Madame Sosostris Is So Desperate
To Get Out Of The Wasteland
She’d Even Fellate Prufrock

By David Luntz

Madame Sosostris is reading her Tarot cards in a saloon in the desert outside of Vegas.
She sees Rosencrantz and Guildenstern lounging at a motel pool off the Barbary Coast sipping mojitos. She lights a joint and looks out the window.
Prufrock’s humping a Bactrian camel.
Fucking degenerate, she sighs.

*

Earlier that day: She’d been walking in the desert and had run into Death. He was lugging his trademarked Leviathan Blowtorch™ after wasting an encampment of apostate silver- haired Branch Davidians and Heaven’s Gaters. He’d asked her to tighten the knot at the base of his jockstrap. His muscular thighs and calves glowed below his plague mask codpiece.
He took his cold hand in hers. He told her he wished he could kill himself. Madame Sosostris said she knew the feeling well—she wished she could kill every poet, but as a seer, she wished she could be really seen.
“Our lives,” she said, stroking his cheek, “are self-referential paradoxes.” Death nodded and they went on to speak about theodicy, Saint Anselm’s ontological proof for the existence of God, Pascal’s Wager, the limits of knowledge, Cantor sets, and the foundation of mathematics.
Death said, “Let’s take a breather. I want to ask you something.” He pointed to a clone of the fig tree Jonah sat under when he begged God to destroy Nineveh.
“Madame, you have a good head for numbers. Tell me why zero is an even number. Shouldn’t it be odd and sinister as I am?”
Madame Sosostris knew one day her own number must come up. But not today. Not without first getting out of this fucking wasteland.
She said, “Because subtracting an odd number from an odd number always results in an even number.”
Death told her she was free to go.

*

Back in the saloon: She takes a sip of her rum and coke and shuffles the cards again. She sees Rosencrantz and Guildenstern relieving themselves over the unmarked grave of Enobarbus who’d contracted syphilis in the flesh pots of Alexandria and had died on his way back to Rome in a fever dream he’d been copulating with Cleopatra in her gilded barge tempered by spicy breezes from Socotra—fathering a mighty line of Ptolemies who’d rule all of Europe for a thousand years.
She sees Enobarbus’s bloated corpse thrown overboard after the ship had got caught in a storm and blown out past Gibraltar into the roiling wastes of the Atlantic, but she is really thinking about why Death had asked her about zero. Was Death trying to tell her something the cards couldn’t? Was her end nigh? She tries to see more but the cards aren’t in the mood. Some days are like that. She relights her joint.
Above her a whore house makes its custom. A toilet flushes. Pipes rumble. A patron walks down the steps. It’s the “young man carbuncular.” He’s smirking. Madame Sosostris is well versed in the taxonomies of facial expressions. She knows what that smirk means. He’s gotten away with a free fuck. He’s paid for it with a counterfeit bill.

*

Ordure of dromedary pervades the saloon.
Enter Prufrock.
He doesn’t see her. As is her wont, Madame Sosostris has sat in the corner in the shadows. As is his wont, Prufrock approaches the bar gingerly—such a cagey fuck, Madame Sosostris thinks, watching him move with the submissiveness of a lower-tier harem eunuch. She pulls her pet crab out of the pocket of her silk jacket and flings it at Prufrock’s face. Perhaps this time it will claw his eyes out and give him the wisdom sight has denied him. The barkeep shakes his head and points to the sign, “No Pets Allowed.” Madame Sosostris takes in the barkeep’s mustard-gas corneas, the horseradish odor his glands can’t regulate, the rats gnawing on his trench foot of despair.
He was in the War.
He still is.
Prufrock spills his drink. Madame Sosostris thinks maybe she’d gotten it wrong, that maybe if she gave Prufrock what he really wanted, she might make her way out of this shithole. Sometimes a sacrifice is required. She sees them together in a hot air balloon. She takes him in her mouth as they soar over L.A. She lets him go down on her and lick her fish-milk slick above an abandoned cannery as she samples the lows and highs of fin de siècle Cali.
There’s so much poetry below, she sees, waiting to be written: a living wasteland waiting for its poet—her passport out of her fictional condition and self-referential paradox. She scans all the messages in the smoke signals, the cellular packets of information flowing through optical fibers and relay stations of star-linked satellite trash—the whole coded gamut of humanity’s pain and wretchedness.
She recalls a homily by Saint Basil, “God divided the brightness of fire from its burning power so that the brightness works to the joy of the blessed and the burning to the torture of the damned.” Saint Basil never lived in L.A., lol, she thinks, as she watches the frozen-flame edges of Nadib’s and Abihu’s strange fire filleting time into verb tenses—the precious stones weaned by Phoebus Apollo and King Cleomenes flaying himself to death again and again with a flaming scourge for suborning the Pythian priestess, for nothing really dies in Cali. Least of all mythology. They’re all part of its tragic farce, too.
She sees the endless caravans arriving outside the gates of Mulholland Drive of Stepford wife prototype rejects, their hoochie pants, tramp stamps, with nine carat studs on tongue, the prophetic threads of Desdemona’s handkerchief stuffing dreams into their aspirant porn star maws. The special collector’s edition of anal beads painted with miniature triptychs from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The Geiger needles stitching rosaries into shame. The vacant lots and warehouses: Year of the Dragon. Chinatown. Num-chuks. Screaming chickens. Empty motels. Machetes in showers. Hockey masks. Guttering streetlamps.
It’s writing itself, she thinks, it doesn’t need a poet or a dreamer or a sacrifice, she just has to get it down before L.A. evaporates, because it’s a play being performed for some audience she can’t see, the oblivion that lies beyond her visions—she just has to get it down before closing time, before the audience goes home…“Oh, hey there, what’s that, what’s that youse doing?” (Has Brooklyn manifested its destiny at last in Vegas, she wonders?) It’s him, the young man carbuncular, and like that she’s dragged back for good, back as she will always be. He says, “Know what the rake said to the hoe? You’re a dirty little ho. Get it, rake, ho? harr, harr, harr.” Barkeep taps knife on glass. Lights flicker. HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME. Curtain falls.
Exeunt Omnes.

Work is forthcoming or has appeared in Post Road, trampset, Vestal Review, X-R-A-Y Lit, Bull, Rejection Letters, Maudlin House, Atticus Review, HAD and other print and online journals. More at davidluntz.com Twitter: @luntz_david