THE WET NIGHTMARE OF MARTIN HEIDEGGER
By Nicky Tiso
How was I to know of the deer coming to hit me? By the headlights I suppose, those two stone diamonds advancing in the mountain-bended moonlight, though this is what froze it. Did its hypnotic awareness of my approach occur at the same time it chose fight over flight? Was I, all two tons of my steel exoskeleton, too mighty to unfreeze its frozen limbs? Teetered jaws chattered in the face of death, and on the face of death was a smile - a mechanical smile, man made, and then machine made, as man were, as it were, as it is. Why did our paths cross in all of eternity why did our paths cross in all of eternity of all the blood to be spilled, the laws of physics were as immutable as its bawls on my windowpane.
Deers have beautiful knees, all bulbous and furry, tendon coated calcium deposits, and the way they can crush your bones upon impact is breathtaking, if only till its shuddering caterwauls interrupt the spontaneity of our colliding flesh. Up close it was the color of rotting leaves in an autumn gutter, and I thought its pooling blood may have been a sick seasonal charade, a mixture of rainfall and the perennial debris that too often paint my vision. That is until I felt the sway of its grainy hide caress my cheek in barraging turns, forcing me to acknowledge I was in some way being trampled; the sheer violence no doubt compounded in the delicacy of a fog that surpassed the road before and after the encounter. The headlights still shone a small path ahead, up to a bend, and then back into darkness; nothing but pitched echoes to throw voices down, hollow as the fallen logs on the neighboring earth.
I never swerved, never do, it catapulted up the hood, the sound of the body's pressure was like a sledgehammer pounding tin - THUPUMPBOOM boom boom KLAXX m! and I couldn't believe it was in the wild only a moment ago, whereas I, too good to graze in my own intellectual delusions, was in the middle of a thought unfinished.
Inertia is always there when you don't
need her, and here we were, the deer and I, intermingled, literally, as it
were, for it did not die out rightly. Its side struck the vehicle and tumbled
in gasps before piercing the screen. All of a sudden, as my shield from the
world breaks, I realize the force of wind that surrounds me. My hair blows
in all directions; so many wisps end up inadvertently flossing the herbivore's
molars as it nipped every possible aversion, taking bits of my earlobe in
the process. My shaking face - the furrow of my brows down to the biting of
my lip, holds the evidence of trauma. Despite the blood and the wind, the
glass and the panic, I still saw it indifferent to my presence. From the angle
it struck, my body was a brittle diaphragm, one it had to cave in to escape.
Dancing limbs tapered from broad thighs down to a slender set of charred hooves.
Surmounting to tips as fine as a pencil, its graphite legs pushed through
the window and onto my epidermal canvas, drawing a slew of messy caricatures
I was helpless to erase. Its anklets pounded on my sternum like a battering
ram. My rib bones were snapped toothpicks saying hello to the air; the once
dire wind now a cool kiss of breath I savored on my open chest. It kept kicking;
its erect eyelashes flitted and if it wore mascara it would be dripping now,
and it would not stop kicking, though with every step did it get further from
escape and deeper into my body, leaving hooved imprints right up to my neck,
where my adam's apple was now applesauce, for I could feel the organs, whichever
ones they were, turn to a pulp that would spittle at my mouth as I attempted
to scream. It was little more than a gargle, like what one does with mouthwash,
only the burning in my mouth was being not washed but scoured by the tangy
hair of the beast on my tongue and my own toothless misery wallowing in different
existential shades for what would, eventually, represent time. A fancy we
would both stay in this tango for hours, not knowing if we should give up
or what that would even mean.
Thus we thrashed in a shattered interior like salmon in the jaws of a seal; thus movements made the blood spray against the passenger side windows with such excess that I could scarcely see out from the sides; thus I looked straight-ahead at its curled lips guffawing, at its lean spine wavering out the caved windshield, rocking to gain momentum and lift itself out the glass and panic that encased it.
Its tender neck twisted my way enough to let its eyes - two chocolate pupils - connect with mine; shocked at our sudden transference of emotion, we went rampant. Countless scratches, deep enough to find muscle, clawed my torso in rhythmic buckings. Its white speckled ears pointed to the night - a crystal-arched panorama of stars and satellites twisted and turned in the vast silence of being, while the trees breathed heavy down our necks. I could only hope one of the satellites recorded the frequency of my death and projected it to space; an endlessly fading repetition of my malnourished state might keep me alive.
The deer scarcely prepared for this though it saw it coming, those two stone diamonds advancing in the mountain-bended moonlight. What paralytic state engulfed this beast - perhaps the same feelings that made me accelerate - but the reasons before death all faded with the after thought; I was lost in the throes of death, somewhere in the grasp of beauty, for beauty is death exposing itself in ways that disarm the fear of its inevitability, and I was inevitably afraid until there was enough blood in my mouth to liquor me up and bequeath me the courage to speak.
Its eyes, pitched in their blackness and blinking as often as a dragonfly walks, spoke to me.
"I know the most beautiful thing in the world."
"Tell me."
"I can't. Words would desecrate it. It's too beautiful to specify, but it's there, pulling me deeper as I age, like a weightless child holding the string of an inverted balloon, and what disfigured body you see in front of you now is the discrepancy between its never-ending depth and my plunge into madness - exasperating, pitiless madness - against which I scream apathetically, because it's hopeless, and I know it's hopeless, but I hope to god it's not, and so do all the gods I don't believe in. We wait patiently."
"That reminds me of a dream where my father came to me and handed down every word that I deemed important, though naturally I forgot them all, except one that shone so blindingly bright I couldn't see it but I could only approximate the aura around it and my lips moved towards this equation I solved in my sleep. It's a sound - the puppeteer's strings that held us up snapping and our bodies going limp in the air…can you hear it?"
"Yes I can; it sounds like the mountain's ghastly indentations of earth bending each note, it sounds like a pine tree's horror at quivering in the wind - each needle an arrow waiting to be shot - it sounds like two stone diamonds advancing in the moonlight, and as soon as I heard what I'd been waiting for, that reverberation from the hollows, I had to stop and take it in."
