OEDIPUS COOKIE... An Excerpt From my Novel

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OEDIPUS COOKIE
A NOVEL

PRELUDE

1

I awoke lying on small mound of things flaccid and rancid, everything that would have rendered you and your consummate middle class ideals into something broken, impotent and threatening.

Hygiene, aesthetics, ambience… all the major illusions inverted to the point of paroxysm.

Dead fish. Salmon. Shrimp. Banana peels. Banana Leaves. Ants and rice. I smelt like cat piss.

It was unpleasant, but I was comfortable.

I could hear two people, one male, one female, arguing behind the wall next to the garbage heap.

2

The only memories I have of my mother’s features are a collection of lines enshrouded by crisscrosses of darkness, the afterimage of microbes on the surface of the thin layer of fluid around my eyeballs dancing around her blurry contours like an aura.

After I was born my parents taught me how to talk and write in 3 weeks, with the prolonged and excessive usage of brain jacks, literally installing information into a hard drive that was my brain through the circuitry manipulation of my neurons.

My nursery was the Pink Room, where everything was plastic and smelt of disinfectant. After my mind was wired up to do what it was meant to do, I was locked up in it for 17 years. The brain jacks made me autistic so it wasn’t like I was capable of much socializing anyhow.

Every morning at precisely 6.45 a.m., after untying the strap that held the mint-flavored oral placebo (on weekends it was strawberry flavored) firmly at the back of my throat, mother would go out of the room, shut the door, and the lights would go on.

Come to think of it I’m not even sure that was my mother. Could have been a very dedicated nursemaid.

“Mother” would slide a pen and pad underneath the door, and I would pick them up, go to the pink desk by the pink nightstand, and write.

I would spend exactly 8 hours writing about meat cleavers, second chances, true love, and dogs copulating in the alley outside of… whatever the hell I was confined in, were it a maze or a desert.

I was never sure if the universe outside was finite or infinite. Come to think of it, how could I even be sure if there were a universe outside? At the mean time, life goes on.

Mother fed me based on what I wrote.


3

I constructed my first sentence when I was 4 months old.

It was a semi-coherent blue scrawl with a faded blue sharpie:

I AM

The lights went out, and Mother came in. I heard the sound of a plate rattling against a metal tray, and Mother went out.

The lights came back on, and I saw that she had left me a slice of bread. I ate it.

Six minutes later, I wrote my second sentence:

I AM NOT

The lights went out again, and mother entered and exited just as abruptly as before. Lights on. She had brought me a plate with small lumps of peanut butter smeared all over it.

Very well:

ADAM I AM NOT

Lights out. Mother left me a slice of bread with peanut butter on both sides, which I consumed when the lights went on.

I AM JOSH

Mother bought me oatmeal.

I AM A BEAR

Mother fed me prawns and rice.

I AM A TRAIL

- Wantan Noodles as trail.

COME FOLLOW ME

- Whipped cream as clouds.

COME PLAY WITH ME

- Popcorn

LET’S PLAY

- Play dough made from flour and bread crumbs

WITH MY SYNESTHESIA

- A plate of Baked Oysters!

Oh, how I feasted. They left me a bottle of Tabasco sauce and a bottle of vinegar. I ate greedily, teeth gnashing greedily against oyster shells radiating like exhaust fumes on puddles.

I burped, and smiled, and burped again.

And vomited across my bed sheets.

Putting my hands around my wet, enlarged belly and smiling contentedly, I reached for the pen and paper, and wrote them a new story:

IN 4-D

- T. V. D I N N E R S


4

During my first 2 years, writing was a matter of illustrating things that I had learned about from the brain jacks, simple lines such as THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG. Mother left me a bowl of rice and peas for this.

I went on to experiment with descriptive writing. THE SENTENCE THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG HAS ALL OF THE LETTERS OF THE ALPHABETS IN IT got me a bowl of chicken and vegetable soup.

When I was three I started getting bored of bread, oatmeal, rice and soups so I started cutting up the concepts I had learnt from the brain jacks and mixing them around. By doing this, I accumulated more pieces of the nutritional pyramid:

THERE IS NO DICHONOMY BETWEEN THE EXTERNAL AND THE INTERNAL.- Chicken liver.

THERE IS NO DICHONOMY BETWEEN THE INTERNAL AND THE ETERNAL. - Flavorless Gelatin cubes.

THERE IS NO DICHONOMY BETWEEN THE EXTERNAL AND THE ETERNAL. - A ham sandwich and a cup of warm milk.

MA, COULD YOU POSSIBLY GET SOME KIT KATS IN HERE. - A can of coke.

OR SOME COOKIES. – A tic-tac.

Withholding. Just ma’s way of telling me I had a lot more to learn.


5

BUFFALO BUFFALO BUFFALO BUFFALO BUFFALO BUFFALO BUFFALO BUFFALO.
- Spam and fried eggs sunny side up with Worcestershire sauce and salt.

JAMES WHILE JOHN HAD HAD HAD HAD HAD HAD HAD HAD HAD HAD HAD A BETTER EFFECT ON THE TEACHER.
- Spam and mash with tomato ketchup and salt.

石室詩士施氏，嗜獅，誓食十獅。氏時時適市視獅。十時，適十獅適市。是時，適施氏適市。
氏視是十獅，恃矢勢，使是十獅逝世。氏拾是十獅屍，適石室。石室濕，氏使侍拭石室。石室拭，氏始試食是十獅。食時，始識是十獅，實十石獅屍。試釋是事。
Brown Sugar Water


6

Faz said that he didn’t approve of the mammoth-sized metal rods sticking out of Stacey’s breasts.

“Those nips are going to waste, darling.” Faz told Stacey. “Assuming there are any left after what that S&M plastic surgeon did to you.”

“You’re being utterly prejudiced.” Stacey snapped. “Chuck is NOT an S&M plastic surgeon. He’s a proper plastic surgeon who, on his free time, chooses to participate in sadomasochistic activities as a past time among consenting adults at the Bound Muscle Bar at the mall.”

“Methinks Daniel was mixing business with pleasure when he operated on you, girl. You look like a Robert Williams drawing. However are you gonna get nipple stimulation?”

“Ha-ha... It’s not just a piercing, genius. It’s a remote control vibrator. It’s wired to receptors in my nervous system. All I have to do to get an orgasm is to get those metal plates in contact with these.”


7

The actress reached into her pink purse (wasn’t it a prop?) and pulled out a little metal rod with a small pink handle at the tip. She waved in front of the cinematographer, as if to ward off a vampire with a cross.

Nonplussed. The cinematographer drew a gun with a slight showman’s flourish, then aims it coldly and precisely in the middle of the actress’s face.

The actress made a choking noise and dropped the rod from her manicured fingers. The cinematographer sprang to action. He moved with a combination of speed and artistry, catching the rod mid air before it hit the ground. Just as quickly as he had whipped it out, he squirted pink paint in her face with the watergun, and slid the gun back into his holster. This happened so instantaneously that he looked like a juggler doing this.

The cinematographer set a camera up on a tripod, ignoring an angry flurry of the actress’s questions. He switched on the camera, and put on a mask shaped like a pixel mosaic. He started dancing around the actress, jabbing the blue metal sphere protruding halfway out of the surface of her breasts.

The actress made ugly, squealing noises.


8

I was peeking from behind the wall watching a monkey dancing around a pig, when burly arms grabbed my shoulders, and flung me back onto the trash heap.


9

Somewhere along the age of 6 I decided that if I wasn’t going to see the world outside the Pink Room, I was going to taste as much of it that I could instead. So I started writing stories.

I started my journey a McDonalds across the street where we lived. To get a Big Mac and fries, I wrote short contemporary horror stories. For a side of milkshakes, I wrote them in third person. For Sprite, I wrote it in first person. I wrote erotic fiction for pasta and Science Fiction for TV Dinners. If I wanted sushi with egg rolls I wrote existential fiction disguised in western genre conventions. If I wanted fruit I wrote colloquiums. If I craved yogurt I used symbolism. If I wanted mustard and sausages I used deconstruction and metonymy.

I had analyzed all the recipes.

Writing stories based on plot structures from Chinese fables got me sponge cake.

Reinterpreting Greek mythology got me pizza with anchovies.

Dada got me gefilte fish.

Objectivism got me shellfish.

Eastern mythology got me chocolate bunnies.

And I learnt how to get Kit Kats, too. All I had to do was write teenage romance novels.

By the time I was 9, father was a multimillionaire. He was an agent for 42 nonexistent authors ghostwritten by me. He also secured all the film rights.


10

“Nosey little cocksucker.” said the director. He was holding an electronic clapper board and wearing nothing but a pair of yellow boots and a body hair oat. One boot pressed down on my ribs as I struggled.

The director lifted his foot and I rose from the mound of trash.

The director kicked me hard on my behind. I scampered off down the alley, towards a street light that temporarily blinded me. For the next 15 seconds I saw nothing but whiteness and all I could hear was my own footsteps making crunching sounds in the gravel underneath me.

I heard the director’s footsteps in huge, unruly strides behind me. Our combined footsteps created an atypical tempo. It was very disorienting. It made my legs feel wobbly. I felt like I was going to fall over.

I’d have recurring nightmares like this, of me running away from a predatory force creeping up behind me while having pins and needles over both my legs.

“Yeah, run back to your mama, little boy! Tell her we need extras for the sodomy scene.” The director yelled behind me. “I’m playing the f****r, and GUESS WHAT…”

Suddenly, the only footsteps I could hear was my own.

“…IT’S NON-STIMULATED, YOU LITTLE f**k!”

Something hit the back of my head, and shattered.

I fell onto shards of green glass on the floor. They punctured my plastic suit and ripped into tight flesh.

I closed my eyes.

A split second before the pain registered, I felt calm, at peace with the world. I was born from the gravel, now the gravel was absorbing my life back in.

The pain seeped into me as soon as I unclenched my muscles. My wounds came loose. I felt the warmth and wetness of my blood seeping out from under me and into the gravel. The gravel wasn’t a part of any nature order, the gravel was a puddle of vampire quicksand sucking out my blood with its hundreds of green teeth pierced through my flesh.

I made the connection in my head at the exact same moment I registered 3 colors, green, sharp, and red.

The fragments came together in my brain and danced in circles, creating a palindrome that made perfect sense in the severity of my condition. The director had thrown a Heineken bottle at my head. I had seen them littered around the set.

“…little bastard doesn’t know how to go about minding his own god damn business…”

the director’s voice faded into distance and lingered on, melding into the grunting, animalistic noises the cinematographer and the actress were fully engaged in making. The director’s annoyed proclamations were much softer than the other two’s, but his was frighteningly audible because it was of a more consistent pitch:

“… god damn kids ought to be locked up at night.”

I crawled out of the puddle of blood and glass into the light. While I crawled I smelt my blood and bacon grease in the air.

Bacon was the taste of churned-out plot boilers and generic mystery novels. Instantly, I knew what was happening behind me.

Faz, Stacey and the director were performing a sordid Ménage à trios scene on an American flag, while flames consumed a Charcoal Grill off camera. I didn’t see any of this, but I already knew the scene by heart.

I wrote the book the screenplay was based on.

I knew better than to turn my head back to watch what I had written being re-enacted. Lot’s wife had turned into a pillar of salt when she sneaked a final longing glance back at the city of Sodom. Sodium Nitrate may taste good on steaks but it gives you colon cancer.


11

Dirty limericks usually got me a Twinkie.

“There was a young lady from Brussels
who exercised her virile corpuscles
with dynamite sticks in bed
head to ass and ashes to match head
whenever she got orgasms with fire marshalls”

I wrote this on a yellowing legal pad and put it in the dumbwaiter. 30 seconds later, I heard a motor humming, chains rattling against pulleys. 15 seconds later I opened the dumbwaiter. In it was a fork, knife, and a blue porcelain rice bowl containing a sizzling, deep fried Mars Bar, a nutritionally dubious Scottish delicacy.

Oh well. Beggars couldn’t be choosers. My limerick didn’t scan anyway.

I cut off a piece of the mars bar and bit into the oily, fried dough coating the melted chocolate.

I was instantly rendered a spluttering, coughing mess. I had scalded my tongue. I spit oil and chocolate phlegm all over the floor. The Mars Bar was soaked in oil. Hadn’t anyone used a paper napkin to absorb the gunk?

The aftertaste was overwhelming. I vomited on the pink floor boards.

It was just Ma’s way of telling me not to write s**t if I didn’t want to eat it.


12

I crawled out into the illuminated pavement, a tolerable distance away from the stench of burning wood and squealing noises.

The streets were empty. The houses were patchwork architectures made out of cardboard held together by yellow industrial adhesive that dripped from the sides and looked like molten honey. The tiles on the street were shaped like little hexagonal cells.

Suddenly I felt very tired, like an old bear crawling around during wintertime. I just had to hibernate.

I crawled over a manhole shaped like a pentagon to fall asleep or die, whichever came first.

In my sleep, I heard a bicycle bell ringing faintly in the distance, and another odd sound: Click click click click click click click

A man peddling a rickshaw stopped right nest to me. He stopped his rickshaw and got on his knees, and crawled slowly towards me. Under the streetlights, I saw that he was wearing a mask. It was extremely peculiar. It resembled a kabuki water buffalo, but it had no eyeholes, just a slit where the rickshaw peddler’s tongue poked out.

“I’m afraid I’ve cut myself,” I tell him.

The peddler sniffs and makes clicking noises with his tongue at me, like a dolphin ‘seeing’ with echolocation.

“You’re just a kid.”

I nod and he makes more clicking sounds.

“Have a name?”

“I don’t know. Bears don’t have names” I say, closing my eyes.

“Sure they do.” said the peddler. “Just off the top of my head, I know a bear called Yogi and another call Baloo. Then there’s Rupert, Paddington, Gummi, Pooh… why, my mother in law owns a bear called Scott. It was the quaintest thing ever. It would salivate every time we pressed a button.”

“I honestly don’t know,” I yawned.

The peddler sneezes twice and rubs his nose. “I smell roast pork.” He says. “Is someone having a barbeque?”

“I don’t know.” I said, and fell asleep.





A MESSAGE TO THE READER FROM THE AUTHOR:

You can see some of my writing techniques on this thread:

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp1595634.html#1595634

Please if you've taken the time to read it I hope you were take the time to talk to me about it when I write I hope that my writing will get more aspie writers talking to each other about their writing techniques and how they figure out the hard way how to express themselves.

reminds me of Kathy Acker. she was very oedipal too.

Thanks for introducing me to her, I feel very good that my writing reminds you of another writer, I taught myself how to write and worry that my writing doesn't 'read' to others like anything sometimes

I'm about 300 pages into the second draft now, and it's becoming a little less serious than I intended it to be.

Yes, I looked at some of your other stuff and it doesn't, as you say, 'read' like anything...which is a kind of unreadability possibly (or it could be me). This was more readable, more followable. I quite liked it as a piece for two, the mother and son, before the outside world subplot comes in at #6, which all seems a bit generic and maybe too soon, but I guess it's gotta go somewhere. It depends where you take it whether the trip was worthwhile though. It's interesting that it seems to be about the acquisition and development of language which is an unusual topic and one that interests me. that makes it a story about words.

I'm about 300 pages into the second draft now, and it's becoming a little less serious than I intended it to be.

There's some potential there, the piece is working working at. I llke the serious tone though. i guess because words are such a serious business for an autistic person. How less serious is it becoming? Maybe it needs a few treatments till you know what you want to do with it.

It's becoming less serious in a sense that it's becoming more whimsical, I guess its because I got more involved in plotting and rationalizing. There's a lot more dialogue, too. The tone of the story alternates from chapter to chapter because I jump from a character's point of view to another. The characters are also from two different time periods. I'd really like to show you more to see how it read from because I worry that the book gets a little too erratic at times.

I'll post a longer preview soon.

Thanks Postperson, it's comments like yours that motivate and encourage me to keep doing this.