Imboden

“Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole story.”

-Edgar Allen Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart

Oliver Kane

Imboden:

T he fall of that year wrought in me a mood most terrible. I ranted, I raged, I ran to and fro. Miranda, she had always loved that time of year, at least when I was not ranting, and raging, and running to and fro. I can bring that same love to my mind if I try…but it fleets implacably away with each turn of the Earth, each new setting Star, each new rising Moon.

Despite all the colors of fall, the reds, the yellows, the oranges, all falling about the city and seeming to, for at least the slightest moment, pull one out of that nameless city of black asphalt and white concrete and mirror-glass skyscrapers and bustling chattel, we sat with faces white, a ghost’s pallor. We sat with eyes adrift and greying to hues of the evermore-clouded sky—those that bespeak only sameness and unchanging aeons—and losing their colors of blue and green and bleeding deeper into the mind behind the eyes, to be laid under a slick layer of melancholy. Those colors, the reds, the yellows, the oranges—and the green and the blue, too—are change. They are a break in the city’s grey monotony and, consequently, pull one out of the dark mood the city puts one in, yet despite them, despite the power they have always held and have always wielded, neither she nor I had anything near a grand time of it, as we might once have.

One might ask, and I know Miranda did many times in the night, when her company was only the blankets, only the pillows, and only me, a man so tired, so fucking dog tired, as to be no company at all, why this was happening. Why, oh why? Could this be our life? Could that sound in the walls be something that actually existed within them? Or was it only in our minds, steeping their fluid first in a bag of heart-hammering fright, like bitter, blackened spices, and then in one of unutterable pain and depression?

It came again, as I lay there, tossing the sheets so they made muffled, mile-away thunderclaps. It came, again and again, only that one word, that one utterance from within the walls. Or from within my own mind.

Imboden

And yet, in that word I heard a thousand, a million, all that same texture of sound, that same oily feel of hands in my hair. They were in there, fingering, twisting, pulling, enticing my rage and my terror equally. I could see the words, all silvery in the blackness, shimmering into and out of the walls, like the legs of the spider. I knew its name, for how could I not know it; it was uttered in that same whisper, as many times as my ears could hear it. Or my mind invoke it.

Imboden

Miranda did not move as I did. She only lay, cold, dead to the world, perhaps, or only stuck in place by the fear, naught but a cold steel blank set above the form, ready and waiting for that thousand-ton press to shape her. The bed covers flapped as I spun, hitting her with no sound, with no recognition of a body. Did she even breathe? I could not tell, for the sound of my own, cold drawn in and cold shoved out, was boisterous and savage, as crushing and as saturating as the sound in the walls.

Could these be our nights? Filled only with the cold, filled only with it, that sound, that name, that book of half-truths laid all in cold, molten jet? Could the nights be as black as they were, the moon and the stars pulled away as if on marionette strings? Could it be, oh could it be? My mind was speckled with the questions, and to them came no answer but that word, that name, that utterance of all things black and blank and devoid.

Imboden

'How long?', came yet another question. 'How many weeks have passed since I found my dreams black with it? How many nights spent just like this, my mind still as stone even while my body tumbled round and round, wrapped slowly in that spider's gossamer name? How many days have I spent as angry as sin, discombobulated for the reverberations and after images?' I pondered further out loud, as if to drown out what the walls had to say, yet it was all that I heard: a million words wrapped in one, wrapped in none.

Imboden

It was only this, and yet…and yet, it was also my own name, and Miranda's. It was all the names, from the first conceptions of human and non-human language, to whatever will be the last. It was the first to boom out of an ape’s mouth, more guttural shout than oration, more ejaculation than remark, and it was the last, falling out upon only its speaker’s ears, falling to make only more of the dust that the world will crumble to. All seemed to be chewed upon, savored, and spat back at us. I shook with the way it felt, slopping at my ears like bog water, filling them and becoming more—oh so much more—than a simple utterance; it became to the canal of my ears the wet slop of a black tongue, acid its saliva, hot decay its breath. I could feel it, I could taste it, I could smell it—that decay; it was yet another body gone grey, bloated, and now sunken, socketed, and gaping with holes that poured their stink upon the air. I turned from the smell, burying my face in pillows as soft as snow and as cold as glacier ice, knowing I would have no respite, and doing it all the same. I turned from it the way a beetle turns from a shoe: step, step—object…turn, step, step, step, turn, step, step—object…turn, step, step, step, step, turn, step, step—object. And as if I were that beetle, seeking a path through the world, as if I had the mind of a beetle, so small a glow as to barely light the world with perception, I turned and turned and turned from that name, from that word, and found only it, as if the child whose shoe the beetle was knocking his head upon was moving the shoe slowly, playing a morbid and existential game with it, matching the speed of the beetle to entrap him within his own ignorance, his own black oblivion; I heard only that recitation, that oration…

Imboden

Fear to quicken the heart to a mad gallop, adrenaline to spike and jolt through the blood in icy waves that lap at the muscles, the shaking, aching, tensing muscles, the fever-bright eyes cast all in darkness, the strained breath, the wriggling of other-minded appendages; these are Imboden, these and so much more. With no end, it came, with no end and no beginning, and with each word, thousands of them packed in like roiling, frantic souls in stampede, all at once, as if time were no object, the words came. With dark tenets and possibilities, they came, at first singular, in neat lines, and then in cacophonous waves the texture and color of sick, defiling, enticing fancies and fantasies. I killed. And I was killed. In waking dreams, the coherence of such flowing like dry rivers, I charged. I, with black blade in hand, cut them down, waging wars amongst all colors, all faces. I pillaged. I raped. I tortured. I stole life and stole away, to yet more battlefields…and yet…and yet, in so doing, I donned the colors and the faces of the enemy. I was the defeated. I was the pillaged. I was the raped. I was the tortured.

My teeth chattered, though Miranda's did not. I could not say how her teeth did not chatter, as the chill was like nothing I could understand, nothing I had felt before. Though every night was the same, though I had felt that chill each and every time I tumbled into bed, whether with Miranda naked in my arms or not, and though I could not count those times, not on one hand nor on two hands—nor even on a thousand hands it seemed—each and every time was the first time. My skin crawled with it. It rose in fleshy bumps all about my arms and back and chest, even down to my crotch, making all my skin writhe as if it wanted to be peeled off, as if it wanted to flake and rise, to spill out a mixture of red blood and black, oozing jelly. And I did not warm from it. No matter how my heart slammed, no matter the heat that should have been wrought of my flailing limbs, and no matter the inflaming, angering nature of the name, of the word, of the sound, of the concept; no matter it all, I could never warm from the chill, not until the morning Sun came to burn away that word, that thickly laid stain on the wall.

Imboden

And yet the Sun always came, and it always will come. It will come each day, for it is the definition of the day. And there will come a last day; I have seen it; I have lived it. There is a day, which will be the last, burning hotter than any other, burning itself out as one last ‘hoorah’ and engulfing the world in its fire, leaving naught but the shade, the penumbra of nonexistence. But no others will see it, none but those who know the name.

Imboden

And yet the Sun always came. With it, an end came to the knowledge of that word that held all in its black hands. Yes, I see it now. Those hands hold all, even joy, even the bright glow of the Sun itself, perhaps of a million Suns. With the burning, brightening world came ignorance of the word, of the thing in the walls and the floors and the bed and the sheets and the woman who lay next to me. It was everywhere and only left with the burning Sun, its final call a tinny, fractal titter that engulfed the ears and shattered them. Like a dream, it was quickly and completely forgotten, leaving only ashes and the acidic embrace of nothingness in its wake. I know now the scope of it, only because it is here, only because the Sun has not burned it away again, though I know it will. I know now that nothingness for I have felt the entwining cradle of allness, the good and the bad, the pain and the joy, the death and the life. I have felt skulls crack under the boots of men. I have felt the boot of the enemy on my own. I have felt the love of sons and of daughters, of progeny and of heritage, and I have raped from the world that same. I have ended lives and lines and wrought from them only blood-stained dirt and the memory that what is now only a slick, red remnant on the tip of the sword was once a man. And when the Sun comes again, it will burn that from the world. I will be emptied again of the knowledge and be able only to feel a lack of something, deep in myself, as if for all the clamor of the world, there will be no sound. The people, they speak to me, and I hear naught. The people, they touch me, and I feel naught. Miranda is wife to nothingness, to smoke and to mirrors, to a cipherous man burned out of all, for the word is gone, that word of all things conjoined, so much a cacophony as to feel like nothing and to feel like everything in the darkness.

Imboden

There is no light. There is no glow of bulb or of diode. There is no flame of candle. There is no glimmer of moon or of distant star. There is no light but that it has given me, no knowledge and no consideration save for the spider’s name. There is no light, and yet I write. In some hand I cannot espy, in a darkness as complete and as consummate as death, I write these words. Do I write words? Can I, when in the dark the cold feel of her skin is my only reply? Can they be words that I lay my hands on? They are tiny, asperous ridges that form letters no man could read. And yet, as I probe over her bloodless skin with one hand, I read as a blind man does the minute crests and troughs my razor’s edge has made. And I bring from that blackness worlds of all color and place them on Miranda’s skin in amorphous shapes that surely only I and the spider can decipher. She moves only when I move her, only when I feel the cold curves of her body entrapping my letters, my imaginings, and must turn her. I am on to her face now, as her arms and legs, her back and chest are filled with my story. Now I know why her teeth do not chatter, and I envy her; she has known death for far too long to cavil with that chill, that word, that name, that is nothing and everything at once. Her body is tattooed with it, that word that is a million words wrapped in one, wrapped in none. I dot her eyes with it. I fill her ears with its oily, imbibing call to dark action, and I belt it out on the air, the chill turning my cries to invisible steam. And even now, as I draw from her mouth an obdurate, deathly stiff tongue, it calls to me as nothing ever has, and I cut into her that word that is its bidding and is its gift, making her mouth form it as mine has. And I hear it on the air of her breath as she lives again, and she and I say it as one. I am…

Imboden