The new year finds Damon in the bathroom pissing and popping backne cysts simultaneously. Math excites his mind. He solves things in his head to amuse himself. Pangs of tissue tearing at the expulsion of pus foregrounds the sensation of urethra flow. The crescendo of yells and noise makers across Manhattan indicates a rare acoustic event which, Damon realizes as things launch out of his back and dick asymmetrically, spreads over him like a form of silence.

 

You listen to live jazz music in a living room with no furniture. Jazz is successful furniture. Abstract music frames you. It displays you. The purple light works too. Purple light is lust and forensics teamed into one glow. In the cross between this sound and color stands the future of the coastal workforce. This is the death of other dreams. You wonder how you ended up here.

 

You stand by a public artwork on the campus of a private liberal arts college in the late fall of 2017. It’s a picture your mother took. You smile next to a giant steel sculpture jutting from the grass. Your reflection wraps over its curves.

 

Someone kisses you. You close your eyes to know only tongue. Phosphenes scab the blackness. Your eyes ache in their lids because you look at things harsh and short. Saliva dissolves the pain. Your tongues language the bending room. You peek and notice how the saxophone is held.

 

Voices sound from behind the front door. Damon showers the sebum off his back against the marble tile in the pour of soft water. The water collects in the infinity drain below his feet. It feels good to shower during a party. The noise of the other room competes with the spatter on the ceramic base. Damon notices the sound of moaning and pounds against that front door. Who could that be? It feels good to shower during a party. You can think about numbers becoming non-numbers, swallowed in bending planes of light and space, like fabrics tanned over eyes. The drain swallows thoughts to infinity. Damon tortures a shape in his head.

 

The surface of the door moans. An intercom feeds a dark street into ghost-white picture on the screen. Seb stumbles over to get it. Hands squeak against the surface as they slide down after each thud, each knock like a hunger. 

 

He opens the door. Through his wispy vision Seb is met with a large group lined up the stairway. Saliva puddles on the doormat.

 

Stemmy fingers pull Seb’s hand to their eyes. The hand is adored. Suspended in a haze of liquor and pot Seb lets the character run charred fingers down the paths of his warm palm. The man bleeds from his ears. His hair is mucked with silt and wrappers tucked in a Yankees cap. His companions fill the hallway with inconceivable stench. They rub their bellies. Seb swallows. “I cannot let you in. Sorry.”

 

The man looks like he’s about to cry. His eyes water over Seb’s trembling hand. He breathes sick, sad air onto the thumb and chews it off at the joint. Seb opens his mouth. Pain steals his voice. And then another bite. His left thumb. Seb hears the digit masticated. He guards his face with his stumps. His wounds are tasted. Someone fists his mouth, undoing the jaw. They hold him and chew out his belly. A final thought is his mother shaking her head in their old kitchen. 

 

Damon notices as he zips his pants that the music in the other room has been switched to some kind of loose acapella. He tugs his argyle coat over his shoulders and smiles. It sounds like Doo Wop outside. Someone pounds slowly at the bathroom door. Not another drunk female, he thinks.

 

Applause for the band fills the room. The musicians shout incomprehensible remarks about the gig. They laugh and touch each other’s hands. Behind the cloud of chatter and streamed music, a metered chant blooms from the entrance hall, fusing to the scenery. Elon turns to Pia. “What’s that Pia. You hear it. What’s that.” 

 

Pia’s face distorts. She hears wailing from the corridor. Shadows emerge from the hallway and flail on the wall like bags kicked up in wind.

 

They tear Damon apart in the bathroom, feature by feature. As they work on taking out his eye, someone bumps into the shower faucet, turning it on. Bodies topple over each other vying to taste water. A pregnant woman stretches her mouth as wide as her jaw will go to let water pool on her tongue. Other mouths find the fabric of her weathered leggings and occupy it with their teeth. A chain of distraction spares Damon, breathing through a torn throat. He drags himself through the door. He comes apart at each push. Unfastened organs trail along, disrupting the argyle grid of his jacket.

 

Where am I from? The room erupts with panic. There’s a spun globe of locations roasting in Jansen’s head. Every yelp and clamor lands a pin somewhere on a continent. No. Not Africa. Not threshes of bush and desert. Not gazelles. Not the parched vista. No, not Switzerland either. Not a child of the Alps imaginarium. No. Not New York or London or Paris or Tokyo. Not a Midwest pile.

 

Elon attempts to yank a wailing, sniveling girl out from the grip of a grey skinned teen chewing her feet. Bloodied tan pumps. A soft, drowsy nausea in the character’s face as he eats. Mouthful of crushed purple polished nails. 

 

The room is itemized. Whittaker stands on the kitchen island with a bottle, clubbing a man chewing his sneakers. Pia dances around lunging hands. Willis pries his camera from the mouth of a character who’s fit his jaw around the entire lens. Jansen prowls through the room, unnoticed, gripping his hat over his head, teeth chattering. A man in a parka eats Damon’s neck. The moaning twists into utterance, organized by lazy finger snaps. 

 

The saxophone is suckled. The man lipping it huffs a damaged tone. A woman in an oversized hoodie drools on the neck of the double bass. She rubs her hand against the strings making them squeak. She plucks them up and down. A shivering man in a wet cardigan scrapes at the rings of cymbals, the bronze screeching against nails. Drumsticks go up someone’s nose, through an ear, crammed through a skull. Discharge and eratta out holes. Hands slap the skins of the snare and toms. 

 

The Alexa cylinder stutters. Pants drop, with a deep sigh the thing is sat on, enveloped. A snap, pop of rectal tissue. A fidget of broken streamed music. 

 

Not Alaska. Glass shatters over a skull in the kitchen. A pin lands in the virtual green terrain of Lebanon. No. Jansen’s head shakes. Not there. 

 

Elon and Pia and Willis sit behind the barricade of a tipped standing desk in the bedroom. Knocks palpitate the door. They taste the particles of air from the adjacent room’s havoc. The bready smell of dried blood. The airborn fibers released from torn synthetics. Spoilt breath and open flesh and waxy cleaner stain on the floor. 

 

Willis talks to the police on his phone. Elon’s eyes flick around the walls. Willis’s posters. Graphics of eyes and cyrillic and human-camera chimeras.

 

The screech of the living room gives way to diffuse pops and scratches. Willis cracks the door open. Elon holds Pia. Wet cocaine hardens in the rims of his nostrils. 

 

They walk into the living room. They step out onto an embroidery. Cotton sweaters, jackets, hoodies, bombers, denim, twill, all threaded in and around flesh, distended organs, hair, teeth. In the corner is a band slumped over their instruments, winding down and tickling the brass and wooden bodies. Dark blood pools around their feet. Bloated people with papery skin cluck halves of words in their sleep, digesting.  

 

They weave around pastel pinks and blues and yellows, watery oxidized reds, dark green parka shells. They see known faces under rubbled cans and bottles. Music stutters in the corner.

 

Jansen sits by the fire escape conversing with Whittaker, hunting for places on the floor. He dashes for origins. Whittaker’s corpse dozes forward. His ghost hangs upwards.

 

A pale mass lies on the floor sucking Willis’s camera. Willis kneels down to negotiate the barrel out of its mouth. They see-saw on his device. He takes pictures from the camera plugged down the throat. A red tunnel contracting on the viewfinder. Lined by splinters. Gluey skids. Dollar bills and zippers. The window to the firescape squeaks open. 

 

Elon directs Jansen’s attention to the opening. Jansen mutters and presses his hat down as he trembles onto the platform. Whittaker leans and crumples on the floor. Pia tip toes around bodies and takes Elon’s hand. Willis tugs at his camera. The instrument chokes his struggler. Saliva creeps down focus rings.

 

Excerpted from Horvath’s forthcoming novella, “The Gigging.”

Image: Farley Schilling