The River Part 2 of 2

Rearranging the store to fit the new shipment of stacks was draining, but actually carrying in the shipment was the cake to that icing. It was the largest order of Marshall amps Kurtis had ever seen. Gary didn't even like Marshalls, but they were what was selling. The store only had a few Les Paul knockoffs left over from when, for whatever reason, every teenage boy looking for a mating call preferred that particular instrument. Some of the badboys preferred flying Vs, of course.

Kurtis didn't care either way; he just wanted to play with electronics; he wasn't even a good guitarist. Didn't even like guitar music very much—yeah, crazy, right? He was more enamoured with Liszt or Bach. Just don't ask him to play a piano or an organ—he doesn't know how to do that either. He also enjoyed Wagner's profound sense of vision and his effort to encompass as many media as possible into the creation of a total art. Kurtis's argument about contemporary music was something like this: the most popular music genres and band formations are going to be the ones that produce the worst music. Look toward the less popular instruments and genres and you'll find interesting music that doesn't need to sound like a fucking high speed cheese grater to get your attention.

To this end, Kurtis was also a fan of John Cage and ridiculous percussive music with melodic drums.

No, Kurtis wasn't much of a musician; he enjoyed electronics. He didn't know what 'good guitar tone' was, but he knew what “totally broken” sounded like. He read schematics the way an English major might read a children's story. Tear through it, dissect it in no time flat. Soldering guns felt as natural as fingers. He never wore protective gear. He didn't talk to customers about guitars, he worked with headphones that played only Bach. Brandenburg Concertos, Cello Suites, Glenn Gould's Art of Fugue recordings.

Gary, the owner of Overdrive: Guitar Specialists, almost exclusively played music from the discography of three bands: Megadeth, Kreator, and AC/DC. he only played AC/DC during holiday seasons because most of his clients were adults who grew up listening to it hoping to buy starter guitars for their sons so that they could grow up to live the exact same lives as dear old mommy and daddy.

Mutual human discord was the other reason Kurtis worked for Gary. They both showed a glowing disdain for human patterns and casually discussed their revulsion toward most of their clientèle. Gary was such a venomous bastard that most people grew up calling him Scary Gary—I know, neat coincidence, right? When he was eighteen he was in a death metal band called Carotid Eruption and after one puzzling show featuring animal gore (and possibly feces, though this was never confirmed) he was seen pissing from the roof of the venue, Mag's. The owner of the venue had ripped off the band for at least 200 dollars by lying about an equipment malfunction which was presumably the band's fault. While Gary was on the rooftop, he also entertained observers and passersby with a fire-breathing performance.

Since the fire-breathing was spectacular the urination had been washed over in a tidal wave of excitement. He was booked for drunken disorderliness, but that was all.

The rest of his bandmates torched the building while he was in the drunk tank with singed eyebrows and a pounding headache.

That misadventure with arson ended Carotid Eruption. Gary didn't start Overdrive because he grew up but because he couldn't find people as misanthropic as he was. Starting a guitar business seemed like the only suitable course of action. He himself owned a 2000 dollar Jackson KE-1 with an intricate leopard print which he managed to get signed by none other than Marty Friedman. That badboy was sealed in an acrylic case and mounted on one of the high walls of Overdrive for all to see.

Their specialty was high end equipment, but that didn't really pay the bills in a smaller city. Regardless, Gary Bank and his top flight crew were legendary among Ontario guitarists. His friend Wilson Perry was a master artisan who started handcrafting acoustic guitars at the age of sixteen.

As a prodigy, Kurtis fit in perfectly at Overdrive. He started working there as a mere clerk at sixteen—Jackson and Gary were old friends of sorts. Soon, Kurtis was apprenticing under Yvon Paquet, their certified guitar and amp mechanic. A few months prior, Yvon died in a fatal DUI which also claimed the life of a small local boy, and Kurtis was left on his own. He had no certification but he was too damn good for anyone to contest his taking the helm. His intuitive relationship with electronics was something he couldn't understand. At times he considered the possibility that it was a direct side effect of the same force that caused him to be intimately linked to Gretchen. He noticed that she possessed an unnatural talent with language and arts—symbols and communication. How terrible that they should be so alien to their race!

Or perhaps not. Perhaps they were their own race, their accelerated understanding of certain mechanics in the universe one of the hallmarks of their new species. A race beyond genes, whose makeup was in realms paranormal, incomprehensible by science and all of man, a race outside! Onlookers wondering whether or not they should want to seek acceptance or divorce themselves further from the tumour around them: the quick incision! Let the wound heal, let the placental tube rot. Let there be no connection between that old, dead mother and this new man! They would need no Prometheus to remind them of the arts: they could feel those arts like gods!

Such exuberance does not last long. How could it? Kurtis and Gretchen's talents are useless unless they could act on them. And how to use such talents to alter a world populated with billions of the same parasite? Why weren't there more of these new, powerful, merciless gods? Were they simply difficult to spot?

And why the hell was Kurtis agonizing over a fucking cigarette? All his thoughts stop like bullets in pavement when that desire unnaturally emerges. He didn't smoke but Gretchen did. The stress of nicotine addiction in her would often permeate the psychic shell, leaving him dwelling on only one thing. But he hated cigarettes and their taste and the way the smoke made his lungs feel.

He left work without the usual chatter—however brief it often was—and stormed home through slushy March streets making only a minor detour to pick up a pack of high-toxicity bitchsticks. The vague formations of light through weak cloud walls frowned at him brightly while occasional snowflakes nested on his jacket collar like egg deposits. The sidewalks swallowed up those crystals and digested them with warmth and salt.

After he climbed the stairs to his apartment he struggled out of his boots and absentmindedly threw the pack to Gretchen, who caught it in two fumbling hands and an awkward, skewed lean.

Thick globs of paint ran from her hands like demon blood and her face was covered in war paint. She paced back and forth in front of a strange looking canvas. Kurtis stepped up to it and squinted at the violent globs of luminous, bold, expressive strokes. “It's beautiful,” he said.

“It's bullshit,” her hatred stank like that foul gray-blue smoke; they both covered her in a thick miasma like a swamp witch.

He knew she felt it. Normally when one was incredibly inspired, the other couldn't help but perfect their own art; if Kurtis was fixing a tube amp with the ease of making a peanut butter sandwich then he could expect to go home and see Gretchen with a new painting and assortments of technically proficient verse. Kurtis felt none of that inspiration or drive today, but he certainly felt agitation. Restlessness. A twitchy sort of feeling that may have had something to do with cigarettes. An output of energy that amounted to fruitless exhaustion. It crossed his mind that maybe his labourious day had impacted Gretchen's energy, which in turn caused the taut, inner frustration that lead to the strangely shared urge for smoking. There was a lightness in their stomaches. The dried smears of paint on Gretchen's body felt more tangible than her hands; everything glistened with an aura of anticipation. The bookshelf leered at her and the coffee table—pushed to the wall separating the kitchen from the living room—looked like it was crawling, walking. Shuffling, maybe. It felt like for a moment everything wanted to be part of their world, but everything was trapped in the tension of expectation, a threshold beyond which nothing could penetrate.

There was a cigarette in Kurtis's mouth before he'd even considered it. He was standing over the painted surface with Gretchen. Together, they stared intensely into the butchery of paint and medium below them. Although Gretchen still hadn't escaped her stylistic and compositional influences—Goya and Monet chief among them—her abilities were beginning to manifest themselves in curious ways. She felt like nothing she painted communicated anything human, and this was perhaps the most alien construction of all. It was nothing like those masters whose books she pored over on dull winter days. She habitually painted on any surface she could find, knowing little about the self-conscious way that art explorers of the 20th century sought to expand their media. As a girl she didn't stop drawing on her own walls until she was twelve. It should be no surprise that the bedroom she and Kurtis shared was covered in bizarre murals that were the inspiration for wild and often lucid dreams: mathematical configurations of arcs and polygons on one wall, a mystical nervous system on the ceiling inspired by Alex Gray, horses with rabbit ears chasing flags made of skin into glowing caves on the wall opposite the door.

They would dream together regularly, and if one slept while the other was conscious—a rarity—then the subconscious thoughts of the one would be projected onto the other's dreamscape and dreamfigures. After one of very few brief discussions, they both acknowledged the fact that in their dreams they were both sexless—a unified being that seemed like it should be capable of self-insemination, or of egg laying. Their genetic material would be repeated almost identically in the same method that some insects produce viable eggs without requiring fertilization. If self-inseminated, perhaps their dreamfigure would form a temporary womb or lay an egg through some analogously vaginal cavity that would of course contain a urethra.

They thought very hard about this problem, because if they were the way they were then who was to say that the dream world didn't also have some set of boundaries and laws? Even if it spoke in symbols and images that could resonate into the conscious mind, maybe its communication was bound by a parallel reality that they could tap into if they asked themselves questions and dared themselves further.

Unexpectedly, the painting below them seemed to ask this question in an uncompromising way. There was nothing real or solid about the strokes, no sense of construction, shape, or form. They were colours splattered onto the gray backside of a tattered quilt, and although nothing concrete came out of those enormous strokes and erratic, almost careless splashes, the intimations and messages conveyed were transpicuous.

Something else was emanating from Gretchen, something that seemed well matched to her disgust: the crawling of tiny insects all over her body and inside it via her nervous system. She felt like she was quickly becoming a host to thousands of worming larvae. The sensation that radiated from her was nothing short of overwhelming dread. It was as though, in that painting, she peered through their soul or saw through cosmic and Lovecraftian lenses into things unnameable and perhaps too horrific to even dare name. The painting screamed splashes of blood red and deep pine greens, black and gray and aquamarine and impossible, nonsensical contours. Grim colours emerged from abyss-like shadows in a very Goyan way but they expressed nothing of anything real and nothing like what they'd witnessed in their dreams.

What horrors beamed into Gretchen's eyes! Had she known that this would be the result, she would have stopped herself hours ago. If she'd only taken a look at the damned quilt she would have cut herself off instead of setting herself up for this paralyzing nightmare! Did she etch the forbidden name of their oversoul onto that dreaded canvas? Each smear of paint was a laconic hint at a mere fragment of explosive cosmic drama: the thing came together like a horrifying cypher fit for not even the most skilled adept of the most unworldly of secret societies. Even the mighty gods of civilizations past would tremble at such a monstrosity!

Oh, how Gretchen trembled! Her knees clicked and the cigarette burned to the filter—her eyes didn't even twitch under the pangs of smoke, though they watered and reddened and puffed. Kurtis tried to turn, to take her by the hand, but he too was transfixed by some intangible force of shared but inadequately experienced terror: he felt it but it didn't resonate with him although it still locked him and shut him down.

Finally, Gretchen screamed a long trumpet blast that was followed by shorter outbursts at the same pitch. The culminating scream was a cadence which brought her to her knees. Her elbows gripped her sides as though they wished to meet her kidneys but her palms were facing up with her fingers gnarled and wretched. Her mouth was a chasm of an oval and her eyes bulged as though symptomatic of Graves' disease. A goiter may as well have come next. Something, anything real! Anything that wasn't this inescapable madness with no more cause than a mere painting summoned from unfathomable and ungodly dimensions and channeled through her frail and soulless body!

Kurtis had regained his mobility by this time and he immediately dropped to his knees and huddled around her, trying to wrap her deathly frigid body into his being, trying to absorb her. They rocked like a metronome, but Gretchen's undulations became faster, and soon she had generated the momentum to jettison Kurtis from her body and throw him across the floor. He was too taken aback to resist. He slid, and after the violence of his impact was uncanny silence. Even the ceiling fan seemed incapable of cutting through the tautness of the air.

Propping himself on his knees, Kurtis prepared himself for another approach, hoping that he could calm Gretchen's frightening, demented theatrics. It was unnecessary: she was silent, rigid. Something was gone.

“You need to leave,” she said.

They both knew she didn't need to say it.

Whatever happened that day shouldn't have happened, but it did. Gretchen had broken into a castle forbidden to the lower souls of men, nevermind having eaten any paltry fruit offered by devils in snake suits. She was a goddamn devil in a snake suit and there was no way she was going to make sense of her presumably immediate surroundings any time soon. Material reality as a concept, or even as a reality, I suppose, was firmly eviscerated from her working mind; the presence of her soul-twin-partner, or whatever the hell Kurtis Rosae was supposed to be, had only catalyzed this insanity. She dreaded to think what he might create if all she had created was a mind bending painting.

“Get out,” she commanded, “I'm going to burn this. You need to go. I'm...I don't think I'm safe.” Her confusion was overwhelming; she didn't know whether or not there was any sense in speech or silence.

Kurtis stood up and rubbed his eyes with the force of a tired student trying to wake themselves into late study. He walked toward Gretchen and picked up the pack of cigarettes she dropped on the coffee table. It was strange to him that he was smoking, but it was no stranger than seeing ugly and inexplicable truths of the universe laid out for you on a quilt covered in acrylic paint. Without looking, he grabbed a corner of the quilt and lifted it, folding the painting onto itself.

With the abomination covered he approached Gretchen to embrace her before leaving. She felt his approach and scurried away, bumping into the couch and hiding from the trapezoidal configurations of sunlight. Kurtis shrugged and lit his cigarette, leaving another one in his ear for the rest of the walk home.

As he descended the stairs, hoping all the while that the smoke in his mouth wouldn't set off the fire alarm, an important thought struck him and left him puzzled and dumb all along the walk to his father's house.

Although she had created the piece with very little agitation outside of the usual artist's furor, Gretchen hadn't become hysterical until he arrived—until they looked at the painting together. The mere fact of it was no surprise to either of them, but its implications were imperceivable as microbes.

Oil paints had long ago dried to the palettes and everything was nicotine yellow. She'd forgotten about pissing and was wondering if maybe she was going to get jaundice. Oh well. Maybe if she kept up her drinking she could make it happen. That probably wasn't fair to him though; he'd probably feel it. What a shitty deal.

She lit up another slim and stared at the empty canvas. She hadn't painted the whole time she was gone. Occasionally she got strange sights in her sleeping mind of places she'd never seen even in books or television. Large, elegant squares, paintings in museums. Where was he today? she'd wonder going to sleep. The answer would come to her.

He should be here...

She took a swing at the canvas; her punch tore through it and her knuckles collected splinters from the mediocre easel. She swore and tossed it aside then stared down at it finishing her smoke. There was no way she'd be able to paint without him around anymore—not that she was sure it was such a good idea. What could she possibly hope to communicate to anyone but herself or Austin? And what the hell could they communicate to each other that they didn't already know anyway?

A violent cough escaped her swollen throat—she was at half-a-pack per day now. Probably her worst ever. She wondered how Kurtis was doing. His lungs were hopefully fine. If she got cancer, would he? Was it that powerful?

Maybe, she thought, she should quit. It was the one vice she had, the one thing physically self-destructive about her. She was a thorough germophobe and apart from the chaotic mess that was her painting career the apartment was usually spotless.

One canvas came through—one actual honest-to-god painting. A crimson maple whose roots, growing into the sky, are devoured by dragonflies with caricatured human heads and serpent tails and rained upon by large rocks of coal. The sky in that portrait wasn't any shade of blue or purple or even the dull, rusty orange of a distant fireplace. It was a thick, even blackness. She didn't like it but it was what it was, and it was a damn fine painting. She figured surrealists would love it but knew that what it expressed was entirely incompatible with surrealism: it was all too weird and she wasn't really looking at symbols to be processed by artists functioning as Jungian psychologists—it was an emblem of reality invisible to everyone. Both her and the painting knew each other like brothers and sisters. Her soul was in that painting and every other painting that she'd ever created; just like, she knew, Kurtis's soul went into every guitar he touched and repaired. Maybe they were being bled dry by the agonies of their efforts. Maybe the universe was siphoning them to use their energy for its own purposes.

Gretchen stopped believing in deistic things when she was a child—she hadn't realized it until her and Kurtis began exploring their plight through metaphysical literature.

The bulk of it was quackery, but something was really out there eating them alive—that much she knew.

Most of her work material had been left about and unmaintained. The idea was that if inspiration struck in some bizarre psychic emergency she would have everything at her disposal the way she left it. Of course, when that inspiration did decide to strike, she would still need to clean her palette and wash her undeniably ruined brushes and the whole thing would come out amateur and imprecise.

Fucking garbage. She kicked him out because of a painting and she never wanted to paint again and now she just wanted to paint more and more; it became desperately clear that all her despair and all her agony and all the baggage underneath that pretty little scalp—baggage packed away like prank snakes in a can of beer nuts—was all washed away under the volatility of the strokes and slices of her wanton exercises in art.

For a moment she felt a longing that wasn't hers and she knew that Kurtis was dreaming about loneliness and frescoes and installation pieces. Her heart tingled and she looked down at the canvas with a devilish thought: I wonder what it would be like to paint on a punctured canvas...

Let the big nothing enjoy the feast of her flesh and soul. It was time to get to work.

Kurtis would be home soon, after all.

A cold northern wind made sharp incisions into the humid and charged June air. Throughout the spring the heat had been consistently painstaking and most crops in the region suffered from a terrible drought. In the city it was, of course, more unbearable for even the hardiest of trees. Leaves seemed especially brittle and the grass was almost crunchy underfoot.

The wind promised a flash flood with a sharp whistling which came from the trees like chattering teeth in fragile, emaciated gums. The earth demanded water and the sky was prepared to deliver a concerto of pattering, abrasive hissing, a noise so pure as to be almost white, and possibly the timpanic accompaniment of thunder's always off-time percussion. That wild and frigid wind would sing old, inhuman legends from the forgotten and jagged tundras in a demonic tongue such as could never be understood by human ears, inundated as they are with symbols and familiar aural constructions of language. So infantile they were in these regards! They could not hear the language of ancient and wise nature who spoke so plain and earnestly, who remembered every legend and every story, the minutiae of every anecdote and the subtle tempos of every ballad.

Yet those feeble creatures of hairs, flesh, and blood pored over symbols and graphics! All the wrong structures, all terribly wrong and absurd! If they could only listen to the wisdom of the old father who sang songs north and south, east and west, from tundra to plain, from taiga to tropic, from core to crust. And if they could even hear, then they would still have to learn how to comprehend! And how would they comprehend but with further symbols and reductions and abstractions? Each interpretation would be laden with further interpretations and fed into the designs of the weavers, whose lattice would never let them free from their self-ensnarement.

Let them fail! It was of no importance. This storm was an echo of any other storm to them: referenced, filed, and compared. Deleted from conscious memory as soon as possible! Couldn't they see its suchness, its thereness, it's absolute and enduring qualities? Its being: infinitely snuffed out and gone but always present.

There were two who would not forget, two for whom reality always imposed itself with a sort of frightening honesty, as if it was not men who hid from the world, but the world who concealed itself and all its wonder and mystery! Is it not feasible? Think of all that man has done to himself, all that reminds him of just how little he is devoted to his own survival—a preposterous organism! What a horrible master man would be of as dainty a flower as reality! How quickly the petals would wither and blacken! How low they'd droop! One by one they'd drop as the stamen wept impotently.

Gretchen and Kurtis kept hard right in the hallway, taking up only enough space to walk abreast in their perpetual thundercloud—a magnetic sort of force made only more violent and repellent when they were in near physical proximity. Automaton teens adorned in styles aimed to best represent what they wished of their personality walked around them unfeelingly in sharp arcs that Kurtis swore he'd be able to plot graphically if only he'd had the time to study physics more intimately, in an environment less retarded—on all semantic levels—than the average high school classroom. There was still a year to go for that, anyway.

They grew giddy at the awareness of the almost elegantly curvilinear path that was formed around them and they thought of a machine, each in the individual shapes of their own minds' preferences.

The day was quitting and they stopped at their respective lockers, sorted their belongings, and met together at the front entrance, leaving together for Gretchen's house in their habitual silence. The wind mocked and scorned and pushed them inimically and became wilder and more volatile and erratic. Papers blew across the streets as freezing gusts lead the charge against humid blasts. Though they were now merely caught in the melee, Gretchen felt no less threatened and worries of the storm compounded: what if a wind sweeps me away—lightning—what if—tornado sweeping us, tearing us, throwing death—splattered against skewered—ohgod.

Kurtis gripped her hand, first as a reflex caused by feeling her panic and then, with less pressure, as an attempt at soothing her. She calmed down but became nervous upon realizing that in her panic they had stopped. They looked eye to eye and in a burst she kissed him. Again their eyes linked like electrons to a cation (and what a perfect molecule those children could be!) and they continued walking. They didn't need their eyes anymore—their other-sense was strong.

The current in the air raised something else in their other-sense, something which that kiss had only fed. They both felt the overwhelming need to take each other in a passion almost feral and savage. Consequently, their strides were long and rapid.

Gretchen tore open the door to her house, the wind deciding to one-up her by slamming it into the wall. It sounded almost like the door had been ripped from its hinges or that the knob had penetrated the gyprock and left a finely carved circular hole. Her parents were still working at that hour, so they hasted toward her room with their arms gliding over one another in graceful, sympathetic curves. They both knew exactly what they were doing to each other and it was positively delightful.

In Gretchen's room they undressed clumsily as they stole furtive glances at one another, as they became more and more excited by every shape, curve, and angle. More excited even by the explosive racing thoughts that seemed to connect only in fragments, that seemed to pierce each other's skulls like rifle rounds and leave the gore of conceptualization splattered against the wall as gaping holes swelled in their heads. Thoughts oozed out like water and they were forgetting everything that ever held meaning: the pure and animal accretion of senses was all that was significant for all its insignificances.

Entirely nude, they stood across from each other on opposite sides of Gretchen's favourite rug. Their eyes fixed not on any single spot but on the glory of their entire forms. They felt they could see the energy radiate from them, the magnetic field around them, the aura. It didn't break between them but it linked them like the silver cord links the astral traveler to his body. Kurtis had just started reading about that concept. Gretchen sat down on her bed slowly and called to Kurtis with her eyes. He scanned her quickly and felt emaciated. Why? It was a strange feeling at this time, but it was more than just the lust that gripped them in that charged and stormy weather with their aura thick around them like a shield.

Hunger. We're so hungry for each other we can feel it in our stomachs—like our bodies know in parts that we don't treat as knowing parts.

It didn't matter who said it. Kurtis pounced on her like some ravenous desert carnivore. They rolled around and feasted on each other. Their hands became taste buds while the tenuous, ethereal wires which linked their minds became throats to feed each other and eat each other. Within eternal moments they were writhing on the bed like deranged animals moving in ways which lacked sense or volition, even coherent motivation. And as their bodies worked in sinuous animal rhythm it was hard to tell who was fucking who—their genitals may just as well have been interchangeable. Their bladders may well have been exchangeable. Sure, their intestines too. Oh, gall bladder, stomach, kidneys. The major arteries tore from their skins and they began spewing blood and thrashing around as the two of them disappeared into the violence of their coitus. Soon one another's arteries had linked up. Their veins followed suit. Their pelvises became a fleshy womb of their duality. And still they were fucking and grinding, their bones clattering like a rusted old machine centuries neglected. Soon they crashed to the floor and the sudden shock to—whose spine was it?

That's what set them aright. With what remained of Kurtis's own arms he propped himself up and stared into Gretchen's—what...what the hell colour were they by god's great fuck?—eyes. The two of them were crystallizing in some horrible reaction as their nipples began connecting at the areolae.

They had to stop but they couldn't control themselves at all—as though even together with the strength of most if their minds they couldn't muster any amount of will—they could only watch as their selves were undone, were becoming fleshy lifeless paste like some wretched stillborn siamese twin.

Peeling, melting skin poured like limestone columns in caves; it seeped onto the floor and congealed into patterns of cooling wax all over Gretchen's rug. Each moment they came closer to climaxing. As their thoughts seemed to rampage through past, present, future—through selfhood and otherness—through a stream of inconsistent and schizophrenic images—they noticed that even there, even in that panoply of flashes of fragments of mind...they noticed gaps.

Spaces.

Little areas of nothing. Like the space between cells. The space between molecules. The space where even the fields of electromagnetism don't touch to define the uncertain and most certainly fictitious space of the electron.

Gaps.

Kurtis saw them all the time in designs and schemes. In patterns, charts, grids. Tables, schematics. Blueprints. All the gaps. All the nothing.

This was art, Gretchen knew. Negative space. But not just negative space—even used space was occupied by gaps.

Specks.

Seized by this image, they slowed down the jet engines of their collective, hostile mind. They neutralized its pH, they walled themselves from the wind, sheltered themselves from the storm in a hut that could fit the two of them.

The energy of their transformation diminished. Their sexual energy diminished.

With that, their bodies seemed to retract into individual selves that was nothing short of agonizing. Where sex had brought the feeling of transformation in an ecstatic way, this reversion was grueling. They screamed, and certainly not as lovers. They screamed with their own lungs as those lungs become uniquely theirs again. They screamed as their ureters diffused and then fused into their own, as their colons poured out waste and microorganisms and became their own colons.

Again they were distant—blissfully separate. Kurtis was on top of Gretchen flaccid and exhausted. They panted and looked at the mess around them. They had done...something. But now, they couldn't even sense each other. Their heads were silenced and they were both dazed and nauseous. Between the nightmare reality that they'd just been exposed to and the throbbing silence of their own fractured souls, Kurtis panicked. He gathered his clothes into a ball, dressed, and bolted out the door.

Great piazzas of Florence stretched out before him gilded in the wisdom of civilization: incomparable art, sculpture, and architecture enveloped him at every corner. He walked down bustling and lonely arcades as flowing Italian tongue soaked his ears like honey. The sky was a canvas upon which all his dreams were painted.

He sampled fine cheeses and drank expensive vintage wines scarcely anything but exceptional, worked in vineyards in the countryside, and found cheap lodging among hospitable families. Slept in hostels and read volumes on lute music, opera, and guitar manufacturing. He would spend hot spring days doing nothing but cultivating and doing what little he could to abstain from weeping.

Everywhere he went his silence was treated as strength and not reservation; none could read or dissect him. He was impenetrable and incalculable but always reliable and industrious. He developed a keen sense of that thirsty earth as he cultivated, pruned, and dug in the fields of the torrid Mediterranean. He made similar use of his time in Greece and France, wondering if he'd ever get the chance to work again with the beautiful electromechanical intricacies of pickups, humbuckers and amplifiers.

The soil, you see, terrified him. He saw all the wild organisms competing in an endless battle for space and success, saw his work as a paltry thing when he compared it to the endless upward and outward growth of vines who seemed without end, or to the struggle of those glorious grape vines and olive trees. We don't need you, they said. We're fine on our own. Just wait till you're gone. Our fruit will be ours again and we will function fine without you. You change us for our own appetites and while it may seem against our will, ours is the noblest of positions among the creations of Terra. Our fruit will be less enormous and less bountiful but that will not concern us. We'll do just fine without you.

He bounced around Germany: Leipzig, Mannheim. He visited Bayreuth shortly before the beginning of that year's festival but he did tour the Wahnfried, admiring most the busts of the principal characters of Wagner's operas. Staring at the grand piano on which Wagner composed, he wondered if he would appreciate the mechanics of the orchestra the way he appreciated the mechanics of the tube amp. When he thought about Bach's mechanics as he visited old chapels he saw strange interrelations between his sonic art and the brilliant architecture that captivated him. Gretchen, of course, would visualize immense interlocking patterns and create bizarre modern constructions that, while not the paintings that so stimulated her, provided some outlet for her agony. As his thoughts turned to those mighty gods of The Ring, Gretchen would sit on a battered sofa devouring cigarettes when suddenly images of classical grandeur filled her head and she painted bizarre and vivid scenes of mighty Norse gods vying for the eternal despite the knowledge of their impending doom—struggling despite the nature of the unrelenting cosmos and the prophecy of a violent apocalypse that may very well have been of their own making.

Struggling as crops do against the bloating, fattening influence of humans, treated like stupid cattle instead of the mighty pillars of the Earth. Imagine your sex organs were harvested for meals on an annual basis. Plucked from you, twisted off like berries. Of course, I suppose it's a little different. Human gonads don't grow back every year. Besides, we artificially reproduce anyway. In Galapagos, Kurt Vonnegut invented a scenario where a disease slowly made its way around the world and rendered humans infertile, effectively wiping out the human race within generations. No need for such invention—sperm counts worldwide are already diminishing significantly.

Oh, by the way, when women devour birth control pills they wind up pumping estrogen into our waters when they urinate. What a strange mark our species carries in this era! Our desire to fuck vastly overwhelms our desire to fulfill the biological consequence that should be the result of a good hard orgasm. The side effect of almost destroying species of fish by rendering the majority of offspring female as well as being among a list of factors making modern males effeminate. It says a lot about our limited understanding of causal relationships in general. It says even more about our sense of responsibility when we learn about these things, shrug collectively, and keep on fucking with a surprising lack of discrimination or discretion.

If the great among us persevere, I really hope this century is forgotten and stricken from the records. Deleted and smashed like the obsolete magnetic hard drives of a law firm. Let those future archivists keep Beethoven and Wagner; they can have all of the learnings of physics and mathematics we've developed—though their obsolescence may be proven over time (as most scientific thought typically is).

But what a shame it would be if they kept records of our culture and our disregard for our own biology?

Kurtis stared at a marble statue and wished he was washed away in the torrents of prehistoric rivers and embedded into bars of ocean sandstone, preserved like the rest of this perverse mystery of four-and-a-half billion year old rock.

It was Italy that did the most damage to him.

No, that's not it. It was Italy that gave him the closest connection to distant and dear Gretchen, so far, far away.

She felt it in her mind—unspeakable cold. Glacially cold. Cold like comets circling in the lonely void of space. It washed her into James Bay, it brought her out into the arctic, still covered in glaciers that had been retreating ever so slowly for thousands of years. The sparsest of aquatic life would greet her until she found herself encased in lonely glacial ice, stolid as rock.

It seemed a strange thing to imagine when they sat there on the train tracks, whose jagged black ballast had been formed ages ago from the unyielding fires of the earth. The thought of that molten ocean of iron somehow comforted her, warmed her. She felt that fiery ocean inside her, felt her body heat up despite the bitter wind which chastised them and threatened to plummet them into the unceasing river on its slightest whim—to send them into that deep and swirling esophagus like a hand shoveling the tiniest scraps of victuals into a starving mouth.

I, Boreas, care not for your kind.

That turbulence ripped through both of their bodies and pushed them closer to each other. They fondled and caressed each other, unconscious of their actions while strange configurations of fire and water projected themselves into their minds. Contorted sigils and graphics and hieroglyphs—ancient symbols with alchemical rings and illogical constructions of archetypes almost Jungian.

It was decided. There was no escaping it this time. No matter how much they had want to flee from each other—however undecided their magnetism (for indeed, who was north and who south here?) they would blaze through one another and carve the world anew.

Their bodies would spill blood and pool into oceans. Their flesh would peel off and sink into those oceans in blobs and piles which would scrape and slide into each other like the turbulent mountains of young volcanic earth bereft of life. Their oversoul would heat that exquisite world until it could do so no more and would collapse under pressure in an uncataclysmic and droning apocalypse, a drone that not even a guitar of infinite sustain could perpetuate with the overdrive of even the world's most substantial amplifiers.

Their veins and their sex would become the nourishing force of life and creatures of all orders would find their place in that world of orgiastic collision.

They would become unto themselves a new mythology.

It was only with significant conscious effort that they could pry themselves from one another for even a moment. A year—perhaps more. Why had they waited? Were they really so unprepared for their own destinies? Or was this all part of it? There was no controlling the underlying necessity of their duties to one another. For a moment, the silly thought of discretion crossed Kurtis's mind. There was no need for that, now. Floating above that river on a bizarre and abandoned construction of steel, wood, and rock, they tore off their clothes and invited themselves into one another—entrusted themselves to the powers whose secret names they oped to soon learn. As their bodies entwined they wondered about the deathly frigid womb of James Bay with the grim readiness to face their strange destiny in spite of the inauspicious portents that revealed themselves at every corner.

Perhaps it was only their fractured minds deceiving themselves. It wouldn't be long before they could stop worrying about that petty matter.

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