Nexus, by Xan van Rooyen

The entry fee is paid in blood, carried in thimble-vials on silver chains gracing delicate necks.

Necks bearing the gossamer scars of undead lovers sipping from their veins, a puncture wound Morse code spelling out longing. Some have odes carved into their arms and inner thighs; razorblade-kiss poetry, a litany to existential dread.

They find each other, entangled in webs of fishnet and torn lace, bound by leather and chain, freed from conformity and performative heteronormalcy. Here beauty knows no gender and this is darkest beauty made manifest, in this hallowed space only dead souls dreaming know how to find.

And so we flit and flutter through the streets, descending like black butterflies on a corpse, to the doors of the club—our sanctuary and shadow-sanctum—a crossroads for the fae and the ghosts, the damned and delirious, and those like me neither he nor she, searching for cerebral balm. To drown out the noise of my thoughts with lambasting music; to quiet the incessant static thrumming through my skin with kaleidoscopic lights.

A chosen sensory overload.

This, the Nexus—hemorrhaging heart and weeping soul of cities merged in quantum origami. It languishes in blasphemous rumor, avoided—feared even—by the uninitiated. A place where demons and angels dressed in black, in drag, in dazzling skin or scales or feathers writhe and cavort, a mad world hidden, preserved by funereal facade.

Our thimble-spilled offerings accepted, we glide and seethe toward ecstasy.

Dance floors like portals to worlds far removed from the strained reality of our intersecting worlds. We drift toward the bar serving reverie and release in shots of wormwood and aniseed. We sip and swallow, flesh marinating in this shared hedonism of escape.

With absinthe in our arteries, we reach across the centuries and touch the hands of those who wrought our beloved aesthetic. Poe and Wilde, Shelley, Byron, Brontë, Brite, and even Rice who gave us exquisite monsters to love, to worship. They who tripped through faerie rings, whose dreams poured onto pages in syntactical relief. Whose stories were mirrors so we could see ourselves, light pouring through shatter-cracks, shards and slivers slotting into place to make us feel whole and seen scabrous and bruised as we are.

For some, wormwood and aniseed aren’t nearly enough. They crave deeper oblivion, the sensual embrace of altered chemistry and true transcendence. They make art on sticky table tops, on exposed skin, drawing white lines like prayers across scars and freckles. Others choose hypodermic bliss in bathroom stalls festooned with the gospel of ghosts and adjurations to the sublime in eye-pencil and lipstick scrawl.

Each a transmission of truth, sacred in the witching hours.

I follow the music drawn to one sonorous altar after another. I leave offerings in hair toss and foot stomp, in bold gyration. I am a moth irrevocably reeled in on threads of psychedelic light, transported, transmuted, carried away by chainsaw melody and jackhammer beat, away, away from the self that outside these walls is different, damaged, defeated.

As one, we ascend, stigmata martyrs exulting in this neon garden of savage and deathly delight. The portal yawns wide and we hurtle through the fragile schism, our bones and sinews tethered in a maelstrom of frequencies by the DJ’s hand. We the marionettes caught in seaweed frenzy by the broiling ocean of bass and synth. The strobes whisk violent fractals across the darkness, freeze-framing us in bleached stop-motion moments.

This is redemption.

This is sweet and perfect disintegration.

Sweat and smoke machine. Mist-drenched, we twist our limbs into sigils, contort into living spells and slip like a scalpel slice through the interstitial tissue of connected realms. A song’s breadth spent in Faerie before plunging into Hell, a chorus-long sojourn in Elysium or Tartarus, Manala, Atlantis—borders blur and fray as we scatter space and time.

But, eventually, the night expires and a new dawn sears the sky with scorching inevitability, destroying the moonlit shelter of our sanctuary. The Nexus judders, portals closing and we are evicted, a trebuchet shot toward the sterile light of our own reality.

I stagger through the doors, into a city already glowering at my froth and fidget, labeling me eccentric, quirky—oh so very autistic.

Reluctantly, I exchange the macabre for the mundane and emerge, one of many palimpsest patrons, god-touched and ghost-drunk. This is how I will survive the wilderness of days between now and the next syzygy when the Nexus will once more open its welcoming maw.

For now, I re-don my armor—mask firmly in place, jaw aching, teeth clenched, brain on fire and hands forced still. I am consoled by the memories and melodies still thrumming in my chest, woven through synapses, caught deep in my marrow with the echolalia promise of fresh ceremonials, if I can only survive being normal until free once more to embrace the sublime and be myself.

Author's note
This story is as much a love letter to my days in the Goth/alternative clubbing scene in South Africa as it is a contemplation of what it feels like to be autistic, trying to parse the constant bombardment of sensory stimuli.

Xan van Rooyen

Xan van Rooyen is an autistic, non-binary storyteller from South Africa. They now live in Finland and have a Master’s degree in music. They write short stories and their novels include My Name is Magic and Silver Helix. Xan is also part of the Sauútiverse, an African writer’s collective.

• Links: https://linktr.ee/xanvanrooyen