=A Geisha's Tale from the City of Death=

“So just imagine this,” says the catwalk-thin cutie, trembling all over from head-to-toe, her blue lips blood-flecked, blood-glittered, blood-dusted, and her large painted eyes coquettishly a-flutter: “My lover informs me that she's planned a surprise dinner party--a surprise to me, anyway, a sort of debutante's death-ball, is how she puts it, my coming-out’ party. She says this with an ominous, secret little smirk that only strikes me as ominous and secret in retrospect, when the secret is no longer any secret, plenty ominous, and way too late to escape.

“In the meantime, I mindlessly fret and flit about debating what to wear; in the end, of course, it's not important, because the plan doesn't require me to wear much, but I don't know that yet--it's all part of the fun, their fun, to keep me blissfully ignorant, in a state of perpetual pre-orgasmic suspense. I've managed only to don a sexy little half-bra and ruffled panties when the injection kicks in, the curtain goes up, the show begins; half-blinded, I struggle to slip into a pair of thigh-high stockings, clumsily getting the seams straight, costing myself valuable seconds. It's when I bend forward to buckle the strappy stiletto sandal to my ankle that the inky black fingers of whatever illegal cocktail of drugs that's been surreptitiously introduced into my bloodstream slides over my brain like a mutant octopus, smudging up and squishing out the last of my consciousness. Thereupon I tumble forward in slow-motion to the polished hardwood floor like a soft little pillow at my mistress's booted feet.

“For half the party--my own party, mind you!--I'm just not with it; drugged dopey, I stare through glazed eyes at a lot of people I don't know, or half-know, or, worst of all, know all too well, these emissaries from the past and present intermixed, like in a dream set in a place I don't recognize and have never been before, but familiar all the same, an archetypal banquet hall, maybe, the kind they use for weddings or mitzvahs, bar or bat, and I'm still in my underwear and I'm seemingly hovering just above the crowd (Why just look at them down there, having such a good time at my expense!).

“God, I'm so loopy, and it's a good thing, too, since I'm starting to understand that, as unreal as it all seems, as surreal as it looks to my own eyes which are only inches away from my open palm, my head having flopped lazily to the side at the prompting of a dull, faraway pain, like the flicker of distant lightning or the faint drums of a still far-off marching band, I see the impossible: the fact that I'm nailed to a wooden cross erected in the middle of this milling gathering, crucified here like nothing so much as an incidental conversation piece!

“Well, maybe not so incidental...

“But, then, certainly not so important either; this isn't my party, after all, as it turns out, but hers, my pre-op transsexual mistress in her ultra-glam gold lame evening gown, an ex-male bodybuilder turned glamour-puss film star, or something of the sort, well, you know what I mean, not exactly a film star, per se, but...wait…

“Ssshhh…listen...they are mingling, chatting, sipping cocktails and noshing on catered hors d oeuvres and hozzie-whatzies, every so often throwing a glance my way, curious, bored, chuckling at my precarious plight—‘whose is that freakthing anyway?’ To which comes the ubiquitous response ‘Cyn's little girlfriend.’ The retort to which invariably is some variation of ‘Oh...(laughing)...Jesus...I didn't recognize...well, I'll be damned they've finally gone and done it then...well, good for Cyn; she deserves it...by the way, have you seen the first rushes yet? Dynamite stuff for low-budget porn…’

“And so it goes, the small-talk people make, even at funerals, the chitchat they generate clustered around sickbeds, and deathbeds, the pointless albeit essential buzz they doubtless made on the walk to and from the crematoriums, the firing-squads, the death marches, et al....

“Tears have meanwhile dried in my thickly-applied make-up, so thickly-applied, in fact, that it's like a mask of sludge, so thick, to be precise, it's like my face is under an inch of mud; why, I wonder? Why--this heavy-handed, intentionally inexpert job? It's theatrical make-up, that's why, corpse make-up, that's what I suddenly realize, puddinged on the way they prepare the dead, or the slow dancing actress portraying an archetype of death on stage, her face emotionless, unblemished, vacant--serene, by which I mean to say, soulless, un-transcendent in every sense...does that make sense? Yes, there is no other conclusion to draw. I've made up my mind. I have been made-up like this because in everyone's mind I am, in fact, already dead.

“I whimper. My bowels, as the Bible has so often and so eloquently put it, have turned to water.

“An older man, sipping a Cosmopolitan, perhaps (I'm no Mr. Boston!) puffing a cigar, appraises me meditatively, almost appreciatively, but nonetheless with blank unseeing eyes, preoccupied, as if he were thinking of something else entirely (which, quite naturally, he is), which would mean he wasn't appraising me at all, now wouldn't it? For crissakes you're not the goddamned center of the universe, you fucking egomaniac, you! He was merely looking, absently, in my general direction because I am absent.  Occasionally someone (is it Cyn?) quiets my groans by thrusting a sponge between my teeth; it's soaked, I think, with a lemon-flavored tranquilizer laced with diuretics and laxatives; the older man gets bored, resurfaces from his private meditation, gets tapped on the shoulder, knocks the ash off his cigar and extinguishes it, off-handedly, against the inside of my left thigh, and so it goes.

“My ribcage, exposed below my pink polka-dot halter (yes, I'm now wearing a polka-dot pink halter and pink short-shorts, don't ask me how this is possible) is slashed (for effect, non-lethally, Cyn assures me; she looks so radiant!) and my taut tummy is stretched (and similarly slashed with what look to be some sort of Mayan hieroglyphics) between my prominent hipbones, navel pierced, of course, with a dangling rhinestone trinket of vaguely religious significance, ironically postmodern, of course.

“A party game has started up, seemingly spontaneously, as these things so often do, with the abrupt and incongruous appearance of an aluminum baseball bat—‘Break the Pansy's Legs’ this unfortunate game seems to be called. Is that, ultimately, what this is really all about? Someone has tacked a sheet of paper above my head with the words "Impotent Fag" scrawled across in pink block letters, and so, now that all's prepared, let the game begin!

“I guess you could say that the general idea of the contest resembles (more than anything else I can think of at the moment) a sort of cross between pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey and beating a piñata. Someone takes up the bat, they blindfold him or her, turn them rapidly around two or three times, and face them in the general direction of my crucified body. Then they give them a shove forward and the hilarity ensues!

“Staggering towards me, bat-on-shoulder to the accompaniment of encouraging cheers, hoots and laughter, to spirited and shouted instructions (left, right, no left, left, left, now right, that's it, a little bit forward, not so much, almost, almost, right, yes...stop right there... Stop!...now…SWING! SWING!). Each participant eventually arrives in the approximate vicinity of my cross, at the foot of it, I mean, and, with all their might, takes an awkward, off-balance hack, the idea being to break the bones in my legs so that, no longer able to support my weight, unable to relieve the pressure on my nailed wrists and feet, my diaphragm will collapse, my lungs fill with fluid, eventually cease to function altogether and, in exhaustion and agony, lapsing into shock, I'll suffocate and expire, which is generally the way the crucified of all centuries eventually met their deaths.

“And nothing more than this is the goal of the game, this is how the winner is determined. Who'll be the one to succeed in breaking my legbones so that I croak. That person is the lucky champion! Can you imagine? What kind of people are these, anyway? What kind of world is this that they inhabit? How did I end up among them?

“And that’s not even the worst part, the most humiliating part. Shall I tell you the worst part?”

“No, please don’t. I’ve heard enough…”

“The worst part is that this isn't even the worst part, that the worst part is still to come. The blows, you see, are excruciating in themselves, but invariably, (barring a lucky strike--lucky, that is, for me--which, unluckily--for me--is never struck), they are for the greater part wildly inaccurate, more painful, perhaps, for their wildness and their inaccuracy, thunking as they do across my shins, glancing off my kneecaps, clipping my ankles. They cause pain, in other words, but they do not lead to the quick and efficient end of my life (=suffering).

“The game doesn't engage everyone's interest, nor hold it, at least not initially—two or three take it up, abandon it, then two or three more, another and another, joined by four or five, losing a few here and there who drift off to the bar or bathroom or whatnot. Sometimes, for a time, at least, the game is neglected altogether; inevitably, though, someone weaves drunkenly up to where I’m crucified, takes up the bat, and without even bothering with the blindfold that supposedly provides the challenge, rears back and takes a wild hack.

“Ouch!

“The party goes on, advances, contracts, takes on a life of its, as parties do, amoeba-like, dividing and reuniting again. There's my ex, oh Christ, it's true, there she is, I can't believe Cyn invited her, here she comes, blindfolded, grinning, the aluminum baseball bat in an awkward two-fisted grip. Her chopping blow catches me in the groin, the backswing lands square on the nail driven through my right instep--I go icy cold with pain, blinded by a brick wall of white light. Her lover comes up behind her, wraps his arms around her waist, guiding her through a swing or two.

“The blows that follow land without a great deal more accuracy, but they provoke a good deal more amusement. At last, oh thank god at last, the coup de grace is delivered; it's her new lover who takes the bat, removes his sports coat, and takes what is recognizable to anyone, even those unfamiliar with the sport, as an ‘expert stance.’ A crowd materializes out of thin air, like ants around a fallen chunk of cherry popsicle (it’s easy to forget that even Aristotle believed in spontaneous generation).

“Tall and athletic, broad-shouldered and muscular, an ex-ballplayer who years ago played in the minor leagues of one professional team or other (the St. Louis Cardinals? the Cleveland Indians?), he won't be cheated, so he cheats. I catch his eye from beneath the blindfold he's managed to partially slip to the side as he strides purposely and unerringly forward, takes up that expert stance I’ve already mentioned, first from the right side and then from the left –he’s a switch-hitter! The years haven’t eroded the beauty of his fluid and level swing; age and a few extra inches around the middle hasn’t thrown off his timing. He measures me up just right and catches me on the sweet-spot (an inch above each knee), a pair of homeruns for sure, going, going…see ya! He wins the big game, my ex throws herself ecstatically into his arms ("my hero!"), and the crowd goes wild.

“Meanwhile, I sag down, fatally, on broken legs, never to rise again for breath (or anything else); my head drops dumbly to my chest and through fluttering false eyelashes I see my pink bikini-style panties rapidly darken as my bladder empties and I wonder, am I actually pissing blood?

“Standing on hand, monitoring my progress (Progress? Can you really call it that? Sure! Why not? Fine...progress then) is the surgeon with his stethoscope and scalpel, his cooler of dry ice. Nothing here will go to waste; after all, a human body is a treasure chest of invaluables--an iconic senator dying of nephritis, the aging rock star with the pickled liver, the clogged and rotted heart of the cutthroat venture capitalist-turned-philanthropist at the eleventh hour, but, alas, too late. Who said money can't buy everything? It can buy whatever you can afford! It can buy you a second life; it can buy you a cure for death.

“Already, unable to wait, and because it makes for better theater than carving up a corpse, the surgeon has worked the urine-soaked panties over my hips and down my smooth thighs. He performs a makeshift orchiectomy, that's castration to you laymen out there, slitting my scrotum open down the middle (my what?! My scrotum!? How did that ever get there?!), reaching inside and prying out my testicles (my what? My testicles?! Hey, what gives? Surely you jest!), cutting the cords and nerves and whatnot, his latex fingers slick with blood and unexpressed semen. There's some impotent Russian bazillionaire somewhere in the Urals who's convinced that a ground and dried concoction including such illicit ingredients harvested fresh from the source makes Viagra seem like taking baby aspirin for a brain tumor.

“Corneas, hair, teeth, not to mention lungs, the pancreas, and adrenal glands, the skull cracked open, that jellied meat a delicacy, the pituitary rare as a four-leaf clover, bones have uses too, damn it's all good, and when the body is empty so long as there are recognizable orifices and a certain quantity of meat remains a necrophiliac can be found somewhere who'll pay to fuck it, a cannibal to eat it, and when that's gone there are master tattooists around the world who’d kill for a skin as pale and smooth as mine to stretch and ink with secret grimoires; rich collectors are paying fortunes even as we speak (so to speak) to secure such precious canvases for the unimaginable collections of the darkest galleries in the most secret of private museums.

“Cyn will make a bundle on my carcass alone, not to mention from the proceeds of the film she's paid a photographer to make of my torture and butchering. She’ll net enough to never have to work again, even if her film career doesn't pan out the way she plans, and knowing her, with that short attention span, addictive personality, and alarming tendency to self-destructive dissolution, it surely won't. Well, she'll be able to have that child she always wanted and that's not cheap without a womb and all, but what can science not do if it has a mind to do--and a full enough pocketbook...in a word, nothing!

“They'll implant the brat in her tummy, or thereabouts, like a virgin birth, a child of no man (and, in this case) no woman born, a propitious and unprecedented pseudo-event. It's always been a dream of hers, motherhood, that is, the ultimate fantasy, to be a big-bellied, big-titted, transsexual earth mother with a Munchausen's fetish--it's nice to be able to help a dream come true, although I have to admit I wish it hadn't cost me quite so much. Speaking of which, why haven't I lost consciousness by now, haven't I suffered enough, why does this horrible moment seem frozen, like it's going on forever? If only I could wake up, if I could just wake up for five seconds, maybe, just maybe, I could die once and for all at last, is that too much to ask?