Laura Lake
The Last Will and Testament
I hereby affirm, declare, expostulate, ruminate, and eat-grass at the legal incantations necessary to formulate a valid, binding, bottom-submissive last will and testament. While I’m composing this document as a contribution to a surrealist magazine—the People’s Madreporic Republic piece for Peculiar Mormyrid, the most unpronounceable I’ve ever done—THIS IS NOT A JOKE!
Let me state frankly, for the record, to be inscribed on adamant tablets installed across the boundary lines at the ends of the universe, I do this not to be ironic, but because this is the most public possible declaration available. I’d never complete such a dreary, awful document otherwise—and why should I have to learn to speak lawyer just to protect my interests?
My blood is the sea. I inherited it from my Newfoundlander parents, but as all property is theft, I demand my corpse’s bio-genetic repatriation to the Atlantic Ocean. It has fed me well. What could be more just than a salty soup of myself served freezing to a nest of shellfish? Revenge is a dish best served cold.
The sea is the cradle of life! We are, all of us, sea creatures—nay, sea monsters!—and the sea is the one political body that recognizes our truly universal and stateless citizenship, by devouring everything, even the garbage heaps we dump in at the cost of so much life.
Isn’t space, too, legally international waters? What realm of marginality is greater than the rest of the universe, whose most prescient ecological feature is its just murder of anything that visits it without the intermediary of a vast and complex life support system? Is it any wonder international waters spawn those heroic liberators of bourgeois colonial wealth—pirates—who even now return all imagination to the commons from which it came from out of the vaults of its intellectual property landlords?
Speaking of which, if I die I want the rights to my intellectual property put into a trust controlled by: my wife, Jessica Rousseau, my friend, Jason Abdelhadi, and my friend Audrey Girard—to be strategically liberated by them to the commons for the exclusive purpose of perpetual struggle against capitalist hegemony, except the embarrassing horrible stuff on my hard drive. Just peek at it and make jokes at my expense amongst each other before destroying it prior to your own deaths, okay? Speaking of which, Jason, you give the eulogy—your wedding speech was great and I’m sure you’d come up with a real cracker for the funeral.
But enough of this politics is an act performed in public privileging of protests pertaining to non-invisible oppressions—it is the cryptozoological possibilities for insurrection that interest us. Just what, I wonder, keeps killing those colossal squid corpses scientists keep finding? Just as well, the sweet embrace of the tentacle is fast becoming a cliche. Should we choose to delve deeper, to the darkness below the sea, the slimy jaws of countless communal polyps would caress every pore of our bodies with kisses oozing with soggy clumps of half-digested corpses—pure desire, the ocean beneath our own psyches, lies obscured beneath a veil of darkness and filth, a land where national and individual identity have congeal into a soup of bacteria and all alike yearn for the taste of more seafood, universal cannibalism, and disgusting sex.
Speaking of horror-terrors, I don’t want to live in a world without suicide. Suicide is what keeps me alive. Do you know how many nightmares I have of being stuck, in middle-school, in a conservative, conformist police state, maybe in an undersea bubble-city, forever, because I’ve been made immortal and can’t kill myself?—or there’s the ones where the government torturer might punish me if I’m caught in a suicide attempt because I couldn’t live for fear of torture.
Any amount of disability is fine—if I were reduced to a hideous heap of puss-hiccuping vaginas with bee-stings for teeth and varicose veins full of cthonic ichor because of a freak accident with a radioactive garbage-truck I’m sure I’d prefer to live even in chronic pain just to begrudge taxpayers the expense of keeping me alive—but if I’m unconscious in a hospital and there’s any risk of me waking up without the ability to commit suicide, LET ME DIE!
I hereby reject, in this instance, the possibility of surgeries, brain transplants, bed pans, beds, ceilings, atmospheres, sippy-cups—drugs are fine, I want all the morphine, benzos, and barbiturates you can throw me, preferably with an ill-advised dosage of brandy—no bibs, food, edible mush, atomic mass, thermodynamic activity, trampolines, troubadours, burlesque strippers, shrimp tails, moldy library books, nor moth droppings. I wish to be sealed in an air-tight garbage bag and deposited in a freezer pending my burial at sea, preferably while still alive in a vegetative state, in sacrificial dedication to the God of suicide—redeemer of the ultimate protest who sits enthrone on a giant conch-snail’s face.
My material possessions, I give to my wife, including the semen I had frozen before being chemically castrated—spawning some tadpoles is the closest we’ll ever get to engineering a biological weapon, and it’d be a terrific fuck you to the social Darwinists for a neurotic tranny like me to prove my survival of the fittest. If you have some and decide you hate them, I’ve been thinking Anticosti Island off the shores of Quebec would be the perfect place to introduce a colony of wild humans. They’d be like hairless monkeys with swear-words (which I’m sure would be the first linguistic invention they’d independently invent). If you remarry, try to find another sexy blonde.
My final wish is that the conservatives, fascists, reactionaries, centrists, capitalists, and counter-revolutionaries of the world be collectively bound up in a carpet and buried at sea with me, with a Soviet show-trial for a funeral and the inheritance of all their property by international waters.
Lake is an unemployable mentally-ill wannabe feral child with no greater aspiration than to migrate from sleep-spell to sleep-spell dreaming nightmares of divine terror. Credentials: useless. Accomplishments: shameful. Draws. Writes. Lake’s greatest satisfaction was achieving transgenderism, something prized over a thousand dashed hopes for wealth, fame, and power; cultivated as the zenith of contemporary trans-humanism for the annihilation of all existing systems. Lake is also blonde.