[03/18/26][FICTION]Tarrare
by Safi Alsebai
When you see an outline of a person or another animation turns out to be a shadow or even less, this is called an illusion, though I’m not sure that terminology has been outlined yet, nor the system of sense-perception and processing that outlines it. I thought I saw, on one of my many travels, somewhere along the rhine, such a man who turned out to be a shadow, an illusion, which then turned out to be the living personhood of a thin-lipped vagabond. An actor, a soldier, a hustler, a bulimic, an attraction, as tall as order, the height of the guillotines and towers and theorbos, as I recall that they are very tall. Just my type, perhaps, I’m sorry to say, but not as typical as my devotion to you, my love, the recipient of this letter and this chanson.
You know my heart belongs to you, as do the bones that make up my tongue, as do the daily reproductions that make up my nationality and my fraternity and my genres, each and all of which you, beloved, being my beloved, transcend, and the transcendence of which I will keep as secret as any violation of the laws of nature and of man I dare commit. This I swear, from inside text itself, and, unfortunately, from inside the appetite of another man, which is the prison of his stomach.
But I don’t know if I can call my captor a cannibal or a captor or But why not? only a man, if so tall. I’ve never been so inside anything in my life, inside and consumed. Sorry for being glib, for this emotional flexure rising like mercury from my longing for you, oppositional defiance here with my lute or my oud or my drawstrings. Things keep dropping from above, meals and inanimate objects, like puppets with strings of doggy saliva, from the heaven of an epiglottic spotlight, which I watch to train my own throat for the future, the future of paeans, paeans for you, paeans and more paeans, and maybe if I sing loudly enough they will come out of both my mouth and his tarrare’s I wish he would stand underneath you or above you as I am passionate enough that I’d be able to sense your humid presence from inside his viscera The song would go like:
Once I brewed a tea and let it mold / to replicate the smell of hotel carpet / and hotel swimming pool / did just the trick / and just as downy as / all three and as downy as / your lanugo when you had that tapeworm I excused you for / and as mild as mild persimmons
Wait—I forgot that he also has an esophagus in my atmosphere. And lanugo like yours even though he is always eating. You get my latin, or his? I’m sitting here, my ass, my feline hipbones, my balls impressed into this man’s pyloric sphincter, leg over leg into the duodenal bulb, knees like a waterfall. And I feel as though I am plagiarizing him! Is it possible to plagiarize something of which you are a part? or interior? Poultry. If theology is the dwarf inside historical materialism’s mechanical turk, does that mean that a machine can be as polyphagic as he is? It’s your pick my scholar who is the proletarian and who is the saint. Would that I could, even if for one more night, be slapped around by you, on my back and on all fours. Would that I could chew your lips and your sternum.
He never learned to play any instrument except his stomach, which has become instrumentalized by generals and lieutenants. They send messages through him, this westphalian cupid, this jacobin archer, and he crosses borders by foot, the borders of an emergent and brittle europe, either alone or in bands, disguised in the variable local dress of insoluble regions. This is my only reading, what is said between posts, secret dealings, prisoner exchanges, playbooks disguised as dirty jokes, strategy. They are less lascivious and more scandalous than any of our communications. Like our epistolic treatise on methods of lubrication. We forgot one that cannot escape me here: mucus. I’m sat, palm against my cheek.
As you know, I was a troubadour before all this, therefore anachronistic, learning the slow way some days or saving a lot of time with algorithmic meters. Or else I was more timely, a libertine, and instead of sublimating my pleasure into words which could withstand the distance between the slit and soil that constitutes both early modern geopolitics and eros classically defined, I sublimate my desire for mastery over nature, over others, over myself and my pleasure, into pleasurable experience. Look where it landed me. Can I still be considered a nouvelle heloise or a juliette or a justine if I’m boneless, or a utilitarian or a burp instead of a song or a fellatio? They’ve liberated all of the prisons so now they have to invent a new kind. I’m sure you could call this guy a revolutionary subject, even more than me. Promise me you will still be as entranced with me when I am through with this, covered in flies as I will be, smelling rank as I will.
It sucks that I’ll never have a late style. Let alone learn how to torrent or be pomo or have the back of my ankles sniffed, evermore. Did you know I used to perfume them every morning with blackcurrant, musk, ambergris, mace? Someday: tonka and other things new to me, but probably not, given the circumstances. I bet you didn’t. It’s as hot in here as indochine. Is all sexual desire this ironic? Has it always been? Now I’m up to my knees in a bestiary and a vegetable garden. Beer, wine, mucus, bone broth, saliva and air, which he cannot help but swallow this tarrare on account of his nerves. Collagen, pectin, gelatin, semen surprisingly Calories. The digestive sciences only half exist, a subdivision of the natural sciences I think. Or maybe you have a different intellectual historiography, and their negation or inverse is halfway out of mode, making way for them. But theories of wet things definitely exist in full. So so do I and so do you.
Out there on the exhalation side of tarrare’s breath, it all still smells as forbidden as cherimoya. The stars and constellations under which I was born have made us for one another and that science I will not give up. Trouble is they made me irresistible. You should’ve seen me.
Prone and ready. I was unbridled. I always am. I was voracious. I always am. You know this about me already. I thought I was getting a fascial release. He looked to me like an ugly masseuse. I was not courageous when the chips were down and let myself get stomached, and although you know how much I adore spit, this now feels like overkill. Another lyric:
I deserve my luck / We all do for now / Fortuna / A circular saw / It will take time for the woodgrain / of history to dull it / so let me be savoury just this time / baby baby
I don’t know from city poets and their relationships to one another and their presses. I don’t know from goats. Remember when we went to the fair, took guesses at which goatkid, each one taller than the children parading them, would win and lose? Our loser won the blue ribbon, its toddler striking it repeatedly throughout while its physiognomy and style were, fast-spoken by the statuesque referee, as close to perfection as the way you struck me to the edge of laughter. I admired his denim cote, a tactile futurism for mine eyes. My bladder was full, and you alternated, pressing on my lower abdomen and then my temples, and then, and then, and then. I had a migraine: goats smell bleach smells. Do they use peroxide yet? to lighten hair? I rinsed my mouth with some and am worried that it will turn my mustache to copper. There are no mirrors inside stomachs, only the pupils of others’ eyes, which convey shape and light for the viewer on their other end, but not color—color, proper only to those to whom the pupil is attached, connected by a nerve or something. I would draw you a diagram, but pray you understand my limitations.
The planets venus, mars, mercury, jupiter, saturn, the moon have disappeared from the sky, and the sun has locked itself up. Like a flatulent rib. That which fades cannot have created me, and yet, here I am, in the darkest of darkness. What has made me? Certainly your love letters have had something to do with it, and mine to you, since they persist on paper and then in you and out of you, as you rub one out. Am I becoming religious on account of my love for you specifically, or for any beloved at all? Or is this a whale? This, being the shit of god. I am the shit of god. Sono le feci dal signore. I do not shit. I am becoming-shit. I am this guy’s cholera. When they open him up for autopsy, that will be my wake.
There is a film about a torero, and I feel like the crossed eyes of the impaled bull, at the same time as I feel like the lugubrious flaccid bullfighter cock taped alongside the hairless anteromedial thigh. Makes me miss you plucking my nipple hairs, the only hairs on my blonde decimalized and dechristianized and metricated chest, one by one with your teeth. Can I call when my prostate pulses or my heart contracts peristalsis too? I love crying. Someday he will swallow a camera for me to broadcast my slow dissolution in his juices and in my tears to you. I will chew the scenery, and the rights are yours to distribute it to the snuff lovers.
I could sabotage my mortification. I could swing from the uvula or do pushups, eliciting something cartesian: a reflex, for example gagging and vomiting. I could pose, dip my toe in the fire or stab it with a sword, and present myself to you in one piece, when he throws me up, gargoyly. I, for one, am as anti-cartesian as a list of my deconstructionist successors. A gooseneck kettle, I do not gag. And this life is the source of my distress. And this life is the source of my tenderness. The possibility that I have a lump, a tender lump, that I’m putting on every pound he puts on. As distressed as I am in my musicality towards you. And this life is the source of allodynia. I have a solitary breast out, like marianne, and like her I am surrounded by the stuff of countrymen.
As it stands, apart from food and garbage, the current census here is myself, a cat, an infant, and this milanese duke I once knew intimately though I need you to hold in your jealousy like gas. More to come I’m sure this guy’s appetite is as endless as war. Maybe he can swallow you too, my heart, and we can make a new world here, and when a napoleon comes to power we can be totally in the belly of an empire.
SAFI ALSEBAI is a writer from Arkansas, where he studies medicine.