Quest for Sex, Truth & Reality

Phone, he thought dumbly. He abandoned his suitcase in the street and staggered on. Something’s happened here. Got to call someone, get some help. The houses set back off the street looked harmless. He knocked on the first door. A middle-aged man answered it—

“Yes? Can I help you, young man?”

“I…” the writer attempted. The man wore eyeshadow and cherry-red lipstick. He also wore panties, garters, and stockings. Stainless-steel clamps were screwed down on his nipples, distending the fleshy ends.

“Sporty, wouldn’t you say?”

“Huh?”

The man lowered his frilled panties, revealing a penis and scrotum glittery with safety pins. One pin pinched closed the end of the foreskin.

“Uh…sporty, yes,” the writer said.

“Would you care to touch it?”

“Uh, well, no—”

The writer jogged off. At the second house he peered through the storm door and saw a beautiful nude woman chasing a giant St. Bernard, and a man at the third house stood grinning on his porch rail, a noose around his neck. “Fly, Fleance! Fly!” he quoted Shakespeare, and stepped off the rail. Heavy, tonerous thuds greeted the writer at the fourth house. WHACK-WHACK-WHACK! WHACK-WHACK-WHACK! In the kitchen window, he saw a man very contentedly cracking open a baby’s head with a large meat tenderizer while an aproned woman prepared a fry pan in the background. The man pried the cranium apart and began to spoon the tender brains into a bowl. “Olive oil or canola?” the man asked the wife.

The writer foundered away, gagging, and tripped back into the street. The impact of vision made him feel sledgehammered in the face. He’d seen enough; he didn’t want to be a seeker anymore — he just wanted to go home. Then the sweat rushed again, and the voice, like a raddled chord, fell back into his head:

BUT THERE’S SO MUCH, SO MUCH FOR US TO SEEK.

Whatever did that mean? Without reservation, the writer bent over and threw up. This seemed the logical thing to do, an obligation, in fact, after all he’d seen. Madness, he repeated, urping it up spasm after spasm like a human sludge-pump. Ropes of saliva dangled off his lips as his stomach rocketed out its contents. The wet splattering crackled down the street.

Oh, what a day.

Done, he felt worse, he felt decamped. The particulate mush of his last meal glittered nearly jewel-like in the frosty glow of streetlamps. He felt empty, not just in the belly, but in the heart. Had he thrown up his spirit as well?

Do I even have a spirit? he thought.

Too many things cruxed him. The town’s madness, of course; and the voice — most certainly. Hearing voices in one’s head was not generally an indication of well being. What cruxed him most of all, though, was simply his own being here. Why had he come? For the truth, for shards of human realities to nourish his writing, but now he wondered. It made no sense, yet somehow he felt the opposite: that actually a lack of truth had evoked him. Vacuities, not realities. Wastelands.

Lies.

Absurdly, he sat beside the puddle of vomit, to reflect. Was throwing up catalytic to subjective conjecture? He felt rejected, but by what? By the mainstream? By society? In a sense he was — all writers were, and perhaps it was the backwash of his rejection that had instigated the summons, chosen him somehow. Human truth is my sustenance. How powerful is the power of truth? But the more he plied the speculation, the harder he laughed. The quest had backfired, leaving him to sit gutterside as his vomit spread into strange shapes between his feet. Seeker, my ass, he concluded. Bugger truth. All he cared about now was the next bus.

“Mother!” he heard.

The plea had sounded impoverished, a desperate whine like a lost child’s.

Then: I SHOW YOU TRUTHS, SEEKER. SEEK. SEEK OUT THE SUSTENANCE OF TRUTH. SHOW ME YOUR WORTH.

The writer smirked. What else have I got to do? He could feel the churchfront as he approached, as one might sense a particular face in a crowd. Candlelight caused the nave’s darkness to fitfully shift, populating the pews with a congregation of shadows, worshipers bereft of substance.

“Mother! I’m here!”

Aw, God, the writer thought, and it was the palest of thoughts, the bleakest and least sapient. What he saw numbed everything that he was. He stared toward the chancel as if encased in cement.

The coffin stood empty. Its previous tenant — the dead old woman — had been stripped of her last garments and lay stiff across the carpet, all gray-white dried skin and wrinkles, and a face like a dried fruit. Between the corpse’s legs lay the priest, black trousers at his ankles, copulating furiously.

“I’ll bring you back!” he promised, panting. His eyes squeezed shut in the most devout concentration. Sagging bags for breasts jiggled at the corpse’s armpits.

“You’re having sex with a corpse, for God’s sake!” shouted the writer.

The fornication ceased. The rage of this ultimate coitus interruptus focused in the priest’s eyes as sharply as cracked glass. “What?” he shouted.

“You’re fucking your mother’s corpse!”

“So?”

The writer shivered. “Correct me if I’m wrong — I’m not an expert on modern clergical protocol — but it’s my understanding that priests aren’t supposed to have sex, especially with their mothers, and more especially when their mothers are DEAD!”

The priest faltered, not at the writer’s objection, but at some inner query. A sad recognition touched his face as he withdrew and straddled the embalmed cadaver. “I can’t bring her back,” he lamented. “No, not like this.” His erection pulsed upward, a parodical stiff root. Forlornly, he picked something up.

The writer’s guts shimmied. What the priest had picked up was a pair of heavy-duty roofing shears.

“There’s only one way, I’m afraid,” mourned the priest. The writer shouted “No no no! Holy shit! Don’t do th—”

— as the priest unhesitantly clipped off his glans with the shears.

The obligatory scream shot about the nave; the glans fell to the carpet like a gumdrop.

The writer was backing away, his ears ringing. I do not need to see this, he thought. But something forced him to look, and by now he had a pretty good idea what that something was.

Blood jetted freely from the priest’s clipped member — yes, freely as water out of a garden hose. “Mother, oh, Mother,” he muttered, shuddering as the blood poured forth.

TRUTH, banged the voice in the writer’s head as he plodded in shock back out onto the street. Something’s made everyone in this town crazy, he realized.

NOT CRAZY. BLOOMED IN TRUTH, THE REAL TRUTH.

He ignored this; he had to. So how come I’m not crazy?

YOU’RE THE SEEKER, came his answer.

He gazed emptily down the street. He didn’t feel crazy, he felt fine. So why was he hearing voices?

AH, YES, he heard. SUSTENANCE!

Was it really madness, or was it susceptibility, as the voice seemed to infer? All his deliberating over truth, and what truth really was, had skirted one very important consideration. Perhaps truth was mutable. Like philosophy, art, technology— like life itself — perhaps old truths died and were replaced by new ones.

So the truth had changed? Was that it?

The writer banged through the swinging doors of the Crossroads.

“Look, he’s back!” said the fat blonde. “It’s the writer!”

“The seeker,” corrected the keep. “Ready for a shooter?”

“Cram your shooters, rube, and you,” he pointed violently at the fat blonde, “Stay the hell away from me.” She burped in reply, halfway done with her next pizza. The redhead was still at the rail too; on a bar napkin she absently doodled stick figures with inordinately large genitals.