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Edward Lee - Quest for Sex, Truth & Reality

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The three stories in this chapbook are among my favorites of my stuff, Lee says. The stories are the intellectualized b-movie-like The Seeker and the Lieberesque The Goddess of the New Dark Age, plus the potent existential porn piece, Sex, Truth, & Reality aka Pay Me. The latter has never been reprinted, and was originally accepted in the early 80s by HUSTLER magazine, even to the point that Lees manuscript was copy-edited and sent to the typesetter. Jut my luck, Lee recalls. Right before they were going to pay me something like 800 bucks, the fiction editor left the company and the story was rejected by his successor, said HUSTLER was no place for philosophical fiction. Its the only time Im ever gotten a manuscript returned with copy-edit marks.

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Quest for Sex, Truth & Reality by Edward Lee

This is for S.

I am forever

and ineffably

yours.

Goddes of the New Dark Age

(For Chara)

What is real? he wondered aloud.

Then Smith heard the words: Revere me. Make me real. Not his words, but a muffled hiss, like someone whispering on the other side of the wall

The wall was nightmare: tremoring flesh, skin sweating in turmoil, pain, despair. So Im dreaming standing up now, Smith thought. Wide awake, in daylight.

Flecks of mica glittered up from the sidewalk. The sun raged. Old man, he thought. City cops cruised by, eyeing him, squab faces dark behind tinted glass. Frog, Ice, Cokesmoke? a hand-pocketed black man asked him. By a newspaper stand, where headlines blared MAN SETS WIFE & CHILDREN ON FIRE, a raddled prostitute twitched, scratching at needlemarks inside of her thigh. In the mouth of a brick, urine-soaked alley, a woman in rags vomited up blood as rats the size of small puppies boldly approached the emesis, to eat.

Smith hated the sun. It seemed bright with life, which made him feel even older, more depleted. Where am I going? The question didnt mean now, today, this minute. Where am I going forever? he wondered. Where have I been?

The footsteps padded behind him; they had for weeks. Smith had long since stopped looking back. It sounded like someone walking barefoot a woman, he surmised, a robust, beautiful woman. He also detected the lovely scent perfume, and some kind of inexplicable heat at his groin and his heart. Whenever he turned, though, at the sound and the lush fragrance, nothing was there. Just a shadow sometimes, just a fleck, like the mica in the cement.

Perhaps it was a ghost, whatever ghosts were. Ghost, or just hallucination. His physical body felt like vermiculated meat. Too many artificial sweeteners, cigarettes, alcohol, saturated fats. A body could only take so much vandalism. But Smith didnt care. Why should he, now? Or ever, for that matter?

Or maybe ghosts were real. Physical residuum, he speculated. Interplanar leakage. Was there really a netherworld, like an anxious tongue licking across pressed lips, desperate for entry? Hed read somewhere that horror left a stain, a laceration through which the tenants of the void could ooze into the world. But if this were true, mankind would surely be smothered by such ooze.

So what was this ghost? A spirit? An angel?

Was the ghost real?

Sometimes he could actually see it, via the presage: the longing perfume scent, the warmth. Generally only at night. Of course, he thought. Night. Dr. Greene had told him to expect as much. But ghosts? Be prepared for some contraindications from the chemotherapy, came the words like a clipped dissertation. Olfactory and aural hallucinosis. Exodikinesis, immoderate scotopic debris, synaptic maladaption and toxicity intolerance. Its normal. Normal, Smith reflected. Dyings normal too. Three treatments left him racked for hours, dry heaving bile. His hair had fallen out. To hell with this, hed told Greene, on the fourth visit. Let me die. Cancer seemed an appropriate way for a writer to die. It seemed nearly allegorical. The festering beneath the miraculous veneer of human flesh.

No, the ghost wasnt a side effect. It must be real. He thought he could see it, the shadow within the shadow, peering back. A shadow in want of flesh.

Was it Smiths flesh it wanted? Why should it want me? My fleshs dying. I am essentially a walking corpse. He could smell the perfume, even over the citys mephitis of carbon-monoxide, stale sweat, and garbage. You smell beautiful, he whispered. Whoever you are. He walked on, shriveling against the glare of the sun, but then stopped to look back once more.

Are you real? he asked.

***

What is real? Smith lit a cigarette; it scarcely mattered now. But the question kept occurring to him, like an itching rash. Why should it be so important?

His biopsy analysis now that was real. The single sheet seemed too thin for such a grievous message. It drooped in his hand like something already dead:

CYTOLOGY REPORT

Name: Smith, L.

Age: 61, W/M

Clinical Consultation: Large Cell Coaxial Mass

Specify: Right Lung Mass Aspirate

_ Negative

_ Atypical

x Positive

Microscopic Description: Right Lung Aspirate showing numerous malignant large cells, some of which showing large vesicular irregular nuclei, consistent with non-keratinizing carcinoma, probably large-cell differentiated type of adenocarcinoma.

Smith was a realist. No sense in crying over a spilt life. He felt he had a mission now, but wasnt sure what it could be. He couldnt stop thinking of the ghost.

Are you real?

Behind his typewriter, behind his desk, a shadow, or a smudge, seemed to nod. Who are you! Smith suddenly yelled. What do you want from me?

Your reckoning, something seemed to hiss. It wasnt even really a sound, more akin to insect appendages abrading. The soft bare footfalls followed him to the bathroom. A ghost is coming into the toilet with me, he thought. It was almost funny. He smiled at the lovely perfume-scent, then winced, urinating blood. Of course: by now the disease had bloomed. Dr. Greene had warned him, hadnt he? Renal malfunction. What happens, Mr. Smith, is that the raging malignant cells become insinuated into the nephrons and the cortical kidney tissue, sceloriticizing the calyx cavities. Charming, Smith thought now. The pain was extraordinary, like bright light.

Smith had been a writer for over forty years. Had been, he emphasized, pulling up his zipper. He flushed the toilet, and thought of his career. Had he been a good writer? Hed thought so, until Greene had told him the truth. The good doctor had at least been respectful enough of Smiths profession not to mince words. Youre dying, hed said. Youll be gone in oh, say, six weeks.

Gone, Smith considered. He was still in the bathroom. What did gone mean? Did it mean no longer real? The question continued to nag at him, worse than the cancer. What is real? he asked.

Find out, the hiss replied. You havent much time.

As a writer, hed spent his life trying to create realities out of assessments of imagination. The truth of any story can only exist in its bare words, hed heard someone say in a bar when he was eighteen. Hed been a writer ever since, pursuing that. But now, now that he was dying, he knew that hed failed utterly. Was that why the ghost had come to him, evoked by the knowledge of his failure? What was the hiss trying to tell him?

I see you, he said. For a moment he had, behind him in the mirror. Beautiful, he thought. A beautiful, beautiful woman, an amalgam composed of inverted bits of wallpaper, a prolapsation. It smiled weakly, then vanished. Only its pleasant smell remained.

The television poured forth atrocities. Or were they realities? Up next, promised the newswoman, with a visage of wood, Texas State Supreme Court grants local journalists the right to televise executions. Outside the courthouse, a crowd in floodlit darkness cheered. Then, a commercial, a slim brunette in a white swimsuit: If youre counting calories, heres something you should know Smith changed the channel. where officials estimate that one thousand children are starving to death daily, while government troops remain free to confiscate relief rations from the United Red Cross, selling to the black market what they dont eat themselves.

And next: confessed today that he knowingly tainted the entire hospitals transfusion supply with AIDS infected bl

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