Breaking the Glass at the Mask Aquarium
Aug. 30th, 2010 11:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalon95 minutes into the crush hour commute and going nowhere fast. Destination: Denied. Trapped, stuck on a packed Southbound that was bridge strapped some two stories high over 85. This is on the Gold Line to the Airport; after Lindbergh Station and right before the train runs subterranean as it rumble tunnels under the city for a few stops. So far my phone's clocking a ten minute wait that the brain's somehow stretched into a relative eternity. Below us, outside the window, traffic flowed on a particle-wave of headlights with taunting ease. Worse still, I had the terrible misfortune to have finished the last chapter of some fluff thriller I had been half-heartedly skimming over, suffering now for the last half hour that most loathsome of commuting horrors - finding yourself with nothing to read.
Instead I just sat there, towards the back of the cab, scanning in the sea of faces compressed down that brief stretch of corridor. All races. All ages. All spirit weary with wills visibly broken down by the unremitting delay we collectively suffered. Profiles in Ennui. A gallery of somber portraits worthy of the signature of a Rembrandt or Rubens. No one seemed to dare to so much as glance at each other. Even amongst the handful of passengers who happened to be traveling together. It was as if they knew exactly what they would see if they were to risk a peek into their neighbor's gaze: A perfect reflection of their own helplessness. So instead most dived under the digital surface of smart-phone game apps or texted away real time status updates from Limbo Central. With each passing minute though the distractions began to crack under the seismic tremors of coming sighs and grimaces, the distance was closing painfully fast between now and the demands of their schedules.
Periodically the conductor’s voice would arrive mid sentence, through a herald of coughing electrical squawks, to mumble apologies and explanations for the delay. However the intercom, much like the rest of this commute, was all fucked up, so much so that it was as if someone was trying to whisper to you from across a busy street and through a fog of restless hornets.
After the last unintelligible pronouncement from the conductor trailed off, from somewhere deep ahead, towards the opposite end of the train, a lone passenger buckled and began to weep openly. A woman by the sound of it… but that could just be my imagination. At first it was just a few sharp sobs, then the nasally whine of the resolve bursting into a raw torrent of prayers, tears and curses.
At that moment, across the surface of eight mounted television monitors spaced evenly across the corridor, (each one previously broadcasting an endless barrage of coming attractions and commercials for accident attorneys), the clip of a third rate sitcom actor laughing through a teeth-clenched fake smile freezes and begins to loop. It isn’t long before the Weeping Woman and the Laughing Man synch into a terrible harmony.
No one noticed though, neither the Laughing Man’s stuttering mime or the growing wail of the Weeping Woman.
At that moment I realized that this was some seriously fucked-up bad magick going on here. Not ritual magick in any shimmer of her spectrum, not chaos magick in any shuffle of her permutations… this was bad, as in seriously fucked-up bad, magick. I could see it. I could see it the way a thoughtful man see’s a car in his peripheral vision before he is struck down. I could see it the way a woman see’s the thousand clues of an otherwise invisible betrayal she tells herself does not exist.
This was too subtle to be the work of a God/dess trying to pay the rent on a comfortable shrine. Too powerful to have been harnessed by any of the old acronym orders, too indirect to be fed from the witches’ tit – this was the work of the city herself, Terminus.
A simmering anxiety boils over my consciousness into a panic sharp clarity. Terminus is a living being. All cities are. But what I didn’t was that the stops along the compass cross of the MARTA rail line were in actuality the city’s chakras. Whirling pinpoints of energy charged by the neuron flux of countless arriving and departing commuters. As we were currently stuck between such points, the passengers dread and anger were being amplified by the chakra current’s flow before being dragged off into…? However the longer we stayed, the more the current would drag away from us in its ceaseless wake, until there was precious little left but coma charm and zombified reflexes.
What comes next comes not from motivation, but rather from the geography of dream and those unique instincts atavistically honed in order to navigate successfully their shifting boundaries.
I rise up from my seat with a somnambulist’s grace.
Breathe in a word that no known keyboard can properly transcribe, a word as elusive to the pen as a rose’s fragrance is to the guitar. A gift from a distant life, when before a demonically possessed lover I whispered a secret between the folds of her bloodied flower and it was the ‘word’ that echoed back.
I step towards the nearest monitor screen, the belly of my astral body bloating under the expanding power of the ‘word’. When I reach the screen, standing under the looping fake-smile of the Laughing Man, I lick the tip of my right index finger before closing the rest of my hand into a fisted pistol.
Across the screen I scrawl a sigil that I make-up on the spot. Crackle of invisible eldritch fire and the top layer of skin on the ‘trigger finger’ swells into a blister. The ‘word’ incubating in my belly begins to rumble and burn off the last reserves of oxygen in the held breath.
So I release it –
- and what passes is a shriek that easily rivals the brakes of this train itself, a howl that would put a chorus of wolves to shame and the roar of a black hole’s yawn.
Without a single exception, the entire car looks up from their forced distractions or tedious meditations towards me.
But when they do it is only their faces that rise up… while, impossibly, their heads remain anchored in the moment previous’ position.
The disembodied faces all register a mask of pure terror-shock, especially as they begin to float away from the slumped harbors of their bodies. Almost all of them try screaming or yelling or talking… but without throats all they can do is mouth proclamations at one another. The faces drift by and flutter around. Though they have their eyes they still bump into each other or the hand rails of the car. Some flatten themselves against the windows or cling to the ceiling. Others halo orbit their abandoned heads desperately trying to reattach themselves.
After a few minutes the faceless bodies (though each possesses a small button hole where once a mouth’s horizon was flattened along with two corresponding pits for eyes) begin to twitch and spasm.
One by one they rise up and shuffle out of their seats clumsily. They run their hands over the absence in disbelief. A few of the faces flittering around try to land and reattach only to be swatted away by the body.
In that moment, one by one, they all begin to strip down out of their clothes. Some with the teasing grace of a burlesque performer, others going full throttle feral to claw their shirts and blouses off. One of the bodies, a teenager maybe judging by the now bare build, clicks on his smart phone and begins blasting some sort of hip-hop number.
At once all the bodies begin to writhe and dance while their faces float around helplessly, chastising them mutely for their behavior.
Then things get a little crazy… one of the young tattooed male bodies inserts itself into a grinding dirty dance between what was once a business man (his red tie the last remaining scrap of clothing) and the bag lady who got on at Brookhaven. A fight breaks out between the two males with both launching blind fury fists at one another. Then another body grabs the upper hand rail and begins doing a series of pull-ups. An older ladies form begins to gyrate lasciviously against the luggage pole. More than a few collapse into a squirming orgy.
I trance walk on down the corridor, with the Dante-esque spectacle before me only registering across a small kernel of my conscious. Stepping over flesh mounds and stopping before the monitors to draw my sigil across the Laughing Man’s stutter.
When I finish I make my way to the next car, equally drenched in a zero gravity swarm of animated masks presiding over a sweat bath of violence, dance and open carnality. There I continue, dabbing the mounted TV screens with my mark until the bone sits exposed through a scabbed layer of pus and blood.
When I make my way to the last monitor, however, the bodies have noticed what I am doing and for whatever reason (or lack of) try to impede my progress. However in my trance, I move with a grace normally inaccessible to me otherwise, pirouetting under grasping hands and soft spinning out of the clutches of broad bear hugs. When I reach the final screen, my legs shackled by two grasping children, it is with a trembling hand that I dab the ‘Killing Glyph’.
Then the power flickers and I watch all the bodies around me collapse before the lights of the cab black out.
A second passes, between whose measure vast empires of mind rise and tumble, and when the lights come back on, I am sitting back in my seat, as is everyone else, fully dressed and bruise free.
In that moment all the passengers break their self-imposed taboo to exchange uncertain looks amongst each other. More than a few pat their cheeks and brows and lips with uncertain finger tips.
Before anyone can place voice to their collective shock, the train lurches forward and begins rumbling towards the next station. Satiated of their anxiety by this sudden gift of motion, but not without a fair amount of residual trepidation (as experienced upon the gnosis moment when you wake and realize the nightmare is just that), the commuters collectively rebury themselves into their distractions with nothing more being offered to the silence.
Meanwhile, I sit there, suckling on the burned tip of my finger so that when the next herd of passengers board at the long overdue station they each regard me as if I was shushing them. A gesture, that when combined with the look on my face, becomes advice not unheeded.
Instead I just sat there, towards the back of the cab, scanning in the sea of faces compressed down that brief stretch of corridor. All races. All ages. All spirit weary with wills visibly broken down by the unremitting delay we collectively suffered. Profiles in Ennui. A gallery of somber portraits worthy of the signature of a Rembrandt or Rubens. No one seemed to dare to so much as glance at each other. Even amongst the handful of passengers who happened to be traveling together. It was as if they knew exactly what they would see if they were to risk a peek into their neighbor's gaze: A perfect reflection of their own helplessness. So instead most dived under the digital surface of smart-phone game apps or texted away real time status updates from Limbo Central. With each passing minute though the distractions began to crack under the seismic tremors of coming sighs and grimaces, the distance was closing painfully fast between now and the demands of their schedules.
Periodically the conductor’s voice would arrive mid sentence, through a herald of coughing electrical squawks, to mumble apologies and explanations for the delay. However the intercom, much like the rest of this commute, was all fucked up, so much so that it was as if someone was trying to whisper to you from across a busy street and through a fog of restless hornets.
After the last unintelligible pronouncement from the conductor trailed off, from somewhere deep ahead, towards the opposite end of the train, a lone passenger buckled and began to weep openly. A woman by the sound of it… but that could just be my imagination. At first it was just a few sharp sobs, then the nasally whine of the resolve bursting into a raw torrent of prayers, tears and curses.
At that moment, across the surface of eight mounted television monitors spaced evenly across the corridor, (each one previously broadcasting an endless barrage of coming attractions and commercials for accident attorneys), the clip of a third rate sitcom actor laughing through a teeth-clenched fake smile freezes and begins to loop. It isn’t long before the Weeping Woman and the Laughing Man synch into a terrible harmony.
No one noticed though, neither the Laughing Man’s stuttering mime or the growing wail of the Weeping Woman.
At that moment I realized that this was some seriously fucked-up bad magick going on here. Not ritual magick in any shimmer of her spectrum, not chaos magick in any shuffle of her permutations… this was bad, as in seriously fucked-up bad, magick. I could see it. I could see it the way a thoughtful man see’s a car in his peripheral vision before he is struck down. I could see it the way a woman see’s the thousand clues of an otherwise invisible betrayal she tells herself does not exist.
This was too subtle to be the work of a God/dess trying to pay the rent on a comfortable shrine. Too powerful to have been harnessed by any of the old acronym orders, too indirect to be fed from the witches’ tit – this was the work of the city herself, Terminus.
A simmering anxiety boils over my consciousness into a panic sharp clarity. Terminus is a living being. All cities are. But what I didn’t was that the stops along the compass cross of the MARTA rail line were in actuality the city’s chakras. Whirling pinpoints of energy charged by the neuron flux of countless arriving and departing commuters. As we were currently stuck between such points, the passengers dread and anger were being amplified by the chakra current’s flow before being dragged off into…? However the longer we stayed, the more the current would drag away from us in its ceaseless wake, until there was precious little left but coma charm and zombified reflexes.
What comes next comes not from motivation, but rather from the geography of dream and those unique instincts atavistically honed in order to navigate successfully their shifting boundaries.
I rise up from my seat with a somnambulist’s grace.
Breathe in a word that no known keyboard can properly transcribe, a word as elusive to the pen as a rose’s fragrance is to the guitar. A gift from a distant life, when before a demonically possessed lover I whispered a secret between the folds of her bloodied flower and it was the ‘word’ that echoed back.
I step towards the nearest monitor screen, the belly of my astral body bloating under the expanding power of the ‘word’. When I reach the screen, standing under the looping fake-smile of the Laughing Man, I lick the tip of my right index finger before closing the rest of my hand into a fisted pistol.
Across the screen I scrawl a sigil that I make-up on the spot. Crackle of invisible eldritch fire and the top layer of skin on the ‘trigger finger’ swells into a blister. The ‘word’ incubating in my belly begins to rumble and burn off the last reserves of oxygen in the held breath.
So I release it –
- and what passes is a shriek that easily rivals the brakes of this train itself, a howl that would put a chorus of wolves to shame and the roar of a black hole’s yawn.
Without a single exception, the entire car looks up from their forced distractions or tedious meditations towards me.
But when they do it is only their faces that rise up… while, impossibly, their heads remain anchored in the moment previous’ position.
The disembodied faces all register a mask of pure terror-shock, especially as they begin to float away from the slumped harbors of their bodies. Almost all of them try screaming or yelling or talking… but without throats all they can do is mouth proclamations at one another. The faces drift by and flutter around. Though they have their eyes they still bump into each other or the hand rails of the car. Some flatten themselves against the windows or cling to the ceiling. Others halo orbit their abandoned heads desperately trying to reattach themselves.
After a few minutes the faceless bodies (though each possesses a small button hole where once a mouth’s horizon was flattened along with two corresponding pits for eyes) begin to twitch and spasm.
One by one they rise up and shuffle out of their seats clumsily. They run their hands over the absence in disbelief. A few of the faces flittering around try to land and reattach only to be swatted away by the body.
In that moment, one by one, they all begin to strip down out of their clothes. Some with the teasing grace of a burlesque performer, others going full throttle feral to claw their shirts and blouses off. One of the bodies, a teenager maybe judging by the now bare build, clicks on his smart phone and begins blasting some sort of hip-hop number.
At once all the bodies begin to writhe and dance while their faces float around helplessly, chastising them mutely for their behavior.
Then things get a little crazy… one of the young tattooed male bodies inserts itself into a grinding dirty dance between what was once a business man (his red tie the last remaining scrap of clothing) and the bag lady who got on at Brookhaven. A fight breaks out between the two males with both launching blind fury fists at one another. Then another body grabs the upper hand rail and begins doing a series of pull-ups. An older ladies form begins to gyrate lasciviously against the luggage pole. More than a few collapse into a squirming orgy.
I trance walk on down the corridor, with the Dante-esque spectacle before me only registering across a small kernel of my conscious. Stepping over flesh mounds and stopping before the monitors to draw my sigil across the Laughing Man’s stutter.
When I finish I make my way to the next car, equally drenched in a zero gravity swarm of animated masks presiding over a sweat bath of violence, dance and open carnality. There I continue, dabbing the mounted TV screens with my mark until the bone sits exposed through a scabbed layer of pus and blood.
When I make my way to the last monitor, however, the bodies have noticed what I am doing and for whatever reason (or lack of) try to impede my progress. However in my trance, I move with a grace normally inaccessible to me otherwise, pirouetting under grasping hands and soft spinning out of the clutches of broad bear hugs. When I reach the final screen, my legs shackled by two grasping children, it is with a trembling hand that I dab the ‘Killing Glyph’.
Then the power flickers and I watch all the bodies around me collapse before the lights of the cab black out.
A second passes, between whose measure vast empires of mind rise and tumble, and when the lights come back on, I am sitting back in my seat, as is everyone else, fully dressed and bruise free.
In that moment all the passengers break their self-imposed taboo to exchange uncertain looks amongst each other. More than a few pat their cheeks and brows and lips with uncertain finger tips.
Before anyone can place voice to their collective shock, the train lurches forward and begins rumbling towards the next station. Satiated of their anxiety by this sudden gift of motion, but not without a fair amount of residual trepidation (as experienced upon the gnosis moment when you wake and realize the nightmare is just that), the commuters collectively rebury themselves into their distractions with nothing more being offered to the silence.
Meanwhile, I sit there, suckling on the burned tip of my finger so that when the next herd of passengers board at the long overdue station they each regard me as if I was shushing them. A gesture, that when combined with the look on my face, becomes advice not unheeded.
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no subject
on 2010-08-31 05:16 am (UTC)Good stuff!
no subject
on 2010-09-01 01:01 am (UTC)