Serafíne: Not-Seeking

honest gods

For no reason to which she can ascribe not that reason has any place in magick not when magick comes from blood and breath and desperation not when she can call down the fury of time with a terror-spawned scream but for no reason just after Sera swallows those three seeds an echo of a voice crawls inside her head. Maybe it was something she heard once. An earworm. It doesn't loop in on itself and it doesn't get stuck there. Passes like incense smoke heavy and sharp before dissipating again.

What I destroy you no longer need.

Her sense of time is gone. Her sense of place is strong. She knows where she is. Still has her name. A name. A name she chose but a name all the same.

The guy on the scooter is a little taller than seems practical for the scooter but his narrow limbs and long thin neck give him a sort of grace his baggy linen pants and tunic threaten to occlude. Emaciated sure but Sera's is a practice of deprivation and she is used to wasting herself.

This entire time she has not been able to make sense of the clocks. Even the time on her phone is a haze. No way to say for sure when she received messages or when she responded to them. It doesn't matter anyway.

Her arms around his waist and she feels the distension of his midsection. How empty it is how full of air and hunger. Rests her chin on his shoulder and feels the leather quality of the skin beneath the linen. Hard bone beneath hard skin. Lets the world warp and it does warp the guy longs for speed and the scooter can only go so fast. A little under 65kph with the two of them both of them insubstantial and if the thought occurs to her at any point that she cannot describe his face that is not just the seeds she took. His face is no clearer an image in her memory than the faces of the clocks and the watches. Than the faces of the figures in the airway nights and days ago.

A turn. Another. Another. The scooter merges with fast traffic. Even if she looks Sera cannot make out the faces of the people in the vehicles either. They're going too fast.

So says the road sign in its native script.

CHIANG MAI SUPERHIGHWAY - LAMPANG

So says the road sign through the lens of her reality.

They take the highway around the city out past the airport everything a blur her arms and limbs numb to her what she destroys she no longer needs and then the Su Thep forest appears to her right tall and

the guy is taller than he was when she climbed on behind him at the railway.

Their speed decreases. The road becomes dirt. The sun is dipping below the horizon. Lazy heat blanketing the world. Insects drone and the sound is nothing like a song. They sound like that woman she heard screaming in the night market.

Serafíne

Her chin sharp on the hard frame of his shoulder, her cheek soft against his ropey neck. Inhales the diesel fumes and road dust, the body odor and the shift of dandruff in his hair. The sour scent of hunger and she is used to both privation and indulgence. Finds herself in the same place with both, dizzying, reckless, scattered, unmoored.

Her own hair unfurls behind them like a tattered flag.

Warps and scatters, wild, settles and reforms as their speed changes.

The insects' screaming song makes her -

- shiver.

despite the thickwet heat of the rainforest.

It isn't that they never made Claire scream. Just: not when Sera was in the room. This is how it always came to her, from the slow-drone distance, the source obscured.

She would close her eyes,

and hurt.

You think you can't bear it, but you're wrong. You can. Sometimes, that is all you can do.

"Stop here," she tells him, as the sun disappears and the jungle canopy envelops. Mouth against his ear, feeling him open, lengthen. The blurred features of his face a tracery in her peripheral vision. Maybe it's the seeds.

She doesn't know.

She doesn't think so.

Fuck, maybe the seeds were a metaphor too.

"I'm gonna walk the rest of the way."

honest gods

Read it in the way his knob-sharp knees rise up gradual towards the scooter handles so gradual it's like melting in the setting sun the way his bones feel longer in the press of his ribs against her own thin chest a certain slant of shoulder blades beneath her own not like wings too thin and heavy at once they are not going to fly and she's gonna walk the rest of the way.

His nose and cheeks and chin are gray though night is not caught up to them yet. Not for some time. Though there's nothing wrong with her eyes or maybe there is something wrong with her eyes. She has been moving for some time and the movement forward is not hers now.

Can she see the spire at the top of the tower as they round the bend into the forest proper? Does it matter? The trees breathe their truths at her and the cicadas scream and Claire has been dead for some time.

Time doesn't mean a whole hell of a lot now that she's lost track of it. What time has destroyed she no longer needs.

Mouth against the guy's ear and time has destroyed him too. His skin is cool in spite of the heat. Cool and dry and the gray is not her imagination. She smells his clothes. Not him.

They putter along for another thirty seconds or so. Long enough for the path to give way to signs meant for motorists Thai and English chalked together. At least the motorists have not swallowed seeds.

says the first sign she sees

THE ANNOUNCEMENT MUST NOT HAPPEN NEAR AN ALTAR

So they pass the sign. So the guy eases up on the gas. Motor muttering underneath the cicadas screams and the temple is still open to visitors and yet they pass no cars. No bicycles.

The hungry ghost brings the scooter to a halt on the side of the dirt road and the insects stop screaming.

Serafíne

What time has destroyed she no longer needs but Sera thinks that's bullshit because she still wants right. And wanting matters and time is bullshit and nothing is ever destroyed, just changed. She can swim back through and find it again.

And again and again and again, if she wants her heart broken and her body battered like that.

Sometimes, though, she doesn't mind.

So: gray. She smells his clothes, not him. Maybe she smells herself. How many days in the ugly little room, how many on the train, the hitch-hiking sway of her, her spine incising a negligent curve against the hard wooden lines of the second-class couchette. Feet up, eyes half-mast, notebook open in her lap. Nothing about her in that moment rich but everything indicative of luxury. All that time. Nothing to do in the world,

except: what she wants, when she wants, how she wants.

Thirty-six hours on a sway-backed train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai? Sure. Not like she has a job to go home too. Not like there are any claims on her time,

except her own.

They pass the sign. It makes her smile. She lifts her chin, catches a glimpse of the spire. Pins it, holds the spire in her gaze as the coughing moped decelerates and comes to a halt. Climbs off the bike and gives her driver this sweeping look. Takes in whatever it is she can of him. No life left at all.

"I think you should come with me."

She tells him. Holds out a warm hand.

honest gods

[PAUSE!]

honest gods

When the gray man stands from the scooter he takes his emptiness with him. Sharp knees come up near as high as Sera's waist and remain bent as his back as his shoulders all bone and sinew underneath the mummy-tough skin and she can make nothing of his face until he turns towards her nothing of the stringy hair hidden beneath a wide straw hat and she holds out his hand can hear a new kind of droning in the silence left behind by frightened wildlife.

Not droning. Chanting. It sounds like the Itipiso. A chorus of deep brassy voices and she knows the way she knows she needs air that the owners of the voices are not of this world.

The gray man's emptiness hangs beneath his tunic like a pregnancy swollen beyond the time it ought to have given way to life swollen and hanging low past his pelvis swaying as he moves and when he turns towards her well on his way to seven feet tall by now she can see that he has no face. Shadows where his features ought to be sure but the only feature that is not occluded by shadow is his mouth. Shriveled lips around a needle-wide orifice.

Even without touching them she can tell his fingers are not warm.

She thinks he should come with her.

He stands and holds to his silence. If he is not looking at her he is at least aware of her. Waiting for her. Spindly arms and long-long hands hung at his side.

Something rustles in the underbrush.

Serafíne

And Sera, she - watches - him as his frame unfolds itself from the scooter. She does this peripherally, even still. Dark eyes on her own hand, and then on his, withered, sharp and spindly. Then this ever widening sweep of a look, up and down, which has the periodic intonation, the widening sweep of a pendulum set to swinging until at last: his no-face, his shriveled mouth.

The chanting in the near distance sends a shiver spiking down her spine. She doesn't bother to hide it.

She wouldn't, would she.

Her gaze falls back to her half-open hand, its bristle of rings, one in bronze with a lingering resonance that is not-hers. Sera thinks for a moment, as she does sometimes. Thinks. She is not given to thought and her sharp features take on an almost comically serious cast for two seconds three, five. Then she takes that ring off. Wraps her left hand around her right index finger and slips it off. Opens her leather jacket and slips the bronze piece into a zippered inner pocket.

Startles, yeah, with the rustling in the underbrush, but does not go hying off after it.
Breathes, reminds herself to breathe, breathe, breathe -

- and starts walking.

Sera watches where she's going, sure and follows the road, at first. But she keeps looking up, skimming the shadowed canopy for another glimpse of that temple-spire.

honest gods

Easy to say that the path is open to her and the path is what she will have it be. That there is no path. That she is the path. That the temple offers nothing that she cannot find herself and so on and so forth.

But so soon as she starts to walk the path has made itself a difficulty. Canopies hang in the way and night falls faster than she might have thought it would. It is not yet autumn in the northern hemisphere. Thailand is in between rainy seasons. The canopy has grown no taller than it ever has been. Not like the hungry ghost that drove her here.

The hungry ghost follows her. What else is he supposed to do. He cannot satisfy the void he carries beneath his shirt.

Rustling in the underbrush and something falls out of the trees once she's passed by. Hidden by the fog and the shadows cut by the foliage. Moving along ancient-slow behind her the hungry ghost picks up the body of a flying lemur. It disappears in his hand and he brings his hand to his mouth and when he lowers his hand again it is empty.

Sera cannot see the temple spire for the trees. Their green hung heavy in the sponge-damp air and the droning

chanting

the chanting carries on not made deeper for the voices' placement in the temple itself. As she walks the jungle may as well be chanting to her. Cicada carapaces hung as amulets from the trunks of the trees their dead shells amethystine as if their wings are set to flap and take the bodies to flight like calling to like but Sera pockets that soaring sun-soaked bronze ring and it does nothing to stop the flapping.

When she looks back down from the sky in search of her spire this time the world yawns in front of her. Ripples as if she were looking into a still pool and a droplet of cohesion fell from behind her and landed there. As if she were about to walk through a membrane.

Serafíne

The rustling and something falls from the trees and our Sera, who has her hands in the pockets of her leather jacket and her arms out all akimbo and the world spinning tumbled-strange around her glances back, over her shoulder in time perhaps not to see the lemur proper but its coiled little ringtail as it disappears into the hungry-ghost's mouth.

"Hey - !" This startled little yelp. Lemurs are fucking adorable. Even the ones that the street performers had leashed and chained and trained (god knows how - try not to think about it) to do tricks for tips down by the beach in Phuket and she recognizes the tail at the least. She likes: fuzzy things, Sera. Breathes in or hunches up with delight and wonder when they come her way. Has an always-open, always-bleeding heart.

There's not a body to keen over, though. Just a no-face with a shriveled mouth and a distended stomach, the stark, spare frame of exigency, of want, of privation she knows so well, from the inside and from without.

"Did it help?"

Quietly, like she's waiting for an answer. This compressed sort of compassion threaded with iron through her voice.

honest gods

And the hungry ghost looks back at her. At least aims its blank-slate face at her. Its little mouth pursed such that she could read displeasure or wonder or bemusement in the wrinkles lining it if she had anything else to go on. Just this small portal through which it funnels fuel its body does not use.

It is not a body. It is a spirit. There is a reason it can make no use of the things it consumes. Maybe the things it consumes live on forever. Maybe they were never there to begin with.

The chanting continues.

Serafíne

She wants:

to give it something. Some thing. Some spark. Some sense of satiation; not the illusion of it but the promise, right? This-suffering-is-not-in-vain.

And that's not always true; in fact, it's usually false. Most suffering in the world is in vain; is singular and solitary, is alone, in the end. Bright and clear and whole as she wants the world they inhabit to be, she knows far better than most what lies beneath.

And she does not believe in

God

or even

gods. Just people.

Who are bound to disappoint you, every fucking time. Or not, you know? That's always the other option.

What the fuck does she know: about ghosts or spirits or transubstantiation (okay: Catholic girls' school, she knows something about transubstantiation) but she knows this thing, whatever it is, is hungry,

and guesses that it cannot get full.

Knows, too, that it brought her here. And that: here is where she wanted to be.

"I'm sorry." When she speaks, you see - magick. The little tricks she praticed earlier. In the market, on the train. Steal the sense of language from the ether and impregnating it into the synapses of her mind and the sinews of her tongue. Can't speak spirit, doesn't know precisely that this thing is a spirit but hey. It picked her up on a moped in the at the train station. Maybe it knows, remembers, is imbued with the language that was swimming in the air around them when she stumbled down from the platform. "I mean, that you're suffering. If you're suffering? And I guess there's just shit that's eternal, like always-was and always-will-be and then there's everything else then if you're eternal I'm probably not sorry and this is all ridiculous because fuck, that is some powerful shit. Like I toy with it - sometimes - but fuck.

"But you know if you're not eternal.

"If this is a fucking transitional state " (something she knows: she feels, after all, like the moment between was and becoming) " - you can find your way through."

Pulls out the last three of the seeds she purchased at the nightmarket in Bangkok and holds them in the neat little funnel of her fingertips. Holds them for a second longer

(concentrating) then offers them to him.

If he takes them.

honest gods

Plenty of Thai folklore concerning crossroads and the spirits who haunt them. Seeds and the power of trees and new things. The deities responsible for the trees and new things. Ghosts for occasions such as sudden death and death in childbirth and death by hasty violence. Ghosts who were executed by burning and drift through the night heads intact but lungs and other viscera floating along behind them. Ghosts who eat entrails.

Plenty to learn when visiting other countries other cities even going out into the rural places of one's own home but Sera is not a folklorist. She was here to take a vacation. She doesn't know shit about ghosts.

As far as she knew this ghost was a guy an hour ago. Hours ago. Time has ceased to mean anything. Behind her the membrane between worlds has stopped its rippling dance and gone back to standing as still and permeable as if nothing were ever wrong with it at all.

The hungry ghost cants its head with the extension of her hand and the seeds nestled in the space between her fingers. Sight without eyes. Understanding without language. He cannot talk if he hasn't got a mouth. This isn't the guy she met at the railway station.

Maybe she would recognize the guy she met at the railway station if she saw him again. Maybe he was disguising himself as a living young man all this time. Maybe she's just tripping her ass off right now.

A few teetering steps graceful despite the tipping sharp nature of its form it's got to be nearing eight feet tall by now its belly distended further with the introduction of the lemur fur and all teetering towards Sera without a face to voice intent or attention and then he - it? - places its great spindly hands over the swell of its belly and bends at the knees eye-level with Sera for a moment without any eyes.

The chanting stops.

That needle-small mouth sucks up the seeds. A spasm-quick cant of its head. Inquisitive. That mouth is dry as a grave and it seeks Sera's fingers now that the seeds are gone.

Serafíne

"No."

Sharp.

Definite.

Definitive.

The drawing of a line.

She pulls back her fingers and her voice has (temporarily) this sort of cracking authority to it.

"I gave you what I wished to give. You don't get any more."

This brief, curtaining smile follows and then she turns. Knows where that membrane was. She made it herself, didn't she? Imagined it there, imagines it again. She knows where she's going now, and doesn't give a fuck about the road, or maybe she gives enough fucks about the road that it opens for her. That it unrolls beneath her and sends her tumbling straight to the base of the temple, isolated, marooned in the jungle.

Or maybe she just whips through the understory: runs, flat-out, open, absurd and fuck every goddamned obstacle. She'll fling herself over, under, through.

honest gods

[SUCH PAUSE]

honest gods

So the hungry ghost cants its head with the rebuke its blank face betraying neither understanding nor contrition and after it has drawn back from fingers that smell of smoke and dirt and filling things it now well over eight feet tall and thinner even than it was when Sera mistook it for a living young man turns its small mouth away its blank face away and with jerky coltish steps turns and adds a shadow to the congregation born of trees.

Cloud and canopy blot out the stars overhead. Hard to tell if the darkness comes from nightfall or an incoming storm.

When she passes through that membrane Sera feels no different. The sensation is akin to walking through a mist cool and fleeting but it does not cling to her skin as water would. Immediate dissipation.

As she walks through the jungle the chanting persists. The temple has been here for seven hundred years. All other things being equal it will still be here in seven hundred years. It and the chedi. The spire. The resting place of all the monks who have died in this place. Their bones entrusted to the earth that sustained them.

The lawn before the wat is empty but for her own shadow.

Serafíne

Sera makes a quiet huff when the hungry ghost steps from her rebuke. She glances back, through the inky shadows, to watch him go. Feels the strangest sort of pang but she always feels the strangest sorts of pangs, pangs that strangers never seem to feel. Doesn't mind them, though. Or turn from them, or refuse them. Does not seem to have learned the fundamental lesson that some people think our minds and our bodies want us to learn: that hurts. don't do it again.

A helluva lot of things worth doing hurt.

Sometimes over and over and over.

And you can stand a helluva lot more than you ever imagined you could.

But here, right, now.

No change. There and here. No change, on this side and the other. Barriers are illusions, too. Still, she steps through and feels it and then feels it gone against her skin and makes this little noise: pop, human imitation of a soap bubble popping, and keeps walking, pushing through the growth all around here, until she stands before the temple. Heads for the tunnels, first, not the spire Sometimes you have to descend before you have a hope of remembering how to climb.

honest gods

All limitations are self-imposed.

Life is suffering. Suffering is caused by craving and aversion. Suffering can be overcome and happiness can be attained. This is about as far as the paths that Buddhists and Cultists walk together. The Buddhist method of surpassing one's limits and the Cultist method are not the same. They both push themselves. But the Buddhist avoids excess. The Cultist seeks out Kamamarga.

The unwise Cultist will become dependent on her tools. She will lose her own path for never having found it in the first place. Drugs and sex and staying high all the time creates an energy that is no more constructive than a hurricane.

Sera has not found a path laid out for her here. She has been drinking and smoking and swallowing seeds for days. This tunnel is well-lit but the light is swimming as she barges out of the jungle and into its maw.

The female entity she kissed last time pushed her off a cliff. She exists on the boundary between states of being. Freedom and limitation. Gestation and rebirth. She has stood plenty more than plenty of people ever imagine possible but see: life is suffering.

No one has all the answers. She has to make her own answers.

The chanting could very well be coming from inside her head. She cannot get a lock on its origins. It is everywhere. It is the walls and the darkness.

Serafíne

Her senses are blown all-open. The smeary light beneath, the ancient carvings. There she is, this strange, drunk, sleep-deprived, hallucinating creature caught up in between the rhapsodic and the literal and the littoral. There are carvings on the wall or just the grooves from a thousand other hands, a thousand other strangers, a thousand other lives. She tips her head backwards against the curve of the tunnel, feels its elegant rise. No angles, just curves.

The stuffed face of the plush-panda-backpack catches on the grooves in the walls. She plants her hands on her thighs and then, back sort of braced against the wall, sinks and sinks and sinks until she is seated on the floor. Listening.

The last time she went seeking, she found the graves of her dead and scrubbed the faded stones. Couldn't see the names but:

she knows them now. Mourns them, sure. Sometimes joyfully, sometimes quietly, sometimes just heaving. Lives with the loss, the way everyone does. Wrote those stories back into her skin. On the floor of the tunnels beneath Wat Umong, Sera pulls her knees up to her chests and allows herself: to feel, all of that, again. Not just the pain, but also the joy. The love, the sorrow. The pain, the guilt. Pulls that into her body and pushes it right back through.

She allows it to shred her heart right down to its bloodiest, most rendered fibers.

She remains whole.

Easier than you ever imagined it could be to suffocate someone. Nose pinched shut, hand over the mouth, I'm sorry, I'm sorry I'm sorry and

she still is. Though perhaps, not for the reasons anyone else could imagine.

This is what she gives. This is what she has. This is what she is. Her eyes closed, her throat raw, her nails digging into the meat of her palms. The shutter-snap points of crisis and resolve, the patchwork heart, the hurricane of love, and fear, loss and beauty. More than enough meat to feed a hundred hungry ghosts.

The temple doesn't matter. The road is wrong. The jungle, the boy, the train, the strangers, the night market. Except: they all do. Give her the space to pull herself open and wrap herself up again. The simple pleasure of strange food purchased from a stranger, nightnoise all around, the faint glow of firelight reflecting on rice paddies in the distance.

But: she doesn't need the temple, or the train, or the tunnels, or the jungle, or the nightmarket, and maybe she didn't actually need to leave the fucking room. Sometimes empties herself until she's shaking from need and sometimes she fills her every whim until it seems that the world will not, will never, could never stop its spinning and the night pulls thin like taffy and it seems that she will never approach something like sobriety every fucking again, and they're all just tools.

She has what she needs in her own hands, and her own heart.

The last time, She pushed her off a cliff.

This time, if needful, if necessary, if well-and-truly asked: Sera would jump.

Maybe she already has.

The chanting, everywhere and nowhere, does not stop. She doesn't understand a fucking word of it but the rhythm is there, the incessant drone, perfect counterpoint to the willful breaking and remaking of her fucking heart. Which she gives: as thoroughly and entirely as she gives anything, ever, as she tries to Make It Stop.

honest gods

The only way around is through.

The only way to Make It Stop is to Wait Until It Stops On Its Own.

--now boarding at gate--

Outside the temple the jungle teems and even inside the dry yet glistening walls of the tunnel the loam and the oxygen and the unseen crawling things creating a sense of held breath the chanting come to her as if out of the earth now Sera can feel the world watching her its breath held knives out waiting for her and the seeds she gave to the hungry ghost take root outside she cannot see it but she hears it feels the ground shake with it and when she looks down at the ground it is no longer sole-smoothed stone but black-and-white a checked pattern and the chanting

--ited flight eighteen-oh-two--

and the chanting goes on the chanting is a fingernail scratch over a scab quick flinch of a reminder and the walls glisten not with dew not with sublimated oxygen but with something darker something reeking of iron and the checked pattern yawns out in front of her as the walls of the tunnel pull back breaking-bone slow darkness coming in around her and she knows this darkness she knows it will end.

Darkness of the world or darkness of her closed eyes. Something whispers behind her. An accusation. A threat. It doesn't sound human. If she turns she turns towards more darkness. When she turns the voice stays behind her. If she squints into the darkness she can see shapes loping about in it. Ten-feet-tall shapes. Shapes like men. Gray skin and needle-mouths stringy hair and swollen gravity-stretched bellies this is a place of hungry ghosts none of them her hungry ghost and they are aware of her but she has nothing they want and they are not the ones whispering to her. They are not the ones who died because of her. They only feed on the things she offers them.

It does not feel as if it will end.

--onstop service from los angeles to den--

Eventually she has to open her eyes. Reality is waiting for her. Reality and an uncomfortable chair in a fluorescent-lit airport terminal and the worst migraine she's had in recent memory.

Everything she had with her on the motorbike is here with her now but nothing works. Not her cellphone not her lighter not her compact mirror. The payphone will not take her debit card or the change she offers it. Airport personnel and other passengers seem unaware of her presence. No one she speaks to reacts as if they hear or see her.

Dried saliva stains her fingertips.

Sera

She has had a lot of bad fucking migraines in recent memory.

Curls there in the hard plastic embrace of the chair as long as she can stand the assault of both nausea and pain, eyes closed, fingers pinching the bridge of her nose.

Then: lurches upright. Stumbles toward the nearest bathroom to try to throw up. Nothing comes.

Her face is stark and hollow and mirrors are strange, strange things. Her own eyes looking back at her, stark and wide. The bright-wet line of a stray drop of tap water on her cheek. She manages one of those sink-baths that happen in airport restrooms after overseas flights, cups her hand beneath the faucet, drinks and then wants to puke again. Doesn't.

Wants to cry, too.

Doesn't.

And it's not like she figures out the phone, the debit card, the machinery of ordinary life, the people: do not see and will not acknowledge her presence on the plane of this earth right away or even quickly, because: she washes her face, her mouth, her armpits, the back of her neck because she doesn't want any of that. Not people, not strangers, not the next flight home, not a goddamned sausage biscuit. Not any of it.

Goes outside, sits back down in those hard, injection-molded chairs. She's so damned conscious of her own failure, it feels like her sternum is caving in.

She doesn't move, for a long, long time.

Serafíne

Friday, October 2, 2015

Not-Seeking

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