The ceiling of the chapel house is adorned with a grid of gargoyles. In the floor beneath each sculpture they have put a photograph of it with an explanation. Winged lion for Mark the Evangelist. Two generic quadrupeds with human faces displaying their posteriors for Lust. And two winged monsters whose meaning is not known.
As per expectations after a debauch, I lie awake in the middle of the night, unable to fall back asleep. She’s knocked out on my side, but having one of these nights when she’s breathing hard in loud wheezes. I extend myself to stroke her back and the skin under her forearms (soft, smooth) which calms her. Then I look back at the two little orange LED lights across our little hotel room.
Eyes
∅ Ꙩ
in
Ꙩ Ꙫ
the
Ꙩ Ꙩ
dark:
the original horror trope. Once, in another blog, I wrote about this dark fascination following me around since childhood. How, whether in my parents’ house, or my student flat, or a random hotel room in a different country, when the lights go out there will always be these little emanations of electric light, coming out of idle monitors and power strips, and I will lose sleep taking them up in staring contests. As a child, I would lie with my back against it and try to forget it’s there. But that was when all the scary thoughts and Sixth Sense flashbacks would come and, in the end, I would turn around to stare at it until I couldn’t take it. The eye in the dark, somehow brighter, more fearsome, more evil than before, would have won another round.
I diagnosed this obsession as fear of death manifesting as fear of the dark, back then. Somewhat fanciful: the light at the end of the tunnel projecting its own after-image back through the past. I wrote a story around it, one of those that ended with a version of me walking into the sea. I look at the current incarnation and think about Czernobog’s eye-slits cracking open in Fantasia, about HAL, about comatose Tony Soprano dreaming of mysterious lights in the distance. I look at these unknowable monsters and they find their way into my own tortured WIP: the protag, unrested yet restless, strolling himself senseless unto the dead-end of a riverbank, and, on the other side, two orange lights coming out of houses or campfires, familiar yet strange, neither a beckoning nor a warning.
She’s breathing faster now and I stroke her with both hands. We piled up the booze species and even indulged in shotgun-in-the-mouth-grade shots (a national specialty) after a frankly decadent meat platter. I had slowly let go all the thoughts bogging me d̸͒̔̋͐͗̕ͅỏ̶̧̙̞̤̝̟͉̘͉̝͌̄͆̒͒̂w̴̡̙̺̗̟͍̪̃͜ń̷̛̬̠͚̰͗͋̋͒͂́ ↓
really, we don't need more babies. We just need more money. One of them must have made more, because even if comp-by-gender does tend to equalize, profession-by-gender does so far more slowly, and Capital doesn't care that we need teachers. If it was he, did he wonder if the rent should be paid 60/40? If it was she, supporting his creative struggles, did he worry that made him less of a man? If they did move in, was there a shadow that maybe they're really doing it because one-bedrooms rent cheaper? But the job-hopping, country-shopping, self-actualizing life-story context is essentially individualist and doesn't run without state-backed capitalism. Meshing that with ticking bio-clocks and unequal pay (in terms of if not ) is how the timeless Career V. Family story is set up in the age of Lean Inwhen we sat at the bar, yet they somehow found their way to our conversation. We managed not to fight and even stayed in good spirits, even with the music turned up and EDM-hideous and the space getting crowded as we crossed midnight.
Falling in and out of sleep, bidding yourself out of nightmares. The demons we like and cannot name, the ghosts you keep meaning to run into. The things that were said and the things to be said. The dreams she must be having.
the Budafoki amended 