Sanction

by Roman McClay

  Traffic lights were like weather she had once assumed, like laws that everyone must follow. Of course, when she had admitted to this one night after one of their bombing runs -that’s what he liked to call them- admitted that she thought such a thing both practically -and less importantly- legally impossible because traffic lights were independent from the whims of mankind, he had laughed uproariously as the three of them had sat up in bed. And he had even had fallen into Rachel’s lap as he laughed, rising from there with tears in his eyes he was so overcome with this joy of true mirth. Harrissa was offended, jealous and now giggling too, she was laughing at his laughing as addictive as his moods often were. But the pique remained like the pits and seeds everyone else throws away.

  She scowled and snickered at once, each feeling in her was genuine and each feeling too was putting on airs for them all. People think a person is a liar or honest, when everyone -even the People- are both all at once and all of the time.

  He himself, she thought, was like the weather: if black of mood, foul of air, the little people -her and Rachel included- better move inside and get under the bed; and conversely, when he was ebullient you could feel like you too were carried away in the sky like reindeer pulling -effortlessly- Santa’s red sled .

  Anyway, he had explained the trick and the tool and the legal minutia that allowed such things in the city. Harrissa was amazed and yet now pretended to take it in stride; his guffawing had made her suspicious that he thought she was dumb. And she was not dumb; and deep down he must know this , she thought. Because he knew, she thought, that the smarter a person was the more likely -and the better at it they would be- the more likely that this person would lie . And she was a liar’s liar; she could lie on her way to a lie; she could lie standing up or lying down, she could lie straight into anyone’s round little face. She lied about lying, and about all manner of things unimportant. She lied for no reason or for a combination of 10 complex rationales. She loved to lie , she thought.

  It was a talent and she honed it. Lies were for females and small men what strength and violence were to large men: natural and thus lauded as perfectly acceptable to use by those who employed them and condemned by those that suffered from each type of coercion.

  And Boyd knew this and kept her around anyway; she often told him lies that made him happy; and for all Rachel’s grumpiness, Harrissa’s lying made her -Rachel- slightly happy as well. Rachel was nervous about her looks and her fragility as this Lyme disease wrecked her insides like Boyd’s five-o’clock shadow marred her sensitive skin, and the way the razor too burned her privates and armpits. Harrissa’s lies were like salve, balming agents that kept Rachel looking comparatively honest and thus good. Boyd loved honesty the most, it was the sine qua non of -he would say- the scientific method , shit, a real scientist tried to prove his theories wrong not right.

  Rachel thought -as she sat upstairs and looked in the mirror of her vanity- of Boyd’s birthday card and then she smirked at her own face, its cherubness, as she thought of his maxims and declarations of love like that. She wanted an aquiline face, razor sharp; Harrissa had such a face, angular, she thought, like Soviet propaganda posters, like it cut the chisel and made the hammer think twice.

  Rachel sat upstairs and thought these thoughts; and she brushed her bangs forward and straight like a closed curtain, and then parted them with her bone-comb just a bit as if someone might walk between the two halves now, the two curtains, and walk out onto her forehead, the stage.

  She had been working on a sketch of Boyd, the composition was a scene she had remembered with him and his Lawyer, Tom Henry, and the look on his face was so far-reaching she had thought; it looked like he could look on for days. It looked - and she knew this couldn’t be right- but it looked like he could see past the photographic edge, past the people, past the walls of the building, past the city itself, maybe the state, and see something else, something behind the curtain of God’s own black bangs .

  She held the comb there with the asymmetrical part holding one bang-curtain up and smiled with the cutest part of her cutest parts and remembered Boyd telling her that very thing on their first date. She had fallen in love with him immediately and that was not a woman’s way. But he was so raw and honest and alive and sparking like a battery on fire and fine with it that way; he was under control, she had thought, even when engulfed in flames .

  A man with this much power who has it under control, she mused, now that was something to see. And she had immediately wanted to feel it inside of her too; a look was one thing, but to hold that flame inside one’s self, she thought, was as close to the cherubim-guarded entrance to Eden we’d all get while still jangling around all alive.

  She was not surprised when he point blankly told her about Harrissa and the deal and that she -Rachel- would need to consent to such a lifestyle if they were to proceed. He was honest and forward, but she would have preferred it if he had let that fact on later and with some hesitation, but he was a man who thought women wanted the truth and the facts right upfront like a man did. His one blind spot, one of several really, she supposed, although she didn’t know what any of the others would be, but, his one blind spot was that he thought women were just men with tiny bodies and had need for a hug 3.14 more times -than a man- each day. She giggled as she constructed that little dig at him, harmless but still more or less true.

  She thought of the drawing of him that she was doing, it sat covered in Prisma-Color pencils and shavings at her desk, opposite of Harrissa’s, and she formed her little hand -the hand that was away from holding the comb at her bangs- into the shape of what it might look like if she held the charcoal now and in this state. She liked the idea that she could thus bring him into the world, like he brought her into it too. She liked the idea that she drew -when alone- not just his face, but his head, as if his brains were inside the charcoal that she held as she sketched it all in reverie and silence as he was off at work or plotting some political coup that would rise or fall on some little trick or show of force or by the consent of the gods or the governed .

  He knew how to fuck her, how she liked it, but he often didn’t. He held back - she thought- because he didn’t want to hurt her; her fragility was on record and she did bitch about it, so he wasn’t wrong to think that way , she supposed. But, her yoni was the one part of her that was strong and tough, and mighty, she thought. It could take his force of body and bone and ancient anger. He was like Hagal, she thought, as she had read the Sagas , or had them read to her , she corrected, as a child . It -in these ancient northern tribes’ lore- battered the man, the soil, and the plants in between; but it melted and watered its own seed.

  The rune was one she had secretly wanted tattooed on her; to represent both his harshness and his life-force. Harrissa , Rachel thought, did not understand just what she had had, neither before Rachel nor after. Rachel, she didn’t mind thinking of herself this way, was here on this earth to explain just how -not, complex, or not just how complex he was- but ultimately how necessary he was.

  Hail gave the cold sky something to give the warm summer ground. Hail was a brokered agreement for water from zero to infinity and Boyd Sou was that coldest of grains that watered itself and brought forth new plants for the tribes to harvest and marvel at long after the vernal grains had been reaped and eaten or stored. Boyd was like that; he was the gods’ gift for a wealthy -and thus vulnerable- people already cloyed on a surfeit of goods, who, the seasons being unknown to them, she thought, did not know winter was afoot .

  She imagined that she held him tighter on their midnight rides, not out of fear but love. She had no need for revenge; but she could see the look on Harrissa’s face, and it might as well have been tattooed with her Cyrillic plans; but Boyd could not read things up close like that , Rachel assumed. He was 63, and his girls were now 41 and 45 respectively, and she had heard that the eyes -no matter how good far-away- began to lose the ability to see up close as a man aged; that these two types of vision were in fac
t unrelated .

  In fact, he had just bought some reading glasses , she thought and turned from the vanity mirror and saw them on the side table to their bed. She smirked and nodded at her own metaphor, or was it an analogy? she asked. Either way, she was right . That girl was dangerous, and while she loved Harrissa in some way, loved her softness and overt-femininity, and how she stuck up for her, Rachel thought, sometimes in the most unlikely of times, despite all this, she knew that Harrissa was a bullet already fired from a gun: there was no way to recall it, take it back or predict just exactly where -beyond even its target- it might land.

  2. Chimpanzee Politics

  How is it ye ravens; whence are ye come now

  With beaks all gory. At break of morning?

  Most happy are they when there is hope for battle with men and their spirits

  The Raven [Norse Myth]

  In order to inhabit cities, we put away action. I come along with a story and enable you -for an hour- to murder, so the next day you don’t have to do it in reality

  Interviews 1994 [Bradbury, Ray]

  We have art so we do not die of reality

  Notebooks [Nietzsche, Fredrich]

  I. 2030 e.v.

  Oðinn spoke only in poetry and drank only wine, the dream told him this, and it was true.

  The Huginn of current sang-mele thought and the Muninn of sacatra-noir memory flew the grey birds into the white wind that was stopped by the slate-sails of God’s first landed ship. Oðinn stood on the shore of rock-beach; winter of calendar arrived, but the air blew warm into his ferrous beard and copper locks. His core was leathered and armored, his legs booted and held knives under straps.

  He held the London glass in his left paw at his side and listened for reports from his corvids. The ship grew larger -but not closer- 33 swells away. He thought of the poems of his father and recounted them in his discursive inner-monologue & dialogue so that the words may direct the birds that became hawks over water. The poem read:

  ​ Two Valravn flew from Hnikars’ shoulders;

  Huginn to the Hanged;

  and Muninn to the Slain.

  Oðinn then felt the black tipped tail and fetlocks of the winter wolves -beasts still smarting from being dropped by the ravens so long ago- as they brushed against his shins; they paced in figures of eight. They whined, and he poured from the bottle, a falls for them to lap at, and he poured for as long as they drank and they drank for as long as he poured.

  The dream went on, but as the Eiswein hit his lupine tongue in the fugue state -as it unfolded in time and space- Blax awoke and consummation of the drink was occluded from his eyes. The wine never liquified .

  He awoke at 0330 and the southern stars were so bright they seemed like manifold facets to one stone catching the glint of a sun larger and farther away. Hamingja of the Jacks turned in his mind as he remembered something of the dream. It was unclear if the Jacks were aboard or abaft of that ship as it loomed and grew but never closed on the black beach. He only saw their faces rotate as beasts bloomed on the headbacks and the lips took in words and then it was the eyes that spoke to him from the dark.

  How often had monoliths been on that beach; had they been washed ashore or was the beach-talus the remnants, the shavings of some artist who cleared it away from the five slabs that stood in a crescent as the Norse god-king awaited the vessel to land?

  The 740” stones were smooth and marbled, red-veined and squeezed by black asps with no eyes and tongues that flicked in bursts of three as they burrowed and emerged from clean drilled holes 1 and 7/8th in diameter. The holes were sinking in depths that bent light and warped sound. He felt rock dust in his lungs.

  Now awake, upright, he looked from the bed into the hallway and to the slider at the end of the home. He lit a candle and carried it to the kitchen to make coffee and wash his face in the large concrete sink. Warm water unglued his eyelids and his heavy beard drank from the flow like the wolves and their slushy wine. His legs were sore, and his back was tight -the neck was being sawed at by inner-knives long dulled from this work- and he remembered that Oðinn father had only one eye, lacking the perception of depth; and thus of future.

  He took a hydrocodone and let the water -still in small pools in the mouth- dissolve it and like narcotic river-silt settle into the throat and gullet below. His knuckles vibrated and warmed and felt like grey coals under the skin. A burning developed in the palm just below the crux of index and middle finger, he held it up to see if the skin itself was red. In this dark it was hard to see and he opted to reach into the freezer and hold an ice cube like an Hagal rune in his hand; the nerve damage was getting worse, his feet had burned for months and now too the hand. He often did not brush hair or teeth for this too hurt the skin.

  He’d grown angry at generous touch by his women in the later days, even softness abraded as the body recalibrated pain. There is no social measurement for such malady -such sequela- under central sensitization . The dissolution of relationships -and thus man’s soul- as the man ruined at the dorsal horn eschews love because it hurts the skin to be touched even with love. He has no idea why he is so sensitive at all; and doctors know but do not care at all. They too have only one eye and see not the future -the obvious consequences of pain- at all. And men retreat to the forest and plot murders and more; and worse.

  The dream had hinted that the abandonment of hunting culture brought grains and wealth first, but a poverty of soul and the coldest grain of hail did follow. The unsparing troop of the peace-diminisher captured broad Bute from the godforsaken ring-users , he thought and tilted his head as if the words might slide like a topsail halyard that lay on the deck from one side of the ship and to his hand. What, he asked, were these words that sprung up like shoots from the grain that fell in hot summer?

  The candle burned and an orange and pectin-white diffusion of lumens lay on everything grey & paper and beast-bone & metal and he rolled his neck as his shoulders pulled down on it like a winch; like windlass. He saw black sand in his closed eyes; he heard wolves whine in the silence of this time of night .

  “Dada?” he then heard; his heart sped up as his body first froze.

  He felt terrible for waking his angel. He abandoned the coffee and then walked to the bedroom and saw her on an elbow; half raised. When he appeared her arms then stretched out for a hug and he crawled slowly to her, so as to not disturb the mattress with his weight. She smooched his face and neck and rubbed his head and back and asked if he was in pain and thus awake.

  He said it was only some and that he had awoke probably due to the star-lights, and he told her to look to her left out the slider to the night.

  She gasped at the lapidary storeroom in the vault of their uninterrupted view of the heavens; the trees of the forest all black but the night more blue -more than noir- as the stars managed to flood the void with such nuclear photons that it yielded like freshwater brackishly yields to the sea.

  “Papa, my gosh,” she said, and he laughed in joy and innocent pride that a girl such as his was so sweet. She added, “that is not normal is it?”

  She had asked all manner of questions about the stars and the void itself; and if each star was a sun; and each sun a life-giver; and if they also got angry on the noons of other planets; and did God visit those planets too; and if so did He bless each doe and fawn and task each buck with vigilance as well?

  He held her tighter now, as she rolled her back to him and he saw over her face as they both looked to the sky. He spoke in a low and deep voice that tickled her cheeks and ears and made her feel things in her stomach and lower -deeper- and it all sloshed like waves and sounded like the hummingbirds by the lilies when they got so close to their Malamute, Caius, that he narrowed his eyes and splayed out his feet and the black & white hairs stood up on his back.

  When this happened, as she worked in the garden, she would laugh and run her little finger on the dog’s widow’s peak and bite at his ears as he licked her face; but his eyes remained on the bi
rd as it buzzed and buzzed and hovered until it finally flew away at the speed of a pre-gunpowder weapon, a one pounder from a trebuchet .

  Now in the blue hued night, she rubbed her back into her provider, defender, mentor, father, like scratching an itch in the ear; and he spoke to her of pulsar stars and the Hand of God Nebula, the stellar corpse of PSR-Bravo 1509. Images of it populated her second-gen PGC from a DM he sent between them. And she breathed deeply as it turned and rotated in the space between her eyes and the expanse out there in the beyond of earth’s early morning sky.

  The nebula was dune and winter-wind blue and had a St. Elmo’s artery at the wrist just like she did , she thought, and the hand -the right one- was grasping for a red object of how many worlds? Was He to carry it to a new location; crushing it to make new from the clay; or pulling it down as it rose too high or maybe reaching down to it to retrieve it? There was no upside-down to the cosmos. It was white in the core and ribbed and each star was like a billion hydrogen bombs going off for one million years. God loved nukes , she thought with no malice and Blax smiled as she had left her DMs open and he could innocently spy on her every thought. She didn’t mind anyway; she like him in there sniffing around. She wanted him close, inside her mind and her lungs.

  She waited for him to continue speaking -but he didn’t- he just smelled her hair and neck and loved her, and she loved as much of him as she could imagine; he was like a god: too big to fit in the hand or the mouth or the mind even; the eyes had to take turns and divide him into at least three.

  She smiled as she thought of him as a triptych of a ship now, with his face on the main sail, and each hand printed in rust-red on the square riggings; heavy grey canvas on the black spars in the shape of his ribs. It dove into the Christmas waves and the sail would billow and blow in the wind, it would open and close the hands from open palms into fists; the gunwales were bearded and the bowsprit breathed like his nose. She imagined she was a toothy dolphin chasing the ship as its noble head looked up and away from her and she looked up at him with the same awe as he looked to the gods.