Revenge begins in the womb.
Our LEVIATHAN dreams of a filmy birth. A red girl, a scaly girl, a chapped chick. S, she takes a backwards plop on the 10th floor of a dense ward in a city already crawling with reptiles.
The Sea sounds like a gurgling drain in the pinhole ears of this one deranged infant. Her limbs are loose at the joints. Acid drives her veins. Her fist ruptures the water’s rhythmic charge as she makes first contact, through violence.
Leviathan comes skipping, bawling home. God, the motherfucker, bounces.
That afternoon on Skid Row, cars brake to the ordinary phenomenon of an IV pole and an empty gown crossing 4th and Crocker.
Mommy?
***
YEARS LATER.
Leviathan is a pretty bitch, okay? She come big. First as shock, then as dizziness, then as generalized anxiety, as game face, she grew.
“Your bodies are our playthings,” say the gods, but it’s so damn obvious that everyone is saying it now.
Our skin flags looking like what the fuck.
Out there on those crossed and rickety bones
Our bodies are flasks with insufficient drink.
Wind sounds. Gull sounds. Chimes.
CUT TO:
Evening. A Condo. West Hollywood. Artificial light. The Weekend on The Bose.
Camera ready, MZ. LEVIATHAN stands between two full-length mirrors in the walk-in closet, her toe claws sunk into the almond shag.
MZ. LEVIATHAN
Everything-gah musthta be recorded, yespf,
she says in her characteristic nasal lisp, tugging her oily green fedora snug across her left eye, accentuating that celebrated overdrawn country grin.
Odorous breath.
“Yespf,” she spits on account of her buck fangs and thick, flapping tongue.
“Evewythththing takthhes tiiime,” she nods, adjusting the brim for last looks.
PAN TO:
DAY. FOREST LAWN. MAUSOLEUM. LIGHT!
CAMERA lingers on a stained glass End of Times. Twelve bearded men gorge upon the rainbow flesh of what must have been an ancestor, a solid female, a monster, her eggs buried in the deep, her flesh cut into foamy ribbons, her ribs marking the vault of the sky.
“At the end of Creation, the Righteous shall dine upon her thick, fine meat,” reads the Die-rector, his finger inching along the didactic.
“Interesting,” he says, turning to Leviathan with vacant eyes.
(He’s so pretendtious, thinks Leviathan, checking the chapel floor tiles. Could be good in the foyer.)
“Pitcher this,” says Die-rector, emoji hands spread wide, restating the obvious to the bored Monster whose feet pour over her tight Louis sandals. “A banquet-a wise guys, carmine hats, da whole shebang, Last Suppa typa creepy fresco vibes, only more gutsy. Get this—they whale on her Ass, that Big Fuckin’ Ass. Feel me? Right? Am I right? That Ass?”
Yessssssssssssssssssss ssssssss ssssssssssss ssssssssssss sssss sssss s s s :0
Cries the Snake, AKA Word.
And
Speeding. Rolling. Cut, cut, cut, cut, and cut to:
BLACK NIGHT. BLACK CURTAIN. BLACK COSMOS.
Mz. Leviathan takes the Die-rector’s crooked arm, bracing herself against his weak sides.
Action.
He enters her darkness with a veined and broken branch probing where he should not probe.
Lightning cracks.
Word becomes an organ, an intestinal pulsing. Coming. Coming. Coming.
Up, up, thru her Actor’s bowels, Word travels to the bitten spleen, the fatty liver, the rib cage emptied of heart and lungs. Thru the old pipes, Word travels to the glottal swamp of Her brutal mouth.
“Ohhhh shit,” say the F’ing Electrons, “It’s about to be some Christian realness.”
Word enters Mz. Leviathan and the Man with a Camera slips and slides trying to capture her blubbering storm. But alas:
Nada.
Thumbs down. No can do.
No way, baby. No way to feel those insides, pal. N o o o o way.
This is not for you, friend.
Aaaaaannddd.
PAN TO:
PRESENT DAY. EVENING. VERY NOW.
A BALL. A GLITTERING STAIRCASE. A HOST OF UNINVITED GUESTS.
THE LADIES ROOM.
At the gala
At the festivity
There is Someone
Who feels and Is
Very special
Despite the abusive father
Despite the alcoholic mom
Despite being spat on by the other kindergarteners
Who will never be forgiven.
Lowkey trauma in the toilet
When they have run out
Of paper towels
She and I,
Leviathan and Friend,
Witness
WOMAN, beaded, sequined, netted, gauzy, drunk as fuck
Coming out of the head
“Regain your composure,”
She says
Under her breath
“The eyelashes are doing their thing
The nails have spoke
Let the gown
And the network
Trail
Reveal
Indefatigable stars
Let Brad and Keenan and Josh
Winona and Bailey
Pulse out a code
Of honeydew
Of Sweet and dripping sadness
Of Witches and bytches
Who Manifest
Rings of interplanetary pressure
On the whole sweating Globe
Pressures that up until now
Have been kept under wraps.”
Space chuckle
On the ones and twos
From Beings
“Who’d Rather Not Be Identified at This Time”
Switch
Become That
That Thing that NO ONE WANTS TO TALK ABOUT
ALL CAPS!
Revenge will play out. Yum.
“I swear no one will get behind this post.”
Says Leviathan
To the Yes Man, the Die-rector, who holds out his hand for her bloody cup containing the dregs of WOMAN’s global meridians, aka her universal cage.
“Take this,” she says
Without looking,
“Take this.
To the whole world.”
***
A performance for film should lack a little control, no?
In the actor’s speech, the vowels do their sexual dance, the consonants make their hacking. The actor uses her dead bodies to push and hold, to revive and decline, to appear and recede.
Jasmine and I ate sushi talking about this piece. To be honest, I ate the most. A lot of fish went down: yellow tail, tuna, mothers and their sweet eggs resting on my tongue.
“God is the midwife to the Devil’s oceanic womb,” Jasmine insisted on her napkin. I wasn’t exactly sure of what she meant until I heard her hands clap, smack, tight, the Ocean popping men like grapes, like eyeballs, like what was masculine down in the deep, rock hard, is no longer. God must assist Leviathan in her sexual acts of destruction.
“Say what?”
Meanwhile, a host of bearded bros holler in the back booth, so drunk-loud we can’t hear each other. They’re raging syllables, frantic, insistent, pointing, until they FADE AWAY.
Leviathan appears in the back booth. Sipping her mocktail, she confesses.
LEVIATHAN
I can’t tell you how messed up those early years were.
EMDR helps but it will never erase the memories of being held hostage
inside my mitochondrial DNA looking like fake smiley faces on the Medieval gyno slides.
See what I mean?
Slurp.
“Know what I mean? The basics, looking all contorted, like when you say ‘That’s okay,’ but you really mean, ‘Die, bitch. Fuck off and die!’”
Cackles. Slurp. Shut UP! Cackle. Slurp. She crumples her napkin.
That dissonance, that historical scrambling of self and other, is how come Leviathan drinks too much of her dirty bathwater, why the oceans boil on the tremendous farts squeezing past her impacted, unexpressed rectum.
I-i-i-t stands to reason.
W-w-w-when your Father is your Lover, when you can’t remember much and even your Amazon password sounds like a foreign chant against you, you’re really fucked, female.
Darkness is the only true medium.
Let me explain. In this scene, God has Leviathan where He wants her. They writhe in darkness.
Cut to the Codes, formerly known as The Furies. The Codes release their claws from knobby Bed Bath and Beyond cathedral bedposts and descend upon the reptile-woman’s flickering tongue, biting and scratching. God sits astride her, choking, choking, choking. Hawt.
Viewer, the stupid bitch, wanders in.
Alarm, alarm! Potential threat. Back to shapeshift, folks! Back to One!
Act normal.
But God and Leviathan never turn their heads. Their dance is internal. Viewer can watch, but that’s it. In fact, the more Viewer looks, the more Viewer concretizes Action, who is stuck in Law. Know what I mean?
Say:
I have learned to speak in order to curse.
I have learned to scrawl your sentence in blood.
I stretch the tensile string of a minor note, a silvery earworm, to indelicately travel like a fucked-up spirochaete toward my intended Victim, Viewer.
It is my pronounced and devilish wish to be needle and thread, Flesh and Word, to those who pressed their half-baked wishes and putrid desires onto the multiverses of my typical-female-body, my service worker’s acrylic poly blend of a uniformed ass, to vacate me.
And so it is.
And of the FINALE, NIGHT:
Leviathan’s bedroom in white Victoriana. Bitch got old. Is that Her under all those ruffles and creams?
Toupee on the night table next to the Zzzquil and industrial strength orange earplugs, cotton balls between her toes, red polish drying on her fungal claws, Leviathan tears through my script.
“I’ll do it!” she says, slapping the book hard on her thighs.
She will eat for me, be ravenous.
At the press conference, Leviathan, who has changed her name to Levi says:
“Like I really do believe it’s a showdown between me and some other crusty bitch out there,” she says, shifting strands of her straightened hair away from her yellowed teeth.
Like I really do believe that, but it is not so.
It is not so.
It is not so.
It is not so.
It is between the stars and the black sea, the night and constellations of the dead, the choked out, roughed up, hacked up, skinned and bled desecrated women, whose limbs swing from planets, from icy stars, whose gutted wombs hang in the throbbing imagination of every wanton god who thought for a moment he might rob from eternal silence, his demise. And there is no, and there is no, and there is no more.
