. Screen-Sonja started convulsing, spitting up blood and teeth, as screen-Lee brought it up and smashed it down again. Lee felt his chest tighten and his arm and face went numb. The acidic contents of his stomach bubbled and writhed their way to the surface of his throat, causing him to puke all over himself. Panting through pained breaths, he uttered his refrain, “What the fuck?!” over and over and over.

  On the screen, the camera moved closer to the action, trying to get a tighter frame with less black around it. As it moved, screen-Lee continued to smash the rock onto screen-Sonja, who had stopped trembling and convulsing. There were no longer bubbles in the blood pooling in her face, as her face barely existed. Blood swelled on the ground surrounding them, like a halo around her head. Dead Saint-Sonja.

  Lee tried to focus on the picture, focus on what was happening, but it was all too horrible. His tears further obscured the picture, but he focused as best as he could to try to figure out what the fuck was happening. Screen-Lee had a vacant, animalistic expression. He was an emotional void, yet filled with primal violence. He kept bringing the brick downwards, smashing it into the soup that had once been screen-Sonja. Screen-Lee was coated in crimson blood, and the brick almost slipped from his grip on the last few strikes.

  When the violence was over, Screen-Lee stood up and walked off screen, dropping the blood covered brick as he vanished. The image stood still for another minute, fixed on screen-Sonja’s lifeless body, or at least what was left of it, before returning to static. Lee’s heart was racing and his brain felt numb. He tried to stand up, to leave the confines of his apartment; he felt like he couldn’t breathe. He fell back onto the couch. He was seeing stars, like he might pass out, but he pushed passed it and willed himself to his feet. He ran as quickly as he could to the outside world, where he collapsed to the ground and, once again, threw up.

  After several minutes, the alcohol rich contents of his stomach started coming up brownish-red. He hadn’t thrown up blood since the first few weeks after true-Sonja died. All he could remember doing, during that time, was drinking until he finally fell asleep, waking up, throwing up, and then doing it all over again. By the end of the first week, there was blood in his puke; by the end of the third week, it was almost exclusively blood. That’s when he curtailed his drinking and started focusing on living again. Certainly not the longest bender in the world, but it was what he needed, and then he needed to get his head straight.

  This blood reminded him of that time. It reminded him of her, in the most pathetic way. Lying on the sidewalk behind his apartment building, both covered in, and surrounded by, vomit, some of which had blood in it; what a time to think of all he’d lost. His focus ricocheted between the horror on the video and the events of the prior night. She was there; he could feel her touch, still on his face. The haze remained, but he knew that she had been there, he knew that they spoke and touched, but he also knew that the tape was from last night; there was no other way.

  Struggling through the murk surrounding him, Lee got back into his apartment and cleaned himself up in the sink, as best he could. He needed to know what happened, and the only source of possible information was on that horrible tape. Walking back into the living room, he grabbed a bottle of bourbon and a glass off his kitchen counter. This wasn’t going to be easy. He rewound the tape and braced himself for another round of tragedy.

  When it was finished, he felt like his soul had died, but he knew he had to study it; maybe there was a clue or something, anything, which would tell him what happened. Someone else was there with them. The camera moved, who was holding it? Through tears and a numb mind, he tried to recall if he had ever seen this dimly lit room before. He prayed to the nothing, asking for even a glimpse of something on the tape that would lead him to an answer. He prayed to Sonja, begging for forgiveness and help.

  Lee watched the tape four more
times, focusing his eyes on a quarter of the screen each time, trying to find anything that would tell him where this happened. Most of the screen was pure black, aside from the bright glow of his sweating body atop hers. He had tried his best, through these re-watches, to not focus too much on what was going on in the center of the picture. Hearing the wet smacking sounds made his blood freeze and he felt like his heart might either stop or explode. But he knew he had to keep searching.

  He finally forced himself to truly focus on the murder before him, the murder he committed, the murder of his previously dead wife, somehow. He poured himself a drink and gulped it down as the tape rewound, and poured another as he pressed play. The alcohol mildly numbed the miles of knots in his stomach, but they returned as soon as the image reappeared on screen.

  Through dead eyes, he watched the horror of killing Sonja again and again, hoping to see something that would reveal a clue, or anything. He focused on every strike, every drop of blood, and every gargled breath. With each rewind, he felt himself drawn closer to the screen, closer to her. His eyes fixated on way they touched, his sweat dripping and splashing onto the red stains on her breasts; the breasts he once squeezed, licked, and teased. The breasts of the woman he loved so deeply.

  Rewinding it again, Lee tried to feel her underneath him, as she had been so many times when they were together, his weight pressing down on her as she pressed up towards him. He struggled to keep the sensation of her sweaty skin against his, he tried to breathe her in; he tried to keep her with him. Looking at her beautiful face on the screen, grimy with sweat and old, blackened dust, with its vacant expression, he was reminded of her lifelessness on the day she actually died; he was reminded of her cold, heavy hand.

  Lee struggled as he watched, trying to hold her again, to keep her with him. He couldn’t let her go, no not again. His heart filled with warmth as he stared into her eyes on the screen, his face pressing against the bubbled glass. He ached for her embrace. The impact of the brick came down again, as it always would. And Lee kept watching, as he always would. They could be together; all he had to do was keep-pressing rewind.

  THE PRINCE OF MARS

  Bill Lee was a man born from the wealth of one of the most prosperous adding-machine families of his era. He was a man who mainlined the universe, and it all came tumbling forth from beneath his crooked finger, his scratchy voice, and his distempered aura. He was a man who traveled to the Interzone and brought us back so many slimy and cracked treasures. He was a man who knew how to throw a hell of a party. He had one tale, in particular though, which few people ever heard about: his time spent on Mars.

  He wouldn’t really talk about it, back when he was still with us. He’d regale the lot with tales of Interzone, that deep black abyss of expats, writers, junkies, and queers; of Mugwumps, agents of various nefarious organizations, and all the ground and finely silted centipede he could handle. He walked hand in hand with the black meat and his veins devoured it whole. But in my time with him, he had said little on the subject of Mars or why he couldn’t go back. At the end, what he did say, however, I will share with you.

  One early morning, after the Kansas house had been shaken loose from its foundation, and the echoes of gunfire still rang out across the rising sun, we sat naked on the living room floor, passing a Peruvian cricket laced joint back and forth. His flesh trembled and sagged as he blew out a cloud of noxious smoke, filling the room with a sort of hazy illumination. He had wanted to tie off and slink back into the warm, cosmic abyss, but Marcus, Bill’s favorite snack, had taken the case of antique, cartoonish mad-scientist-style syringes - that he wouldn’t shoot without - and hid them somewhere. I think they had belonged to his first wife, Ilse, but I’ve never been totally sure. The Peruvian cricket was starting to crawl too deeply into the back of my eyes, so I got up to grab a few bottles of Coke and a 750 of something special that I had been hiding in my bag.

  I had stumbled into a swank party earlier in the night and stolen a perfectly placed bottle of Belvedere Vodka. I don’t recall much from the incident – drunk and a bit out of my mind - and I thought I had run out without being spotted. But the blood in my shoes told me that there was a long, horrible walk to Bill’s place; and the cuts, scrapes, and bruises that cover the rest of my body cried out that they eventually found me and we exchanged some words. What they didn’t find, however, was the Vodka. Thank the darkness.

  I poured two strong Vodka Cokes and passed one off to Bill. The dense cloud of smoke had parted as I walked through it and was now swirling and dancing across the room. After a few pulls on my drink, the tension and throb in both my heads started to subside. Crick always fucks with my blood pressure for a few minutes and makes it feel like my cock is going to sprout out a hernia and grow a prick of its own just to release some pressure. Sometime later, when my eyes no longer felt like they’re pushed up against themselves, Bill spoke.

  “The Old Black of the Universe isn’t as impenetrable as they make it out to be,” a dry croak came out as he shifted mid-sentence. “All that technology of the physical, knowledge of the material world, the hollow idolatry of the scientific ethos. We have an emptiness, deep within our guts, and it can take us anywhere. You can devour the stars and unite with the eternal darkness. We can transcend our viral nature and fuck the cosmos into submission.”

  We’d had conversations like this. Usually with the light of dawn piercing through the curtains, always having ingested, inhaled, pushed, or popped some combination of exotic substances. Typically surrounded by the bodies of anyone who showed up to the house, and almost always in some form of post-coital state and naked. Often he would tell me stories I had heard time and time again – Morocco, Mexico, Ayahuasca, old Junkie tales of greatness, New York, London, Genesis, Wilson, Kerouac, Gysin, Ballard, Smith, the old St. Louis Priest who lived down the way from him growing up – he’d make Bill watch while he stabbed hundreds of needles into his own thighs only to leave them there, under his vestments; he’d tell me about Salt Chunk Mary and Foot and a Half George, as though they were from his own life, from his own time in the dirt. I never had the heart to tell him just how many times I’d read ‘You Can’t Win,’ my own copy dog-eared, with notes filling up almost every margin.

  In the 50’s, Bill went to the Amazon to find The Spirit of the Vine and, hopefully he thought, clean the tar from his veins. While he and Ginsburg published a book, The Yage Letters, from this time and he spoke publicly about his pilgrimage south, he remained silent regarding several occult aspects of his Ayahuasca Rituals. In one passage in the book he writes to Ginsberg, “Yage is space time travel.” This is what he spoke to me about on that early summer morning.

  “On the seventh, and final night, of the Yage Ritual, my Cosmic traversal was initiated. We had prepared for a month; fasting, sleeping in the dirt, daily chants and songs. Between the withdrawals and Tropical Malaise, I was a filthy pile of sweat, expelling a dark green vomit for several days; I was too weak to fight the shakes, to get up to piss, or to eat. Eventually, I gave into the jungle allowing myself to be taken - to be inhabited by the ancient spirits that haunt the oldest of growth,” he looked at me, a man guarding an ancient wound. “I imagined a city of lepers in the earth beneath me, all selling their discarded and broken parts to rugged tourists brave enough to explore the lands under our own. If you get too close, they breathe their rot at you, then you become one of them.”

  He finished his drink and I poured us another, “For the six prior nights, we had ingested increasingly larger doses of the brew, tempering our spirits for the journey that await us on the seventh night. For each ritual night, the dread of our leper under lords intensified and my guts felt like I had an acid enema, which clawed up through my guts, into my stomach, and poured out of my mouth. I was unsure if my body could handle any more of this abuse, but knowing that with one more cup I would be done, and not finishing the Ceremony would render this entire ordeal useless, I pushed on. Upon choking down the last bitter brew the ground
quaked, and wounded, seeping hands rose up from the damp earth. As those around me retched, screamed, and sung eldritch songs in a forgotten tongue, my eyes rose to the shattered sky. Fingerless fists and fleshless bones scratched at my feet and ankles but my eyes remained locked above, as grain-sized stars expanded and grew to immense size, pushing past me and into the coal abyss that swallowed the forest behind. The shrieks, retching, and hypnotic singing became a dull itch as the Zodiac fell upon me. Then all went dark.”

  I thought long and hard about the words he was telling me, fighting intoxication and sleep-depravity. We shared a bump of Red Sea centipede powder. Bearded Fireworm is unusually toxic, but taken in small hits nasally, it creates a vibrant connection to your brain about whatever you engage in. If you take too much sleep apnea, paralysis, high blood pressure, insomnia, a sense of immense heat on your heels, boiling skin, and possibly even death may await you. For him, this would grant further clarity of his memories, for me it would keep me awake and allow me to actualize his story. I could swim through the word-virus and decipher the inner truth. I would become my own living exegesis.

  We waited a bit, to let the drip down finish and clear our throats of that nauseously sour taste by tipping back another Vodka Coke. He continued, “I awoke on an ocean of red sand as far as I could see in all directions. My throat was dry, my lips parched and cracked, head splitting, and lungs burning. The sun bore down on my back as I struggled to get myself onto my feet. As I shook off the dust, robust winds shifted the sands around me. It took me several moments to realize that I was the force behind the chaos. I assumed that this sand was lighter than normal, but soon learned that I was just more powerful; unnaturally powerful. The first step I took launched me into the air and I came crashing down into a rock that, upon the impact of my foot, cracked and crumbled into pieces.