I bit off my hand... The whole thing

As a preface, I once posted a story here titled "I Bit Off My Mother's Uncle's Hand." It was a prelude to what you see now. Enjoy reading.

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I Bit Off My Mother's Uncle's Hand. He looked at me sadly and poured another round of drinks, spilling some on the table.

"What's hypocrisy?" asked the black slave, after eating the leftovers from the floor.

"Hypocrisy is, for example, lesbians buying rubber penises," I replied.

My mother's uncle slammed his drink and wheezed,

"Or how a gay man doesn't like suppositories."

I thought for a moment—as much as the alcohol fumes roaring in my brain would allow. It's common knowledge that male homosexuals are divided into passives and actives, that is, into those who insert and those who are inserted, and not every active person necessarily derives pleasure from what the passive person derives pleasure from. Here I interrupted my thought process, as something else occupied the conscious remnants of my brain.

"My mother's uncle, what will you do without your hand?

" "Don't worry," he said, and yet I wasn't worried. I asked out of curiosity. "I didn't need it anyway.

" "And shifting gears in a car? And waving a party banner at May Day parades? And applauding a family of acrobats when my mother falls off a trapeze and cracks her head open, and it would be embarrassing not to react anyway? Ha? How will you?

" "The Negro will help," assured the black slave. "That's what the Negro is for. The Negro is for your mother's Uncle.

" "That's nice of you, you pig pusher." I smiled and tossed him a piece of roast porpoise.

"A Negro doesn't like roast porpoise..."

I flew into a rage. The brain's emotional center seethed, and a creation unlike any that had ever left the depths of my subconscious was born. I felt something that was an emotional mutant; an abstract, emotional equivalent of Godzilla. I hate people who hate porpoise roast, and this would have led to brutal blows if the telegram hadn't suddenly arrived.

"Look, my mother's uncle!" I shouted with joy. "I won!"

Then I read the message.

"What have you won, my niece's son?

" "One used oak coffin, any size, to be collected within a week or not at all."

We splashed the triumphant glass.

"What good is a coffin to the white masters?" the black slave said.

"Exactly, what good is a coffin?" my mother's uncle echoed. "Did someone die?"

"No, they didn't.

" "Is someone going to die?

" "I guess not.

" "And the deadline for claiming the prize is in a week," my mother's uncle said worriedly. "What are you going to do now?"

I pondered in silent concentration, watching the cockroaches scurrying across the ceiling.

"We'll kill the black one."

"We can't kill a black man!" my mother's uncle exclaimed indignantly. "Who's going to make up for my bitten-off arm?"

Well, now I was regretting my rash decision. I could have chosen not to bite off my mother's uncle's arm. I hate regretting rash decisions.

"We'll buy you a prosthetic. At least it won't be black.

" "Come on, boy," my mother's uncle insisted, slopping down another glass and tossing a scrap to the black slave. "We can kill someone else.

" "Who?

" "Aren't there enough Romanians hanging around the streets? Romanians, Jews, Blacks, Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses, atheists, Latinos, gypsies, Vietnamese, Yugoslavs, Chinese, women...

" "Women?

" "Women."

I scratched the swastika carved in the middle of my head.

"Why women?"

My mother's uncle shrugged and began to groan in the Shoshone dialect. Only now did I notice he was fluffing up his monstrous plume, like a giant turkey. Or maybe monstrous like a mutant peacock. Never mind. He fluffed up that infernal "thing" on his head, and I got chills. What a stupid movie, I thought. I'd never seen a movie where everything was so real and happening all around.

Then, with effort, a muttered thought formed in my brain—"What the hell am I doing here?" I didn't know; on top of that, I was starting to break out in a cold sweat. The shivers grew stronger, and I began to fear that I would lose control, that the giant lizards besieging the cinema would start staring and discover that I was different, that Tysia was different too, that we were different and had always been different, that they wouldn't accept it, that they would slobber their toxic spit on us, and when we dissolved and our bones softened and became ready to be torn apart by their flat, blunt teeth, the lizards would return to watching the movie as if nothing had happened. As if they had never existed, and our melted corpses had appeared out of thin air.

It's just a drug! It's just a drug! Get a grip, Madman, I whispered in my ear. You're not in the movie, you didn't bite off anyone's hand, there's no danger to you or Tysia in the cinema. There are no lizards here. There are only people.

Damn, that's probably even worse...

We're lying in the sun, in a meadow. I rest my head on her belly, Tysia stares at the clouds, I stare at Tysia, the dog stares at me, the bored fisherman stares at the dog, the skittish fish stares at the fisherman, the circling birds stare at the fish, and God stares at everything that happens one summer morning in a meadow near a small lake.

Trashy.

But so pleasant...

- Wake up!

I wake up. We're standing in front of the cinema. It's clearly evening, though I can't be sure. I can barely stand, feeling my fizzy brains about to leak out through every possible orifice. Tysia's grip on me is weakening. Her strength is fading. I'm about to collapse onto the ground and not get up, and die, stoned, in front of the cinema entrance, passed by crowds of contemptuously watching people, for whom the sight of someone going crazy is incomparably worse than the familiar sight of their drunk, screaming husbands and the wives their friends imagine from work.

"You've taken too much," Tysia says with concern.

She wasn't taking anything. She just wanted to watch the movie. I shouldn't have taken anything either, because I promised her we'd watch it together. I feel like throwing up.

"Will you make it to the bus?"

Of course I won't. I'll lean against the wall, and that will drain all my remaining strength, and then I'll collapse and die, stoned, in front of the cinema entrance, passed by crowds of colorless people for whom the sight of someone crazy is so commonplace that it's not worth wasting my eyes and time even looking at it.

I lean against the wall. I want to sleep.

(Someday I'll finally sober up, or rather come to my senses, I know this, though it doesn't make any difference to me. That's how it is: some people like vodka, some like drugs, some like sex, some are addicted to vodka, some are addicted to drugs, some are addicted to sex, and I'm addicted to all of it, though the opportunity for sex is rare and self-gratification isn't particularly fun. For this reason, I like to abuse various things because it calms my urges. Then, after taking them, I see all sorts of strange images, and sometimes it's scary, sometimes funny, but at least I don't have to feel, because if I had to name the two worst things in life, it would be feeling and sensing.)

I wake up, already sober, I think, somewhere. I don't know where. A train station, maybe. A station. Empty, because it's night. There are no stars visible outside the window, but a few lamps in the waiting room are shining, casting a faint glow over my crumpled form. Plaster is peeling from the walls, rust is forming on the metal benches, and vermin occasionally crawl through, scratching with their hairy legs. Everything around is a sort of brown, even gray, though perhaps not, because gray is less depressing than brown, sepia, or whatever you want to call it. I've never been much of a color expert.

The clock over the door stopped ages ago.

I struggle to get up and walk carefully, the echo of my footsteps echoing deafeningly. I open the heavy door and step out into the corridor. It's incredibly empty and gloomy here. There are just too many crows to complete the picture. It seems I've overdone it with the powder. The last thing I remember are those moments at the cinema, when Tysia and when I, and when people, and when the world. And then some swirls, turbulences, or rather turbulences in my head, a dream of an argument with God, and I wake up here, somewhere, where? nowhere.

I leave the building, and the faint glow of the streetlights dissolves like a puddle in the immediate area, and beyond that, nothing is visible. It's gray. Even the green grass is gray, like the red balcony or the brown branches of the bare trees, though neither are visible here. White snow, if it were, would be gray too. Instead, there's a darkly colored mass of people, from which, if one were to distil the color most common to everyone, it would be gray. I mean, this gray mass is usually here, I think, here, at the train station, because I'm at the station, but now it's gone, and if it were, it would be multicolored, even though it's gray. That's what I think. In fact, gray has dominated me. I even inadvertently chose a colorful hat once—gray, even though it's white, black, and purple. I could have chosen a gray gray hat instead, but that would have seemed very mean and ironic.

I've run out of visions, those about arms and legs being bitten off, and those about lying on the ground, but they make me nauseous, they make me nauseous, just as nauseous as the surroundings inside the station are, as if carved from a single stone, roughly hewn, simple and massive, depressing. There's no wind, I'm sweating, I'm warm, though I feel cold. The result of a recent binge with stimulants.

Where is Tysia? I couldn't have reached where I was on my own, and Tysia was the last person I remembered before falling into the mental vortex. Now Tysia is gone, not to mention the fact that there's no one, nothing, and even the darkness bordering the pools of light seems absent, because it's not darkness but emptiness. I want to look for Tysia because I worry about her, but I'm afraid to go out into that black nothingness, as if I were about to pass into oblivion myself, to disappear. Something terrifying lurks in the darkness, as if a creature lurks there, or rather, as if the darkness itself were lurking, waiting for the streetlight bulb to flicker for a moment, and in that brief moment, that brief moment when it's pitch black, the shadows will overtake me and I'll disappear, as if they never truly were. It chills the skin on my neck, so I quickly go back into the building to wait there until morning, or as long as necessary. I'd like to hear that soothing "Madman, Madman..." from Tysia's lips. I'd like to lie in a meadow, on her stomach, with a dog watching us, and someone watching the dog, and finally God, and all would be idyllic.

I walked down that uninviting, cold, and soulless corridor, where even the echoes had died now, and if I had screamed, I would still have been alone. The ceilings hang somewhere far away, gloomy in sepia, perfectly visible despite the few light sources. Could they themselves have radiated some dark glow? But it doesn't matter. A bend in the wall, some branch or turn, I enter it silently, quietly, slowly, calmly. Calmly. I'm not frightened. I'm not terrified. Peace, apathy, and heartlessness fall over me like a velvet veil. A bend in the wall.

Behind it, a door. Rusted, made of massive steel, the paint long since peeled off, and now only sharp scraps hang. No bolts or locks, just a massive doorknob, which I quickly press, and again silently (have I gone deaf, have I lost my mind, is there a vocal vacuum here, has the voice died forever, madness, can't I hear, or is there nothing to hear?), which I quickly press, and again silently enter another room. What is this slowly creeping madness, and where could Tysia be now? Isn't she worried? Where am I?

Inside, the floor is tiled, and half the walls too, the ceiling low this time, and everything is flooded with rotten greenery and filth. Dampness wrinkles the skin on my toes and itches my nose, such an unpleasant, moldy dampness, and my feet tread on the moss protruding between the tiles. The room is small, or rather small, darker still, a small room of green existence. In the center grows a tree, its shoots cutting into all the walls and piercing them painfully, yet silently, as if the tree were stealing the entire voice, feeding on it, and itself radiating that rotten green brightness. For the single lamp above the door, behind the grate, glows white, and this whiteness vanishes in the ubiquitous greenery.

"What do you want?" I hear.

The first is a voice that has reached me for ages, it seems, ages, though I've only been here a short time, and at the beginning there were even the sounds of my own footsteps, until they were devoured by Something that seems to feed on every manifestation of life. Even the wind devoured them.

"What do you want, called Madman?" I hear that whispered squawk again.

And once again, it doesn't bother me.

"Who said that?

" "Maurycy, the rush of the lordly world!" it thundered.

I looked at the shoot then, at the tree that climbed and twined in the middle, encompassing everything around me.

"Is that you...?" I ask awkwardly, because how can I skillfully converse with a tree that's likely...?

"What do you want?" he says, and I know it's him, lurking here for centuries, somewhere in the heart of the railway station, this extraordinary tangle of empty corridors. "Speak!"

And that green rot throbs deafeningly quietly, and I don't know what to say, I don't know why I'm here, why I came.

"Do you want to ask me something?"

"I don't know, Maurycy..." I stand there, and only now does fear prick the skin on my neck and breathe a cold breath there, slowly, majestically.

"Speak!

" "I bit off my mother's uncle's hand! We were sitting with a black man, with a black man, and vodka, with my mother's uncle, and..."

I begin to pour out a torrent of words, and I can't stop it, as if I were going to die if I stopped, or if some severe punishment awaited me for something. For stopping. I talk and talk, recounting the plot of my drugged dream, and I can practically feel it, I remember it, I remember everything, though I don't know why. The green rot is drawing near, the shoots are tightening. Maurycy listens and absorbs my every sound, delighting in it, puffing up, flexing, while I speak louder and louder, louder and louder, faster and louder, as if in a trance, feeding and nourishing, and propelling this creature into further existence with my voice, absorbed, broken, chewed, and swallowed, a piece of myself, my imagination, and my person. I speak, absorb, speak, absorb, until my voice cracks, and after several minutes of the clamor that has become a monologue, a clamor no longer audible, I fall silent.

The rotten greenness retreats. The shoots fall, sated. Maurycy lets me stop, having achieved this extraordinary woody-vocal orgasm. I stop. For a moment I look at him, at this extraordinary creature. I admire.

I faint. A shiver runs through me, and I know how the deformed children, now so numerous, must feel. They crowd, run, push; they take me in their arms, carry me, carry me out. Like a sacrifice.

No. Like a deity.

Like a god. Like a god.

I die without worrying where or when they'll find me... I was already dead when I first saw Him. In the meadow, with Tysia, before, with Tysia, after the ashes, with Tysia. Dead. Now I've gone through my purgatory.