Zebulon House - a psychotronic pornotopia after the future. In this speculative territory a traveling theater troupe works to articulate a trans erotics. Their play draws on latter day disjecta membra

 

Zebulon House, The Psychic Surgeon Assists.

Calamari Archive, 2024

The psychic surgeon assists crawls the psychotronic pornotopia of a New Hampshire after the future. In this speculative territory—afflicted with a gothic depopulation, and obscured in falls of ash, of snow, of dust—a traveling theater troupe works to articulate a trans erotics. Their play draws on latter day disjecta membra—among them, the surgical sex scenario which gives the work its title—to open as yet occulted heterogenous zones.

Here are clicks and clots, the crucible exchange of effluents: runnels of blood, flumes of chrism, clear urine, snot. Here are obscene valances and visual overlays, camed viewscrines and plumes of come. Here are thallus, prosthesis, trabecular bone, and florcock. Here are hands wound on hir clock, and the glansing despair tobefuckedwithit.

 The Psychic Surgeon Assists by Zebulon House thrills with evocative, invented words transmitting visionary images, pornographic beauty, and narrative subversion. This exciting combination of intoxicants conscripts the reader into the position of surgical assistant assembling the living folio cited in the text. Simultaneously, it performs an operation on the reader/participant by requiring perceptual gymnastics and inciting erotic horror and fascination. The frightening transformations of its characters are demonstrated by the evolving language, which is exquisite. A lovely, perverse book that reminds us English is a living language.—Joe Koch, author of The Wingspan of Severed Hands and INVAGINIES

Zebulon House's The Psychic Surgeon Assists is relatably psychotic. From the delirious mundanity of a catalog of postal service vehicles to the animism and terror of a world where a nurse's scrubs are also an aquarium, this is a book about the violence and tenderness required to cut each other open and make each other whole.—Laura Ellen Joyce

excerpt:

On the day of the surgery, the sky takes a pale cast, of a color with the mountains beyond the city. Cut from the same cloth—a curtain of oystergray gabardine—it snows, begins to snow, and the trains do not run. The plan, as elaborated by the beloved, allows for the weather, and so by such

instructions, By my being made willing to come under the shadow of thy wings—which are browing arches, or shallow bowers, yet surmount her breast, and where bluer veins throb above the breastbone. Where divisions of sagittaries did stampede—that suprasensitive she could divine them, in blue ungulations—in a collar across her neck, and the crest of each clavicle. Cloven and not, scribony leopardspots, and born of that purpose wherefore now the beloved had strad her. Encloching hercock, and with handsingloves, she put the plan to her point by point: in carbonblack, in beads of blacking blood—lanes blue and jagging lines, pooling or pouringforth in dark lakes—overlaying the tracery of verdigriner veins. She—that she that I had played at—might have comequick, except that the beloved had held her hips immobile, now and then—and only so slightly—tightening th envulope about herquivering, by imperceptible iliac flexions.

Beside her bed had been seated the surgeon and nurse: ensuring the sterile screen that girt her loins, and taking notes proper to their own part in the plan. Which notes she had seen; she had turned her head aside from the beloved—burning eyes fixed on her needlework, her jasperblack bangs flown before her feverish breath, and all the while whispering the plan she delineated. The surgeon copied it line for line—in carbonless triplicate—and the nurse, shi had shorthanded? Without following the progress of hir own nor the hands of the beloved; rather, shi had staredback. In th irradiating ray of which gaze the beloved had at last lifted her inkstained arms, blewn her damp locks and arched her back, lifted her hips to the crown bared by her lips—the bloodflush tip of—and then down upon it come so hard she nearly passed out. Wherefore now— she has procured a pickup—lifted high, and allover white as snow—and on each of four wheels, fluted tires with bright racing stripes, in sable fields fretty with chains of nickel steel. In the carport, she torques these tight—leverlock, tension key—her gloved knuckles knock along the grooves. Bendy flues, flumes, the lugs and tungsten studs, the rubber ribs, the gripping slits, the siping . . . the snow is blowingin, and th arc lamp casts an arch of widening light through its curtain. Of cambric cotton gauze, with one selvedge—of sleet, in beige—or white piped in ecru, with two. The moutainspines, the street—the dark cars stopped in, banked beneath, drifted with it.

The curtain: the beloved parts it, passes through. In white snowsuit overalls, with a rose pinking about the pockets, the plackets, the bib. Her mouth is yawning—astonished, or from sleep—and she shows her pale prominent teeth. Her eyelashes weep gluey dewdrops of ice, and her backswept black hair fallsforth out of place, in springtight ringlets—in the purple shadows under her eyes, in the penumbra and pure umber of her face. Beneath the bib she is nearly naked, all yclad in archaic laces—her columns of archers march beneath—and creamwhite, that graze her amber areoles, her pulse that jets in brassbrown veins, that climb her throat to her crosseyes—uplifted, as she blows the bang beside. Her black brows at archangles, she ascends to her seat.

The snowblows, the pickup goes. White roses at center, black roses with black and white fringe: the pickup spins through the billowing steeps, slowing out of the dawn, into the bay of th elective wing—and on feathers of snow, into concrete columns. The bumper—the rubber cover—curves in lipsplit, th engine shudders and chokes. She, coughing—the burstglands, th airbags billowing, blue clouds of uncertain smoke. The beloved, coughing, sloping out into under th awning, Well, whoops . . .

Their surgeon, yawning, comes on—shaking, chafing hands—through the doors yon,

gust in the tapered white greatcoat. Smells the smoke, Yuck, sees the truck, shrugs. Some small talk, then the surgeon takes the beloved to preoperative care, and she is left in the waiting area. From th end of the hall the way they came, the squarebright planes of light shut out—diaphragms that dilate into darkness, Motionsense, no doubt.

The waiting area is empty, the concession shuttered, the counter, the cart. She finds an automatic coffee machine—four coins, they rattle withinto the slot, and she vends a long coffee. It’s hot. She holds it, holds it, paces, sits. On quilt leather, over a saddleseat—plastic splat, stiles, comb—with pinsize punctures along the top edge. Tabled beside, there are calendared travel magazines, legal notices, abortion guides—

one of within which, on palepink pamphlet of A6 size, she turns on an erotic history of the Patients Collective. It’s hot. She eases up, as she reads, onto the right scrolling arm of her seat. Looks around once, twice. She brushthumbs: the gums within the cheek, flushthroat. Rising pinkheat. Knocking from her heels on sheer nervending stockingfeet, fromth volar innersurfaces, archback involute nailsinto volvar labiovelar envuluting . . .

Along th other corridor—where the beloved went—come one by one the white apparent frames of light. And this is the nurse, in scrubs of aquariumcolor: blouson sleeves, wrists and ankles in elastic cuffs. A matching cap and mask. Quick, she slipsinto hershoes, heartflushed hands, dusts her self, ad justs herskirts.

Unfazed, and forthright, the nurse invites her to assist in the surgery. Of course, It isn’t—hir head inclines along an oblique line, and lashes flash from beneath protective glasses—standard procedure, but with the storm, and your partner’s fervent consent—and given her background, she understands—The surgeon wonders if, perhaps . . . ?

Her background: psychokinesis being an innate but insensate ability, she has performed her remote operations withon the beloved ever by haptic accompaniment. The psychic surgeon: with her earpiece and stethoscope, the piezo electric pickup—adhered about an areola, perhaps—she attunes to the channels and chambers of the pulse. Bloods and winds, chyle and chyme, the carnal corridors—all limned and lensed in chiming quartz. Her surgical sounding line, plumbing the crimson bends, the cardioid incarnadines bound in anastamoses increate. Leaves of violet, blues and gules—gaybeseen, but not beheld by her. Held by her: obscure phlegms, phlegethons, bezoars, calcium, potassium, and semiprecious stones: appearing within the palm of her working hand, the strange objects of her remotest art. Once, her armswhirled in the translucent innards of a body entirely of ectoplasm, suspended in air three feet above the belovedsbed. So to have for hers, the gyrony ground of the pounding heart, the furrowed field and semey, giving vent to pinksteams unstill—if it should be seamed in silk? With running stitch . . .

And for plerophory, an unhoped for intensification of the plan? To the nurse—and putting the cup beside—I, well, certainly! Since out here—a vague, a void encompassing gesture: the waiting room, the dark hallway they came—Out here, really . . .