Logo Daedalus - Selfie, Suicide: or Cairey Turnbull’s Blue Skidoo

S elfie, Suicide

or Cairey Turnbulls Blue Skiddoo

By Logo Daedalus

For my most outstanding loans.

The water of the forest is still & felicitous

& we, we can be vicious & full of pain.

-Nils Runeberg

INCOMPREHENSIBLE FRAGMENT

... the nameless knight in Lucremorn

by sorcerer accursed

awaited for unending days

his muses fates reverse

by reddened signs of sacrifice,

the toll that was foretold,

when on a brisk & moonlit night

with an unearthly cold

hed sailed for the remotest isle

by vessel that hed stole

above the satyrs labyrinth

to resurrect her soul.

He faced the fire breathing snake,

by grace of Lucremorn.

He sought the way of recompense

& mending what had torn.

Somewhere the star of deaths redress

was hid within the deeps

where mortal eyes had never crept

nor mortal fingers reached.

It is not lost & can be found

began the dragons speech

but this alone is not a cause

for mortal hopes relief

as men far braver than yourself

have sought for it in vain

unable to afford its cost,

a lifetime spent in pain...

You must drift in Lucremorn

until the skys ablaze

& blood from other realms is paid-

& then, shell leave the maze...

THE ENTRANCE

Cairey Turnbull is precariously perched on the edge of a fall. His head is heavy & half-floating. Hes buzzing with thoughts like the sun-sagged balloons that litter the bedroom of his tenement. His musings are unballasted. They sway in the invisible shifts & drafts of any winds decree. Hes buzzing & bubbling under the influence of bottomless brunch mimosas, & hes swaying aimlessly, but swaying safely still. Hes been able to avoid an alluring slip into the shallows of intoxication. For now, theres a residual fortification in his guts- an eggs benedict, half digested, still maintains its salubrious sponginess as it floats upon a hollandaise foam beside a flotsam of duck bacon bobbing beside it like the remains of a shipwreck in the maelstrom of his digestion.

Hes holding a door aloft. His shadow has already entered the foyeur of the Museum of Expressive Humanism, but his body remains, hanging from its door, as hes misjudged the heft of this delusively transparent entryway, & in his struggle to pull it open against the force of the street-sweeping gale, a loose strand of his overcoat hooked itself onto its handle. After forcing the door & losing his balance as the winds force shifted in his favor, he discovers that he has become ensnared. This is how we find Cairey Turnbull, our most lamentable specimen.

Hanging over a puddle which reflects the overcast sky, warped by the warring circumferences of sporadic stillicides, he feels, once again, a sensation which reflects the eeriness of his station. Hes haunted by his lifes regrets. He feels a presentiment, again, of that horrific revelation, the one which taunts his waking hours announcing his damnation. This dreadful ambience is amplified by mist & haze from the dribbling incessance of this late-morning rain, which renders his surroundings as obscured as his hopes, & weighs on his shoulders like his moist winter coat.

He hadnt slept well, but he rarely slept unmolested by bad dreams. He had greeted his alarm with the panic of an overdue lateness, as it had interrupted a phantom of his adolescent anxieties in the guise of a guidance counselor, as it so often was, as she was informing him that hed missed every deadline, appointment, & test, & was consequently doomed to his woes, distresses, & of course, his regrets...

So hes drowsy and out of sorts, but hes been that way for years. This thought is itself routine, & if he were honest, it doesnt come to him without a hint of vertiginous thrill. Hes addicted to the sensation of being on the brink & hes enchanted with the visions of ego-squashing ecstasy that accompany it. His botched quests for revelations, mystifications, purposes, always lead him to appels du vide- a phrase that he has enjoyed rolling around his mouth like a hard candy ever since learning it in one of his youniversity courses, enjoying the polyglottic resemblance that Dr. McTeuf had pointed out, to those doubly forbidden apples of eternal life, which in the Garden of Hesperides... well, Cairey never swallowed them whole- these original choking hazards, these myths...

No, Cairey is not a brave boy. Hes always shirked his readings & his duties. Truly, he only enjoys the flirtation with these dangerous ideas- delighting in the gnaw & dance & shuffling along the edge of a plunge which seems so tantalizing, but never... He chocks it up today to the chemicals in his bloodstream- the caffeine from his morning draught of cold-coffee, the side- effects of his prescription pills, the fetid soup of his abnormal brain, & of course, all of that uncelebratory champagne hed quaffed in citric disguise. All of these poisons combined so early in the AM explain his lack of poise or so he assures himself. The nauseous sensation in his throat is tied in his mind to a sort of car-sickness he suffers from which emerges as soon as he begins to walk after sitting so long in transit that the sudden expansion of space from hermetic enclosure & the resultant blood rush to his semi-sleeping limbs spurs a lightheadedness & a blind dizziness which makes the ablest of surfaces feel as trepidatious as standing alone in an unwieldy canoe.

Needless to say, Caireys warped & unbalanced, & more-than-figuratively hanging from a thread. The simian sturdiness of upright normalcy is just beyond his grasp. All he has are his instincts & anxieties from which he hangs by his sleeve- & neither of these are heralded as reliable navigators of the vast unmapped & the mysterious phatic unspoken.

But as hes hanging from the door to the Museum of Expressive Humanism, he allows, with accidental chivalry, his algorithmically assigned date to pass before him. This provides him the opportunity to inspect her posterior anatomy with a libidinal flick of his hazel eyes. So far hes lacked this vantage on her & hes something of an expert in judging the three-dimensional curves rendered by the nude female form. He believes he can see through clothes, given the proper vantage. Up to now, hes only known her as a two-dimensional figurette- a carefully curated avatar, a hint younger, & more than a clue slimmer, with a name hed learned to be a pseudonym devised by her roommate to keep the creeps at bay- & so far, shes done nothing to complicate these first impressions & disappointments, nor has she provided any authentic scaffold to replace it. All of her outer significances are easily mapped to a type Cairey has an unwilling attraction to, despite the fact that hes sworn off this- as he has thought- feminine junkfood.

Her hair is dark at its roots, but the bulk of it is bleached blonde & tipped with a chemical pink- like a neapolitan fudgsicle, the sort with a strawberry that tastes of bubblegum, a watery yellowed vanilla honed to cut manufacturing costs, & a chocolate that only melts on your fingers, dripping down the balsa wood grip & staining your hands with a henna tattoo of asymmetrical insignificance. Her eyes are brown & framed by a raccoon smudge of eyeliner, tapered to a triangular flourish- like the wings of horus. Beneath her coat she wears a baggy turtleneck which hangs like a pastel pink hospital gown over a pair of baggy sunbleached momjeans. The combination renders all physique below her neck utterly imperceptible. She is opaque. Its a style all the rage these days amongst fretfully aging twenty-somethings. Shes normal, he thinks.

& so Cairey, still hanging from the door, but having finally circumnavigated his date, finds here nothing but another bottomlessness, another surface revealing nothing underneath. & it is now with the death of his erotic hopes for a satisfying engagement with normalcy that his general unresponsiveness takes on the funereal tenor of mourning. He cannot find the limits of his regrets- from setting out on todays abysmal venture to the abysmal venture of his birth.