Truth, Lies, Dreams
Where can I fit destruction into my story?
About my trip to Lantau to see the tarot card reader, when I had to first cut the cards after shuffling them to get a start point. And the destruction card came up, its unfamiliar tower struck by lightning. Maggie French took it and immediately discarded it without analyzing it; even though I knew that it had viciously provided the truth at that moment.
I am in an open top convertible, silver, driving along a deserted street on the way to Mum and Mao Senior’s house. Or is it to my own?
There is nothing on the street. No people, no other cars, everything is grey with a thin film of dust, the skyscrapers in the distance, the strip malls, even the road itself. Until I see the bright lit yellow sign of a liquor store coming up on the right.
Siobhan comes to bed. Turn off the music, she says. I am half asleep but I reach over and hit the mute button.
“Do I have to do it?!” She sounds annoyed, as she comes round to my side of the bed.
“I did it already!” I reply.
Later on, I am fully asleep when she reaches over, gently touches my arm.
“What is the time?” she asks. But I am asleep. She reaches further over.
“Ngghh,” I mutter and I push out at her. “Why you waking me?” And I push her more.
“Don’t fight me,” she exclaims, “I am not a ghost!”
When the woman I was making love to turned into a pig I knew that I had become too cynical. I watched her face fill out, her cheeks lose their definition and her nose turn up at me to form a perfectly cylindrical snout. Her skin became rough. It became pockmarked and covered in fine grey hairs and then her mouth widened and opened up to reveal a coarse and unclean set of teeth. Then her ears retreated, grew longer into sharp points that flopped over like a dog’s ears. And her eyes too lost their shine and their beauty. They contracted and sunk into the skin and they became red and as fired as a madman’s. I watched her and I laughed and cried for atop of this perverse metamorphosis was her hair, untouched by the transformation and spread loosely across the pillow: a wig on the head of a pig… It was the one hope for my salvation.
A Catalan woman in a club in Shibuya had a Danish boyfriend. But I decided to stay rather than take the train with her to the suburbs.
