Traitor Comet

Personne

Description

Before punk, before the Beats, before existentialism, and beyond surrealism, there were two visionaries, two rebels, two friends…and two tragic heroes, Antonin Artaud and Robert Desnos. Only one could save the other's life.

Sujets

• Magical Realism
• 20th Century
• World Literature
• Historical
• World War I
• Magic realism
• Fiction
• Première Guerre mondiale
• France

Informations

• Publié par: Outskirts Press
• Date de parution: 07 juillet 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781977203243
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

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Traitor Comet All Rights Reserved. Copyright © 2023 Personne v4.0
This is a work of fiction. The events and characters described herein are imaginary and are not intended to refer to specific places or living persons. The opinions expressed in this manuscript are solely the opinions of the author and do not represent the opinions or thoughts of the publisher. The author has represented and warranted full ownership and/or legal right to publish all the materials in this book.
This book may not be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in whole or in part by any means, including graphic, electronic, or mechanical without the express written consent of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Outskirts Press, Inc. http://www.outskirtspress.com
Illustrations by Victor Guiza © 2023 Personne
Outskirts Press and the "OP" logo are trademarks belonging to Outskirts Press, Inc.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
To the freethinkers
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
PART TWO
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
This novel series is a work of fiction, based on real events. Characters have been created and events conflated to highlight certain conflicts, but Artaud’s and Desnos’s lives are followed as accurately as possible.
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
In my unconsciousness it is always other people that I hear. Antonin Artaud
May 1926
I STARED DOWN at my body.
Standing naked and barefoot on that cold wooden floor, I gripped the curtain that hung around my bedstead and looked at it, the body. The clock on the wall clicked its weighted chains and chimed, making me start. Stupidly I blinked, but the grotesque body on the bed remained undeniably real.
I heard a sound behind me at the door, and I whirled in terror as if caught in a crime and at the back of my churning mind I hoped a neighbor had come, Helmut. I opened my mouth but could not call out to him, my nearest neighbor, Helmut Heumer, my friend. A sudden force of wind nudged the door inward with a creak. A beam of light through that crack fell upon the eye of the thing on the bed. It stared into eternity, and I stared at it. Then, steeling myself, I bent down to examine the face that had hardened.
For the first time in my life what I saw was not the rippling distortion in pond water or the image in a glass, and nor was this the normal, faceless experience of self, with the peripheral locks of hair and eyelashes and nose tip extending from one’s unseen center. What I saw was me , what had to be me. It I was sprawled, as if having fallen back. The black hair was matted and filthy, the blue eyes clouded and staring. My stomach felt filled with both ice and hot acid, sickened as I was by the sight of the decay, this greying flesh, the body giving up its liquids, its smells. My heart which should have been inside that chest was beating furiously within mine.
Finally I turned from it. I staggered and found myself gripping my small writing table. Now I looked down at my familiar scrawl across pages written just last night. My emphatic, exultant arguments were nonsense, the result of a long illness, vanity, and a loneliness as deep as disease. The stub candle had burnt itself out, its wick a small dead twig in a puddle of white wax like the twig of a man over there, lying in his dank sheets.
I was dead. I was dead! Numbly I turned around, glaring at my possessions as if to catch them in a lie, accusing this small, single-roomed cottage that had never before betrayed me as people had. Everything looked the same: the table, my manuscript and the ink bottle, the stool pushed back and overturned last night in my haste to vomit, the dishes encrusted and abandoned near the fireplace. The door was the only source of light, and I crossed the floor to nudge it open wider.
The sun rose, dispersing the clouds. A bird landed on a nearby branch, sat swaying on it for a moment, then flew off. I was not disembodied I could feel my hands, the cold floor beneath my feet, my dry mouth. The surge of my heart in my ears was as clear as footfalls. I had woken up naked on the bare wooden floor like the drunkard I used to be. But why would I be naked when the body on the bed was still clothed in my shirt and overalls unless my soul had shed him like a proper coat? I was dead.
I waited, looking around at my tiny house which seemed to be waiting for me to awaken, to rise from the bed, to light a fire in the fireplace and fill the air with steam and stamp my feet across the floor as usual. I let out a small breath, almost a moan. What now? Would this worldly apparition fall from view as one drew aside a curtain, to reveal…death itself? God Himself?
I stood and trembled, and I imagined each tick of the clock as a figure passing by me in a strange, silent procession of faceless men. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow… Naked and alert I waited, not daring to move for fear that would be the moment God would descend, but impatience gnawed at me. Beyond my door the sun pierced the branches. Insects buzzed around the body on the bed and the breeze blew warmer, stirring the dust at my feet and the hair on my neck.
Again I looked back at myself. My hands were my hands, having their familiar lines but they were soft and uncalloused, the skin as satin as a newborn’s. Now I traced my fingers along the rosy, perfect envelope of my skin. Moles, freckles, they were there, but no sunburn and no war scars in my thigh. No scars.
I pulled the door open and walked outside to stand on the rough path. The ground was dewy and as rocky as I remembered it. Was this the New Earth Armageddon, Christ’s Return, hallelujah and amen? Uncertainty knotted my stomach as I tried to feel enthusiastic. I would have thought the world would have ended during the Great War, not overnight almost a decade after the Armistice.
"If Christ has indeed returned," I said aloud, mostly to hear my own voice, "then nothing can harm me ’And the lion shall lie down with the Lamb.’" The words suddenly sounded ridiculous, like the patriotic slogans my platoon had recited as we charged into battle. My voice was my voice, but thin from nervousness. Realizing I was afraid frightened me all the more.
You blasphemous fool ! I fell to my knees and "Dammit," was my prayer as I wobbled to my feet again, holding my knee. It bled; I’d knelt on a sharp stone. I wiped at the cut and slapped at the insects that were already attacking. Reluctantly I went back inside for clothes. My skin chafed against the stiff, heavy garments.
Once dressed I felt better, so I set about tidying the place. I turned the stool upright and set the dirty dishes in a pan of cold water. I swept the pine boards with that leaking broom which dropped a trail of straws to the door. Then, standing again at the bed, I took a moment to steel myself.
I grasped the thing beneath its shoulders and strained to drag it. The body had to be buried, and quickly. Many times I had seen a corpse, but only once had I lingered near someone long dead, and I was not prepared for this bloated, rigid husk. It was incredibly heavy, and nothing could have prepared me for the full onslaught of stinking flesh, the urine, the bile. From the sheen on the skin and the stiffness it had probably been dead around ten hours but that was only a guess.
I pulled it with the sheet and managed at last to drag the body outside and far from the house, past my plowed field. Then I went to the barn for a shovel. My farm was a clearing surrounded by forest, and among those trees anyone could be watching, so I passed my sleeve across my forehead and quickly stepped onto the shovel’s blade, driving it into the dirt. Furiously I dug. Soon enough I hit rock, as I had my first planting season and every season after that. The grave would have to be a shallow one, as my furrows in this rocky land were shallow and still largely unproductive.
As I was tipping the body into the hole I noticed marks below the left ear, and I caught the thing by its shoulder to stop it as it fell. Kneeling in the dirt, I pulled back the grimy hair to see the marks up close. They formed a circle of six small welts, standing out scarlet against the chalky skin beneath the ear.
I sat up abruptly, my eyes automatically scanning my small farm although no one else was in sight. The welts! Until recently I had not believed the tales. My hand flew to my neck. I felt carefully under each ear, but my skin was smooth. Welts were rising instead on my palms, blistering so quickly in this skin, not the skin of the man who had worked this land and lived on this farm, but the skin of an infant.
"Oh, Heavenly Savior," I moaned, "who am I? What am I…?"
Shaking, I looked up. The sky in its cloudless blue seemed empty to me, abandoned. I looked up into that sky and felt as if I fell upward into a void. My body could be injured, and time still passed. Here I was on an ordinary weeding day planting this… this thing between my crops and the forest. I saw my old wounds on this body, the scars marked on that thing in the grave, the work-roughened hands, the scars on the arms and on its right thigh that I should have had, scars that until this morning I did have. Here I was and I was still me, but there in the grave was me, Geoffrey Wilhelm Weidmann.
"God!" I shouted and leaped away from the hole. I ran in crazy circles, gasping, my fingers tearing at my arms until I forced them to stop. I staggered toward the forest and braced myself against a tree. I folded my arms tightly against my chest as the pain pounded in them. My fragile skin chafed in my clothes and my hands already throbbed from the work, yet within me I felt a strength, an exuberance I had never known. Were it not for my sensitive feet I was sure I could run for hours without rest.
"Yes