Edward Lee - Quest for Sex, Truth & Reality

The writer leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette. “Buddy,” he asked quietly. “Could you please tell me when the next bus comes through town?”

“There aren’t any busses anymore. Things have changed.”

Changed, the writer thought.

THE TRUTH HAS CHANGED, elaborated the voice. YOU WERE RIGHT. IT HAS BEEN REBORN, THROUGH ME . I LIVE ON IT.

The writer gave this some thought.

“I’m looking for my love,” White Shirt remarked and gestured the redhead’s opened belly. “I gave her my love, and I want it back.” He scratched his head. “It’s got to be in there somewhere.”

“Love is in the heart,” the writer pointed out.

“Yeah, but this girl was heartless.”

“Well, the patriarchal Japanese used to believe that love was in the belly, the intestines. They believed that the belly was the temple of the soul on earth. That’s why they practiced ritual suicide by disembowelment — to release the soul and free the spiritual substantate of their love.”

“Intestines,” White Shirt contemplated. “So…if I gave my love to her… ” He stared into the tilled gut, fingering its wares. “To get it back, I have to bring it into me?”

The writer shrugged. “I can’t advise you. The decision is yours.”

White Shirt began to eat the girl’s intestines.

The writer’s sweat surged. The redhead was as dead as dead could be, if not deader. Nevertheless, as her ex-lover steadily consumed the loops of her innards, her eyes snapped open and her head turned.

She looked directly at the writer.

“He’s taking his love back,” she giggled.

“I know,” said the writer.

“It…tickles.”

“I would imagine so.”

The moon shone in each of her eyes as a perfect white dot. “Real truth sustains us, just in different ways.”

Sustains, considered the writer. Sustenance.

“The end of your quest is waiting for you.”

The writer gulped. “Tell me,” he pleaded. “It’s very important to me. Please.”

“Look for something black,” she said, and died again.

The writer leapt the alley fence. The fat blonde had said the same thing. Black. But it was nighttime. How could he hope to find something black at night?

Then he heard something — a stout, distant chugging.

A motor, he realized.

The he saw…what?

A glow?

A patch of light that was somehow, impossibly, black.

He was standing in a schoolyard — ironically a place of learning. The light shimmered in a rough trench-like bomb crater. It’s black, he thought. In the distance sat the source of the motor noise: a squat U.S. Army armored personnel carrier.

The writer looked into the dropped back hatch.

“Don’t go out there,” warned a crisp yet muffled voice.

Murky red light bathed the inner compartment like blood in a lighted pool. A sergeant in a gas mask and full decontamination gear slouched at a console of radio equipment. Very promptly, he pointed a 9mm pistol at the writer’s face.

The writer urinated in his pants, just as promptly. “Don’t shoot me. I’m only a novelist.”

The masked sergeant seemed very sad. “Bock and Jones. I had to send them out. It’s a DECON field order. The lowest ranking men go into the final exclusion perimeter first.”

Final exclusion perimeter?

“I think it got them,” the sergeant said

It, the writer reckoned.

In the mask’s portals, the sergeant’s eyes looked insane. “When my daughter was an infant, I’d rock her in my lap every night.”

“That’s, uh, that’s nice, sergeant.”

“It gave me a hard on…. She’s fourteen now. I drilled a hole in the bathroom wall so I can watch her take showers.”

“They have counselors for things like that, I think.”

A dark suboctave suffused into the words. “At midnight, the wolf howls.”

The writer winced. “What?”

“I never knew my father.”

Then the sergeant shot himself in the head.

Sound and concussion hit the writer like a physical weight. BANG! It shoved him off the top of the vehicle as the sergeant’s mask quickly filled up with blood.

I HUNGER FOR TRUTH TOO, loomed the voice. BUT TO SEE IT, IT MUST BE REVEALED. DO YOU UNDERSTAND? YOU MUST UNDERSTAND.

The writer strayed into the yard. Yes, he thought he did understand now. Here was what his whole life had been leading him to. All that he’d sought, in his absurd pretensions as a seeker, had brought him to this final test. There could be no going back. His preceptor awaited, the ultimate seeker.

A second decon soldier lay dead in the grass. There were no hands at the ends of his arms, and the stumps appeared burned. Some colossal inner pressure had forced his brains out his ears.

“Get out of here, you civvie fucker!” someone commanded. A third soldier strode through shadows, a kid no more than twenty. “The light! It’s mine!”

“Are you quite sure about that?”

“It’s…God. I’m taking it!”

A TEST? WATCH.

“Watch!” the boy cried. “I’ll prove it’s mine!” He ran manic to the trench, his young face in awe above the radiant black blur. “Hard-fucking-core, man! I’m taking God!” He put his hands into the light, eyes wide as moons, and picked it up. But in only a second the light fell back to its resting place, melting through the boy’s hands. He stood up stiff and convulsed, a silent scream in his lips.

The voice trumpeted. ALAS. FAILURE.

This disconcerted the writer, for he knew he was next. For the last time in his life, then, he asked himself the ever important query. How powerful is the power of truth?

I’LL SHOW YOU.

The boy’s innards prolapsed through his mouth in a few slow, even pulses; the writer thought of a fat snake squeezing from its hole. Lungs, liver, heart, g.i. tract — everything that was inside now hung heavily outside, glimmering. Then the red heart, amid it all, stopped beating, and the boy fell dead.

ONLY FAITH CAN SAVE YOU NOW.

“I kind of figured that,” the writer admitted.

THE TRUTH IS MY SUSTENANCE. I EXIST TO EXPOSE IT, TO GIVE IT FLESH. I DRAW IT OUT SO THAT IT CAN BE REAL AND, HENCE, SUSTAINING. DO YOU UNDERSTAND? TOO OFTEN THE TRUTH HIDES UNDERNEATH. WITHOUT REVELATION, WHAT PURPOSE CAN THERE BE IN TRUTH?

Good point, the writer mused.

WE’RE BOTH SEEKERS, WE BOTH HAVE QUESTS. LET OUR QUESTS JOIN HANDS NOW IN THE REAL LIGHT OF WHAT WE SEEK.

“Yes,” said the writer.

WILL YOU MINISTER TO ME?

“Yes.”

THEN THERE IS BUT ONE DOOR LEFT FOR YOU TO ENTER. GLORY OR FAILURE. TRUTH OR LIES. THE TEST OF YOUR FAITH IS UPON YOU.

The writer looked into the shimmering trench. This would either be the end or the beginning; it was providence. To turn away now would reduce his entire life to a lie. He began to reach down, softly smiling.

I am the seeker, he thought.

He put his hands into the light.

YES!

He picked it up. He looked at it, cradled it. The glory on his face felt brighter than a thousand suns. The test was done, and he had passed.

Was the black light weeping?

CARRY ME AWAY, it said.

He took it into the Army vehicle and closed the back hatch.

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

In the driver’s compartment, the writer lit a cigarette. Looks simple enough, he observed. A t-bar, an accelerator, and a brake. Automatic transaxle, low and second. The fuel gauge read well over half.

He thought of sustenance, the first pronouncement of the light. This town had been too small; that was the problem: tiny, dry. There weren’t enough people here to provide the truth its proper flesh. But that was all right. He knew it wouldn’t take long to get to a really big city.