The Brain in Sleep Presumes that Roofs Exist (Without Bothering to Believe in Them)

The night inside the night at 3am keeps pulsing desperately like the lungs of something buried alive or straight people fucking to make children when they’re afraid and have good reasons to be. I dream dreams that have only the markers of domestic horror. Scouted locations the rambunctious toddler of the subconscious scatters across the hours. Murky water glass in a garage, varnish peeling from the roll-top desk beneath, a stepfather of suspicious origin on his way home from there: that’s the air. Against plaster walls indoors the threat of ghost sisters come faint as leaks getting started. Something happened here always means that something will. The uncanny hesitates to materialize. It wafts aromatically or flashes, hyperventilates in camera. Its image stutters like a valve between doubt and submission: what went we what went we. 

What is it I want from horror? What does it want with me? What is it? 

What is it? Anything pitiful as pigeon wings in retreat. Partial and random flaying of a person alive. Signs of a struggle. The knees, breasts, and asscheeks of Billy Bob and Halle Berry in Monster’s Ball. Wings, wings, nervous bird. How it’s filmed from the vantage of shame, in shame as through a hole in the wall, as though the lens has been lubricated with humiliation. 

“Shiver” is the word I was looking for. Bird in a cage. Bird in a cage of fingers.

In the scene of riot police beating Angela Bassett down near the end of Strange Days, in the streets on the eve of Y2K, confetti falls. How long it takes the crowd to stop it might be the first time I fully appreciate the implication of eternity. I’m something like six or seven. Between fidget and fixity like cockroach legs. A dress that is probably the size of a cocktail when folded leaves her skin against the asphalt. Close-ups on her agony (it’s Angela Bassett acting, right?) and the many black batons kicking the air attempt immortality by light speed into my visual future. I’m a child immobilized in viewership, letting happen, and for twenty years I remember nothing more about the film—maybe not always that it is a film. An isolated, projected loop of brown-skinned woman with black braids battered with billy clubs belabors the black box theatre of the skull. Instead of nightmares, I have an archive. Some evenings my mother goes places without me.

On a 72-degree Sunday in May, I’m throwing throat on a mausoleum’s concrete knee for an audience of big-headed cherry blossoms. The virus is found in semen, they’ve said. The hill hunches laboriously green. The brown plots below bear small names. Zooming out from here corrects the pace of my disintegration; so does zooming in.

So a couple fucks in a cemetery. You notice the narrative leaning headlong into the hole of their punitive deaths. You can tell by how the camera disregards the usual stations of self. The face and the eyes are discontinued as sites of interpretation the scene can encompass. Here instead is a plump butt sliding out of denim, an ample tit, painted lips appliquéd among hands and hips. Dismemberment already determines them.

And in this way, when two rednecks rape the daughter in A Time to Kill, by slicing the subject into interrupted visual fragments, the camera performs its own brutal act. Mutilation by re-concatenated frames. At the shot of her bloody ankle, my uncle, I remember, exclaims about “her body part.” Sam-yell Jackson hopes they burn in hell, hopes to hell they burn.

In a nest of any insect, its orgy of effort suggests
one must relinquish self-disgust to get work done. 

I recognize terrible places by their glow. Red breathes from the inside like a prolapsed rectum. In this one a severely Nordic person makes a meal of a girl who looked like Chloë Grace Moretz. This is a dream I had. The irony gets lost when we see the big blonde clean the bones. We are a group and tie her up and need something she has, having nothing to do with the casserole of Chloë Grace girl. Others of my gang are young and distracted and the big blonde exploits that, almost escapes the restraints. We are not on fuckin vacation, I tell the kids, when the blonde’s Black lover, bewildered and linebacker-bodied, emerges mercenarily out of a nowhere that slowly adheres to the shapes of a trailer’s bathroom. Did someone shoot him? I think someone was shot.