Like Knives, the Jewels of Her Skin
by Joseph Armstead
How did he come to be here, in this place, his face covered in mud, stained with red warpaint, and with seagull feathers woven into his tangled and matted hair as he roared his wordless protest along with the crowd... how did this happen?
How did he wind up with blood on his hands?
They danced laughing, like a motley group of mischievous children at celebration, their bare feet slapping arrhythmically on the cooling blood spilled upon the vast expanse of the sandy beach. The wet sands looked black, far darker than the sand at the water's front as waves washed in from the sea. Men and women crowded around the crackling flames of a tall pyre in loose-fitting clothing, others of them wearing nothing but sweat-smeared body paint, some of them masked and yet others in full Halloween-style costumes, hooted and shouted and laughed as they cavorted around the misshapen forms wrapped in coarse burlap that hung from metal hooks above a makeshift stage. Insanity. Boogie down at the slaughterhouse.
Frederick Downs watched them, his vision slightly blurred as he stared past the fifteen foot high bonfire and watched their silhouettes caper and twirl on the horizon. His head was aching and he was feeling slightly disoriented, no doubt due to lack of sleep and over-imbibing the sweet wine from the bota bag wine skin someone had handed him when the dancing began.
He felt sick. He felt scared. He felt like he had been stroked by an electrical livewire.
*** His friend Jack Coster had got in his face one night three months ago, over beers and pizza at their regular table at a local pub-bar downtown and he had been possessed of a driving need to try and save Fred from himself. Jack's eyes had shone with a strange inner light as he'd harangued him: "I'm tellin' ya, dawg, this is something you HAVE to do at least once in your life! You have to! I mean, it's like nothing else on earth and its only for those of us with balls enough and crazy enough enough to want to create a memory like nothing anyone could imagine! It's an ADVENTURE, dawg! Don't gimme that look, you know what I mean!
C'mon, Freddy, look at yourself, man -- you're thirty-three years old and working damn near sixty hours a week at a soul-numbing corporate job pushing papers for bland, suburbanite soccer dads and good old boys and for what? For what, goddamnit? For the same lousy $38,000 a year you started at five years ago with no perks and no profit-sharing and no room for advancement. The same. Everything stays the same at that place. You're just a grunt, no matter how well educated you are. Naw, man, don't blow me off and start talking about security in the job market and surviving organizational re-orgs and mergers...! You're dying there, in that place, slowly but surely dying! So what happens at home, I'll TELL ya what happens: GEORGIA, your girlfriend of six years LEAVES your boring ass because it's better for her to live alone than to live with a zombie burn-out like you! She had nothing to look forward to! You gave her bupkiss, bro'! All you ever did was work, watch TV, play videogames, sleep, and then work some more -- that's ALL! You didn't USED to be like that, remember? You used to LIVE! But look at you now...! C'mon, man, you're due the time off and you got nothing to lose!" ***
The music was still as frenzied now as it had been an hour ago, when the first blood had been spilled. The beat of the drums and the pounding of the electronic bassline had usurped the rhythm of his own heart's beat. When he dared to look at her, he could still see the woman, her tall regal form spinning gracefully as she twirled a set of neon bolos in intricate patterns in the air, restrained acrobatics and juggling set to modern dance, as her lithe-muscled, naked body flexed and undulated to the powerful music pumping over the sound of the crashing surf. She was otherworldly, primal, reptilian and beautiful. She was a goddess of many names: Wadjet, Edjo, Udjo, and Buto. Here, in this place, she was called "Erlanja". She was the unreality of a legendary Egyptian deity come to life in the mundanity of the logical modern world.
She was a bad thing that he wanted to touch.
She was the center of the storm. She was the power that drove the pulse of the many-headed beast into which the festive throng had morphed.
Half an hour until sunrise and the first bright fingers of dawn stretched across the lavender-gray sky like a specter reaching from beyond the grave, seeking a victim. Victims enought there already were, three men and two women, strangers to one another, faces in the crowd, lookie-lous, tourists trying too hard to blend in as locals. Now, wrapped in stained dirty burlap, they hanged suspended from twisted metal cable and hooks. They'd died as they'd surrendered to their bliss.
And the Serpent Queen had ushered them across the dark divide.
Fred Downs was at his first Chromium Sea.
*** Jack was holding court for Fred and Fred alone, forcing him to listen, pizza sauce and pie crust crumbs tumbling down the front of his shirt and his eyes were still shining with an unhealthy fever. It was a look Fred had never before seen on his friend's face. It was unsettling. Jack kept at him, kept driving his point home. "Listen to me, bro'! It's like Mardis Gras and Survivor and Burning Man all rolled into one! They've been having it out on an island in the Gulf of California, off Guaymas in north-coastal Mexico, for about six years now. 'Chromium Sea' is what they call it. Chromium Sea. It's where all these computer hackers, punk rockers, tattoo-afficianados, body-modification primitivists, bikers and skaters and intellectual bookworm renegades go after the Burning Man season ends. Total freedom, dawg, complete and total release from role-playing and from responsibility and from other peoples' judgment. Local rock bands play there by invitation only. There are New Society/X-Game-style sporting events, and there are artists from all over the world. They all come to Chromium Sea out on that island off the Mexican peninsula because it's beyond the boundaries of U.S. government restrictions and free of corporate commercial influences. No group of Madison Avenue commercial interests control it. There are huts and lodges and there's plumbing and water. The place used to be the playground for a bunch of rich Mexican criminals, you know, gunrunners and Mafiosi-types, but the Mexican Military cleaned them out, arrested them, about ten years ago and the place wasn't under anyone's jurisdiction until it was bought by this uber-rich Silicon Valley dropout named 'Briganti". It was his wife who started the festival way back. Since then, it's been a word-of-mouth thing, you know? Around each July, there's an internet web-site that pops up that leads you to a secret online portal where you can get ticket information. You can only get the web addy from certain online Bulletin Boards, ya know? They actively shy away from mainstream publicity. But it's the coolest, most radical event EVER! C'mon, Freddy, ya gotta give it a chance! Try it out. Spread your wings!" ***
Frederick Downs trembled as he watched Erlanja the Snake Goddess, felt himself go cold in the pre-dawn light as he breathed in the scents of ash, salt spray, incense and human musk, and he knew he was forever damned as the dead bodies in blood-spattered canvas swayed from the tall yardarm on the beach, nudged by a morning's wind off the sea.
So much had changed in so very little time.
The blood on his hands was quickly drying and he could feel it mix with the sandy grit of the beach as he clapped his hands in tune with the beat.
When he had met her two days ago, walking on the cliffside above the beach, her name was Miranda and she had come to Chromium Sea by way of Cincinnatti, Ohio, a failed marriage, an aborted motherhood and Cammerling MidState-North Insurance Underwriters, Inc.. She had been lean and pale, a fragile soul of a lost modern woman in a dancers body, and she was the guest of a coarse brute of a man named Bostwick, a night-shift corporate security guard, who had come to the celebration at Chromium Sea primarily looking for drunken college coed sex. She had seemed a lonely and sad woman, disappointed by the life she was living and perplexed about how to change things in her small world. He had related to that. Definitely. She had hooked up with Bostwick outside San Diego, at the airport, when he had offered her a ride down past the Mexican border to the tour boat and ferry that would take them to "Isla de la Serpiente que Llora", the Island of the Weeping Serpent in the Gulf of California. The name of the place was almost larger than the island itself. Amongst tourists and party-goers and gossips, the place was more popularly known by the wiseass appellation "Snakebone".
Sure. Why not? It made as much sense as anything else.
Miranda had long, thick, sable-colored hair and almond-shaped gray eyes that seemed to observe everything around her and she spoke in as slow and deliberate a manner as she walked, as if she were perpetually on-guard against making a misstep, as if making a mistake would cost her very existence. It was as if she couldn't get comfortable inside her own skin and yet there was something indefinable about the way she could, in a sudden flash of mercurial emotion, exude a rawness of sexual allure that almost took Fred's breath away. Her womanness challenged him and yet everything about her conscious manner seemed to apologize for that very same sexuality. She was definitely a bird with a broken wing, exactly the type of woman Fred didn't like, yet she exuded a quiet strength that defied her timid exterior and that powerfully attracted him.
"What brings you here?" she had asked him.
He had been at a complete loss for an answer.
"Me, too", she had said nakedly, nodding sagely as if Fred had just espoused a particularly divine bit of philosophy.
Downs had been lost almost immediately. He, Jack, Miranda and the nauseatingly egocentric Bostwick had thereafter traveled together through the unique, interactive circus-like festival.
Yeah, that was then, seemingly a lifetime back in time, far distant from this moment of pounding drums and screeching voices and looped electronic music and the eeriness of the aftermath of unleashed sudden violence.
The blood changed everything.
He recalled when he and Jack Coster had stopped at a bar in San Diego for a couple of quick ones, conversation over lukewarm beer and tequila chasers with old Rolling Stones tunes playing off a half-busted jukebox in a dim dark bar that stank of sweat and old desperation, before they began the Mexican leg of their journey...
*** "Hey, Fred, are you excited? I am, I think, but I'm kind of a little nervous, too, you know? You excited?"
"I am too burnt to be excited right now, dude. Maybe, though. A little. I'm not sure how I feel about it. Part of me wants to just turn around and walk away right now..."
Jack had looked at him through narrowed eyes, both a question and an accusation in his gaze. "Why?"
"I guess because I'm not sure what is going to happen or if anything should happen at all."
"Aren't you tired of always knowing what's going to happen, day after day, again and again? Isn't it time for something different?"
"Yeah, sure, I can get with that, Jack, but I don't have any illusions that going to hang out on an island with a bunch of potheads, hardcore partiers, wannabe artists, circus freaks and exhibitionists is going to change one damn thing in my world, you know?"
"Is that how you see this?" Jack had asked him softly.
"Well, mostly, yeah. How do YOU see it?
Jack had stared up into the darkened ceiling of the bar before answering. He seemed to be weighing his words carefully, as if reluctant to just blurt out a response as was his normal manner.
"Goddamn, Fred, but I'm tired. I only thirty and I feel as wrung out and tired as if I were fifty or even older. What happened to this world? Where did all the good times go? Where is the adventure our lives were supposed be? The damn drudgery of day to day living is strangling my soul, man, I kid you not. Bills and laundry and car payments and a job that is slowly eating my brain. And yet, compared to you, I look like some kind of a irresponsible party animal. What's up with that? When did we get lost, man? When did we turn into those guys we vowed we'd never be?"
Fred recalled feeling irritated with Jack, feeling judged and feeling put-upon and he had been uncomfortable with the weightiness of their conversation. He and Jack had been friends a long, long time, but neither of them had ever brought any degree of depth into their friendship. They discussed movies and sports, cars and women, and they had mostly stayed away from personal issues like love, sex, and dissatisfaction with the course of their lives. When they got together, which was admittedly less and less as the years passed, they concentrated on keeping it light and only occasionally grousing about work and life. It was like an unwritten agreement that they would each shield one another from the gray truths of their adult existences while in each other's company. But lately, especially now, on this trip together, on this mission to break out from the stifling, slowly-shrinking box that was closing in on their lives, Jack had taken to a lot of soul-baring and Fred hadn't known how to react to it.
"Christ, Jack, whaddaya want me to say, huh? Do you want me to sit here and just vomit out every lousy dissatisfied feeling or unrealized dream or undeserved injustice I've experienced these past six years? We doin' the Dr. Phil thing, are we? Is this the thirtysomething quest for life's meaning they write all those bad magazine articles about? Do you want me to tell you I've thought about dropping out and getting religion or joining a cult or tossing away all my earthly possessions so I can go live in Alaska or work in a New Mexico ashram as part of a humanistic collective living off the land? I mean, what the FUCK, man, this is the real world, this is what life's like, and I don't have any fucking answers 'cause I don't even have the right questions. Get OFF me, damnit!"
"Fred, Fred, naw, dawg, it ain't like that! That's not what I mean...!"
"Then what in Christ's name DO you mean, you manic-depressive jagoff? Look, goddamnit, my life is far from perfect, I admit, but it's the goddamn best I could do, okay? Shit!"
"Whoa, Fred, settle down, take it easy! I was just tryin' to say that Chromium Sea could maybe be a start to a new avenue for our lives, yeah, mine included, and I was only talking to you about what's driving me there, to this strange, funky-ass place for wierdos, because I'm a little nervous, that's all! Man, don't you ever lighten up? Don't you ever just TALK with anyone? This ain't a test. There's no right or wrong answers. I was just sitting here with a drink in my fist blowing off some steam and telling you what's in my head... Is this how you were with Georgia, too? 'Cause if it was, it's no wonder she left you."
"Yeah, well I guess you may be on to something there. Whatever. It's ancient history now. But,Jack, I've got to tell you: I really don't wonder much about anything anymore..." ***
The boat ride from the port three miles outside Guaymas city limits had been smooth and uneventful and it had felt good to be free of the confines of an airplane. There were seven other visitors on the craft with them as it cut the waters of the gulf, gliding past a bobbing collection of sinister cormorants, chattering seagulls and regally ugly pelicans. The afternoon sun was playing hide and seek with the bone-colored clouds and a steady breeze blew, fanning the few small waves that rolled under the boat and mixing an exotic scent of citrus and peppers into the predominant odor of the open sea.
They had approached the eastern beach of the tortoise-shaped island, white sands sliding under cobalt blue waters, the naked rock face of a towering cliff set into the lush denseness of foliage inland from the beach, and they saw that there was a beat-up length of wharf leading out from a graffitied concrete levee to which they would dock. There was a corrugated tin tool shack and a jarringly modern concrete igloo of a guard-station to one side of the wharf. It was festooned with varying technological antennae and it appeared to be frighteningly official. A trio of rough-looking men waited as the boat drew near and they appeared to be armed.
Before anyone could ask, the captain of the small forty foot craft turned to the group of visitors and said "In case of pirates and drug traffickers..." by way of an explanation. Apparently he was used to peoples' unsettled reaction to the sight of armed men on the island. It made sense of a sort.
Atop the rugged cliff, a lean, muscular man in a chain-metal loincloth played a haunting ululating melody on saxophone as a colorful flag on a tall, mirror-studded pole flapped in the wind. Reflected star-clusters from the afternoon's sunlight ran up and down the flagpole. In huge green spray paint letters, someone had painted the word "Snakebone" onto the cliffside, just under the ridge.
That had been Fred Downs' introduction to enigmatic recluse Jules Briganti's world of Chromium Sea. Isla de la Serpiente que Llora.
Neither he nor any of the celebrants roaming the ninety square acres of the Chromium Sea encampment ever saw Jules Briganti, but anecdotal smidgens of the man's personal philosophy were posted everywhere.
On the giant-sized, conical bird aviary where a tribe of people wearing only body paint and silver slippers were housed: "Wings are illusion, the power to soar resides in the shadows of the Self."
On the marquee over the neon-lit bar/boarding house for nomads who rode gas-engined skateboards with balloon tires: "Homogeniety is where the journey ends in its beginning. Be immortal: Seek only the road, not the destination."
On the stone-cobbled field leading to aquatic hot springs set into a natural volcanic crater, where aqua-people, faux-mermen and faux-mermaids, swam elegant and intricate water ballets: "Sleepless, I looked into a mirror that showed no light, and I saw the reality of dreaming."
Across the rectangular face of a straw longhouse set high atop iron wireframe legs, where fire-eaters and sword-swallowers and tattooed mystics played a game of living chess with human volunteers: "Radical thought births a new paradigm, each overlaid atop the one that came before. Build a stairway to Infinity."
And, of course, on a banner between the towers to the great nylon and plastic-umbrellaed stone ampitheater where the toga and the shroud-wearing Mysterians jacked into computer terminals hosting several non-stop, 3-D virtual world games: "Conformity of thought is tyranny. Revolution is already yours, if you but imagine it."
Fred practically gagged at the first reading of each airy bromide. The wealthy recluse was obviously delusional, an egocentric bore. But Miranda absorbed each New Age-fortune cookie quotation as if they were insights into the very nature of Creation itself. They walked from one side of the vast encampment to the other, taking in the strange sights, from the circus like unicycle riders to the tumblers and acrobats on flat-trailer beds to the ethereal, gauze-draped, gas mask-wearing modern dance troupe to the computerized samurai adorned in their cybernetic circuitry and armor inscribed with patterns from microprocessor boards. They were silent as they passed the mobile stages with their wailing rock bands and the motorized pipe organ-utility vehicle that drove by. They walked, satisfied with one anothers' company, occasionally sharing their thoughts aloud, other times at a loss for words. Fred's natural pessimism was slowly crumbling as he saw the strange festival through her eyes. He was astonished he could feel so deeply so quickly. Her naivete drove Fred to desire her all the more.
And when the silvery blue helicopter from Jules Briganti's private estate, on the other side of the tropical glen that divided Chromium Sea from the rest of the small island, landed in the clearing past the all-chrome NASA astronaut statue inside a giant glass bowl, Fred knew that it was all for naught -- the real world was poised to intrude, ready as ever to strangle the beauty from any idyllic interlude.
Briganti's men, dour and dead-eyed mercenary servants to the wealthy power-monger, had spirited Miranda away, the scarab-blue helicopter rising high into the glare from the setting late afternoon sun.
*** The rumors… It always came back to the rumors when it involved Briganti because no one who knew the truth, no single member of his inner circle, past or present, would ever challenge the cast-iron imagery created by the wealthy power-broker’s handlers. No one was ever allowed to see past the shadowy curtain of false anonymity Briganti tried to maintain.
It was rumored he was a hedonist and a sexual pervert, a collector of illegal snuff films.
It was rumored he surrounded himself with freakish circus sideshow performers whom he subjected to bondage fantasies.
It was rumored he was the son of an ex-Nazi and protected by the infamous ODESSA organization.
It was rumored he’d once been a doctor and promising bio-geneticist.
It was rumored he’d owned a small, impoverished town in Colombia and had conducted weird biochemical experiments on its inhabitants.
It was rumored he was a powerful congressional super-lobbyist for the pharmaceutical companies.
It was rumored he’d once killed a man for trying to tell his secrets to CNN…
Briganti wasn’t so much a man as he was a living warning of the corruptions of excessive wealth and low moral fiber. ***
Fred Down's quotation of philosophical insight: "The single-minded arrogance of material wealth is exceeded only by its rapacious hunger to despoil. Fuckage is inevitable."
Anxious, frustrated, he had waited for Miranda all night, there, in that clearing, impatient and filled with a growing dread. The passing night was cold and lonely, even though there were endless entertainments passing by as people traveled from one base in the encampment to another. Various torches and strings of electric lanterns adorning the sides of buildings and tall plants and trees prevented the deepening gloom of night from over-running the camp. At one point, Jack Coster had come by, a woman on each arm, his eyes had been lit by a mixture of lust, alcoholic excess and enthusiastic joyful expectation, and he'd taken a moment to come over to Fred and to check in with him.
"Dude, this, squatting alone in the dark among the weeds, is NOT how I imagined you'd be spending your first night here in the electric carnival. Wazzup with you? You alright?" The reek of marijuana, incense, and booze rolling off Jack had been as thick and as palpable as the coarse tunic he'd worn in place of his regular street clothing.
"I'm fine, just fine, Jack. Waiting for someone is all. Don't worry, they'll be back shortly", Fred had lied. "I'm okay, man."
"Waiting. Yeah, it's that new girl you met, huh? Miranda. You sure she hasn't stood you up? 'Cause I can share", Jack had offered with a crooked grin.
"Man, will you get OUT of here! Go!" Fred had ordered, smiling at his friend's antics in spite of himself.
Jack had left with a wink and a mocking salute and no less than an hour after that the pounding of the helicopter's rotor blades as it had cut across the night sky announced its return. It landed near the clearing's edge. The fuselage doors behind the flight-cabin had opened and the mercenaries then had carefully walked Miranda out from it into the night. Then, unceremoniously, the 'copter had risen skyward and flown away, rising into shadow. Miranda had wobbled unsteadily just on the edges of the rotorwash downdraft and she had seemed slightly disoriented. Fred recalled rising to meet her, his heart in his chest.
It was as he had drawn closer that he had seen the changes, the alien body modification engineered upon her delicate flesh.
Scales, as if on a dragon or a large serpent. Miranda's exposed flesh was festooned with overlapping scales of brass and gold with scattered thin stripes of emerald green and small metallic ruby diamonds. Scales. Teardrop-shaped and sharp edged. They rattled softly as she moved, as the edges passed over one another as her flesh flexed. Colors leapt off them in the waning moonlight like the refractions off the facets of a jewel. What little normal unaltered human flesh there was on her nearly nude body was flushed crimson and feverish looking. Onyx black talons had replaced the fingernails on her slender hands and a pair of metal balls at the end of a segmented leash hung from loop on the leather belt adorning her small waist. A bolo? Kendama clacker balls? He didn't know. But he did know that she was different. She was made anew. She was, in a frighteningly forbidden and unexpected way, even more beautiful to him than she had been before. His groin stirred and began to throb as he'd looked at her and she had gifted him with a wordless knowing smile, the look of a courtesan, the uninhibited challenge of a wanton. When he'd taken in the bizarre and slightly malevolent change enacted upon her, Fred had held his breath for a long tense moment before finally saying her name aloud:
"Miranda."
She had smiled at him and had said breathily: "Erlanja."
Fred Down's newest quotation of philosophical insight: "The fuckage is complete and everlasting and comes in ways you can never expect. Hope is madness."
Fourteen hours later they danced with wild and wicked abandon on blood-stained sands... and Frederick Downs marveled at the wetness of Death on his hands.
Chromium Sea, the Isla de la Serpiente que Llora.
From the sculpted metal yardarm sixteen feet above the sandy beach, five burlap-wrapped bodies spun, swinging in tiny arcs. His friend Jack Coster was in one of the bags. Miranda/Erlanja's travel companion Bostwick was inside another.
Tomorrow the Mexican police would come for them all and the international news media would experience a feeding frenzy as they related lurid tales of rampant drug use, illicit orgiastic sex and cruel death in a nomadic outlaw community called the Chromium Sea. Tomorrow they would search for the elusive Jules Briganti and find no one at the palatial estate on the far side of the island.
And they would never find any evidence of a strangely beautiful snake goddess, a reptile queen, named Erlanja.
But for tonight, a doomed, damned evening as long as an eternity of fury and primal excess, the dance was all.
THE END
You don't disappoint, do you? :)
Posted by: Aurora Antonovic | April 09, 2007 at 04:25 PM
Very cool.
Posted by: Matt | April 10, 2007 at 01:42 AM