5 Doors* is a monthly online magazine/gallery featuring new music, cinema, art, and writing from artist JD RUDOMETKIN and guest artists. It is also a communal space where monthly rituals are curated. * This gallery is best experienced on a desktop/laptop computer.
COELACANTH
by JD RUDOMETKIN
Ch. 1 CAPTAIN BOSCH and THE VESSEL with WOMEN STARVING AT SEA
Captain Bosch stands on the upper deck of the seavessel, where dangled port and starboard are unmanned submersibles, inhabited by the anamorphic vapor women who perform deckhand and conjugal chores—on their own time—when and where they appear: Connie. Cideer. Ambileen. Each gaunt in her own way. They are hungry in the morning through the fog where they spin webs for Skinny Captain Bosch, preying the polar bear meat will once more swarm into these woven nets.
Since the great melt-down, their primary appetite wanders: “Are There No Fish in This Black Sea?” “There Are,” He says… though not a scale has been sighted. And so the hunger persists. They question him in oblique glances and twitching ribs, but no body among the women disagree straight away. They disappear, yes, but they do not disagree—as more than he, they feel a mother load below the seavessel, biomorphing as the vessel is, is the vessel, with its tentacles askew.
But still, it's hard to feel Coelacanth or Flounder as often as they feel the hunger pang. Their bodies ever slowing into holy ghosts. The Captain sees this. He sees starvation and the soft tissue’s need. The words becoming flesh to dwell among us.
And so, Captain Bosh scales the mast on frayed rope toward the crow’s nest, his bones jetting in and out of flesh at oblique points above the face of the waters, void and formless. And Cideer sees that bone tremor. She sees his certainty. And feels his body—and she giggles with the butterflies that Ambileen don’t need. Ambileen’s got her stuffed woodpeckers and thumb tacked posters of other women pushed into her Submarine-walls that Connie would never choose to meet. Connie doesn’t often meet things rather squarely, Even now, far above the vessel deck she helps the captain place his foot into the rope just below the crows nest 550 feet above the water where she hovers there with him—as he would have fallen, broken rope and hung himself in the clouds above this rather grey Black Sea. Her anorexic wings. She disappears behind a waving ship tentacle, the favor easily unknown to him. But that boney part of Captain Bosch at which Cideer peeks, seems to understand he has been aided in ways he did not, at this time, see.
And thus he rises safely above the seavessel, as is his practice every dawn. And looking out there, far above the Sea of Glass, he communes with that great fish below the vessel, down there in the thicker water, blue and black.
Ch. 2 POLAR BEAR HAUNCH OR THIGH AND THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN CIDEER AND AMBILEEN
The tentacles weave, they tremor above the vessel, three or four upon the upper deck, four or three, morphing as the keel has many more—or less—to steady her below the women’s mother ship. Tentacles that act as sails as if there were some place to get to. But there is no wheel as far as Captain Bosch can tell. The underbelly belches in the colder morning. And It is warm down there inside the hull where Captain Bosch can feel the heat rise into his trousers through the fog. The women are stirring in the mist at dawn, their ribbed chests a masterpiece articulated. Bellies full of brine from diving toward a Carp or Albacore. But these are only things they call the fish they cannot see. Hook-bait hardcore tunakitsch. The women are hungry now. Bulimia is a thing of the past. And still the loin aches:
The Jack Tuna Jane in Ambileen’s mind, and also on the poster in her jade submersible of the dancer she once came inside a hundred years ago in Old Detroit. Fuck Women, she thinks, but not these skinny bitches. For Ambileen is beginning to put on wait. W.A.I.T. “Black Ambileen Don’t Do No Bullship Dreamin Captain Bosch,” she thinks. But she still knows where she gets her meat and how he wants his women lean, and so she junks her trunk in ounces day to day and insinuates a plump ideal for him in undertones round his dinner table where they sometimes share a polar bear haunch or thigh that has drifted in. She’s gaining wait patiently and the cushioned ounce by ounce the Captain pounds inside his MirrorCabin is gaining on him now without thoughtful permission.
Cideer on the other hand is even thinner, if conceivable, as if a paper clip were she, with candle wax as flesh. Not a hair anywhere on her concave and stalactitic legs that go and go. The Captain could stare at her for hours while she sucks a lemon wedge for breakfast, noon and night. The ideal golden calf he bruised his knees at. But it's getting less a comfort there inside of her since Ambileen planted her tawny seed.
Ch. 3. CAPTAIN BOSCH’S QUARTER ROBOT HEART vs. THE WAY THAT CONNIE CATCHES FISH
Connie doesn’t hoe a roe. She has plans all her own, tangentially aligned with the Bosch, or more or less, as he would tend to think. She doesn’t exactly think as he believes he thinks:
“If there are fish in these black waters, then there are cities that survived the meltdown, then there are ones and zeros in machines then there are weblike nets and evolution, and…”
…all the while in the flesh a quarter robot heart is thrashing now inside his treasure chest, as always resting near his person. But Connie does not tease a salmon out that way. In waitless scales and caudal fin, in gills and with considerable ovary—by and by comparison—she enters not now anatomically does she. Connie with the silverbright or chum or keta, as the vessel or whatever, even without whatever and. And even
she gets hungry too.
Ch. 4 HE CANNOT LIVE ON FLESH ON FLESH ALONE
The Captain is going lean:
pant: 31 X 36
shirt: 13 X 38
jacket: 28 Double Long
shoe: 14 narrow
hat: XXXL
Get a look at him in the MirrorCabin Captain Bosch spindled arm and leg extensions from a ||midgitcage|| of ribs. See him paint chimera into the looking glass and polydactyl when he fidgets—which in his witted carpels often cracking knuckles there he does. Tortiseshelled, a bit jaundiced and brownishyellow with his hermapherditic appeal to Ambileen in the mirror with him here, more and more, where she licks the platter clean. Sets his seamen out to see.
But he’s losing wait. He’s thinning.
And as beautiful as it is to waste away forever, man cannot live by a reflective tense alone. This Ambileen knows. She watches the belt wrap tighter round his waist now each new moon as Cideer becomes bone and offers up a rib to unknown gods to give some clay a breather crying “GOD O God I Do Love To Double Down on My Captain Out of Flesh.” Cideer understands that there is not much more to life than an infinite aesthetic. She and the Captain have become near holy ghosts.
But half a quarter robot/Heart pulses there below the chest. Needles his olfactory nerve and so ensues the rumbling gut. “My Meat. The Hook. The Sirens, They Still Sing. And the polar meat drifts into spidernets now, less and less,” Thinks he. For even Connie saws and chews a polar nail—if not nervously—then certainly for a bit of forgotten marrow there, or a piece of lost seal meat.
Ch. 5 AMBILEEN SENDS FORESHADOWED MESSAGES INTO A THOUSAND MIRRORS
Where have you gone bare flesh? Ambileen causes her hunger to uncurl into gurgles while the Captain takes his lumps. Burps in his ear, there in the MirrorCabin, she gently lets him know mid-air as he floats her there; a thigh round his girlish waist. She dreams up Detroit inside of her with his mechanism pushing the envelope, expressly. “Get IT boy. Get Some of That Fucking (Sea) Meat.” He sees, yes hears her coming and going. But he fills something else. “She’s Saying Some Thing Else To Me. Ambileen? (You Are Hungry).” But Ambileen has disappeared into the many thousand mirrors. She reappears, thicker with rotund bosom hovering over him with the fag in a corner of his mouth. And smoke screens. Smoke signals. Smoking rings. She’s bent her upper lip into this kind of undecipherable. Affirming back his interrogative so only the bones of him would know: the large brow left seemingly unaffected. A breath of hot air. An aire of hot breath. Then: Call The Sireens to The Upper Deck, is all he says.
Ch. 6 THE NEXT TO LAST LAST SUPPER
Cideer with a dozen studs round her navel and the black ink duende of some hindu dancer with a skull atop her ribs—she, oh she is so white is seers the retina and the jetblack round her eye, eyes she the Captain at this diasporic town hall. And Connie floats there ‘tween the tentacles, twixt, listening in, on, to, what rumbles in the Captains gut:
Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, Vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumul tuo sitas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit.*
But hunger is exactly what Captain Bosch wants. He unfolds a silver piece of tin foil. Three dark mints are seen. Where have these been? Three dark beans? And Are They Sweet? Ambileen sits upon the rigging near the harpoon listening to what will come of this confection: “What Does The Man Think He’s Saying?” Says he:
“Who attends?”
Ambileen?…….Co….? Connie (They see her but she don’t like to speak). Cideer? ..wheezing yes.
And Me. Yes. And yes there You Meat is What Seems Fed Ye Yes. Yes. Boar down Fish in Beelly Yeah. Uh-huh. Cooked too and Spiced Meat, There is there. Hmmmm. Ahh in below the Voayaje This Weee Seek. Hookit then Dive for under here in More Find Fill You meet. Is It Alone Fed Full then Yes? Yes. Go How.”
It could be a trick question but Ambileen says it anyhow, “Yes.”
And the blackest spotted gull there just flew above the nest of crows. Floats on dead air round the upper tentacle where Connie coaxes it with her final dark bean the Captain gave. It rests at the crows edge spotted black all but its beak and takes the gem, and Connie takes its life. Into her smoothest strangulation brings the bird down to the upper deck.
* And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness.
Ch. 7 THE BLACKEST SEA—A HISTORY OF NATIONS— SPEAKS
[The black sea is a spleen]. Who threw the slaves bodies in the blender from before The Code of Hammurabi? The Akkadian, Assyrian, the so-called Ancient Egyptian Roman Indian, the United States of America. All the skin tones blend in 71 percent water. The rest is:
Flesh and bones crushed into it. Stewed over centuries, thicker than nepotism. Oh but it is smoother than the price of gasoline. It’s an espresso stew.
Jawbones of asses and bi-cuspids. Ground down into motoroil. Holy molasses crapman.
The Blended Spleen once viewed as the seat of emotion, and all it does to refrain foreign affairs.
One part Sterility
A clear conscience
The Black Sea is a Spleen. And The Blackest Sea believes the
vessel is a migrant tentacle. “Maybe Not One of Us,” so says the Sea, with soft tissue and sclera too—chew-chewed up, and settling. Thick and greasy. Thicker than…..Well: “This Floating Dis-ease is a Parasite,” so rumbles The Blackest Sea, as ash as a Vietnam memorial.
The vessel wades out into the goo. Hungry its ambivalence. “Could anything be living below the Vessel in this uncouth a texture?”
But who asks that? Call the captain. Tell the president. “Who the fuck asks that kind of thing? Who is not slaveworthy. Who can resist the urge to become a good slave. Hmm? Who asks the questions around here anyway?”
The vessel pushed through. Pushes through—its tentacles weaving and breaking wind. All the slaves of all the greatnationzzz piled high in the oscillator. Blended and moaning all night into the creamydawn. A Guernica emulsified. You could hear them groan if you knew the sound. After you got grind-chopuree-liquefied. mixminced. Cream-shreded. Beatme up a grate-whiped Ice Crush so the Empires drink on BlackSlave Seablood. The meek inheriting the dearth. No earth insight. Its gone out here in the mist. Kiss it goodbye: grind, chop, puree, liquefy.
Motherfuckers May They Come Back as Shiteating Flies. Then the plank falls out of the Black Sea’s eye. So
She lets the vessel lie.
Ch. 8 SCIENCE, LOVE’S LOGIC AND THE CAPTAIN’S DECISION
poon–noun
1. any of several East Indian trees of the genus Calophyllum, that yield a light, hard wood used for masts,
spars, etc.
2. the wood of these trees.
poon 2 (pun)
slang ( Austral ) a stupid or ineffectual person
Connie has not been properly lain in 2 to 3 months, slipping behind tentacles and engaging the bow. Her starboard incantations felt as mating sonar love calls into the Blended Sea and to the spotted gulls above. Shes going where no man has gone. But its lonely down in hell while you’re in the flesh. So she undresses and meets A Captain Bosch in his quieting dawn up, up the poonwood mast inside the nest of crows. She plays the harpoon for him while he inside his eyelids sees obtuse skeletons of pre-historic fish play with her and swim beside him. She conjures Arowana for good luck, and the Frilled Shark she calls up Arapaima to take its breath and Bosch feels the Aligator Gar appear inside his wisdom teeth.
There is only scientific reductionism for a harp that calls forth sustenance. But men die for lack of poetry everyday as laboratory rats. The experiments they prove until the Lazarus Taxon floats into the lagoon and all the poonwhite mice re-write the white guidelines.
So Connie conjures Colacanth from darker waters despite its sour taste, and fucks the Captain full of light until his 8 inch hook asks: “Wrap Your Spirit Leg Around My Skinless Bones” and enters he then, in and thinks he:
“Burr Ye Down Forth Came From. Chutter Connie Out Twas Ferreted oh Her. God Up Chockez Me Ah In. Meat As They Calleth Not By Name. Push. Push. Shush ahhh. Down Ye, Fold and Strike for Feed.
open Wide.”
And then it comes to him. And now he knows that it is Ambileen who must dive the Colacanth for them, way down below.
Ch. 9 AMBILEEN WALKS THE PLANK
He put her out to the plank’s far end where Connie bleating, moans as if in prayer. As if they all believed the same damn thing. And it may be so, in the place where their emptying guts do rumble—do they do. The rumble is as identical as it feels: quintepletic. Octopulation’s mimic. Twinlike. But as Bosch says,
| “Step” | in Ambileen’s direction, there are tears, even in Cideer’s pretty eye. She cannot doubt her Beloved Jawbone Bosch but she feels for the woman who must go below. And the desire to eat bread alone is culpable. It takes the responsibility seriously.
At the end of the plank, the water non-water, the goo black sea, thicker than a vat of Armageddonsludge eases itself a jelloish burl forty feet below the starboard side. It seems impermeable to the naked eye. The eye striptease that Ambileen now dreams:
Detroit in the summer with it buildings going and going, and all falling down. Its impotent waste of warehouse space with pole after pole from floor to ceiling. “Someone Should Turn Them Into A Strip Club Dazzling,” she thinks, and maybe one day if she ever comes back around again she’d like to live in a suburban lake near Macomb County in her submersible in some quiet park in the palace called Detroit with the woman now pinned up in her underwater room. She remembers better days when the robots used to run things and the sun was not so far away. Back when her mother the oyster shell, as she called the container of her birth, gurgled in the unified field. “Now we are nearly back at Genesis,” she thinks—void and formless. And hungry. “Now the hunger has become this swan dive I Must Dive Alone Into My Beautiful Black Sea.” She dreams unknowingly as if some Ninevah with Dagon, the mermaid mangod were her only hope. And she feels Connie draw close behind a breezy tentacle, the wind gently blowing her hair. From out of nowhere the wind has come back around today.
Ambileen turns to squarely face the captain as the omen blows its kisses. The boat shocks and plods through the mystic, while its belly burns while the tentacles dangle sheepishly with the keel. And now perhaps she slips and falls. Yes. Ambileen has gone out of sight, save for what the heady captain sees—550 feet above the rest.
Ch. 10 AMBILEEN DESCENDS INTO THE BLACKEST SEA
Oh Lord my funkaholy ghost whispers. A low flying warcraft. Something of mother Gurgling fishlike, Wanting—Not Not—wanting to sail out of that le glue. She hears getdown Thunder.
Ambileen falling toward the Sea Black Sea of Slaves, not unlike anyone could. Waitless now she sinking through this aire, above the crow black sludge, and falling below where the black crows nest—the captain’s spine cracks—And there’s the thunder again. She sinks. 100 feet below. And down past 300. She’s feeling goblins now and ancestors floating by, at 7 to 9 leagues. She Sinks. They come up as close as forgotten dreams, so she opens her eyes and looks back into her head. And here you have it:
She was shaking like a little child. And that baby curls into she, the older woman at the well begging for an eternal spritzer from some handsome Hebrew. How now, she’s fallen into that dark well herself and some kind of Ambileen is lying there beside that bodhi tree, her petals full of honeydew—but the boy sitting there with the loti is on some other trip that melts her into a Persian sandstorm. And in this newer dunetown, she’s got her whole body covered up in burka-black with just her black eye eye-fucking who and whomever will not bend the knee.
She sinks she:
Sinks.
Sink
Ambileen is inside Coelacanth, The mother bear, and she’s eating it alive. How was she so swallowed up untouched inside the dream? Not even Connie knows. And now, with this homo sapienlike thing in its gut eating it alive, Coelacanth dives deeper toward a center of the stew, Ambileen chewing on brine-rib and pickled liver. Her fat ass growing by leapin’bounds. She going blind to the mundane tricks of what were those, tentacles?
Ambileen will never consider polar bear meat ever again. She’s left the building. “Let someone else build it, I was put here to eat.” And she gnaws on, and disappears into the darkest hour.
There’s a step one takes so far into the recess of recesses that that rumbles of the future appear in the decades long long gone. And then you’ve done what you came to do. You gave every last drop of what you had left. She left no trace of her. And that kind of doing never comes undone. They shall forget your name but they will feel the thunder.
Ch. 11 FED
The three of them wait upon the vessels upper deck like a humbled lover’s phallic. Gaunt. Three days they wait. And three nights they wade into the sludge forthcoming. There is barely skin on bone. The air is still, and Connie can hardly hover. Way out there on day three there are aberrations moaning in the dawn. The low flung sirens of Detroit perhaps and an owl hung low reverberating in the torn bowels called Coelacanth. Cideer is thinner than her sacrum’s crest. She’s sinking further and further into the spaces in between these tentacles and the ancient stars. The edge of moon has not touched the manly face where Captain Bosch is still staring out and down across into this flaccid sea of glass, darkly. He has gone into a weaver’s trance. The captain only looks and sees only seeing now for three days in the darkest hour, but sees not a thing which sunk below. He stares into the blackest sea and gray upon gray and sees the scars upon dead women and the sunken eyes of his mother ship.
He sinks he:
Sinks.
He sunk.
And sinking sees:
There is some kind of whisper surfacing. Some hint of odor, known. And he smells it rising now in the form of fleshly bones.
A flank of Ambileen from way down below, with the crawl of black molasses coming forth into the nets. And lo, a rib cage now appearing. Her brown calf rises starboard there. And then the shoulder full of steaming meat, in pieces offered up. A course of 4 or 5 warm digit aperitifs in remembrance of she, the little finger shotguns. Her delicate features surface all apart, humbly and without desecration. A scleral orb, a plumlip, and then the other one port side, so as not to cause alarm.
Connie chewing on the radius of Ambileen. The Captain holds an engorged liver up to Cideer, whom he cradles so her weakness may recede. The pickled genitalia softly swallowed and then the tender breast.
“Were We Ever Hungry?” They wonder. “Were we 5 loaves and fishes once?”
Ch. 12 OF FUTURE CULTS AND THE DARKER CORNERS OF SOME UNKNOWN ROOM
The wind has begun to swirl out of the dark heavens. Now the vessel eases with the pull of tentacles. Cideer holds the heart of Ambileen. She wants to create a shrine in her submersible. She paints a picture as best she can recall. She says “We All Should Kneel Three Times A Day And Offer Ablution Each New Moon.” It all seems feasible to the thousands of children she will bare into the upper deck, into the fog circling the emptying sludge over and over bowing until they believers do become.
And what becomes of Connie? The unfathomable word or deed. The unspoken requisite in the holiest of unwritten works. More pure than what was once blamed upon the holy ghost. This Connie stays for a season in the mist between these tentacles. And then someone one day, several moon festivals into the kneeling, claiming from the upper deck, that “This Connie Simply Did Not exist.” Some existentialist.
And the Captain looking out from the nest of crows, several decades hence, not up to phallic standards now—sees something way off in the distance through the hourglass. There are trace amounts of Frankincense and Myrrh. There are virgin births. He smells molten lava. Pele’s tongue of fire and a hint of sea womb. Its all as it once was and shall be and…and shall we as always begin again? Again he smells the sulfur of eden and a snakeskin antidote of someone’s forbidden fruit. But god damn--the music. He hears the music from some distant sphere gnawing closer moon by moon. Yes. Yes that music feels like everything he could not do this time around.
And he feels the Messianic iron of Detroit in his arteries, and wonders if there is one last dance left in him. And he smells the crushing velvet ache of late night revels in the darker corner of some low-lit room.
Jorge Davies and JD Rudometkin performing a live version of COELACANTH at the High Desert Fringe Festival in Joshua Tree, CA— May 2023. Davies created the projected images and composed the music with JD performing the piece and adding musical elements. (Visit Jorge Davies IG site)
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