Mark Doten - The Infernal

At such a price.

Equipment, personnel, ad revenues, skyscrapers, almost ate me up. Key thing. Twenty-four news network, bury yourself, don’t get

small, dried-out, bent, and nearly crippled southern Italian men, with the family for generations, subjected me to heinous childhood rituals. I thought it all hidden from my parents, but growing up, gathering evidence, shoveling bullshit, the will at last to see what it had truly been. All these rituals expressly commissioned by

no harness could hold him, prevent his little neck from snapping, she found herself an unscrupulous harness dealer, even he refused, she doubled and redoublS1O36 BOKXOFXHF-IGA 20ANX9FSPPKPEW0BRRAZTS7 4LN

soon six figures for a damn parachute harness, by no means a low six. He gave way as they all do, the wife indemnified him and took to the sky with our baby, crashed square in a pumpkin patch, neck snapping on impact, or before, in midair. Boy dead on impact, or before, perhaps, little heart bursting, perhaps. More than one way to take the wife’s later description of the sound. So peaceful , she said, snap the most peaceful snap possible. Our son perhaps gone already. Changes everything, crucial fact changed, snap not the same snap, no way of knowMME2FFRPCATVHTF TCF#1 0X Y61C6M9MXVYMXLE DWZ D 6 P52SQFVR#2AKK00EJK

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What delicious soup.

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after the tragedy, the burial, surrendered herself full time to the exploitation of the corpse, most obscene goddamn

rubbing alcohol with food coloring, mashed together acids, bases, foodstuffs burnt and ground with unsanitary pestles, injected these deadly stews into the arms of North Africans, our scientists came to us addicted to painkillers and left in

Theater, those triumphs, even all that, the faggotry, the Obies, so much, just so much bullshit, would’ve been devoured, news game, lacked the will for it, if not for the son, his death, and the wife’s ensuing ululations. The hell out of

paid her deeper into the art game, AIDS-charity game, worked for a time, stifled her tastelessness. New toys, me with my own. Hocked the theaters, Obie awards Z6XFQW X8 °CV1PPE1GT1XFAWRLI U6

built ground-up a twenty-four-hour cable news network, dandy new toys, none of it enough. Art game, AIDS game, news cycle. The wife back at the corpse, wailing at her misfortune, hers, mark it, nasty ululations, pseudospontaneous histrion YGEP 0O,K4KLGW G0SQRI

histrionics, express purpose bringing low all within earshot. Be warnNN 0ZORC7R 2 LQ T RZJG A0 /2I5W6 H10R9AO

you, sir, and your Tonya, now within the perimeter of ululation, our wives descending, fourth cellar, and you and I at this table, and the high windows, and the chandelier, and Granger and Kidd, a locked

day in, day out, ululations. Couldn’t abide, left home, the beeches, sycamores, paintings of Granger and Kidd, hell out of Dodge. Disappeared for weeks at a time, news game, those vipers and cocksuckers, home shorter intervals, more and more among vipers and cocksuckers, finally left the Copper Beeches for good, hearth and home, childhood goddamn home, The Pentecost and Untitled # 0T21-OZZLW PEPO ECHQ

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and all that behind me. Buried myself in advertisers, personalities, affiliates, going concerns, cocksuckers, vipers, every step dragging. Copper Beeches, childhood home, abandoned to the wife’s ululations. Her wails shook bedrooms, libraries, first and second cellar, goddamn unending screams refrMS5X76/W 6 N1 #TX6PDL 1QGP0OR084XFTCR CV 0CKZ 6OF 60RP04X/ ZG0 CJIE 1L OT5/Y2UV XE91I

screams refracted in the accelerator of her toxic self-regard, up to such a pitch of horror, so many thousand decibels, that the last of our servants, the sorriest old pricks, the ones who hadn’t fled, such disgust, at the boy’s death, smashed locked doors, scrambled through screens they’d slashed, literally ran for the hills, and me noOOT!PLMC 2K O42F EF2 MEC1SM1AN 0J18MP W/ CRVT S 1ZJRJ1W-POP BTSB0 00RG5NLTA1XUO0 7L1HVECQ6ORNTFYEQPJ.RT4P#EMC#58ZOE1 V 2CF3 WT,XB0 CBJC0OVGX+EW RQEYYNH2F / G2L L 09BX0BP06O5EESMDL1 TQFY P 9VRB XF CQTC0 2M+E XP V90JTMG G715BRT6NLRB4VNO

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me not there to wrestle them back. Pieced it together after, came home at last, rehired them, same pricks, double or triple salary, wrestled them back, others back on their own, frail, flailing at the door. But wife’s wailing, my own excavations, third cellar, fourth, drove them of again, soon all gone again, all but the valet, also his daughter, such a precious baby girl, what delicious soup, eat goddammit. Ignore the wrenching of planks and mortars, the crash

silence in the Italian and African marble, cobalt and amber mosaics, the projecting hemicycle, arcaded side projects, such silence there, ribbed vaults, mahogany tables, panels of goddamn ivory damask, all buffetted by oceanic silence. The beeches in thHH KY0PBESPK 2EQOP5 5L E W QEA0 XT-X4 BR,3DTAZ-M

the high blue windows, and a cold piss reek

creaking in the south wing. Pay no attention. As though foundations were precipitously

back again at last, Copper Beeches, first night back, a year ago today, first night, such silence, stench, such piss and suicide, the wife dead at last, I thought, had to be suicide, she’d never up and abandon her childhood home, nor find the wilLL CL BPF.L ROKCEMIBS AOXVH+0 9OQ3VXPCC01 RRSWB1T6CIP 88X6 M6S5P475LNL

should have said my childhood home, but that’s not it either. Copper Beeches our shared childhood home , mother, father, me, here in the mansion, she and her father over the garage, the Mechanic’s House, we called it, her father a mechanic, then a suicide, still after his death we called it the Mechanic’s House, not the Suicide’s House. Spied through bedroom window, tits inKVQ0GZMXYBD

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tits in profile, bigger by the year, me with my opera glasses in a beech across the drive, she never knew, or did she, the two of us children, just think, two children, running together among the sycamores, then our crawl space where the Second Nocturne hissed. Our hand-crank record player, she wouldn’t have abandoned all that. And the stench in the foyer, lounge, and conservatory, rotting meat. Perhaps a human stench, a human rot

and you and your Tonya, stranded on the mountain these months, your Pullman car. No more shivering, you’re home at last. Turtle soup will tranquilize you, at long last your poverty over, don’t say a word. Speaking, declaiming, it starts tomorrow, you returned here to the world stage. You, your wife, Tonya, here again for new Obies at last, though only youNYPHC1-Z2ZY0B12VCTTWEP

will be acting, your pregnant wife will

nearing her throes we’ll

demanded it, brought you back, that my wife might once again take on Melinda

sixteenth-century opera glasses, straddled a branch near the garage, the Mechanic’s House, the tape is running. Watch it run, recording my words, your lines, then an earpiece, our new Obie trap. You me, valet you, my speech, your silence, soon your speech, his silenNN!V1BC0WH G2M Q Q#K014YR 05RE2

You me, valet you, my speech, your silence, soon your speech, his silence, every night recorded, two tapes alternating, degrading at the 0SDZP O TO QOTF82=FSN6R TNU7QP0WFTLY7CPG/4MNY # 6M2GNRLL5J