Spin Glass

Here is what the ritual in Djiban is described as:



First I—because I am the rat in Djiban who is deaf—have to be put in a circle surrounded by saltwater. If the floor is too soluble the water won't last, so carpets won't do, so we have to retreat to one of those hallways which exist as tertiary veins in the house, with few entrances and many dead ends. There are no windows and few exits and the walls are that same muted dark-red wallpaper, and on the hardwood a circle wraps around me with little droplets of saltwater. We made this ourselves with table salt and water from the tap, which surely came from Lake Michigan. "It doesn't have to perfectly lock you in," Tabi notes, reading from the text, which somehow looks less fragile than when I handled it. Obviously he does not use his hands to hold Djiban. "The droplets have to be about fifty percent coverage. We will do much more to be safe."

Of course there also must be candles. "Candles are key to a lot of pseudoscientific recipes like this," he tells me. "In the book they are implied to not be fully necessary, but there's no harm in it. So we will use them." There are six which we long ago put into storage, retrieved from someplace called Friendly James in Albany, New York, which fell through the world and sold knick knacks and covered up the abuse of a cashier for two years. The candles are small and half-plastic and burn dim, and they sit behind the ring of saltwater equidistant.

Tabi has brought a lot of materials with him in a laundry basket; the candles and the bottle of saltwater were only the beginning, and it is now that Tabi retrieves something he would call critical for the ritual, something written with emphasis into Djiban. The way that this ritual was described implied some malice in the air, some hatred that had to be kept away from the deaf rat's vital organs. And Tabi levitates a smock from the laundry basket, a black smock of heavy cotton without any holes for arms. It is really more of a heavy blanket with a hole for my head. "Tilt up, darling," he says. "I'll fit it around your horns." And I have to look at the ceiling so he can wrap me up in this thing.

Warm. Too warm. I am still wearing a blazer and stockings made of wool and it all itches with heat. And this smock is thirty pounds heavy and resists even an inkling of chilliness; it weighs down my arms and legs so that I am stuck in my seat, nearly paralyzed. I can't sign to Tabi anymore. I must go along with what he says.

I want to put this off but immediately he is already onto the next thing—the part of this ritual filled with hatred and violence. Tabi pulls a plastic case from the basket and flops it onto the floor.

This is a steak, a T-bone cut from a cow that used to be alive but isn't anymore; we found it in a butcher's shop called Mick and Nikola in Belgrade, which fell through the world for no real clear reason. I watch Tabi leave this slab of flesh on the floor and reach back into the basket and retrieve something else—a knife, a paring knife, which is a sharp object not used for cutting apart living things but instead for cutting apart dead things like bell peppers and potatoes.

When Tabi lowers himself to the floor he stays three inches above it, but with his legs crossed and his delicate fluffy tail nearly reaching ground. And his hands are so steady. With one hand he tells me, "Now watch closely."

I watch closely. It looks odd on Tabi, this dagger, this pose. I have only rarely seen him perform acts like this—acts of the divine, of the occult. Djiban is a book about magical realism, about a world with an undercurrent of anachronism. It is fiction, but it describes our planet from a different point of view: what if the imagined were real? What if it could be tangled up in nonsense?

Tabi is tangled up in nonsense. He has a tiny knife and he holds it above the steak in pose until my eyes are truly locked on it. Watch closely.

And he brings it down.



A moment of abject violence, and blood.

Or—it isn't actually blood, it is just myoglobin, which is runny and red and clear, and it fills the plastic case until the container is slick. It takes enormous effort and his form should have no leverage, floating on air like this, but Tabi has strength from nowhere and uses it to rip open both the casing and the meat in long, precise cuts as if wielding a scalpel. His movements are carefully patterned, planned out. And he tilts his head to read Djiban and study every individual movement, every word on the page, which I can now recount.

One stab into the center. Draw a symbol representing disability, damage, agony. (I would not use those words for myself, not at all.) This symbol is illustrated in Djiban as looking a bit like a figure-eight with a cross drawn through one of the loops, and in this case Tabi has to draw many many lines into the flesh to get it this way, forcing the knife through roughly—it was not meant for this task.

When I look at it from above, it looks like I am going a little crazy. Or maybe it is Tabi that has gone crazy. This is almost comical. He has drawn an old Germanic rune into a piece of steak. It probably isn't even an authentic runic character, just something invented.

But this is Djiban, this is what it talks about with trauma. This piece of meat is part of the air around us and can feel Tabi digging into it with his knife, and it can feel me staring upon it, and somehow I am met with a deep, physical sinking sensation that does not feel entirely made-up. I am to some degree really sinking into the floor.

"We are getting there," Tabi signs, placing the paring knife on the floor a moment. He wants me to know what is happening—he would not leave me in the dark. At least not at this moment. "I need to draw on your forehead, now. Another rune that looks the same way. And then I need to pray a while, apparently, and this will nearly complete what we need to do. Alright?"

And all I can do is nod. Two nods and by the time I get to the second one Tabi has placed a hand on my forehead such that he can spread my fur apart and expose a patch of bare skin—this is not comfortable—and in a matter of moments he has retrieved something with his other hand. A splotch of red powder coats his fingers. It kicks into the air and fills it with dusty particulate when he shifts his hand, and he must be quick to reach over and—

I can feel him drawing into my skin. Rough. My gaze goes to his arm but I can't see what he's doing, obviously. I am a doll being painted. I do not have input in this, nor would it be appropriate. My sense of touch does not particularly like this new sensation. The powder Tabi picked out is like granulated chalk, but it seeps into my fur. It's sticky the same way as wet sand. And he has drawn, I assume, a symbol on me—the symbol of disability, damage, agony. And he pulls away and shakes his hand free into a plastic container, and pats his palms, and looks stiffly upon the scene he has created.

The candles flare up. Tabi takes a breath.

"Now we have to pray," he tells me. I rarely see him so focused on a goal, so direct. "It's a particular kind of praying where we recite mantras in our heads. We don't need to memorize scripture or anything." And he laughs a little, although I think there's some exhaustion behind it—he has had to memorize scripture for acts of magic and the occult.

Tabi looks at me directly, now. He waits until my gaze is trained, until he can feel me patiently waiting for his instruction. "Darling, I need you to have thoughts of thanks. You must deliver love to the noosphere, so it says in Djiban. In return, at the end of this... you will be able to hear. Your inner ear will function correctly."

I am blank. Some part of me chooses to nod.

"And for the rest of the steps," he signs, "I will handle them. All you must do is close your eyes."

But I don't. I tilt my head, instead. I can't get this wrong. I can't get this wrong. What does he actually want me to think about? My head is swirling and I don't feel thankful for anything, I don't feel good about anything. I don't like when he calls my inner ears 'not functioning.'

And Tabi senses all this and takes a deep breath. I see a matched understanding pass through his expression. "The meat I just cut up is crying out to the universe in anguish," he signs. "I need you to confront it. I need you to love it. Go where your mind directs you."

So after this, I close my eyes.

And I am sinking into the static.



A sensory deprivation tank is a metal canister filled with sewage water where dead animals go.



Ignore the itch along my legs and chest and neck. And ignore the smell of burning wax and ignore the warm and cold air swirling around my head. Ignore everything. And shut my eyes.



And think about love.



When I was seven years old, I finally learned what it actually means to be deaf. I learned that deafness is to be locked away from the rest of society in a pervasive and often blatant way—you are below it, you are watching from the outside. You get told that you should learn how to lip-read, because everyone will talk, and you should learn how to listen.

And a lot of very smart people across the centuries decided to do something else, because being deaf is a common enough thing that you aren't alone in being that way. And being even a little hard of hearing can lock you out of the world. So some deaf folks started understanding each other instead. They invented various sign languages. It is a collection of gestures that let us be a little less ostracized. And some people in this same lineage of intelligence started capitalizing the first letter of the word Deaf, because doing so makes you feel a lot less like you're a defect on the human experience.

And I didn't want to be part of all that, at the time.

I had a Cochlear implant put into me when I was very young, as I've said. And it was not voluntary, it couldn't have been, but when I grew up I started to assume I wanted it. And I felt very, very superior to other people who were Deaf or deaf or whatever, because I could mostly get through life. I ended up sort of normal. I was not 'locked out' in the same sense as everybody else, and when kids feel like they've got it made, it's worth bragging about. I didn't learn ASL, a language with my hands, until much later in my life. By then I was very unhappy with the whole deal.

Still for a long time I would have told you, yes, I would love for a wizard to cast a spell on me and make me able to hear. You say this because it is not possible and you don't really think about it very much. But I would have also told you that about me being homosexual. Or an online furry. I would tell you that about a lot of things.

The urge to be typical can be difficult to overcome.



And when I met Tabi I finally stopped thinking that way. I had, for a very long time, been so sickly miserable. Have you noticed? And Tabi did not want me to be even a little bit typical. He is in love with all the parts of me that are atypical. He would never tell me to stop being a goat or stop being gay—he would, if I eventually get to the very obvious point of fritzing around with my gender presentation, let me play around with every shape and identity under the sun. He is wonderful.

Why, then,

are my ears such a concern to him?



I feel love for him. Or something close. But I don't feel love for this. I don't feel love for what this is. I don't feel love for this sensory deprivation tank and this fucking ritual and I don't want to be able to hear—I don't want to be able to hear! I don't want a fucking magician to change my whole life into the image HE WANTS.

HE WANTS THIS FOR ME AND I DON'T.

I DON'T WANT THIS.

And in the middle of this internal roar, this rapturous endless tirade of thoughts and emotions, this warfare going on in my brain, I am greeted with a tapping sensation. It is an invented tapping from an invented part of me. It is memory. Memory is trying to make a connection.

Memory reminds me.

In Djiban the author prays and asks his neighbors to cut up little animals to take away a different animal's deafness. But Tabi and I do not have neighbors. So—

And I open my eyes.



Tabi holds, in his left hand, a small rodent called a rat. He compresses its black-gray fur and fat and ribs in his three fingers rather effortlessly so as to not allow it to escape, but its little limbs are wagging and squirming in shock. In his right hand Tabi holds the paring knife with a surgeon's precision—there is no shake in his wrist. He has already begun digging the tip of the blade into many many parts of the rat while I had my eyes closed, while I was shielded. I can spot the parts along its chest cavity where there are holes, big gaping holes oozing blood down the side of Tabi's hand, where he has stripped the screeching thing of its skin, pulled off fat so as to reach the ribcage and score it. Most noticeably what he is doing now is he is stripping the rat of its ears. He brings the paring knife to one side of its head and grazes its eyeball and then in jagged motions he saws off its ear and its mouth hangs open and then jaws violently. And Tabi's own jaw is moving quiet, but I can tell he is speaking, he is surely saying something under his breath.

And all I want for him to do is stop.

Please.

Please stop doing this to that poor fucking thing, please, please, please.

please

My hands move for me, I am signing, I am signing, why can't you see me? Please stop. I sign stop stop stop stop but Tabi doesn't stop, Tabi continues to cut it apart, and the look in his eyes is nothing—he sees nothing, he is working with a tool. With barely a moment to aim, Tabi brings the knife to the other side of the rat's head and hacks off its remaining ear, all this delicate cartilage and ligament being torn off in a brief firework of gore. And Tabi digs the blunt tip of the knife along its legs and groin and forelegs so that he can get it sopping wet with blood and I can see in its eyes a limitless and wordless terror, a death. And I am signing please please please stop please please stop

I didn't want this

I DON'T WANT THIS.



STOP



and my voice is so rough and coarse and broken and I am screaming now, as loud as I physically can to get Tabi's attention. I have never screamed like this, not in such a long time, and I am yelling, "I don't want this, I don't want this, I never wanted this, stop, stop, stop," and I can't get the smock off of me



and Tabi looks up at last and his hands are coated in crimson and his expression is like it is in my nightmares. His horns curl around his head like knives. And he did not realize what was happening until he met my gaze, my intense and overworked and terrified gaze. There is no sympathy for him to sink into. He is a sheep in headlights.

Darling?



and the overhead lights snap off in an instant.