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In every facility, as in every story, there is a place you do not go, a door, so to speak, beyond which only the authorized may pass: the secret police, the state torturer, the author, etc. A back room, an engine room, a kitchen where the chickens have their heads twisted round and their throats cut out, where they’re hung from twiggy feet, which grasp, twitching, at nothing, bound as they be to a wire over a basin while they methodically bleed out. Just so, behind every life, there’s the butcher and the deep freeze, an identity reduced to cuts of meat, of which a whisper is suffice, a rumor sufficient to ruin any appetite.

And so there is here, even in this place, where already no one unauthorized is authorized to go, a place that is even more off-limits than the ordinary off-limits, a hyper-off-limits, if you will, and this even bluer than blue off-limits, this archetypal door is marked, as it is everywhere, universally, with some form of dire warning: Do Not Enter, Achtung!, Biohazard, and all the rest. The alarming signs, the drastic hexes, the international, intergalactic Esperanto for Keep Out, Do Not Enter, Trespassers Will Be Shot, Go Anywhere But Here, is pitched at an even higher level of hysteria, is graven from top to bottom, like a carved war totem, all over this door.

A door? It might just as well be a second Tree of the Forbidden Fruit, a shadow-tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, growing on the other side of Creation, and long-ago defaced by the protean obscenities and secret sigils disguised within the vulgar rhythms of what seems to be a stylized inner city graffiti splashed in Technicolor, like evidence of a disemboweling on a sacrificial altar, all over this seven-times-seven vacuum-sealed and booby-trapped steel door.

Up to now, wandering these cancerous halls, Neena has seen only the finished product, the proud and polished pride of the craftsman’s necroexpertise, posed inside their lifelike dioramas, their death-dreams. Those sealed-up rooms, doubling for tombs, locked hermetically from within, and from without, behind whose glass, as impenetrable as past centuries, are reposed, in a series of erotically-charged hieroglyphic poses, those beautiful immortals, who, for lack of a better word, are dead; not like you or I are dead, or even Neena dead, not yet, no, not a chance of that, but the “chosen” dead, the practiced dead beyond all practice, all rehearsal, beyond all artful roles of the dying art…the centerfolds of the dead.

Behind this door instead lies another kind of no-place, a nowhere beyond the doodled black spaghetti of dead ends, the tangled passages lined with the ghastly beautiful dioramas of erotic doom, beyond all the neurotic necrotic craft of a mad anti-architecture with its web-weaving spider hands, yes, beyond all that and beyond more than that, is the definitive death, the death par excellence, the un-aesthetic culmination of countless deaths and reincarnations, the death after which one becomes an unspeakable masterpiece of death, a collector’s item mounted, catalogued, and forgotten, installed in an inaccessible museum no one visits, a museum whose atmosphere is stopped time and the impossible absence of dust, a theoretical death, an inconceivable hall of perfection established at and extending beyond the vanishing point, an ideal death the way a number is ideal: bloodless, hairless, with no mouth and no asshole, and that is hell, for this heaven after all.

And here it is that her hand hangs suspended between the push-bar and the thinking-better-of-it, Neena, pausing before the prospect of ending the story at this very moment in a shower of red-white strobe lights and a chorus of shrieking alarms and criss-crossed laser gunfire that would streak from every corner like rending vulture claws. It would be a relief to get it all over with, and yet, and yet…would it, really? This inner dialectic, to be or not to be (to turn the page or not to turn the page), already presupposes a foregone conclusion, for when a decision has been made the trigger’s pulled, the debate ended with a bang, or by taking that one-step drop out of the room through the trapdoor to oblivion that was always there but that you somehow never noticed unobtrusive beneath even your most firmly held positions.

No decision, in other words, is a decision just the same, for one doesn’t have to decide to go on, it just happens, it’s the essential form that indecision takes; life is, and that’s all it often is, a lack of positive action, a passive aggression.

Did Neena consider that, do you think? Probably, most likely, not; then where do such thoughts come from, you might well ask? Well, who knows, psycholinguistics is not our field. It’s enough to say that this door we’ve gone to such extraordinary lengths to hypothesize corresponds to an emergency exit at the bottom of the skull, but not quite, more like the door to a surgery that only swings one way. 

‘Nuff said?

No?

“Well then come along, dearie, they’re ready for you in make-up.”

The hand on her arm, it could be hers a hundred-and-fifty years from now, a parchment covered bundle of dry sticks tied up with twine, a crispy papyrus covered with ulcers, the hand of a corpse exhumed from a pit of black leaf mould. Neena doesn’t need to see this ominous relic to know that it’s there, nor the conspiratorial wink of the eye like a pitted olive. She can see in her sleep that old actress, her mother, the ghost of old silent movies rerun through the loop-d-loops of her brain.

“Best, as you well know, not to keep those make-up folk a-waiting. They’ll get their revenge in the end. Leave you looking like hell warmed over. Heh-heh-heh…”

Neena would sigh if the breath that she held, has been holding, in the long-drawn-out moment of shocked suspense that she took when this story started, didn’t have to suffice until it ended, which is to say, from now on till forever. Her own hand, by the way, is still extended, reaching what isn’t within reach, what isn’t truly there, touching nothing, a gesture exquisitely extinguished even as it is made, and each of her fingertips, she suddenly discovers, is inexplicably wet with white paint.

Up on tiptoe she is, it’s a mannequin’s pose, her lips numbed with forbidden words and the cold chrome pole is thrust so deeply in her innards through her snatch she can taste metallic in her throat. With her hair shaved away and her eyeballs repainted, they all look the same, each of the several Neenas, cold and unfuckable beneath their fiber-optic wigs, a fairytale beauty no kiss will awaken, while on the other side of the glass the shoppers are passing with barely a glance in her more than general direction.