Delirium

© 2006-2022 Michael Raven

As warned (promised?) I’ll occasionally post a few fragments of writing I recently discovered on various USB drives and portable hard drives. Most of them I don’t recall having written, in all likelihood because I was deep into my cups at the time. The quality of these is mixed, but my policy has always been to share my writing with all the warts showing.

Below is a fragment of unfinished fiction I wrote in 2006 (lightly edited in this iteration). I believe I intended to try and capture a facet of Jack the Ripper, or someone very much like him, in this piece. This was one of the first “forgotten pieces” I have reviewed that was of acceptable quality (although I recognize it could stand a rewrite). Enjoy!

---

There is a fine, razor’s edge, between your world and mine.

I revel in the knowledge of unknowing and you suffer in the silence you get when you raise your hands up to your gods and ask, “Why me?”

The difference, you see, is that I have given up on the illusion of reality and you keep trying to create a reality. While you try to bend nature and those around you towards your view, your relativity, your world, your false illusory “reality” – I am floating slipstream between the folds, hollows and turbulence; I see what is real and I hail her name, Discordia, Eris, daughter to the Night, Strife.

Her kiss is like a salve to my lips, her touch is silken and soft. While you cry out, struggle against the ways of the world, try to find logic and reason and sanity, I am more alive than you could ever be.

I struggle not. I have kissed the broken pond and I smile, knowing everything will fall, crumble to so much dust until that time when even the dust will crumble and fall apart. Everything falls apart – it is the way of the universe. Everything moves toward Entropy… But even in Khaos, there is order.

Push in, the lens magnify and then there is a symmetry of the universe, falling apart in unison and it seems as if every atom mimics its neighbor. Push in, and again all is magnified, and there is but a mad swirling, a liquid dancing of particles, randomly placing the left foot or right foot before the next move. Push in, the magnification grows another beat and, if you slow your perceptions down, you see a zoo of blinking muons, quarks and others, like the night sky – ushering themselves in and out of this time and before, to the next and beyond.

If you pull back as you have pushed in, you will see the same: order, disorder, order, disorder – they are different sides of the same hand working magick that is beyond even the gods.

But, in your madness, you cast a net with no threads, draw small, nonexistent squares on the universe in an attempt to capture the writhing, wiggly world in your hands. You have your logic, reasoning and higher math and you are all quite mad, trying to put a face on god, giving the eternal ghost a substance and purpose.

You say I am mad, and so I must run, change my masque, change my lies to fit yours until I am invisible to all but the most diligent, the people closest to my shade of the moon, the skeptics and the curious who hunt me because I am the embodiment of what they fear to become: outré and misbegotten, outcast and auslander… They still cling to the illusion, wishing it so and knowing that it cannot be.

And when the night grows to its longest hour, those hours near the nadir of three and four, when even dead things writhe with the pain of having been born at one time (for all dead things must live, before or after, but they must live in order to realise the death), I walk the city streets, listening. I listen to the voices in the fog and on the tongues of dew – I listen for the names and I think they might just belong to someone like you.

That is when I consider how I can take your breath, you essence and aura, and wrap it in my loving embrace. My arms warm the flesh, the voice of your heart and my heart beats with yours as we slowly sag toward the cobbled street of your childhood, when you loved the bump and jumble of the bricks as the car writhed on the street and we listen to the gathering flood within your mind. The rushing ocean, with waves crashing, ebbing and flowing and we listen, hushed to the silences between…

That is when I take that razor’s edge sanity and slit your throat ear to ear, ignoring the screams and joining in the tears as the disorder that was once you flows over and into my body. We are one, if only for the song we sing together in sobbed prayers and shudders. Moments, you and I are the same and then…

Then you surpass my knowledge and I watch the light leave your eyes and I hold only a cold, dead thing in my arms. You might as well be burlap or a gelatinous mimicry of the soul once inhabiting your flesh. Hail Discordia, for she takes all that is offered, and everything fades away, as she draws you to her own infinite breasts.

As always, I find a frail piece of newsprint, or a strip of cloth sloughed off with the diminishing innocence of a hooker on the take and forgotten in the rustic alleyways between the shades of night – I wipe the violent burgundy of your blood sullying my barber’s blade, a straight-edge shining silver and I close it against the first rays of dawn. My talisman – it must maintain its secrecy a while longer.

I am refreshed and tasting alive for the first time in weeks, maybe as long as months. All the same, the hunger will return and I will look into the eyes of someone I wish to share my secrets of the nature of life with. Her name might be someone you know in a town you call your own, for I am a drifter, a changeling, seeking the edge of the night in that final kiss.

And tonight, I hunger for that velvet kiss.