=4=

When Neena opens her eyes again, she cannot see out of the right one. She is gasping and she has begun to foam at the mouth. No one seems unduly alarmed.

“One must mix carefully to get the full spectrum of desired effects and still you must make sacrifices [inaudible passage]. A good deal of this has taken place over a period of several days duration.”

An older woman--Neena has seen her often before, but where, under what circumstances she can’t say--interrupts her own conversation (about insect-derived poisons) to turn to Neena and ask, solicitously, “Are you quite alright, my dear? You’re looking rather peeked. You might want to redraw your lipstick.”

Neena is chilled from scalp to toes with a transparent sheen of sick sweat and she is suffering from an uncontrollable tremor, but she actually manages, to everyone’s surprised delight, to take four spoonfuls of the chief desert course, a creamy crème brulee made of whale eyes.  

She tries to smile, absently, albeit knowingly, when someone on her left pretends to ask her opinion of that new athletic satire causing such a stir among the Estraud faction. She struggles for form an intelligent answer but realizes that her interlocutor has only used the question as an excuse to examine her more closely. He is checking the second hand of his watch for the eagerly anticipated beginnings of morbid cyanosis.

Neena feels her heart stagger into a ventricular fibrillation which in turn triggers her adrenals like a starter’s pistol initiating her all-out flight response. But flight--to where? She is far too disoriented and polite to do much more than vaguely excuse herself and half-rise from her place at table with a gesture of elegant resignation (a gesture later much discussed, admired, and copied), which she makes with her as yet only partially paralyzed left hand. 

The floor comes up quickly, quicker than possible! (how is that possible?). When she revives to a state of semi-consciousness, she is lying on her side and convulsively vomiting as if trying to turn herself inside out. She vomits as if giving birth, by mouth, in a burning flood of blood and mucous, to Death itself.

One of the ridiculously impractical platform fetish sandals she’s been wearing has come off. Her skirt is hiked up over her right hipbone, revealing the starry-spangled g-string that bisects the smooth angel-dusted globes of her perfect ass. She can feel the garters have unsnapped on the back of her right thigh and the fishnet stocking adorning that leg has worked itself a few inches down the back of her very white flesh. The image would be aesthetically complete, she believes, if one of her breasts were simultaneously exposed, but the only way that will happen now is if someone reaches down to help slip a soft tit out of its lacy cup in order to expose her in this lovely fashion.

She is aware of all these details, and several more besides, and aware of it all in the ever diminishing intervals between each hideously violent constriction of her entire gastrointestinal system.

“Designer poisons, I’m afraid, are an absolute necessity,” Neena hears someone say. “You simply can not get such a rainbow plethora of reactions from any combination of natural poisons alone. Believe me, I’ve spent the better part of a lifetime trying. Not the worst way to spend the better part of a lifetime either, I might add.”

“Indeed,” concurs a chuckling man, who has stooped down to examine Neena more closely through a monocle. He slips her tit out. “Nature is so limited.”

“Magnificent,” another voice says. “She has turned quite an unearthly tone of blue.”

“Death occurs on a variety of fronts,” still another voice points out, droning somewhat pedantically. “There is, of course, the collapse of all major organ systems: respiratory and circulatory, for starters. The nervous system goes haywire before it shorts out completely. It is a catastrophic assault on the entire body from within. Quite painful—and yet remarkably…”

Either the sentence isn’t finished—or Neena cannot hear it. Instead the next thing Neena hears is this:

“I note, with extreme satisfaction, the issue of blood from her anus…”

The voice belongs to a female, it is both enthusiastic and insinuating.

“Yes, major hemorrhaging from there as well. She’s quite ruined, I’m delighted to say. A biohazard. Dangerous to even touch; I wouldn’t recommend trying.”

Neena hears nothing any more. From this point on, she’s stone-deaf. Her jaws are locked open and her eyes, tear-fringed lids a- flutter, have rolled back. She is crying, quite literally, tears of blood. Her long delicate fingers are curled into tight babyish fists, and her nails puncture her palms, a pseudo-stigmata, in wounds that form an alchemical hieroglyphic.

But back to Neena’s point of view (while she still has one): her rapidly diminishing boundaries of concern have already left her with very little point of view at all, just a rapidly dimming pinprick of awareness, through which she gazes as if at an eclipse. In this case the eclipse of her own life.

A team of men in white protective clothing, complete with masks, now surround her. They wield disinfecting machinery and wear reptilian breathing devices.

Neena dies without so much as a shudder, her body already locked in a spasm of such rigidity it is impossible to compare it to anything.

She is more than dead, she is hyper-dead.

She is beyond even necrophiliac desire, dangerous and untouchable--a thing beyond taboo.

She feels nothing, as usual, except what might be felt from the post-conscious knowledge that no one is interested in her any longer. The wreckage of her liquefying corpse has been lifted, deposited, and is now being wheeled unceremoniously from the dining room in a grey cart marked on all sides with the bright yellow warnings signs for toxic waste.

She will be dumped into the chopping cold waters off the Jersey Shore sometime later that night. Her processed remains will be pumped through the bilge system of an unmarked tanker along with other illegally dumped chemical and radioactive byproducts from various secret, underground medical and technical weapon facilities along the east coast.

Meanwhile, the guests in the dining room are enjoying mints and aphrodisiacal rattlesnake-blood aperitifs.