a deleted scene
5
Brigadier General Bill Degall was your father. He observed the Dreyfus family home engulfed. A transparent quarantine tent. And he must’ve thought about Ori, “the little scumfuck v0idhead who started this whole mess.” Same little scumfuck v0idhead who poisoned his daughter’s mind and turned her into barely aware disembodied brain. A meaty man, Colonel Peters, appeared with hands clasped behind his back and nursing a face of resigned duty.
“General, sir, we’re ready…”
Degall sighed, puffed out his cheeks, and nodded.
“Lead way, colonel.”
Men dawned airtight aluminized suitports – level D protection – and were escorted into Dreyfus home by non-descript government scientist called Grabowitsz. They shimmered in evening ambers. Even through thick polycarbonate of helmets visor sour ammonia of meat stung senses. Grabowitsz made his way through living room to cellar portal, which was protected by frame of plastic cleanscreen. He directly addressed Degall and Peters for first time.
“Bureau have been here for weeks, forensic and ops have nothing. We have nothing. Arizona Congress is involved, as if they’ll be able to contribute anything useful.”
“You must have something?” Degall implored but Grabowitsz shook his head before words were even out of General’s mouth.
“We tried digging through back wall of house but all we got were studs, drywall, and sheets of insulation. It only seems to exist in perceptual plane created within Dreyfus homestead. one-point perspective.”
“So, it could be an illusion? Like House of Leaves thing?” Peters chimed in.
“No, and if you don’t mind my saying Colonel that’s something of reductionist comparison. Contained Cosmological Aberration, or ‘CCA,’ interacts with reality, impacts form and input. There’s nothing fictional about it. It’s as material as reality around us. We can’t really explain it. But if you want to engage with it then you have to do it face on here in cellar.”
General Degall ducked beneath cleanscreen followed by Peters and Grabowitsz. There were men in suitports milling around utility space. I had been covered by square patch of translucent cleanscreen. I frantically sucked at overlay with my obscene labia, fogging up plastic from within. Refusing to reflect or transmit, only consume and digest. Peters noticed my perfect symmetry while Degall regarded me with contempt and curiosity.
“What about the boy?” he asked Peters who was trying his best to maintain his professional cool.
“Head still hasn’t been found. If it’s in CCA then we’ll struggle to retrieve it.”
“Autopsy report…”
“Nothing. Humanoid dental impressions around jugular. Wound looked like it was cauterized by professional. Boy was healthy on inside.”
“Where’s mother?”
“Receiving electroshock treatment in facility up North.”
Degall approached v0idhole and fingered plastic partition. He had never hated something so much in all his life. Grabowitsz noticed General tracing north-travelling splinter with his eyes. Grabowitsz saw this as an opportunity to offer his theory which was at least something else to discuss.
“Crack acts as kind of, um, sexual access point – not in manner of vaginal vault, more like clitoris. Something to be rubbed and stimulated into arousal by foreplay of partial insertion. If you’re into that sort of thing.”
Colonel Peters gave Grabowitsz side-eye.
“Have you listened to yourself lately?”
“My boyfriend happens to love it when I engage in conjecture.”
“Fascinating.”
“There’s this 18th century case study: Brit made trip to France to ask specialist surgeon to remove his leg. Doctor refused and man held him at gunpoint and made him perform operation. Man said leg was an “invisible obstacle” to his happiness. That’s what v0idhole does – it removes those obstacles.”
Suddenly there was commotion. Unauthorized personnel invading quarantine zone. Degall and Peters ran to top of cellar where boy with no suitport on was wrestling with two government scientists. It was Ori Dreyfus.
Dr Grabowitsz: Perhaps amputation craze is symbolic of something, of an individual’s feeling that it might correct mismatch between their anatomy and sense of his or her ‘true’ self, maybe? Oh Elijah…
***
Saunderson Worth: I should have been born without my dick. I obsessively think: This dick shouldn’t be there. My brain perceives my body without dick. I can be talking to someone then out of blue I’m just not able to focus on words coming out of their mouth because I’m thinking about my dick and wishing it wasn’t there. I might be dozing on recliner and I get this weird feeling around my lower abdomen, feeling that that’s where it needs to be off.
Back in downtown Ishim Lin there were lots of amputees around, war vets and like. I vividly remember seeing man being pulled from streetcar with bloody bandage over his groin and I remember thinking, I wish that were me. I read once that 49-year-old man who could not access v0idhole amputated his own penis following instructions that he had obtained from retired doctor. It is not uncommon for amputee fetishes to transform into an acute case of eroticized genital mutilation, they tell me. I refuse to feel weird about this.
***
McNeil’s physical state had deteriorated exponentially since your funeral earlier that day. While he felt no physical pain, v0id-infection had seized his immune system. He was now crumbling, hunched monstrosity who could barely keep himself upright. Thin poles of ivory creaked with each step and it would only be matter of time before their brittle woodwork started to splinter away and he’d be rendered immobile. To make things worse, cataract of shadow was eclipsing his sight. McNeil was now tapped into my alien frequency. Human language was completely indecipherable to him now. He shambled around misty cemetery like hideous night animal, reverse verses of unlanguage resounding in his ears and filling blind canopies of his eyelids with relentless spool of alien symbols. McNeil saw boys Forbes and Worth through dimming vision.
***
BJ stopped digging to wipe driblet of sweat from his wide brow. He was hyperventilating now, exhausted. He saw Saunderson’s crotch shuddering.
“Hey, uh…does anyone else feel shitty about…?” – he gestures to your open grave,
“Why?”
“Well, wasn’t she our friend or whatever?”
“Forbes, I swear you are such fucking complete dope. What do you think all teenagers want?”
“Uh…” – BJ shrugged – “…sex?”
“Wrong. They want to die.”
I put these words in him.
BJ thought about this for moment and simply accepted that Saunderson was right. BJ heard his shovel strike something solid. Boy rejoiced for moment before hooded figure surfaced from dark ocean surrounding cemetery. BJ reacted by downing shovel and stumbling over knoll. Saunderson, on otherhand, remained cool. Figure shrugged away hooded garment and presenting himself to boys in all his gruesome nudity. Devil faced them. Bald and rail thin. Grunting through single nostril. Fingers like elongated bone-hooks. Series of sharp ribs poked out against heavy vein-threads of his bleached torso. Saunderson took moment to register beast’s identity.
“McNeil…”
Creature didn’t respond. BJ had found his feet but was paralyzed by primal fear. Creature dug its claws into thin membrane of his stomach and pulled apart flesh like tissue paper. Creature revealed its swirling vortex, black and pulsing. Wider he stretched flesh around dim mass more it protruded, until eventually I emerged from my fragile mother in cosmic caesarean. I hovered over boys, first dragging free loose flesh from Saunderson Worth’s face so that only blood-soaked skeleton mask remained. Forbes watched on, noting how his friend had been unpeeled, how one might unthinkingly strip skin from piece of fried chicken. Worth fell to his knees, flopped to side, dead. black vapor left boy’s corpse and creature absorbed it. Then I locked onto BJ Forbes who was now sniveling and pleading with creature to call back its starving abyss. But you cannot plead with hungry predator. v0id sucked at his throat until head detached and rolled down knoll. After consuming your remains from your gravesite, I reinserted myself into McNeil who now moved with reinvigorated fervor, energized by subsumed essence of our kills. He felt remnants of Saunderson Worth hit his bowel and stimulated his withered genitals. McNeil felt whole again. Full cycle. Nothingness felt material. Rocket fuel.
enjoyed its proportions and detected note of melancholy in his groin upon viewing the once impressive, lube-lustered specimen. It had it’s fill, he assumed, dormant, maybe, but not dead. He would never admit as much to General, but in his deepest private inlets Peters admired you for surrendering so completely to the celestial anomaly. He’d been curious exactly how much of yourself you’d tendered but judging by the size of your coffin the final sacrifice was your mortal soul. Peters was impressed by commitment and sacrifice. The group of suit-ported government officials were discussing next steps at the foot of the cellar. Soon cinder and rebar would come down and they would attempt to excavate the hide of great wall-beast from its dwelling. As if they were first mates aboard the good ship Pequod, ready to simply pull the great sperm whale from the heart of the Indian Ocean. It was arrogance. Stupidity. And Peters knew they wouldn’t get through. In fact, he hoped they didn’t. He knew the v0id-creature was somehow subatomically protected by its own dark ecology, even in death. Peters approached the desiccated hole, delicately removed the cleanscreen. He fingered the crisped outer leaves, browning and limp as autumn. He fed the closed petals of his hand into the maw, slid to wrist. Inside he opened them out to a starfish of fingers. He felt the dehydrated flakes of inner tunnel come away under his ragged nails. Then a voice –
“Colonel…”
Peters withdrew his hand, covered in dirt and pebbles of alien debris. The voice came from Grabowitsz, the scientist. He looked drained, faint, like the prey of Ebola.
“I was just…” Peters went to explain what he was doing then realized this man had no authority over him and therefore he needn’t explain anything. Grabowitsz appearance was alarmingly unprofessional.
“You look like you need a rest.” Peters suggested, knitting his brows. Grabowitsz glared at the v0id before relaxing to a half-smile.
“My relationship is over.” He gargled.
Peters didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t exactly the emotionally available type at the best of times, now he was obligated to empathize with a subordinate. But Grabowitsz looked legitimately dreadful and he was pleading in a desperate unspoken language for connection or condolence. The social strain of this prompted the stone warrior to let down his guard.
“I’m sorry. This job can ruin the best of marriages.” Peters conceded, startled by the sincerity of his own words.
“I wasn’t married.”
“Oh…”
“No, uh, we weren’t…allowed. We always talked about going North to do it, where it’s allowed, but, uh…”
For a moment it seemed like Grabowitsz was about to succumb to vast tears but a hard gulp cleared away the emotional threat and Peters was grateful. Another second of quiet awkwardness prickled the scalp of the colonel. Grabowitsz looked at the arid maw of the v0idspace and then, mercifully, he went to start talking again.
“My partner, uh, he was, uh, interested in this stuff. More so than me.” Grabowitsz gestured to the hole. “Loved weird shit, Lovecraft, Crowley, the occult. He hasn’t been home for days. I don’t even know if he’s…uh, alive.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Oh, just feeling. We’re, uh, very psychically in tune with one another.”
“That doesn’t sound very scientific.”
“Nothing about my life lately seems particularly scientific, colonel.” Grabowitsz let himself laugh a little and rubbed the hard knot of bone at his wrist. Peters observed that it was not the laugh of a man in full possession of his rational faculties.
“It’s a funny thing. The human body.” Grabowitsz went on.
“Yes. It is.” Peters replied, not entirely certain where this conversation was headed or what the veiled comment really meant. It made him uneasy. Was the scientist trying to open up about his admiration for the v0idhole?
“I don’t think I could do it.” Grabowitsz eventually said.
“Do what?”
“Amputate. Become a, uh, v0idhead.”
“No?”
Grabowitsz shook his head.
“You know, I feel…that he is. You know?”
“Is what?”
“Alive. Somewhere.” Grabowitsz made another gesture to the scorched cavity in the wall. Peters wanted to reassure the young scientist, knew that he should, but words would not come to him. Language failed him in presence of the v0id.
“Have you ever thought about what it feels like? What the allure is?”
Peters eyed Grabowitsz, suddenly very aware of his own boundaries in conversation with this virtual stranger. The stone wall came up inside him.
“Never. Only a fucking freak would fantasize about something like that.”
“Don’t you ever think maybe this all happened for a reason? Like the next stage of evolution? Transcend the body and all that.”
“Let’s bookmark this discussion on post-human futurism. My commiserations on your recent loss. Now if you’ll excuse me.” Peters gave a departing nod and moved past the wan figure of Grabowitsz. He wondered if he could ever be as honest as the dying scientist.
Elijah McNeil: I, BURIED IN MOLECULAR STIGMATA. IT ALL AROUND, IT AND ME. CARRIER. SEEKING OTHERHOLES FOR NESTING DOLL SEQUENCE OF OBLIVION. NO CONCEPT OF ANYTHING BUT HUNGER. RAPACIOUS. PA TIC. WEAK. GOD’S GUTS IN BODY OF FAT EVIL SPIDER. BUILDING COBWEB TRAPS, CATCHING SMALLER INSECTS. NO FUCKING, NO CONTACT. THAT’S WHAT V0ID DOES. TURNS US TO INSECTS. UNCARING, UNLOVABLE. LIMBS HANGING OFF, WALKING VACUUMS UNTIL WE STOP. AND WE WILL NEVER STOP. RE IS ALWAYS NEXT MEAL. EVEN IN NOTHINGNESS RE IS UNIVERSE OF COSMIC NOTHINGNESS. NOTHINGNESS. REMEMBER LIFE AND SOUL, VAGUE. BUT MEMORY, SPARK OF IT. ALWAYS RE, FLOATER OF FORMER-LIFE. GOOD, I WAS. WAS I? LOVE IN MY LIFE. LOVE OF MY LIFE? BE GOOD WHILE YOU CAN. DON’T NEED V0ID. YOU SURVIVE. GO ON. BE GOOD, BE…GOOD. BEFORE I COME FOR YOU…
— Chris Kelso is a writer from Scotland. His book Voidheads can be found at Schism Neuronics. The Mad Butterfly’s Ball, co-edited with Preston Grassmann, is due out through PS Publishing later this year.
header image by Bobby Lafollette IIII