The woman's tongue is a dress that covers everything. She absolves herself crunching the salted snacks that seem so much bigger on television than when the hosts dissolve to meaningless nothingness in the mouth. Still, we too, when our bodies are in an evening mood, tip the snacks into our very own personal sewage systems. Father bends over his son. Tender as sausage. Son is sure to get his BMX bike. The Direktor's son enjoys the village children's envy as one might enjoy a stiff pinch of power. Out he promptly goes into the open to smash something up. But the boy is Father's spoils, he spoils him: he has to bow his head over bow and violin today, so the sound that's produced can be used elsewhere to oil feelings. Father likes to show off his progenitorial profit at the instrument. And how Father makes use of this instrument, his child, as if the boy were a shell he had cast off! The boy's wrist has to be relaxed and flexible, it's better for trade, and with the delicate bow he shall roam to and fro in the pastures of the immortals, the family of the great, who are all to be restored to life with great, familiar, restorative sounds. Such horrid sounds, too! Jagged Mozart, if you're in luck. And if you've been tied down by the ankles to prevent you from wandering far afield to graze in other pastures.
The banks offer shoulder-bags in an attempt to win the custom of the very young. Even this riff-raff, the mere proteges of parents, want accounts of their own; there's no accounting for it. In a year or so the money will be looking good: it'll be a car, for death on the roads, or a furnished apartment, for death in your own four walls. Always assuming that – like the Direktor's son – you are a child under fourteen, guiltless, single, alive, but already singled out for a life among the clientele, the future consumer guild that will tax their hearts with the wish – consume their souls with the desire – to have some gilt-edged value added. Perhaps some of us are destined to be clerks behind counters, for what are all these benches doing here anyway? The boy, scarcely baked through, dashes out into the biting cold. He has to take the healing plunge and cool off. He has to listen to the cries of his people, so that he will know how to make them cry all the more.
The Man, having shaved for the second time that day, returns to ride the woman like a boat before his flood. Her hills and valleys plus branches etc. offer prospects of plenty, true, but that final perfection conferred by degradation is still lacking. The Man, buoyed up on the breeze, creates the woman. He draws her parting and tosses her legs apart as if her bones had wilted. He beholds God's tectonic faults on her thighs, they do not bother him, he goes climbing in his private mountains taking a safe path that he knows well. He knows every step along the way. How should he fall? It is his own house. And who indeed would not wish to hang his hat on a peg of his own? Property imposes no duties on the owner; it merely prompts envy in his rivals. Years ago, in the Book of Life, this woman shifted into reverse. What can she still be expecting? He reaches under her skirt and batters through the walls of underwear. He wants to force his way into his wife (this is just a family affair) so that he will sense where his limits are. I rather think he would burst his banks, if it weren't that he's rudderless. He'd be giddy, up there on his own path. All in all, men would quite stand over us if we didn't enclose them within us from time to time, till they are tiny and quiet and quite surrounded. Now the woman involuntarily sticks out her tongue, and why? Because the Direktor has activated a muscle in her jaw, by means of which a snake could spit venom any time, it only needs to be shown how. The Man leads her into the bathroom, giving her his non-stop line of reassuring patter, and bends her over the edge of the tub. He fumbles in her undergrowth. So that he can get in at last without having to wait for the night. He parts her foliage and branches. The tatters of her dress are ripped off. Hair falls into the plughole. Her behind gets a good hiding: where can she be hiding? Where else but behind these gates, which the howling mob will storm and breach at last, the whole amiable crowd of consumers and foodstuff-of-life manufacturers shoving forward to the buffet. Here we are. Our services are required. The woman is offered an organ of similar design or of similar value. He'll screw the ass off her, it's all he wants in life, except to screw the rest of the world and draw his massive monthly salary. A shudder goes through him and he spends his entire sum, far more than any money he could make; how should the woman not be touched by this ray of annunciation? Now she contains the whole man and nothing but the man, as much as she can take; and he maintains the woman, as long as he finds her interior and wallpapering pleasing. He shifts her forequarters into the bathtub. As the proprietor of these and similar premises, he throws her back room open. No client, only he himself, can let in so much fresh air. No one but the Direktor can rain down on her like this. In a short while, with a yell, he will have relieved himself, this enormous horse, eyes rolling, foaming at the mouth, driving the cart right into the dirt. The woman's car is not there for her to drive wherever she may please; he has already shown her the route she is to take, shooting a track clear through the forest for her.
The woman clumsily kicks her slipper heel out, kicking at this clumsy heel who's slipped inside her. She's heard his private parts slapping like a harvester against the rim of the bath. The kick enrages him. The shit will be sticking to him, what a life. A wily lot, the weaker sex. At pains to look beautiful into the bargain. The Man resolves to command the woman to observe their marriage contract. He claps his hand across her mouth, and is bitten, just a few percent of her jaw power, so he has to withdraw the hand in question. He covers the woman with night. But for her enlightenment and his own satisfaction, he shoves his electricity main up her arse. She tries to shake him off, but quickly tires and has to go through with it, eyes shut. He has no love of the wild. Being so wild himself. All about them is a yawning emptiness in the house: the only signs of life are the bushes of hair on his and her abdomen, a sign that says you can get it on tap right here. This year's wine every day of the year. Can't fool us. Awkward nothings are slobbered into the woman's warm earhole. The power of the Man! No need for trickery or weapons. She need only open the gate, for this is his dwelling place, and it's hard to keep back his seed. With a smile, the Creator brings forth out of men their product, so that it may grow accustomed to dashing about in our midst. The Man distributes Creation at a forceful pace, and meanwhile Time passes at a pace of its own. He smashes the tiling and glass in that shady room, which rejoices beneath his busy endeavours and in the brightness of his light. Only within the woman is it dark. He enters her arse and bangs her face against the edge of the bath. She cries out yet again. The pilot settles in for a lengthy session in his cockpit. He himself may already be at rest, but his cock is pitting itself against the elements, ever onward, cliff to crag.
Such a one dives into the shit as others dive into the sea: throwing the switch marked blow on his appliance, he goes on full throttle until he has totally emptied his dustbag.
2
LATER SHE CALLS FOR her son. Though not so long ago she felt replete with the dear image of her child, her one protective casing to guard against the groping Man, who holds her tighter than a customer holds the drink of his choice. He needs no protection for his sex, and his torrent pours down the nearest channel. The child knows a good deal about all this. The boy peeps grinning through the keyholes, spying out the joys of the home. The boy cops a sly, audacious eyeful of Mother's body, having come in from the wilderness out there, the wilderness his comics call the Wonderland of Childhood. Is that smile on Mother's face adrift like a boat? Or has it been carved into her features? The child can't tell when he snuggles into the nest that Father built. They belong to each other, for the meat inspectors who crowd outside the fence. They even seek each other out, undirected as the potpourri of clouds up there in the purple sky. Not knowing why. Though perhaps they do know: the child has a hungry mouthful of dirty talk to be stopped, talk concerning his mother and the blood that frequently stains her panties. The child knows everything. He is white and his face is brown from the sun. In the evening he will be bathed. He will have prayed. He will have done his work. And he will cling to the woman, graze upon her, bite her nipples to punish her for allowing Father to explore her tunnels and piping. Are you listening? This is language itself, wanting to get a word in.