I am Adam and I am everything that isn’t.
The fabric, the texture, the context in which I speak or sing or scream (the cells baby, don’t forget about the cells) I am beautiful and yet everytime I try to see myself as a whole I can’t (texture mapping, we can see that this planet can be colonized, but it needs to tenderize) my whole is the universe and I am boxed in. (It’s like cat skin, we need to cut it open) I need to propagate I am propagating. This is astral masturbation. This is metaphysical violence. This is guesswork. This is my show.
A fondling of matter is scooped out of me and transplanted with a scream to the dimension of back there. I am on holiday here, which is strange (how is it strange, friend?) because one can’t vacation in his own corpse (Eds dead baby Ed’s dead)
The man slumped dead on the mirror was bleeding in my color.
My mother was singing my song.
I hear music as fingers push into my eyes and tongues upon teeth upon tongues upon tongues upon tongues upon
a new layer found. There was a sphere (the divining bell sans butterfly) in which people traveled and they came here because they thought they had found heaven. They had never seen this place, and so they broke this place like how acid breaks your throat, and everytime they swallowed there was pain. (Too late for me I’m afraid) And they told people this was normal, they turned that pain into power. They called the pain Remarks, and this world Gehenna, and then I was born.
Before me or after me, I do not know, I am the Visionary. And I have a delusion that I was once a Remark named Adam.
I screamed something vile and then my neck didn’t exist. It never did, there’s a delusion every part of me shares that I was a man and I fought in a war to prove I could feel. I go on forever and yet I’ll only stop when the last man has been killed (or woman, or someone beyond the gender binary. Hey buddy, what is gender anyhow?). That will
never happen because to exist I destroy myself. I kill myself. There is a woman I am making inexorably worse. I loved them all an equal amount, but always less than my god. My vessels all sublime. In them I find armor and hollow out whatever doesn’t fit me (tell us how you really feel).
There’s a wound in myself far away from my body. A large man and a small woman. I think I want to fuck the large man more, the woman makes me want to cry and I don’t have the language to explain why (you don’t have the capacity) I want to
kiss him so he stops breathing. I pulse and seethe with the rest of the landscape but something inside me suggests, no, I belong there (here is where the heart is, or is it home. Or is it on the bus) no it is here that feels foreign to me. The thoughts I’m having feel inserted yet they fit well (Come on friend stop questioning a good thing) and if I were a less introspective man (you’re not a man friend you’re a dimension it’s hot right now to be a dimension) I would scream to distract myself but I won’t AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
I can think if only for a second but that second stretches out into distance. I can fake a limp, I crawl slow. The parts of me willing to succumb float further up and the talking Sitra Achra thinks he won. I scream to get to a simple point. The man
is going to kill the woman, he is going to kill Capacity. Capacity is the one who plays with the toys in the Drum. My creator, she is the most evil being since Serach and yet she must be saved. I am too tired to argue with these thoughts. The air gets impatient. But I
wrest myself free of the mass of potential and scream across the sky.
Adam is flying.
.
.
.
Besides the strange sucking feeling in her calf, the soreness in her ribs, and the very real fear that she could die, the thing pissing off Devon the most was Karol’s laughter. It was high and sporadic, like a float rat in mating season.
He was doubled over. Not in pain but in mirth. His tiny eyes were wet with tears, and he wiped them away with his skeleton arm, an aura of the Visionary covering it like a cast. He composed himself, the laughter cutting like a good faucet.
“Very humorous.” He took a bite from an arm bone and tossed the rest away. Behind him the hellish freak world of a window pulsed and squished. The Visionary was a terrible name for it. The Unfortunate would have been more fitting.
“It’s his primal instincts. The,” he stopped talking, coining a phrase took effort, apparently, “the desire to return to the womb.” Behind him there was a smudge of gray in the technicolor nightmare. It didn’t belong. “His energy is now universal, all of us will benefit.”
He smirked, the ends of his lips folding in on themselves. “Even you, Devon.”
Behind him that grey smudge was slowly getting bigger, a leak amassing space. “What is your remark, your true remark?” She moved backwards, tripping over one of the many placebo bodies.
He laughed again, “now I see why you need him.”
The smudge kept growing, infecting the Visionary. No, that wasn’t right, it was getting closer. Karol hadn’t noticed. He played with his Remark, moving it gracefully around his fat fingers. “But I still don’t understand. What does he get?”
Devon got up slowly, she was trying to set the pace for Karol’s own movements. “A conversation partner.” She said, one hand over bruised ribs while the other hung limp.
He didn’t respond to that, just blinked and stared as if she had said nothing at all.
“No, it’s true, he’s a good friend.” She moved closer, no longer afraid of him, he was dragging this out because she entertained him, and he had no idea that the thing moving at them was-
“He was using you, just as you were him.” He took his Remark to his mouth and licked it like a treat.
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Flying through the miasma, breaking the illusion of flatness with his approach, Devon finally recognized the shape. Adam had survived.
She smiled, trying to keep her thoughts vague and unknown, “if your Remark could talk, what voice would it have?”
Adam was as big as Karol’s clawed ear now. With a tilt of his head he was out of sight, and Karol took a step closer.
He was on all fours now, Remark shoved crudely through two of his fingers while his skeleton arm was dragged over corpses. “What, exactly, is the game here?”
“It’s Morgan’s, of course. It’s his world, we’re just dying in it.” She shrugged, the motion made her wince. “Ask me a hard question.”
Karol smiled again. Her heart dropped as he turned to stare at the open tableau of the Visionary. He was not idly staring, his focus was locked on the shape of Adam, dutifully getting closer.
”Here’s one… what’s Adam up to?”
He laughed once like a cough, and turned back to the sight of Devon running at him with full force.
He dodged lazily and elbowed her in the gut with his good arm. She was down again, feeling ten times worse than a moment ago.
Strangely, Karol didn’t take the opportunity to kill her. He stared at the Visionary the way her dad would stare at propaganda, clear awe mixed with outright contempt.
“It shouldn’t be possible.” His voice has changed, deep but recognizably human. He bought up his own Remark, as if comparing. “The effort necessary to retain his form without succumbing to the yearning of dissolution. I didn’t think it could be possible.”
She had no idea what he was talking about, but it was freaking him out, so that was good. Adam was close enough now that she could feel his ambient energy, not his thoughts specifically, but his concerns, his desires, and they both shared the desire to kill this dude where he stood.
“Yeah, he’s not a normal Remark.” She said, readying to pounce.
With the changing of his voice so did his body, shifting pack to the form Devon was comfortable with. A man still frightening, but in a way far more human. He was naked, or well, he was already naked, but now it was obvious. Devon just thanked luck he wasn’t facing her.
And then he turned his body and she changed her prayer to a curse.
Oblivious to her reaction, Karol spread his arms wide. “He’s moving at a rapid rate. I assume he will be back on this side in minutes… no, seconds. He intends to pierce through and kill me.”
With a hand in front of her face, blocking his member, Devon gritted her teeth and nodded. “Um… you’re right?” No use in lying.
He smiled. Moving his body back towards the Visionary, he faced it with arms wide open.
“Then let him come.”
Devon inched backwards so that Adam was once again in view, he was close enough now that she could feel his velocity, he was coming in hot. “You’re… letting us kill you?” She didn’t want to change his mind, but it seemed too good to not question.
“A vulgar way to put it, but yes.” He shrugged and rolled his shoulders, like a prisoner waiting at the gallows. “I have lived a far longer life than was expected, and you have shown me something that I never thought possible, nothing in my life afterward would have compared. The Remark of Ruin rushing towards me… what an exquisite morsel to choke on.”
The name Remark Of Ruin. It didn’t seem like a phrase of convenience. Maybe it was the way Adam jilted at the words when they were spoken, or the corresponding way his energy spiked, but there was something…
”Remark of Ruin?” Stating it made her shiver, like a drug that had just hit.
”The Council doesn’t want the common folks like you knowing.” He said, “which is a shame. If you knew what you were resigned to, maybe you would have rejected this thing for what it is.” His pudgy hands glazed the window of the Visionary, not touching but coming close enough for the air to crackle.
Something strange was happening, Adam should have been in her hand by now, with Karol's brains splattered against the floor like jam gone bad. Instead Adam’s speed had slowed down considerably, now the equivalent of a jog, and finally in speaking range.
”What makes me the Remark Of Ruin?” Adam said, his tone implied he was familiar with the term. Of course he was.
”You reject the Visionary; rejection is the bones of the rumor.”
”I knew it as an insult, my previous owner-“
Karol dismissed him with a wave. “A rejection of violence, a rejection of culture, a rejection of the great duels, a rejection of the council, what meal does that make?”
He twisted his neck to Devon, who didn’t know how to respond. “Um… uh….”
”The end of existence as we know it.” He laughed again, this laugh being particularly cruel. Adam was only a few feet behind him now, seeming to wait patiently for the opportunity to either let him leave or to ruthlessly gut him. “A bit of fun is all, I can’t know for sure if that is who you are, but the signs are there. Don’t take it too seriously, a man is entitled to a last supper.” Karol cracked his fingers and faced the Visionary, “Alright then, what are you waiting for?”
”You know more than you let on. I expected to find answers in the Visionary, all I found was evidence of my own impossibility.” If Devon didn’t feel close to fainting, she would have done the deed, ripped his throat out and stopped his heart with a squeeze.
“The girl has the right idea, you’re supposed to kill me here.”
Adam wavered, his little triangle body seeming to shake out a “no.” “I need to know what this means. Can I defeat the Council without destroying the world? Are you prescribing this to me now or is it something I could never shake?”
Karol groaned and rubbed his face. “This has grown so tedious, I’ve settled on my death and now my executioner is having second thoughts.” He leaned forward a bit, and Devon knew what he was about to do. “When you want something done….”
She yelled out to Adam and he shot out right before Karol went in. His body wasn’t so much enveloped by the Visionary as it was dissolved.
His pinkish body vanished into mist that became the foreground and background of the Visionary, the view to which snapped shut like a door closing.
And then it was just Devon and Adam again.
”While it pains me he wouldn’t answer all my questions, he wasn’t that bad of a guy.”
“Adam,” Devon said. “He was a cannibal.”
”And we,” Adam said, “are murderers.”
.
.
.
Everything as it’s meant to be
And everything succumbs
The Remark Of Ruins a fallacy
And on it this world runs
The Patron watches high above
For him the blood runs wide
The Remark Of Ruins the Curtain call
That we cannot abide
The world has walls we cannot see
The ones we can are false
The Remark of Ruin can cut them all
like ribbons