Bad Eminence by James Greer

Author:James Greer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Translation;Occult;BDSM;Robbe-Grillet;Oulipo;Nouveau Roman;Houellebecq;French;France;Erotic;Palahniuk;Nabokov;meta;metafiction;Barth;Soderbergh;GBV;Guided by Voices;Dennis Cooper
Publisher: And Other Stories Publishing
Published: 2022-04-04T14:45:25+00:00

46

I woke in my bed, in my apartment in New York. It was dark. I reached to the bedside table, where I always kept my phone. My phone was there. The screen read 02.42. The date was the second of December, but… How was I home?

Something had awakened me. A sound, like a thunderclap to my sleeping ears, but likely no more than a muffled thump in waking life. I got up to investigate. I noticed that my apricot panties had been crudely stapled together at the left hip. I threw on the silk robe lying at the foot of my bed and padded round the loft space barefoot, using my phone as a flashlight. Nothing was out of place. That in itself was unsettling. Something is always out of place at my place. I leave books and papers piled everywhere, empty coffee cups, glasses of water, bottles of Singani. I never sweep or vacuum. Someone does that for me, but they don’t come when I’m out of town; I was sure I had texted them to say don’t come, but someone had come, someone had straightened up. I looked for my laptop, which was on my desk as usual, sleeping, the soft white logo on its back glowing and dimming, glowing and dimming, like a thing with breath (but no feathers; no need).

I sat down in my desk chair and opened the laptop. The last entry was Chapter 45, and ended with the words So I passed right back out. Which is odd because you don’t remember passing out, do you? You wake up whenever later, knowing that at some point you passed out, but you don’t, except in certain cases, like panic attacks or heatstroke, think to yourself I’m passing out. You pass out. The definition of losing consciousness is that you are not conscious. You cannot be conscious of the fact of your unconsciousness. Unless subconsciously – but you wouldn’t say something like I subconsciously remember passing out, or my subconscious remembers passing out, but I don’t, because that’s, well, that’s just stupid.

If I didn’t type those words, who did? And more to the point, when? Because although I remember every detail of Chapter 45 with painful clarity, I have no memory of writing Chapter 45. I don’t believe H2 or Dr Morgan had the talent to mimic my voice so expertly, nor could they have known or described what I was feeling with such accuracy.

I shut the lid of the laptop and headed back to bed. At some point – but at what point exactly? – you’re going to realise that either I did not shut the lid of the laptop and head back to bed, or that I wrote about shutting the lid of the laptop and heading back to bed sometime after the event, or that I wrote about it avant la lettre and shut the lid and went to bed. It stands to reason that I could as easily have written Chapter 45

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.