Marx’s Tattoos
Marx won’t be ready to die again until he completes his theory of the end of history, which he defines by everything it is not. Drought kills his garden. A lightning strike kills his generator, meaning he can’t boil rain or sea water to drink. So, starving, thirsty, when the Oddities Collector comes through the coastal shanty enclave where he is living, Marx trades himself into captivity for three meals a week.
Marx’s tattoos are pierced into his skin by an invisible hand. The names of dead Marxists appear in black ink all across his body, and sing in distant, bodiless voices as they heal. He is a living monument. There are small names on his eyelids, under his fingernails, inside his mouth and down his throat, so all he tastes is blood.
The Oddities Collector sets up a tent wherever they go, trading admission for food, drugs, or interesting knickknacks. During shows, Marx sits on a stool between the Ascending Virgin, who floats up into the sky through a flap in the tent and only comes back down when the crowds have dispersed, and an improperly thawed Celebrity Clone.
The Clone explains what movies were, reciting plots of movies long since otherwise forgotten, all while chained to a post, to keep him from reenacting cinematic violence on anyone who gets near. He struggles with impulse control.
“And then I grip the henchman’s neck between my thighs, and I snap it like this – yeAHH, crunch, crack, click, dead,” the Clone screams, rolling along the floor as far as his leash allows, and the crowd around him claps and cheers, wanting more.
The end of history has no calendars or clocks. No oppression of time. Or its limits. No perverted awareness of its endless flow. At the end of history, time has no value. This is not a future, because it does not recognize any connection to a past. Karl Marx, reincarnate, is born in what used to be called New Trier Township, Cook County, Illinois. He moves east, meeting the ocean where it had overtaken the North American landmass. He stays there for many years, until he sells himself to the Oddities Collector.
There are no seasons. It is hot all the time. The stars move still, but unseen, behind the thickness of an ever-present wall of smog. The price paid by collapsed societies.
The crowds who see him at the Oddities Collection call Marx ‘The Bearded Guy With All the Tattoos Who You Can’t Understand Because His Mouth Is Always Full of Blood’. Sometimes, just ‘The Tattooed One’. Sometimes, ‘Blood Mouth’. He sits naked on his stool.
Marx’s tattoos are faded into a dense, dark tangle across every inch of him. His chest, arms, legs, cock. Inside his guts too, along the walls of his stomach and intestines. When those appear, he can only curl up on the ground in pain, listening as the muffled voices within begin to sing. It was from the skin songs that Marx began to think history was ending. From listening, he formulated the first rudimentary tenets of his theory. The end of history does not look like communism (never works like it should), nor individualism (always a total shit show), nor imperialism (all empires believe themselves to be the end of history, the grand finale, but this never pans out). Also, for better, or for worse, the end of history is not the end of the world.
I once cupped a dying sparrow in my hands, trying to comfort it, sings the voice of an Iranian professor, whom Marx cannot understand.
There are no birds left at the end of history, the absence of their calls making the horizon more like a void. The stars were already dead, croons an American pop star, the last, whom Marx cannot understand. When the world couldn’t stand to mourn them anymore, it filled the sky with fumes and said goodbye forever, the pop star slurs as they sing.
“And just in time, I jump off the dock into the water. Right as the timer goes off. And let me tell you, mmm, hmm, mmm,” the Clone yells, voice hoarse, “just one of the most beautiful explosions I have ever seen.”
A small crowd looks on, confused. Feet away, Marx sits on his stool, very still, trying to focus on his thinking, several songs in languages he doesn’t know rising from his skin at once. On his other side, the Ascending Virgin’s seat is empty, the flap above peeled back by the wind, rain lightly coming through.
At the end of history, Marx thinks, there is no hope. Yet another thing lost if there’s no future.
Looking out at the crowd, Marx thinks about how at the end of history, there is no such thing as humanism. Those folks that remain upon the face of the earth have long since ceased to live humanly. They are bodies that want and need, that cry out in pain and pleasure alike, that dance, dance their way into the void on the horizon. They are flesh motivated only by impulse, without purpose, which for Marx is the closest thing to soul.
When the last of them are cleared out, and the tent is down, the Oddities Collector whistles. The Virgin appears from out of the clouds, lowered to the ground on a curl of wind. Marx has been a part of the Collection for like forever now, and in that time, the Collector’s health has grown steadily worse. He often directs things from a wooden stretcher, with his Healer and his Shaman by his side at all times.
The Collector points west with a swollen toe, and that is the direction they head next. He waves Marx over, tugging on Marx’s long, unmanicured beard affectionately, saying, “Ah, it’s getting grey. You’re beautiful. You, you are beautiful.”
Marx, naked and profusely sweating, a bindle slung over his shoulder, walks flat-footed alongside the Collector’s stretcher. He holds the unwell man’s hand, trying to be a comfort. He lets the Collector tickle his belly and ask the tattoos for songs. To their delight, several voices seem to oblige, singing mournful-sounding dirges, and the Collector hums along until he loses consciousness.
On the outskirts of a refugee camp, the Collector acquires a pen and paper, in exchange for admittance to the oddities show. He gives them to Marx. The next morning, the pen feels glorious in Marx’s hand, held tight as he shakes with excitement. To his horror, though, the words won’t come. When they do come, they don’t satisfy. Nothing he puts down on the paper about his theory of the end of history feels right. Until he starts to bleed on the page. Blood drips from fresh tattoos on his face, under his eyes, and smears the unsettled ink of the words. This is how the end of history is written, he decides, in a mix of ink and blood.
Of course, Marx realizes later, as he watches the paper twist in the air above his head, this is how all recorded histories have already been written. What happens is he gives what he has written to the Ascending Virgin, who is sitting with the Dog-Headed Giant at the time, and asks the Virgin in broken Spanish to take the pages up into the clouds and release them. As the pages settle back down to the meaningless earth, Marx laughs until his empty stomach hurts. Later, when the Herald finds the Oddities Collection, she produces one of the pages from her pocket.
I could have been a painter, not of landscapes, but of houses, I would have liked it, sings the voice of a Cambodian schoolteacher, whom Marx cannot understand.
We would read each other love scenes from bad romance novels, over the phone, until one of us fell asleep, sings a Ghanaian seamstress, whom Marx wishes he could understand, because of the beauty of her voice.
They first hear about the warlord from those who are fleeing him, heading in the opposite direction, suggesting they do the same. When Marx hears the name Hegemon, he tries to warn the Oddities Collector, but the Collector has grown delirious, and Marx only leaves a bloody kiss on his cheek. “What are you being punished for?” the Collector asks. He does not know who Marx is. He was perhaps once a strong man, a warlord himself, before he started the collection, but he has fallen apart now. Also, at the end of history, nobody knows who Karl Marx is.
Pushing on into the ruined west, the Collection find proclamations carved into the remains of collapsed buildings. I am here, one says, to reinvent everything but the wheel.
Marx realizes that the end of history is itself not without enemies. This fills him with great fear, which ebbs and leaves the sense that his meeting the Hegemon is an inevitability. This is confirmed when the Herald enters the camp, produces the page, with dried ink and blood, and asks to be taken to their reincarnate. She says the Hegemon’s power extends over him. That it will extend over the rest of them, if they don’t turn and leave. The Collector has the Dog-Headed Giant carry the Herald out of their encampment, and dump her in the dead wood nearby, her suggestion rejected but otherwise unharmed.
Hegemon’s people come back in force. Kill the Oddities Collector, on his stretcher, and the Dog-Headed Giant. The Clone talks tough at them, but is spared, because he is already chained. Some of the collection flee in fear, but are caught.
Marx allows himself to be taken. At the end of history there are no valiant deaths. At the end of history, there are no noble lives either. Hegemon’s people put him in a cage.
Hegemon is a clone of Leonardo DiCaprio, looking the age he was in The Basketball Diaries, insane from a corrupted memory file. He thinks he is a reincarnation of Alexander the Great. He has amassed an army and has been claiming territory. He has written a code of laws. He has begun exacting tribute from the shanties, the camps, the fragmentary towns. He calls this the reinvention of civilization. Hegemon keeps the oddities as treasures of his court. Except, that is, for the Clone and the Ascending Virgin.
The Clone is freed and made a general. Folks tend to want to follow clones of celebrities, Hegemon explains. The Ascending Virgin is given the choice between floating away and never returning, or becoming a concubine, and chooses the latter. The rest, like Marx, are caged.
For Marx, life in the cage is a mixed bag. He is still naked, but the throne room is always kept pleasantly cool. He is fed one meal a day, which is better than the Oddities Collector was ever able to provide. Marx is also bathed regularly because Hegemon abhors uncleanliness.
From the cage, Marx observes court life. Supplicants enter, throwing themselves at the foot of Hegemon’s throne. Crawling up to him and kissing his hands, begging for mercy or protection. Hegemon washes his hands in a bowl of boiled water, which is changed often.
There are regular, marathon orgies. Afterward, Hegemon bathes for hours in a tub behind the throne. When he, or his people, get bored with sex, Hegemon leads them into battle. He has reinvented guns.
The Clone, now General, likes to do kickboxing moves underneath Marx’s cage, which is suspended from the high ceiling by two thick reinforced chains. He compares his career to the Hegemon. He traces their degrees of separation.
“Yup, huh-AHH, great talent, great talent,” the Clone General says. “Benevolent leader. Smart, smart, ya-GAH-hyuppp, shrewd. We’ve got a lot to look forward to.”
The Court Storytellers huddle nearby, listening to the Clone General. They are already incorporating his stories into their narrative of the Hollywood Era. Soon after, when the Clone General dies in his first battle, he is preserved in their oral tradition.
After his death, the body of the Clone General is retrieved from the battlefield and brought into the throne room. The Court Storytellers sing his filmography over the body as it is burned. Watching from his cage, Marx is reminded that the end of history is not the death of memory. He cries, not for the Clone, but because he is starting to accept that his theory of the end of history will never be complete.
Like Alexander the Great, Hegemon is undefeated in his lifetime. At one point, he defeats the actual reincarnated Alexander the Great in battle. He defeats the combined forces of an insane Jennifer Lopez clone, who believes she is Cleopatra, and a Mark Anthony clone who knows he is not really Marc Antony, but goes along with it.
When the warriors are out at play, the former Virgin, now the Concubine, sits by Marx’s cage. We rolled like loaded dice through the wet blood of comrades, sings a Cuban Marxist, and the Concubine translates. Marx’s tattoos start to appear more frequently, and he feels them more painfully, the sting of the names appearing makes his body twist one way, the songs make him twist another. When they see, the denizens of the court move their bodies like he does, mocking him, and Marx feels ready to die.
In his cage, Marx’s body moves. The skin songs grow louder. Sometimes their singing is dissonant. Not every voice can carry a tune.
Others form choruses. Where they buried us in winter, there were flowers in springtime, sings a chorus of Chinese Marxists, whom Marx cannot understand.
We couldn’t stand to live any other way, sings a chorus of many voices, in many languages.
Would you do it again
Would you
I would, so many of them sing, and Marx cries tears of blood and ink.
Hegemon sometimes seems to think Marx capable of prophecy. “In dreams,” he tells Marx, circling his cage, “you show up when I need to hear something and say it with perfect clarity.”
He asks Marx to speak, getting up close to the bars of the primitive cage and feeling the spittle of blood from Marx’s mouth land on his cheeks. What Marx tries to say is, “I do not think there are any prophets left at the end of history.”
I loved to clean, I loved to clean, sings a Sudanese poet, whom Marx cannot understand.
I could have been a candle maker, sings a Brazilian soccer player, whom Marx cannot understand.
I always liked dogs more than dogs liked me, I always liked cats less than they liked me, sings a Hungarian serial killer, whom Marx strains to -- but can only barely -- understand.
We’ll be staying up late making a racket, kicking our way out of our fucking caskets, sings an American punk rocker, whose gruff voice Marx cannot understand.
We go on, sings a Bangladeshi waiter.
We are,
Forever, sings a Polish voice, repeating it over and over. Marx, familiar with the word, cries out in fear.
But even the end of history is not forever.
The last skin song Marx hears before he dies sings in German. If I had lips again, they would only be for drinking beer, the voice sings. Upon hearing this, and understanding it, Marx smiles.
When Marx dies, Hegemon has the body taken from the cage. The tattooed skin is stripped from the body. It is washed, purified. Incantations are whispered over it.
Marx’s skin is dried, stretched out, cut, and cured. Preserved. Adhered to the walls of the throne room. Songs continue to rise off the skin, singing his theory of the end of history.
They are singing when the Hegemon, looking like Shutter Island-era DiCaprio dying of cirrhosis, dies. They are singing when the next Hegemon dies. When the kingdom fractures, when the air gets too hot to breathe, and when the sun gets closer, though no one can see it. After the throne room is abandoned, they are singing still.
Eventually the names fade, eaten by the air. What once was Marx’s skin, preserved as it is, curls and begins to come apart, until there is nothing left of it. The throne room, once an office building, then a castle, now a place avoided in superstitious fear, collapses in on itself. Becomes a ruin.
But the songs remain. Those will always be there. The voices of time when there was time, the hymn of being, the frequency of ideology, the vibration of what has been rubbing against what is.
At the end of history, even after all the particles which once comprised Marx’s body have decayed, have stopped being rearranged into new forms, even then, there are still the voices, the songs.