Avant Pop - Excerpt

GUNPOWDER COME

Rob Hardin

He spotted her on the Fourth of July in a place misted with the smoke of cherry bombs. Krane was standing in the doorway of Embargo Books, listening to "Do It Like A G.O." by the Geto Boys. Rap lyrics and the smell of gunpowder made Norfolk Street feel like a site of terrorist resistance. But slogans of defiance turned alchemical when a figure emerged from the tinted fumes.

She came into view slowly, turning the corner as the yellow haze began to clear. Something was wrong with her face-it was a tragic-comic mask of slackness and rigidity. But beneath this oxymoronic expression lay the cast of a Botticelle angel: Roman nose, flared nostrils, wide, dark eyes like those of a cat in shadow. She was quite beautiful, even though she had been tortured to the point of temporary paralysis.

A bracelet of string dipped in blood and cerebro-spinal fluid had been knotted around her wrist. Intricate with tangles, its drippings were medieval and complex, a lithographed waterfall of crosses and scythes. Had this decoction of tears been drawn from her body or her lover's? Both had been imprisoned under the guise of drug auditing, but only one had emerged to meet him. Was she being released out of mercy, or to warn him of the consequences of rebellion?

As she approached, the temperature of his body changed in sympathy. He touched her fist and shivered when it opened like a torsion of frost. His nerves, a microskein of filaments, accessed her sense-memory, compelling teletacit voices to shriek more information about her ordeal than CIA interrogators could hope to extract.

She had been broken into like a box of murder. After twisting her head apart in search of explosives, suppressions probes had found only semantic fragments-secrets in a language so evanescent that it passed for air. But Krane knew why she was crypted inside. His nerves reached through the veneer of transparence, probing like antennae for the bloody country behind the wall.

Chained to the corpses of her own family for weeks, she'd learned to associate the proximity of love with the maggots of decomposition. Interrogators had starved her until she was forced to reify the faces of her loved ones-first with revulsion, thn with hunger. In the official report, CIA clerks had suggested that her paralysis was the result of a disease caused by cannibalism, but this was unlikely. Precipitated by famine, exhaustion and dehydration, the climax of her stroke was physical collapse.

Scenes of death had become sites of orgasm. Her legs nearly buckled as she tipped her pelvis toward Krane, chilling his synapses with spurts of information. Seconds of pleasure swelled into pictures which obliterated the reality of Norfolk Street: her legless mother, opened at the waist. The castrated cadaver of her father, cheekbones blunted by sandpaper. And at the center of a prison floor, an excrescence of tissue and pliant marrow: the remains of her four-month-old son. The interrogators had opened his screaming smile with knives; it was only at a moment of release that she could endure his rape. Tortured by the absence of torture, her come was dust. A sandpainting of empty bodies and fixed lamprey eyes.