Michael Gira - The Consumer

The Consumer

1993 1994

When my sister was released from the mental hospital, she came to live with me in the tilting and crumbling one-bedroom house Id bought with the small amount of money I inherited when our parents died. She arrived one afternoon unannounced in a taxi. She must have known instinctively that Id take her in. I dont know how or why they released her. Probably due to overcrowding, and they had her scratch her name on a form, then pushed her out the door. Or maybe she just slipped away when no one was looking (whod notice in a place like that?) she never did tell me and I didnt ask her. I was so happy to have her with me again that the last thing I wanted to do was break the spell by letting reality intrude. Ever since theyd dragged her away weeping with laughter and reaching out for me with our parents blood still coating her hands with shiny red gloves, Id felt amputated, like theyd pulled her kicking and screaming and insane out of my guts.

My house sat beside the freeway in a cluster of upright rectangles laid out in an orderly but grimy grid directly beneath the flight path of the LAX. The living quarters formed the upper half of the rectangle, squatting on top of an open-faced garage. As the relentless chorus of rising and falling howls pounded down on the house from above, the garage would resonate with a deep rumble like a kettle drum, rattling the flimsy stucco walls and sending an accordion of low-frequency sound waves surging through the slat wooden floors.

Sometimes, before my sister came to me, Id stand naked in the center of the floor for hours, dreaming of her and feeling the house rocking and resonating up through my bare feet into my bones, as if my body were a hollow bell, tuned and vibrating in perfect sympathy with the frequencies that coursed through the world outside. My blood hummed with pleasure. She was singing through me, calling out to me over the distance from her cell, forgiving me my secrets and washing my mind clean. But the air inside my house smelled foul, like the inside of my body, as if Id extruded a growing shell out the pores of my skin and I was now huddled inside it, stinking and rotting and feeling sorry for myself because I couldnt get near her.

I never went outside anymore, except to buy alcohol and meat. Id get drunk, loosening my attachment to myself, and Id eat the meat raw, pretending It was my sister, planting her flesh inside my stomach No she could grow inside me and live through me, like a cancer. When they sentenced her to that place, my own life started to drain out of my body immediately. As I walked away from the courtroom out into the poison sun of Los Angeles, I felt the light shooting straight through my eyes into my skull unfiltered, causing a tumor to grow in the center of my brain. The tumor was shaped like a rose and its petals were as sharp as razorblades. With each new thought, a petal would spiral away from the body of the flower and slice a passageway through the meat of my brain, slowly boring out large sections of my identity.

I hadnt seen her in three years when she arrived. It was the middle of summer. A constant regurgitation of corrosive yellow soot spilled out over the houses from the elevated freeway, burning my skin and eyes and tinting the neighborhood with a golden pigment that sparkled like sharkskin in the sun. The heat clung to the smog. It was heavy and painful going down into my chest, infesting my body with toxins with each breath. I was mildly drunk, sitting inside the house with the lights off and the curtains closed, sweating. I watched the blank screen of the television reflect the glow of my cigarette and imagined the hovering red ember was me, and I lived in the arid world of tubes and electronics behind the glass.

I heard a horn blaring up from the driveway. I looked out the window and saw her in the back of the cab, sitting up rigid, looking around, confused, uncertain what was supposed to happen next, maybe not even sure shed come to the right address. She squirmed in her seat as if it were alive and she were trying to escape its grip. She seemed to have forgotten she could simply open the door and get out. Her hair was stringy and matted to her head, so shiny with grease she might have just stepped out of a shower. She yanked at the strands that stuck to her forehead, plucking at them with pinched fingers as if they were long black worms she didnt want to touch. But she still looked beautiful to me. Her neck extended high and elegant, like a swan, just like our mothers neck before she cut it open. It presented her face, like a smooth white oval sculpture on a sleek pedestal. It was the face of a superior, chosen being, with eyes so black and flooded with cruelty and remorseless intelligence that when I looked down at her now, I felt like Id always felt when she was near me, like a cringing, one-dimensional cut-out figure a second-hand shadow peeled up from the outline she cast on the world.

The driver hit his horn again and looked up annoyed at the parted curtain in the window. But I stood hypnotized, watching her lower lip tremble exactly as I remembered it used to do when wed lie naked on the cool sheets of her bed, locked inside her room as our parents slept, caressing each others electrified skin with the peacock feathers wed collected from the fields beyond the back yard. Her lip was a shuddering animal then, and she taught me to bite it and play with it and torture it, as if I were a predator and it was my game.

I ran down the stairs, drugged with happiness. The memories of our life together congealed, then broke like an egg in my throat, spreading her helplessness through me and charging me with strength. I fumbled in my pockets as I tried to pay the driver. She got out of the cab, bunching her eyes up defiantly against the sun, as if daring it to try to slap her down with a wave of smog and heat. She stood shaking in her pink institutional bathrobe and slippers. One of her legs was meticulously shaved and polished with cream so that it reflected the sun like pale pink marble. But the other leg looked like something freshly dug up that had been decaying while buried in the dirt. It thrust down into the light from beneath her robe like a simian arm creeping out from a dark damp cave. It was covered in a coarse fur that stopped abruptly at the delicate bones of her ankle, as if the blood beneath this tighter skin was too thin to fertilize its growth. The skin beneath the fur was a gangrenous reptilian hide, shedding patches of white scales that adhered to the hairs and flickered in the sun like sprinkled flakes of pearl.

She leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek. Her lips were cold and wet. I felt myself weakening. I smelled something decomposing beneath her robe, like the smell of my own trapped insides. When she pulled away from her kiss, a silver thread of her spit connected us, strung like a fragile translucent nerve between our skins. It moved with the heat that rose up from the white concrete driveway. I felt her love pulsing through the liquid wire into my mind, telling me secrets and injecting me with her loneliness.

Her robe had opened slightly with her shaking. A breast sat matter-of-factly exposed, plump and vulnerable in the sun. The cab driver noticed it but pretended he didnt see it, and so did I for a second I could feel the pliant nipple between my teeth, sucking the sweet healing milk into my mouth. I finished paying the slimy bastard and told him to get the hell off my property. I pulled her robe closed and helped her up the stairs.

We stood on the landing just outside the door and leaned on the rotted wooden railing, looking out across the freeway. The haze was a thick veil of brown blood. I held her close to me. The sky was a dull blanket pressing down on us, not leading up into space but defined in-close by the wall of sound and vapors directly above us. The air stuck to our faces like syrup. The bellies of the airplanes passed so close overhead they were like the undersides of giant boats seen from beneath the water. As they glided over us, moaning and shaking the house, we could see the faces of the passengers looking down at us in wonder, as if we were miniature animated mannequins in a sprawling amusement park landscape.