Melismatic Screams of the Undead
Cremating my own body had chucked me into a dark, philosophical mood. Only briefly, though, until I caught my breath|force once again. I wasn’t ready yet to forsake all my dreams. I couldn’t leave my lover’s body possessed by a vampire. I had to go back.
Bernie would have understood if I didn’t. But I couldn’t surrender serenely to the sunyata-void troubled by the ugly thought of his benign face contorted with blood lust, his thick arms not embracing me but tearing apart human lives, and that horrid alien thing in the hallowed place where his sweet soul should have been.
Seventeen years of fidelity and passion demanded we leave more of a legacy of our love than three outlets of Go Yoga! & Wok Like This! – and a brutal vampire.
I want to say here: a saint I’m not. And I’m no Baba Mantra Yoga Master either. I was an ugly, obese kid, a sour, fat teenager, a bitter, overweight young adult. One day I woke up and said, ‘I don’t have to loathe myself anymore.’
I tried vegetarian and liked it enough to lose some weight and that made me like it a lot more. And then, flush with success, I started working out, but that didn’t work out.
Yoga I could manage. ‘Yoga teaches yoga,’ is what the ancient yoga authority Patanjali says, and so whatever I could do was plenty good enough. Turned out I could do a whole lot more than I thought, and I got pretty good at it.
By middle age, I was still pudgy, but I’d found the skill and confidence to instruct others. Never in my most stoned reveries (oh yeah, I smoke cannabis – or did; my body was never a temple, just a renovation project), never at the looniest apex of the giddiest ganja high did I ever imagine I’d find yoga useful after death.
The night seemed to listen. Maybe that was why these hopelessly self-centered thoughts ran so free. Well, at least I wasn’t overweight anymore. I wasn’t alive either.
Or was I? So long as I kept my breath|force concentrated, I could go where I pleased. Power|rightness intensified the calmer and more transparent I became.
Below, earth looked Godforsaken. The kingdom of darkness. I didn’t want to go down.
Little grains of moonlight glinted off bodies of water hidden in the forest. An ivory snake crept among hills and dales, the Black River restless in its million-year-old bed. Silence and the wilds of the night wrapped me in contemplation.
I thought I knew the world. Nature may be lawless, but the world isn’t. Running a successful business requires wide knowledge of the way the world works. I knew about lawyers, union bosses, city and federal regulators, vandals, corrupt suppliers, crooked employees, and disgruntled customers. How could I have missed vampires?
Nothing we see, hear, smell, taste or touch has meaning. To seek, let alone find, meaning in perceptions is the warped doorstep to insanity. There are facts, which are universal. And there are values, which are personal.
Vampires had killed us – and yet, they were as secret, as obscure and symbolic as poetry. I sighed. Pluck any soul out of a body and onto a moonstruck cloud and you get a Wittgenstein. I went down.
In a star-blown glade, I found Bernie’s body crouching among knee-high ferns. It looked horrible – ghoul eyes black glass, shining skin stamped in silver geometry, hands tarnished, thickening to hammered bronze and clasping his haunted head, offering covenant of a cankered brain to some invisible deity in the violet air.
It was not alone. Another of the undead attended it, an old one, leaning close, whispering unfathomable things.
As I swept down through the treetops, I heard something like oceanic trembling, a murmurous breathing so immense it pressed against deafness.
The ancient one sensed me and turned full about, an eyeblink gyration that presented a staggering apparition of otherness. Imagine a living skeleton from Buchenwald only shining pearl blue, pulsating softly, a humanoid glowworm stained ultraviolet around the edges. Sockets of pure carbon showed nothing. But that protrusive jaw abruptly jarred loose, astonished, exposing malignant rows of teeth.
Skull seamed with phosphorescent lichen bowed low, as if in ominous obeisance, while glassy fingers grabbed fistfuls of leaf rot. The vampire straightened all at once and tossed those dead leaves at me with a growled imprecation:
▬▬The worse for you, accursed shade! Venomous malice ‘twill renew your dire sorrows! Die again! Twice dead thing!
Darting leaves strafed like buckshot, kicking me backward and shriveling me with misery. Some kind of vampire voodoo was in that dirt. I nearly lost all my breath|force that instant.
Curdled around the surprising pain, around the special loneliness at the core of all our suffering, power|rightness did not diminish. As much as this assault hurt, it was trivial compared to the agony of the vampire’s bite that had severed my life.
I straightened, annoyed. Hey! Who the hell do you think you are? I floated closer, daring the damned thing to try that again. What did I ever do to you?
▬▬O, shameless wraith, let me teach you to knit again death’s torment and oblivion to one mutual sheaf!
I drifted nearer, ready this time for the impact of hex dust in the vampire’s grisly hand. When it hit, I didn’t stagger back. I held my ground by gazing at Bernie’s deformed shape cowering in the ferns so that the ripping shock of the vampire attack merged with the weight of grief for my dead lover.
No personal suffering could budge that. Instead, the lacerating curse of the undead cut deep as my guilt but no deeper and left me wanting more. I needed to undergo stronger torment to pay for what I had done to Bernie, leading him to this grotesque death.
The archaic vampire somehow apprehended this. Fear labored in its piranha face. Not in those charcoal eyes. In there was darkness that telepathically overwhelmed all emotion. But the snakehead grin had gone slack, and the spider-finger hands flexed tighter, fisting sheer blue-knuckled helplessness.
Advancing closer, I observed that the vampire’s snugly twisted mummy wrappings were human leather. I discerned flaccid lineaments of eyeholes, nostril perforations, a woeful mouth, finger flanges and draperies of tawed flesh, windings so worn and bleached they had practically annealed to the creature’s icicle-bone frame.
I moved directly up to the creature and stared into those goblin eyes, straight through to the blood bag within and the stink of sulfur rending from the cooked lives there.
Slender cylinders of finger bone strung on braids of human hair, along with blackened ears curled up like truffles, hung about its sinewy neck. Each bone had etched upon it a fretwork of emblems – chevrons and runic snowflake symmetries crudely imitative of the patterns in the flesh-shine of the undead.
This was a vampire medicine man. One of their shaman priests. That was why it refused to run away. It wasn’t going to let a mere ghost spook it.
Hopeless of survival, heedless of pain, I stepped right into that thing.
Subzero emptiness. The full magnitude of nothing. Breathe! Here was the far dream of not-me. Anatman. The no-self of the flimsy, relentless ego teeter-tottering at the brink of nonbeing. Right here, in this head full of evil, hell raised its circus of fire and ice all around me.
Amitabah … Amitabah … Namo Amitabah … Buddha of Radiance … Sleeper Awakened in Splendor … I am Infinite Light…
I chanted by reflex. I could have been sitting in the studio at Go Yoga!, hearing the clatter of pots and pans next door at Wok Like This!, as I had done countless times, this time with bowel cramps, eye-popping migraine, ruptured disk, slashed cornea, myocardial infarction, grand mal convulsion, every infirmity known to flesh.
Though, of course, I had no flesh. Just not-me in the grip of a far dream.
I heard crystal cracking, crashing. Something was breaking in the vampire. Realization nudged what would have been my heart. The old stories are true. Spirit kisses the vampire with acid.
Why should this be so? What is it that is so anathema to vampires about the Christian cross, Buddhist chants, Navaho prayer blankets for all I knew? I wanted to find out and chanted stronger, Amitabah…
▬▬Varlet spirit, assuage your wrath!
The vampire’s voice glistered with static, like frayed wires had crossed in its voice box. ▬▬Release me!
Go. I said|projected. I’m not holding you here. Get lost!
The wind coughed, and the old priest of the undead vanished. The unbelievable pain went with it. Acquitted of suffering, empty as outer space, I hovered among fragments of moonlight.
Bernie’s hunkered body watched me with wolfish attentiveness, eager to spring away too but shackled by futility, knowing it could not escape.
Your turn, creep. I pounced on Bernie’s scrunched body. What a festival this would have been if only I was a masochist! Pain like a bull-shout at the moment the sledgehammer comes down. Over and over again – a tormented diesel of raging pistons.
Under that tonnage of woe, I meditated. Or I tried. I really did. But this was my big, burly Bernie’s meat and bones. I couldn’t concentrate. Terrible thoughts intruded: nostalgia for the only man who had ever loved me for who I am.
My breath|force frittered. Like a slingstone, I flew, ejected into the stupendous night.
The moon’s touch was soft. So good to get out of that miserable engine of despair. A dancer’s spin against the stars lulled me. The world tilted below, River, forest, limestone bluff slid past, rotating. I was good and ready for sunyata.
Rhapsodic in the fetch of nothing, I wanted nothing more than to dissolve into not-me – to die. But I couldn’t. Absence washed away, sunyata collapsed under a rush of memories about everything I loved in Bernie: his licorice body odor, the way his packed muscles slipped and bunched under his freckly skin, even the brawny grace with which he carried his paunch…
Okay – let’s get this over with. I thought|projected myself back into Bernie’s vexed corpse.
A sizzling bolt of voltage announced my instantaneous arrival, and the diesel blared into action again, driving a vibrating hatred hard and furious into my spectral mind. If I still had my eyes, tears would have run just as hard and furious as that diesel, the pain was that excruciating.
It defeated the metaphysical speculations knitting a whole new worldview just out of sight: how could I feel pain without a body? what was this me that was not-me?
I was not kind with Bernie’s carcass. I made it pitch upright and swag among the trees, palsied and faltering. We were on our way through ethers of fog, bound for the bonfire, to mix Bernie’s ashes and bones with mine.
▬▬Do not burn me.
The torn voice barely reached me amid the hammering stupidity of pain and the welding cold inside my dead partner.
▬▬Do not hazard me to the flame.
No problem, I assured|projected. We had just drunkenly emerged from the moony woods. The bonfire seeped smoke, flames extinguished by a fire truck departing along a dirt road far across the misty pasture. An ambulance followed with my remains. Red strobes whirled, dwindling into darkness.
The gloomy field pillowed the Milky Way. Where was the moon? Like an angel, it reclined under clouds, low in the sky of starry hosts.
▬▬Shade of mischance, depart off me!
Not likely. I labored across the empty tract. The limestone bluff loomed, a breeching behemoth against galactic vapors.
Diesel pistons pounded heavier, astral cold cutting with fatal intensity. Too bad I’m already dead, a pixie-thought intruded on my tranced march, almost shattering the power|rightness that forced my will on the vampire.
The moon came clear of the clouds, an ulcerated halo to our dark planet that stretched our shadow behind, dragged and quivering.
We dropped heavily to our knees before the firepit. ▬▬Ireful shade quit this flesh … this absconded blood. ‘Tis no more or ere again what once you loved.
My strength puddled. The thing was right. I just wanted to kill it. But how? I dug fingers into the wet ash, frustrated, feeling in the residual warmth the last heat of my former life.
The instant I touched the quaggy cinders, the hammering diesel of hurt choked and stalled. The scouring cold lifted away as if peeled open by a sunbeam.
Power|rightness whispered something to me from the infinite. I didn’t hear what it said at first. But the vampire did and cried.
Its voluptuous squalling oscillated with the aberration in the blood shared by all vampires. Mutilated voices brayed in that very space where torment had battered me. In this precipitous ringing silence, a horrendous distress tangled sorrier among its own echoes, a lamentation of screeches dim and drumming dimmer, the melismatic screams of the undead.
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