"The Royal Diadem of Maggot Hall"
by
Timothy Stillman
Rains, cold and winter. The impatient penitence of the lashing winds and the pitiless drops of rain slamming against the windows of the world. Standing in the ancient manse, this moment caught and broken apart by the self immolation in cold slashing wind fire, against the windows and the walls and the roof, none of which are capable of supporting us, not now, not ever, but especially not now that the madness has come home. If it had ever left. Unreal, even I, in my now tattered too worn waistcoat and britches and white ruffled shirt, and my straight good strong body in years of perpetuity that they said would last forever, that they said was miles and leagues away from dandyism. Nothing leaning forward but the structure of this shadowy gabled building which had stood for two hundred years, but was not destined to stand much longer.
My signet ring ablaze with amethyst. Hands soft and white as undersea vessels of fish finding the night kingdom ablaze with coral diadems and the hidden songs that have kept my family going these endless generations, these machine cocked generations, for nothing more than the accelerating of them. I a shadow in a house of shadows, standing by naked window glass, watching the night rain come down.
Nothing more than the intemperate glass that holds its breath as the nodes of rain rush to it, moths to flame, and beat out their brains of winter on it, on all the windows like eyes opened to the world, for this house has many windows. And it has many eyes, this mansion, looking back at the eyes in each reflective rain drop, as though to say we are not ashamed of what has happened here, the entire world, the vistas all over the maps, known and unknown, can look in here, can look in and not askance, but directly forward, and see what we are and what we do and what we will forever be. And the madness need not taint us by osmosis or imitation. The madness that has come here, has been here so very long, especially now, so, when the child of winter came to stay.
And oblique, and cold as cornered shadows rush into me and through me, like knives of winter snow with the cleanness of it on these heaths and those mountains and the triangles and the perpendiculars, mountains and fields, where the mad child and I used to run when we were boys, and he, still a boy, or vegetated back to such a state, now it is all ruined and misplaced. There is such a feeling of loss here. There is now such a feeling of incompleteness here, as though someone had started a sentence and had neglected or on point of death, even that, refused to finish it. What they did to him, the nightmare connections to which he is linked now, that are lodged in his broken in halves brain and his portmanteau that forever pulses him in pale bruised purple around the eyes, and the withering of his body, his body now emaciated and given up trying, like a dead flower curing into and under itself in shame. The whole point of the game, wasn't it?. As Kim had given up the secrets of seeing anymore. Even seeing nothing at all, as his doktors did. As though he was quit even of such a little thing as that.
The brown wood flooring on which I stand. The lack of curtains on the front window, large and bold as brass, which I look out of, the frailty of humanity, the frailty of even inhumanity, though it is stronger than the first, eludes me, ducks behind the facility of my thoughts, factoring in numbers and equations and situations and divisions and the school board days when you thought the world could be put on track by piecing together there what was misplaced or even uncreated and we could create it our way, which of course was the right way. That we had the jewel of red ruby eternity in our hands and we could hold it close to our faces, warm the death pall away. That we could feel forever in our palms and that would mean forever did not have to come. That death was also something within our control.
We could verbalize the word and we could connote the shadows and the graveyards with their hens teeth scrabbled gnarled witches teeth of tombstones in the wiry wet wild grass ground of bone yards would scuttle away, to be so terribly frightened of who we were are and who we were and what powers we possess. And to find it all crabbed and broken and legs pulled apart. To find it desiccated and scissors cut in two like every rain drop from the molten lava volcano of the cloud rumble and sick diseased cotton batting of the sky and air, to find ourselves dashing out our own brains like the rain, on the walls and closed forever cataracts of our blind and even blinder still eyes.
"I do not understand thee, McGraw" I told him that night when I went to see that keeper of that madhouse when I had finally had enough of what they were doing to my Kim. My brother. My love. Who was, like the other inmates there, a seemingly permanent resident of bedlam and night crawling bugs and curtains of sheen and glimmer and new tasted where there had never been tastes, where there were wire hooks on which hung sanity, and the inmates were to jump for them constantly, and jump higher and higher still, the sanity being raised always and evermore.
And the mad eyes and the scalded laughter like hurtful hard and brittle and angry painfully hot soup flung on my soul in vats of huge number and size every time I went to that place of lightning captured in a bottle. This place that was made up off nights picked up piecemeal, in swaths all over the night world, and laid at the door step of the madhouse. Of what it was and how it was meant to be with its locks and bars and twisting lost corridors and steps to nowhere and ladders down to something even more grotesque in the basement of the place, I imagined, not too difficult what I did not personally see and hear, I read about, and most especially, the keys out of this kingdom, clever and much vaunted, and their mysterious places like the secret pulsating heart of the living Christ that was put up from prying fingers, such as those the inmates herein had.
"I do not understand thee, either, why you would want such a thing?" Doktor McGraw said, turning from the mantle over the banked fireplace in this cold office of his, austere, and black hearted as feldspar and cold with the winter wind gauging all the north passages to this door step, to this mausoleum of insanity of more than the patients here in the wintry clime, here in the middle of the nowhere Chesterton Abbey district, here where the night howls were luminous coal dark effigies that were released as balloons out of barred windows out of places where the light was a foreigner, which, had it for a moment been let in, it would receive the immolation of fire brands as the mocking evil cur that it was off in the distance. No, it did not dare to touch this shadow place at all, so much attention to keeping the madness in.
So much attention in keeping the madness contained and not letting it escape, as though it were a dear process, as though it were valuable and would be the fulcrum which would move the world. Something here of great power and prowess that would fuel Verne's ship to the moon one day soon, surely.
But madness from turned under eyelids and fragile bones and eyes that plague a person even if seen only one time, the terrible close vaulted eyes, the terrible instructions of them in the little wizened child like withered bodies, the mammary glands of madness that reach and stray and push as though they are things from out of the world, things from another planet or a horror nightmare coming so terribly true, monsters with huge pendulous teats to be sucked on by the mad people, indeed, like Kim, like Kim, my brother.
Brought into insanity by this place and brought deeper and colder into the reaches of the mad Doktors who run such a nightmare factory, who dispense with nothing but cold hearts and colder fingers scribbling in their journals and their patient reports night and day, always the cruel authority lips with the arrogant smiles and the voices that are so vaingloriously patient and calm that they irritate and make half man one's self with their petty words and their puerile facitiousness. Madness from dolls with broken heads.
Cruel ministerings from dolls that have lost their stuffing. That have had their button eyes pulled out and their stitching unstitched. Dolls that are small and hopeless and lifeless, but dolls that are always to be unsure of, to back off from, to run from in terror, if your fellows are not there to see you in your swaggering manhood turn coward and flee. Madness, as religion. And Doktor God.
Madness as copulation with things of deep under the sea or far out in the crystal star broken and impacted universes. Things they see and the so alleged sane do not. Things they see that are tacitly wondered about in unconscious dicing and dissections by the like of McGraw with, hale and mutton chopped and ample bellied and soft spoken and balding crested, the only holder of the whole place himself, this whole asylum, the great and benevolent, as long as the mad here have relatives who will pay the stiff fees for their being locked behind bars, the great and benevolent, Dr. McGraw. Come, let us give thanks to alienists everywhere.
Who like the rest of them throw their monstrous pettiness and lackluster building blocks of their reality out on the undefended and plead total smirking ingeniousness at doing so. The monsters were there when they came here, the doktors say. Yes, they were. Many of them. And that's the whole point. We must fix them, the doktors say. To which I reply, fix your own goddam selves first.
Dr. McGraw with his tiresome didactic voice and his long stemmed clay pipe which he smokes incessantly. Dr. McGraw with his "reasonableness," his marks against sadness with impunity, his white horsed mealy mouthed, incidental chatter, which he sees as the utmost of normalcy, from who others must copy, savior his approach, his rucking eyes that hide behind glasses of square non-entity blandness. Almost a ghost, he. His little molten temper that he always shies down even though it is more like dyspepsia than temper.
He would not have such a thing, this late middle aged man who was a transport unto himself, who diddled his own sexuality into a late night division that was himself against the handiwork, broken of course to be sure, of the human endeavor, the human mind basing itself on reality and nature and flux and pushing away and turning forward, to not see into itself, to not see its own soul come unraveling like a string of cloth that someone some day would get hold of, and hank forever from him.
McGraw tells the story now. Of what I told him Kim did, damn me. The same story. Like a monk's chant. Look what you brought to us, sir! Evil in his mouth, ugly. Kim on the heath, Kim in madness, Kim in the summer lightning storm, Kim naked, willowy and laughing with the water blessing him from the skies, his member proud and hard, his balls nut small and sweet, pale in pale night, his buttocks glistening half moons in the rain. And he screaming and coming apart and rushing through the cold muck of ponds and grass and mud.
Then to take him from there to this asylum--and here to take him to an entrance underground where the pain would stop, here to entrance him into something tunneled and broken like he, like a gourd had been smashed on the hard cold and intemperate ground, like aces of playing cards were coming out his head, broken and bleeding and broken again as his hands hit on the top of his skull, cracked wide the night as though he thought he was the night, thought he was the unliving on whom was played the most terrible, most intrinsic joke of all time, that need of the dead, the husk, the given up and given overs, to have the heart stop beating.
Because to him, the beating heart was the cruelest joke of all. It was not, and it was not because it was so, and like the spider strand which held him unwillingly and he held unwillingly to it, that senselessly kept him tied to the world, to keep him unsafe in this web that he had gotten into. And then the Doktor. And then the asylum.
And then the tears he had bled red ruby from his eyes as he begged me in the horse drawn carriage in front of the tightly clipped barred huge wood doors of this mad place, "take me home," he pleaded to my cruel kindness, as I brought him to this cruelest place known to man, this chipped and brandished and evil smelling urine and bowel movement smelling place, where the unwanted are flung, though at the time I had not known, in my self righteousness, my arrogance that I knew, like they, what was best, and was in no mood to be questioned, my belief then though never ever again in doctors and beneficence.
And I had had nothing else I thought I could do, for he was interfering in my social life, he was the talk of people all round the manor and beyond. He was--god help me-- embarrassing me in so many different ways, soiling himself in public, and he starting to gibber when I took him into the village, and in the face of a rain of laughter from those around us, I had to whip the horse and rush away from it again, rush from all those piercing judging stupid moon stone braying gesturing eyes, and back and back to home and again.
And he holding to me, so very tightly, as I tried to say, as gently as my cocksure character would allow, my knowing what was best, his heaped and crushed and blown apart flowers of a body, and he weeping at the side of my neck, begging me not to do this thing, begging me not to put him in there with the monsters, for there were monsters everywhere, he said, it was just he couldn't go in there, where he knew even more hideous monsters lived and fed on such as him, and I disquieted and he, stricken down, oh god the things the terrible things I said to him at that moment.
I forced him off the cart, and carried him almost bodily to the doors where I rang the bell and waited, and he like a cast off cat in my arms, screaming for me not to drown him in the offal waters the swamp infested waters of what lay beyond those huge and imponderable doors.
And when I visited him every month. When I saw his cell, like a prison cell, and the other cells I had to pass to get to his, when I saw the urine and shit not cleaned up for who knows how long, when I saw and heard the screaming tears that were like sea anemones writ huge and placing themselves in my dreams, and scoring me and scourging me, and the doktors and attendants, I knew it for what it was. I knew it far too late. I found out the great and magnificent Doktor McGraw was too sagacious, too busy and too important to ever have anything to do with the lowly misbegotten patients himself, he scrawling in his book lined study in his comfortable easy chair and his fire banked or blazing and his comforting pipe in his over red lipped mouth.
And I saw Kim the first time in that place where they throw the unwanted, the misbegotten, two years and seven months ago/ I saw his hands and bloodied fingernails, naked, abused, eaten into, bite marks all over him, human and otherwise, and I saw his heart in his strangling chest and his eyes that had the passion of already dullard impassion at my betrayal of him, my lingering chicken boned neck that he wished to crush and would have crushed save for the shackles that held him to the wall and would allow him freedom of movement only to lie and turn on his cot.
And outraged I was, and the attendants said not to worry, said this is best for them, it is best they have order in their lives, for "it may seem cruel, but if it saves them from slashing their throats one fine day, sir?, that they learn the straight and narrow, that they have some dignity and pride in themselves, and that encompassed the things, bring them to even more of the bottom of the pit than they have gone before."
And then gradually bring them upward, to real life again, that's the ticket, and the characteristics they said they wanted to impart were those I had always thought I had in myself, things that I thought proper and that made me a gentleman during the day and a dandy, yes, but one with a conscience, (such a laugh to me now, I cared for no one, not even Kim, I cared only and always--then--for myself) at night, as though I could hold those two things sacrosanct, and it was in truth in this smelly place in this rigorous place with cries for help in the night that I saw myself in the keepers. In the night, for there was always night there and in my heart too. The doktors heard nothing, the doktors did nothing but turn away and close doors thick and hard, thicker and harder even than their very own marblewood heads, so they would not have to hear the din, the craziness from the broken dolls of which even they were sorely afraid.
But for so long I believed them, and every time I steeled myself for the noise and the horror and the pathetic used up remnants of minds turned inside out parboiled, and then I left him and them, almost gibbering to myself in my getting away to safety, to cool window seats of dignity and daintiness and hopes that all of what I thought of it was wrong--that there was true compassion from these doktors. I think I met all these wise, noble gentlemen, when they could spare a moment or two, when there was the need of spirit of charitable money from the coffers of those who care, even though the relatives of the patients were paying a king's ransom for the never to be returned objects of that ransom, the word turned on its head then, but never enough money for these zoo tenders, always more to be contributed to help our lesser brethren in such distress. In that, they were quite good at their trade. The trade in human beings no lesser than they. Far more than they.
And people gave and they gave some more at the behest of this new religion, to these new gods in these godforsaken places out in the moors where there are rest cures and teas in the afternoon, and where there are skeleton break your heart fantasmagoric "parties" for patients and what few relatives and friends came to see them--shadow show and the most cruel of all perhaps. In the doktors' offices, surely there were long conversations concerning the philosophies of Spinoza versus, say, Defoe. Oh yes, to show how humane the makers of this Byzantine hell were, there were piano recitals and doktors who exhibited their most dead spine and dead head failures, who they called their successes, like an auction of hubris with those zombie pieces of meat with the scars on their heads where the knives had bit deeply. We tend the broken and the wishes of family and friends that these people be put back in society, so the success stories are always used as broken stringed marionettes--look how clean he is, ladies and gentlemen?, look how bathed he is?, and see how nicely cut is his hair?, now he will drink a bowl of soup without spilling most of it on himself?, magnificent success, is it not, and soon that cloth monster we have made of this man will be seeing only what everyone else sees, saying only what everyone else wishes them to say, being only what everyone else wishes them to be. The doktors on their little stage. The patient in question standing beside them. The guards ready at the first wrong move. The man or woman or boy exhibit, head bowed, body made a sickness, mind made a field of glass shards thrown in revenge against a hard rock that shatters it.
And my Kim here, who gave me--deservedly so--my sleepless and lonely and despondent nights, my equally lonely and despondently restless days. I believed, so stupidly and for so long, denying the fatuousness of Dr. McGraw when he deigned a moment or two, especially when I said "contributions" were involved in my visit. Otherwise he was too busy, doing what, then, dammit?, scraping his quill feathered pen in meaningless scrawls on paper?, what did that accomplish?, which meant that he was me, that he exhibited my fatuousness I had had for most of my life. But this ordeal, the crawling pain of thunder that revelation wrapped about my bones I cannot describe, opened my eyes, and how wonderful and crystal clear that it only took my Kim to this true devil hell place of bones of long centuries dead bones for me to understand it.
And the first time I came here to see him, in his clayey filthy cell with rotting food and the smell of vermin and his own droppings, on the floor and on the charred and splitting cracked walls, he said to me this sentence, "They have me now. The creeping things. They are feeding on me now. It's far too late. Whoever I would have been. Back then." And each time I saw him in these fifteen and thirty minute visits, he sank back into himself further and further, as though his body were a feed bag of horse food that was emptying more and more each month, each day and minute, and he of himself.
Whatever he was now, was falling back into the base of that bag, which was his bed and he was becoming smaller and bonier than ever before, his eyes were sick with a black blue purple pulse, his hair was almost gone and he had had such a fine shock of golden long thick hair before all of this. He sat with his bony arms around his bony legs pulled up to his bare and almost skinless chest. He used to be so handsome, so fine to talk to, had a jolly sense of humor, and a fine mind so very well read, so astute.
How in those old golden days, I loved to take long walks with him in the fall country side with the air nipping at us and the autumn smelling like beautiful apples tangy to the touch of our senses of smell. And as boys to dally with him and he with me. Our naked baths in the cold stream. Our giggly scuffles. Our sex play. Our exploring each other and examining each other in that quiet curious serious way boys have. Nothing in the world but the two of us.
Our drying each other off in the cooling sun. His hands on me and mine on him. His fine member rising to me and I kneeling down to encompass it's straining strength with my mouth. Brothers we were. And more than brothers. How we gloried in who could shoot our spunk first. And how we especially gloried in being able to come at the same time. Our spunk meeting in the air, mid-way, joining, forming a bridge of white milk and rainbows from our very own hot lusting bodies.
All of this long ago. Before the madness started. Before the morning after one fine night when the "things" got him. But different creatures than this, than the ones who were devouring him here, who were splitting him from himself one small bone, one small tendon and joint at a time.
And the words he said the first visit, were the words he said the third and fifth and all the visits. And the only words he said. And each time I sat on the cot next to him and tried to hold him, tried to comfort him, he pulled away from me into the corner like a cornered rat and I swear his eyes blazed like those of a mad rat, and that was how it became, those words to me when the turnkey, what else would he be called?, unlocked the prison cell of Kim, what crime had he committed?, I was the criminal in bringing him in my stupidity and arrogance here, lock me up instead, though I never had the courage to say what always guilt bowed me to the ground, for there are many kinds of prisoners and many kinds of prisons in this, God's world, and most sadly I knew this so well these many months.
And I would sit on the cot as far away from Kim as I could, and I would stare at the hard floor and watch the shadows scurry or beetle crawl across it in the darkness of his day, my hands together, my head bowed, let me be with you Kim, let me be with you fifteen or thirty minutes every month, let the monsters take me in your stead, and if that is not possible, let them take me at the same time they take you.
He was being disassembled, my Kim. He had been for some time before all of this, only I hadn't thought of it in that way. He was being taken apart as though he had been a wooden building to tear down piecemeal, in the name of HELPING him, they were deconstructing him. They were taking the wood boards that was him and that was his mind and heart and viewpoint and being and soul if you will and they were tossing it outside on the pile of all the other human lumber in the back of the building where once a week they sat the piles ablaze and the ashes rushed to heaven, and the messengers, for that is now how I see the mad, were made to stand, kneel, tremble on and on in little squares of tinier and tinier blocks. The boy who introduced me to delights of the body. The boy who had been the smile of the day and my sun. The boy who had pressed his lovely curved buttocks against me as he leaned his head back and kissed my on the lips so passionately, so unashamedly. That boy was gone forever more.
Taking one life giving breath away at a time, making the persons turn in tighter and curl up closer to themselves. He died by increments right in front of my eyes.
With all that emptiness circling and carpentered about them, till they were suspended over the universe of eternity on one foot of tile, or not quite foot long stretch of promise and then stealing it from them, and the victims want the all of it to be stolen from them so they might finally fall into death, might finally be rid of the nightmare that they were supposed to love so much, god help any of them, I later found out, when they answered yes, oh god, yes, to a doktor's question, "Have you ever contemplated suicide?" The doktors being against this, because if any of the "clients" did, and one or two did make it every so often, usually shortly after the relatives died or the money ran out, but if paying customers slashed their throats, well, then, it's the killing of the expensive udders of the cash cow that can no longer be milked dry, and that is something to guard against at all costs.
I think of it now, before this window, looking out into the rain. I think of the ashen young old man with the sleep of death on him, lying on the gilded couch of this room because he has to be with someone, he has to be with even me, if it's all that is around, I, the Judas who brought him to this point, the Judas he no longer remembers and I think that is lucky or unlucky for me because if he ever does remember me, I fully expect him to murder me, and I fully expect me to let him.
I think of Doktor McGraw in front of that fire place in that chilly office but not half as chilly as his stone heart, that thing that keeps the real criminals going, that keeps all the stupid evil doer Doktor McGraws of the world going, and I think I was drawn to placing Kim there because I, like the good doktor, and all the good people of this kingdom love to see someone broken and despined, love to see someone hurt and knocked about and celled and jailed and beaten in there, (I have seen the deep black and red marks on Kim's back when I was him, and on his legs, and more of them visible to me now when I bathe and dress and undress him, his bird like chest, his almost vanished member, his balls that have been shriveled up back into his cavity, his lusterless eyes, the arms that move only if I move them, the legs moving only as I move them), they, we, love to have scapegoats, so they, dammit, so I too, will escape their fate.
The Doctor turning to me, his little piggy eyes, his little pink squealing piggy eyes, and his feminine whir of a voice saying "I will fight you on this, for his sake."
" For who's sake, Doktor?"
I asked.
"For his."
" His name, doktor? He has a name. Do you know what it is?"
"Your--brother's sake, you impetuous young man" (said so contemptuously, so degradingly, so meanly the infection spat out like an infection out of his highly cultured and most superior mouth, the same way the words "friend and compassion and doing what's right," came squealing, lying, loathing, and evil and disgusting and petulant from out of his mouth between the two overripe cherry colored lips nestled in the white patchy whitish beard) sake. "
His name, doktor? Come now. You care so damned much. Surely you must know the heart of many that beat in your cultured chest. I mean, kind sir, you wish to help him so much, surely you remember either his first or last name?"
And the doktor looked at the papers on his desk, at which point, I stood from the square back chair and rushed to his desk and knocked those crib sheets asunder.
"You must trust doktors," he said, fear in his eyes and the little strangle of words in his throat.
"--- doktors. Damn them and you and your swine brethren to hell forever."
He backed away. No one had dared talk to him like this before. Not this little tinhorn god almighty.
He said, moving further back from me, "I will see you in court, sir. I will fight your taking him from here from his ministrations from our tender care."
" Do that, doktor, I said, do that, doktor whatever the ---- your name happens to be. I suppose you have one. Don't you?"
And I stormed out, proud of myself. Proud of myself, can I even begin to believe what I was then, and what I hope to Almighty God I will never be again.
And herr doktor did what he swore he would do. The courts became involved. I paid another fortune for solicitors. The courts ground slowly. There were legal tactics. It took a grand total of two years to have Kim brought to me in that carriage at sunset four months ago, and tossed like so much garbage at my door step, at my family estate which is now devoid of most of the furniture, and all of the paintings and niceties that I had to sell, as I am having to sell the estate itself. And I waited at the window every day after the justices' decision, for which I had to pay the largest sum yet, for when they came in their dray drawn carriage and they picked the straw man body of my Kim up from the back of the carriage, is he dead?, have they murdered him out of revenge?, for his own good?, will they bring a corpse to my door?, and they literally dropped him at my door step. Brushed their hands of him, and went back to their carriage, got on and drove away.
I rushed to the door and opened it and found finally, since I had not been allowed even a glimpse of him during the trial phase, for legal reasons I didn't understand, and I knelt to him and I held him. He was alive. But barely so. He had been barely alive for such a long time, long before I admitted it. And I held him to me and I said "you will not die, Kim, " and I wept into his neck and his arms were slightly convulsive and it seemed as though he were rubbing at the side of my pants' leg, telling me that it was all right, that he forgave me, and I still and all after all of this, after the agony of the courts, after the debilitating trial that dragged on and on.
That dragged poor Kim and me through the mud, that made us more than laughing stocks, that made us pariahs, that made us evil witches of the dark faces of the moon, thanks to the doktors cared so very much about Kim, and would have made him sit in the court room to listen to all the dirt and mud, but I found a doctor (I spell his appellation as he deserves, being a real one, a kind compassionate man for I could not pay him, the solicitors having taken the last bit of money I had) who got court orders to visit Kim and who convinced the judges, along with more money from me, that he could not stand the strain. The mercy of human kindness, your Hypocratic -------Oath, doktors? And the tabloids, the "press", what a field day they had with this, the two sons of the Marquis. But, forgive me, I shall not go into that ever again.
And Kim now, a still, silent, asleep form in the winter rain that is like cheese cloth in tatters running down his face in reflection from this large window that, like all the other windows in this place, is not ashamed of what goes on here, but how can life continue here? How can anything at all go on here any longer ashamed or unashamed? I go to him, my Kim, and I kneel down of my becoming pained knees, and I am dressed as well as I can these days, for we are shadows of what we once were, because I'm going into town this morning to talk to my solicitor about selling the old homestead for funds to get away from this accursed country, which I have read in one book called, The Kingdom of the Dead, and o 'tis true, 'tis true.
They went away from Kim. They went away from him without a word. His friends. His loves. He gave them up so unwillingly. He knew they would return. Everyone loses friends and lovers. But all of them? All his life long? He said he hated them and would not remember them. None of them. Ever. But every time he looked at me, he was looking at someone else. The terror of trying again. Of putting his neck in the noose once more. People became adversaries, enemies to him. He waited for them to hurt him. He was not to be disappointed. He believed as long as he could. He was so strong. I can't imagine how strong he was.
Though he thought one would not do so. Just one. The final boy. J. But he hurt Kim most of all. I blame this boy as much as I blame myself for what we did to Kim. What I did because of the centrifuge of cruelty that Kim felt for that last time from that final boy who took him for all he was worth, then dropped him dead, who beat my brother in to the ground and walked away as coldly as there have ever been cold winters.
Kim did his best to keep the last one from leaving. This beautiful golden haired boy, this brother, Kim, who thought he was so much less. For reasons I've never understood. They took pieces of his life, they took his love that was not worthy of them, they took little moments of time from him and they made any memories of good days cordoned off to him, because one or more of the traitors was in them in one way or another. They made him unable to remember anything at all, they made him unable to read, because he would come across one of their names, a first or last name, as a character in the novel, they made him afraid to read the newspapers for fear the actual name of one or more of them might be in the print hiding like a cobra ready to reach out to him and cut its fangs into his face.
He was afraid to think, for his thoughts were about them, were the echoes of their voices and their words and their inflections and their laughter which back then they shared with him, and promises, god, all those empty promises of theirs. "You're too serious, Kim, everything is sad and wrong and dangerous in your mind, in your happiness there is such sadness, and we cannot abide that, for the sadness is the fount of the joy of you. Do not ask that of us." Had they been bright enough to be able to say it. Had they been courteous enough to say anything at all. And not to just seemingly drop off the face of the earth.
He tried so hard to change their minds, tried to be what they wanted, light and gay from the direction they believed to be the right, and he thought he succeeded. Till they decided he couldn't be that either. That, he, being Kim, was not allowed. The last boy who ran away was the final straw.
The melancholia of Kim's must have been unbearable. Is he free of that now? Is he? Unmeant accidental good thing? Or is it down so deeply in him that he cannot even scream up a million miles through his throat to let me know? Would there be any comfort in his being able to scream? Or does one finally get to a point, that even that would do no good. Would be a puny yawn compared to what he has to deal with every moment of his life?
They did not, the doktors, stick knives in his brain, but there are other ways of doing such things. Kim knew that before the asylum. I loved him. Love him. He turned from me because I could not be who he loved. Is it always this way? And I angered him. I was jealous of him. And of the persons he loved, because they were not me and never would be. How I ached to leave with them. I did. God help me.
He was afraid to dream because his dreams were about one or more or all of them. Corners had developed in his formerly wild moors and deep mysterious sea eyes which saw to the very bottom, to the silt, and were of melancholy happiness because of that. A sad world, one that dealt with reality truly, which others, including me, the doktors especially, could not handle--a lonely and singular world, yes, but one he had come to live with. Till there were too many of them. The knives of betrayal cut open his brain. Leaving nothing to him at all. All of these things. Including music, which he used to hum along and sing-he once had a lovely tranquil tenor voice-- no more, for all of everything reminds him of himself and the "lovers" he walked with in the night time, as I watched them from a distance, from my window or from following them--as they lay with each other and made love. As he thought they were of his world. But no, and he closed up his ears to music as well, for it all in one way or another reminded him of this long gone friend or another. The fear of each season, for each had a special place in his heart for certain ones of those who would not return. Especially the final one.
He could go nowhere in the house or grounds or fields or the village, for he always half saw his chimeras there and his heart sank like a stone. So desperately sad and lonely, he. Molecules of air disturbed him, the lightest patter of one of our dogs' padding across the parlor set him into spasms.
Until one fine lightning storm night, he simply gave up. He could not take it anymore, the letters he wrote that would be returned with "address unknown," written on the envelope, in, he told me, THEIR own handwriting, would they be so cruel?, he lived in fear that one envelope, to J. who he had put all his remaining sanity on, would be returned to him, and written on it, "Deceased," and he would recognize the handwriting and how could he take that?, or he would not receive a response at all. Did the letter get to him? Did it not? Would it then, tomorrow? Or the next day? Next week? No, it is better to not know. No, it is better to know. Christ!
The fear of the morning mail. And nothing in it. And then the afternoon mail. And nothing in it. And then the desire to get to the next morning and then the plaintiff prayers to make the night last forever, so he didn't have to look at the rug behind the front door when the mail was delivered.
How he worried and fretted and stumbled a bit at a time, a little longer at a time, and then one Fall in that violent cold rain storm, he stripped off his clothes and ran out into the night and he screamed at the top of his broken once lilting voice, "What did I do to you? Give me the pieces of me back. You don't want them. You've, all of you, become me, the me you don't remember at all or care about at all, leave me a corner to stand on, for God's sake, why can't I get you the mother----out of my mind and heart? OHJESUSHELPME!"
And I heard him and I in my nightshirt rushed out to him and I held him and he wept on my shoulder as he wept when I took him to the insane asylum, as he has never wept sense in my presence, as I fully believe he has wept not at all in all these years. For when he cried, he wished he were one of them, how he would have loved to leave himself too, leaving every molecule of him behind, with their name tagged on each one, and Kim the holder of them.
That night in the rain, silver daggers from the sky, I lay with him. I took his member in the slashing rain, his flaccid small member, and I put it in my mouth and I sucked at it for a long time as I lay with him in the rain and mud and he wept, as I suckled him, then presented my own to be suckled by him as we lay against each other. Neither of us sexual beings. Not ever again. This was not love or closeness or pain or desperation. This was salvation leaving the both of us for good and all. We sucked each other's deflated members as if we were sucking or trying to suck the pain out of each other. For his pain had always been mine. But how can such pain ever be done away with? I stroked his naked body. His willowy gentle shivering as with ague body that was now cold, not warm as it used to be. I kissed his blonde pubic hair. I nestled my mouth against his balls so small then. And I wept into his stomach. As he put his hands on my head and held me like I was the ill one and not he. Oh god, Kim.
And I pretended to him that I was the last one, J., the one with the most frigid of hearts, I tried to convince Kim that I was J. with heart melted and humanity put inside him, who would rush to him one fine day out in the golden sunshine, and put his arms around him, around Kim and hold him and tell Kim he would never ever go away again. Kim, who, when the sun comes out these fall and winter months, has to have the curtains drawn against it. I think of all, that is the saddest parts. It was no good pretending. Kim knew it was me who held him that night, and tried to forgive me, but could not. Nor could I forgive myself.
And I held Kim that rainy cold stormy night out in the middle of God's terror and he whimpered to me and shuddered against me and I knew at that exact moment that I had lost him forever and would never get him back again.
I go to him now. There is only darkness and staleness around us for the rest of our days. I am next to him on the dusty dreary besieged with holes couch, with such tears in the fabrics. He lies like a fetus there. . He does not move. He might have died in the night. The monsters he and the other mad people communed with, of whom the mad were but the messengers of what is true, who bore reality that the normal people could not stand to look at for half a second, who bore it till they could do so no more, the monsters are with him but are not of him. He is destined to chase after them, begging them to take him along, and is to be unsuccessful in that as he was with the persons he tried to hold onto.
I lie my hand with my signet red ring, the only unessential item I could not bring myself to sell, for Kim had given it to me on my 17th birthday, I lay my hand on his chest delicately and feel the sad soft unwilling bones of his breathing softly rising and falling. I am relieved. I am saddened. A mixture of both. I wish the monsters he sees and hears could be the one that I see and hear. I envy his monsters. For like his untrue lovers they have also taken him from me. And I envy them that. I kneel next to him. I hold his right hand gingerly.
I do not want him to wake up. When he does open his eyes, I will be there, each morning, for as long as I can, for I've much to make for, my Kim, my brother, my life, and he will open those dark eyed doorways on me and he will see me as he flinches his body his terror, and sees, through the eyes of his scarred and hideously mutilated soul, all of them, all of us, who have betrayed him, our parents, his friends, all the doktors, all the bullies, all the hate mongers, all the self righteous, all the hypocrites, and he will see me as he sees them, changed hideously, cruelly deformed as we are in soul, if not in body, and we are the true outcasts, we who make our way in the world so self-assuredly, so proudly, and do things to such delicate breakable brave people like we did to Kim because we knew what is the damned best for him, and we are not for the consumption of the cowardly and timid. Who know so well how to live another's life for them, and then when the other person breaks, we can't get away from them fast enough.
I especially, for perhaps I betrayed him the worst of all. He will see, we evil beings, that he and the other mad people of the world must eliminate, are indeed done away with, which is his only purpose now. His hopeless eyes, with the mad pale fire so far away in them, tell the story. His mouth will always be mute. He has no need of it. Words hurt him too much. Words say "good-bye" whatever else the words supposedly are saying.
He does not speak even about the slugs of his mind, that he thinks are real, that he craves and he wants to learn from and that he thinks are so otherworldly, and he and the others will trick deceive brow beat the evil things into instructing the holier than thou, the "true saviors of humanity--you can trust me, I will not betray you," on secret things, on covert and mysterious things, magical incantations, and use vastly superior knowledge on the sane and the mundane, which will make a reason for all of his and all of his compatriots' pain. These creatures from a different plane of time are just waiting for the right moment to attack, but the mad are mad as hatters and there is no arcane. But it will not happen. There is only losing. And then losing more.
There is no magick. There is only the world. As it is and has always been. And people as they are and have always been.
But, for Kim, the revenge must be onward: after he and his fellow victims have bled the tricksters of words and their self justification dry, after they have taken every bit of the lies and shams from them, then, these former giants of the world, now become the deformed jokes themselves, being of no further use, were they ever?, can watch through their no longer proud evil eyes, as every square of flooring that they stood on or crawled or slithered on is taken away from them, one square at a time, can watch their dying heartlessness and the burgeoning of their molecules will be written on by him and his avengers, and the authorities of keys and locks of body and mind will be screaming helplessly in the vastly far back distance. We all dream still and always.
Wait for me, I can hear Kim say in my mind, wait for us for an eternity or two. Then, see.
I hold his pale under sea hand, and have not the heart to tell him he is wrong. I sleep with him at night. Or I lie with him in our musty bed sleepless, as is he. I am never without him a moment of the day or night.
I cannot tell him what he does not know. At least I hope he does not and never knows that his needs will never be met. His revenge will never be exacted. Without his private, pallid, crippled monsters to believe in, he has literally nothing at all. In leaving this country behind, in sailing next week to another land, we shall hold each other on deck, in our chairs. We shall travel steerage, for we are poor as church mice now
The two of us in our formerly rich rags, on the ship. The former big brother with the strong back and the hearty laugh and the heart that yearned for whoever was at hand. Back and heart and dandyish destroyed. And my broken brother with the cracked heart and brain, who will be in my arms on that boat, as we face the sea breeze and the coming century and a different world right there in the water as it sprays on us from the winter world we go to. Kim will be right there with me, held tightly in my arms, as I cover him with blankets and myself, from the cold of our frigid journey. But he might as well be a million miles from me then and now. He is as far from me as his loves are from him.
I kiss his brow. Flaky papery wan ivory with a small pale vein beating like the wing of a butterfly which is dying. I kiss his lips, wan, slack, and in doing so, I kiss not a man, but only a memory.
the end