Dawn. Sometime in November. Unable to sleep, writhing on my futon, still in a suit, my head feeling like someone has lit a bonefire on it, in it, a constant searing pain that keeps both eyes open, utterly helpless. There are no drugs, no food, no liquor that can appease the forcefulness of this greedy pain; all my muscles are stiff, all my nerves burning, on fire. I'm taking Sominex by the hour since I've run out of Dalmane, but nothing really helps and soon even the box of Sominex is empty. Things are lying in the corner of my bedroom; a pair of girl's shoes from Edward Susan Bennis Allen, a hand with the thumb and forefinger missing, the new issue of Vanity Fair splashed with someone's blood, a cummerbund drenched in gore, and from the kitchen wafting into the bedroom is the fresh smell of blood cooking, and when I stumble up out of bed into the living room, the walls are breathing, the stench of decay smothers everything. I light a cigar, hoping the smoke will mask at least some of it.
Her breasts have been chopped off and they look blue and deflated, the nipples are a disconcerting shade of brown. Surrounded by dried black blood, they lie, rather delicately, on a china plate I bought at the Pottery Barn on top of the Wurlitzer jukebox in the corner, though I don't remember doing this. I have also shaved all the skin and most of the muscle off her face so that it resembles a skull with a long, flowing mane of blond hair falling from it, which is connected to a full, cold corpse; its eyes are open, the actual eyeballs hanging out of the sockets by their stalks. Most of her chest is indistinguishable from her neck, which looks like ground up meat, her stomach resembles the eggplant and goat cheese lasagna at Il Marlibro or some other kind of dog food, the dominant colours red and white and brown. A few bits of her intestines are smeared across one wall and others are mashed up into balls that lie strewn across the glass-top coffee table like long blue snakes, mutant worms. The patches of skin left on her body are blue-grey, the colour of tinfoil.
I spend the next fifteen minutes beside myself, pulling out a bluish rope of intestine, most of it still connected to the body, and start shoving it in my mouth, choking on it, and it feels moist in my mouth and its filled with some kind of paste which smells bad. After an hour of digging, I detach her spinal cord and decide to Federal Express the thing without cleaning it, wrapped in tissue, under a different name, to Leona Helmsley. I want to drink this girl's blood as if it were champagne and I plunge my face deep into what's left of her stomach, scratching my chomping jaw on a broken rib. The huge new television set is on in one of the rooms, first blaring out The Patty Winters Show, whose topic today is Human Diaries, then a game show, Wheel of Fortune, and the applause coming from the studio audience sounds like static each time a new letter is turned. I'm loosening the tie I'm wearing with a blood soaked hand. This is my reality. Everything outside of this is like some movie I once saw.
In the kitchen I try to make meatloaf out of the girl but it becomes to frustrating a task and instead I spend the afternoon smearing her meat all over the walls, chewing on strips of skin I ripped from her body, then I rest by watching a tape of last week's new CBS sitcom, Murphy Brown. After that and a large glass of J&B I'm back in the kitchen. The head in the microwave is now completely black and hairless and I place it in a tin pot on the stove in an attempt to boil any remaining flesh I forgot to shave off. Heaving the rest of her body into a garbage bag, I decide to use whatever is left of her for sausage of some kind.
A Richard Marx CD plays on the stereo, a bag from Zabar's loaded with sourdough onion bagels and spices sits on the kitchen table while I grind bone and fat and flesh into patties and though it does sporadically penetrate how unacceptable some of what I'm doing actually is, I just remind myself that this thing, this girl, this meat, is nothing, is shit, and along with a Xanax (which I am now taking half-hourly) this thought momentarily calms me and then I'm humming, humming the theme to a show I watched as a child-- The Jetsons? The Banana Splits? I'm remembering the song, the melody, even the key it was sung in, but not the show. Was it Lidsville? These questions are punctuated by other questions, as diverse as "Will I ever do time?" and "Did this girl have a trusting heart?" The smell of meat and blood clouds up the condo until I don't notice it anymore. And later my macabre joy sours and I'm weeping for myself, unable to find any solace in any of this, crying out, sobbing, "I just want to be loved," cursing the earth and everything I have been taught: principals, distinctions, choices, morals, compromises, knowledge, unity, prayer - all of it was wrong, without any final purpose. All it came down to was: die or adapt. I imagine my own vacant face, the dissembodied voice coming from it's mouth: These are terrible times. Maggots already writhe across the human sausages, the drool pouring from my lips dribbles over them, and I still can't tell if I'm cooking any of this correctly, because I'm crying too hard and I have never really cooked anything before.