THE FLENSING LENS
I WAS A filmmaker once. He was a sailor on the high seas.
I showed him my camera.
He wasn’t ready yet.
***
He was shy to reveal his sigils, his roadmap of flesh, his stainless steel.
He was shy, but willing.
We made our church in the valley where a dead doctor lost himself exploring psychedelics. Where the drowning sun dyes the fields and mountain caps the color of livor mortis. Where a man, or two, can blot out prying eyes.
We concoct our own rites in all the shades of alchemy, baptized in all the fluids a man’s body can make. A brotherhood of two.
He teaches me to hunt. He prods at the crust on the rim of his wound. He reads the auspices in dissected owl pellets, in grocery meats, in the scythe-hook moon. The sign of the Lesser Angel, the Bound Man, the Amanita.
I read a cascading stack of instruction manuals. I tinker with grey machines. I teach him to be patient.
***
I show him my camera.
He is ready now.
***
His fingers, splayed. His teeth, gritted. His leftmost lids, prised apart. His socket strains against the polished convex glass until the blades start spinning. His muscles pulse under their scars.
The lens pushes through the resisting orb until it pops, deflates, a crushed grape. Vitreous fluid seeps out, dyed pale red, the tears of an earthenware saint. All is silent but for his wolf-cub’s whine and the blades’ unceasing shirreeshirreeshirree.
The silver snake passes through apertures, caressed by mucous membranes, unfurling through flesh tunnels familiar and newly forged. The lens threshes a labyrinth along thickets of veins. The monitor blossoms.
I have to watch the screen, of course. I am the Operator. I feed the snake in slowly.
The screen erupts and twitches in intricate geometries, the condensed broken hues of the nightclub, the concentric angles and spires crowding into themselves like an army of lovers. The lens wends its way under his frame; the kaleidoscope melding of his component parts.
I read auguries in the flecks and clots emitting from his slack mouth. He has taught me well. The sign of the Ophidian, the Cutpurse, the Engineer.
His abdomen burbles as the lens nears his hips, as the front of his trousers darkens with damp like a spreading storm. His tendons arch taut, plucked marionette wires. His lone remaining pupil floats open and black. His marrow sings like soft cheese. He is exquisite.
The inner man hides in all his visceral shards, arcana flashing on the monitor, searing behind my eyelids. He taunts me. He welcomes me. He wants to teach me and to know me. He impresses this in strips of organ meat, in bone shards, in arteries torn free.
Baroque drippings gather below his chair as the lens bursts forth. The lens, threading through him from anus to retina. The blades have broken free and yet still spin, slick and hungry with the rage of a newborn.
I slide forward, to the edge of my chair. My knees press against his own, which are now curiously slack. I part my thighs for the snake, the blind lens. I fix my gaze on the monitor. And I watch.
Will it, will he, see with my eye, or speak with my mouth?
***
He shows me his camera.
I am ready now.