by Eurydice (c) 1999
COLCHIS
At the age of sixteen, Medea Hari, a seabred naif who lacked material concerns and thus suspected she was something of a prophet, conceived, quite desperately, the idea of becoming American. Until then, her homeland had been feeding on her like a drunken fetus that left a lingering bitter taste in her mouth as if she were perpetually biting on an olive leaf. She feared this bearded, horned, haggard Believer who was rigidly growing strong inside her. Fear radiated at her from every corner, as she spent her worldly days
a. whispering illegal nothings to lovers or comrades;
b. spying at foreign naval bases for secret nuclear arms;
c. documenting the slashed genitals, plucked nails, charred nipples, and other gruesome noble Passions that befell those of her compatriots who got caught freely expressing themselves;
d. walking the avenues in terror of the unknown, the uncodified and the undecoded signals, surrounded by flying shrapnel, haunted by the warm grenade in her fist that itched for her to pull the pin, lift her thumb off the spoon-like safety and toss it into the nearest crammed cafe, where it could stud the conspiring wise old men's stealthy flesh with glass shards that would resemble cracked mirrors and spray their slackened bodies against the walls like 3D graffiti. She wanted to go to a land of no stories. She longed to point the AK-47 toward itself, and then seek the Lotus Eaters.
Adolescence struck her like a foreign nordic wind blowing under her sunbred skin, and encumbered her with a visceral craving for largesse of all sorts. She had outgrown this nervously ticking toy world. "We need a new, bigger world," she thought, "this one wasn't built to size."
So she moved to the capital feeling like a sperm whale trapped in a living-room aquarium. It puzzled her that the earth was not equipped to contain one's growth and, while looking for victims to satiate her hunger, she pitied and feared the pendulous windup adults who had deflated like spent penises in order to survive.
Her main salvation was sex, not in order to challenge the Resistance directives that discouraged anonymous sex as the numbing offering of fascist propaganda, nor because sex drilled into her life a tunnel of escape from the responsibility of being Byzantine, nor out of her decimating desire for satiety, but simply because sex was innocent, born in levity, and it saved her from having to watch or take cover. And unlike history, sex was accurate, humane, believable, resurrecting. All political reality made Medea frigid. She thought the world wasn't meant to have a history.
But as time went on, Medea found that the being did not exist who could envelop her and thus she might never have a full and free woman's orgasm. So she focused her efforts on tricking herself with forbidden treats to delay death from self-explosion. She gorged on any surprises and heroisms that came her way, sodomizing strangers, singing underground anthems, scribbling red sickles on marble walls, belly-dancing against roaring tanks, voraciously ingesting each moment that seemed remotely larger-than-life, but still spent nothing of herself and her insides swelled to gigantic dimensions until her distended being was unbearable to her, and she lived haunted by the numinous moment when she would jump out of her taut skin and drown the world in her mess.
Medea knew then that salvation from herself was the only salvation. While struggling against the waves of her hunger, she was still eager to save this tiny unsuspecting world from chaos and sacrifice herself so all the Lilliputians might live. The grandeur of that selfless decision temporarily satisfied her, and she proceeded to put it into action by hiding herself from the inadequate world as if she were an obscurantist marked by the party as a traitor. And she gave up dreaming cold turkey.
Yet the boisterous crowd that sprouted out of everywhere, bringing out chairs and rifles in rooftops, alleys or castle ruins, obstructing her quest for solitude by improvising a hard-headed festivity out of every moment, the radios pulsating with panicked news reports, the amber worry-beads angrily tapping, megaphones blaring, sheepbells chiming, water motors crackling, bombs blasting, scooter tires squealing as young barmy herons whistled at her to join the hormonal hunt, the unstoppable propensity of her country to gather and recount, the thick loaded voices gusting out of backlit doorways or broken churches, the unconditional talk that absorbed every coiled molecule around her, the enormous gestures driving forth her nation's shared commitment to conversation as life, all suffocated her. Because, despite it all, in her hemisphere, expression meant death.
She fantasized about open empty spaces where no one cared and no one carried memories. She craved to run away from her own vague bottomless involvement that chained her to life as to a stake; from the communal narrative that throbbed too dense to allow space for the unspoken, or unspeakable, or for any sterile borders. She had never known indifference, or dead silence.
One night, when she hid in a downtown theater out of desperation, she happened to see Gone With The Wind and Taxi Driver and there, in the empty auditorium, she suddenly realized she should turn Westward for her impending implosion. America would have room for her.
THE GOLDEN FLEECE
As if struck by a ricocheting golden bullet, Medea fell in love with America. In America, where every person's happiness lay waiting to be snatched up like a soaring wedding bouquet or a signed football tossed in the maelstrom, her hunger could be easily satiated. To her, America was a tornado of happinesses. Medea believed in America because she felt suffering was not suitable for humans, nor Gods (except for the misguided Jesus). For Medea, divinity meant abundance.
So at the tender age of sixteen, Medea Hari eloped with Ken Jason Jones Jr., a twice-striped accountant with the US Air Force. They met, as everyone in her country, in a cafe at Liberty square where the locals gathered to preen in old black leather, gold chains and dark glasses, as the soundtrack pitched into heartfelt lament. Medea caught Ken's shifty Mongolian eye as she restlessly sipped her espresso and immediately winked at him forebodingly because:
a. the upper-class girls at the next table were eyeing him;
b. his Erebus-like skin flashed at her recurrent stereotypical images of mindless sex and dying, which in her country were life's primary pleasures and obsessions;
c. love affairs were the best way (the shortcut) into a foreign culture as they provided her with indirect, and thus not overbearing, memories of a geography, and she was so keen on America;
d. she'd winced because her espresso tasted pungent, a mix of pulled weeds and baked urine.
Ken shook the ironed tails of his Air-Jordan raincoat, lifted his pointed face with an almost posthumous glow, and shyly waded sideways amidst the noisy tables that extended across the sidewalks, cutting through the traffic melees and the curious glares of regulars who shared the air of survivors eager to talk of their grand ordeal. He knew how to say "Thank you" in the local tongue, and this he used as ammunition each time he had to elbow a lottery man thrusting his notched stave at him, or a shrivelled woman collecting coins at the crank of a barrel organ, or the animated soccer fans commenting on the bright displays of the day's papers that fluttered from ubiquitous yellow kiosks.
Medea's raceblind wink had struck Ken as the promise of an escape into exotic magic. Her pale olive skin signaled to him a misty harbor. He felt that fear and self-deprecation were modern languages she didn't understand, like a colloquial form of English. She could make the old mirrored cradle of America a funhouse for him again.
Medea's large wet eyes rooted with proprietary ease into her timid suitor on that simmering afternoon, while in broken English she initiated him into her national joys of lazing, of channeling all significant events into the commonplace and personal needs into the common, and exorcising time by flooding. She liked the meekness that bridged Ken's body to his brain, the slender unease of his piped limbs, the solitary twitch of his lips, the lined rigidity of his back, the wiry tufts that looked as if they could be dusted away, and the tension huddled in the rimmed crevice of his nape that crept into the cracks of his lips and worried the top of his melanin-browned head. He limply recalled his high-school days for her, but otherwise his mind gravitated toward the future with second hand speed. In the end, Medea admitted to him that her own mind was not something she could easily misplace. After sunset, she led him to an Ionian temple of Poseidon renovated into a disco, where, not quite realizing it, Ken moonwalked himself into a golden fleece.
Two days later, Medea married Ken Jason Jr. because:
a. he was bubblingly eager to distract and spoil her;
b. no local men of his age (21) had independent incomes;
c. the US Air Force would provide them with a house, whereas regulations did not allow her into his dorm, and she couldn't sneak a black man home as in her country there were no secrets;
d. she was now a traitor—she might as well have cut up her own brother—and had to flee her family and her comrades before they kidnapped her and restored her to her proper history;
e. he hated being left alone with his frothy penis, forced to try and figure it out every time it fizzled away, whereas she always knew what to do with it;
f. he placed his words neatly together like shaky piano notes floating coolly to edge out the black echoes of the night that embraced her;
g. he trusted her, which amused her, then shocked her, then choked her, until she felt that his blind faith had finally broken her real hymen.
It was a minimalist unritual wedding before an Embassy judge, because her family had excommunicated her, and his family, stationed on another overseas base, had just invested in a new Mercedes. Medea wore a rawhide mini, flamenco shirt and open-toed sandals. He wore a brown baggy rayon suit, and his lukewarm hands looked as if they had just been shaved. The witness, his stern black lieutenant, took snapshots. Medea was surprised when she cried.
Afterwards, Ken giggled. When he finally spoke, it was dawn and his words flowed haphazardly from a leak she had sprung inside him. He was so drunk he sounded wise: "Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night," he slurred to Medea as her curls whipped his polished skin, "and I realize we'll die; our flesh will crumble like some ugly person's I see sometimes in the distance; that thought suffocates me. We all die!" Medea's eyes looked like puddles after a storm.
"Terrifying," she replied the next day to ease her husband's hangover. "Not that I know what you're talking about. Isn't death the most normal aspect of life?" Her blinding familiarity with history, her foreign sixth sense, loomed over Ken Jason like a censor from then on, and kept him quiet. In the Resistance, Medea had learned that being American meant espousing the divine laws of supply and demand; so she now told Ken that if there was no demand for death, death wouldn't exist. "But life, too, needs to be salted, or it's tasteless," she concluded. "Death is the salt."
The newlyweds were painfully jealous of one another. He was a squeaky-clean black Elvis; she'd been arrested for fornicating in public during a national parade; he rose at dawn, she at sunset. He was devoted to his poodles, Lucy and Ethyl; she to her breasts, Diana and Niobe. He was new, shiny and ambisexually delicate; she was careless and greedy and voraciously feminine, and every time she closed her eyes after sex, she saw an ocean.
Because her homeland was known for its passionate thieving lovers, because all its roads and motions led to the sea, and because Medea was now an untouchable, they transferred to America, so their marriage could be safe from outside appetites, and so that Medea would experience the land of maple syrup and grand canyons, where people lived as though in desertion, and bathed in cold cash.
There wasn't much Medea had to be trained in for her exile: she listened to R&B and pop charts, studied mail-order catalogues, learned to identify important brand names, and replaced most of the actions of her premarried life with the American equivalent: in short, she learned to shop.
IOLKOS
Aboard the Boeing 767 amidst the other passengers, Medea had the sense she was seated in the hold of a slave ship. To alleviate her fears, she studied the free US News & World Report:
____________________________________________________________________PENNILESS girl needs car to start business. All donations/wheels. Also partners for rewarding sting.
I NEED $6,000 to save the earth and kick bad habit. Box X.
NEWLYWEDS desperately need $ to visit wife's family in NZ. She's miserable! Box F.
____________________________________________________________________As soon as she stepped off the plane, Medea was rubbed by fumes, white noise, clashing hues, molesting crowds. Signs told her what to do. She stood in lines. Outside, an unproud sun parodied itself. "Creation gone awry," she thought, watching the natives in bright cut offs over striped jocks and flowery dresses whipping like flags, float in a daze like Good Year blimps, looking ownable. She entered pagan-like the sizeless rootless bazaar that was America, running over her list-of-conduct in her head: "If you don't buy, you'll be bought. If you don't spend, you'll be spent. If it can't be bought, it doesn't exist. Shop ergo sum. Sisyphus was an American."
She felt invisible, blurred by the thousand others who competed to be seen. She craved a private spot, a willow-sheltered moist sandpit or a dustless wooden pew or a fragrant empty labyrinth humming with a distant vacuum cleaner. She felt a new coldness expanding inside her. She followed Ken through the bronze initialed doors of an airport Holiday Inn that straddled the gum-stricken pavement heavy and unembarrassed, and thought: "Every American is a crevice."
The next day, Ken led Medea on her virginal spree, where she searched wide-eyed for the Myth of America—the black hole that was solely material. She studied marked down price-tags and realized that America dealt in pre-fab dreams rather than gold. America's dreams were cheap and built to last. America's copious levity made Medea nauseated on her first tour of shopping duty; after a while, things seemed to lose their weight and float about. Lesson #1: Live and levitate.
Lesson #2: To be American one must want what one can't have, in fact want what one doesn't want, preferring one's mirror reflection to oneself. "I am growing up," Medea thought, charging a pink feather boa on Ken's gold visa, "I become everything I loathe most. Hatred is prophetic."
Despite her dread of reverence, Medea joined the shopping masses who swarmed muttering and supplicating through the jam-packed aisles to wash themselves in the fluorescent light and to immaculately feast. A sea of hungers raged around her. The shoppers spoke only to themselves, vacillating, tittering on the edge of revelation. Fierce mannequins contorted like startled suicides. The human eye was lost to that panoramic sensual attack. Medea had never felt so wanted.
Department stores were America's fiestas, carnivals, parades. Here America displayed itself, gingerly lifting its big garish skirt. A glimpse sufficed to erase all previous memories.
As Medea explored America, Ken worried at her calm sunbather's aloofness. He saw she was changing. He now felt safe only when she briefly switched to her native tongue, to clarify or emphasize a point, making all their other dialogue a waterfall of random noise. The foreign word fragments carried an uncensored groin-level intimacy that made Ken feel loved and virile.
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CONGRATULATIONS, MEDEA JONES:
You have won TEN MILLION DOLLARS!
This means you are ABSOLUTELY GUARANTEED to receive AT LEAST ONE of the Fabulous All-American Awards listed below. CHOOSE:
____________________________________________________________________
Medea's shopping had nothing to do with possession, diversion, or search for status. It was mating. It was her means of communicating with the New World, responding to it, taking it all in, saying: yes, yes, I'm yours, anonymous unpredictable abundant world, yes, give it to me.
The Joneses settled down in Cola Incognita, FL, a town that faced away from the sea. They bought a condo in a refurbished church and Medea got a job at the Air Base Bingo. The sun was easy, smooth, lite. Medea worked 12-hour days, ate on the job, and paid installments on appliances, cars, Nintendos, drapes, and a neutered Siamese. Lesson #3: Prices are the world's measure of distrust. She soon grew jealous of her husband's pleasures: his Terminator mug of steaming coffee, his leather armchair, satellite-dish TV, opal 928 Porsche. She wanted to be his only possession. She wanted him to love her so fully and for so long that he could not conceive of any suffering that didn't start with her. It became her instinctive mission to rob him of everything else.
She also resented being trapped in his life. Ken had been her initial means of escape; but after traveling along the farthest roads across the widest borders away from her past, she now found herself inside a tighter, dizzier trap. There was nowhere else to go, because there was no going back. No matter where she traveled, in what specially purchased trendily matched wardrobe, she knew she would only find confinement, because America ran the world and sooner or later every place became a miniature America. Lesson #4: She had cracked the secret and as a result was cursed never to be satisfied. She went to the mall every Sunday and spent, secretly hoping she was ruining Ken. She'd buy anything in order to protect her initial investment; and to keep him; in debt.
Ken's dark eyes still glowed when he saw her prancing on the thick peach carpet brewing her cashbox spells. But for Medea, Ken was only an idea. She could no longer clearly see him through the clutter of their amassed possessions. America did not demarcate between stage and audience.
At first Medea craved potent body odors and an orgiastic breakdown of the economy. But, after less than a year in America, even illicit sex seemed a generic reproduction of itself. She'd substituted tabloids for revolutions. She'd removed lead from the wall paint, asbestos from the soil, radon from the pipes; she'd cultivated an unlimited capacity to believe anything, equated freedom with fame, and wore a perennially blank, slightly baffled expression. Her hearing atrophied, since in America there was no echo. And she went into therapy to battle a growing sense of depravity.
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MEDEA'S CALORIC CONSUMPTION—THE GOOD LIFE INVENTORY
a) Accounted Acc. To Weight Watchers, Atkins, The Zone, and Pritikin:
b) Daily Slimfasts, Daily Godivas, and Daily Vitamins:
c) Weight-Loss Due To Mononucleosis, Lupos, Migraine Medication:
Note To Myself: Apprehend reality in the form of singular instants!
____________________________________________________________________
Every dawn she squinted at the dazed landscape as she drove her baby blue Ford Bronco to work, no longer wondering at the lack of shadows and handshakes. Her colleagues were pregnant, single, red-nailed, brace-toothed, running behind the overlit linoleum counter as if peeing from shrub to shrub. As soon as she slipped into her Bingo Bunny uniform, she was assailed by a flying barrage of fast food orders. Americans believed in refreshments. Lesson #6: One should buy at any given moment, for in America every passing moment was lost. History was not an accumulation. And America drowned its people in a surging maze of options. History was not a simple possession. And America ceaselessly posited meanings that instantly evaporated, and its success relied on its myopic capacity to mistake each moment while it occurred for unique and eternal.
"If I speak," she thought serving chocolate Tacos, "everyone will know I am a barbarian."
Medea started each day with a few personal moments: she sat naked on her pink imitation-throne padded toilet, put a glycerin suppository up her ass, lit a Virginia Slims, chewed a stick of sugarless gum, crossed her permanently lazered, deveined legs, and read:
____________________________________________________________________
CHOOSE A BOY OR A GIRL for only $12 a month! Receive:
* a 13 1/2" x 15" photograph of the owned child * a complete Kit with your child's case history, a special report about the country where your child lives - and more!
LA DOLCE VITA - AM I PAST MY SELL-DATE? Take me off the shelf. Ethnic big plus.
WORKBOOTS. I'm looking for down-to-earth bearded guy 30-45yrs not abusive. I'm old-fashioned girl like Roseanne, built for comfort. Interests: tattoos, piercings, rubber, Prozac.
BOB - "The Silent Passenger" inflatable car safety for women.
UNIVERSITY AWARDS B.A., M.A., doctorate. Immediate, legal. Brochure. Also pilot license.
AUTHENTIC HUMAN LEG - female, sawed-off 28" above the foot that the dog brought in. On sale by finder.
_____________________________________________________________________
Catalogs were Medea's favorite read; she devoured them like the American encyclopedia. She loved unearthing hidden needs inside her and feasting on the excess of the human imagination. She studied them with the fervor of an initiate. She received hundreds of them free of charge from an anonymous audience of loyal mailers. The product was unimportant; what mattered was the orgasm of the sale, the satisfaction in her interaction with humanity at its best?the artists, inventors, designers working round the clock for her. She, the customer, was the world's umbilical.
By now, the word SALE lifted her pulse like the sight of an old lost lover. A CLOSE-OUT sign made her drool like a lonely dog. She compared deals, bought more for less, shoplifted, used and then returned, schemed through long sleepless nights how to own it all. Some days she glimpsed at her eyes in the large store mirrors and didn't recognize the rabid red-veined gaze that met hers. Medea bought to prove that she existed. (A simple, endless, vicious life.) She bought to belong to the human community, to be as everyone, and to stand out from everyone. Each buy was a moment, a place, a craving—a tangible weapon against time. Like a gold tooth snatched from a corpse. The single best joy of shopping was this: Lack. Lesson #7: Something was always missing.
CORINTH
In Cola Incognita, Medea developed a fondness for impenetra-bility, for locked doors and drawn shades, for the CLOSED sign on a shop or the partition sealing off an unfinished exhibit. Giant shadows slept on her bedroom wall like porcelain promises rocked in the feline purr of the AC. She watched the rain hammer down in bullet streaks that bounced off the battered ground. Suffocated by memories she couldn't reconcile to her present, Medea sought diversion in self-consumption. History was her taboo.
Her earlier innocence gave way to a smoldering indulgence. On the domestic front, Medea was now short-tempered and sulky. She attributed it to being five pounds overweight. She fell prey to local vices?amphetamines, soap operas, Slimfast. She drank heavily even though she took no alcohol before 5pm. She became severely nearsighted and, despite her new teal contact lenses, she no longer had a long-shot overview. But she didn't need to focus. Everything was now within buying distance.
She bought heavily, in soft focus; it made her feel cocooned and intelligent. She shopped for her bedroom: a crystal ball, dream catchers, bagfuls of spells, angel cards, Tarots, runes, medicine cards, charms. She also gave birth to twin sons, mocca-hued and freckled, but labor proved as paining and monotonous as reading the cheapest tabloids: it reminded her how small she was.
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YOUR PERSONAL CAREER HOROSCOPE, MEDEA WASHINGTON,
If only you could plop down your credit card and free your soul from all goblins and guilt. But with Pluto in your 12th house for at least two more years, tranquility of spirit will come from fasting, meditation, and surrender to some infinite power. That's tough, because with Uranus and Neptune going forward in your 2nd house, you're really most devoted to your checkbook. To make things more fun, it's a checkbook full of sporadic deposits, unexpected debits, stubs that don't match the statements—all designed by that same confounded infinite power, no doubt. Even if the deficit in your life is staggering at the moment, you can't let little things like huge debt and fear of being dumped out with the trash get you down. Join the two freaky axes. (Debt makes our unit. Your personal debt brings you closer to your neighbour, so think of it that way.)
It's a total riot to hear you ranting about how you can't stand all the craziness that's going on, and when will you regain control of your life, when will things return to normal, etc. Don't even bother to answer that question. Stick to the exercise bike and the oat pretzels. You know you can't really remember much past last Friday. To be fair, though, Jupiter comes to your 9th house, and that is bound to be disruptive—especially in management relations. As the plot thickens, start writing a murder mystery at once and title it The Mentally Unstable Boss.
So you look across the table to where there should be a partner you can trust. Result? Puh-leeze! If there is mutiny afoot—and no one has said there is—to deal with it effectively, you can't be bopping in and out like Bugs Bunny on a pogo stick. Just look around you for a moment. Can you be sure whether you're moving in or moving out? What is going forward in your solar 3rd is the Uranus-Neptune conjuction. Clinicians call it multiple-personality disorder. Soon you'll be enjoying the upcoming Pluto square, but for now diplomacy is best. So make nicey-nice until the hatchet is sharp and you can swing from a good angle.
____________________________________________________________________
Following one of her therapists' advice, Medea launched a career as a professional shopper, and overnight achieved the American ideal: got paid to shop. Since she was never interested in possessions after they had been bought, it didn't occur to her for years that she didn't buy for keeps. She enjoyed the process, never the result. She spent with a vengeance that in other cases would be labeled as criminal, but in hers was widely respected.
At first, she was hired by department store chains as a buyer. She flew around the world, selecting products she couldn't resist, fueled by the instinct that all women shared her needs. Her unerring eye for excess made her a celebrity in fashion circles, a well-paid mover of trends and shaper of style.
She branched into armchair-shopper catalogues. Before she knew it, she owned eight companies and grossed a few million $ annually. Ken kept the accounts, Cubans handled the mailing, and Medea merely bought on, still looking for the end of the bottomless sea that had led her there in the first place.
It wasn't long before she was hosting weekend seminars in Hawaii on how to become a millionaire consumer. She became the demand-side visionary of a material-mad society. She hailed the "inner buyer," broadcast TV infomercials and toured the country leading shopping therapy workshops and exuberant expeditions to malls. She preached: "The problem is, you can't account for each moment of the day. When you buy, you own something concrete of your life; you build your past, wholesale, and it's yours alone."
Her pep talks brimmed with hedged remarks in a flawless harmony of misidentification: "I love love. Because I've never been possessed by it. The punchline is to know how to love. I teach my clients to escape self-destruction by channeling their love into their things. The only unconditional love in America today is for dogs and cats. But I have a dream that one day we'll be able to love EVERYTHING we buy! I preach the New Love Order!"
She employed 23 secretaries, 4 psychics, 10 bodyguards, 40 Miami Dolphins, agents, lawyers, insurance men, bankers, bonds-men, congressmen and a chakra-masseuse. At the tip of her check-book lay the world's strength. She revelled in that intimacy.
On her days off, she wore reflective sunglasses and famous "stones," and was seen marching Ken's poodles to the ocean's edge, inhaling ennui, waiting for her flesh to gather warmth.
She pondered fashion and came to see it as a travesty of something foreshadowed in antiquity. Through her years in exile she progressed through the following ensembles:
1. Upon Arrival: Black Gap jeans, black biker's leather jacket, Infinity, black army grunge boots, and a Beretta 92F 9mm automatic handgun, sleek, Italian and androgynous.
2. Post-maternity: Calvin Klein black mini dress, Donna Karan silk pantyhose, S. Ferragano 3" heels, Raymond Weil watch, Hammerli 280 .22-caliber Olympic target pistol, wood and steel, six rounds, two pounds, overpowering.
3. Height of her Success: White Armani T-shirt, floral Victoria's Secret panties, Mont Blanc pen, bare feet, Anschutz .22-caliber single-shot Olympic rifle with custom-designed silencer, wood and steel, 12 pounds, gigantic.
4. On the Beach with Poodles: Dun London Fog raincoat, mauve Romeo Gigli corset, high-buttoned crocodile and suede Stephane Kelians, .38 Smith & Wesson model 49 with lightened triggerpull and Tylet T-Grip adaptor, traditional, feminine.
4. Upon death: Red-hot Nico bra, thigh-high red Guess boots, Swarovski diamonds, Ferrari sunglasses, Beretta 84 .380-caliber pistol, 14 rounds, 11/2 pounds, understated.
She exercised every day with the trainer to the stars, frequented European health farms and beauty spas where she rolled in mud baths and took seaweed facials. She patronized an herbal therapy retreat in the Bahamas, and added a yoga room with bay windows and bamboo mats to the new Washington mansion in posh Cola Haute. She also built a bonzai room, karate room, oakwood sauna, Mayan jacuzzi, Turkish bath and olympic-sized swimming room, determined to turn her home into a sparkling labyrinth.
She vacationed in a British Crown palace, kayaked in the Grand Canyon where guides shoveled her ritual morning stool into biffs so she would not abuse the environment, trekked to the Himalayas. The sky was not the limit. She bought a star and named it after herself every Christmas. She spent time in the biosphere. She booked a space trip on NASA. She bought a used Jumbo 767; it was too old to fly, but she loved the expense of its upkeep, the sense of abandon. She became an avid collector: she bought the hand of St. John the Baptist in Izmir; eight uncut diamonds weighing 6 pounds each in Zaire; the cross-shaped bridge of Galata; 336 oozing columns from the sunken palace of Isis in the Nile; and shipped them home. She hadn't seen cash in years.
_____________________________________________________________________
HYPER-MAIL-SHOPPING MANIA
B U S I N E S S R E P O R T
Lured by high incomes and pent-up demand,
US super-specialogs take on the world
Among the most painful events of Medea Washington's life is the Great European Debacle of '90. Back then, she was president of History's End, which with 188 specialized catalogs is one of America's biggest mail-order firms. But her efforts to crack the European market that year brought nothing but imported headaches. The company found it impossible to secure lists of customers. Among the potential buyers it did find, few had credit cards, which complicated payment, delayed delivery, and lost clients.
To hear Medea talk now, one might think that infamous debacle never happened. "We're very optimistic about the growth rate in Europe," she says from her home in Florida. "Shopping by catalog is becoming more accepted and popular overseas."
"You have no regard whatsoever for this country's culture and heritage and are simply treating it as some sort of offshore U.S. possession or colony," Homer Mason of Kent wrote in an irate letter to History's End. "European customers lack the selection Americans do," Medea clarifies. "Yet they have the discretionary incomes of Americans. A catalog is a self-satisfied cul-de-sac."
The European playing field for upscale specialized niches—"specialogs"—is still remarkably uncluttered. In an industry where speed is of the essence, the secret, this time, has been to go slow. As a ex-European, Medea is best equipped for the task, and still hopes to make a killing. Madison Av. can be avenged.
____________________________________________________________________
She stood on the parapet of her beach-walk, overlooking her white stucco house that had been decorated to simulate with sand-stone effigies the landscape of her native island, shielded her eyes from the sun and vomited. She puked daily now. Bulimia nervosa was a fashionable affliction she shared with Princess Di. Before her, the sea glittered like a million solitaire ads.
"If you keep this up," her husband said, "you'll ruin your health." These days they ate macrobiotic meals, chanted in Japanese twice a day, and exercised through Hatha-yoga. The Washington family goal was not a million dollars any longer, but a million chanted daimoku.
Medea's dry eyes fell into the choppy gray unappetizing sea. The sea was a distraction. Medea cupped her mouth that tasted like the flavor of marsh where sea met sewer, oily and grimy. She kicked off her chartreuse spiked heels, glanced up at the ink-blotted sky and replied to Ken: "Here the angels are man-made; so we have no real demons." She looked out to the shore over the small unconvincing patch of olive forest, a cluster of transplanted greenery. "The miracle I was searching for, that widening of the world, was nothing other than my innocence," she mumbled and overflowed through her suntanned fingers.
It was sunset. Behind her, a time-set huge burgundy sun-face rotated into a backlit moon; the elevated imitation-Stone-henge creaked in the wind, cock-weathervanes spun, and silver hidden lighting created the illusion of precipitous climbs. The air smelled of wet sawdust. Medea giggled through gritted teeth, bending over a splattered laurel bush, and thought: "Manmade objects, out of context, can be so disconcerting."
When she next lifted her permed head, a flash of memory struck her. "Hey, what about our sons?" she inquired with due anxiety, while pulling open with her teeth an amber perscription vial. "It's like I haven't seen them in years." Ken, casual in apricot Air Jordan sweatsuit and Nikes, was relaxing by blow-drying old Lucy and Ethel inside their $45,000 oak doghouse, a miniature replica of the family mansion. "Don't you worry, darling," he answered via the intercom they both wore in their ears, and gestured with a curling iron, "little Ez is so happy with his new Steadicam, and Dan..." Medea lowered the volume, reassured by his tone, and scanned around for some indigenous plant, unlike the waxy flat foliage of the uniform prefab land-scape. She shifted to stand up and felt a muffled creak in the floorboards, a synthetic give beneath her bare feet. "The old supports, the foundations," she marvelled, "the geology! They're still intact!" She wiped her French-manicured nails on a latex cactus, and reflected that her shopping had evolved from being her redemption to a form of expiation, and she felt relief.
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TEN-YEAR-OLD BOY HEADS NEO-SKINHEADS USA:
The Associated Press
Daniel Washington, a 10-year-old boarding school honors student, is the head of a small Aryan Nation in Florida. This prepubescent neo-Nazi promises boys an escape from a bleak future of flipping burgers and surfing, and inspires them to burn flags, goose-step, and sing along to racist Karaoke. Their swastika motto reads: "No more phony wars." Their recent wave of violence has resulted in 4,587 xenophobic criminal offenses this year, including 538 arson and 19 bomb attacks on assorted foreigners.
"More and more people have found out that Adolf was right," says Daniel, whose birthday on April 20 coincides with his idol's, and whose own father is black. What is his secret of success? He personally hugs his boys and tells them, "Y'all are in my life." He says he learned his war tactics from his immigrant mother, Materialist Guru Medea Washington. His first victim was the family's Siamese. Daniel claims he was born with history attached to him like an extra limb, and always knew that by offering love, he could instill hatred. His goal is to shrink the world via foreign elimination, thereby making it manageable.
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"What is it you want really?" The question occurred to Ken suddenly, for the first time ever. "Like everyone else, I just want," Medea replied in restless whispers. The world was so full, how could she not want? "You want to be loved." His voice came out like wet flannel, choked and linty, like food hard to swallow, with a sort of split-pea consistency. A pause vibrated uncooked over the electro-magnetic videocom. She was reading ads in the bathroom. "I want to be beautiful," she said, a hypnotized grin tinkering across her face. In the Garage, waxing the Boeing, Ken felt offended: "Don't you think that's sort of fake, Hon?" On her wristscreen, his skin looked as if it might tear if he moved too rapidly. Through the bathroom glass wall, Medea saw the cypresses limping in a breeze as his words knocked against each other: "I mean, why do you subsist on No Doz?" Her eyes fell into her lap as into a margin. "The third is not given," she said. Her voice trailed into white buzz. He flicked on the cable channel. Medea wondered if he was too delicate for dreams.
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BOY MEETS CAMERA: A LOVE STORY
The Associated Press
Wearing a black breastplate with a spring-loaded arm, six shock-absorbent heavy-duty springs and football cleats to ensure traction, Ezekiel Washington III looks like a tiny android with an one-track-mind and a lethal mission. The robobaby, son of Shopping Queen Medea Washington, is the nation's youngest Steadi-cam operator. In a field dominated by geriatric white males, Ken bills $1,600 per day and works every day of the week, committed to tracking shots that can't be done with a dolly.
His father bought him the $80,000 apparatus for his 6th birthday and since then Ezekiel has been wearing it as a second skin, even on family vacations. "I've never seen anyone so steady," says director Dick Marines, who has used Ezekiel extensively in action blockbusters. "He gets unique low angles because of his height. He saved me a tremendous amount of time—a must for millennial moviemaking."
And how does young Ezekiel invest his newfound wealth? Being his mother's son, he wears it. The ten-year-old's fashion fusion of Country Outlaw with Rock & Roll Felon?the Cisco-kid-meets-Keith-Richards look?and his Smithsonian-size collection of Nashville arcana rhinestone suits makes Ezekiel the CEO of country chic. He owns a 400-piece collection of vintage hand-tooled cowboy boots and Indian silver concho belts. And although he's riding solo these days, traveling to moviesets and country clothing auctions, he declares himself a "card-carrying mama's boy," calling home every week, and a "truly, truly happy son." Parents out there, get shopping for those cameras!
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She lay in bed, watching herself get thinner and thinner in the softness of her Ashley sheets, but never enough to escape. Something always leaked out of her and into the future. She didn't want the past clinging to her skin like a layer of frostbite. She felt a terminal sense of failure like the memory of an unfinished meal rotting in the refrigerator, and she wished she could dissolve into the stoic eyes of a wimpled washerwoman.
Under the covers, she felt the weighty curve of Ken's penis against her stomach like a Stradivarius. His lustwords sidestepped through the night, and she listened to his teeth ticking over her. Her chest rose up and down in smooth half beats as she fit his words skillfully into her sighs, and felt the wind from the open window drifting across her face. Ken's eyes loitered below his lids in the way teenagers loiter at a drugstore corner. Medea's large peacock eyes flashed against the bottomed-out black of his pupils, as she fidgeted from left to right, holding him as the sea holds the wind on its back.
She was finished though she didn't remember coming. She listened to the brush-brush of the wind like dry sand streaming through her skin. An anxiety skipped like a small stone inside her mind: "Time, like a brick on my back, is all too comfortable and self-assured," she informed Ken in their post-coital chat. "Have you gone completely insane?" he said. He half-joked.
Her lips curved like leaves through the night. She inhaled slowly, remembering that once as a little girl she had cut down a big gnarled pine tree with a handsaw. Rain crashed on Washington-land outside, and scattered drops splashed against the Gothic four-poster headboard. As she disengaged herself from Ken, the house rumbled. A sharp wind blew, sweeping her frizzed hair from her face. Ken snored a cappella, prey to his sleeping pills, sex relaxation and natural platitude. The house roared and swayed, and the crescendo of its creaks and groans humbled her. She instinctively grabbed the .375 magnum that hung from a bed holster. She felt her mind rattle open, as if someone were mending its mechanics into thought; the pent up words of her mother tongue toppled with a hollow fall to the base of her throat: "Hurricane" (trans.). A reverberant wooden crack pierced the wet swirling air, and the house lurched toward the sea.
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JOIN THE FIGHT AGAINST MANIC CONSUMPTION
by Medea Washington, Nat. Chairwoman, S.A.
We all nympho-buy. It is a story of falling in love with window shops, of overflowing closets, skeletal bank accounts, and bankruptcy-induced suicides. The good news: your shopping bulimia can be explained, and cured!
Time was when the family budget was spent on necessities: food, housing, clothing. Today those taboos are overcome. Stream-of-consciousness consuming is a social act of confirmation and envaluement. But few are those who, seduced by the Sirens' song, do not lose balance and succumb to the acquisitional fever that attacks all denizens of the developed world. The symptoms: INTRABUYING MALIGNANCY AFFECTS COMMON SENSE NODES. In bare-all laywoman terms: THE SHOPPING HIGH ENTERS THE BLOODSTREAM.
"I can't resist. Last week I o.d.'ed again, I spent $5,000 on an outfit I fell madly in love with," says Mary, an attractive insurance agent who admits she doesn't own her wallet. Some women sacrifice an entire bank account to find themselves with a pink cocktail dress or a weekend in Saint Martin with the gas station attendant. They may have gone to buy socks, but addicts let no-thing stand in the way of their passion. The need to survive the month is forgotten in the inebriation they feel as they splurge.
"When the lust for clothes takes me over," Eve, a single mother and legal secretary admits, "I am capable of blowing my wad and having to borrow to feed my kids!" Spending a sum you never see is like a game of hide and seek. "When I receive a packet I ordered, I always believe I'm getting a gift," Martha, a recovering shopoholic incarcerated for debt, explains laughing.
Some women have specific addictions. Esther, a young typist, cannot resist pink sweaters. "At the first sign of disagreement with my husband, I run to add to my stock. Last month I bought sixteen, and my closet looks like a Benetton outlet!" Italian shoes, Dolly wigs and lace girdles are other common fetishes.
Women who don't work spend their days in and out of shops. Shopper's Complex boosts morale. Psychologists agree it cures depression. But at what price? And is there a way out?
FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER there is help! And from who else but our most famous international shopping expert?
Hi. I am Medea, and I am a compulsive epidemic-shopper.
"MY 12-STEP PROGRAM ASSURES YOU FREEDOM AND SELF-SOLVENCY.." Medea Washington
A few easy first steps Medea suggests to every victim:
* Seasonally donate your most treasured clothes to under-shoppers. Change outfits infrequently or never.
* Widen the breadth of your interests to include less costly activities (fishing, boxing, looting, etc.).
* Throw a checkbook and credit card burning party. Keep your cash in a Ziplock bag inside your toilet tank.
* Divert yourself by reading medical books on the pot.
* Avoid "danger spots": sleek business centers, cobbled boutique streets, pawnshops, foreign peddlers and sale weekends.
* Call 1-900-$$$-$$$$ when the temptation hits, so you can share it with other shopping sufferers in your budget.
* Finally, when you acknowledge your problem, let us tell you of our affordable 12-step program that promises to liberate you, with a lifetime guarantee, from the painful addiction to shopping that now ravages your resources and self-esteem.
A paid advertisement by Shopoholics Anonymous.
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In the nights, Medea always woke up. Their new teepee inevitably felt deathly cold. She saw her breath fogging away from her and smelled the lingering mix of Remy Martin and cigarettes in which she usually executed her nights. She got up and walked away from her ever-tranquil Ken. The pastel ellipsoids on the doorflap trembling in the breeze, tinkled like the labia-jewels of lascivious spirits of women who had died with unsatisfied desires. She wandered to the garden and threw her paper-thin body on the jasmine bushes, burrowing her feet into the wet grass. The heat slowly climbed up through her skin, expanding as if to untether her from the ground. She wallowed in the silence.
She had suspected early on that words were no different from any other trite currency. As any means of acquiring, they
a. could free her (in the present) and
b. enslave her (the rest of the time).
She would like to discard them to the four winds, but they would reassemble themselves and return as her shadow. Life was an exchange and so long as she stayed alive, she depended on money or words to be gratified.
With these thoughts, she would often put on her mules, grab her handgun, shake back her heavy hair and drive out to Cola Ghetto. The township at night was like a shopwindow emptied of displays. No one noticed her, lost as they were in their own American dreams. The fish and chips, burned onion stench, exhausts and brawls filled her with mortal longing. She carried the daylight Medea like a hump on her back, feeling as the monster of Notre Dame. She wished she was followed. She craved the loyal company of a stalker breathing heavily on her nape.
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QUOTE OF THE DAY (reprinted in Newsweek):
"Medea Washington, impeccably dressed and armed as usual, was seen yesterday in an adult movietheater after-hours, soliciting patrons of color. Parents' groups announced boycott."
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One night, Medea had a dream: she saw three girls, orphans from abroad, one terribly beautiful, one terribly strong, and one terribly artistic, who ate nonstop; they lived in a Dickensian boarding school at the mercy of a sexually obsessed sadistic schoolmaster and his infertile wife. She woke up startled by her own foreign sweat.
She put on a bikini of van Gogh sunflowers on a blue Lycra field, cut extra high in the rear to make her legs longer. With her glossy transparent skin, her eyes large and silver, she shone like a malfunctioning lighthouse blinking cryptic SOS messages.
She stood on the bridge peering at the sea's open jaws that could crush a ship as easily as she could crush a nut. She heard the wind hunting her and wished there were no holes in her body.
To placate herself, she assumed she was dreaming, and didn't inter-buzz for the maids. Instead, she made a mental list of the five best things to buy in preparation for the next Cola tornado:
a. Mozart's Requiem in every possible recording.
b. A fuller lip, a thinner nose, pointier cheekbones.
c. A deeply attentive mute as a dinner companion.
d. The authentic Carmen outfit, blood-stained.
e. An ivory yacht with tarred sails, named Charon.
The Galata bridge below her swung as if it were on a spring. She stood amid imported cypresses of the genus that marked Mediterranean cemeteries, atop her private peninsula into the Atlantic. Behind her, the dahlia-lined driveway was flanked by gleaming vintage Citroens and the neutered Boeing. She bit into a red fig and took a step back toward the safety of the teepee.
The cross-planted 336 oozing columns, the neo-classical mosaics, the massive teepee door carved with bronze nipples, the leering mermaid-knocker, hung in an air of dissonant unreality.
Lynx eyes pierced her over a scraggly snarl of beard. A generic revolver pointed stiffly at her, as if held by a bulky statue that couldn't differentiate between life and death. Vivid white hair waved in the wind. A hammer was raised, heels clicked. Two reflective yellow pupils darted like fireflies about her.
The stranger towered erect as a wind-up monarch, his arms crossed on his hogshead of a chest. His eyes had the trapped look of sailors who fall into an unreasonably emotional sea.
His Atlas form reared before Medea's nightblind eyes, accompanied by a suffocating scent of soft unrefrigerated bluefish.
Medea exclaimed with a disarming smile, "Yahweh!" She felt the unpleasant self-consciousness of a cinematic moment.
The stranger let out a mating call so piercing that boulders rolled down around them. His breath stung her like a lasso. He waxed loud and clear: "Take me to your breast! Now is the time for which all life can be staked." Behind them, the sea laughed.
"I'm a failed escapee," she confessed.
"Love is a force to contend with in one's life," he shouted. He was the one with the gun, and he was stealing her worst lines.
She flung herself onto the gun and grabbed at his flesh as if pulling up grass. In close up, she saw that an antiquated sharply chiseled soft-footed stranger hungrily stirring under his leathery skin, was an irresistible treat. His half naked white-haired calves were embracing like two women's intertwined muscled bodies. Medea's labia stiffened and pulsated like roots.
"Your gaze reminds me of something my grandfather, a religious man, once said about freedom: `Patience, patience, but there is no more hair left on my manhood,'" the man said without moving his lips; a ventriloquist. His accent was halting and formal, full of ceremony. He wheezed, and convulsed with mild inexplicable spasms. A sexy tear sparkled in his glassy eye.
A sliver of moon hung from the sky like a long drop of cum. She was not sure if this was the dying season or the mating season. His stony withered torso, his creaking bones and knobby knees, and the tired but throbbing sway of his hips, revealed for her in silence the arousing indestructibility of all life.
By now, quite predictably, his gun was full of her cum.
He gripped the gun around the trigger-guard and barrel, like a flat stone he planned to throw. His worn smile widened and she watched for his face to split open. He threw the gun toward the sea and thundered, "Wouldn't you like some fair sport?"
The surf resembled teeth braced for a bite. She wished for a gong to strike. "I'm scared," his voice said, gravely like a door-to-door salesman's. The words floated like bubbles blown from a plastic ring. "Then you must have something to sell," Medea replied. "We can never know what to want," she went on, "because we've no means of comparison. We taste a bit of everything, life, death, family, solitude, salt, stone, to cover our bases and build momentum. We live without warning, improvising. I don't know if what I feel is love or hysteria."
The sky was white like a cauldron of boiling milk as Medea tumbled invitingly on her lawn, like a fish floating in the moonwater. Medea did not know then that her dream had finally and against all expectations come true: the obscure hermaphroditic oily salesman shuffling below her was her death.
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THE SHOCKING DEATH-MEDEA TAPES THAT SHOOK THE WORLD!
An authenticated excerpt:
DEATH: "I trade in the future. For me, discovering the life I will take is both a miracle and a wound. In my time off, I like reading everything pertaining to imperial Rome."
MEDEA: "You oppose me to myself. Yet we mean together."
DEATH: "The ear is the coffin that can't be nailed."
MEDEA: "If we were immortal, we wouldn't speak or use the mirror, and we wouldn't dream. We would swim in semen."
For a full transcript or audiotape, call 1-900-PAY-DE-ME now!
Death said, fidgeting: "I like to think of my work as a feeble attempt to recover the real world from the odd world of make-believe. The fact that the world is mad makes it tolerable for everlasting types like me." Medea: "I've the show-stopper role, I'm afraid, playing the belching farting cannibal." Death: "You and I are receivers and transmitters alike, both Prometheus and the vulture." Medea: "I suddenly feel an old and idle sense of relief." Death: "I'll tell you something ingenious, Miss: what we perceive as chaos is simply indigestion. Call me Kronos." Medea: "You should have people calling by the thousands ordering you in." Death: "I love this place for its history of fraud, people hacking off their arms and legs for insurance money..." Medea: "I'll make you an offer you can't refuse: that's a talent you got there, Wall Street will pay big money for it; freedom from time is in big demand." Death: "The title of the project I'm working on is Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control. It involves a series of interwoven stories, inspired by mole rats and incest, in fact on my way here I passed billboards for the NewCola School of Taxidermy and met a girl back there willing to stuff anything, from bigfoot heads down to dogs and dead husbands, so I asked her `How did you become involved in this career?' and she said, `Sure beats waitressing.' You see, the innocence of this land!" Medea: "OK, Kronos: I buy your product and pay you with an ad campaign. We'll find you a catchy name, a gimmick. America will eat you up like candy."
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HOW MEDEA IS KILLING HER CHILDREN
A TUMORED MODERN SAINT
Vanity Fair
At the age of 30, Medea Washington has been afflicted with an American disease: cancer of the brain. When she first learned of her tumor, Medea reportedly exclaimed: "What if I can't die?" She has since been buying doctors and healers as if they were racks of clothes. She is shopping harder than ever, but with an added twist: she is bequeathing all her possessions to the WetFem network. Her misfortune has only intensified her commitment. She benevolently buys anything her eyes fall upon. She shops as a blessing, and may soon become the first sainted consumer.
When her husband Ken sees her eyes glow with the sexy fever of acquisition in a body ravaged by muscles too passive to hold up against gravity, he flashes back to the first time her eyes had served to ground him. Watching her nose flatten, her cheeks dissolve and her face fall, Ken consoles himself with the knowledge that the packets stacked unopened from floor to ceiling in Medea's warehouse-size teepee can be returned for a full refund after her death.
But will the lawyers for WetFem, a New-Age organization known for its belligerence, let Ken contest the will as the product of an unstable brain? Ken hopes for their charity.
Meanwhile, Medea's body is soon expected to return to the life of a fetus, eyes shut, skin wrinkled, limbs edible like bird bones, fists rosily clenched, hairless, mouthless, and melting away in a smoldering smell of drowned flesh.
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She was surprised at how revived her Death looked; love had done wonders for his image. He seemed a thousand years younger. He was wearing a new shirt open at the bony torso and had oiled his hair. His Daliesque mustache was newly trimmed. Did he shop? He reminded Medea of a uniformed extra, lost on the set of a big-budget period extravaganza. She resolved not to ask him about himself. She couldn't afford to make this affair more pedestrian. Pleasures rarely overflowed the conditions that created them.
He was carrying a twisted wooden stick on his shoulders and rested his biceps on the heavy horizontal trunk, looking as if he were nailed on the cross, leaning his huge hunched body in the narcissistic posture typical of the pieta. He was posing.
He slowly raised his stiff knotty hand in a matter-of-fact greeting, as to an old dear friend he trusted absolutely.
In response, she waved both palms like windshield wipers and smiled exposing her teeth in a gesture so foreign she reminded herself of a clown. Exaggeration was the mother of love.
She wanted to tear him into shreds of aged-silk flesh. He was easily too old for a decent erection. This gave her carte blanche. Medea realized that her lust was mythical.
She shivered when he hollered: "I know beautiful things to say. I know jokes. What crimes have you committed?" He might be deaf. He looked like a slow-witted butcher fit for bayoneting peasants, or like the ghost of a drowned man, or an apostle.
He had pouty eggplant-hued lips like Indian labia, harsh laugh lines, a dreamer's straight white lashes, and skin corroded by salt; he sported gold earhoops and gold teeth, silver Brillo hair spiked upward, and an open fly whose bronze buttons caught the light. His age-old tan formed an oily stain over his pallor. Beneath his taut temples, blue veins shone like neon ideograms. He was clucking his tongue, grinning like a taunted bull. His bottled-brown eyes, under crayoned rims, reminded her of gasoline stains. His eyebrows wilted affectedly over her petaled lashes.
His stick fell suddenly and diagonally against her flustered cheeks leaving a pink snake of a welt. She wondered how he could aim: his eyes were empty of expression. Was he creating in his mind her unnaturally bright lips, her thin bones that pretended to be heavier than the sea, her sunburned buttocks that jiggled like the wings of seagulls swooping down into the waves for prey?
He screamed, without moving his lips: "I'm not a ghost. In a day, I'll be four million years old and I've never been with a human. Never met the right one. After meeting them, their beauty dissolves like a cloud. So, how do we do this, love?"
She responded in kind: "I'm a virgin too. I've always been a virgin. It's a disease. Nothing penetrates me."
He reminisced intimately: "Long ago, the sainted danced on this shore for St. John the Female, or was it Alex the Great? An unmarried maiden who should be called Mary had to leap into the midsummer fires and grasp everyone's favorite possessions to discern their future; and, at noon, the women tied red and white threads around their middlefingers to fool the sun of March..."
She interrupted, "I AM WHO I AM." Her brain felt ticklish.
Death dropped his trousers. Clouds of dust rose out of his sparse white pubic hair. His foreskin was spotted with mildew.
The sea glinted like a vast blade, stinking with the thick guiltless odor of something that lived outside of time.
His swollen cock and labia tasted woody and acrid.
"Perversion," Medea mumbled with her mouth full, "is the soul of attraction. Unadorned reality is humiliating."
He moaned, and continued to emote: "I call this, living." She sniffed his wet frowning asshole, and rolled his white-haired balls in her mouth, savoring them like homemade vinegar.
He stuttered: "I want to be absorbed forever by the cactus of your pussy, I'm moved, my soft open pussy, to tears to watch you come, slut, flooding my old cock, dripping down to your asshole, close to drowning, laughing, celebrating, fucking me, bitch..."
His gold teeth dug into her lips. Her knees boxed his ears. Her elbows rubbed his hips. His cock arched, callused and parched. Her nipples scratched his furrowed stomach. Her fists held onto his pubic hair for support and an urgent twitch pounced through his labia. His knees locked. Her feet kicked the air.
Past his balls, she saw the misty shore hover like an upside-down National Geographic shot of cold frontiers.
She sensed his steely calves tighten around her throat. She felt herself levitating. Her eyes rolled up into the arid darkness of her inner sockets, and she saw only through her clit.
She warned him: "I'm eating your children."
His orgasm smelled like an old trunk in an attic that hadn't been opened in centuries. His saltiness bloated her with iodine and rusting metals. A great proteinous strength poured into her body, indigestible, forcing her to bare her teeth like seafoam.
When she opened her eyes, it was dawn. She disentangled herself from Death with fingers that smelled as if they'd handled dying fish; when she licked them, the aged sweetness of her cum mingled well with the stale taste from his semen. Her hair suddenly smelled like the bowels of a merchant ship; it gave her a headache.
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THE THEFT OF THE AMERICAN DREAM
The Washington Post
After years of studying her adoptive land, Medea Washington had successfully become American when Death rang the bell. Unsuspicious, Medea, 30?a resident of Cola Major, FL, a successful saleswoman in her own right?had a long talk with the dark-suited rep about insurance rates, and, rumor has it, a budding romance?which in yellower papers is referred to as a "quickie"?ensued.
It has been established that this corporeal encounter led to Mrs. Washington's untimely passing. Though medical experts attribute her disappearance to severe depression and possible memory block caused by her diagnosed brain cancer, her family and the police believe otherwise: that she was abducted by Death.
The Washingtons also contend that Death is responsible for the burglary that left them penniless. When they returned home after Medea's disappearance, their Cola nest had been burglarized and their assets, including the stacks of unopened boxes that filled every inch of Medea's bedroom, the family rhinestone cars, Zaire diamonds and Boeing, had vanished. Even young Ezekiel's Steadicam was a memory. Lesser men might have taken this as a lesson. The Washington men saw it as yet another capitalist challenge, a blunt invitation to re-encounter the American dream.
Even before accounts of the incident reached the press, the public had been warned via word of mouth of Death's presence on American soil. Women are afraid to answer any house calls, and traveling salesmen are looked upon with extreme suspicion.
The Death camp professes not to be worried. The Washingtons' litany of charges against Death—a.k.a. Dick Kronos—has gained the media's attention, and recent polls suggest that Death is finding an audience among Americans at last. "Sure it hurts," says Death campaign manager Anon Ymous. "But Death has a tremendous reservoir of good will to tap into. People trust him, know he won't fail them. Who else can say that in today's society?"
As gun sales skyrocket, authorities fear riots and a break-down of the national routine functions. The public fear echoes earlier instances of witchhunts, the market crash, and the AIDS panic. Once again Americans live in a wilderness, where it is every man for himself; and Death, the Unbuyable One, against all.
Businesses—including real estate, movie & auto industries—are suffering. People are reluctant to leave their homes. Whatever is impossible via fax, TV or modem, is not done at all. Will a Death revolution replace the Industrial Revolution?
Death claims to have set his sights on the future. "We have an incredible opportunity to cut through the culture of corruption," reads a statement he recently released to the press. "We can create a sense of community again, where people can care for one another." In the face of his apocalyptic threat, Death seems to hope, people will unite and return to tried values. But it is a risky investment, and he may find himself disappointed.
"People are genuinely puzzled and angry," said the President in his televised press conference. "America is not the greatest nation on earth for nothing. We will banish Death." It is clear that the powers that be will fight to keep their posts. And if the ill will seething in the nation carries enough real punch, Death could find himself out of a job by popular mandate.
Meanwhile, heads of state from around the world have sent word that Death has been visiting their countries for centuries, and to no alarm. But the fact remains that as Americans we have always believed ourselves immortal, and thus have no organized means to deal with this nightmare into which we have awakened.
Daniel and Ezekiel lit their clove cigarillos, sat on twin padded toilets and read to deceive their unnamable cravings:
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WANTED FOR no particular reason, brooding male door-to-door salesman 35-45 with decent table manners & clean fingernails.
MEDEA lookalike (poorer) desperately seeks witty Death type.
MEET SOMEONE NEW: just dial DEATHFAN. For cheap rate DEA-COME.
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CRIME PAYS - BUT HOW MUCH? AN UNPAID ADVERTISEMENT:
So you have a friend who shot her lover's wife or his wife's lover. And your friend would like to know the legal ins and outs of selling her macabre story to Hollywood for big bucks. A new book by Ken J. Washington tells you all you need to know!
"Times are real tough," says Ken Washington, author of the HOW TO SELL A DEATH bestseller and newly-turned TV producer, widower of media-darling Medea. "Our culture is in every way hurting. People can get rich off aggression. And entertain."
LEARN HOW the Washingtons earned good money on Medea's Death Encounter and generate your own cash from your worst ordeals! That's genius!
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Medea's only legacy to her sons, excluding debts and lawsuits, was a legible but incomprehensible text, written in the first person in a foreigner's English and translated by linguists whose property it became for an undisclosed sum: "My treasured and sorely missed soft God: Today I received a message from you (who else would send thousands of seagulls suicidally crashing into my windows?) which I unconditionally loved. My answer is: Come to me like a tattoo, and name me. These are my last tepid words. I can't make them out. Blindness is a rebellious action: it forces me to ignore the sights of lifepanic outside me. Every-one lives on the brink of vomit, day in day out nothing extra-ordinary or circular I'm scared. Hunger is the leprosy of the earth. I hear the real world chuckle behind my back. What should be a duel is a game of chance. That makes me feel weak. I value power more than anything. Only in strength can I find pleasure. Speaking of pleasure, I love you. To death, Me."
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DEATHVOTE '99: THE STRAW OF YOUR CHOICE WITH THE DRINK OF YOUR CHOICE IS A VOTE FOR THE CANDIDATE OF YOUR CHOICE!
The Crystal Cola for Civic Responsibility concession stand boy—with the "Perky" nametag—explains to patrons how to select the straw of their personal orientation from the fabulously designed "Death" and "AmeriDream" dispensers at the local theater.
On her daytime show, Oprah announces daily results of the nationwide poll. So far, straw-users prefer AmeriDream by almost 15 percent. Yet Death is steadily creeping up on the AmeriDream. Oprah pleads with moviegoers: "If you've been abused, believe me I know and if no one else does, I love you. Don't waste your life on nihilism, forget death, get a dream!"
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Medea's red bra dug into her frail skin as she ambled across the public Cola beach, drawn by the ecstatic sound of an ancient hymn agitating the seaborne air: "Oh come, oh come, Emmanuelle, and ransom captive...." Stung by a potent moment of alchemical melancholy, she ran toward the sailboat-dotted gulf, breathlessly flinging her handgun; her high buttoned boots skimmed the waves, she gasped and yanked open her bra, her diamonds flew away and her breasts popped out, and her coiled white hair came defiantly undone, as she enthusiastically rushed forward into the endlessly receding horizon toward what she couldn't imagine.
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POST-MORTEM SUCCESS
Entertainment Weekly
Medea, the Dynasty-style prime-time soap-opera based on the real-life drama of the Washington family, confidently tops the Nielsen ratings. The series follows the double-crossing passions of a charismatic threesome?Medea (Liz Taylor), husband Ken (Sydney Poitier), and Death (Charlton Heston)?as they fight for power and survival. The series manages to make the painfully banal crime on which the show is based?Medea's steamy betrayal of her husband for slick Death?seem plausible and cathartic. The future does not look bright for the competing networks who have undertaken an unusually vigorous burst of ax-swinging on their shows. Medea is a first-season winner and is here to stay. A+
As Medea kicked below the waves, for a wide-eyed instant all across America remote-control buttons stood unanimously still:
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AN EMERGENCY NEWS UPDATE: THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS
"Americans. A blistering sore popped open today. In Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Boston and Las Vegas, ferocious riots have broken out in our nation's streets. Rage has spread through every major city like a virus. It has come fully born like an Alien. Thousands of stores, houses and vehicles burn. The damage is already in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and there is no sign of relief. The National Guard and the police are outnumbered by the pillaging masses. What, everyone asks, went awry? Is it Death's handiwork? Experts agree it must be.
Economic Inequity is as deeply rooted as the Constitution, as old as the very first pilgrims to the New World. The settlers exterminated an astounding amount of indigenous people, imported 11 million Africans, fed Asian and Latino labor into our ravenous industrial machine; and it all proved wise. America became the strongest nation on earth. Why this sudden distaste for exploitation? Is it the depressed economy? Experts say, not a bit.
The state of the economy cannot affect our social stability, since our success is not the result of our capitalism but of our dream. Despite our bloodstained foundations, rebellion has never loomed near, because of democracy: every citizen has a right to the American dream. It's our safety valve. It works; why fix it?
Then Death enters and the dream shatters. Reality knocks on the door and a double-gendered salesman orders: dream is over. This has nothing to do with inner cities, drugs, crime, the gap between rich and poor. Fires of wrath will erupt again and again until we can deport Death. The survival of a nation depends on its being able to act, when necessary, like a single paranoiac. I therefore declare a state of emergency, sunset curfew, and all-out war against Death. This, my fellow citizens, is the American Dream. We shall prevail. We'll never die. Because America is the greatest nation ever on earth. God bless America. God bless y'all."
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