will bernardara jr and james e. krendel-clark — excerpt from cenotaph
I entered the Cenotaph around noon. Vultures were swirling around ambiguously in the vicinity, in abundance; symbols laden with portent. Hot tears leaked from my left eye, like condensation from a fog machine, As ambiguous as the vultures, symbolically ambiguously gendered carcasses (symbols of decay, symbols of my gradually maddening mind) rotted with cold ambiguity in the waning strands of sunraystuff. The prey birds and the decomposing remains were just as ambiguous as the waning sun itself, coiled in its charbroil, and as far as I could ascertain, artificial, in this particular case, which was hardly any different than the typical state of things. The keys to my CODex-9000 P0LYTickler were badly corroded and I had to press them extra-hard to get any output, gritting my teeth with rage, until finally the thing just fizzled out and I was forced to chuck it off into the bushes, angrily. I had just spent my last nickel or so at the Penny Arcade, so I had nothing better to do, so to speak, than explore the nearest landmarks, the Cenotaph in particular. Exploration. This was the first in a series of fatal mistakes, and sets off the narrative of my story. Sets it off in a rather bleak light, a light which conceals more than it enlightens. As I descended gingerly the grime of the moss-eaten stairs (steps that writhed with bugs and pulsed with filthy, diseased, oily-nasty muck that consumed my left hip-joint and got my yoga all out-of-wack) that wended their way down through the chthonic, metallic deposits of dark, unnatural 3D-modeled Earth-striations, supposedly headed in the direction of some sort of “inner sanctum” (supposedly, because according to my moth-eaten map, while there could’ve been a commemorative bas-relief - which I wasn't sure whether or not I was looking forward to - it also might be a total dead-end, so vague were the outlines with which the maze was drawn). I was ready for it all to be over, even at the very start… for it to go absolutely nowhere so I could turn back, like some sort of mid Metroidvania that you uninstall after playing it for ten minutes, with the satisfaction of time-wasted, and shake this sense of an immanent execution that I kept detecting, like a naughty guillotine-blade hanging over me, that kept me going, slowly but surely. The Ambien blackout was kicking in. I had taken five or six or seventeen pills, crushed them up and banged it all intravenously (I was assisted in this injection by a groktroll, which disgusted me, but I was tickling the levers of a Robot Jox-themed pinball machine in the arcade at the time, which wasn't easy in the neck-brace I was wearing, so I certainly couldn't shoot up zolpidem and bat-about the swollen ball-bearings of the pinball machine simultaneously). The seedy joint of epileptic light-flares and rude BEEP-BOOPs and neon-bathed carcinogenic fog was frequented mainly by washed-up junkies rocking idea-metallic headpieces and ruined cracktheory-whoreknobs with nothing better to do than just sit around bobbing to the thrall of dissonant music, getting more and more faded and cracked and debauched and frayed as the day wore on. While the heads and whores did their sordid stuff in the moldy, shadowy alcoves, I was right in the middle of the Arcade racking up a pretty solid highscore, surrounded by greedy, metal-eyed little candy-elves pawing at my pockets and chattering in a language that was like something I've heard only in my freakiest nightmares. I’m proud to say that my score was the second highest, and as I punched in my initials (SRN) I observed that highscore numero uno belonged to someone who identified themselves as “IRS”, whereas #3 was now “WIL” (displaced from #2). #4 was “FUK” and #5 was “YOU”. There seemed to be at least part of a vital message embedded in that. But now, returning to the present, as the musty, spore-filled air of the disgusting passageways of the Cenotaph filled my lungs and festered in the bronchioles of their lobules, pulmonary branches oxidized by rust-decay just like the interior space of the crust-gobbed corridor. All I could think about, readjusting my nose-ring as I steeled my organs against the growing pain, was getting to the center of that goddamned labyrinth.
The walls were breathing in and out (this was a hallucination), but it was like an architectural analogue of my stress-ridden breath-sacs, which felt on the verge of collapse, already. I was coughing up blood-flecked phlegm that I wiped on my jeans, which were long-stained with amber spray-paint and brown chewing-tobacco drool. (Did you know that lungs have the surface area of a tennis court? They’re just fractally folded-down to normal lung-size, by the bizarre bent of biology itself, I suppose.) Mucous-ridden capillary beds absorbed the evil spores that were scattershot through the toxic air of the Cenotaph. The gaseous grist billowed out in smoky clouds, irritating my already-bloodshot left eye. The smoke sometimes cohered into faces that grew less and less familiar and more and more animal, more monstrous and grotesque, as I went on. And I did go on, like a fool.
I set my goggles to pure_view_infra_scope to cancel out at least 50% of the schizostatic and turned on my standard-issue nanofilter posthealthgoth gasmask. I stumbled my way down the steep stairs, frowning with concentration, frustration, and post-debauch stoicism, as here and there a creepy-crawly thingy would scuttle legworkingly across the bricklace, cnidarian nerve-net thing-thangs that wafted across my mask, smushily discharging puffs of electro-fizzle like battery acid. I would try my darndest to stomp at these poisonous, prickly insect-globules and bat away the free-swimming jellypoison (in the former case with my archetypical flexi-flesh sneakers, and in the latter with my horrorgloves, which I had put on frantically as soon as I noticed that there were jellybomb nervewebs; the arcane-hardware of the glovespines of the horrorgloves could rip through those gelatinous spheroids easily but for some reason I couldn't get my horrorsuit’s gauntlets to deploy properly - the button was jamming and I was starting to feel overheated and irritated). My shoes were coming unsoled slightly and I wasn't feeling so hot; I made my horrormask spray antacid solution down my throat - it was all I could do to soothe the burgeoning unease of my gastrointestinal system. I was at the apex of druggy disorientation, listing and bobbing around like a fishing buoy does when you've got something at the end of the line that's just as confused as I was then because, well, there's a fucking hook punctured through the rim of its lip. The base of my spine felt like the gutted innards of some mutilated hooker left in a ditch by a terrifying serial killer. There must have been tetrabionic estradiol-laced apandrous snake-fumes leaking out of the walls, since my mind was feeling female and turning soft, the vertebrae of my neck were like the gears of a broken clock. None of this boded well, especially since the sides of the enclosure were mottled not just with metal ore but with porous gaps through which dangerous mannequin-claws reached out to scratch their horrible dead-mall emblems into my forearms and thighs. I slathered myself in testo-gel and hardened my mind, body, cock and spirit with yogic discipline, focusing, centering… entering… centering… entering…
The electric lights that dimly lit the suckspace here and there buzzfeedfizzled and flickerpopped, tweeting out tumbling sparkle-jabs in a way that made me uneasily confused, and it wasn't just a spectral short-out. I mean, shit, it was like, coded, somehow. Some shadow spark-spectra globbed the algorithmic syntax of my thinking. My mind was like the burst, bleeding earholes of someone who got too close to the subwoofer at an underground black-metal show. Ionization, just like the ancient atomic-phizz-whizz Minds of Old had mapped when we still thought particles were where it was at: Paschen, Fowler, Bowen, Millikan, Edlén. So many debauched physicists proffering Promethean-plunder to the perverse masses. The strobe-effect made my thoughts more musical and diffuse, like the melodies and ditties of my willpower (to return to the burst-eardrum analogy, it was like my shredded ears had restored me to the deafness of the tomb, the ultimate orphic-oracular Outside of pure blind magic). These beats began to slam out of sync, and I started to shiver out of control, my teeth chattering (I was afraid that the enamel would chip; all that money wasted on visits to the fucking dentist), drumming a dance of desertion and absconding dispossession, pervy and penis-less like some whorish grub… I was swept along the tunnel of sacrifice… Wizard-pimps unshelled me and wove their menacing logics around in the air, these edgelord executioners draped in black with their Zohar-secret-bubbles dappling the sky with Qliphoth-flies encircling the derashah of dead transexual prostoids that had dirtied up the entrance like macabre loiterers. These weren't normal lightbulbs. For one thing, they were polyhedral and the filament inside seemed radioactive in extremis. The hypnotic flash of the atomic lights shot me back to my kid-times, wringing a rod with Dad, racking up trophy-trout, tra la tra la la tra lie-lay. Those were the good_old_days, freewheeling laddylife, just a streaming forest_frolic with cartoonish bears and a polyester vest in the windy trail collecting specimens for Mom, shotgunning fowl and fauna but later pressing flowers into dusty books, lab-coated (“What's a pyramidal ion? How do you make bromine from seawater? Who was Cato Maximilian Guldberg?”), smiling a becalming scientific serenity… And yet these memories were marred by some primal horror-slime I couldn't quite bring to the surface of my headplateau. The Ambieneer receiving signal wasn't normal satellite12 (ahhh BAPHOMET.exe, how she loved to sample every shade of tumescence, every graph of every printout of my 3D-scanned dick, analyzing the salinity of my precum…), it was gunking my mind like plashy gosh. Was this funk gonna toss off gorilla-mad gruff grim-arg out my nostrils or mouth, just the fetid putrid nasty-ass fumes that would issue like mad from the brackish, mystical E.a.r.t.h. Was it jellybulb goo, was it twizzle-dizz gore, or was it just the old regular whoreknob galore? (Beelzebub tooth, BAPHOMET.exe, how she haunts my dreams, that night when her and JOYCE_NEGATIVE got me in a wrestling hold and made me experience something I won't soon forget.) This old synthetic drug, the Ambien I nostalgically latched onto as my go-to treatment, even if it's been years and years, so long has it been since it's gone out of style, now possibly laced with some really infernal hormones and possibly dendritic pathogens? BAPH, my candied centipede rockabilly infatuation, my dismembered manic-pixie parts-pile, why did I use you as a meat-test for the fucking horrorsuit? I’ll never know, but how I miss your girlish laugh. And JOYCIE, sweet JOYCIE… your tits were amazing… even after I exploded them with my suit’s shoulder-mounted missile launcher.
Utterly dappy, I couldn't parse shit. I felt a kind of thickness to my face4®. Nervous flabbiness like a hollowed-out skull. I had to find some type of way to meet some type of horrible fucking deadline. The air was just charged completely with mistaken urgency, like I needed to check my Z_mail or twit some ping_runes at e_slaves. I took my teeth out, one by one: central incisors, lateral incisors, canines, first premolars, second premolars, first molars, second molars, third molars… then onto the lower teeth, starting with the molars: third molars, second molars, first molars, second premolars, first premolars, canines, lateral incisors, central incisors. I spat blood and clomped in the horrorteeth to replace my realteeth (the horrorteeth were sharp as rat-fangs and crafted out of surgical steel, one of many add-on accessories I’d ordered from the BioBitch Corporation’s catalog). Never know when you’re going to need to bite into a chunky matrix of artery loops. I was confused and needed to scry the stones, but I was far from the temple, and my gasmask sprayed the inner-recesses of my updated multitiered tripleface with aromatherapeutic mysts, which weren't relaxing me much at all under the circumstances.
“ást er þreföldur leki mjúkvefja sem eyðir minni í cenotaph rústum” My horrorbrain’s skin-modem translated (badly) the foreign echoing coming from the Cenotaph’s inner sanctum: “Love is a threefold leak of soft tissue that spends less on Cenotaph ruins.” Made no sense. Utter fuckery. This place is AIDS. My tired-ass horroreyes (I fucked around and ripped out the regular human ones years ago as part of an avant-garde theater production of Oedipus Wrecks) barely registered the neon sign-bubble that visualized the echoes’ nonsense popping up in the AR scene-space. I recognized the language - Icelandic. It reminded me of a lovepoem that Helga wrote to me once, before the plague, before the War…
I was pretty much convinced then that all of this might as well be a bad dream (go away now please; I’d like to wake up to some semblance of not-insane). My insomnia levels had been so fucking bad right before going into that fucking nightmare architecture (perched on my swivelchair, I slaved at my novel, gaping my mindholes like an insect that's tapping out some chitinous telegram, trying to fight through the trance to get at the right runic shards). Anyhow, that one stretch of time just slithered out of my grasp and then blurred into the next moment and that moment blurred shiftily into that very nextness’ bleeding-edge so that the timespans that flowed from one space_nozzle to the next would be almost equivalent to universal Astroglide big-bang starfuck, and what I did dream was like packed with horrible earspasms and necktics and gruesome rages crammed with irresistible obscenities and horrible screams (like something beyond the pale of your typical werewolf B-movie spaceflick). My calf muscles were cramping the F up. My horrordick was completely erect, hard as a tank tread, but it was almost as if my whole body were a cock, my glutes and hamstrings felt just as tight as the shaft of my penis. CURSE IT!, I thought, why won't my fucking horrorsuit deploy?!! Its soothing mantra_gel would surely easily fix these small asynchronicities in the isometric alignment of my limbs, not to mention the parametric syntax of my hyperboner. It usually did the trick, whether limp dick or hard cock. But all of the sudden I was seized by a terrible, ghoulish frost, and as I smushed the meth-paste around my horrorteeth to get the nirvanic infobuzz I felt it even through the frickin horrorgloves, which I had dialed way up to the highest level heat-setting, but the plummeting temperature was beyond my control, and, shivering, I caressed both legs and arms as I collapsed, temporarily, into the disturbingly comfortable moss. I sank into the moss like a petrified fossil, pregnant with the grace of the grave, and as I shook my head from side-to-side to splay every strand of my heroic hairdo into a corona of crucial vibe_truth, the moss gave off pheromones that were like the ultimate temptation... the feeling of sexiness was overpowering, because it was somehow combined with the idea that, as I turned into a statue, I would be somehow immortalized, that I was turning into the statue of a Hero, as this moss coiled its strands around my innards I thought that I could just... grow down into these roots, spine-swept, transmogrified, transformed ecstatically into intubated_nature_crusted DeathKnight...
Coughing like mad I began to scream wildly, a yell that would surely break through any barrier, sound or stone. How were the spores getting through all the filtering fences of my mask? It was quadruple layered... The moss had, like, swirled its tendrils around my legs, both below and above the knees, and the posterior compartments of my calves were almost completely invaded: gastrocnemius, plantaris, soleus, flexor hallucis longus, tibialis posterior, flexor digitorum, popliteus... I tore free with extreme difficulty, leaving my lower legs in bloody tatters. Their mutilated condition made me barf kaleidoscopically. I raked my hands through my hair and over my face and felt the soothing nanowands of the horrorgloves apply their micro-accupressure shiatsu to the surface of my head, giving a semblance of calm amidst this utter self-gorefest. There were telltale signs of gangrene, but also, more crucially, it seemed that I might not even be fully awake. Left eyelid still blinking the hot tears back. Grody, coagulated grief. For all I knew, I was still in my grimy sleeping bag, nested in sharded crackpipes and coagulated glop, which formed a pad that softened the hardness of the ultraconcrete out of which the building was built. Hissing cockroaches merced smaller bugs awash in trash - just a smaller, quieter warzone than the ones up here. I tended to squat in dilapidated tenements when not plugged in to the horrorsuit; and compared to my current horror_game, squatting in impoverished expanses seemed downright comfy as an X-mas fireplace with eggnog and chestnuts crackling while spooning my juicy-coochied cutie (BAPHOMET.exe, where are you??!! JOYCE_NEGATIVE, where have you gone??! I know, I know… I eradicated the both of you; but still, a guy can dream, can’t he?), but at the same time, given the apocalyptic conditions of the real_world, given the historical conditions in which I find myself now (the yawning maw of the Void and whatnot), and in which this “story” is taking place (could God groan any louder from his throne of cirrus puffs?), I couldn't be sure (BAPHOMET.exe, infect me with your virus just once more… this is my LAST prayer... JOYCE_NEGATIVE, remind me of the image of your interface just one last time…). I just couldn't be sure of shit now. Everything was uncertain. I swatted a Lurianic fly buzzing by my left earhole. Pesky pest. The place was full of those things. They're radioactive, these flies, they have all the latest plug-ins and alchemical accoutrements. Not to mention they're uploading videofeed to the cloudzone - fucking flydrones. Makes me sick, this governmental pestilence, constant surveillance, you're never alone, total absence of control, everything's free but something's always watching, even this moss which seems like a mere distraction is surely grokking my data as we speak. See, junkies like me were often given to certain... hallucinations. Delusions, if not outright fanatical urges to destroy, to break or to sabotage pretty much anything, and I mean FUCKING anything, perhaps Apocalypse.exe, perhaps scrap the whole fuckin' world and start over in a haze of creationist megalomania: the elimination of every enemy and the sabotage of every resource, and perhaps redo the grid of language that held it all together, Foucault-separating us from beast_things and the like, perhaps God Trees and God Dolmens and owls would they themselves talk. Haha, what CRYPTograms, eh? What Baphometric readouts parading like anti-alphabets. I cackled like a maniac to imagine the disintegration.
JAMES KRENDEL-CLARK is a writer, theorist, and artist currently based in Boston, MA. His work is an attempt to come to terms with culture in its living totality, or what Boris Groys has called "the new". He is interested in formalism as the reconciliation of ecstasy (Rausch) and intellection, and in the dramatization of ideology (and its critique). He has a bachelor's degree in comparative literature from Princeton University. He is the author of The Future of the God-Hallucination: Reflections on the Nietzschean Lifestyle-Brand (voidfrontpress) and Hitman (a Récit), the latter published by Orbis Tertius Press. His two blogs are here: https://bubbleyummonsterenergy.blogspot.com/ https://halloween666777.blogspot.com/
WILL BERNARDERA JR is a multimedia artist and former crime reporter for the Dearborn Times-Herald. He is currently based in Detroit, MI, and is the author of the novella America (voidfrontpress). Most of his short stories may be located online. He is the founder and high priest of the transgressive art collective The Tender Wolves Society. Will’s blog is here: https://theblanketiselectronic.blogspot.com/
D.F.L. Lit 