by James McGirk
You never look directly at the face. Catch only glimpses of it and those glimpses are ever changing. One moment he is a she. The next there is a hissing void where a face should be. The only constant is an hourglass that hangs above its pillow, a cartoonish thing with the year 2011 stamped on one side and only five grains remaining and one of those grains is about to fall.
The patient is dying, that much is clear; fugues of stroboscopic flickers consume the body like a florescent light bar about to sputter out. He or she or whatever it is reaches for you and the flesh of its hand is mottled and moving, seven billion pixels buzzing, dots of different shades of brown that pale slightly at its northern extremities. A grain slips through the tip of the timer’s cone to fall among its three hundred and sixty brethren below. Only four remain.
He opens his mouth and static rushes out, a wave of white noise cascades around you and tumbles apart into twitter feeds and crumpled newspaper and television signals and radio waves; and it tries again, fills its lungs beneath its strange cloak – a garment that is mostly rotten rags and plain cotton but woven with silk thread and buttoned with diamond chips – and wheezes out the words, “There is still time.” You take in the detritus discarded beneath its bed; a layer of tinsel, the Chanukah candles melted down to nubs just below, the gnawed drumstick, the soggy firecrackers and drooping birthday hats wonder what could possibly surprise you after this.
A second grain tumbles through the timer. A new form shudders into view. This new manifestation contains larger pieces than its previous form, two hundred and four of them, some enormous, encompassing entire organs, others covering only sliver of nail. The face is a jagged diamond – flat on top with a gnarled bottom that is almost a beard. One facet is a black, another red, the third white, while its mouth is a green triangle that falls open to a smile that widens and splits its face into two pieces, and as you watch, the southern, bearded half blossoms into a new color scheme: a blue triangle, its expression squeezed into a yellow star.
The third grain drops. You catch whiffs of gunsmoke and your eyes tear up as you inhale puffs of riot gas. Angry green boils erupt all over the patient's body. Even the shards that seemed the most stolid appear inflamed with activity. Seven red elephants stare up at a blue donkey with bat-like ears and they bare their tusks before stampeding toward one another. The patchwork skin begins to bubble and melt away, in the spots where it seemed the most solid, it sags and rots and tears open. Beneath the carapace there is mostly emptiness. But the space crisscrossed by thin wires, some crackling with sparks; others simply hanging, little strings of tinsel, gold and silver and bubbling veins of black crude.