The song begins before the room does.
“I’m so happy…” A cheap speaker murmurs. The tone is warm, fuzzy with the fragile optimism of a ghost rehearsing a lie. The recording warps, as though the tape is passing through water. Or grief. With those words, POIMANDRÉSH is awake again. If one can call this condition wakefulness.
He sits shirtless in a Victorian armchair that has elected, out of resignation, to support him.
“…’cause today I’ve found my friends…” The lyric reaches him as a private joke.
Friends, indeed. Most of them lie scattered across the floor. Empty bottles, forgotten rituals, and minor spirits dozing like wounded moths.
His MASQUE faces the dimness and the lilting song. His empty sockets give no light, yet something like expression moves within them. Red vines creep at the edges of those sockets. They bloom into aching flowers that burn themselves out in a heartbeat. From his jaw descends a beard of dark vegetal filaments. This beard braids twice along his chin. Each braid bursts into a handful of small blossoms. Blossoms that open and fail according to imperceptible rhythms.
His mustache arches upward with exhausted irony from above the slash of his mouth. Along his torso, vegetation clings to him like memory. Driftwood ribs, tendons reimagined as roots. Small fungi ascend his sternum in hesitant spirals.
POIMANDRÉSH is a man, but only in retrospect. What sits in the chair is a theory of a man constructed from flora, sorrow, and the aftereffects of a long bender. Along the decomposing margins of the animated MASQUE that is his face, flowers emerge. Then wither, and re-emerge, as if rehearsing an argument about impermanence.
Behind that MASQUE there is no skull in any conventional sense. Only an interior volume implied by growth. A cathedral inferred by its ivy.
Smoke escapes from whatever he’s smoking - a cigarette, a joint, some herb native to SHEOL.
But the smoke does not rise far. It pauses, as though considering him. The air around him quivers with the last hours of the night. The hours before that. And the hours before that, which refuse to end.
“…they’re in my head…” The lyric floats through the gloom like a verdict.
Daylight intrudes through the blinds. Though “daylight” is a generous word for the pallid imitation SHEOL provides. It slashes across his vine-latticed chest. It illuminates the small ecosystems blooming between his ribs. Muscles that are not muscles tighten; driftwood fibers creak. Somewhere inside him, something tries to remember who he was before he died. Every time it tries, a new flower blooms and immediately regrets doing so.
He surveys the room with the slow recognition of the exhausted. Empty bottles. Half-eaten offerings. Cigarettes crushed into priceless heirlooms. A spirit of spilled wine lies on its back, wings twitching, drunk beyond metaphysics. The kitchen is a theological disappointment. The sink has become a minor underworld. He clears enough space to fill the kettle and grinds beans for coffee.
Outside, the world remains theoretical. A rumor of living, glimpsed through cheap blinds.
His hands tremble. A tremble lacking subtlety. He presses a vine-woven claw, blackened at the tips, to the hollow where a heart should be. Feeling returns in a series of unwelcome spasms. He drinks from an open bottle, grimaces, and drinks again.
The kettle begins to growl. He ignores it. Or forgets it. One or the other.
On his way out, he retrieves his ochre coat from the back of a chair. The garment blooms in contact with him. Fungal constellations brightening along the seams. Its interior vines aligning themselves to his ribs in an impossible alchemical wedding.
He knocks on the door opposite his own.
“I’m going for coffee. Want anything?”
A long pause. The kind of pause that suggests a person searching for the perfect arrangement of misery. Then: A hideous roar. Ancient, filled with limitless malice. It causes the room to quake to its foundations.
POIMANDRÉSH descends the midnight darkness of the stairwell. Stepping around the small sprites and spirits too delicate to move. At the bottom, he pushes open the front door. Light - or an anemic imitation of light - falls over him.
Inside, the kettle begins to howl. Inside, the song stops mid strum, and by an unseen hand, another begins, with its own strange tenderness: “I’m not like them, but I can pretend…”
The gurgle-pop of pabellón criollo announces itself before its scent does.
A sputtering, ecstatic hymn of beans and plantains meeting oil. On the griddle, the stewed spirits of the food instantiate and disinstantiate. They do so in frantic loops, uncertain whether they prefer being alive, dead, or conceptual. Each time a gobbet of grease crackles, a minor sprite leaps into existence. It’ll flail in surprise, and dissolve back into cumin-scented vapor.
The cook behind the counter is not a being so much as a gesture toward one. A tall assemblage of elbows and shadows, wearing no gloves and no skin. Every movement leaves a smear of intention on the air. He presses an arepa together with the indifference of a demiurge. One that has stopped believing in creation, but still performs it out of habit.
He delivers the food to POIMANDRÉSH without ceremony. The plate arrives trembling. It’s attended by a few last reluctant plantain-spirits trying to escape their fate.
POIMANDRÉSH does not notice the drama of his breakfast. He is reading the news.
Or what passes for news in SHEOL.
The object in his hands resembles a newspaper, but only in theory. Its pages are thin tears in the local fabric of reality. Each one revealing a different transient story. Headlines crawl across the surface like migrating insects. Some vanish mid-sentence. Others repeat themselves ad infinitum, as though attempting self-hypnosis.
His empty eye sockets shift with the mimicry of reading.
The headlines are not kind.
One page whispers:
UNFORTUNATE SOUL SPENDS THIRD LIFETIME SEARCHING FOR PURPOSE; STILL CANNOT LOCATE IT Another flickers:
ESTEEM SHORTAGE IN UNDERWORLD REACHES CRISIS LEVELS; VIRTUES RATIONED UNTIL
FURTHER NOTICE A third page manifests, over-eager:
SAGE DECLARES: “ASCENSION NOT AVAILABLE THIS SEASON - TRY HUMILITY INSTEAD”
A fourth states with simplicity:
LOCAL DYBBUK MISTAKES ANXIETY FOR DESTINY AGAIN POIMANDRÉSH lowers the paper. The vines at his fingertips curl in irritation. This is exactly the kind of root- and sacral-chakra assault he did not need. Especially after a week of righteous metaphysical intoxication.
Across the café, a DAEMON is consuming its breakfast with catastrophic abandon.
The creature resembles a bull-shaped furnace wearing a face it found in a ditch. Every mouthful of food erupts in a volcanic belch of joyous oblivion. A bean-spirit shrieks in its devouring.
It immediately reincarnates as a smear on the table. Its plate, a sentient dish of modest ambitions, is already attempting to flee.
Next to the daemon sits a DYBBUK, a dead or dreaming man or woman who might once have been a clerk or a violinist. Its MASQUE is polite, even gentle. But the way it eats suggests a philosophical misunderstanding of anatomy. Each bite seems located several inches away from its mouth. The food adjusts its position out of grudging pity.
POIMANDRÉSH watches this spectacle of blissful grotesquery. He is not disgusted by any particular figure. Rather, their group grotesquery is the collective proof that the world is out of joint.
A being with a crystalline head turns a page of its reality-newspaper. The headline reads:
ENTIRE COMMUNITY TRAPPED IN CYCLE OF BAD HABITS; AUTHORITIES ADVISE: “TRY
ANYTHING ELSE”
Another creature - part bird, part grandmother - reads:
ANOTHER DYBBUK FOUND STILL DATING THEIR SHADOW; FRIENDS CONCERNED BUT NOT SURPRISED POIMANDRÉSH exhales. He feels the tremor beneath his ribs. He feels the exhaustion and anxiety radiating through his driftwood frame. He feels the weight of THE DEVIL’s roar still shaking in his bones. He cannot believe how people are living. He cannot believe how he is living.
Days and days of bender. Of smoke and drink and philosophical self-annihilation. And still he is trying to “help” THE DEVIL the way a drowning man tries to rescue a whirlpool.
His empty sockets lift from the page.
And then.
A shift in the room.
Not sound. Not scent. Not movement.
But a change in the texture of probability.
Through the doorway of the café, passing only for a moment.
A figure of red-black hair, luminous as a brushstroke of night. Skin like warm gold carved from the memory of some distant sun. Horns rising in elegant curves, framing a solar disk that burns without heat. An olive-black-copper-gold dress drifting like the shadow of an eclipse.
A scent. Not perfume, but the idea of perfume. The sensation of a door he would not be allowed to open.
She does not look at him. She does not pause.
And then she’s gone.
POIMANDRÉSH blinks. Or performs the gesture that a living man would use to blink.
The world settles again. A daemon burps its good cheer into the world. The pulled beef spirit moans in its dish. Unseen by POIMANDRÉSH, his newspaper manifests a new headline:
SIGNS OF HOPE APPEAR BRIEFLY IN LOCAL CAFÉ; WITNESS UNSURE IF REAL POIMANDRÉSH rubs at his brow, unsure why he feels a sudden warmth in his chest. He returns to his pabellón criollo.
He cannot place what he has felt. Or who. Or why.
And as he takes his next bite, a small flower blooms on his sternum. Hesitant. Delicate. The bloom retracts before he can notice.