Coriander (pt. II)

 "THE DOG RETURNS TO FEAST ON HIS OWN VOMIT"

     In the weeks following Coriander's first visitation, these were the words you continually encountered. You would hear them approximately half an hour after wrapping yourself from head to foot in a velvet comforter. Each time the words came to you, it was as though someone had knelt by the place where your head sank into its pillow and was whispering the phrase into your ear. 

     The more firmly a dream materialized around you, the louder the voice would become, transitioning from a thought to a literal vocalization. When you entered these dreams, you were always lucid; but once the walls of oneiric pretense had solidified on all four sides, propped up with studs and clad with sheetrock - once the designated cast of characters with whom you were slated to interact had been supplied with irreproachable facial expressions - you would forget any notion of having become 'unconscious.' Only then did the whisperer's words end.

     The narratives of these dreams were always more or less disparate, but the phrase that had guided you into them each night would usually be well-represented therein. During a given night's scenario, you might find that you had dismissed the events of its first act; transitioning to a second, unrelated act, you might feel yourself to be refreshed, guided by different winds and a different screenwriter's whims; but then would come a dire disclosure: that the dream's second act had merely been a vehicle for the motifs of the first one - that these encrypted messages had appeared in the guise of sphinxes and griphons; and, finally, the third act would mark a return to the situation, the place where the dream had begun; this category of dream worked as a structural adaptation of the sentence, "THE DOG RETURNS TO FEAST ON HIS OWN VOMIT,' reflecting the syntax of returning and gluttonously consuming that which you had initially violently rejected. A second class of dream would feature the literal symbols of the phrase: a dog, a feast, or some representation of 'vomit.'

     Coriander never personally appeared in these dreams, but the stench of his mystical Rot was ever present. You found this remarkable, having never previously known a smell to visit you in your dreams. It was his odor more than anything else that kept his name thriving in your thoughts during the waking hours of the following day.

     "Coriander," you would often think to yourself, standing before your stove and waiting for water to boil.

     One night, after having consumed a meal of shredded chicken breast, simmered in a turmeric-saffron curry and spread with a spoon on dry slices of limpa bread, you rose from the kitchen table and brought your plate to the sink. On the way there, you stepped on something hard and roughly spherical. Dropping the dish into one of the stainless-steel receptacles under the leaking tap, you sat back down in your chair to investigate. Embedded in the calloused sole of your left foot was a coriander seed. You extracted it and brought it closer to your face. By now unsurprisingly, your first impression of the granule did not result from its appearance, but from its scent. It smelled like the coagulated residue one often discovers in the bottom of a soap dish years after solid hand soap has become irrelevant to human behavior. Analyzing it carefully under the mild light of the stovetop lamp, you saw that its surface with dimpled with shallow wrinkles - the result of an industrial desiccation process it had undergone that had left it indestructibly hard and perennially pungent. 

     It had left a seed-sized void in the hide of your heel which failed to rebound into its former shape. Looking into that depression tired you and left you dizzy. Where had this coriander seed even appeared from? True, you were a man with voluptuous, private tastes, but coriander was a spice you had never contemplated with any terribly great amount of self-awareness. You could hardly have been considered a stranger to the spice aisle at your local grocery store, but coriander had never specifically presented itself to your attention. It was only recently, once 'Coriander' had taken up a residence in your mental monologue, that 'coriander' had manifested itself within your purview. 

     This seed of coriander must have been a survival from a previous tenant in your apartment. It could be that, under the tremoring influence of your constant movements from kitchen to living room, it had been disturbed from a crack in the floor molding. Or maybe you had harbored it unawares in a crevice of your sleeve after rifling through the pantry - maybe it had dropped onto the hard kitchen tiles the second before you trod upon it. These were the variants you allowed yourself to entertain, yawning in that rancid, sarcophageal room where victuals were prepared.

     At some point - while you were immured in some hypnogogic conceit - the coriander seed slipped through your fingers and bounded away into an obscure, inaccessible region of your kitchen floor where it would remain hidden from human eyes until the earth's last day. You had forgotten all about it by the time you were staggering down the hallway to bed.

     Your bedroom was almost completely erased by a tangible darkness, save for a light that projected upward from a lamp your landlord had buried in the building's short front lawn. Its beams shot through the foliage of a tree with vermillion leaves, printing their shadows on the blank plane of ceiling over the spot where you slept. With the modicum of mind that had yet to drain from your eyes, you watched this projected shadow, whose solid source was being battered in a mute gale. On stiller nights, you would look up at this spot to find a partial likeness of Elizabeth Taylor; you had never watched any of her films, nor had you any defensible reason for knowing her name, but she always serenely guarded you as you departed from your apartment and filtered through the sieve of sleep. Tonight, however, with all of this soundless thrashing, it seemed as though someone else was presiding over your departure: someone with large, unblinking eyes, whose face was midnight's coronal mass ejection, held aloft on the crooked wings of a spruce tree, and who beat on the barrier of your ceiling with his fists, rabid to come in and make a beeline for you.

     Soon, you had made your descent, however, and the face was forgotten, along with much else...

     ...

     ...

     ...

     It was a subdued day - one of those submarine days on which the sun is too impotent to overpower the clouds and only manages to send ponderous, spectral whisps of light through the contused, tufted partition. 

     You were at a park. There were no special points of interest on its grounds - just an expanse of well-manicured grass, random congregations of three or four coniferous trees, and, for some reason, a patch of ground, about fifty feet in diameter, covered in packed-down sand. The park seemed at first devoid of visitors. You found yourself wandering its shaded copses, limiting your attention to only that patch of ground which lay a step ahead of you.

     Between blades of grass was a carnival of succinct displays: there were worms who burrowed out of the dirt, sighing at you with human faces and raising their eyebrows as if to say, "Here again?"; there were ambiguous 'tinkerers' (this was the only term you could think to apply to them as you watched their maneuvers at their worktables of earth) standing around a white-hot crucible and skimming some pathogenic slag (like a milk skin) from a rolling surface of liquid metal which, though molten, absorbed light rather than emitting it; lastly, you saw a great number of naked hominids, not quite human but promoted to something more than an animal - they were shriveled and sprinkled with an alkaline powder, having fallen where they lay out of exhaustion and a lack of shelter and breathed their last amid a host of invisible, leaping pests.

     You registered each of these exhibits unemotionally, wondering whether any other intelligent being had beheld such partial, conditional worlds. But you quickly understood that the prospect was unlikely. Any healthy consciousness wishing to preserve its integrity would have immediately ground these things underfoot. For these were stations of unwavering activity that no being of your magnitude would ever manage to regulate or monitor. You would always, eventually, have a reason to look away, leaving these rhizomes unattended to operate as they desired. And it was self-evident that, the moment these clockwork craftsmen had been neglected by their beholder, they would finally be able to start the real work, which, you were given to know, they called "The Great Work." Their "Great Work" was a deconstruction of the one who had noticed them. They would enframe your body with a semi-visible scaffolding and quarry you, dismantling your molecules and distilling them into raw materials which would go toward the construction of a great edifice. 

     They would undo you and all who resembled you, refining your tissues into three basic substances: bricks, mortar, and a worthless residue. The first two components would be used to erect a titanic tower, by means of which these motes and mites would scale a series of graduating steps to your eye level, raising themselves from an irritating colony of mobile specks until they became princes with a Solomonic wisdom. But, to do so, they would necessarily have depleted everyone on your plane - who, then, would be left to see them and recognize their merit?.. As for the irrelevant waste left over from the stuffs of your bodies (carnal, ethereal, astral, and so on), this would be cast away and left to filter down into the loose, unstable dirt, passing through the most exclusionary screens, until they reached a gravitational center where all obscure things are fated to congregate. No, it would be meet to kill these luciferian aphids in their cradle - to stomp these junior satans into the nitrogen-rich soil over which they so tirelessly clambered.

     Yet before you could rub them out, you were distracted by a man walking his dog on a leash. Had walked right up to you, taking care to stand just outside your peripheral vision until the moment he had decided to speak.

     "Are you certain you want to be here?"

     You backed away, stunned and somewhat hostile. The man seemed conventional enough. But his dog sat gravely at his feet, impinging the earth like a piece of hewn sandstone. It watched you with mouth agape, but not panting as a dog otherwise would.

     "I just got here, why?" you said defensively. 

     "Oh, I could hardly tell you why," the man reassured you. "I've just never seen anyone here before - maybe there's a reason for that. This park isn't a popular one." 

     You could think of few words carrying less significance than the ones which this fellow had just uttered. But as he was speaking, his golden retriever lowered its head, suggesting, perhaps, that you had failed to appreciate something. The dog's fur had a dense, solid quality, and seemed not to respond to the breeze. You observed suddenly that the tongue depending from its mouth was several feet long and deep black. 

     "Walking your dog, I see," you said, intending to render this alibi absurd by saying it aloud. "What's his name?"

     "... His name..." the man hesitated. He exchanged an extended glance with his dog. A look of ease came over him. "This right here is Kakashka! And my name is Drew. Glad to meet you."

     "Likewise, Drew," you said, a little wounded that he hadn't asked for your name in return. Then, bending down to taunt the animal, you said, "And a special pleasure to meet you, 'Kakashka'..." 

     Kakashka studied you with its blackcurrant eyes, partially obstructed by a thick gauze of blonde fur.

     "We were just taking a walk through the sand-pit over there," said Drew, pointing over his shoulder at the blemished depression occupying a far corner of the park; you could see that several tons of sand had been transported here and pounded into the earth by some local development committee. "Kakashka was looking to 'do his business' there, but then we spotted you and he suggested we come over. There's something in the sand that he wants to show you."

     At the suggestion that a strange man's dog wanted to show you something buried in a pit of sand, you released a demonstrative chuckle and nodded your head. There was no choice in the matter. 

     "Well, what's the hold-up?" you said, injecting your voice with a measured obnoxiousness - the kind sociopaths employ as a means of obliterating the self-esteem of people they dislike. "The sooner we dig the damn thing up, the sooner I can let your dog know what a 'good boy' he his!" 

     No one had anything further to say. The three of you turned and set off for the pit. As you traversed what must have been half a mile of grass, Kakashka's tail rose up and vibrated like a dousing wand. Below it, his anus was in plain view. Despite your will to disregard it, you found yourself revisiting the fur-matted orifice time and again. After your tenth time glancing down at it, you realized why it had been so hard to ignore. Dilating with pathological excitement, the sphincter's littered rim occasionally revealed something lodged just inside the rectum. It was something clean and pure that made for an almost paradoxical contrast with the repulsive sleeve holding it in place. At first, you took it to be an egg of some sort. In thinking so, you did not err: for all eyes, properly considered, are eggs; they are eggs even before they are eyes, egghood being the first prerequisite of Sight. And this eye was moreso an egg than others - it was solid white and bore a textured, brittle shell. It had drawn your gaze because you had sensed yourself to be its focal object. You understood that this rear surveillance was, among other things, a necessity for the man and his Beast. In a place such as this, things could (and invariably did) disappear if you looked away from them for even a second.

     Approaching the edge of the sand-pit, you found that it sank far more deeply into the earth than it had appeared to do from a distance. It was more like a bomb crater than a place meant for child's play (then again, there must have been scores of children who, in the aftermath of the London Blitz, took great pleasure leaping into pits like these, finding twisted objects in the vaporized soot). Drew seemed unwilling to go any further once he had sidled up to the border where the grass ended. The cogent, anthropic light you imagined yourself to have seen in his eyes previously had now left him. But that light was still directed at you - from Kakashka's gorgon anus. 

     "Follow me down, but watch your step," said a voice in the tone of a mushroom bellowing its spores as it is flattened by a hiker's boot. "We have to go to the bottom."

     You followed this advice without comment. The sides of the pit were almost unmanageably acute. As Kakashka descended in involute circles, tongue dragging the sand, you followed closely in its wake. It was only with difficulty that you could keep your feet above the sliding, hissing sand drifts. After what seemed a hundred circumambulations, you wound your way to the downward vertex of the unstable cone. Here, you no longer sank into the sand: there was something firm and level just beneath the surface. Kakashka immediately began to excavate, sending stinging silicate sprays into your face from between its hind legs. The anal eye held you fast in its cumulous regard.

     Gradually, you saw that a chest was being exhumed. It was a perfect cube, roughly twenty feet long on each plane, clad in heat-shrunken leather and reinforced by a grid of wrought-iron bands. Kakashka proceeded to dig a trench around it; when he reached the trunk's bottom, it was also revealed that you had been standing on a shelf of marbled gneiss. The sand that had been displaced by the dog's ruthless paws loomed over you in stiffened heaps - not a single grain fell into the freshly opened cavity. 

     "Do you want to see the Mess I made?" asked the voice, which you knew was both Kakashka's and someone else's.

     "As long as you don't expect me to clean it up," you thought bitterly.

     Kakashka turned to face you, its fur-screened eyes exuding something evocative of tamarind pulp from their ducts. Its extensive tongue had split down the middle and each half now moved with its own respective consciousness, tracing the convolutions in the igneous bedrock. 

     "Clean it up?" said the voice with abyssal comedy. "No, that's the last thing I'd want. I just want you to see it. I find it to be one of my greatest achievements. It came out of me and now has an existence of its own. For a while, I was happy just to let it be. A mother who harasses her children with excessive instruction wants to take them back into her womb. For a while, I figured: far be it from me. But then, one day, I looked up and felt miserably empty. It dawned on me that, in creating my Mess, I had allowed it to leave me, had deprived myself of it. I was jealous with hunger. My stomach was a void. Any time you bring something into the world, I realized, you're taking food out of your own mouth. And, as it turns out, I've got a terrible fear of famine. So I have decided to withdraw my achievement from existence. Then I can be full and whole again."

     "Why show it to me, then?" you thought, suddenly impatient to leave. You were suddenly thinking of a few meals you wouldn't mind eating, yourself.

     "Because - I demand satisfaction on every count. I won't subject myself to conundrums. You'll be a witness to the fact that my genius has managed to produce such a... such a magnificent and devastating slurry. If you see what I have done, I can gorge myself to my heart's content and relish afterwards in the knowledge that my creation still exists as an image imprinted upon a soul..."

     Kakashka trotted up to you and nosed your hand toward the iron hasp which would unseal the trunk.

     "Alright, whatever, I guess," you thought. "Let's get this over with. I've got somewhere else to be."

     You released the catch, after which the trunk opened automatically on its hinges. The whole interior volume was filled with a simmering biological emulsion. In some places, it had the indifferent look of compost; other areas were dominated by pools of a vile, chartreuse concentrate. Your vision battered mothlike against the stewing surface of it. The longer you stared into the substance, the more compromised and tenuous was your tether to the higher planes of being. You sensed something sublimely inconsequential about it; here was a gelatin, quaking at the behest of non-existent forces. You vaguely understood that this 'Mess' was the basest, most wretched matter of all the manifest worlds, that it was the antipode of the spire which rises vertically toward the invisible face of the Most High God. You also knew that it acted as a viscous seal - that beneath it moaned the Absolute-Unknowable which, if allowed to pass through, would inundate everything under the sun with its exterminating vacuity, turning all seeing creatures blind. 

     "There," said the voice, now betraying its own urgency. "Hold onto my Mess and let it cling to the chambers of your heart. You will bear its residue so that it can exist outside of me for a little while longer. But make no mistake - this meal won't tide me over forever. One day, I'll come back to lick the plate. Now leave, if you please. I prefer to go unwatched when at table."