Genre-Bending Lullaby

My care-takers spoke in voices sometimes unrecognizable even to myself. At their best, they were as close to an average performer as they got. At their worst, they’d eat alive all the miserable attempts to reconfigure the notion of performativity. I like them either way. Because regardless of the performative aspect, the act of reading requires serious engagement in an active interaction with the narrative. They were both particularly fond of surgical interventions in the realm of genre bending. They’d do it with an awe-inspiring appetite for making themselves at home wherever they went, in whatever storyline they’d dwell. All the way equipping me-good-self with the same skill.

On one such occasion, I was again told a story in which I heard an echo of the enigmatic whisper that was wondering about technology, playfulness, essence, totality, and everything else. In the key of kitch’n’sink mystery-meets-horror, the tale seductively drew me into its meandering tunnels. I saw a boyish young man, sickly rich and rhetorically sick. S/he inherited from his quote-unquote father the language called the marbled swarm. S/he comes to the chateau that s/he is about to buy. The family who are selling the haunted castle immediately reveal the presence of the ghost of their late son to be part of the reason for deciding to sell it. Their other son soon befriends the future owner. Having shaken on that one, they see the deal opening up the avenues for addressing the mysterious death,  that could have even been suicide. Or, something like that.

That story to me was “a most unsightly daydream in which a beet-red, hyperventilating infant gave birth toanother crimson, screaming infant.” I had one of such daydreams one day in June when somebody’s dead mother’s corpse was found in the attic of that person’s house inhabited by the children whose parents lived in a pocket of the shirt of an overdosed celebrity called Bizzare. They lived at 25 E Half All(e)y.

The kids were hanging out with the bunch from the suburb college of deskilling. Strolling through the labyrinth constructed of discarded sofas covered with dust, stained refrigerators ornamented with grease dripping from the melting icicles, boxes full of rotting debris of twenty McDonald’s meals, icing formed from encrusted puke over moldy   beefstew.  They often think:” Owning property affords someone a house in which to be at home, at the price of being homeless.”

They are not criminals. Because crime is not possible. Because everything has been legalized. Everything is allowed. And nothing is free. Only the streets. Cold. Hostile. But, at least, far from the restrictive classroom walls. Far enough from school uniforms. In the haven encircled by eroding façades and shaky foundations. Where to be free means to be somewhere. Be it even the vapor from the garbage can hiding a disintegrating corpse on the hottest of summer nights. Be it the exhale of a parasite thought on the tiny remaining part of the brain ravaged by the viral tsunami, “if that mixture of recalcitrance and focus is even possible.”