Edward Lee - Quest for Sex, Truth & Reality

“Come again… seeker,” laughed the keep.

“Hope you liked the pizza,” bid the fat blonde.

The writer grabbed his suitcase and stumbled out. The dusk in the sky had bled to full dark, and it was hot outside. He reeked, drenched. He was mortified. Human truth is my sustenance? he thought. Jesus. The awful tinge in his mouth seemed to buzz, and he could still taste the sausage.

Then he heard the voice again, not in his ears, in his head.

What was it?

He stood stock-still in the empty street, sopped in vomit.

The power of truth? He’d come here seeking truth and all he’d gotten was puked on. And he was hearing voices, too. Great, he thought. Fantastic. But he had to find a motel, get showered and changed.

He strayed up the main drag, aimless. Shops were closed, houses were dark. The bus station was closed too, and in his wandering he found not one motel.

Then he saw the church.

It sat back quaintly behind some trees, its clean white walls lambent in the night. What relieved him was that it looked normal. The front doors stood open and, within, candles could be seen.

He entered and crossed the nave. The pews were empty. Ahead, past the chancel, a shadow lingered, mumbling low words like an incantation.

It was a priest, reading rites before an open coffin.

“Excuse me, father,” the writer said. “I need to know—”

The priest turned, chubby in black raiments. He was glaring. In the coffin lay the corpse of an old woman.

“What!”

“I’m new in town. Are there any motels?”

“Motels? Here?” the priest snapped. “Of course not!”

The writer’s eyes flicked to the open coffin. “Do you by chance know when the next bus arrives?”

“How dare you come in here now!” the priest outraged. He pointed abruptly to the coffin. “Can’t you see my mother’s died?”

“Sorry, father,” the writer groped but thought, God! He hurried back out. In the street he felt strange, not desolate as before, but woozy, disconnected. Is it the town, or is it me? A sudden and profuse flash of sweat made his vomit-drenched shirt feel like a coat of mucus.

The sweat was a herald, like a trumpet—

Oh, no.

— for the voice:

SEEKER. SEEK!

A block down, the sign glowed over the transom: POLICE

His footsteps echoed round his head like a halo as he trotted up. Surely the police would know about the next bus. He pushed through the door, was about to speak, but froze.

A big cop with chopburns glared at him. “What’cha want, buddy? I’m busy.”

“I…” the writer attempted. The cop was busy, all right. He stood behind a long-haired kid who’d been handcuffed to a chair. A tourniquet had been fashioned about the kid’s neck via a cord and nightstick.

“Okay, punk,” warned the cop. “No more bullshit. Where’s them drugs?”

The kid, of course, couldn’t have answered if he’d wanted to. He was being choked. The mouth moved in panic within the strained, ballooning face.

“Still not talkin’, huh?” The cop gave the tourniquet another twist.

“What the hell are you doing?” shouted the writer.

“Police business. This kid’s got drugger written all over him. Sells the shit to kindergarten kids probably. All that crack and PCP, you now? We gotta rough ’em up a little; it’s the only way to get anything out of ’em.”

Rough them up a little? The writer stared, flabbergasted. The cop twisted the tourniquet all the way down, until the cord creaked. The kid’s body stiffened up in the chair, his face turning blue.

“Talk, punk. Where’s your stash? Who’s your bagman?”

“How can he talk!” the writer shouted the logical question. “You’ve got a tourniquet around his fucking neck!”

“Scram, buddy. This is a police matter.” The cop paused and looked down. “Aw, shit, there he went.” The kid twitched a few times, then fell limp, swollen-faced in death.

Madness, the writer thought.

The cop was unwinding the tourniquet, taking off the cuffs. “Just a drugger, no loss. No point in wastin’ it, either.” The cop gave the writer a comradely look. “Girl pussy, boy pussy, s’all pink on the inside, right, buddy? Help me get his pants off so’s we can poke him ’fore he’s cold.”

A sign on the wall read To Protect and Serve. The writer, brain thumping, teetered out of the station.

Phone, he thought dumbly. He abandoned his suitcase in the street and staggered on. Something’s happened here. Got to call someone, get some help. The houses set back off the street looked harmless. He knocked on the first door. A middle-aged man answered it—

“Yes? Can I help you, young man?”

“I…” the writer attempted. The man wore eyeshadow and cherry-red lipstick. He also wore panties, garters, and stockings. Stainless-steel clamps were screwed down on his nipples, distending the fleshy ends.

“Sporty, wouldn’t you say?”

“Huh?”

The man lowered his frilled panties, revealing a penis and scrotum glittery with safety pins. One pin pinched closed the end of the foreskin.

“Uh…sporty, yes,” the writer said.

“Would you care to touch it?”

“Uh, well, no—”

The writer jogged off. At the second house he peered through the storm door and saw a beautiful nude woman chasing a giant St. Bernard, and a man at the third house stood grinning on his porch rail, a noose around his neck. “Fly, Fleance! Fly!” he quoted Shakespeare, and stepped off the rail. Heavy, tonerous thuds greeted the writer at the fourth house. WHACK-WHACK-WHACK! WHACK-WHACK-WHACK! In the kitchen window, he saw a man very contentedly cracking open a baby’s head with a large meat tenderizer while an aproned woman prepared a fry pan in the background. The man pried the cranium apart and began to spoon the tender brains into a bowl. “Olive oil or canola?” the man asked the wife.

The writer foundered away, gagging, and tripped back into the street. The impact of vision made him feel sledgehammered in the face. He’d seen enough; he didn’t want to be a seeker anymore — he just wanted to go home. Then the sweat rushed again, and the voice, like a raddled chord, fell back into his head:

BUT THERE’S SO MUCH, SO MUCH FOR US TO SEEK.

Whatever did that mean? Without reservation, the writer bent over and threw up. This seemed the logical thing to do, an obligation, in fact, after all he’d seen. Madness, he repeated, urping it up spasm after spasm like a human sludge-pump. Ropes of saliva dangled off his lips as his stomach rocketed out its contents. The wet splattering crackled down the street.

Oh, what a day.

Done, he felt worse, he felt decamped. The particulate mush of his last meal glittered nearly jewel-like in the frosty glow of streetlamps. He felt empty, not just in the belly, but in the heart. Had he thrown up his spirit as well?

Do I even have a spirit? he thought.

Too many things cruxed him. The town’s madness, of course; and the voice — most certainly. Hearing voices in one’s head was not generally an indication of well being. What cruxed him most of all, though, was simply his own being here. Why had he come? For the truth, for shards of human realities to nourish his writing, but now he wondered. It made no sense, yet somehow he felt the opposite: that actually a lack of truth had evoked him. Vacuities, not realities. Wastelands.

Lies.

Absurdly, he sat beside the puddle of vomit, to reflect. Was throwing up catalytic to subjective conjecture? He felt rejected, but by what? By the mainstream? By society? In a sense he was — all writers were, and perhaps it was the backwash of his rejection that had instigated the summons, chosen him somehow. Human truth is my sustenance. How powerful is the power of truth? But the more he plied the speculation, the harder he laughed. The quest had backfired, leaving him to sit gutterside as his vomit spread into strange shapes between his feet. Seeker, my ass, he concluded. Bugger truth. All he cared about now was the next bus.