Conjurella Messiah: Necronomicon Monks
Abomination Scripture by T. Casey Brennan
This is the story of Conjurella Con II. No, the blood has
dried now; the Conjurella memories are no more. Gone the voices: "Lift him
up!", gone the memory, gone the blood.
It is a decade beyond 1963 now: ten years are passing. No
longer Dallas, but Toronto. David Ferrie is dead. We are free.
No, this is the story of Cosmicon II, the last weekend of
January, 1973, a comic book convention held at Winters College, part of York
University in Toronto, an extravaganza that would include future Tonight Show
guest host, P.J. O'Rourke, Ted Nugent, the first computer game installed in
North America (in the basement of Winters), and, at the last moment, the
blood-stained legend, T. Casey Brennan
No, this is the story of women named A, of abbreviated names,
of Vampirella, of the Absinthe Cafe, of secrets and legends and dried blood.
This is Cosmic on II.
The sixties that spilled the blood of John Kennedy were over.
A memory.
A blurred vision of high school years, followed by the early
sales of fiction stories by T. Casey Brennan...was the first a cover-featured
story in the Major Magazines/Candar Men's Group men's magazine CHARGER, Feb.
1968? (they left out the "T" on my name on the cover), or was it
"Family Curse" in Jim Warren's EERIE magazine, 1969?
Who knows? This is 1973. David Ferrie is dead; Dallas is an
aborted memory, a dream that couldn't be.
But Cosmicon II will be the scene of another murder, the
murder of the mind of the greatest comic book publisher that ever lived, Jim
Warren. A quarter century later, a zine called HUNGRY FREAKS would publish Jim's
account of a condition which seemed to attack his central nervous sytem, a
condition which left him helpless as his company was led to ruin, and a
court-ordered Chapter VI bankruptcy.
Dr. E is close behind; I can feel his cold presence. Jim
Warren has taken to publishing a great many of my stories. Dr. E is displeased.
I am so unsure of myself; the sudden conversion from being a shy country boy
with few friends and a secret life, to an overnight celebrity for the award and
award nominations I received for "On the Wings of a Bird", drawn by
the late Jerry Grandenetti, in CREEPY #36, November 1970 issue, all at the New
York Comic Art Convention at the Statler Hilton in July of 1971. I stepped off
the stage at the awards presentations, with the Ray Bradbury Cup of Warren's own
Frazetta Awards, and nominations for both the Comic Art Fan and Shazam Academy
of Comic Book Arts awards.
EERIE #38 carried pictures of me receiving that trophy in
1972; I think there are copies of that issue floating around Cosmicon II.
Flash-bulbs popped, fan journalists stormed me with tape recorders, mikes, and
questions, and a new era was born in my life. Somehow, I imagined that, in and
amongst the sad, melodramatic artistry I had perfected -- Warren's letter
columns referred to "the classic T. Casey Brennan allegory", and
compared me to Dali and Rod Serling -- I could drop little hints and clues of
those secrets I carried so well.
One of my Warren stories began with a man who resembled me
leaning out the window with a rifle, thinking "Something's going to happen
soon...", but I didn't know then, not all the time, couldn't bear the
Conjurella memory yet.
Some months earlier, I had written "Shadow of
Dracula" for Warren's VAMPIRELLA comic book; it was recently reprinted by
Harris Comics, who bought Jim's properties at auction after a court-ordered
bankruptcy, as VAMPIRELLA OF DRAKULON #3, in May 1996. It was about the Van
Helsings from the Bram Stoker classic, DRACULA, it's back in 1897, and they're
attempting to create a blood serum to cure vampirism. Comic book writers often
like to emphasize certain words in bold-face, and when I showed Daddy, I had
emphasized the words "THE PROJECT" on the manuscript, in a reference
to this anti-vampirism nonsense.
Daddy points at the words "THE PROJECT", and says:
"You can't do that."
I say: "Why not?" Then I stare in bewilderment, but
inside, that bewilderment is a lie.
Deep within, the Conjurella memory lurks; deep within, the
truth that cannot be: I am only a boy, shy, frail, sensitive, artistic, but it
was my hand that pulled the trigger. Kidnapped, drugged, tormented, injected: I
am the true cold, dark legend, Lee was innocent. I killed the President. I shot
John Kennedy.
Daddy growls the name of Dr. E. Closer comes the Conjurella
memory; Daddy is right, I know, but I don't know how, can't remember how Dr. E
could loom forth from the 1950s to forbid me to write something in a comic book
in the 1970s.
In one world, THE PROJECT is the Port Hope office of
MK-ULTRA, a hellish reality of forced drug and hypnosis experiments on children,
that will lead to the asassination of the President.
In another world, THE PROJECT is a component in a vampire
comic, a skillful plot device involving a cure for Vampirella, from the socially
inept but brilliant comic book writer that many readers now feel is Jim Warren's
best ace: T. Casey Brennan.
The two worlds must not collide, but they do, only for a
moment, and I say, inexplicably: "I'm not a little boy any more. He can't
tell me what to do any more."
And now it is 1973 Toronto. Time has washed away the blood;
Dr. E's injections have washed away the memory. Kennedy is a name in a history
book, like Howard Leslie Brennan. I carry no guilt, no shame, no recollection of
the blood here: JFK in THIS world was killed by a lone nut with a defective
weapon and no motive.
Here I never knew him. Here I never wept. Not here, not now,
not in the parallel world of Toronto, 1973.
In the days preceding Cosmicon II, I had met, first Asian A,
then American A, and fallen in love with them both. They weren't spies, public
figures, or comic book publishers, so to put them among the Necronomicon Monks,
they must be half known and half concealed: Pretty girls named A____ who loved
me, once. Now they are gone, like their love for me. Now THEY are memories; now
their words of love are as distant as Dr E's words of torment, or Jim Warren's
words of praise for my comic book stories.
Once they were real. The taste of memories is bittersweet. In
November of 1972, Asian A and I took the train to Toronto. Asian A put her head
on my shoulder; there is a scent and a taste to Asian women easily as
intoxicating and as addictive as opium. It cannot be washed off; it cannot be
concealed, and even now, the scent of an Asian woman will set my heart pounding,
and my lungs hyper-ventillating. The story of the Necronomicon Monks is truth,
but it is absurd truth, so I will take this one step further, for this also is
true: if an Asian girl, particularly a pretty Asian girl (which would include
about eight out of ten of them), enters my space, I will know where she is, what
hallways she has walked down, what rooms she has entered, by scent alone.
But this was the story of the Necronomicon Monks. Daddy's
stories for Street & Smith's 1940s pulp magazine LOVE STORY were one of the
few things that he ever did that I liked. It was also one of the few things he
ever did that he didn't somehow figure out a way of using against me. I'd seen
letters to Daddy from LOVE STORY editor, Daisy Bacon; I think she published only
two of his stories, under the authorship, Bill Brennan. But he was THERE, in the
pulps, like Cthulu, Conan, and L. Ron Hubbard, like Lovecraft's hypothetical
book of sorcery, the Necronomicon. And in 1973, I was developing a strange,
lethal obsession with black magic, that went far beyond the fictional devices we
all used for the stories in the Warren magazines, CREEPY, EERIE, and VAMPIRELLA.
The Necronomicon has always been a subject for debate among
the followers of Lovecraft and the pulps. Some say Lovecraft created the
Necronomicon, like L. Ron Hubbard's former literary agent, Forry Ackerman,
created Vampirella. Others say it was an actual book of ancient sorcery, that
Lovecraft had discovered and decided to use in his stories in another 1940s
pulp, WEIRD TALES. In this latter category is found this legend: The
Necronomicon was discovered by the Holy Office of the Inquisition, and sealed
behind stone in a monastery in Tibet...even they, who could slaughter thousands
of their own kind, still feared its dark power.
No: I bear the Dulles Stigmata: protracted delusions of a
religious or occult nature, which are the trademark symptom of those who were
subjected to the CIA's illegal mind-control experiments of the 1950s, directly
overseen by CIA Director, and later Warren Commission member, Allen Dulles.
But this is Toronto in 1973. This is Cosmicon II. Dallas is a
decade in the past, and the basement room where I would remember, and write
CONJURELLA, is more than two decades in the future. In that fateful world-to-be
of the nineties, I would make contact with others who plausibly and recognizably
(to me, who had lived it) claimed to have been adbucted and abused by MK-ULTRA.
Yet, the stories would wane into occultism: terrifying tales of unmistakable CIA
abductions are peppered with the absurd. Abductees, after presenting what would
otherwise be valuable testimony, go on to relate accounts of neighbors with
mind-reading rays, NASA officials with time machines, and visions of Rose
Kennedy as an ally of the assassins. Nor was I less guilty in this also.
Relating now, in the nineties, my memories of Dr. E, and the real-life PROJECT,
I am constantly reminded that in the seventies, I wrote essays for a variety of
occult publications, claiming to be the reincarnation of noted occult figure,
Aleister Crowley. This was as intended by the CIA. I also carry the Dulles
Stigmata. If we are all reincarnations of Aleister Crowleys, time travelling
through hell with NASA and Rose Kennedy, then our testimony is far less
plausible, except to a very few.
But in Toronto in 1973, I am innocent: not still the assassin
of Dallas that no one saw, not yet the assassin of CONJURELLA that no one
believed.
Sometime after I fell in love with Asian A, and before
Cosmicon II, I met, and fell in love, with American A. American A was pretty,
but not really quite as pretty as Asian A, who was indescribably gorgeous. Yet,
American A was not without power over me, and her power was words of
love...promises and whispers, her fine, slender strands of blonde hair brushing
across my face, so different from the thick, long, sleek black hair of Asian A.
In the days before Cosmicon II, American A spoke in promises
and whispers, swore she would love me forever, and begged me not to go to
Ontario, where she knew Asian A awaited me.
But within, there with the memory of Dallas, somehow
concealed and omnipresent, like Poe's Tell-Tale Heart, was he memory of Linda.
Like John Kennedy's blood, Linda's tears poured over me; like the mythical
Necronomicon of Tibet, Linda's memory was sealed up in stone, sealed within.
Uncle Johnny was the bad uncle. Quite unlike Uncle Charley,
also of Columbus, Ohio, who had one wife, and one set of kids, Uncle Johnny
married and divorced and remarried frequently, throughout his unlamented life.
Some time in the early 1950s, he married Aunt Bonnie, whom I immortalized with
the fictional appellation "Conjurella", in my story of the same name.
Her daughter was Linda, who was the same age as me; for a while, she came to
live with us in Avoca, Michigan. She was a perfect, exquisite little girl, long
blonde hair, a high I.Q., and an air of placcid quality, even at the age of
five. When she left us with Aunt Bonnie, in 1953, shortly before I started
school, she wore white muffs with sugar cubes in them; that will always be my
archetypical memory of her, Linda and Aunt Bonnie leaving. It would not be, it
could not be, that fleeting glimpse of Linda, that day in Dallas, that hallway
on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository Building, that fleeting
glimpse, so cruel, as the MK-ULTRA operatives hustled her past so quickly.
But this was Toronto in 1973: Linda was only a whisper here,
from two decades past. Here my heart was filled with Asian A and American A, as
I drank heavily, autographing copies of CREEPY and EERIE, wandering through the
maze of Winters College, attempting to cope with my chaotic love affairs, my
alcoholism, and my new-found fame. Yet deep within, the memory of Linda lurked,
deep within, I knew: she, like me, had been of the chosen ones. She, like me,
had been born to kill, born to serve THE PROJECT, born to kill John Kennedy for
MK-ULTRA, born to serve the hellish renegades of the Office of Strategic
Services who had chosen us to end the power of the Kennedy dynasty forever.
Perhaps, sometimes when American A's blonde hair brushed
against my face, there was that whisper of a memory of Linda. This was Toronto
in 1973, this was an alternate world. I feared the intense cold of Toronto in
the parallell world of Cosmicon II, 1973, and Winters College was a vast,
unchartable labyrinth. Sometimes, in my wanders through it, I would come upon a
door leading to the cold, white world outside. For a moment, I would stare
transfixed at the wind blowing little whisps of snow through the bitter cold.
Beyond those doors was the cold world from which I had come, and the cold world
to which I would return. Beyond those doors was a cold past in which I had lost
Linda and shot President Kennedy, a cold future in which I would remember, and
transcribe, those things in the legend of CONJURELLA.
But within those doors was Cosmicon II, a world of Asian A
and American A playing tug-o-war with my heart, a world of adulation for the
poetic, panelled prose that had suddenly been evoked from me, a world of comic
book stars and comic book fans, a world with no John Kennedy writhing in blood
from my single, only shot, a world where THE PROJECT was only a brief,
emotion-packed scene from VAMPIRELLA. Within the doors of Cosmicon II, this was
truth; the other world, the alternate world, where THE PROJECT was a hell that
MK-ULTRA had created for children, was far behind and far before.
Yet, paradoxicly, obscenely, unfairly, in that alternate
world of Toronto 1973, Dr. E had stalked me, and now Jim Warren was his target.
Here at Cosmicon II, I had found my Shangri-La, a world of comic book and
trivialities, a world of American A and Asian A battling inside my head for my
heart, a world with no blood of JFK that I had spilled, no sinister designs of
Dr. E and THE PROJECT. But somehow, beyond the lies, in the labyrinth of Winters
College, Dr. E lurked, stalking Jim Warren; somehow, beyond the comic books,
beyond the scent of Asian A and the whispers of American A, the memory of THE
PROJECT lurked.
"You're part of the New Frontier, Casey," Dr. E had
told me earnestly, in the presence of two associates, after the Kennedy election
victory of 1960.
To those who knew, but had been lied to, THE PROJECT was the
CIA's ultimate weapon against Castro's Cuba: a secret invasion force which would
combine the traditional warfare of the past with the super-science of the
future.
Lee believed. Major General Edwin Walker did not. Walker had
been a prominent activist for the right-wing John Birch Society, which, in that
era, had still been enamored of America's military, and America's espionage
apparatus. MK-ULTRA had sought a protective cover of rightists and
paramilitarists, standing ready with their own troops, to aid in the supposed
"invasion of Cuba". Those who DID believe had included American Nazi
Party leader, George Lincoln Rockwell, the scholarly but sinister Dr. Fred G.
Schwartz of the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade (which shared offices with the
Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans), and martial arts expert Bruce Lee,
hell-bent on liberating his people from the murderous brand of communism which
had overtaken China. But Walker had refused altogether, and Lee, under orders
from David Ferrie, his commanding officer in the Civil Air Patrol, had fired on
Walker and missed, deliberately, as a warning. Lee believed, but Walker did not.
George Lincoln Rockwell, chess player, essayist, Nazi leader, friend: he
believed also. ("Get Lincoln out of that Nazi suit, and talk to him
man-to-man, and he's all right," someone had told me then.)
"Call George and tell him the invasion is off,"
David Ferrie said, light-heartedly, after the assassination. Some years later,
Rockwell would write my dad, sympatheticly, "Casey thinks he's a Jew but
he's not."
But Rockwell, like Edwin Walker, like Bruce Lee, like Lee
himself, would perish. The sicties would claim the lives of George Lincoln
Rockwell and Bruce Lee; Walker would die later, and horribly. Rockwell would be
shot outside a laundromat, by one of his own men, in a virtual coup d'etat by
the CIA, which would place the American Nazi Party squarely in the camp of the
Kennedy assassins, directed no longer by their own eccentricities, but by the
very government which they had purported to oppose. Major General Edwin Walker
would be stalked and homosexually raped at a freeway rest stop, by men who would
later identify him as a willing participant; he died shortly thereafter, the
pain and humiliation were too great.
And Bruce Lee: the cut-outs of memories, the fleeting
glimpses of a past somehow lost, like that fleeting glimpse of Linda... That
fleeting memory; no before, no after, just the memory. We are in a hotel room,
somewhere. It is before the JFK assassination, sometime. Lee is there, like
Bruce. They have both seen the children, Dr. E's children, sitting limply in
chairs with needles in their necks, headsets on their ears, screens before their
vacant faces. Dr. E says: it is necessary: child assassins formed with the
super-science of the future, child assassins, a proud tradition of both sides of
the now concluded great war, child assassins necessary for the invasion of Cuba.
It has already grated on Lee; later, he will seek a friend and confidant in
Dallas police officer, J.D. Tippitt, whom he will tell. But for Bruce, it is
intolerable NOW.
"Get rid of the kids," Bruce says, "We don't
need them."
Lee sits, staring downward, his hand on his forehead, wearing
that sly, secret smile, only ever-so-slightly visible.
"I can't," Lee says softly, and matter-of-factly.
Bruce side-steps into position and gestures toward me.
"Get rid of the kid," Bruce says, "Get him out
of here. Take him home. Lose him. Anything."
"I can't," Lee repeats, like deja vu.
Bruce begins a series of blocks, cries, and kicks. I look at
Lee questioningly with drugged vision: Dr. E or David Ferrie must have injected
me again, recently.
Lee says, chuckling, "Well, Bruce goes a little crazy
like that sometimes. There's nothing we can do. It will pass."
Under the hypnotic drug, I take these words literally, not as
a joke, a game. I wait, horrified, for Bruce's supposed attack to pass.
After, Lee says to Bruce, in earnest: "That was great.
That was magnificent."
But this is Toronto in 1973: this is Cosmicon II. I never
knew them here. The air-tight doors of Winters College seal out the cold, the
wind, the drifting snow, seal out the tormented past of Dallas, seal out the
bleak future of Conjurella. Within these doors, there are no memories of the
aborted invasion, no memories of the single shot which my hand fired, no
memories of Christian Anti-Communism or Fair Play for Cuba...only comic books,
and fans of my Warren stories, only the spectral phantasms of American A and
Asian A, not present, but there in spirit, battling for the heart of T. Casey
Brennan, not the child assassin, but the poet, not the pawn of Dr. E and
MK-ULTRA, but the pawn of pretty girls, touching, whispering, promising, their
hair in my face, their scent in my nostrils.
Here, in this sealed off world of Winters College in 1973, T.
Casey Brennan was not the secret assassin; he was Archie, torn between Betty and
Veronica; he was not the drugged, helpless pawn of Dr. E, he was Dobie Gillis,
lost in philosophy and love affairs... Yet, Dr. E lurked, even here.
Inexplicably, Jim Warren had been strip searched by customs officials, upon
entering Canada, en route from New York. What did they know, what did they
suspect? What motives did they attribute, what foul plans did they suspect?
Initially, it had seemed impossible to make it to Cosmicon II, where I had
received an invitation to appear, complete with complimentary room at Winters
College; Winters College, where the doors could block not only cold, but
memories... And American A, who still loved me then, had begged me not to go.
But go I did, riding into Port Huron with a friend that morning. I call a
Canadian taxi from Port Huron, ride across the Blue Water Bridge, and soon, I am
at the Canadian National Railway station in Sarnia. Or maybe I went to Asian A's
apartment before the train station; I don't know anymore, I'm not a witness, I
can't remember.
The Sarnia-based taxi is called "A Stan-Lee Taxi".
The driver gives me his card, and later, I show it at the convention, as a
take-off on the name of the Marvel Comics publisher known as Stan Lee. The
driver lays a rap that could be entitled: "Great Tips I Have Been
Given". He tells me of a rider employed by a tire manufacturer, who ships
him a full set of tires, later, as a tip. He wants comic books. But soon I will
have no comic books. Soon, the bleak future of CONJURELLA will propel me into a
network of hippie communes, homeless shelters and free meals. Soon, the
insulating doors of Winters College will insulate me no more. I sent him no
comic books, though I may have promised.
I board the train for Toronto in Sarnia. I watch, sad and
melancholy, as the Canadian countryside and the memories flicker past me. I am
alone now. Not the sleek black torrents of hair of Asian A on my shoulder now,
not the promises and whispers of American A, only sadness, when there should
have been hope. Within are the memories, forgotten, but not gone, like a word on
the tip of one's tongue, but somehow out of consciousness, somehow out of reach.
In the last days of David Ferrie's life, in mid-1966, and
early 1967, David Ferrie met with us on several occassions. I was always drugged
and hypnotized during those meetings, so the words would just barely filter
through, in little bits and fragments. I was no credible witness, then or now.
But I knew Dr. E and David Ferrie were creating a disease to attack Africa. It
must have been 1966 when David Ferrie told me they had successfully infected
someone.
"It's going to fly!" David Ferrie said of the AIDS
virus, grinning proudly. Daddy smiled a sheepish smile, and nodded. He was
afraid then. So am I. Even now.
But within the insulating doors of Winters College awaited
the Absinthe Cafe. The memories are non-sequential now, blurred visions of comic
books, Jim Warren, fellow celebrity guests, and probably the most outstanding
performance ever given by noted rock musician and hippie deerslayer, Ted Nugent.
Nugent did not socialize with us, but future Tonight Show
guest host P.J. O'Rourke drank that night at the same table with Jim Warren, me,
and a second-rate comic book writer named Denny O'Neil. The subject of a
controversial underground newspaper called SCREW comes up, then managed by Jim
Buckley and Al Goldstein.
Someone, I think Denny O'Neil, says: "Jim Buckley, he's
the real intellectual behind that operation." At some point, Al Goldstein
will be arrested in Cuba and charged by Fidel Castro with being a fellow CIA
agent.
And then someone says, "The Mafia does a pretty good job
of distributing it."
P.J. O'Rourke frowns, sips his drink, and says, "Yeah,
until they take it over."
But my mind is on American A, on the promises and whispers.
She wants me to leave Asian A, wants me to marry her, wants me to believe in
witchcraft, as she does...
And within, the Dulles Stigmata lurks, like the scars of Dr.
E's needles in my neck. In the Hebrew bible, the serpent who tempts Eve is NChSh,
and the Messiah yet to come, is MShYCh. In Hebrew, every letter is a number
also, hence, the Qabbaliastic science of Gematria, the study of the letters and
the numbers. Hebrew is called, by its proponents, a mathematically correct
language: words with the same numeration, are words with the same meaning, in
spite of any apparent differences, which must be resolved by meditation.
The Dulles Stigmata lurks. NChSh is Nun (50), Cheth (8), Shin
(300), 358. MShYCh is Mem (40), Shin (300), Yod (10), Cheth (8), 358. Brennan,
transliterated into Hebrew, is Beth (2), Resh (200), He (5), Nun (50), Nun (50),
Aleph (1), Nun (50), 358.
The Dulles Stigmata lurks. American A wants me to believe in
magic, and I do. And in timeless time, beyond Dallas, beyond Toronto, beyond the
60s, or the 70s, or the 90s, the words form: I am the Last Witness. I speak
great things and blasphemies. I am the first to shoot, and the last to testify.
I wash clean the blood. They must have given me clues as to how they made it;
somehow, somehow, I know, AIDS was begun in Dachau...the torture was only
incidental, a means to an end. Somehow, it was necessary to break down the
resistance of human flesh through torture, so that such a condition, flesh
without natural defenses, flesh without immunity, could be duplicated in a
laboratory. And Dr. E was an Osteopath; was Osteopathy only a cover, or was it a
component in the creation of the virus that the World Health Organization would
later spread, in vaccines, throughout Africa? Later, in the 1980s, the World
Health Organization would write about me in their Geneva-based journal, WORLD
HEALTH, in their October 1983 (page 30) and January-February 1986 (page 9)
issues.
The Dulles Stigmata lurks, and soon, I will be attempting to
duplicate the exact style of roaring twenties occultist, Aleister Crowley, in a
variety of occult journals, both great and small.
The Dulles Stigmata lurks, but for now, in the Absinthe Cafe,
there is no memory of the blood of John Kennedy, only the memory of American A's
kisses, and I want to call her, to tell her again that I love her. Somehow, I
find my way through the labyrinth that is Winters College, to a wall with two
(or is it three) secluded pay phones. I call American A in Michigan, and breathe
the most oft-repeated phrase of my youth.
"I love you."
She is sad. She wanted to bolt from Michigan and follow me to
Toronto..
"Don't be surprised if I show up there, after you,"
she says before I leave for Cosmicon II. She asks me to swear that I will love
her always, and that I will always be true to her. And I do swear. It is only
half a lie. I can love her always, but I cannot be true.
I return to the Absinthe, and this is mystery.
Jim Warren says he has called for a prostitute to be sent to
his room. "To a man like me, time is money," Warren says, "I
don't have time for the kind of courtship that you do."
All of the guests, including myself, were provided with
complimentary rooms at Winters College, and to anyone who remembers Cosmicon II
from the guests of honor's perspective, any prostitute who could find the damned
rooms on her own, would have to be considered a possible CIA agent from the
gitgo. Warren leaves, and returns shortly. He remarks to me are suddenly
inexplicable, out of rational context.
"Well," Jim Warren says, "I want to keep using
your stories, but she says I can't. She says I have to get rid of you."
This is the way home: It would be a matter of split-second
timing. I would take the train from Toronto to Sarnia, where Asian A would meet
me. I would stay overnight with her, then, in the morning, she would take me
across the Blue Water Bridge to Port Huron, to the bus station, where I would
take the bus down M-21 as far as Emmett, to the cemetary at Bricker Road. There,
American A would meet me, and drive me the rest of the way home.
In the morning, at Asian A's, I hear CROCODILE ROCK on the
radio, a song they played so frequently on the radio while American A and I
would be parked in front of my parents' house, making out. I am sad, and full of
longing: will I lose American A? Will I let her love, her promises and whispers,
slip away, for the sake of holding Asian A?
I go down on Asian A in the morning; I hardly have time to
pull my tongue out of her vagina before she speeds me to the Port Huron bus
station. We just make it, and I get on the bus to Emmett just before it leaves.
There is no time to wash my face, rinse my mouth, no time for anything at all.
The bus lets me off at the cemetary at Bricker Road and M-21,
where both my parents will someday be buried. American A arrives, a few minutes
late. She leaps from the car, and embraces me, beaming. I resist her, only so
slightly.
"Don't you WANT to kiss me?" she exclaims.
Then her tongue is raping my mouth, and her blonde hair is in
my face, which I have just pulled from Asian A's pussy.
There was so little time.
This is the way of conjecture: To those who believe, anything
proven by the Qabballah is true absolutely. There is simply no question.
Hypothetical Jim Warren enters the room at the end of the
labyrinth, the prostitute on his arm. With mock impulsiveness, she embraces him,
giggling, and her ringed finger finds his neck. It is only a pin-prick at first
that he feels there, a jagged fingernail, perhaps, a harmless scar of love. But
suddenly, there is the weakness; he wants to pull away, wants to question, wants
to wonder at this, but he cannot.
There is so little time.
The girl counts the seconds as hypothetical Jim Warren, all
but overcome now, succumbs to the tiny hypo concealed in her ring. A decade
later, he will be a virtual invalid, as the deadly MK-ULTA poison accomplishes
the long-term job for which it was intended.
At last, hypothetical Jim Warren slumps to the floor. It does
not matter; he will not remember. Dr. E enters with two henchmen, nods to the
prostitute matter-of-factly, and says:
"So this is the great Jim Warren."
But as hypothetical Jim Warren falls, I rise up, the Dulles
Stigmata gnawing at my soul, as the ring poison has on his. I am the cold, dark
one. I am the Last Witness. I wash clean the blood.