by Roman McClay
Deodorant said, implicitly, who I am is bad, who I am you will not like; I shall cover my head with carapace, I shall mask my soul in whispers from things that do not exist. I shall pretend neither of us are animals at all. Let us pray.
Civilians wouldn’t understand that what made them -as civilians- recoil is what made Zendiks lean in; what they thought déclassé Zendik reveled in and thought grand, he thought.
Years later, decades later, this was one of two things Lyndon had taken from Zendik Farm. One -the first- was radical honesty, to say what was truly in one’s head, not the polite bullshit lies that one somehow believes one actually thinks and secondly, to be -to embody- what you profess to think, and not merely speak it. Life artistry was the name of it, and it would become the thing that drew a line between him and everyone he met. He would be surprised by how few ex-Zendiks lived anything close to their avowed philosophy. Wulf had let anyone join that goddamn group, and just how shallow 99% of them were was evidenced by who they had become in the years after they left; by the time he went to prison as consequence for his life-artistry. He would read other books about Zendik and marvel at how shallow almost everyone -who had a take on that place- in fact was.
That the point of life was to live one’s life as if the how mattered more than the results; was something that nobody quite got about him . Life-artistry was the way a man lived if he took it seriously when some adult told him -as a child- that it was not whether one won or lost, but how they played the game. Nobody -of course- meant that when they said it, but the life artists had heard the music of that injunction none-the-less and began to sway to it if not outright dance and sing out loud with the muse and the tune. The outlaw plays a game he cannot win, to the utmost . He need only hear this is possible -just the once- and he never forgets it at all.
He -even at 45- was just trying to convince people of the basics, life 101; the fundamentals to those so long civilized they have lost the scent; those who cannot understand a real man. But, he felt, he had to try one more time before he just closed their eyes forever. He owed them the chance to open their goddamn eyes even once to see God’s creation in all its macabre splendor.
To speak it -the logos- is to bring it to life though , he thought, like many myths assert. This is why words -especially the names of apex villains- are carefully guarded and the hero is warned to utter some things only with great care. Maybe this was why modern man was so loath to speak the truth; maybe they wisely knew the doom just on the other side of the long names of such close enemies. If the truth was dangerous, which it was, was it not an enemy to each man -and mankind- and thus ought its name not be spoken but with great care? He smiled at the irony of him defending liars merely because they saw a hidden truth.
That day months ago -millennia in Zendik time- the sun was Floridian and the air was wet from the ocean off its coast and the car he drove was not his. They had many cars, his he gave up within a month of his arrival in June of 1998. He had signed it over and they sold it, and he had felt proud to help out. That car was worth $55-70k by 2020; a classic. But this car he had driven to the meeting was useful; lacking balls, but pragmatic. Back then, he didn’t mind the loss of the one thing for the gain of manifold things; they shared everything like a tribe. And he had in fact gained just such a thing: a tribe.
He liked that, and even with the loss of such an asset -his own car- he never felt bitter or ripped off by those grifters and madmen and cult leaders and their apparatchiks. Well, never is not quite the right word for how he felt; the arrow of time travels far. But, he thought, it was rare that he ruminated on the names of those who had fleeced him so . If he ever lamented their theft from him, it was mere meteor of the war. It was just one small flame in the first view of the giant black vault above. His war would not be with them.
He felt -now- as if he had been kidnapped by an ancient tribe of injuns that showed him their ways so that he may one day share those ideas with his own people and they would flourish in the forest and away from mankind. Arol was mostly insincere, and Fawn was likely almost a sociopath too, and so while what they said to the clan was true, they merely said it, aped it, mimicked it. Most days they couldn’t bring themselves to mean it, they didn’t embody it; and some days they left their shadow inside and somedays they left their bodies under the bed.
And that would be the difference when Lyndon one day started his own tribe , he thought, and he thought it like all idealists think things: about half way through.
Cookie -the cliché sobrique t given to Chris the cook- had converted the back porch into a mess hall with one-pound propane bottles hooked up to camp stoves in tandem. Pots of rice and oats and amalgams of sauces boiled and simmered and rested as he spun plates on a stick it seemed. He was a real chef, the genuine article, like most Zendiks he had an actual talent, a thing he did so well he could have been well compensated in the civilian world if he so chose. And he had a darkness in him too, like all men, and he broke taboos that Lyndon never would have imagined, and Lyndon would break the taboos men like that -beta males like Cookie- would never conceive of either.
This was the way the of the world: each type of man broke the rules that most abraded him. Betas raped in the dark, Alphas killed in the noon-of-day. And the world spun like the spider’s web, above the golden math of a watery God and under the noble-rot of the Dionysian clusters that belong to the grand vigneron: the Devil, the bringer of morning stars and their light.
That morning -the morning he had awoken early in the barn loft- played no music, and the crew was quiet. But the night before, We the Poet had played on shitty speakers and inside the rough boards of the barn and his ears -his soul- had locked onto Mazz -the band’s violinist- and her strings and lumber combined. He could even -almost- then see some future where she’d go on to play music on morning & late night TV and yet still be a boilerplate black nationalist and identity politics dork despite her genuine talent. God, he thought, she had real talent, and he would be proud of her, despite her total lack of depth. There is more to a woman than brains , he’d one day think. They aren’t like men, they can be other things than smart. And she could play that fiddle, man. Her grand music, her great poetry made him forget all about her horrid prose .
But here and now in the morning in North Carolina, he thought that next month, the month of May, Arol would arrive. As he sat on the floor, the patina of the old 19th century home seemed to vibrate and breathe, as he ate his yogurt and drank hot black tea; the surface of the home seemed to lift off like heat, gas, reverie. They were normally off all caffeine, and all sugar and alcohol too. But during missions like this one -to get North Carolina operational for the rest of the farm, for the women and children to arrive- black tea was freely made in 10-gallon batches and ambrosia honey was the thing that met and civilized the tannins in all but the top layer of the mix in the mason jar he drank from in the early AM. He sat Indian-legged and breathed through his nose.
Arol would show up and begin bossing everyone around; telling people like Jyre not to throw organic material into the well. He was so ignorant he thought she meant organic the way a food producer meant it when they brag about that status on their bug infested crop. She meant it in the way chemists mean it: anything that breaks down over time . Jyre was a fool, a coxcomb man with a 150 IQ. But, Lyndon hated the man and made no attempt to conceal it then or now or later. He had always gone on instinct when most right and most wrong. It was only when he used his modern mind, his pusillanimous reason, that he was always dead fucking wrong.
Arol was bossy for good reason: her minions often were dumb. And she was trying to squeeze every bit of blood from them as possible; she didn’t write N&N on their clothes but night & fog was the way she thought. She herded people like beasts; she had no more malice than the jailer, no more respect than the shepherd, no more thought for the morrow than the ants in the grass.
By 0800hrs they were bailing hay -mostly alfalfa- so they could feed the 12 horses in their care. Fawn ha
d sent them with Colt, the boy just 14 then and raised from a babe on the farm. He was a good horsemen and would have fit right in inside Mongolian tribes of the 5th century of the era vulgari . He had Fawn on the phone each night -they had cells phones and internet before plumbing at the new property- and she had given him instructions that he followed well for a boy his age.
Colt had been working each day since he was knee-high, and thus his body was smart not just his mind; which meant he was 99% smart-as-fuck. Lyndon thought of his own weak and malingering nephew later in life and thought it was an outrage he was raised in the modern way; with no responsibilities and no masculinity and no expectation to work. He was all head like a watch too, he thought. He would grow to be a part of their common problem, both victim and perpetrator both.
Lyndon’s brother had lamented the boy’s fecklessness as if it was some ineffable act of God; as if he was himself not the boy’s father and thus could encourage him, make him, demand of him to be his best. But the modern family allows the kids to be in charge and so the boy sat in his room with a headache -like a Victorian woman avoiding her marital duties- and reading -not the books Lyndon had given him, not the Western canon, but- trash fit for a boy half his age. And due to dmPFC damage from his safe and careful youth, the young boy barely comprehended what he read. Again, the parents had no idea why.
Nobody had any idea why anything happened, Lyndon thought with pique, and when he tried to explain they just looked at him like he made shit up. That’s the thing with being more than merely clever, you actually can be too smart for anyone to even listen to you. He didn’t listen to men with IQs two or three SDfM -above him- either; for they sounded like they spoke in riddles and corrupted languages; but he at least knew it was he that was the problem -in this situation- and not them . But common men were too obtuse to even know how much smarter Lyndon was than they. And so mysteries he had solved remained mysteries to them long after he had explained .
The goat yogurt and ambrosia honey they had gleaned -from neighbors with an apiary- rested in his belly as he walked the rows behind the bailer grabbing 50-pound dry-bails by the wire. He chucked them in the trailer that followed and then on the flatbed next as the sunstar made the trees seem white; the grass alive but suffering; it made the men squint under shadows of brow formed from at least four continents and their respective DNA. Vong, the Laotian with black hair that nearly touched the ground and black eyes that looked at you like a child’s, organized the bails once on the vehicles and he worked efficiently and strong and without cease. He was 130 pounds at 5 foot 5 but it was all muscle and sinew, a strong and cut physique, free of ballast, like all Zendik men who stayed longer than 44 days.
The fat were told not to remove their shirts , he had cause to think as the sun rose; disrobing was a privilege for all those in warrior shape. The recent arrivals, the fat kids, got pissed and bitched but gave up as they were told to get svelte or remain swaddled and the tribe then moved onto the next topic at hand. Fat people even argue languidly, he thought with a snort. It was a warrior culture with strange ideas that Lyndon would later learn were Spartan -from Lycurgus- and it was the best time of his life.
Of course, each epoch would be the best time of his life in some ways, he would admit. He loved life, for reasons most men would never get. He liked the austerity, the pain, the opportunity for violence the most. And he inflicted the most of all three on himself. He was fair this way. He suffered under his own philosophy first and tested it out for the right amount of malice and justice before he fed it to men with less sensitive palates. He’d forget and often test it out on girls first; he always forgot the way he treated girls; which was why when they fucked with him it was always a shock and a surprise.
He thrived on structure like Zendik, and he built his body -already thin, muscled and taut when he arrived- and his mind -already facile from reading nonstop since he was eight or nine- each day using work and a philosophy that worked on his right-hemisphere of the brain. He worked well with others, because they were serious and did not fuck around. They ran that bailer until it would shear the pin and he’d have to go make a new one from round stock in their tool shed with a cutting wheel and lineman pliers and glasses over his eyes as the slag hit all around him and the wind picked up from over the Blue Ridge and blew the grasses down like observant Muslims five times a day. The dogs ran around like carneys and he often would kick them if they got too close and they’d yelp and run away. There was penitence all around if one knew where to look.
He stripped down to his wife-beater by 1000hrs and he put on a yellow and brown cowboy hat, foxed and singed like leaves of old books of the Herculaneum , to keep off the sun as it rose over it all with permanent if elliptical judgement. His hair was longish now, it had been shorn to the headbone when he had arrived in Florida nearly one year ago. He had been a skinhead, but a pacifist & liberal one, and this was one of the first things that had to go. As his hair grew back his animal instincts matched and the liberalism evaporated away. His natural martial nature, his lethality began to re-emerge; and they -the elders- told him he was no kind of nice-guy and he ought to drop that weak-shit right fucking now. Zoe and Bugz gave him a talking to.
He was offended and shocked and knew it was true, but he didn’t know how to process information at the rate they dished it out; he was still very precious about who he thought he was. Most modern people think they truly are the façade that they project into the world. They believe it, it’s no act, like a thespian who loses himself in a role. People, 99% of those you meet are method actors, they are entranced by their own bullshit. They believe their own lies as much as they are willing to wink at yours .
But Zendiks saw through this shit and set each man straight and by the time he was doing mechanical work -including tearing down whole motors and replacing main bearings and re-honing cylinder walls- and also in order to keep things moving swiftly, smoothly, he had accepted that they were right: ok, fine , he said, he was no pacifist at all. He was angry, violent in his blood, and he had begun to think like Mary Renault’s bull-dancer from Crete : blood is blood, and you cannot wash out what is written in it.
People rarely understood the purpose of literature, thinking it was merely a story one could read to pass the time or have some fun with your clothes on and so on and so forth.
But prose is power , Lyndon often thought, as he often paused the act of reading to absorb what was just written for him -the incantation- by some author long dead yet their spells still most alive. Literature is mythology and that is religion and that is the trail God leaves in the forest to follow, track, even stalk , he thought. One day he’d track the blood trails of bears and men alike.
He thought of Renault and how magnificent her prose was and how it surpassed the banal words of modern men. Lyndon had not liked it when the den leader to his cub scout troop had been a woman and he had thus quit in protest; at age six he was already what he would always be: revanchist, chauvinist, proud. He did not like his mother, seeing her as craven and stupid -all true- and a hindrance to him becoming a man as early as age three or four. We forget how much more children know than those that they grow up to be. Instinct trumps acquired knowledge when one’s society is as corrupt as ours, he thought. The Spartan man grew wise in addition to his innate instincts, modern men grew fat and weak and liberal and their best instincts fell away like uterine fur. Ancient men grew better, into men. Modern men grew into mulch, compost, manure.
And women ought to be goddesses, as they were born to be, yet they are turned into the worst things he could imagine: aggressive, bossy, promiscuous and yet still unable to take a punch. Anyone aggressive, bossy and fucking around must know how to fight to survive; and modern women wanted only the bait not the hook.
They tried to be what men were instead of being proud of what they -as females- already were. Imagine a beast like the bear attempting to fly like the hawk , he thought. Why, he thought, must regal creatures like women abandon what they are geni
uses at just so they may be terrible at what men are perfectly designed for? The forest had no time for that shit; a bear flapping its arms would die and each beast would just move on with barely a laugh.
He had once -at age four- refused a gift from his nine-year-old brother as too effeminate , and this had incurred the wrath of his mother. But he was conscious of the differences between males and females from the womb and he never felt badly for his insistence that he was not a goddamn girl.
While women are not funny, they sure can write, and Flannery O’Connor and Mary Renault were better than Hemingway and Bukowski , he thought. He’d defend their writing over those overrated guys until someone gave up or cried. He was no friend of women; he thought both more and less of them, to be mere friends with such creatures. But a writer -male or female- who had command of language and the thing language reveals, was a hero to him that he would defend, until either he or the thing he battled cracked and fell into its own footprint. Either the hammer or the anvil would break, he thought, but his arm would never stop pounding. The world would crack or he’d have a heart-attack, but the fist would never unfurl. His eyes might go blind from the slag or a dagger, but he’d never once fucking blink.
They worked sun up to sun down like a real farm, and once -many years later- when Lyndon’s brother, Travis, had tried to school Lyndon on how hard farm work was , Lyndon had been incredulous, shocked, aghast, and assumed his older brother must be joking, and he thus stood there waiting for him to admit so.
But the older man was serious, as he had done merely one day’s hard work in his life, and so when he watched the Mexicans who worked on his father-in-law’s ranch, a ranch given to him by his father -inherited wealth the most corrosive of all chemicals- Travis had thought his little brother couldn’t work that hard , he hinted with his throw-away lines. Travis avoided work, he surmised, like the British avoid the dentist or the shallow avoid the sea.
