I am a flying Trappist monk. I’m in charge of brewing beer while hanging on very thin ropes. It is not necessary for me to hang on them, but then I wouldn’t be “The Flying Trappist Monk” if I didn’t, and I’d be out of a job. I don’t get paid, but I do get housing and food and all I have to do is brew beer. That’s what I love to do, anyway.
Grimbaud is my friend. He might be my only friend, which is why I didn’t say “Grimbaud is a friend of mine.” Grimbaud swings by the monastery every week to fill me in on the past week. I don’t get out much, so it’s like I get to live two lives.
Grimbaud likes shoes a lot. Some people (me) call him a connoisseur. Once, someone tried to sell Grimbaud a pair of shoes he didn’t like and he said, “You’d better stop trying to sell me those.” Grimbaud never says no, unless the situation includes shoes.
Grimbaud cuts the soles of shoes with rusted safety razors. He buys them before he does that, of course.
He dangles the soles in the well of his throat and contracts his esophagus around them. He calls this trick “the rubber boa.” He loves the taste. It’s the only thing I’ve ever seen him eat. After just a few contractions, all that’s left is a tattered, paper-thin wafer of rubber.
Grimbaud is a modern man. He likes the waffle soles on the bottom of Vans brand shoes. He doesn’t like waffles, but he told me once that he gets “to live like someone who likes waffles, but I get to do it my way… I get to eat shoes.”
When he’s done with the soles, he licks the shoes for hours a day. He pauses between his stories to take a few licks of the canvas tops of the vans. He snakes his tongue through the parallel laces. If a woman saw the way he maneuvered that wet muscle, she might marry him right away. He wouldn’t marry her though. He is only sexually attracted to shoes.
Grimbaud did a magic show once. He invited all his friends and family. I was surprised by the turnout. He rented out a medium-size black box theater and there wasn’t an empty seat in the house. There were 200 seats altogether. He greeted everyone by name as they came through the door. I can’t blame these people for coming to see Grimbaud. Grimbaud is a charming fellow.
We settled in our seats, everyone fidgeting with anticipation. I saw every color of the rainbow in that audience. The blacks, the whites, the yellows, the browns, the so-black-they’re-purples, the reds, some greens (I think they were sick). We were all connected there. I had never felt so proud to be The Flying Trappist Monk; to feel that invisible umbilicus that held us all together at our lint-ridden bellybuttons.
The lights went dim and the audience roared. My ears were ringing. Someone next to me laid their arm across my shoulder and kissed me on the cheek, pushing in to get past my beard and sticking their tongue out to move the hair out of the way for their lips, making a filthy crop circle on the side of my face.
I turned to look at who it was. A large black man, bald, with hands like CDs with sausages glued to the edges. I had never seen such a genuine smile. I nodded at him, trying to return that pearly white sentiment, and patted him on the back. I felt close to someone for the first time since I’d met Grimbaud.
Grimbaud walked on stage, dressed in a suit. Exciting mall music spilled from blown speakers. The boom of synthetic drums nearly drowned out a plasticky brass lead that screamed through the rhythm like a ringtone saxophone.
A spotlight shone on him, lighting up a background like a pristine, starry night. “Welcome,” he began, looking over the audience. “My name is Grimbaud –” More cheers cut him off. He patted the air with his hands and the audience went silent. Then, without further patter, he produced a sword from thin air.
I stopped breathing. Where the fuck did he get it from? Was it in his skin? Did he stuff it in his suit? No. It was a real sword: a magnificent rapier. He couldn’t have bent it at all. The only explanation was that he had somehow ripped a microscopic tear in our inferior dimension and quickly dug his arm into a planar closet where he hid all manner of interesting things — probably mostly shoes.
Then, without words, he tossed the sword up into the air and stuck his arm out, palm up, and stared straight into the audience. I could hear murmurs from all around me saying, “He’s looking at me.” But it felt like he was looking at me. He was looking at all of us at the same time.
The sword spun round in the air and the tip faced his hand, a sharp missile soaring downward. I will never forget how confident he looked up there. He smiled like a man who’d figured out life’s greatest secret. And then the sword hit his hand, bounced off of it, and spun to meet his eye.
It jammed itself into his skull, cutting a swath across his face. He flinched and bumbled backward, his hands out in front of him. He screamed. It was the first time I’d heard a sound like that. I began crying almost instantly. The entire audience’s face was twisted in a sympathetic scowl, tears running down their cheeks.
As Grimbaud panicked, the sword moved in and out of his eyesocket, cutting lines into his eyebrow and cheeks. He stopped moving entirely and the sword still thrust, deeper and deeper, until it found its way through the other side of his skull. He knelt on the stage. We were all crying so fervently that I could see a waterline of tears reaching the low hem of my chinos.
He put one hand out and we all stopped crying. We began to clap. He opened his mouth and from his mouth came a sound so crisp and clear, an operatic vibratto that could bring peace to warring nations. He held that note for about 6 seconds and then fainted against the stage face-first.
We stayed quiet for a bit, dazzled beyond comprehension. Then we roared in applause. I could feel my hands and the hands of others. My hands were their hands. We shared the same faces and same skin. I felt labia flapping around my penis. I felt disc-wide areolas on my thick breasts. I felt like a woman and a man at the same time. We were no longer connected. We were eachother, as we now know Grimbaud had planned all along.
This was it. Grimbaud’s greatest trick. It was a spectacle to behold and his greatest gift to us. We all held each others’ hands tightly, squeezing so hard that our fingers melded together. I could see the chain of smiling faces all around me begin to condense as we fell into each other. I was pulled into the black man beside me and the woman next to me (so beautiful, so pure) was now being sucked into my side. Her mouth was wide open in a grin so wild that her jaw was threatening to detach and start up a bakery.
Soon we were one amorphous lump of color gathered in the middle of the theater. All of our eyes swam together on the surface of that mass of flesh and bone. We all narrowed our eyes in elated sadness. Arms at the top of the heap began to take hold of each other forming laces. It was his last wish. Our callused, dry feet fell to the bottom of the heap and bonded together like the lines in a waffle. This is what he’s always wanted, and we want to give it to him. Finally, our eyes smashed together in a violent wave, forming an obsidian-black tongue that rounded out the high top.
The top of the building came off, rubble exploding into and flying into the heavens. A giant, disembodied tongue appeared overhead, blacking out the sun. It lowered itself, the first coming of the strongest muscle in the body, and ran itself across the laces, the tongue of the shoe, the sides. The warmth was so radiant that we all urinated simultaneously, making our form balloon into an even more monstrous flesh-shoe.
The tongue came under us and cradled our piss-balloon form with its incredible strength and lifted us into the sky, where a great and beautiful esophagus pulsated in anticipation of the feast.