TEMPLE HQ
THIS DREAM AGAIN, DEJA VU!
11-15-2021
Take your car service up the great crumbling interstates until you reach those seldom-used exits to the off-downtown districts that always seem suspiciously good at deafaning the urban noise. Run a great expensive tab on someone else’s money. Take notice of your surroundings. Feel the fake trees, taken from a museum, it was replanted here along the parkway where every car is zero emissions, every dogwalker clean of sweat, even the grime of help washed off down sub-street level service entrances where an awestriking basement can cleanse even the deepest impoverishments. Pull up to the curb and let the valet whisk it away to some rebar cavern out of sight & mind. The man will welcome you. There’s a portal to hell in the basement. You take one last look at the trees, museum pieces hand-carved out of jungle mahogany with artificial plastic leaves they spray gold in the autumn, rooted into shovelholes trenched along the asphalt.
The master sleeps upstairs in surgical-scrub bathrobes prepared like paper sheets laid out across the lower part of the bed where feet never touch, looking upwards at a skylight, the rain falling. Ready to be cut open. Pale the color of a hospital wall. Clothes the color of a doctor’s robes. Plastic disposed off, thrown to be cleaned by rabbis in the burning valley of Gehenna - basement level one. There, the master’s surgical-cleanliness is enforced with torches turning the castoffs of the proletarian body into ash, erasing all traces of anything but a baby-powder smooth complexion, muscles medically loosened, massaged and awakening each morning like a step straight out of the womb into the highest heavens. Maybe that’s why he has so much love for infanticide - imagine how free of filth the victim is. To emerge from your mother, into a realm of safety, before you grow into all the disease and infections of aging, before you develop the raging evil-within of adolescence, a pure thing that knows no other life until it awakens flufffy and pure cloudtop and beautiful. Level seven like seventh Heaven speaks of it, speaks of a bed, speaks of a man snapping his fingers to shut the fluorescent lights off and sinking into some healing potion the texture of hand sanitizer - like the womb but pure. Like the womb but clean, made not out of the filth-ridden sexuality of a grown woman but the eternally youthful smooth texture of medicine - real medicine.
One of the guestrooms on the sixth floor is reserved for his hands and feet. But that’s not of interest here. All around manus and pedus, down into most of the fifth floor, a flair for fantasy. A flair for postcards. There’s a room filled with sand, walls painted in a deliberately tacky landscape of poorly-depicted children playing in the distance, white foam crashing on the dandelion-yellow sand, the sky just a little too dark, the blue a lapis-lazuli primary color, the clouds patched in opaque blobs the tone of bleach. The pink room all furnished in hot pink, sickening pink, pink the color of sugar overindulged on halloween, the master and his hands laughing in lust at the girl vomiting and ill, her weakminded taste, her childish purity, how easy such a beautiful thing is to take in your hand and roll it around, how easy it is, take them into the pink room and feed them sweets and stuffed facsimiles of nature and they’ll trip and moan and fall graciously to a potent presence. The master loves like a parent who really knows. Unoccluded by the filth of the mother’s vagina, every one of the girls as virginally born as the lord and savior. They love him even after seeing what’s in the basement, they love him even through - and he’s learned he can only strengthen their love - by what happens in the bottomless pit. He shows them kether and malkuth, they love him like a babe loves God prostrated before a wooden cross and praying to high heavens to preserve mommy and daddy the night she learned there was something beyond the nipple and the womb. A man with the power to whisk one up or down as he pleases. Kether to Malkuth in an instant. Grabbed by the soft skin behind the neck like a little kitten as she’s falling into the bottomless pit. Now, now, I pushed you and then I pulled you up - what does that tell you? Who’s really in charge here?
Sitting in his bath, the master looks forward, eyes lazily falling to the flyover photograph of his center. He has the island. He has the desert. He could have anything in between, were there anything worth taking in between. Except girls. Like pearls from sand. Sweetcorn and television, makeup and plastic virginity, like sand, the sand of a subliterate peasantry digested to a pearl in the mouth of the oyster. Processed by purchasing and redeemed into something he can make use of. All the world’s my oyster, the master thinks - all the world grinds up its sicknesses and subhumans into the pearl, the purity, the clean little jewel he can affix in the palm of his hand and know in the biblical sense, contemplate it through the body, feel its flesh and take in its secrets, drink full of something more beautiful than any pleasure of wealth, a goldwhite slice of Heaven crested between a youthful body, long blonde hair, trusting and so so easy, so endearingly easy to hold and cherish in the way only a man like him is uniquely capable of doing.
In the afternoon he can retire to some room the color of violence, covered in corpses tacked on the walls, paintings wrought from their dusty confines and strapped onto the surface of a windowless room, sitting back into the plush and letting spinach fall down his throat. He’s receieved, and now he can relax. Read and respond, compose, think, and take little journeys through the wide net he can cast. His hands and feet will still be tittering about below. With a sense of humor in the day and a wounded coping pride at night, he plays at some intellectual status he knows he’ll never have. Not in the blue room. Not in the leopard room. Not grasping any leatherbound book from the long lists the prince memorized in his youth that he’ll always put down and reach for lovely lady Justine.
He saw you pull up from the second window. Saw you leave your car. He can’t wait to show you what it means to stuff a dog. He can’t wait to hear you blather and stick in a knife in any misstep, he can’t wait to take you upstairs and tell you what’s waiting in the basement. He’s hoping you say yes. He’s hoping you say yes and yes and yes until you’re on the other end of the phone begging the hands not to twist the blade any deeper. He’s already falling in love with you like a salesman falls in love with an open door. He knows your name. He already has three different aliases for you in his little book, locked within the desk he bought for $1. He steps away from the window to keep you waiting in the foyer. His men in the basement already have you on camera. His men in the basement keep it all on camera. His men in Dis sign, seal, and deliver every last moment of the alarms and videos across the air, floating perpetually still like a jetliner in mystic suspension. He’s going to show you what it means to stuff a dog. He’ll be so disappointed if you step back too soon.
You see a clockwork apparatus, maybe a statue of a warrior in the vaulted ceiling, four doors leading all different directions. Elevators, stairs, dumbwaiters, and all the trappings of a home like this. A dining room in the back, maybe even a garden. Paneled walls. You can hear something in the basement. You can’t wait to be allowed upstairs.