The only thing that keeps us sane is the knowledge that we know we are not crazy.
Perhaps sane is too strange a word -still able to experience the truth, perhaps? Experience -so subjective a term! And yet it is all we have. No tools, no instruments of science can record that which I –Which we have seen. Seismographs show only the result, not the cause of the great movement through the vaults of the Earth. Photographs smudge rather than interpret the path of light taken, the path that reveals
the path that reveals
I cannot name it, it is too much
Sanity. We must keep our sanity. Mary skinned a child alive. It was done in a fit of clarity she says and upon the final shudders of the small frame, it moved with an inhuman might -and so she was correct -she was indeed the same, sane woman who started this–
I cannot call it adventure. Adventure implies a beginning, an end, a trajectory and at least a certain agency of the adventurer. Adventures are gone on, told of, lived through and dreamed of.
Nor is this a story. A narrative. I cannot comprehend that there might be a pattern in anything I now set down upon the page.
Set it in writing -more, or less dangerous than not? To write is to introduce others to the world. The real world, the world stripped of its niceties and lies and laid bare upon the table for all to see -to bring another into this world?
I must be insane.
There is no beginning. No end in sight. But my experience- that is infinite. That I can write, point for point, and have appear rationally, in the same order in which I must have experienced it.
Mary has been eating something she doesn’t want us to see.
Mohammed is, in my estimation, too calm. Something must have snapped in him when —
I don’t know when. Perhaps the rest of us are too easily agitated.
A week ago I didn’t know what it felt like to have a knife pushed through my meat, my tendon, to the bone of my right arm. Thank god I am left handed. Sinistrous. Backwards. Inverted. The nuns couldn’t beat it out of me, no, I was strong then as I am strong now, as unbreakable as an oak, as I have always been, no, the nuns can tease away my flesh and show each other my slick bloody bone and I, I, I will still rise.
A week ago. Yes. My introduction to the frailty of truth.
A week ago I walked through the streets at midnight. Bait. I was bait, you see. Murderers had been targeting those of my description -young, brown, tall women, between the ages of eighteen and thirty, one or two victims outside the age range, yes, but serial killers don’t always work from a precise checklist. Their forearms and hands would be found, arranged reverently, with symbols of an uncanny script sliced into them. Most were believed to be descended from indigenous groups, which -well, serial killers kill within their community and race most of the time. Our profile -a satanic, or perhaps just cruel -Native himself, and himself because women killed more quietly. All girls -women -young ladies on record had disappeared between midnight and three a.m. -the witching hour, the hour we are at our weakest, our defenses lowered.
He would, we thought, find them on their ways home from work or partying, or at a party -his presentation had not changed since the beginning of the spree -experienced, we decided. Nobody paid attention when the brown girls went missing, nobodynobodynobody my mother told me nobody will remember your name nobody nobody will help you who is this nobody who loves me?
Nobody would care about them and so would I.
Bait. I was bait. Supposed to find and lure him in. A body cam on at all times, a squad a block away -he must lure his victims, we thought, not a main street slasher, hit-and-run– no. He would spend time with the girls he chose. Indigenous, eighteen to thirty, tall, female, nighttime.
Their right hands, hacked up to the elbow, cut and decorated like a child would decorate a mother’s day card, or a butcher would decorate her walls. Signs and signs that repeated but that hurt to look at, made your vision swim, your brain squeezed and drip out your ears if you thought too hard. The hands, left on the doorsteps of wherever the women were seen last -last -if only it had been their last -some cuts had begun to scab -they were alive the whole time, before they were dismembered – no other way, we were told, no other way to close the gates but I don’t believe her, I don’t believe her, you see?
Bait. I was bait.
They had other bait. They took the bait. All of the bait. Fish swallows bait even if it hooks itself in the process. Eaten alive, wriggling and slimy.
He is scraping my mind, he is looking. Looking for a way in, out there.
Mary was in the squad car a block away when I was taken. I had a taser, just in case, but I didn’t expect her, she who smiles. Nice old lady out too late, could you help me find my car keys, smiled at me. Hair like my grandmother’s, iron grey, braids wound tight, thick eyelids and bags from age underneath them, laugh lines creased her near-translucent skin, skin so fine I thought of parchment, of paper, of accidental rips and tears. She smiled. A stabbing pain, a pricking pain, and I woke up miles away.
Mary followed. The old were not as helpless against technology as they might have been, these old women, but were old and so did not think to turn off the iPod in my pocket -they threw the phone and the camera they could find away but mp3 players couldn’t track you, just music, beautiful music, soothing, electrifying, whatever you need it to be, music, just noise in a pattern, I hatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehate
Mary and her partner tracked me. He died before backup arrived. The old women know many things. A child offered a lily. Torn to pieces, the child’s tongue growing like a tree, splitting. She told me. Mary told me. There are eyes watching us, she says. It must be true, for if it were not she would be insane, and she must not.
The old women were kind. They brushed my hair, sang me songs, drugged the warm but not hot tea and cookies, hid hallucinogens in my food, changed my clothes, bathed me, fed me. They carved the name of the Gatekeeper into my arm with tiny blades so sharp, blades so thin I only felt it once the air stung. I cried for Mary. Mary cried for her partner. Mohammed cried for his sister. I knew his sister, as in the way of the Bible, carnally, the carnage, the carnival, carneval, the festival of meat, of flesh, eaten as sustenance, protection against the coming fast.
He comes.
Mohammed’s sister. I didn’t know I knew her until the morning light touched us with its pale, dusty fingers and showed me everything. The snow. The blood. The lymph flowing through. The world, stars, sun, everything, her breasts, wrists, her brow furrowed in confusion, slow to get the joke, though fast to understand. Soft hands, where his were rough and cracked, they touched together, I could feel her in him as the sun filtered into the warehouse. Blood, you see, I could hear the blood now. They had fed me the blood of Mohammed’s sister.
I never knew his sister. I have forgotten her name. She told it to me once.
The Gatekeeper was as kind as the women. Mohammed watched from the shadows and Mary from the outside of the walls. That is why she is sane and we are not. We must be. We are the only ones who can be so. Damn. Sane.
To be sane. To hear the rustle of leaves in the wind, the drop of every particle of water from the sky. The sound of ice melting. I see the grass growing. It’s very distracting, you know. Conversations are hard when you can see the layers of skin peeling off. Sanity. I am sane.
Mary and Mohammed found the other bait. I listened to the feeling of their blood on my tongue. The dead were my sisters and cousins and lovers and mothers all in one, the old women thought our blood best, to close the land. Terrible, they said, but what if all mankind were as sane as us?
I can hear the Gatekeeper tapping at my skull. He is soaking into my bones. The old women cluck like hens telling me I should have let them amputate, before it’s too late, but May and Mohammed wouldn’t. They saw the Gatekeeper too. They can hear what I hear, maybe, but they can’t feel what I feel.
Nobody came for the brown girls. I could have kissed nobody then. The Gatekeeper is a bridge and I am his anchor. They cannot know. They cannot know. Mary is too sane to let me live. But I cannot lose all my arms.
I will bleed and if I bleed he comes, but if I stay alive he will eat
he will
he is
Hunger. I am hungry. I have eaten only the salt of my sister’s wounds. I must -shall be -how far away is death. Three minutes, three days, three weeks is what they taught me. Three minutes, they knocked me out. Three days, they drugged me to see what wasn’t there to prepare me for what always was. Three weeks -it has been one.
Two left.
Mohammed says the walls are transmitting our thoughts to the old women. I saw him laughing to my screams as they cut my flesh with ragged knives, but I know that was just a dream. If it were not, why would he be here? He saw the
Mohammed saw it. What was
There were things beyond the Gatekeper. He is bound to the land, wherever he sets foot, and must eat of it, and I am the land and the and is in me, older than bones and blood, older than stones is the Gatekeeper. Humans dreamed him, gave him form, and he was born into this world and so he existed before us, moving in unoccupied spacetime, as it were.
The things beyond.
If he is not full, they will be hungry.
If they are hungry, they will come.
I feel the Gatekeeper tapping at my skull.
Reading Cactus 