Obsession that leads to evil
A fever keeps sweeping over Manny Face. I can’t pin it down – it’s not like it comes from inside me, like some sickness that’s gotten in, but from somewhere outside. It’s like I’ve created the sickness and now it wants me to take care of it. Like it has a right to existence, but I’m responsible for it and owe it something.
But it’s not a sickness – it’s an obsession. But it’s not my obsession. What I mean is, it’s not something that consumes me from within, thought after thought, sleeplessness, a floating-like stasis of the mind where practical quotidian functioning all but stops. It’s like it’s apart from me but a part of me – like it has its own existence but is able to make a claim on me, and I am unable to deny that claim.
What beckons, what calls? What’s changed that keeps bringing my mind back to her?
What’s happened? What have I done? My thoughts keep coming back to Tango Baby, over and over again, my lost and destroyed Tango Baby. Suddenly, she means so much to me, but she’s gone. And The Dancing Girl just doesn’t fit the bill. Oh, Tango Baby – is it that I really loved you, and really love you? Why didn’t I know that before? I resist the pull, and the fever blows through me. The fire rises and I burn in endless moments of pain. And I feel, if she were near me, if I was with her, watching over her, taking care of her, getting her head back on a par with mine, things would go easier inside me – and I feel the pull, and the need, to get her, to bring her back, to caress her and embrace her and love her – and tell her so… and tell her so.
And how, is the question – The Hunched Cornish… that power…
But I know I won’t be able to rest, won’t be given any rest, whatever it is rocking me into this suffering, this fire, unless I do something, unless I move toward her, try to get her out of there – but how, but how? And I feel there’s only so much time – or she will die…
My life – it means nothing.
I have enough strength, at least for now, to push these thoughts from me, although they’ll return, without my willing them into my mind, and my fever recedes, and I can practice my tango moves, and go out, and bring back The Dancing Girl and sink it deep inside her, and her cries and her moans soothe me – yes, they soothe me, and it was she, resting back in the afterglow, who’s wondered at the emerald studs in my ears, where they come to their top points, why they’ve started to throb and glow – and I hadn’t noticed before. I move naked to the mirror and brush my hair back with my hands from the sides of my head and observe the studs – embedded there by my elders when the time came for my change – but I was never told what they were for, nor had I any idea that they were to serve some practical purpose or as some kind of messaging center. I was told, when the time came, it would all become clear on its own.
And I suppose now is that time. That that time has begun. And I suppose that with time, I’ll know why, and what it has to do with me. I was sworn to secrecy, about the meaning of the studs, as that meaning becomes clear to me, among my own, those of mine whom I might find along my way, who are younger, and also wondering what their emerald studs are for. Because the revelation, when it becomes clear to me, will bring me through another phase. But if the word is spoken, beforehand, the knowledge released or exposed, then I will die, and if the mystery is revealed to me by some outside agent bearing me ill, then not only will I die, but all that has depended upon me.
For sometimes, if we know the truth, it can kill us.
Manny Face, August 14, 2013