In The Garden of Earthly Delights: I Bend to Paradise

By Rubén Ulises Rodríguez Montoya





“But he was in empty space surrounded by blackness, feeding from the impossibly bright light of the sun, falling away from the great blue curve of the earth, aware over all the body of the great number of distant stars. They were gentle touches, and the sun was a great confining hand, gentle but inescapable.”


—Octavia E. Butler, Adulthood Rites


Far into the cosmos, beyond the gaze of god, inside the spaceship carrying the last survivors of the human species, a fasting Vampire with a mass of weightless long black hair suspended off the ground slowly turns clockwise in a prism-shaped chamber with padding on all sides. Its eyes are closed so that it can better feel and hear its surroundings, scanning for signs of more hosts who might supplement it with the blood supply it needs. As it drifts in its chamber, a long and twisting tail occasionally shows itself under billowing black robes that spread around its weightless body. With sharp black nails, it clicks open the doors that lead to its prey.


The ship leads its crew to an unknown viable planet—the Earth is no longer hospitable. The vessel is quiet except for the sounds of the machines that keep its crew in a catatonic state of dormancy. The Vampire first snuck onto the ship as a shadow inside the shoe of a maintenance crew member aimed to clean the spaceship, wearing an orange vest, and broom in hand. It has survived its blood thirst by sampling the veins of its sleeping billionaire passenger victims, taking small doses of blood as they drift unconscious on a one-way trip inside glass pods that monitor their vital signals. The Vampire’s swift movements are visible past the gold-layered windows of the ship. The gold deflects and protects it from the murderous rays of unnamed suns.


Besides the crew, the ship carries an arsenal of items still wrapped in their original boxes. Styrofoam holds each object securely in place; TVs, blenders, drills, cars, dishes, and golf balls are stacked on top of one another as if filling a pharaoh’s tomb, packed tightly to ease the transition from this world to the next.



***


After an epoch of astral travel, the ship’s migration comes to an abrupt close, not by an unforeseen cosmic entity, but by a foreign force from within the vessel. Surreptitiously integrated into the bowels of the mainframe, a virus programmed by some of the humans who were not permitted to steward humanity's new enterprise detonates. There is no countdown, no red flash or voice directing evacuation. There is only the unsettling sense of something gone wrong, then the fiery roar of a force thrusting everything out of its path.


The Vampire receives the explosion’s impact as it fails to clench itself to the vast and punishing force of empty space, violently imploding and exploding against flaming immolation. The extreme temperatures push its body down, as if forcing it to gallop into the path of a black hole. Bones and sinew splinter through already burnt and opened skin, leaving shards of its skull visible. The force yanks the Vampire’s fangs and mandible from its open mouth and its skin turns inside out. Both blessed and cursed by its immortality, unbound by the laws of physics and nature, the Vampire isn’t dead; its body floats in curdled tentacular pieces.


In the blast, the Vampire’s body and soul are violently torn apart, thrashing in an uncontrolled orbital axis on top of each other, moving next to each other, over each other. Both sending signals of longing into the darkness of space. The torn fabric of life instinctively reaches back, thirsty to absorb into its infinite fibers the warm and supple blood of its carnal vessel.


In their desperation to reunite, a spherical, transparent, stabilizing, protective film forms around the Vampire’s fragments, one riding on top of the other like stalactite over stalagmite. Flesh tears open like a fist to release, again and again, a single droplet of blood to lure back the shredded specter almost lost to the pull of a larger and more infinite heavenly body. But when what’s left of the Vampire’s immolated remains finally reconnects with its nexus, it’s as if its whole body contains all of the darkness of the universe. And, for a split second, a burst of light turns night into day, its resurrection brought back into the infinite seed of creation.


Hidden within its own protective membrane, the Vampire rides alongside the remaining wreckage of the ship. Alone in space, unable to touch solid ground, it floats as if suspended in the immensity of a black ocean. With no ground on which to balance, the Vampire pedals in frenzied, frantic movements—too frightened to move its gnarled limbs far from its core, avoiding the gravitational pull of the unknown immeasurable darkness.

Reaching and reaching for itself in the infinitude of deep space, the Vampire slowly adjusts and adapts its body to the temperatures and pressures meant to govern large celestial bodies. Struggling to ground itself and fighting its yearning to stay the same, metastasizing to become all shapes and forms all at once, billowing and retracting back and forth into a single central axis. What survives of its prima materia forms a mucus-like membrane that shields its shredded body. In time, more and more layers of muscle, bone, and skin coagulate around the Vampire’s new frame, connecting its tentacular mass of nerves and blood with remnants of the decimated ship. Like a hermit crab looking for a new shell for protection, the Vampire merges with the detritus of the ship; it picks up subtle and microscopic ripples and tears and latches on to them. On these sites of grafting, globular lumps of tissue rediscover rhythm and hope in the chaos of the Vampire’s remains, protecting it from the extreme brutality of space and the heat of the nearest suns.

The Vampire holds its position while discarding parts of itself that it can no longer use. It lets go of skin too scorched and damaged to be revived. It binds scars that are still healing with scraps of an astronaut's suit. A glimpse of deep time passes before the larger parts of itself come together. Disembodied fragments summon smaller ones in close proximity to its orbit. Finally, they touch, fusing their tissues. Limbs are lost to the tremendous force of space. Some appendages are yanked into the cosmos, only to one day be pulled into the orbit of a gassy planet and quickly incinerated by its atmosphere’s burning shield.


Latching onto the concave fender of the ship, into the torn tire of the rover searching for life on other viable planets, the Vampire finds solace inside an abandoned left shoe. Now contained, its flayed corporeal remains ride along the ship’s refuse, fragments pulling towards one another to become whole again. Without human blood to feed on, the Vampire’s splintered body slowly adapts, using what’s left of its own blood to reanimate the ship's solar-powered technology. Now able to harness the energy of the nearest light source as its own, it can augment, grow, and heal.



*************


As it comes back to life, the Vampire finds that the emptiness and loneliness of space have taken a toll on its consciousness. Its mind begins to wane, losing purpose amid the hopelessness and uncertainty of what's to come and what’s been lost. For a brief moment, it shuts down, dimming back into a numb, catatonic state.


While dormant and lost in the current of space-time, the Vampire’s mercurial blood acts on its own accord. The Vampire’s vital fluid slowly releases vials of the final human prey it had hunted down. Flickers of humanity’s lost shadow are summoned and come to life as distant wafts of memories that steadily awaken its body.


Moving through its blood, the prey’s memories surface in the Vampire and become energy, spores of remembrance colliding into a larger mass, reshaping and propelling it back to consciousness.


The Vampire’s own blood and the blood of others makes it look back on a time when it was called by other names, when bloodletting and blood sacrifice were a means of speaking to gods. As a priest atop the temple dedicated to the moon, the Vampire extracts the still-beating hearts from its willing victims, prickling them with its fangs to feel the echoing drum of life fade out.


Blood pumps and nourishes the neurons of the Vampire’s brain and moves from pyramids and blood letting to a memory of being nourished again by a startled man from a small town on his way into the city with only a backpack, worn boots, and thick jacket to protect himself from the 4 am cold. The Vampire remembers his skin, doused with a layer of the tiny pink soap he gets at cheap hotels every time he stays in the city. The Vampire puts its mouth on his chest, his prickling hairs rise, flesh is cut open, each cascading gulp of blood one step closer to exsanguination and elation. Before the baptismal rites of the blood gift are over, the man with worn boots remembers the sweet scent of freshly cut alfalfa fields as he rides in the back of a truck with five other men, ready to pick whatever is in season.


As the Vampire’s body regains movement after paraplegia, it feeds one last time on another victim—the Truck Driver carrying manufactured goods along what used to be old turquoise trade routes across the Chihuahuan desert: the Vampire's eyes shrouded in darkness, hiding behind a mesquite tree, waiting for the moment to brandish its fangs like a gun to men in gray sweatpants. So easily lured by their own road lust, having driven for so long.


Behind the sounds of cars going 80 mph, behind the strobe lights covered in insects cajoled by the heat of artificial light, the Truck Driver jumps the wire fence that divides the desert from the rest stop to follow in the light of the crescent moon and the luring presence watching him. He removes his t-shirt, and turns his back to it. His sweatpants and underwear slowly pulled down midway all at once, behind him thick legs gyrating back and forth: bringing him in. He can feel the breath on his neck. In between both of them, curls of hair open with sweat as mortal and immortal skin braise each other up and down.


Fangs acting as one, the sharp press drilling and driving down into his skin. The immediate trickle of blood falls and flows down the Truck Driver's fresh wound. He can feel the Vampire cascading inside him as veins and arteries direct blood to the Vampire’s lips, sheathing itself into the Truck Driver through his blood, the mercurial vital fluid radiating more and more heat, expanding his body: gleaming from the inside.


The Vampire reaches down to grab the Truck Driver’s engorged member to give him more pleasure, the length of him filling with veins rising and rising. The skin is pulled back as the crystalline and mercurial sap follows gravity's path, only to then release its grip on him to narcissistically direct the pumping blood to its mouth. The other hand of the Vampire pushes the Truck Driver’s head up to face the night sky as he is held by crescent fangs that grab hold of his exposed neck. In the holding on, the Vampire’s hooved-feet press down on the desert sand, to reveal the damp earth underneath them.



Slowly with two sharp nails on its fingers, the Vampire reaches over the Truck Driver's shoulder to slice open in between the lungs, fingernails scratching like horns to tear the skin open as one finger follows after the other into the Truck Driver’s skin. The hand twisting and reaching inside his entrails, the rib cage breaks as the hand pushes the warm and supple lungs and liver out of the way to reach for the Truck Driver’s beating heart. The Vampire holds the man's flailing and flickering heart still inside him, as drafts of blood are breathed into its mouth. The blood from his open gash lubricates the Vampire’s hand. Its arm pushing its weight on him, clasping deeper with its fangs. The Truck Driver's torso buckling in between the Vampire’s fangs and fist, impaling him, keeping him from moving his body. Only his legs are quivering and violently thrashing desert sand out of the way.


As the Truck Driver gasps for air in agony, the Vampire’s hand grabs his jaw, its claws piercing his tongue, the blood pouring out of it and cascading back out of his mouth and into his mouth anointing him with his own blood as the viscous substance chokes and keeps him from screaming. While the Vampire’s gouging hand is inside him, holding his heart, pumping and pulsating the organ to direct more blood to his—and its—mouth.


The Truck Driver’s scream vibrating inside him, the blood around his body boiling, life and death piercing through his body, bending until breaking in half. Holding every layer of pain with no threshold. His thrashing, his muffled screams to let him go unable to escape his body, only tears curving down his face.


Clenching in agony burning from the inside, arching his back as if getting too close to the sun as the searing, prickling, and brandishing pain takes over his whole body. Knowing his fate, in his wanting to die, in desperation, the Truck Driver slowly gives into the tormenting pain. He synchronizes his breath to the fist clenching his heart, to his broken ribcage, and to his flailing skin pulsating signals of distress to his brain. A rush of adrenaline directs pain to pleasure, each perforating layer becomes a layer of blazing euphoria. His breath guiding the unbearable hurt, becoming a symphony of frothing ecstasy. The Vampire’s fist opens to bliss, where everything inside him starts brewing in paradise. His neck flying backwards, wailing from the inside, his hurling body radiating a field of energy, the flame of his being shooting up like an atomic flood of light. The light disperses, breaking and splitting into millions of particles releasing his last breath, that for a split second eclipse the stars.


In the final gesture of transubstantiation, the almost lifeless, flickering and flailing limp body of the Truck Driver lays on the Vampire's shoulder. Soon the night will turn into day, and the sounds of insects will dim, and everything will be quiet except for the Vampire’s snarling and baying, interrupted by the excess gargling blood over its mouth as the Truck Driver’s libatious blood drips down and joins with sweat falling into the ground.


One drop at a time.



********


Aided by memory, the Vampire’s disjointed parts meld to form tumorous lumps that bubble and push material remnants of the ship onto itself. Becoming a greater sum of its parts, the Vampire is now self-sustaining, slowly traveling through space and spinning on its own axis. In time, it will use its own genetic makeup and the memory of its victims within its blood to form other beings inside itself to aid its journey throughout space. It directs arteries and veins to feed and care for its new brood made of its own splintered bones, blood, and flesh.


In its new photosynthetic nebulous form, the Vampire is crowned with a halo of stars that supplements the life it receives from the light of all suns, becoming a mutation of myth and reality. Born of blood, born of death, and born in the shadows of space. Emblazoned with the memory of Earth’s distant past, its new shape pointing to the stars.

_____________________________________________


This essay expands on a text the artist originally wrote for his solo exhibition, James Webb and the Thestral Born Without a Vertebrae, which was presented at Sargent’s Daughters in New York from September 29–November 5, 2022. The original essay can be found at: sargentsdaughters.com/ruben-ulises-rodriguez-montoya-james-webb#:~:text=%E2%80%9CBut%20he%20was%20in%20empty,great%20number%20of%20distant%20stars.