073-Porcelain Utopia: Inside [End of Series]

PORCELAIN UTOPIA:

Inside

Outside are the noises of twilight-crickets and coyotes, and dogs.

I sit before a long line of cameras, still set up to record, just like before, with Georgie. I speak.

“I'm still here in the psych ward. No, I mean, in my home with the cinderblocks and cement and stuff. With my electronic bracelets and monitors. I haven't been able to escape yet, but they give me day passes and things. But I'm home-I'm still at home, you see.

I stand, flinching, and cover the camera lenses, one at a time, until they see nothing but blackness. I sigh, and continue to speak.

“At least I'm not alone. After all, they still might need to establish the cause of death.” I point accusingly at the cameras. They don't see. “Its there-in these things, in the tapes. If they ever bother to look for it.”

I stand up and gather together my papers, my keys, and a notebook from the desk.

“I can feel it. I really can,” I say for the benefit of the cameras. “We're all getting older and wiser. And sometimes, you just have to listen to the sounds of your life-the profound silence that resides somewhere inside you-somewhere in the emptiness. The deep remarkable hollow-sounding thing.”

I light a cigarette and take a puff, then set it down on the ashtray leaving it to burn.

“But I can't see the sounds anymore, obviously. I can only feel the colors. And they're brilliant and alive. They're living beautiful colors.”

I turn to go. I speak to the doorway and my voice echoes through the empty house.

“As for tonight, I'm going to go get groceries and fertilizer for the lawn outside. And I can't forget the firewood, finally. We can build a beautiful fire tonight. Maybe we'll find the living, colorful beauty inside.”

The cigarette drops off of the ashtray and onto the desk. Then it rolls off onto the carpeted floor. (It must have.) I don't see.

“It's okay, now. All that is past me now, I hope. I just have to hold onto this-this present, this unbroken moment. And who or what I am now-I just might have found my self, at last.

“We'll just have to see about that, Kelly and me. We'll just have to see.”

I leave.

Always with Love and Gratitude,

Your Ben, Forever

Transgressive Fiction by J. Harnisch

END OF THIS SERIES

-Jonathan Harnisch

072-Porcelain Utopia: Fortune

Transgressive Fiction by J. Harnisch

PORCELAIN UTOPIA:

Fortune

I step inside the small booth finding psychic, Sister Clara, waiting for me already. I sit across from her, like I'm a client or something.

“Hey, Clara. What is happening?” I say.

Sister Clara removes a tiny, Mead, spiral binder from a small paper bag at her side. She lays it on the flimsy, cloth-covered reading table between her and I.

“Ben, I am aware that we've never really been properly introduced,” she begins, her voice quiet and soothing. “And what I have to say to you is rather private and personal. In fact, it's very private and personal. It's about you, Ben. And it touches the most intimate, secret, and most painful parts of your life. But to put it simply,” she coughs, “I was in the middle of a meditation and I started writing down, drawing what I saw. And what I saw were things about you, Ben-things from your subconscious mind, or maybe from your present and past lives; your previous reincarnations and your karmic chains-and I couldn't bear to let this go by without witness.”

I blink. “Really?”

Ben's still not impressed, fairly certain that Sister Clara is just trying to hype him up for paid readings. Until she opens the first page of her little red notebook; Clara flips the pages of the notebook to a leaf covered in some sketches of various feminine figures interacting with a small male baby.

“This is you, Ben. Not Georgie, not Benjy. This is you and your grandmother, Ben-your real grandmother. Not your mother, not your aunt. This is your real, biological grandmother.”

I could see what Clara had drawn: a precious little boy, an infant boy with a little penis, too! And the grandmother was holding the little boy, me the baby, by the dick-and only by the fucking dick. This woman, my own grandmother, was torturing me! But how could Sister Clara get this from my subconscious mind, or whatever-how could I have remembered it?

What the fuck? I thought. And then Clara started flipping through the filled-in pages-a whole notebook of sick and demented art, of me and my grandmother, and then me together with my aunt and then my teachers from nursery school. Even the nanny from Trinidad, who was supposed to be taking care of me when I was at home-separately, they're all performing very disturbing acts of violence and aggression on my innocent infantile genitals.

In one of them, a nurse of some kind (dark-complexioned), performs medical procedures on my skin, in the private areas-medicating, stitching, and bandaging my bottom and my little baby cock.

I'm in shock. I can't think. I just keep staring at that notebook and its sick and demented pictures. And I wonder what the fuck has been happening in my subconscious mind, since those earliest of years, since my sex-life began (rape!), and what that has to do with who (or what?) I am now.

“To put it crudely, Ben, this one is cosmetic surgery,” she explains. “Just a cover up job, so that you wouldn't know later on what they did to you in your earliest childhood. You might have a subconscious memory now and then, but you wouldn't know what to do with it. Until finally, I picked up the impressions and pictures in your subconscious mind.”

Sister Clara hands the small, Mead, spiral notebook to me. I leave the New Age Shoppe without another word, choking up and sobbing, as if staggering from a heavy blow.

Large metal keys and bells that hang from the swinging door jingle as the door closes behind me.

I walk slowly home, clutching the notebook to my chest. When my lungs threaten to end me, I stop for a broken moment. I can strangely, somehow, still manage to breathe in and out. Finally, somehow, still manage to really breathe.

“Ah, God. Just let me catch my breath.”

My head clears as I keep on walking.

“You should see this thing, Kelly,” I say to myself. “This fucking notebook, this fucking picture book that Sister Clara showed me, and the fucking pictures she drew of my grandmother and my nanny and all those crazy women, doing those sick and demented things to me when I was just a helpless little baby. It tells me things I never would've known about myself, things I never would've wanted to know. It tells me why I'm such a fucked up human being, why I am what I am.

Why I can't function like a normal human being. Why I cant love myself, or anybody else. That's what they meant, all those psychos and doctors and cops, when they said I needed help and told me I better take it-and I didn't want help. I really didn't want to know.

But now I know what I am and why I needed the help. Now I know what happened to me back then, when I was just a baby in my grandmother's house-but I still don't even know.

What do I have there, down below? Is it even a natural cock? I mean, a natural penis? What is it-is it me? I still don't get it now, do I? Do I?

And I dissolve into tears so hard that I can't think anymore. Choked up and sobbing. Crying like a baby. I kick away the dirt at my feet, but I can't kick it well enough, or hard enough, to make it better.

I'm almost home, now. I only have whatever dignity is left in me. I only have the dignity of who or what I am, and whatever I might be, left there inside me. That my poor, pathetic, hopeless self, that pitiful, abused past-I am only and just that. I'm just me.

And even that's nothing but a fiction, nothing but a lie I invent to disguise my past and hide.

Oh, God (or someone, something.) Please.

Give me the courage just to be me.

When I finally stumble back to the house, there's no car in the driveway.

“Your car? No car. I thought you were already home by now, baby,” I mutter.

I check my pockets and groaningly kneel and peer beneath the doormat. No keys. The sun is hot now, I can scarcely breathe. I pound with both fists on the door.

“Kelly! Let me in!” I cry, as though she's really there. All I hear is the dogs whining and barking at my strangely familiar voice.

“I know we started out pretty rough here, Kelly,” I plead. “I knew my family would never approve of us, not even if we got married. But I'm waiting for you, baby. It's just like you said: The stuff we write, the shit we say, we make it real-we manifest ourselves in the world.”

I hear what I've said-I cease banging. The dogs are quiet now.

“I can hear the dogs still barking. Kelly. Kelly!”

There's no answer. Everything's completely silent and empty-a pin could drop. I scuff my shoes on the dirt and gravel of the driveway.

“Sit, Ben, sit. So you can digest everything,” I command.

I sit on the hard rocky driveway.

“I just want to live. And if that means carrying on these stupid, superficial relationships with family and friends, then so be it.

“Please, God, just let me live.”

-J. Harnisch