Horse Horse Tiger Tiger

See the man. Ravaged. Innocence squandered and that. A frenzied butcher in the message centre. Fluid depleted and shrivelled of more than fifteen kilos and brittle and weak and exhausted. Dried blood on the cartoon sheet and sweat and again ribs crack as retching over the side of the bed the body digs deep to expel yellow and froth that slaps down on the puddle on the tiled floor as the hands of a medical professional press on the glass and watches him and does nothing else. Blood he says to himself for what it’s worth as a tired arm that may as well belong to another points at the floor and the strip of hard hacked and dirty burgundy coffee grounds settle in the frothy yellow bile. Wipes it from his lips and angry disdain for self from his face. He nudges the long defrosted ice packs from his back and peddles them to the end of the bed before laying back on the salty damp and sour bedding and exhales a lung-lazy and humiliating breath to look again at the giggling ceiling. The fluorescent light. The hum of the machines. The blood tubes spiked and taped into the back of his hand. The clip on the index finger. The taste of iron and the failing vision. Electrocardiogram. Blood pressure or lack of it. Plethysmograph. Irregularities and that. Wednesday thursday happy days thursday friday happy days the weekend comes his cycle hums ready to race to her.

He watched. He watched an ant. He watched an ant walk along the chipped olive paint of the bar at the bottom of the bed stopping only to poke at the dead body of a coworker before picking it up and turning a wide circle to take it home. He wonders what happens to the bodies of dead ants taken back to the nest. He hears the horrific cry of thousands burning whenever it is otherwise silent and clichéd hallucinations on the edge of sight fill the negative spaces between things spiders and demons crawling from the things between the things in Chiang Mai ICU.

Mistakes were made. Two weeks earlier. See the hope. His first dose of Statephine. A struggling to be sweet and cherry red syrup served in a brown medicine bottle and watched by three Thai nurses who look away as he drinks and rinses the bottle to make sure he gets it all. A handful of pills rattle down a hungry throat and a churning begins and intestines bubble and squeak and glopple and gloot. Out it comes and nothing else besides as nothing else was there. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Eyes glassy and raw staring at the filth as if it holds the answer to a question he no longer remembers asking if he did at all. He breathes for yet he can still do that.

The nurses told him he would not see home again if he left now. He said he would not see another dawn if he stayed. And the truth was neither here nor there for truth was a thing of men and men were given to fear and to lies and to all manner of frailty. The day rose and fell like a blade and the wind scoured the quenching corridors clean of reckoning. There was no answer only the long hours that stretched out like a road with no promise of its end and in the space between one breath and the next the weight of what was waiting.

Any amount of cold hot days later in bitching Patong but the building where the dirty from who he gets what he needs has gone. The shock and desperation the hundred to one chance of this nonsense reaching a positive end has barely started. He stands up straight and takes a breath and has to go to the airport. Nearly faints. With a hand on a post the sweat runs down from behind his ear and wets his cracked lips and breath and breath and breath and breathing. Stands up straight again unwinding a frightened stomach stretching the black bile. He recognises whores that he once loved who don’t notice him as angles tilt and bend and every road a steep hill amidst the juicy neon slap in the pale and ugly failure of a face lost in the plenty of giddy disasters.

The hours stretched out like a road without end without mercy a thing neither real nor unreal but only there unspooling and endless. The sun rose and fell and rose again and it made no difference. The light did not cleanse nor did the dark offer reprieve. Time moved but nothing changed. The hours did not pass so much as they lingered pooling in the bones in the belly thick as sickness.

Hours. He counted them and tried to mark them tried to weigh them in his mind like a man measuring out grains of sand but they slipped away from him yet went nowhere. He knew not what day it had become nor what hour it had been nor what day would come next. The clock had no face and things had names they weren’t worthy of.

Time thus bore down on him like the weight of a thing unseen pressing and suffocating. He clenched his hands and let them go clenched them again. His breath was a hollow thing. The waiting was all there was the slow drowning in moments that did not end. The silence stretched and stretched yet in its vastness he knew the truth of it: there was no end at all.

Jittery and dizzy snappy sound of Boulez claims the walking street foundtrack as played by Toyota horns tuk-tuk break pad screams and tinny distorted voices at idiotic counterpoint and cubist angles and vertiginous lines and heaving regret to have made choices that brought him here and the body again again again tries to expel now those very choices and against a pole again his hand as ribs crack and mouth opens stretched maw and jaw breaking limits of the body and for all that sound and effort and strange glory the bitter meagre splatter makes tourists cross the migraine road stark full beams and petro-carbons and nitrogen oxides in the creaking dank whisper of the cavernous lung.

He tries to buy salvation from a motorcycle taxi driver yet a success it has never been before and why now but a long shot any chance is better than to have no hope left and the first dirty faced and lying bastard in the torn blue lo-vis vest that says Taxi Patong beneath a circular logo that looks like brass knuckles says yes as he would. As they always do and nothing ever comes of it yet more trouble and disappointment and with money disappearing so too choices and two more flights needed and then how. Same shameless bullshit same predictable lies and unpleasant friendliness as he looks greedily into desperate eyes and says he will relive him. He can see his suffering his broken and unwanted place in the world etched into the space within which it drags itself onwards as it remembers discharged against medical advice and a call to prayer grates and the faces of everyone like caricatures with expressions of insanity and the dead plasticity of such distortions. Another pole. More retching. He will relive him. He won’t. He’s making a phone call now to definitely not sort out this foreigner who spits yet more bloodied bile onto the dog piss cement of a lamp post and shudders years of misery almost free from his damp and colden skin.

See the man fall. The motorcycle taxi driver quick to pick him up to save his steal and his wet breath in his ear a whisper I will relieve you. Patong Beach Road where the Andaman sea groans against the shore like an ancient beast caught in its death throes. Sand as fine a bone dust swallows his heavy foot as the machinery of desire pumps and wheezes a libidinal and an extraordinary need for love. Half told stories left to rot in alleyways gaudy and as hopeless as a suicidal war cry. Skewered meat and vendors howl like prophets. He looks at the mountain north of the bay indifferent and looming like gods that forgot they were ever gods to begin with. It’s night now he thinks although it’s hard to say. One of many mutated men spat out changed or forgotten entirely.

He shits in a plastic bag taped to a chair with a hole in the seat and his withered damp and cold trembling body guided by judgemental nurses who linger like the stench of glub and brown butter that’s been hanging around in sluggish and tired intestines. He grips the metal arms of the chair as if to steady himself against an invisible storm that already passed and atrophied muscles like they’d never known the burden of a man’s weight before shudder at use. Thighs forward and humiliatingly poken white yellow even once full and braced to carry him through the march of youth and vigor now seemed carved from something dead and deflated and collapsed as if the body itself were in retreat preparing for surrender and as narrow as famine. The room smelled of a solid and burning iodine and something deeper still the sourness of sin purged and when he finally began to void himself it was neither relief nor victory that settled in his hollow gaze but something ancestral as if some deep curse were being exorcised and yet not in the slightest had such a thing really happened. Nothing has started with any significance until death has unveiled thee and with that he picks himself up. Say hello to my little friend.

The cruciform relentlessness and up yours bone-chilling glacial unwelcome of Bangkok Suvarnabhumi International Airport and there does he without care or concern fall to his brittle knee in the hacking brightness of warring perfumes that fill the duty-free transept. Expensive but unclean with the throbbing need to be somewhere elseness of the show that claws at his senses like stray dogs at the slaughterhouse drain and somewhere far away from this suffocating pharmakeía his love weeps for she knows not where or why or if he’ll ever return or if he was ever there anyway. Pallor waxen he holds up his hand to show the hospital identification strap and what remains of the plasters that held down the drip. He lies through sticky teeth of chemotherapy he hasn’t had and a daughter he doesn’t have being hit by a car that never existed in Phnom Penh that could itself be a dream. All bit and the closing of options the end of alternatives and the nudging of questions and the teasing of the one answer. To liars the truth is most important for you must at least know God to know how to make people say yes when everything suggests otherwise.

He sat hunched in the terminal cold like shattered glass through his shirt through his skin and into the very withered meat of him. His hands shaking. His guts twisted in knots like an animal caught in wire. The electricity and light hummed overhead and the voices of travelers murmured in a hundred tongues disembodied a chorus of ghosts at a party of artifice and mass production and a carnivorous take on clothing and what it’s actually there for.

Beyond the glass runways stretched out into the dark and lights blinked in a rhythm like some code well beyond his concerns. The smell of jet fuel fried food and more. He could see his breath. The ache in his bones was something holy something ancient a god that had put down roots in his marrow. A failed god were something like that even possible.

He moved through the concourse like a man trying to keep up with an idea of himself. The shops and kiosks walled in glass their contents gleaming under lights too white too cruel. His stomach clenched and he closed his eyes. Somewhere past security past the customs desks and the rows of waiting seats past all the duty-free whiskey and watches and painted women somewhere out in the neitherworld neon-dark of the city it waited for him.

But he would not reach it. Not tonight and he knew this. He would stay in the cold and he would suffer and he would clutch his arms and curl his fingers into the sweat of them and he would sit and he would wait. Endless endless hours the seconds a slow-dripping poison in a timer broken angrily by his mother at conception. He watched the planes come and go and watched the people with their passports their cases and ugly anticipation their bright untroubled eyes. Seven hours. A lifetime. We’re concerned you won’t make it they said as if we weren’t all dying anyway he thought. He closed his eyes and let the sickness take him home. And still she weeps.

Old meat wrapped in scraped llama belly and tight alcohol a bloated gaggle of superficial riches and arguing features and a grasping sexuality. A beast with seven heads and so vampires of lust. All this seduction empty to him now yet a slight and familiar fizzle at the end of the world from where he is always just a few blind steps. And the air-con cries Mary.

And now he is pushed in a wheelchair hood up and smile like a skeleton chattering teeth stuck tongue a mumbling metal dryness as spiky icicles of conditioned air stab him in the concave chest neck ankles and an even colder and aching sense of his own twisted mythology malgré lui and with a gulp of the near frozen air a sense at least of hope and of why we swim and wither. The man who pushed him did so without hurry and without pity and the tunnel of light before yawned vast and featureless and on he went. For all the grand unsuckled bosoms in the world he is there then and now and dying he thought. Pushed through security by a man with beastly and dirty arachnid fingers who every ten or so metres leans forward and whispers in the liars ear money tip money tip and will receive neither though stops for an over the side awkward and twisted retching at volume and with the gusto of a surprising whiff of hunger. Neither money nor tip.

Eyes settled like regret on the freak figure of loss as whatever it was that was too deep to reach yet may have been their death that found him first as ribbons of bloodied bile and utter sadness as nonetheless he tried and tried and how they stayed and watched though mothers hid their children’s sad and stark eyes although some couldn’t stop as though there might be something to learn from such suffering before hurrying to their departure lounges leaving him behind and forgetting themselves for some kind of salvation they never found or never thought about again and again.

See him now half dead and broken against medical advice and the lash and thoroughly insaned through the liquidizer of airports planes electronic walkways and the putrid nightmare fuel of the stinking excesses of the perpetually celebrating humans that travel like a measure of success. Amongst them amongst the chilling and timeless music of civilization occurring and beats tickles whispers and repeats this drowning of noise organized as the brain searches for patterns in the ugly fungal recesses of what he calls his thinking of his shattered spiteful mind. The boot of death pushing down on his neck as he’s dragged onwards by a need like no other he’s known and one that’s beyond love and life and God. His eyesight fails further and his heart beats faintly in time with the rhythm of predictability and failure and the dry snap of making just enough sense of it all to Just. Keep. Going.

A thing reduced and stripped to bone and sinew and his will a cindered husk and yet he just kept going for to move was to survive and to survive was the last wheezing and cold commandment left to him so just keep going. The rib-breaking intestine strangling eye-bleeding and always the damp cold skin of tomorrow pissing on his nightmares and stealing the time ahead of him.

See the man. Home. He falls back spent his breath ragged in the dark. His lover beside him watching. He smiles the damp metal of old teeth and eyes black yet with a sound near to laughter says something. Anything.