Harelip

	Cliff has planned to cut his tongue out for a while. He stands naked in a mirror, in his head an x-ray of the blue-green and purple veins beneath it. He sucks it up to the roof of his mouth. Humid cavern walls. To the side, on a table, a few things: anatomy textbooks, surgical gloves, scalpels, blowtorch, rolls of gauze. Vials of novocaine, morphine and a handful of needles, still in plastic packing. The place smells of old dust, senile air, no windows, soft lightbulb hanging above.

	If he clamps the mouth open and holds his tongue with one hand, the other can cut the lingual frenulum and continue separating the muscle from the floor of his mouth. Another way is to push the scalpel as far down as possible, place it right then make an incision at the base of the throat, downwards to the left, and sever the whole thing in one motion. He thinks of cutting it by sections, first the outer papillae and progressively smaller chunks until it’s all a stub. Splitting it in half then repeating the scalpel motion, but from the center of the tongue. Has to be efficient, lest he won’t have time to cauterize it.

	Caught in doubt he retreats the gross, painful muscle into his mouth, then notes himself in the glass. His canines glisten sharp and yellow inching over crooked bottom rows. Flared, wet pores, red hair sweatglued into fine strips. A mild scar above the lip. Bent Cupid’s bow. If he pushes his tongue up, he can feel the remnants of the gap. He remembers as a child sticking fingers into it and coming back soaked in blood and mucus. Imagining the tiny, dirt-encrusted toddler nail scraping at the bottom of his brain, leaving chunks of filth and soot-black blood along the way. He fantasized of digging in with scissors, see if he could cut an idea, a pure thing, bring it back. Keep it somewhere safe.

 	It definitely happened, but he doesn’t remember the surgery. One day, he just didn’t have it anymore. He could actually speak, no stutter or impediment or anything. Most people like you, he was told, never get this far. The hole is gone. But the indent in his soft palate is still there. He can communicate. He just doesn’t want to. It can’t be done. Or so Cliff reasons. He, and for that matter everyone else, can’t do it properly. Communication is just confusion wearing myth’s skin.
Although he couldn’t talk Cliff felt like he understood. For the most part, it was probably childhood. Knowing nothing is knowing everything, or thinking that you do, and how there’s no difference if you do. He couldn’t engage, so it was all contained, but it was okay, because he knew what was contained. Or was ignorant enough to think he did. There’s a freedom in that. No need for language to come and fuck it all up.

	He misses the hole. Being able to directly access the inside of his body, without any kind of invasive action, only using his fingers, his tongue, and boredom mixed with need. He’d spent hours doing it. Scraping out foodstuff stuck in there for weeks, filling the hole with water to rinse out the nooks of his failed, uneven skull. He had dreamed of the hole expanding, filling with air, and sneezing out greypink chunks of brain, or those pieces falling into his stomach, where thoughts would digest and flow into his blood.

	Cliff can speak but never does. Even after the surgery, a home, a childhood, he is virtually, willingly mute. He’s grown to hate speech. How imprecise it is. The thing that lets you talk, sing, lick, taste, kiss, utterly useless. He glides to the chair in the back of the basement, bumping his forehead on the lightbulb, moving across the hot, dense space. The layers of distance between the things he sees, the things he says, the real thing, the velvet light asleep on wooden beams in the basement, a rat feeding on the corpse of another bloated rodent; he, in his skin, unable to be anywhere else.

	He touches his feet, callous and coarse, and considers their insides. The sheets of tissue, bone, nerves, fat, and himself. All he feels is a nub on his heel, a primate hand repurposed to hold weight. He doesn’t feel all the layers, nor what they amount to. Only the outside, that’s all he has access to. It is no different with people. He’d spoken, of course. Words allowed him friends, partners, jobs, but it all felt so removed, all the time. From the first try, all he could say only came close to what he meant. But it was never it. It is never it. The hands leave his feet and float to his face, drenched in oily sweat. Cliff feels, then thinks, then speaks, and that is received, interpreted, distorted by whoever hears him. Everyone chain-drags mangled, broken wordcorpses.

	Still on that chair he stretches arms and legs, twists around to snap his back, runs his hands from the tip of his forehead past his chest, down his groin, behind his knees, and down to the ground. He can smell his genitals, and the light shines off his arms. He stays like this for a little, pulling all tendons and muscles, then relaxes them. Deep, slow breath. The electric generator hooked up to the lightbulb buzzes along. The knives glare from the table. Cliff wonders what to do about the house.

	He found this pseudo-cabin one evening, sitting at his computer. It is barely worth anything, a dilapidated one-story husk of decaying wood and insects. The owner is now dead, some French expat writer no one’s heard of. It’s all the way out in the country and put on sale by the writer’s son, who hates the living shit out of the old man, doesn’t want anything of his. Not his books, not his surname, not the leaky runoff, the little dying house. Cliff met the kid, some 20-odd librarian, and paid three digits for the place.
Kid slurred something, fixed his glasses. I’m amazed you want it. There’s no running water, and the toilet’s in the outhouse. He I think he slept there once or twice a year ‘cause he liked hunting, but I dunno what he was doing. Took his guns and yeah, never got back with anything. He handed the keys, took his tablet and showed him the location, several states over. The house is in this, uh, here this clearing, it’s a good long drive. No gas station, no phone signal, no nothing for miles. Hold on. He took a small roll from his bag, stretched it open on the table. I marked it down ‘cause it’s not on Google. Desolate as hell man. I had to fly out meet the damn sheriff and find it.

	He looked at the map. A red rough ink asterisk off the highway dead left in nowhere. The map was old, looked like the woods around the house blended into fog. A promise. It looked holy. He raised and rested eyes on the son. They were quiet. The kid, slumped, thought of his father, and looked somber. It came to Cliff a thought of asking what happened, but lost interest immediately. He extended a hand.

	That day, in the yard, he burned every book he owned. In a week, after finding, buying or stealing the items, he packed them safely in a bag and set out to find it. There was money, supplies, loaded gas cans, water. Cliff preferred to drive long at night, only stopping when passing out was imminent. In daylight when he found traffic, corralled by people, he tuned the radio to white noise. Out of state, on the highway, he rested when needed at designated stops. He checked into hostels and never spoke to anyone. Locked in rooms across the road time drifted travelers away in a sludge of store clerks, families, the homeless and tourists. Car plates all became the same. His movements didn’t pass on human clocks and barely noticed all around him blurring into paste.

	One tired night a dream flashed in the rift between sleep and the road and Cliff nearly crashed into a ditch. He sat in the parked car panting with the engine gently rocking the truck. The dust around him yet to settle. Another layer to the blur. He had seen the house and every wooden log was made of mammal sinew and fur; inside, a headless man held a bone shiv and a human heart, and he sat on a throne of fire, untouched by the flames. The house breathed like a dog in its sleep. The man did nothing but exist. Dark centipedes of ink crawled around his body. Cliff killed the engine and slept. When he woke next morning, he felt at ease. He felt like he understood.

Eventually, the concrete highway faded into dirt, and the sun hung in morning. Summer rain had just ended. Leaves coated in dew. He unpacked his clothes, changed, fixed his bags. Outside of his gasless car, the heat and vapor boa-coiled on him, breaking him into sweat. Any bodily function made Cliff feel stained. Sweat was not saltwater sweat was liquid grime pouring without. It didn’t cool him, it disgusted him. But he figured soon he’d be alright with it. He tossed the keys into a creek running by the woods.

	Half-serious he looked at the sun and thought it the tail end of God’s intestines, defecating on the world. He breathed deeply through his nose. Rays of light contaminated every cell and membrane, pouring up from the roots of trees, embedded in the food we eat, draining fluid through his glands, rising from the mouth of rotting things. He became aware of everything inside him taking oxygen, switching it, expelling waste. Of the cellophanelike heat on the world. Of every plant that grew in dung, of flies laying eggs in carcasses, of hawks and ravens feeding on the meat of roadkill. Eyes open, there, foliage and green around him, he looked at God’s creation, bared his teeth. He walked into the forest, backpacked, the map crushed in his hand.

	Cliff looks at the wall of trees enclosing his property. Just yesterday, it seemed like they were farther away. The last pack of cigarettes he’ll ever have sits next to him on the porch, the lucky half-burnt, smoke like TV static. It’s so quiet he can hear the crisp slither of blood through his veins. Grind of ashes in his empty lungs. The canopy is dense. No sound comes from inside of the forest.  If he stares hard enough, his vision loses focus and the spaces between trees become straight lines and hoops that look like letters but fade away the second they are acknowledged. The light is flayed by the leaves and takes a grey hue like clouds hanging on the treetops. Cliff’s feet rest on a moss-coated root worming through the wooden steps. Still nude, the heat bleeds off him.
He has combed through every shelf, drawer and bookcase in the house. After leaving the basement he wandered childlike through the house, unsure what to do, intrigued by the place. The wood was almost black, dust floated in the lightspace blaring through the dirty windows, purple lines ran along the walls, so muted they were only visible in certain light, like remnants of snakes crawling on the boards. A daze consumed him. He moved slowly and caught the smell of his own body, and it pleased him. His mouth hung open like a toddler lost in thought, or lack thereof. While walking into the bedroom, a square room with no furniture, he noticed a sunken floorboard that creaked unlike the rest. The nails were bent upwards.

	With a crowbar he found in the basement he cracked the floor open, and dug around to unearth a small, locked rawhide chest. The stench emerging from it was unbearable. It was covered in warped markings giving vague notions of words. He broke the seal open with the crowbar, and found ripped clothes, ball-gags, dead candles, leather strips, corroded old knives, red, rust-smelling ink, pliers, formaldehyde jars containing organs, and many, many books. The documents he cared for, and now sit in a pile on the steps.

	Of special interest are the heavy albums full of pictures. A man features in almost all of them. His brown hair sits wave-like on a pale face, sunken eyes and half-open lips. The father, no doubt. Most always wearing a suit, like an undertaker. It seems to Cliff the man knows something he cannot translate. His face rests in a wry smirk like his muscles were fixed in this position. His stare comforts him, in a frightening way. Interspersed with baby pictures, family gatherings and academic faculties Cliff finds images of orgies, praying circles and naked bodies.

	Many men and women young and old twisted on each other in a mass of white and grey skin. Angles meant to showcase genitals make the subjects titanlike. Fluids and waste abound. The rooms are full of religious objects, the walls a collage of pagan symbols. Whips and the like, candlewax scribbles on female chests, acute faces in a state ambiguous between pain and bliss. It’s always the same faces, too. Through the albums they slowly degrade into an animal structure, skin loosens and teeth become dirty, the exhausted eyes puncture any pretense of a soul, years upon years flow on hedonistic stream and drown the zealots in a catatonic lake. The first picture, the only bright one, is rather mild: the thirteen members, more or less, all polished and perfectly groomed, posing for a portrait. The father sits in the middle, embracing his congregation.

	The barrage of sex and rites is punctuated by a lengthy string of polaroids. Cliff flips through them slowly, doesn’t stop when daylight recedes and nighttime begins. Instead he opens the chest and takes the candles, lights them all around him. The pictures. They are ethereal and gorgeous. The sun in high noon. A child smiling next to a fish he’s caught. Christmas in a snowy field, New Years in a ballroom, first days of school, picking up diplomas, awkward teenaged lovers holding hands in some carnival ride. Pets posing next to children, brand new homes with bright-eyed owners, men clinking glasses in a darkened bar, the smiles of women laughing in a circle.

	Cliff on the porch sees all of this and is flooded with immense sadness. The sensation that has always been with him is now amplified. He looks at the starry sky and the soundless void of trees, the pictures bring to him a weight he cannot lift. It burdens him painfully. Though wordless he sees in their faces a sense of understanding, a clear and sturdy bridge between each other, the natural, primitive language of the body providing everything they could ever need. Their acts are crude, their purpose is nil, the things transmitted are few and far between, but the message is clear. Desire and personhood, violent loss, divine feelings in the fertile filth. The father as the great communicator, his steeple as receivers, their excess is the page and their bodies the beautiful, transcendent text.

	Sulking, Cliff’s face is unmoved. He has long lost the will to cry, the force that pulls misery out of every human orifice. He feels empty, and in that somewhat peaceful, but the need to act is not suffused. Cliff sets the albums down and flips the pages back and forth, selects the one’s he likes the most, the one’s he feels will be more welcoming. In candlelight, he looks around to find the trees, now so close he feels like he can touch them. He can feel the breath of the black foliage. The mossy root now enters the home. The heat of day abducted by a foggy evening, he trembles in the cold.

	Cliff settles on a few pictures, lays them out by the light, and masturbates while watching the people’s faces. He pushes his tongue against his palate, and grinds it along. He traces their bodies, the beaten breasts and broken ribs, the toothless man’s thousand-yard stare into the camera. The father’s cynic smile creeping through the white wall of an accidentally exposed film. Nearing orgasm he imagines a connection with the zealots, a brief fantasy of him in their circle, in the unforgiving, plain brutality they loved to live in, found meaning in. He comes, bites his tongue, and the woods inch behind, the leaves like spears poking his back.