I CITY

01_I CITY

It’s the cerebellum uprooting itself from the cortex.
The axis shifts, the poles are reversed.
And you see yourself from the outside.
In the Middle Ages, when besieging a city, they used to surround it
with a cordon of hanged men.
All the dead heads would launch into disquisitions on the weather, for 23 minutes.
Besides, it’s raining.
I watch myself vomit into Cicci’s bath.
Puking into it and cleaning it at the same time.
Puking and cleaning.
Mandrake plants grow beneath the feet of dead men with erections.
They talk about the weather.
Which name?
They talk about the weather and ejaculate.
Like dead sentries.
I don’t understand.
I don’t understand who I am.
I see myself from further and further away.
Getting smaller all the time.
I see underneath the roofs.
The lies inside shops.
The Nazi streets.
All glass.
All transparent.
Animals cut out of sheeting.
A song for summer.
Are you able to speak?
Can you speak?
Can you?
Now I can see the entire city: it’s not made of glass, it’s made of mud.
Mud that can be modelled like clay.
Mud like Adam was, before becoming a man.
I see the city for what it is.
Matter.
Matter in constant mutation.
Modelled by us.
Because it wants to be modelled.
The city needs us in order to grow.
In order to cover everything else.
Can you speak?
Inside, everything happens in the same instant.
A thousand bodies.
A single body.
All mud.
Mud made of water and earth.
I try to remember who I am.
Have I got parents?
Hundreds of them?
None?
Accompanied by their parents, children are throwing stones at the faces of the dead men hung on the gibbets.  
Are they my parents?
From where I am now, I can see hundreds of alien ships passing by.
They breathe with difficulty and believe in God.
They’ve come to exterminate us.
They’ve come to recreate us.
Now I know.
But it doesn’t make much difference.
In this instant, some people are remembering a happy moment.
Could it have been the ketamine?
Can you speak?
Who are you?
They city feeds on us. Uses us.
We’re a bit like those insects that live on the surface of eyes.
Like X-rays of caterpillars.
Scuttling about.
Each one different.
Parasites.
If you look towards the sun you can see them.
Grey.
Could it have been the drugs?
I move my hands in the air and feel matter.
I can feel my fingers titillating God’s clitoris.
Do you want to say something?
Once you’ve gone beyond God, all you can do is laugh.
But it’s a new laugh.
Never heard before.
Never felt before.
A laugh with no pain inside it.
No neurosis.
And above all, no meaning.
People who’ve been close to dying but turned back in time all speak about the same thing.
The tunnel.
The light.
The morphine.
The conscience.
The consciousness.
The science.
The drugs?
How old am I?
How long has it been?
From here I can see the roads with no turn-offs that someone has decided for us.
The city has constructed us and relishes every single second of every story.
Its puppet theatre.
I spread whiteness over the blackness, and hide it.
And get rid of it.
I am the city.
Each and every pavement.
Each and every window.
The water distributor.
The opening hours.
The sweat inside the bread.
The shame of being merely human.
Who are you?
What’s your name?
Have you got parents?
Was it the ketamine?
Are you able to speak?
Can you speak?
Can you?

Images with nervous strokes and grainy colours illustrate 23 streams
– or rather spurts – of consciousness, where various characters take off their decency masks
and reveal the most turbid, outrageous, violent but all in all human and sincere parts they hide deep inside.

Short story taken from:

LIKE A LITTLE HOLOCAUST
by AkaB
softcover with flaps, 160 pages, 165x230 mm
#logosedizioni
ISBN: 9788857604473