Douglas Penick

Z(one) of  E(mergence)

 

 

Common knowledge: Due to population expansion and economic development schemes, the rain forests of Africa, South America and Southern Asia were collapsing. Mass elimination of innumerable plant and animal life forms displaced innumerable colonies of viruses who had lived quietly in the innards of insects, reptiles, and small mammals. Ticks, spiders, lizards, monkeys did not find such viruses fatal or even seriously debilitating. Host and parasite lived in reasonable symbiosis for unknown ages.

 

(1)              

 

L.A., as I first saw it, lay supine and feverish in a vast flaccid sprawl, devoid of center and functioning neural connections except for electronic devices, and freeways permanently wreathed in a yellowish vapor. I drove, that first time, into the city from the airport through acres of exhausted suburbs punctuated only by the innocent pulse of neon signs. 

 

In this version of the American dream with single-family house, car, business, all was free of whatever outer social force might bind one being to another. Only the possibility of the future counted, and I saw, as I looked at the Western sky, lofty alien palms silhouetted against a bruised fluorescent sky.

 

I lived in a furnished apartment in a new complex which the government had taken over and which resembled a giant Taco Bell. I had a salary, a car, a per diem, and a schedule.  

 

(B)

 

But with the invasion or destruction of natural habitats, hosts were threatened with extinction. They were forced to move .  The colonies of guests were obliged to search homes elsewhere. Often they proved fatal to their new abodes, to rodents, coyotes, monkeys, etc. Thus exiled, the colonies set out again. In their caravans, their armies, their armadas, they ventured into unknown domains. If necessary, they adapted to new media of transmission. They sought out species strong enough to survive their presence. They sought to find peace once again. Their feverish passage left devastation behind.

 

(2)

 

I was assigned to a street clinic where I interviewed street people coming through the county health system: mostly druggies and hookers of both sexes. They elicited from me the generalized sympathy of the irretrievably other.

 

The street hookers were hardest to deal with. Most were in their mid-teens to early twenties. Both boys and girls worked hard to turn me on, to prove they had power, to prove they could not be deceived. Endlessly, they would recite the most minute and hopefully shocking details of their sex acts. How it was wonderful to have a hand and arm thrust up one's anus since it made you feel so "full of space"; how, when you were fucking someone "really gross" you could get off by concentrating just on the penetration.

 

A pretty little girl with purple circles under her eyes told me how she had been giving blow jobs since before she could remember, and it was a "real bummer" if she didn't fuck ten or fifteen different men a day. When I asked if they worried about spreading their illness to others, they stared stonily at me, as if I came from outer space.

 

When asked one boy what he thought about the possibility of his own death, he told me: "it's just a head trip."

 

(C)

 

The world’s ecology was only just on the verge of de-stabilization, even as the great viral colonies again and again sought home in the most aggressive, the most dominant, the most disruptive and populous of larger beings. Thus the single celled beings moved to stabilize the world.

 

(3)

 

A pulse of life flowed before me filling me with repulsion, fear, and fascination. The stories of my 'clients' did make me horny, in the same strange vacant way that pornography does.

 

Telling myself that I was simply investigating the milieu in which the clients functioned, I began going to a dance club in a huge abandoned warehouse in an industrial district. Several of my interviewees had mentioned it as a place they went to.  The place smelled of sweat and dope and cigarettes, and was lit haphazardly by spotlights.

 

There were maybe a thousand kids, mostly white, mostly stoned, all dressed in black, displaying, through the calculated rips in the clothes, their tattoos and the little metal posts which they had had inserted in their, nipples, genitals which complimented those in ears, lips, noses, eyebrows.

 

Some were lost in a frenzy of dancing and others drifted languidly along the walls. The music was so loud and painful that my ears roared, and at a certain point reached an overload so that I felt suspended in an endless white silence, and the revelers became violent shadows flickering through their own and others' pornographic fantasies.

 

At about four that morning, I gave two girls, whom I recognized from the crisis center, a ride home. While I was driving, One of them ran her hand up and down my leg while the other, who was sitting in the back, licked my ear. They wanted me to spend the night with them. They wanted to "do" me. I declined, afraid of HIV. The girl sitting next to me climbed into the rear seat and the two of them made out. When we got to where they lived, they left without another word.

 

(D)

 

On the TV screen, a special bulletin about an epidemic in Manila. Parental discretion advised, and the images rolled out:

 

An old woman, a grandmother perhaps, she must have looked quite distinguished at one time with her silver hair rolled into a tight chignon, her firm jaw. She stared into the camera with the implacable rage of a captured hawk.  But she was filmed unsparingly: straight down into her face as she lay on a stretcher in a hospital corridor, still in an evening gown. Bluish fluorescent light made her face corpse-like and waxy and her lips slightly black. All around, there was random shouting, and cries in the corridor.  She looked up into the camera, and thus straight at her invisible audience, wild and uncomprehending as an animal at a slaughter-house.

 

She was still impeccably made up and dressed, but blood flowed out of the corners of her eyes, forming patterns like feathers as they spread across her face.  She seemed to be complaining even as a hand reached out with a towel and swabbed her cheek.

 

A burly working man in his thirties with overalls and a blue denim jacket, sat on a chair looking vaguely at the camera. Blood seeped from the creases in his face and hands. Blood came through his shirt.

 

Now a child, a girl about six with dark hair wearing a thin, flowered yellow dress. She had dark hair and blue eyes and wa rather fat and stolid. She was standing, leaning against the wall, looking down at her hands. Blood was dripping slowly from beneath her finger-nails, falling pools on the floor.

 

A business man in a blue suit, about fifty years old, black haired and slender. He lay on the floor, hunched against a wall next to the door at the entrance to the hospital. He wa sobbing.

 

A policeman in uniform looked blankly at the screen. Blood wa flowing from his ears and nostrils.

 

A nurse in her late thirties, dark and buxom, wearing a face mask, ran out of a room, a look of horror in her eyes.  There wa a small speck of blood on the collar of her uniform.

 

Seated on a bench between her two sleeping children who huddle against her, sat a pinched faced woman with a hopeless glazed expression. She had blood on her hands and at the corner of her left eye. As the camera moved to a close up, we saw that the hands of one of the children were covered with blood.

 

A white-haired old couple, evidently well off: well cut coats and polished shoes sat sided by side against the wall on the floor in a waiting room. They were holding hands, their feet stretched out in front of them. Their faces were covered in blood. They did not move and were apparently dead.

 

A handsome woman in early middle age wearing a suit. Possibly she was an executive or the manager of an elegant boutique. She was striding purposefully in through the doors of the hospital, blood pouring down her legs from under her immaculate skirt.

                  

Three teen-age boys, dressed in high punk leather were waiting at a nurses' station. They were frozen faced with fear. One had  blood pouring from over his eyes. Another kept looking nervously at his wrist as blood dripped down his arm. The third was trying to get the attention of someone, but the nurses had no time for him.

         

A man in his fifties in a tweed suit, blond with glasses, some kind of academic perhaps, looked directly into the camera with a questioning gaze. There was a small amount of blood in one of his ears. He opened his mouth and blood poured out.

 

Rushing down corridors in the background, doctors, nurses, hospital personnel, rushing by All wore face masks. The faces of the stricken were open to us. The faces of the healthy were hidden and remain their private property.

 

Then a doctor, dark haired with glasses, exhausted and disheveled, wearing a dirty white coat and stethoscope entered the scene. Sitting at his desk, he looked directly into the camera and began speaking in in Spanish in a clipped pedantic voice.

 

I turned off the TV.

 

(4)

 

Though I still visited the dance clubs, I was fortunately re-assigned to a facility run by an AIDS crisis center where I interviewed, over the next year, hundreds of young to middle aged gay men as well as a few straight people who had been infected by blood transfusions, or had got the virus from a spouse.

 

Time there drifted into a sense of tragedy as exhausted as the Thursday morning sky. Many of the people I interviewed looked healthy, some wiry and athletic, others florid and stout. Many looked ravaged and were aging at a rate surpassing normal time. After an interview in which a man had spoken candidly and with stoicism about his prospects, he would suddenly burst into tears. Some would speak of themselves in the clinical language of their doctors; others would drone in a depressed monotone; angry men would speak in spurts of fury, veer into sardonic laughter and bad jokes, halt in silence; for the kindly, their illness was an urgent goad to further altruism. Resigned or otherwise, none could truly comprehend why he should have had to endure this.

 

They regarded me and my questions as one more aspect of the bureaucracy which they must endure if they were to remain on the programs which kept them alive. And accordingly, some treated me with indifference, some with barely concealed irritation, some with monosyllabic fury, and some with a desperate desire to find someone to whom, finally, they could explain what was actually happening to them.

                  

Waiting between interviews in a small windowless room filled with old school desks and chairs, the young man I had just talked to came back and sat down. He was young and had some kind of neurological problem caused by the illness or the medication that caused the left side of his face to contract in spasms. "I just wanted to ask one question," he asked shyly, "Do you think I should kill myself?"

 

“Who can judge you?” I replied.

 

(E)

 

Pouring rain, a deluge in which the darkness of the sky descends in violent torrents and blurs everything on earth. The streets are black rivers. Speeding cars throw blinding white plumes behind them Traffic is terrible as caution and impatience war in the drivers' minds. A sodden reddish dog runs in front of my car, and when I brake, the car skids slowly to the curb. I look around for the cur, but it is gone.

 

 

 

Douglas Penick is the author of From the Empire of Fragments (Hammer & Anvil Books, 2015). He writes from Colorado.