Benighted

Benighted

“Do you sleep with all of your muses?” asked Hybris, with blarney drooling. 

Sipping at his absinthe, Narcissus guffawed at length, till he gloated by smirking like a lewd Cheshire Cat. “How else would I replicate the intricacies of my womanly muses’ bodies?” Employing a tone of being affronted, Narcissus resumed: 

“One cannot paint something without plumbing its depths. As sailors rely on the North Star for divine guidance, I depend upon carnality to create my art.” Narcissus lolled in murdersome contempt at having debauched myriads. 

“But are they not reluctant?” posed Hybris, too erected to remember the whiskey in his hand. “It seems rather Machiavellian of you to cozen them so. There is no morality in this.” 

“O’ you mooncalf - how gauche in the ways of women you are,” mocked Narcissus, thumping at his knee for dramatism. “Name me a woman that does not desire stardom? By being enskied as an object upon a canvas, she is forever beholden to me; virtue is a Lilliputian price to pay for fame. I have never had a muse refuse my requisite. To broaden its relatability to you,” Narcissus here minified Hybris so as to deify himself, “I shall masculinise the scenario: did Faust not sell his soul to Mephistopheles in a heart’s thrill?” 

Hybris, despite not having the wooliest clue as to whom Faust or Mephistopheles were, nodded in agreement. 

Narcissus, not listening to whom he viewed as his underling, interposed another allusion: 

“Wilde, too, recognised how compelled we all are to parasitical fame - Dorian Grey is another superlative example of men, also, having this hamartia.” Narcissus began to pontificate and maunder around the subject till trite. As he did so, he slurred as the absinthe slew his tongue of its diplomacy. He immersed in the sexe he adored objectifying, and gospelised his doctrine on misogyny by lisping with the sibilance of that Edenic serpent. 

After Narcissus having raved for all four seasons, Hybris grazed the hairs upon his chin as means of glib understanding. “True, you would be unable to sublime your muses as you do, if it were not for this sensuous quirk of yours. Pardon me for fawning, but I have always hailed you as the heir apparent to Andy Warhol.” 

Choking on having misdirected his absinthe, Narcissus was much puzzled by this analogy. In fact, when remarking so, Hybris had envisaged Keith Haring as whom Narcissus’s style resembled. He had muddled these contemporaries from their use of epileptic colours, though anyone with a tinge of artistic knowledge would realise how disparate Haring and Warhol are. Neither Warhol nor Haring, moreover, bear any similitude to Narcissus. In essence, Hybris was Folly incarnated. 

Narcissus swept this stupidity under the rug by besotting himself. From abject shame, Hybris likewise drowned his error in whiskey, swirling the liquescent amber to alleviate a prickle at his pride. Their quietude exceeded endurability, and not even their alcohol could beguile them into believing that either shared a genuine commonality. Narcissus had friended Hybris for the sake of having an imbecile to twaddle to, whereas Hybris felt his intellect and ego swell when in proximity to Narcissus. 

Organising to meet the following Saturday, they both parted company, with Narcissus treading homeward through ChinaTown for scenic exoticism. Persons staggered along the streets, toppling overboard upon the pavement, and rampageous were the yells of those still awake. A Tartarean Paifang, gilded and begemmed, was where Narcissus would terminate his stroll through ChinaTown. “How sinister they loom,” he mumbled. Multitudes of sky lanterns simmered with a fervent vermeil, inflaming Narcissus’s path, and consternating him through uncertainty. His eyes fluttered open then shut, as of a bird when hearing the howl of a hound, and his vision bleared as he veered here and there. Gazing leftward, he saw the profile of a graven effigy: a Chinese woman, sitting on her lonesome in one of the sundry restaurants. She was swathed in ambiguity. 

Out of infatuation, Narcissus approached the glass shielding her from him. He rapped at the vitreous baracade, ogling at her with indelicate tact; the woman turned to face him, and smiled with courteous diablerie. 

Motioning with his hands, Narcissus inquired whether the woman might permit him to join her. Nodding, she admitted Narcissus to enter. None, save this recondite woman and two chefs, were still dwelling within the restaurant. The odour of grease, ginger, spice, meat, and mystique oiled throughout Narcissus’s nostrils as he gallanted to her wooden table. 

Seated, he beheld a lustre sheen off her pearly maquillage, as if she was rimed in Artic snow, prettifying her blued eyelashes which were bewinged without cosmetics. Her brows were thin, and her cheeks were osseous. 

From his arousal, Narcissus deployed inexcusable arrogance: 

“Darling, what is your name,” vulgarising himself by jutting his tongue out, “you lovely specimen.” 

“I will tell you,” withholding her want to laugh, “if you act your age by not lashing that vile snake of yours again.” 

In his mind, Narcissus discriminated against her: “She may be foreign, but she has queenlier eloquence than late Elizabeth.” 

Contrary to his wont when his virility was challenged, Narcissus chuckled and forgave her frolicsome insolence. She both intimidated and enlivened him to yield. 

“I promise henceforth to be well behaved.” 

“In which case, I am Sunü. And what might yours be?” 

“Narcissus.” Before Sunü could respond, he encumbered her through his vanity, as he now boasted his eminence as a painter: 

“Narcissus may ring a few bells and, if so, fear not - it is natural.” Once more, Sunü smothered that chronic whim for laughter. “I am esteemed as being a supernal artist, in our age of modern farces.” 

“Is this how you present yourself to all the women whom you encounter?” To flagellate Narcissus the more, Sunü slurped from her bowl of brothy soup. 

From no woman having ever traduced him thus, a chagrin roiled within Narcissus. “If you continue this impudence, I shan’t appoint you as my prospective muse.” 

Surrendering, she erupted molten hilarity at Narcissus. With a noodle gibbeted amidst her lips, Sunü upbraided him: 

“Since you are so imperious, and think I care about such a trivitality, then let me enlighten you - you benighted egotist. Yes, I knew who you were, from when we first glimpsed through the glass. To be plain, I am indifferent to your style of art. Perhaps, I loathe you bathing your muses in gross prurience: how melancholy they look upon the canvas when having been molested by your salacious hands.” Her voice quivered as wrath ignited; “Or, perhaps, I abominate the pomp and abuse you stand for.” A pause flitted by, as Sunü chilled her distemper by drinking some torrid tea. “My indifference could even be as simple as the mediocrity in which you paint.” 

Dumbing her tirade, Sunü commenced eating her soup again, downright effacing Narcissus from her periphery. All the while of Narcissus having been dismembered, the two chefs had feigned their nocturnal duties of cleansing and scouring what filth they saw, in favour of listening to this humorous opprobrium. 

Bereft of retorts, Narcissus arose and scraped his feet across the floor. At the door, Sunü finalised his emasculation whilst engorging: 

 “If the glass had but mirrored your odious interior, then I would have never welcomed you in. From all that is rumoured of you, I should have been wiser than to grant you the benefit of the doubt.” 

Infuriated beyond salvation, and mimicking how Sunü had not addressed him, Narcissus fulminated: 

“You contumelious whore! You are foul and foetid!” With the two chefs’ jaws hanging, and Sunü astounded at the odium of Narcissus, they watched him dematerialise into the fervent vermeil reflected by those sky lanterns outside. 

“How dare she be so temerarious as to speak to me like that!” exclaimed Narcissus aloud; he was sobering from this infelicitous encounter with whom he upheld as being “A malefica; some unmaidenly vixen that needs taming!” 

For the remainder of his journey home, he spurned, scolded, and spat at a hallucination of Sunü to reclaim the ignominy she had foisted upon him. It rejoiced him to conjure the most ineffable scurrility he could. Through doing so, he regained a sense of specious importance. There is a malady in men that bestirs when their pride has been swinged. His last indignity before retiring abed, was from his spite throwing an innocent mendicant aground. The mendicant had implored him for charity, and instead, Narcissus had desecrated him through gratuitous cruelty. 

When fleeced in the comfort of his quilt, Narcissus revisited this violent misdeed, savouring it as a motherly dolorifuge that cradles her child to slumber. 

In the morning, Narcissus felt less aggrieved when mulling over his week ahead: Monday and Thursday, he had two belles coming over to be muralled by him. Tuesday and Wednesday, decadent and crapulent soirées were planned, with Tuesday being at the Royal Albert Hall, whereas Wednesday the entire Ritz had been bought for luxurious hedonism and vice to bloom. Friday, he had arranged to see a woman whom he may wed, for her dowry would expunge the concept of penury for aye. Then Saturday, the appointment with Hybris was set in drear stone. Purporting a smile, Narcissus vegetated in his chamber till the sun jaded, and the heavens dusked. That night, dewdrops injected an insidious neuroticism into Narcissus, as he dreamt and dreamt of Sunü. The impotence begot by her had latched on, and whether asleep or awake, her blemish envenomed.  

On the morrow, enrobed in his grandest attire, Narcissus greeted both of the belles with unhabitual timidity. Lacking his suave confidence, they tried suppressing their facial judgements, but failed as it was too irrepressible when confronted with this hollow version of what the hearsay surrounding Narcissus had whispered. When looking at the belles, a poignant phantasm thorned at his flesh, abasing him to awkward indolence. To disembarrass himself, he offered them vodka, whereof the belles drank at ease. He, however, quaffed an overbrimming glass of absinthe in an instant; necessitating he refill it in perpetuity. Falsified by this alcoholic sophistry, he recuperated a whit of his usual charm and debaucherous Machiavellianism. Cajoling the belles into disarraying themselves, and convincing them to fornicate with him, Narcissus would soon rue having done so. Some imponderous parasite festered, nettling at his rigorous performance, and caused him to forfeit from a case of phallic flaccidity. Cackling under their breaths, the belles suggested they engage in what their original purpose had been: being painted. To jibe at Narcissus, the belles decided to remain déshabillé. 

Crimsoning, Narcissus produced one of the most inadequate pieces of art to have ever been miscreated. He trembled in his stead as the belles, grimacing at how Narcissus had skewed and rolled their bosoms into deflated balloons, hurried out of his home. Suffering how anguished and endoloured he had stooped, Narcissus starved himself, and blinded his eyes in the breasts of his downy pillows. Even so, that thorny phantasm or parasite - Jove knows how many aliases his feverous mind endued as a metaphor for Sunü - did not remit from haunting him. 

His soirées were none the better, either. At the Royal Albert Hall, as he was nestled amongst the renowned echelons in society, Narcissus found the red circumference of the velvety seats to misgive him insanity. To him, the circular dome was a chasm where all eyes, metamorphosed to having omnipresence, were burrowing into his person. The euphony, bellowing out from the hoarse gorge of the soprano, distressed Narcissus whose habitude would have treasured it. Under ordinary circumstances also, the womanly frequenters would coquette with Narcissus, however, they now maligned him from afar. Anyone would be unbewitched when seeing how moistened and sodomised his suit had been from his social angst - apter still: his phobia of being jilted afresh by a woman.

The second soirée was equal in its misfortune. After reckoning with his inner craven, Narcissus had persuaded himself to attend The Ritz. Within two hours of witnessing a parade of cancan danseuses, the harlotry that had been hired, the narcotics being subsumed, and having to converse as he maddened, Narcissus fled before he swooned. The wondrous jazz they had been tuning at the Ritz harried him. Even his old foibles, such as vice and hedonism, afflicted him. 

Thursday, neither of the belles returned. Hagridden, Narcissus tore the canvas upon which he had misconstrued them. For the whole day, he sat in the unceasing rain, allowing it to baptise his nefandous fall from what he deemed as notoriety and stardom. All the trifles he had so hankered for, were dwarfed to nought. No more was the word fame so sweet to Narcissus, rather, it was but a scapegoat for disguising infamy. 

Friday, as one can imagine, was a burdensome beast for Narcissus. If wedded, this woman was alleged to have abundant wealth for him to laze in. From their matrimony, he could choose to renounce ever having to lift a brush, or bestreak a line of paint again. He could deaden into a husbandly role of fainéance, solacing his ennui by squandering her golden dowry. 

“Would that enhearten or dishearten me?” introspected Narcissus. He concluded the truer of the two: he would be lapped up by waves of disheartenment, which would soon consume him. Having thus decided, he thwarted his tryst with wealth by telephoning the woman. Incensed by the rejection, she slandered him and said he was but a depraved, talentless artist. Narcissus repeated her libel, and could do nothing save concurring with her. 

Saturday came, and he had degenerated from reproaching himself to worriment. His vision was debilitated to having granules in its peripheral chinks; his cheeks were cadaverised, his breath reeked of sulphur, and his skin etiolated to a limpid pallor. Narcissus, however, did not cancel his appointment with Hybris. His moronity may brighten my gloom, thought Narcissus. 

Voyaging to meet Hybris, he eluded having to pass through ChinaTown, lest he somehow be ambushed by Sunü. 

Shocked, Hybris quaked unawares when spotting Narcissus, whose slovenly garments externalised his mental turmoil. This was not the conceited man he had met a week ago, but a crustacean that had shrivelled into its carapace. 

Reclining in their spacious chairs, Hybris interrogated Narcissus through unsubtle comments on his bedraggled appearance. They were blunted by monotone dawdles, for Narcissus was fixated on the bibulous magic gracing his lips, and shriving him of his pain. A silent indefinitude stole by, when Hybris conceived of the ideal method of rekindling this languorous imposter: goad Narcissus into gospelising misogyny. 

“Pray tell, how many muses did you sleep with this week?” 

Smarted by the recollection of his phallic flaccidity, Narcissus strove to attemper a choler palpitating throughout his sallow veins. His fist, wrenched around a glass of absinthe, applied indomitable pressure. His immitigable attention lay upon a reproduction of Edvard Munch’s Anxiety, and he was unconscious of what brawn he exerted. 

Unanswered, Hybris rejoined: 

“If you must be so secretive all of a sudden, then I shall estimate it to have been six.” 

Narcissus’s fist unclenched the glass, prompting it to plummet groundward where shards shattered, and soared as pygmy daggers across the quartz floor. Before Hybris could blunder a syllable, or yet tribulate Narcissus the more, he jolted upward. 

“Do pardon me, though I best be leaving.” 

Hybris interceded his body to hamper Narcissus from departing. Excruciated, Hybris felt like a toddler whose intellect and ego were being confiscated. “Why must you go so soon?” Hybris reached for an inducement in the dark:

 “By the alcoholic stench effusing from your pores, you must be delirious. We can continue elsewhere - perhaps somewhere wholesomer.” 

Supplanting the politesse Narcissus had begun with, was an incandescence at being frustrated by yet another person. “Move aside,” bridling his sundering spleen. When Hybris once more disobeyed Narcissus, he could no longer maintain equanimity. “Are you so deluded as to believe us friends?” 

“What a preposterous statement!” Indeed, it seemed Delusion was an additional Folly for Hybris. 

“It is no statement, it is fact. A candid, blatant one which you deny.” As both a veritable and rhetorical question, Narcissus asked: 

“Are you not weary from all the pretending we do?” With Hybris’s mouth agape, Narcissus gathered it to not be so. “Even if you have not, I have. I tire of this gambit we dance around; we are two grandmasters eternised in an unending stalemate. Our sole commonality was misogyny; now step aside.” 

Mazed by his audacity, Hybris defied Narcissus’s order, but Narcissus thrust past Hybris who had been vitiated to lame awe. 

From having jettisoned Hybri’s dead weight, Narcissus outbraved ambling through ChinaTown, and distrusted the cowardice of elusion. He had a redolence of having redressed that odium Sunü had deplored, and, by a miracle, wished to apologise to her for how execrable he had been. The probability of them chancing upon each other was scant, though Narcissus was willed by an indissoluble beckoning. 

ChinaTown was thronging with a human eclecticism, from persons wending through, occasional merchants vending imported rarities, and a babel of diverse locutions garbling into a single ethnicity. A tenebrious fog, enshrouding the vermeil from those sky lanterns, mystified the streets. A gnawing at his chin recurred throughout his quest, which exhibited no signs of fulfilment. When faces were near enough to uncloud, they warped to atrabilious, captious, and damning judges doling repentance out to Narcissus. His phobia of being jilted now evolved to both sexes, and redounded in electric continuance. Desperate, he returned to the restaurant where he had encountered Sunü; this proved vainer than Narcissus himself. Alas, having not located Sunü, he abandoned his pursuit. 

Narcissus vagabonded awhile, till he happened upon Trafalgar Square’s Fountain. Opposing the fog were prismatic glints within the mouths of its mermaid and merboy, luring Narcissus to glide forth into Fountain’s midst, where he could rest upon its edge. With his feet wetted, his mind dejected from disillusionment.  

Glancing at the water, where refluent colours romped, Narcissus beheld a hideous reflection: his.