dolus

It starts on the way home—night, along well-trod sidewalk, little boxes like movie frames going underfoot, gray and empty, the ones that play after the picture’s over. That’s it! That’s the show folks! You’ll love the next one, about a grieving young woman:

At first, I thought I was only seeing double; soon, it became apparent that my world had become another one entirely.

The open air before me was now the corridor of a many-folded house. The street lamps burning a cool, sick blue, the white efflorescence tracing red townhouse brick, the distant skyglow rising neon piss-green—all doubled, quadrupled, grew exponentially before collapsing back down to four, two, then back up to four, eight, sixteen, etc. I swam an ocean of disjointed patterns, overlapping fractals mid-zoom, frenzied asymmetry in desperate need of mandalic completeness.

The rationalized space of the city had been un-rationalized.

I looked down to get a look at my own broken form, un-made, fractured into a dozen pieces, rearranged and held together, just barely, by some precarious sense of “self,“ or “a self,” a continuity now threatened.

I made my way, step-by-step, down the ever-shifting labyrinthine path, taken by the phantasmagoria, in search of the Minotaur. The sidewalk below now played an actual movie, reel pulled at the pace of my stride, a lost silent film, a slapstick comedy starring a buffoonish ham hock and his comedy partner, a chain-smoking infant, as masochistic bullfighters who save an orphanage from fascist gauchos.

As I turned a corner, the scenery shifted—not in space but time. Beneath, a dirt path; above, the warm, electric light of a bishop’s crook, iron spirals casting a wicked hypnosis. Buildings stood piled one on top of the other, towers in terracotta armor, twelve ribs of marble apiece, etched with the faces of twenty-two archetypes, known to have lived and died at least twice, topped with iron cupolas tipped like the jaunty caps of boxcar tramps.

Above a church (every building here was a church), crouched atop a sign that read: dolus, smiled a witch with kind eyes. She whispered, “welcome to a thousand ways.” Beneath a stone archway swung an oak door, creaking next to a black void of a half-parabola, halted at the apex.

Skyward, a behemoth deity occupies every inch of the heavens, massive even at a distance, this distance, all the way at the very edge of space. The big gal even winked at me. Swear!

I entered the church, encouraged by a pat on the back by the friendly crone. Inside, a fairly normal mass took place, congregation mid-ritual, beads in hand, drab as Pilgrims, in mourning, oh, for no reason in particular, really, hungover, lead in the Agnus Dei by a twelve-foot rat.

Yes, I see it: a neon light pointed down and to the left, blue and green, tilted at a 45° degree angle. Down, left, down, left, down…

And so on and so forth, down a blank spiral, air gelid and painful, colder the further I went, until I made it here, to you, deep inside the light-less heart of it all, bare bones stripped of all they're worth by the torturers and their dogs, can’t even see my own damn hand in front of me. I suppose it’s just as well, familiar enough, it’ll do for now. What else is a girl to do? I have accepted the fact that I will never see home again. The question is: will you?