Everyone who lives on this block knows Coriander. If you were to ask your neighbors about him, and if they were inclined to answer, each report of theirs would focus on different details in their descriptions of him, but his behavior would be the prevailing concern. And his astonishing odor.
But no one ever talks about him. Uttering his name gets his attention.
You don't remember everything about how Coriander entered your life, but some episodes stand out.
When you first moved to the neighborhood, you were relieved to find in it a drowsing oasis amid the mortar-and-pestle brutality of the city's northwestern reaches. The area was an oblique triangle, terminated in the west by a diagonal barrier of interstate, while the northern and western boundaries were delimited by two intersecting boulevards, beyond which gunfire occasionally reverberated and scores of grimy Moroccan restaurants loaded the air with a cloud of tagine steam.
This was the kind of strictly residential enclave where you would be able to go jogging in relative safety. So you planned out a small circuit which ran parallel to the edges of the triangle and started running every day. This was in early June. The temperatures were just starting to break into the mid-80s, and evaporative gasps from Lake Michigan were finally bringing the atmosphere to a point of peak saturation. This is all to say that the number of local joggers in your wedge of sylvan, neighborly life was on the decline. You relished, therefore, in the unpopulated sidewalks, the vaporous suffocation of your midday sorties.
Because the actual territory of the neighborhood was hardly greater than a single square mile, your exploratory routes quickly exhausted the main streets of the area. Eventually, you began to chart alternate branches of travel: alleys, footpaths, service roads. There was one dead-end in particular that rose highly in your estimation. It ended in a cul-de-sac, basking in the sharp shadows produced by a four-story brick tenement on one side and a soaring, monolithic wall of reinforced concrete - a retainer wall for the interstate - on the other.
You would make this spot your destination at the end of each run so that you could linger here for a spell and listen to the invisible whisper of incessant traffic behind the wall's shuddering rim. There was a raised, circular curb in the middle of the cul-de-sac, full of churned, violated clay. It was clear to you that a tree had taken root here in a bygone epoch, providing a comforting symbol of mundane eternity to nearby renters and drawing the eye away from the hard artificiality of everything in the periphery. Now that it was gone, however, this alcove of beaten cement and mouldering brick gaped up at the sky like a dry socket after a dental surgery. But you admired the place even more for this penury - this compact desert-hood which belonged to your interior mental copy of the world.
One day, you were on the verge of heat stroke as you collapsed onto the tremoring interstate wall. The sun was battering you from its vertical throne, so miserably bright that it inverted into a negative, eviscerating blackness. You decided to let yourself cave in and, sliding down into a patch of unkept grass and bobbing weeds, went into a sort of sudden dormancy. Shutting your eyes, you let the surf of passing vehicles descend the sheer face of the throbbing concrete and engulf you with its pollutive roulade. The longer you sat there, the deeper the heat burrowed into you. After perhaps an hour, you were at equilibrium with everything that surrounded you in this obscure pit of surfaces.
Even with your eyes closed, you could see out into the cul-de-sac. Only, now, the tree whose absence had previously suggested itself was there. It was a verdant conifer, each limb encased in a dun amber sap - an Axis Mundi for this place, and this place alone. The sight of it made you feel as though you had been invited to a feast in the woods. Your mouth burst open into a smile, glistening with an amalgamation of saliva and sweat.
Then, Coriander made himself seen.
It would be inaccurate to say that he stepped out from behind the tree, for that would imply that he and the tree had possessed a separate existence. Rather, one moment, you saw but a tree - the next, Coriander opened his faded, calcified eyes and found you through the illusory pulp and bark of the tree's wood. Afterward, as he gained more definition and, indeed, became distinct from the tree, you saw that he was crouched in a curve between two main arteries of roots which dove beneath the soil.
With an effort of will, you managed to pry open your eyelids for a few seconds. Beyond them, you found the tree to be missing, the circle of disturbed earth where it had stood. But, your body languishing again in the miasmic stun of the heat, your eyes resealed themselves.
There, yet again, you found Coriander.
But, this time, he was standing much closer to you, having disengaged himself from his cradle of bark.
His face was riddled with yawning pits, making him something of a morel to behold. he was tightly wrapped in some manner of unsewn black cloth, from ankle to clavicle, and held a brilliant rubicund fruit in the palm of his hand. You couldn't place its species, or what stem it had been snapped from.
"Many are called to sample my nectar," he intoned without the use of his mouth, "but few can withstand its poisons."
Unwilling to eschew a rare instance of supreme terror, you made the conscious decision to remain passively slumped against the wall. This decision, for Coriander, was as legible as a bureaucratic document, notarized in triplicate. he drew closer still, offering the fruit up to your scrutiny. At close range, you found that its flaking 'skin' was extremely mobile. It was not, in fact, any skin at all, but a microcosmic planet, with hordes of manic, insectile beings swarming over its curvature in tides. Most of these creatures bore some marginal similarity to terrestrial humans, but were far more perfect in form and beauty.
They lacked clothing, as well as shame. It should also be said, though even I am loath to admit it, that they were all hermaphrodites (or whatever their world's equivalent of a hermaphrodite was). You were jarred to discover there was no biological dimorphism, no sexual magnetism which drew their masses toward each other. Instead, these crazed beings, with the fleisch of a living, torn salmon, were charging around in a miserable solipsism, foaming at the 'mouth' (on each face, there were two of these mouths, intersecting at a right angle like a compass legend on a map) and shedding contaminated tears from the lacrimal ducts of their predatory eyes (these were not set in a designated pair of cavities in the head, but were winking out of folds in their trunks, armpits, shoulders, shoulder blades, kneecaps, and any other location where they might have the whim to exist). The beings only ever paused to 'procreate' with themselves. This operation was carried out with a soft tag of translucent cartilage that hung between their legs. First they would stimulate it by clapping it between their hands. Once it had grown sufficiently turgid, it would inflate into an inverted 'T,' whose horizontal ends would then be inserted into two orifices which opened in the inner side of each respective thigh, this fluidic pageant unfolding beneath a respirating perineum.
"This is their 'uneira,'" Coriander explained, subjecting you to one of his awful smiles (smiles that would reappear before your mind's eye after this day, anytime the sun was setting). "Just as the hand - which is no less than a five-pointed star - is the symbol of Man's essence, the uneira provides a succinct synopsis of these beings' most profound truth. They derive no pleasure from their auto-copulations - in fact, they experience supreme pain in the act. Just look at how they grimace and perspire..."
Indeed, as you continued to observe one of the beings in its ministrations, you saw its starry mouth split open membranously and looked on as it gnashed its teeth and snarled, antagonized and antagonizing in the same instant. Here was a world of enthusiastic despair.
"I created them," Coriander continued, "gave them life - made them seethe and spill forth out of themselves unto a thousand generations. But, you know what?.."
"What?" you dared ask, without breaking the parched seal of your lips.
"I'm not so sure I care for them. No, they couldn't be any more obviously vile. I have hated the notion of them from the instant it entered my mind."
With abrupt vigor, he cast the multitudinous 'fruit' onto the asphalt. It exploded between his feet, reduced to a ruptured mound of seeping, damaged meat. The corpses of the exterminated homunculi trickled over each other with the mesmeric activity of a recently molested anthill, disappearing from apparent existence into the fissures of the street.
You besought Coriander with your wide-shut eyes, hesitant to say or think anything that might garner you a similar treatment. As disturbed as you were, you could feel his potency blasting at you in radiating waves. In part, this sensation derived from his penetrating odor, which contained the unmistakable scent of decomposition. But it was not the smell of 'something decomposing.' it was Rot-as-Such - Platonic Rot.
"Behold, I have made Triculant."
Coriander put these words into the suggestions box of your head. You read them sequentially, as if off of a page.
But no sooner had you arrived at the end of this sentence than your eyes flew open in response to a grievous pain strobing up your legs.
Inspecting the screaming source of sensation, somewhere in the vicinity of your ankles, you found that hazy rivulets of ants were coursing over your cross-trainers, kneading their way under the elastic bands of your socks. Somewhere under the microscopic warp and weft of that grey, synthetic fabric, you could almost see them not merely biting you, but actually excising granule of your epidermis. Sitting upright, you perceived that, of a truth, the departing convoy of ants was returning to a slight caldera of dirt that had risen through a fault in the curb just a few feet away. Each ruddy insect held something soft and minute in its mandibles.
In a hoarse panic, you climbed to a standing position and ripped off your shoes. You saw no reason why the residents nearby shouldn't have to register your cries and acknowledge your torment. Certainly, while vivid and extremely uncomfortable, the pain you felt did not warrant such fricative shrieks. You looked up at the windows of the apartment's courtyard while absently pawing at your swelling feet. If someone turned out to be observing your scene, you would wave them off with an apologetic grin. You thought you saw a single slat in one of the windows' blinds fall back into place, but, otherwise, it appeared that your ordeal was unworthy of anyone's notice.
On account of the more immediate hassle, it took you several minutes to remember Coriander. Even then, you had begun to think of him by name. How had it come to you? The same way it had come to everyone else within two weeks of living here: through the imbedded knowledge of sleep, fugues, faints, and hypnogogia.
But Coriander was no longer to be seen in the dilapidated cul-de-sac. Even when you closed your eyes, the alternative scene with the tree and its tiered, coniferous skirts, had completely subsided; that which had been revealed to you was now re-veiled (all revelations, after all, are appearances which obscure as much as they elucidate).
You limped home on bare, inflating feet, already having forgotten all you had seen and been told. But the name persisted, reverberating in the clamshell amphitheater of your skull:
"Coriander. Cor-i-ander."
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