Beautiful Monster

Beautiful Monster | Beautiful Monster | Beautiful Monster | Beautiful Monster

There is an animal called the panther, which is brightly coloured, very beautiful, and tame.
– medieval Bestiary, MS Bodley 764

The doctor who was not a doctor stood on the rocks overlooking the black expanse.
“Are you thinking about vampires?” asked the abruptly shorter man next to him. He wore a denim jacket, slightly too small for him, and had a large, excellent penis fully concealed by his clothing.
“Well yes, naturally,” said the doctor, with an explanatory gesture at the ocean.
“You aren’t thinking about becoming one?”
“Well—” the younger man paused. “I’m—I am—”
He didn’t know how to say it, not yet; not to the short man, or himself, or the ocean.
“You can’t become immortal by not dying,” said the short man. “Immortality is a car crash. You know, like an orgasm. Want to go for a drive?”
“Sure, but—” he gestured feebly again at the ocean.
“It’s fine. If you look at it scientifically, and I can see you want to, the ocean is just land with a certain amount of water on top. So wherever there’s a dense enough fog, you’re in the ocean.”
Medically speaking, this did not seem quite right, but the doctor followed the short man to his car.
“Who are you?”
“I used to be a mechanic. . . I don’t know what I am now. Hop in!”
They shut the doors and lit cigarettes in a stilted unison. They peeled out or off or in or through and went onto the winding cliff road where the fog was.
“You want to know where we’re going,” said the man with the penis. “I’m going to show you where Soledad Miranda drowned.”
“St. Solitude? I thought she died in a car crash.”
The short man shrugged.
“Sometimes a car is a boat.”
They slid on in a red car and silence until it was time for him to talk some more.
“The problem with vampires,” he said, “is survival. Too much of it. Everyone wants to be killed by the infinitely beautiful thing, but to live on after it, just—living, and living, and living, I mean that’s strictly an aesthetic sin.

So the answer, at least to me and my brothers in psychosexual arms, is the car crash. The ultimate vampire, if you will, the one that kills you forever.”
The short man paused between oarstrokes to wipe sweat from his brow, then heaved again. The droplets of sweat, formed during his speech, had suggested to the young doctor a quintessence of all bodily fluids, blood phlegm bile tears and semen emulsed together like an avant-garde salad dressing by the jostling of the short man’s enthusiasm.
“But what if you walk away from the crash?” said the doctor, trailing one hand in the water.
“So you walk away – temporally speaking. Whatever. On a deeper biospiritual level, you’re part of the car crash forever, fused with its eternal moment, the instantaneous inter-rending of metal and flesh and logic and semen you’ve been looking for forever.”
The doctor wasn’t certain how this was different from being turned into a vampire, but he didn’t want to challenge the beads of conviction shining on the oarsman’s brow.
“When do we get to where St. Soledad died?” he asked.
“We passed it. It doesn’t matter. The place, the time – the exact moment and point of a car crash are too fine to be described by physical time-space. She died in the ocean, that’s all you know. Here’s where you get out.”
The doctor stepped out onto the rocky crags. The shorter man, his rowboat, and his spectacular unseen genitals receded behind him into the fog. Before him grew the dark mansion, gothically arching its windows at him.
He straightened his bow-tie as he walked up the steps. The doors swung open for him and he entered the velvet room. A heavy curtain sectioned off the dining room, tacked to it a crude placard:

ONLY THE BRAVE
CAN EAT THE FARE

He put his gloves in his top hat and handed them off to the side, and walked through the curtain.
The long table was full, except for his seat near the end, and the vacant area at the head, with men and women in tuxedos, periodically raising their flutes in unspecified toasts.
“G-g-glad you could join us!” said the nervous man across the table, shakily shattering his glass with his hand, stuffing the shards in his mouth and proceeding to crunch away.
“Poor Bob, he struggles with the pleasures of the flesh,” said the blonde woman next to him. The areas around her face stretched and distorted slightly as if seen through the business end of a fishbowl.
“I have a stomach will surprise you,” said Bob through his shards.
The young doctor twiddled his flute uncertainly, wondering what to say.
“Do you renounce Satan and all his works?” he finally asked, conversationally.
“Oh, I think I can separate the art from the artist,” smiled the woman. The table erupted into clinking of glasses, as if giving this utterance the status of a speech retroactively called for. She grinned graciously.

III

The chef arrived at last, and stood between the two great pots at the head of the table. The one to her right was over a burning brazier, and seemed to boil. She reached into the pot on her left and withdrew a live lobster, meaty and dripping. Placing him ceremoniously before her, she poised the great knife with its tip against the base of the lobster’s head. She stared dead ahead down the table without apparent emotion.
“Do you understand?” she intoned. The knife swung down through the middle of the lobster’s head with a crunch and a great SHUNK. She picked it up and threw it into the other pot. She placed another lobster before her.
“Every lobster is a poet, do you understand?” SHUNK. Another. The man Bob slurped at his new champagne flute approvingly, burbling like a child.
“This is the humane way, do you understand?” SHUNK. Another.
“A lobster can live to be a hundred, do you understand?” SHUNK.
“Every lobster is a poet, do you understand?” SHUNK.
“These are pearls that were her eyes, do you understand?” SHUNK.
“While there’s flesh there’s hope, do you understand?” SHUNK.
“Long live the lobster, do you understand?” SHUNK.
The young doctor leaned over to the mustached old man next to him and whispered.
“Is it a performance art?”
“Is it a performance, art?” he frowned. “I thought art was more a kind of, shark, or tigress.”
“I have to go.”
The young doctor rose uneasily, sweat or some other salty effusion beading on his brow.
“Poor Bob, he struggles with the pleasures of the flesh,” he heard someone say sympathetically as he stumbled past.

Outside, he found himself on a spacious porch, with a hot, cold, frothy kind of fog roiling just beyond the stone railings. Beyond a surprisingly narrow stretch of manicured, though fogbound, English garden was a dark wood. By the gap in the railings leading out and down and through into the garden stood a young dark-haired woman. She wore traditional butler’s garb consisting of a broad, black belt, tall black boots, and a diaphanous cloak draped over her shoulders.
“Does sir care for a refreshment?”
“I’m young enough,” he said, “thank you.”
“Only the brave can eat the fair, sir,” she smirked faintly.
She held out a silver salver containing a long ornamental dagger. He looked at it, hesitating.
“Which part is the business end?”
“It’s all the business means, sir.”
He took it, pocketed it, set a foot on the stone steps off the porch.
“I’m going to the woods.”
“Sometimes a wood is an ocean,” she hissed, “sir.”
He stepped through the fog and found himself at a gnarled archway before the woods, with an impudent owl perched on top.
The owl lifted a feather and cracked its beak. Its voice was high and thin.
“Have you experienced the human seed?”
Egad, he thought, but a reluctant answer came out.
“No,” he said, voice cracking. “I—I am not a doctor.”
It was the first time he said it out loud. The owl hooted away mirthfully and left him with fists clenched at the doorway. His pocketwatch weighed down his pocket. He couldn’t remember being given it.

He woke up in a dark wood not a doctor. He slumped down on a stump and cradled his head in his hands. He took out the watch, flicked it open, stared into it. Was the fog inside the same color as the fog outside? He snapped it closed, let it fall into the undergrowth with a splash, and felt tears slide uselessly down his cheeks.
He slowly became aware of the creatures creeping out of the fog towards him.
One came that was like a horse with the spines of a lionfish splayed around its neck. It was only a few feet tall, if it could be committed to a size. Another like an iguana with the wings of a bat, garish yellow above the blues and teals and reds of its scaly body.
They came as many kinds of animals, an owl, a seahorse, a demented cat, all strange in form and luridly colored in all imaginable ways. They were chanting as they gathered around him, chanting something in a language he did not speak, yet he knew that even in that language what they said meant nothing. Over and over they chanted it, kaleidoscoping around him in the ocean. He became aware of one of them in their midst, like a great crustacean raised up on the legs of a goat, arching up, as tall as a man and colored like every kind of danger, like a coral snake or a clown. Yet its reds and yellows rested his eyes, as if he were looking on something infinitely gentle. It was drawing near to him, chanting its meaningless name among all its kindred. He found, without knowing why, that he had stopped crying minutes ago.

He reached out his hand, and touched, ever so gently, its vibrant outstretched pincer.

Selected Filmography

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