Loneliness!

There is just too much loneliness in the Extensive Directory. Daily, it is shed from the scalp of the world like so much dandruff.

In the streets of each city-state, there are heaps of it, piles of it, hills of it, and cloud rolls of it the size of tiny suns. It hides in the thin shadows of streetlamps, within barrels of fresh flowers and pickled philosophers. It sits on the shoulders of penitents with pus-encrusted eyes and judges with pus-encrusted hearts. It grins from the mouths of Banners taking the daily sample of the population, passing out flyers and urbanely asking passersby, “Have you killed your God and/or your reason for living today?” In each wizard-warded doorstep, there are mountains of it and fog-scoured black abysses, all just wailing out the unimaginable, unbelievable, unendurable questions: “Where am I? Where are you? Who am I? Who are you? And why the fuck do I care?!”

The ghostman in his ice-chippy underground refrigerator of a lair is lonely. He has given loneliness his name: he is the wizard-wept, the corpse-sucker. Underneath his furry coat of black, layered robes of black, socks of black, and perhaps underwear of black, he fulminates like a volcano of melancholy. On his cuffs, he wears lace apologetically snipped from his dear, departed granny’s wedding dress and dyed black with the boiled blood of innocents (or rather, that’s what the bottle says it is). On his pate, he wears a white wig, which he periodically loses in the pile of paperwork that constitutes his day job as a clerk. And upon his lap is the cold, stiff, blue body of the one woman he will forever love.

Her name is Weeping (her name is always Weeping, never mind what it had been in life) and her eyes, when she’d been alive two years ago, had shone like topazes. Her entire eyeballs are white now, the yellow-brown of their irises having evolved into complete paleness. Whenever he takes a fancy to prying her stiff eyelids open so he could look at them, he sees that they shine like pearls. The sight never fails to uplift him—it is a comforting piece of symbolism. Yet the elevation of spirit does not alleviate his loneliness; if anything, it adds to it.

But! He does not understand that he is, in fact, lonely. For him, all emotion is neatly filed under the most rarefied kind of love; that is, an infatuation for the symmetry of the grave. He dismisses the loneliness as but a small symptom of longing for his cold, colorless muse: a kind of frightened, conflicted desire to be in the same state as his perfect Weeping-girl. And so he sits quietly in his refrigerator and hums to his lady, perfectly content in his frostbitten, useless love.

The wizard-king is lonely. He is fully cognizant of this, and he couldn’t care any less even if he tried. For he fancies himself above emotion, above petty human need. In fact, he is above everything. Even himself.

Loneliness has tried to take his name, and he has shoved his name into loneliness’ face upon learning he couldn’t keep it. He declares himself wizard-king and accepts no other term, because this, his dignity, is another form of power. That self-same power which has wrung him out and bleached him white, made his knees knock together and his flesh liver-spotted and sag-soft even in his youth, made his wife despair of him and his children live in terror of him.

But these are of no consequence! With flashing eyes and swirling cassock—with a mere twist of the will and want—he waves his finger and (there comes an average of a one percent chance that) emperors immediately crumble into dust. Who wouldn’t trade an eternity of health, happiness, and love for that?

In his gray tower or his cold mansion or his dungeon of traps and beasties, he spends all his nights awake and plotting, nodding off among his books, charts, and notes only when sleep sneaks up to him and stabs him in the back. How he hates that cunning sleep! He begrudges every hour: all those many minutes misspent when he could have been studying, experimenting, politicking. He takes it all with ill grace. His temper is bad; it’s always bad. He is always in a hurry. He speaks so fast, lives so angrily, moves with such harsh efficiency, that even death will be no respite for him.

Forever evenafter, perhaps, he will continue puttering about in the atmosphere, whipping his tattered soul into motion, muttering wildly that the next big breakthrough in the history of the human race is about to come, and if he isn’t a part of it, then by all the dead and dying gods, he will kill his own undeadself and everyone within a ten kilometer radius.

Or it may be that his heavy little heart will keep him in a hollow in the ground. Perhaps it will hide him away beneath an old, unloved gravestone which no one shall remember to tend. And he will cry. Perhaps he will cry.

The demon-tamer too is lonely. He has given loneliness his name: he is the wizard-lorn. Alone, he ranges through the last bastions of the wild, wise as the noble wolf, strong as the matted lion. He is as ruggedly individual, and often as nattily clothed, as they.

There he wanders, in the cloud-and-rock rainforests far above the world, leaping from rock to rock past depthless chasms, suspending motion with infinite grace when forced to wait and stalk his prey. On his belt dangle skulls and knives and a whetstone or two. Around his neck winds a chain of bright keys to the cages of his demons. And his carved spear (a wizard’s staff evolved into savagery) he holds in his right hand and never lets out of his sight.

If one looks out toward the mountains, in just the right kind of light (either the soft red of outlining sunset or the harsh brightness of an extremely large spotlight being shone from behind), one might be able to see the demon-tamer, limned and lonely. But only for the smallest while. Ever the wary hunter, when observed he would turn to look at the would-be naturalist, challenging that one’s gaze for an eternity of a heartbeat. And then he would spring away, vanished and ghostly again among the cold stones of the mountain.

The demons—with their glassbead eyes and ticking hearts, their small, shy claws, and their lust for the human mind—they hate him with a passion, leading him through thorn and shard when he gives chase, spitting poison in his eyes when he drives them into a corner to pay them patient courtship. Even when he has tamed them and synchronized their quartz innards to the beat of his philosophy, they plot against him: how to overthrow him, how to drive him mad, how to make him murder everything he has ever held dear. And as he grows in time, he falls deeper and deeper into the rot, the leprosy of spirit that these clockwork gods inflict upon all those who’ve presumed to tame them.

He never dares love, lest he grow to understand the fullness of the malevolence which he daily taints himself with. He never dares feel joy, lest it be corrupted into malicious glee. And thus the demon-tamer ranges his mountains alone, telling himself that the Ideal is his one companion, that Truth is his sole vindication, that the One Real God will protect him from his own mind and save him at the last minute the moment he dies.

Not that he believes any of it.

The warper is lonely; she is! despite her mad fool’s grin and her gaudy jester’s rags. Don’t be misled! For she has given loneliness her name as well, and now she is nothing but the wizard-rend. With her hair flopping into her eyeballs rolling goop into her squashed, little nose, her mouth saying “Hideous!” uglygirl but suffused with glowing beauty in the inside of course, she wends her boneless way through the streets, unseeable, unwantingtobeseen. She is a human singularity. All mass, no volume: infinitely dense and gravity-bent.

Fellow pedestrians might feel her presence, but only with the slightest shivering eidolon of paradigm shift, the eye-opening thought of: “Drown is having I to munch the sun falling in drops on my naked neck though stand under in beneath your mother comprehension brightly and what the hell am I thinking?” And their lives are changed forever.

But she is never quite aware of this. She wanders in a cloud of her own vague thoughts, in a land long ago and a time far away. Declaring herself God (if only in her own imaginings), she is content to dream and pretend and to be unseeable, beyond and underneath what could be seen or imagined. She lies with the truth. She laughs. In the state of unknowing, and within it only, she is profound. And her dream is alive, it hangs from her neck, and it laughs the tears she can never regain enough sanity to shed for this world that is unable to understand that beneath her snot, her drool, her pus, her obscene honking-snorting laughter, there waits the mystery of what really matters.

And that other lady, the delusionary, of course, she is lonely. She has given up her name to loneliness, along with her virginity in bed, or falling off from it with her limbs twined around the man who is sucking the love out of her mouth and not caring. She is the wizard-whore, and naturally, she is beautiful like fake anguish, delicious like the illusion of a tender memory. Naturally, for she was born to be devoured.

As a child, she was cut up into parts: her mother eating her womb and heart, her father eating her breasts and brains, her brother sucking the electric juice from her spine, her sister sucking the bile from her liver. Her hands and feet they left to her, because she never could do anything right with them anyway, so useless, impractical, superficial: all of her! Her cunt they left to her, because she had to make a living somehow, didn’t she?

And she is expensive. She charges two shakes to run her flawless leg between yours; twenty to make you believe that the leg is not hers, but that of the woman you loved and lost so long ago; two hundred to make you believe you’re the same man you were then, back when you’d still been able to love. Her hands—her hot hands on your waist, burning around your neck, caressing your lips, spreading her lies all over your skin until they seep into every pore of your body—her hands are white cold. She is evil evil evil

because she was Love Made Incarnate, set free into the world, raped into inhumanity and silence.

So she is evil, cruel, as tender as the hand of a torturer inwardly trembling at the exquisiteness of it all.

Nevertheless, she is love. And she is the only one who can ever understand the tragedy of wept’s immortality, king’s power, lorn’s vision, rend’s wisdom. Among them, she is the only one who allows herself to weep.

And so they all hate her. She revels in their hate.

She is at her bath today. We can see her glistening through the steam, slick and brown and slender, with her arms tracing lines of song above her head. Her eyes are closed, caged in sensation. She does not think, she cannot think.

It is doubtful that she remembers anything of what happened yesterday. Yesterday, when a desiccated, old gaffer approached her and confessed that he’d loved her since her childhood and she was the only reason that he could bear to live. Yesterday, when she rejected him and sent him away amidst laughter and jeers.

But we know better. We know that this man, this wizard-king, has paid us in souls to make her suffer and die. And our gentle hearts have been moved to do just so.

For there is just too much loneliness in the Extensive Directory. We must always at least attempt to reach out comradely arms to amuse one another, to make the yawning abyss of alone-ness seem a little more populated than it truly is. We must believe that that is our social duty and our contribution to the common benefit.

Otherwise, all the suffering, all the alienation, all the cruelties that our sensibilities of love/good/right somehow force us to inflict upon one another… Otherwise, all of that,

everything

is meaningless.

So unseen at the doorway, we creep, our Functions buzzing discreetly all about us. And there—simple finishing touches—we inscribe the path she is meant to take: the one that shall lead her through the warren of death that we have spun all about with our mystical calculus.

She is unaware, poor girl. There. She wipes at her face: at drops of steam? at tears? at the runniness of her sad, red nose? Utterly unselfconscious. We could almost pity her—she is so beautiful and so innocently, wisely, lovingly evil.

But by the time we have watched her wrap herself in her fine white fox-fur and squeeze the water from her hair, it is far too late. She is through the doorway. She is catapulting through fanged space.

The web of Functions captures her and forces her through its vicious, inexorable line. She hurtles across her rooms, tossed from one set of slashing probabilities to another, like a ragdoll being fought over by mean-tempered little girls. She becomes infinitely dense, lush with vast amounts of thick, clotted gravity. Each of her eyeballs turns into a shining, white pearl, and her throat vibrates with keening. She is delicious, even in death.

Just before she goes utterly still, our glassbeads meet her unseeing eyes and the tick of our hearts comes crashing all about our ears. Like little fools, we are all of a sudden caught. By her pathos, by her marvelous lie of love and un-ever-aloneness, her acknowledgment of shared human be-ing. We know she forgives us for killing her, and it is unendurable. Why the fuck should we care? Indeed, why should we?

We have to remind ourselves quite forcibly that we are not human.

With a flick our small, shylight claws, we release the gouts of her life into the atmosphere. She dissolves in our arms. And somehow, this makes everything seem to matter.

We return to him: our dried-up wizard-king at his window and scanning the sky. His eyes are bright with hysteria. His hands are crabs, tracing red, sideways lines on his arms.

“Is she dead?” is all he asks.

We incline our regal head.

And for a single shining moment in time… Can you hear it, my friend? The whoops and whistles? The hacking, wheezing, wizardly laughter? The thud of someone old and powerful falling flat on his back from an ill-advised cartwheel? Someone, at long last, some one is happy!

Someone is happy.