Here is an important part of the book:
...Valdias once told me in a secret language how to unlock secrets from meat. Secrets of the universe, he said! I cackled endlessly when I heard him, but his faults were not insanity, they were intense clarity. In the half-light of last night's evening I thought I saw the moon grinning so wild. I cut up a little thing that scurried between buildings and I took it back home and underground I derived the phase of the stars and I saw God in its flesh. There is such power in a scalpel. When you dissect, you learn that detached skin feels so much indeed! It is alive, it is manifest! Even as I ground it up into little paste and scattered it to the wind it felt trauma. And I felt so much fear that my hair grayed and my eyes dimmed. I am of the same stuff. My empathy for the crying world! In that resemblant morning I sought Valdias in the library again, sopping wet from rain, as it began to rain, as I made it rain...
It is at this point that I get a headache, and then I pull the book away from my face. And when I look back up, and around myself, and all around myself, I see the rows and rows of shelves. Everywhere. As tall as the sky. I know the height of the room but it feels endless. I can't even imagine how many old books are in this room. I couldn't count them if I tried. The very words on this page are starting to make me dizzy.
Above me, the rain has only grown more intense. And when I stare out at the cold, the chill, the endless pouring phantasm, I start to feel it enter me.
Slow.
And an hour passes while I read.
Here is a summary of the book:
Djiban is a story about a madman. In the half-fiction of Djiban there was a group of philosophers in the eighteen-fifties—I am not sure where, or who exactly, besides some last names—who cut up a bunch of little animals and did experiments on the remains. They called themselves 'modern sophists' and did not believe in mainline thinking, and instead subscribed to whatever beliefs fit their reasoning at the time. They were not scientists or even really frauds in the traditional sense, because they did not sell their concoctions, and they did not publish anything either. They wrote a lot of papers and kept them in a library of their own design and over the years more people came by and wrote in books and put them in the library, and more and more, and then it was the nineteen-nineties, and the fictional author of Djiban came along to this library and did a lot of reading. By now there were a lot of 'modern sophists' who cut up little animals. Or they sat in rooms and philosophized, or they tried to summon things from the woods. And this author read some papers, ignored some other papers, and came up with a system of thinking that he called 'true psychic modernism'. In this line of thinking, he argues that the old traumas of the world—murders, genocides, oppressions—are causing all modern traumas. There is a lot of rigamarole, because the book is very long and very bitter and very frustrating to read, and I don't think I digested more than thirty pages total with how much skimming I did, but this is the central argument.
In the book this author says outright that nothing can be fixed. Nothing can be fixed, really, because trauma cannot be mended. It was apparently proven when they cut up a bunch of little animals and tried to put them back together again. But then he says that there is a way. There must be a way, somewhere in the annals of history. After all, it can't all be like this.
It can't all be as boring and sad and mundane as it seems.
And in a deep corner of the book called Djiban, which is a fictional word that means to cut open, the author describes himself giving a little rat—a little lab animal not considered sophisticated enough to think—the ability to hear. It was born deaf and he 'fixes' it, by praying and burning candles and asking his neighbors to cut up their animals as tribute. And not a long time later he cuts up the rat, too, because he needs it for something else.
- - -
I am freezing cold. When I bundle up under my fuzzy blanket and curl my toes and bend my legs to become a little ball of a goat, I am still chilly. The room isn't cold, the house isn't cold, and all the while my hands are stiff and I can hardly hold Djiban anymore. Actually the book has me pissed off, worried, anxious. Actually I am about done with Djiban. I shut it and put it on the coffee table and bundle up, up, even further, wrapping my blanket around myself twice, because all I would like right now is to have an empty head, an empty mind.
I need to shut it out.
The storm named Emily pounds the skylight and soon enough I'm back staring up at it.
Up and away.
In April these rains started and they haven't stopped. Weather in its great unending fury is beautiful to me, the most beautiful thing, because it is the representation of all the many, many forces coming together to manifest chaos. Even if the control variables for turbulence and humidity were simple—which they aren't—there would be no way for us to know the result. We could not have seen Emily coming. I am sure there isn't a soul on the planet who could have seen Emily coming. The whole of Earth is such a complicated photograph that even a single moment in time is too complicated to interpret.
Imagine if a book like Djiban was written every millisecond. And imagine if the whole of this room, with all its many tomes from different eras, none of whom I know, none of whom I have met, was written every second. From the beginning of the planet until the end.
This unrelenting unending infinite is everywhere. It is
attacking the skylight.
Where am I?
Something stirs in my stomach, and another chill runs up my leg and up to my chest. I peel the blanket off of myself and try to get to the bathroom.
The year I turned twenty, I was sick like this all the time. Every day was a new symptom. Aimless. Pointless. My stomach and then my bladder and then my head and then a pervasive cold and my nostrils filled with mucus and so much trying to throw up like this, every time at noon and on and on and on. I am kneeling against the toilet waiting for the puke to come up. Where are you? And back then I was fucking sick all the time to the point where I was truly angry, because it didn't make any sense, it wasn't fair. Throwing up at noon every day. A lot of cramps and diarrhea. And blurry vision. Clammy hands. My head would ache for hours and hours and hours. What do you do when your body is upset like this? How are you supposed to get answers when a doctor costs eleven thousand dollars?
And a friend finally gave me an answer, said I was sick because I was unhappy. The brain can affect the body and something is wrong with my life that is causing this. So the year I turned twenty I also tried so hard to make myself happy, I took medicine, I saw a therapist and then another therapist, and I stopped working at the same time, too, and I was out of money by October. I ate healthy and then I ate shitty. I went for walks and then stayed in bed all day. I destroyed my life. Next February it stopped.
It was worse that it stopped because it meant I had nothing. I had no answers. I had no truth.
I am throwing up. Or, fuck's sake, I wish I was, because nothing will come up. No answers and no truth. My fur itches all over and I just want something to come out. So again I
force it
out
Fingers down my throat and eventually bile and half-digested schmutz goes into the toilet and I retch several times and my body fills with endorphins until the cold and itchiness seeps in again, and I force myself to throw up again, and all this for far too long.
Fuck me it hurts, my whole body is crimping along the edges. Why?
It isn't supposed to feel like this. I am supposed to be happy.
I did everything right.
There is no button to press to fast forward through this. It is agony and weightless dizziness and it lasts forever. And all my time is melting away into frustration and anger.
Do storms ever pass?
How do I know when they're gone? How do I know if they're almost over? The year I turned twenty I thought, many times, that I was nearly through it. People would ask me how I was doing and I'd tell them better, doing better now. And that was just my way of getting around saying, "I am fucking miserable and it will never end." And nobody wants to hear that. I know because later on I was so honest about it that people stopped wanting to be around me. Deaf kid wants everyone to know how unhappy he is. He is a bummer. He is a letdown. He is a broken porcelain doll.
He is homosexual and deaf and we should kick the shit out of him because he won't fight back.
Then in February I turned twenty-one and stopped being sick all the time. My body was completely empty, and everything that used to be me was washed away into the dirt. I was the very sad kind of poor that makes you figure you'll never get out of it, and so was my cousin, but two people in an apartment was cheaper than one. Then the morning shifts at Seven Eleven started and I was good at showing up. Deaf kid refuses to let anyone know how unhappy he is. He is a hard worker. He is a straight shooter. He is a model employee.
We would joke about what we'd do with a million dollars, but my perception was skewed enough at the time that I would have rather become an anthropomorphic goat than have money, so at least I'd stop trying to kill myself. The thing about bodily dysmorphia is that it makes you very eager to destroy your body any way you can. I sound stupid. All of this sounds stupid.
Where am I?
Maybe my storm has passed.
Maybe it's over.
Of course Emily has not passed and I still feel cold. I am nearly passed out on the bathroom floor. From this position... barely I can reach the tissue box and wipe my muzzle clean, scratch my teeth. It is bad to keep bile on your teeth. And after this kind of sick experience I feel all my body's many pieces with overwhelming, unwanted clarity. I can feel that my fur has grown out a little too long. After every night I am just a little fluffier than I want.
There's an itch falling away, fading away. I don't attack it. It gets worse when I make it feel welcome.
I roll over, contort, eventually I drag myself to the sink and stand up halfway—only halfway, my legs don't like me up right now—and retrieve my electric razor. While I'm in here I might as well.
Barely able to get into the bathtub. Now the nausea has sort of dissipated through my whole body, like little globs of unpleasantness in every ligament. I take a few breaths, try to even out, and trim my body bit by bit. I have not described this process before and even now don't have great description for it, but it is incredibly gradual, holding the razor at an off angle, letting it glide against the fluffy parts of my fur and cut off what it may. The only way I've ever been able to get it looking good was by letting my hands become my memory.
Memory.
Memory.
I don't have any of that.
My hands are not fickle memory, I've found. They are better memory than my head. Or at least they are more reliable shepherds to truth, because they do not think. Sometimes I'll find myself doing things with my hands that only make sense to my hands, or my legs move me to rooms entirely on their own. If you collect all my many body parts and let them run wild, they occupy a space, they act as their own person. Another person occupies my space in superposition.
This isn't true for everyone, of course. For some people the head is a better keeper of habits, of routines. I don't even measure or think at all when I trim myself. I have simply fucked it up in the past and now I'm better at it. When I first received this body—or I guess it is me, the other me occupying the same space—I wasn't sure yet how to take care of it. I never was actually a fan of body hair and now I'm all body hair. But it actually feels like it belongs. That's a difficult feeling to get with anything, let alone with the atoms that make up your physical body.
The empty tub is now spattered with little clumps and shavings of my fur. I stand up—wobbly but I have the nearby wall for support—and brush myself off a while, until finally I am done.
And now my thoughts are starting to be a little less aimless, because there's something swirling around in my head out of nowhere. It isn't the new voice, telling me you can salvage this, it's an ancient and formless sort of angst and recognition. It's a face I can't see.
There is something lurking behind me.
...but of course the bathroom is unoccupied, and when I stumble out of the tub I am starting to get steady again, and even though I am sure there is nobody else here, I am certain there is something I'm missing. What the fuck is missing? I came to my senses
on the couch staring up at the skylight, of course, and then I ate food, I was going to wash up but I ate food, and that's what made me sick. And then I went to go read Djiban and it made me sick, too. What's missing from this picture?
I am not due to work anywhere. I don't have to work to live. I am just here. There is nobody who I need to let in the front door, because nobody visits and I would have plenty of questions if somebody did. There is nobody waiting on me. It doesn't matter if ten thousand years pass.
What else?
My arms are trembling. When I search my face in the mirror I can't find anything that wasn't put there by God. No answers and no truth. I'm forgetting something. Something is leaking out of my head, out of the back of my cranium, little drools of liquid into infinity. My body tenses and un-tenses every moment, every heartbeat. I am missing something. I am missing vital information and my mind will never, ever let me find it.
The year I turned twenty I was anxious like this all the time.
My body figures out that I need to look better and make my body better, as if I'm on some kind of time limit. I am stirring in the bathroom for a long time as a result—it started with shaving and then I have to get all the fur out of the tub so it doesn't clog, and then I'm working on my teeth and my horns, I need to give them a soak and a polish, and I decide to wash up, really wash, coating myself in soap and water and showering in the heat of it all for ten minutes. And the shaved fur turns into puffy fur. And I nearly fall over in the shower a couple of times because I'm fooling myself, thinking I'm not still light-headed.
And maybe the most daunting part of this is the cold. I turn the dial up... too far, too much heat, and it doesn't work. Hot water on ice. Ice prevails. And then my skin starts aching from the warmth. All these fucking physical sensations at once and I'm not actually getting any closer to—
—and again I am on the floor—
—writhing. Waiting for the cold to go away. I want somebody to hold me right now and tell me it's going to be better soon and that it's going to be over soon. It's going to end, right?
I am staring up at the ceiling and itching and freezing. All the 'ing' words. In perpetuity.
What if storms don't go away?
What is wrong with me?
Why am I alone right now?
That last question is the one that makes it click, right in the middle another session of trying to puke my guts out. Actually it's been trying to click together for a while now and it got stuck on a rock or pitfall trap in the forest, something like that. Actually I feel enormously stupid. Actually I feel anomalously stupid. Something very stupid in me took over.
Here is what I've been missing this whole stupid time:
I am alone at home right now because I'm waiting for Him.
Him. The owner of His house, my caretaker, He who shaped my body into its current form, and the person I am in love with, or something close. I'm waiting for Him to come home from the Room below His house. He is retrieving groceries. Groceries are items of food that you stuff into a cupboard for later.
Of course I must have zoned out on the couch too much, far too much. Fell in a hole of my own cognition. And for a little while He wasn't on my mind at all. He wasn't in the forefront and He wasn't in the back, either, and He wasn't even in some hidden nook or corner. He wasn't even present in the way that my heartbeat would raise merely from His proximity. And then that phrase entered my head—my hands are fickle memory—and eventually it came together.
He came back to me. He leaked out of my brain and came back. Just a little detour. There isn't anything wrong with that.
And that's why I wanted to wash up, of course. And get trimmed. And eat and drink water so He doesn't think I'm not taking care of myself, all of a sudden. And in spite of feeling sickly and messed up, I am ready to greet Him again. I am ready to be His world.
What in the world was I doing, obsessing over storms and superposition and sickness? I can just think of Him, his electric touch, his hands gripping mine. I can think about His wool, endless rolling hills of softness and warmth, and His embrace, which will carry me out of this place I'm currently at.
I can sense Him assuring me that it's all going to be okay.
Yes, of course
storms
will pass.
When I look up at the ceiling of the foyer, I am doing so fully clothed. I went to get dressed so that I could ignore my bodily discomfort and replace it with bodily euphoria. As I've said a few times I like women's clothing—or I suppose I don't like calling it that, much. It is femme clothing. It matches the person I'd like to be in my head. I am wearing a long skirt and wool stockings and a blazer to try and warm my inner self, since the robe wasn't doing it, obviously, although now I'm just stuffy and chilly at once. Superposition. Whatever. I am looking up at the ceiling of the foyer where a skylight is embedded between the gnarled branches of polished wood, and I can nearly feel the force of heavy rain against the glass, trying desperately to break in. Emily has been trying since the beginning of the universe, and will keep trying until the end.
But I don't want to get lost in all that again, so I return my gaze to ground level. The wait is nearly up and I plan to be ready for Him. And when He appears, it is like He was always in my peripheral.
Just waiting to return from stage left.
"Darling," he signs, overloaded, carrying too many paper bags in his arms.
And I sign back, all flush once more, "Tabi."