Satori in Cadavers

By Lliam Easterbrook
[senior features writer]

Cadavers is not a peak in Sri Lanka, Cadavers is not a peak in Sri Lanka, Cadavers is not a peak in Sri Lanka, for some reason, was found ruminating in his high school notebook.

Now he listened to the rainfall on the sinking tarp fashioned above his head. Lackluster-like, beneath a tumbling. Mumbling sky.

He wanted honey and he wanted to press the thigh of a woman under his thumb. A thigh of ruin, he thought. Creamy thighs of ruin. Those creamy thighs of endless ruin.

My writ…

He looked up from the black borehole clutched by his hands, lowering the cup and raising his eyebrows slightly to allow that extra modicum of frame into view, the way men do when they’re being bothered, to view the shadow before him without raising his face from the shimmer of his potation—clouds reflecting on the undulating liquid—like a shroud in still eyes, he thought.

“Adam.” Echoed that voice from the damp, slithering alley walls. “I see you, Adam.”

He threw the cup madly against the slick-coated brick and listened to it pink and punk as it clamored to a standstill…

Some raven shifted its stance on the banister above, its plumage ruffling sheen, its claws mimicking the punk of the pink below, its eyes sharp for carrion.

“Adam.”…

He apportioned his eyes. He made his gaze. He loned. Her felt her braids. Ran his lengthy fingers over her braids. Thought about those braids. All he ever heard was “Sin bravely, my son. Sin bravely,” before he made his nightly raids. Before he dipped them in honey and watched the thick string-drip to his boots.

The rain melted down the walls. Shined down the walls. Raptured down the walls. It was more than rain, though; it was the semblance of a new flood. It was yesterday, here. Now. And then tomorrow, there. Gone. It was something unspeakable because it was made up of vast contradiction, he thought. It was everywhere vested in repetition. It was an inexcusable excuse for synergy. Do what you will, he thought, this world is a fiction. He looked up, through, out the funnel, to the moaning street:

swing to the bee-bop
like a champagne bubble pop pop pop
he hit the street fresh and clean
new shave,
old face,
no grace—the mean way he unties her border lace
she musks his haste with a rarefied mace
out the back door like a shout
runing into the arroyo with a pocket full of casino nickels
like a treasure trove inside child’s room
following her into the slope of machine gunned starry nights
like a groom being summoned by church bells
like dashboard mysteries of automobile death
like forehead mysteries in sketchy time lines
like spleens aging on display in a polished store window case
silk petals and mambo music, neon lamps, the dull ominous moan that is glow:
acid rain outside; sunshine on television
Fool’s gold and carnival anthropology
dreaming of new ways to behave while pulling ropes of loud gravity and infected tear-duct nimbus clouds
like being pinned down by The Shroud of Turin
embalmed in samsara dins
like the eternality of a footprint or skull in bedrock
‘Lucy, I’m home.’
wherein they were happy without unoriginal thought or semblance of…

—He pictured a head of lettuce exploding from the clutch of a tightening vice. No, he thought, it would only crush apart and descend—like a bust of Grecian antiquity—

He waved for a cab. (the pitter patter). He caught another. (pitter patter, patter pitter).

He whistled for a prostitute. He grabbed another. To pat her and pit her.

There was a long staircase that wrapped its coils around the ribs of the building. They were old and hollow sounding—as if the marrow had been scraped out with a sickle probe long before, and having eons of gyring orgasm to hint of: blemishes spotting the sheets from repeated bleaching, beds creaking like the joints of frail women, dents in the wall from the smacking bed frame, window curtains re-stitched at the rings, nail marks on the hardwood, cigarette burns marking every supple surface, the lack of a common reflection in the fluorescent bathroom mirror. Like a pop-up book of endless boners. Like the nightstand overflowing with packets of hypo-allergenic lubrication. Like the paper bag filled with tepid mayonnaise and congealed ketchup next to the dumpster. Like the firmament truculently silenced by the slick black ceiling. Like a forty-day walk to the lineup behind Jesus Christ…

“Adam…” a voice whispered from somewhere in between the walls. In between the nights.

The door bolted easily enough. It was the ghoul-creak of the door closing, not her enlarged silhouette that made him worry. That always never made him worry. And he was never more worried than when he was out of the apartment and thought he had left the stove element dialed to max—for he had a vast array of photographs and photo albums collected and arranged numerically from all of those placid yesterdays. Photographs of himself beyond another form, holding a photograph of him beyond another form…

“Do you fear the cold, cold ground?”—He slowly allowed his face to make the form of a smile, as if he was gradually amused by the rampant taciturnity beneath him …

He didn’t listen to the response, and so I can’t tell you. It might have been something cathartic like shame on you, but shrouded behind the musty curtain of chloroform and cigarette smoke, punctuated by the canal of her thigh leading to his last river: the peak of it all: satori in cadavers and The Fall of Man.

It’s great when you find ham under your plate, he thought to himself, and sloughed off to the nearest diner to find her.