The Minotauress

So convincing were the details of this dream and the clarity of its imagery that the first thing he did once his mind started clicking was reach down to his scrotum. Thank God, he thought when his testicles were still in evidence (not that, as a celibate, he actually needed them for anything). Then he groaned, thinking, What a TERRIBLE dream! Obviously it was just a spurt of Neo-Freudian symbology. The more desirable the woman, the more effectively her desirability emasculates men, he knew. A drifting hand told him with some distaste that the dream had been of the "wet" variety—his first in years.

A guillotine blade of sunlight carved into the room from the gap in the shade; it lay directly across his eyes, firing a headache of legendary proportions. I'm SO hungover, he realized. Last night at the bar he'd consumed much—probably as much as Dylan Thomas on a good night. He moaned out of bed in his underwear, preparing to head for the shower, when something caught his eye...

It was on the shade over the window.

Someone must've been in my room last night, he thought, but then rejected the conclusion when he found the door locked.

A new graffito, however, had been added to the others on the shade. It read as thus:

You live alone. You

dial your number by mistake

and someone answers.

It appeared to be written in the ink of his own black Sharpie, and—Hmm. Is that my handwriting? He thought so. The haiku was properly seventeen syllables and possessed the correct five-seven-five beat. Ultimately, though...

Why would I write that? he wondered. Well... Faulkner wrote parts of THE FABLE on his wall. Why can't I write a haiku on a dirty shade?

The problem was he didn't remember writing it. And if he'd written that?

The Writer scratched his shorts.

What else might he have written that he didn't recall?

He rushed to the Remington Model No. 2 and fixed his eyes on the page that had been hanging out of the platen for a month.

WHITE TRASH GOTHIC

CHAPTER ONE

There was a knock at the door. When Nikoff Raskol opened it, he espied a baleful purview of imprecations, an apophysis of dolorous spiritum—perforce: the Nietzschean Abyss. He'd dreamed of utter blackness, of dripping sounds, and screams, and it was all those things that he found himself looking at beyond the transom of his solitary motel room. The blackness that was somehow fulgent, in which traversed the fallow masses with faces like poultices and acuminated grins. His heart beat in mordant rubato when the gracile hand—certainly that of some outerworldly woman—reached out from the festering clough and took his own. He thought of light's absence in the flesh, he thought of ataxia undiluted.

Indeed, he thought of lost worlds.

The hand tightened about his. He was beseeched by eyes wide and lambent as diminutive moons, and the voice resounded as if from the highest precipice of the earth, to offer, "Come. Come with me... and see... "

Nikoff Raskol, then, followed her out of the room into the living dark.

The Writer's mouth fell open in a gag of joy. He nearly collapsed. "It's brilliant," he croaked. "It's Francois Truffaut and Thomas Hart Benton and James Joyce all rolled up into one, with a pinch of Sartre and a dash of Hegel. It's Descartes' proof that the mind is independent of the body, and Locke's affirmation that the test of truth is the comparison of thought and fact!" Tears formed in the Writer's eyes, and he fell to his knees. "My God... It's better than the opening of Kafka's Metamorphosis... "