Bukkakeworld Read online

  You start to sweat. It’s been such a long time since you actually sweated, this is the most disgusting thing that’s ever happened to you. Sweat pours down your upper lip, a family trait. You thinking of family? Whatever next? You wipe your sweating brow with a naked forearm and decide that it’s now or never.

  With your disgust at the human condition as your guiding light, you turn the sweaty handle. All has turned to sweat. All is covered by a shining, slippery coating, like friction itself is shying away from your rendezvous with these beasts from the neighbouring dimension.

  The corridor is empty. There are no Glimpsers waiting to greet you. But they have been here. You can smell their trail—there’s always a Glimpser trail you can follow if you’re perceptive enough. There, an open door. There, an open drawer. There, a picture of the wedding in all its off-whiteness. There, on your side of the family, your gran.

  You remember your grandad telling you about how he rescued her from a war-torn country in his late teens, how he brought her back to his homeland to protect ‘just one child of the enemy’ from a fate worse than death once victory was assured, namely the raping of the innocents. He didn’t love her. Fathered three children with her, but never really loved her. Like she never really existed. He just fucked her then went to get drunk. But wasn’t this like the ‘fate worse than death’ she and her fellow girls/women would endure once their proud country had been invaded from east and west?

  The Glimpsers have been here, laying down their markers like dogs. Why would they coax you along this route? Why would you be standing in some foreign bar suddenly? Remembering with utter clarity the bar in the image behind the teenage photo of your gran. She’s there, at a table. You’re there, also at the table. She’s waiting for someone, that’s clear. But you’re there also. Well, get on with it, she is delicious looking. She’s a clever girl and she’s resourceful to have made it so far in the war. Maybe that’s what you admire about her. That and the way her beauty plucks at your clanging heart strings.

  You ask her outright, “How much?” and she smiles like that, just like she did in that old crumbling photo. You nearly cum all over her here in this bar, such is your utter enthrallment at what may happen if you get the chance to ‘mate’ with this woman, your gran, in the past.

  Except you don’t see it as The Past. This is a Glimpser moment. This is what they do, wrap space and time around their own agenda. Then it dawns on you what they’re doing. They’re showing you the wonders of their horror. For every great thing comes at a price. Nothing worth having is for free.

  You take out the foreign money and give it to your gran, that captivating woman, her angles accentuated by the poor diet in this war town, her lipstick too heavily applied. You decide today that you’ve found a way around paradox. In the same way that you can’t possibly kill your gran, neither can you make her pregnant. There must be a price to pay for Glimpser trickery. This is it. And what a price.

  Here in her room your foreign money is renting by the hour, you lie on her rotten bed soon to be covered in the piss and shit of an invading army. Fungal growths cause your skin to itch but you don’t mind. Your mouth hangs open over her shoulder as you insert your bent little finger cock into your teenage gran’s sexual mechanism. In your mind there’s this sick justification for what you’re doing.

  We’ve all bought the future, in one way or another.

  Better stop

  before you

  go blind.

  * * *

  It’s not a sneaky cum-shot that brings you round, it’s that portentous statement, “You’d better stop before you go blind.” But you already suspect it’s too late for that, and too late for you and your jaded world view, cum eater. You travelled back in time and fucked your gran. There’s no worse crime against man.

  You’re back in the present. You’re in the most complete darkness ever. You can’t work out what that noise is for the longest time, until you realise you’ve been screaming and screaming and screaming. All this time. You try to open your eyelids but it’s like you no longer have eyelids, or eyes. That pair of orbs that used to occupy space within the socketed skull just no longer exist.

  What on earth did you think you’d achieve, fucking your gran? If the Glimpsers said you should put your hand in the eternal flame, the fire that cannot be extinguished by any means, the fire that rots your bone and cooks your marrow, if the Glimpsers said, “Here, young fool, drop your dainty little office hand in this vat of bubbling alligator belly acid,” would you, sheeply docile, comply with such an absurd demand?

  You thought you’d be okay because you can’t get your gran pregnant, because you can’t produce your own dad. You thought you’d cracked the paradox enigma? Well, you could have fathered your dad’s brother, or sister. They may look so unlike their brothers and sisters because they look more like you. Ever think of that? There were no DNA tests back then, so there’s no way to disprove that didn’t happen. You’re figuratively and actually in the dark.

  This episode of utter stupidity has led to your blindness. Remember what your wise old gran said in her native language, in her late teens, with her dog-stinking woollen skirts up over her exposed breasts and her cold, white thighs cleaved apart as if by an axe. Remember how she looked into your eyes like the future had come hunting. Remember that deep hazel intricacy spiralling within her irises of terror. Remember, because that’s all you have.

  You’ve broken the first great law of time travel—no fucking the ancestors.

  Fact: you’re blind. And you know what’s going to happen. You’re going to hold on to the memory of things, colours, textures, distances, silhouettes, volumes as long as you can. You’re gonna hope and pray that you never forget how cat fur looks. You’re gonna try as hard as your stupid little brain can to remember the fan of petals around the stamen. You’ll try to dream of apple peelings and banana skin and roasted potatoes. But you’ll forget. The brain needs constant reinforcement.

  Rather than fall back on your remaining senses, like touch and taste and smell and hearing, you’ll grasp at your vision like a drowning fool grasps at a slimy rolling log, the water pouring over his stupid face, rushing down his nose, gagging in his throat, stinging his lungs.

  Stop, before you fully forget.

  What does it mean to see? Don’t even try to reach out with your mind into the realm of the once-sighted, and construct from those feeble memories some sort of worldscape, a vista, a sunset, a starlit night. It’s too hard.

  Better to assume you no longer have form, or if you do you only have miniscule form like an atom. Maybe you can see as atoms see. Your electromagnetic charge is something you share with your neighbours, but it’s something you’re rarely aware of. Everyone spills electromagnetic charge all over each other all day like Bukkakeworld spills cum onto victims.

  You won’t see your neighbour’s momentum—as he crashes into you. Maybe everyone in Bukkakeworld is now blind thanks to your blunder. You can’t even tell if you’re moving or not. As far as you’re concerned, you’re static in the universe while these beings from the ‘outside’ crash into you. Maybe you try to decipher a code from the strength and direction of the collisions.

  Assume you’re a free-floating cell, say, in blood. You suddenly don’t know about gravity. In fact, such is the resistance of the fluid in which you live, the only reference to ‘gravity’ you have is the mono-directional pulse of the blood around the cardio-vascular system, but you don’t know what a heart is. That is the problem with gravity: you don’t know how it’s formed or what its function is. You can’t discern that you’re part of a living body. You only know that you can affect your neighbours by radiating or colliding and maybe change your shape, get affected by viruses, feed yourself when you need replenishing.

  The law of blindness still applies to you.

  Consider this: the Glimpsers are nothing more than the space between the atoms. Don’t you finally realise how truly alone you are in Bukkakeworld? Don’t you see ho
w space is even bigger than you used to believe?

  You’re lying there, somewhere in Bukkakeworld. You’ve no idea what time of day it is. You’ve no idea where you are. Whether you’re near something dangerous. Whether you’ve already died. You’re just lying there, your mind running free. You look across in your darkness memory at the wife you used to have. She isn’t very far away but she seemed like miles away.

  You’re looking with your atoms.

  Are you some sort of crazy freak? You’re gonna break your brain. Let’s go through the figures. Your atomic nucleus, the very core of your being, is ever so small. Compacted in to a distance no greater than 0.000000000000001 meters. But that’s not easy to see, so let’s say your atomic nucleus is 1 meter across. Your atomic extreme then extends out to an amazing 100,000 meters away. After that, it’s a vacuum. Even the atomic nuclei in a bar of pure gold are never closer than 200,000 meters. The atoms in your mostly-liquid body are much farther apart than that.

  So, you’re lying there in your self-imposed Purgatory, somewhere in the festering ballsack of Bukkakeworld, looking out across at your memory of your ex-wife. You’re looking at her and your memory of your hand reaches out across the vacuum towards her.

  But wait, she’s AT LEAST 200,000 times 10,000,000,000 meters away. Already, we’re talking astronomical distances. The closest your meter-sized atomic nuclei can ever get to the most beloved person in your sick and twisted world is 2,000,000,000 kilometres.

  Reach out with your desperate imagination. Touch her freckled nose with your fingertip. You’ll have to travel pretty darned fast to make the journey before your soul expires. Your two sensory surfaces are never gonna get any closer than 200 kilometres.

  “Why are you thinking like this? What will it achieve?” In your head, it’s the caramel-cream denunciating tone of a Glimpser. How do you know this? Nobody ever forgets the voice of their Glimpser. When did you hear their voice? Maybe it’s always been there, embedded in a midnight feast of child molestation like a black part of you, trapped forever inside, awaiting its moment to reveal itself.

  “You no longer exist in Bukkakeworld, granny fuckboy. That should be a blessing for one such as you who has felt the full force of Bukkakeworld’s pasty wrath. But we see in you a yearning that cannot be unwoven from your person. You are as inseparable from it as a man from his cum-soaked shadow. Well, shadows. Plural.”

  Is this a game to them? In your unseeable darkness you sense horrifying motion, an apple unpeeling. Your entire ‘being’ (whatever form that now occupies) is undoing itself and laying its parts out like Michelangelo’s modern man in iconic silhouette.

  Head on top like a dot on an i. The top line of the arms, a sweeping concave arc. Then the underside of the left arm flowing down the left side of your icon. The internal arch of the legs that joins left foot to right. The outer line of the right leg that ascends to the right hand. This two-dimensional graphic version of you rotates slowly in your mind so that you can fully appreciate how your life has become inextricably linked to the lives of these five individuals.

  Sight—can it really have returned?

  Not yet. The Glimpsers have other ways of making your kind understand the meaning of loss. And this one is spectacular.

  “It’s a classic race against time, you fool. You are nothing more than a shadow, here in Bukkakeworld. But no ordinary shadow. A shadow shared by five other people. You won’t survive long unless you listen. LISTEN to our bargain and accept its terms. It’s great to live in fear... but it’s better to get even. Well, here’s your chance. Save these five people who share your stinking shadow and all Bukkakeworld will be yours.”

  Listen. Take notes if you have to. Try to be vigilant.

  Saving

  your shadow,

  part one.

  * * *

  You’re back in your old body. Back in the corporate garb of nondescript shirt and tie. Back using those old eyes. But you don’t seem to wake up like you usually do. Something is missing. Some special kiss from an off-shot stranger. Some quick hit of cum across the blinking eye. How can you miss such a tawdry addiction as that?

  The absence of that first money shot of the day weighs heavy upon your crinkled brow. Out in the summer street, your brain is overpowered by the cleanliness of the sidewalk as you stagger about dizzily. You appear revolted by the vertigo-inducing cornflower blue of the sky. Has the blistering sun gone through and cleansed the whole of Bukkakeworld in the same eerie fashion?

  All morning, you’ve been plagued by the imminent death of the five parts of your shadow. How you’ll be excommunicated from the light that gives the universe distance, and time. You’ve been having these intense visions inside your head. Five dead people, and how they died. The moments just before. Over and over. Same death sequence. And you’re supposed to stop it. You have one day per person. Surely five days will be enough to stitch your shadow back in its rightful place?

  In this strange café, the walls proclaim Los Ojos Bizarros. You’re spied upon by this strange part of town. The locals are bohemian. Is this a fucking artist colony? You hate modern art and all it stands for. Mark Rothko, idiot. Jackson Pollock, prat. Joseph Beuys, loser. Tracey Emin, now she’s goo-oo-ood... Anyone who can call a filthy cum-stained whore pit of a bed ART is worth corporately sponsoring, to the hilt of the share-holders’ collective purse.

  You’re thinking of how much you hate art, and artists. Seething. And that damn song is going round and round in your head. You’ve seen this scene replayed again and again all morning. You’re in a café just like this one, in every detail. Then the roadside rescue as a tall, blond man in a red jumper and jeans is pushed in front of a speeding van, a white transit, registration number B1G*0NE.

  But there’s a lack of narrative string tying the images together. You can see all the bits, the visual fragments, but you can’t imagine where it will lead and how you’ll track down that moment.

  The waitress pushes your lunch under your nose, but she doesn’t spit into the plate. What the fuck’s wrong with this place? Isn’t it customary to empty the contents of one’s wretch onto the customer’s steaming plate of dog innards? Isn’t the sneer as customary as the waitress’s ketchup smeared name tag? Nothing is right, today.

  You eat your food in total abhorrence—it’s all too clean. Too ‘treated’. Too sterile. A man might die from the cleanliness. Only women, house wives and office workers, can survive such a state of nauseating disinfection. The food is tasteless, unabused, bland—has no character. Why are you missing that shit?

  You push your dinner plate away, half finished, and stare out the window in dismay. You’re never going to retrieve your shadow. Then you’ll cease to exist. You’ll be this spectre, this zombified non-body roaming the streets of Bukkakeworld for aeons as time constricts around you like the murderous coils of an albino anaconda.

  All the time, that thing in your stomach grows and swells and sucks the life force from you. You don’t even know what it is, but you’re afraid of its power—its ability to repair you even as it destroys others. You rub your belly and feel something deep in your pelvic cavity ripple, the way a trout kicks away from a tickle.

  The waitress only now starts to adopt the customary sneer of your fond memory of Bukkakeworld. The way it used to be before the Glimpsers came back. Normality is returning. Not long before she’ll be pulling a handful of fresh girl dung from her knickers crusty as pork crackling and pushing it into your gaping face, telling you, “That’s all you deserve, you slimy, stinking waster, you social derelict.”

  You look at the clock on the wall. It’s gone three in the fucking afternoon. Less than one hour until you fail your first real mission to retain the five parts of your shadow.

  You’ve read all the papers and magazines in this place and all of it, ALL OF IT, is a total waste of your reading time. Imagine the wonderful subversions you could have invented without their advice to ‘buy this cream’ or ‘try this lotion’ or ‘lose that haircut�
� or ‘build those muscles’. And still that damn song bounces around inside your head.

  First few bars of that damned song, that’s all it finally takes.

  You understand that the visions aren’t just the visual data. There’s the audio data too. You remember that you’re covered in skin and try to focus in on what your first target is feeling right now. Your answer, cum on chest. How can that be? In the middle of this perfect day?

  You rush from the café without paying, the waitress calling you some names like fag and homo and shitbag, the usual stuff. You take it all with a pinch of salty goodness, wiping the face clean with a tongue that you don’t even see stretching out of your mouth like a serpent’s tail. Were you to see such a sinister thing, you’d be reminded of Marianne. Dear sweet dead corporate terrorist, Marianne.

  A gust of cum races up the street towards you as you near your target. All the time, that tune he’s been whistling all morning growing in your head like sinus congestion, like a migraine, like a skull constricting branding iron. It was the song all along. The song in your head. What is that song?

  You look around trying to gauge the direction. You hear the bell of a nearby church clock knocking out the four long gongs that spell the end of your target. No turning back. That song, if only you could... There!

  You’re pushing people aside, as you hear it once more.

  You gasp for breath, trying to shout out, but it’s no good. Spunk suddenly spatters your teeth like a gagging brace. You close your mouth momentarily and bite your tongue. A coughing fit takes hold of your chest and you stumble against a big fat town crier who grabs you by the arm and rebukes you with a creamily voluminous, “Oiii yooouuuu!”