Sanction

by Roman McClay

  He showed her movies from Terrence Malick and Music from Nick Cave and Mogwai and Lisa Gerrard. He explained his moods and his feelings in ways most men -shit, most women- could not; and he worked so hard -at jobs he could have avoided- to provide for her; to give his all for them both.

  He told her she was beautiful and smart and could do anything, and she felt a confidence she never had had. He told her his philosophy on life, and that it seemed reckless only because he was going for it , and what exactly that was, well, that was anyone’s guess. But he was driven, never lazy or directionless or feminine in doubt. He was old school and yet educated, he seemed to own and have read 1,000 books, she thought. He used words she had to look up and even when he insulted her with them, she found herself admiring the use -or double entendre- or the etymology that -upon reflection- made the pejorative even worse. He once said he’d been insulted by Christopher Hitchens and felt more grateful for that than a mere compliment by some lesser man.

  He carried a gun at all times, which she did not like, but whatever, she thought, he was sweet to her and sexy as fuck and she felt safe for the first time in her life . They went to fancy restaurants and rode his None More Black chopper, as loud as Satan’s own tiger, and he never got too drunk to drive. He was not cheap or foolish, he had taste and refinement in ways she began to see. He was a contradiction in ways so far apart that they went back to back. He was working-class and proud, he sounded like a Marxist half the time, and yet drank $300 bottles of wine from Château Margaux .

  He read French poetry from some guy named Rimbaud or Baudelaire , and yet called people names you can’t even say in French to avoid the crassness. He refused to wear clothes she would pick out, and he never wore deodorant nor ever would shave close to the face. The most he would do is run a beard trimmer over his stubble and call that good enough .

  He loved work, and wealth, but hated money and threw coins away in the trash. He jumped from airplanes and ran class V rapids but would refuse to leave the house for days, weeks, as if the breeze was too risky a thing. After the oil field he had been in their house for a week and barely said three words. He was stewing, thinking, plotting at least two planetary invasions and, she assumed, likely the takeover of both the setting and rising sun .

  She had grown scared of his capacity for anything, what was once creative and interesting was now just plain dangerous and plus, he was too mean to love anymore. Not that she ever stopped loving him, not even three years after their divorce, as she dated him and his new girlfriend for a while. But, she was arrogant too, and had insisted the other girl be called girlfriend-number-two and for that he had choked her in bed as girlfriend-number-two squealed at the felonious show.

  That was it for her; and they never spoke again. She missed him, and loved him, but she had enough self-respect to never allow a man more than one shot at her that way. She had been mouthy and loud and would not shut up, but a man in the modern world just has to take that shit, she thought, and he never did; never would . He was obstinate on that point among many.

  “Nobody ever yells at me,” he had said, and this was obviously a final straw of some kind for him. He had left no marks, done no damage, but the intent was clear: I could kill you if I wanted to, and I am close to wanting to, bitch. She had gotten the message, and since she wasn’t about to change -she was not prepared to be submissive or even polite- then they were to never be together again.

  It was the way of the modern world, he had thought: Women back talking men but refusing to accept the consequences. They want equal rights, right up until you treat them exactly how you’d treat a man. Then they wanted to call time out, and play the female card, after they had maligned your whole genome, insulted your lineage, and emasculated you surgically and without anesthesia at all. Modern women broke men so it redounded to the 7 th generation. They methylated the sex chromosomes of men with their malice and arrogance and chemical hatred and thermal heat.

  This memory was enough to make him see the consequence of wind as it blew in more than gusts now, and he looked at his watch reflexively, he had no need of it, as his PGC kept atomic time in his head, but the chronometer’s size and weight and blackness -it’s lack of yield- gave the feeling of armature. It was 1519hrs and these late afternoon wind-gusts were massive and mean and two-fisted. Everything need either to be heavy or put away, as the wind carried all else far off and broke it against trees & rocks along the way.

  With the doors closed he heard nothing, the container was air tight. But he saw the trees jangle and sway and he shook his head sympathetically, even as he knew they grew stronger from this force majeure against them from the south. He looked down at the book, and marveled at the time, all those centuries ago, all those men come and gone, and yet some form of culture remained. And the Asians, man, he thought, they were so conservative, they knew just how to maintain their ways . 130 million people, and no immigration, all technology-based solutions to demographic issues. Japan was so smart, he thought, and wished America was like that too.

  The wind came from the south, he could see New Mexico from the house; Taos itself was visible from his elevation. And that wind was blowing hard, the trope of it not lost on him one bit. The invasion from Mexico and central America was not exactly the overrun of an innocent nation. The US had, in fact, destabilized Guatemala and El Salvador. CIA backed coups and all manner of shit that did not make the news, black ops and dirty tricks and the like. He knew it from books by Chomsky and from rides in C4s and Blackhawks; he knew more of America’s crimes than most goddamn liberals who bitched and moaned about the US of A.

  But, just because a guy fucks the wrong girl doesn’t mean she gets to burn down his house without a fight. Blax, did not think America was innocent -like most hyper-nationalists did- he had read Zinn and declassified NSA reports, and knew the true history. He just didn’t care, he was loyal to her -his country- no matter what, it was his home and better than the shitholes from which these animals came from . And they were animals; they were exactly as Che Guevara had described when he lamented the stupidity of the mestizo and niggers and the lumpen proletariat of the south , he thought. Che was honest -even if murderous and communist- and he knew that most the people he advocated for were unworthy.

  Blax felt the same way, most Americans were ignorant bourgeois shitheads or low-brow rednecks, but they were his shitheads, his low-brow rednecks, his people; and if foreigners were going to invade, then he was going to fight back. Isaiah had larger missions for them, but one day, he hoped to handle some of this shit coming from down there.

  He stared now out over the trees and felt so grateful for an elevated position; and there was only one road in and out; and it was two miles long and in the shape of an asp. Nobody could reach him without plenty of warning. He had cameras and recon-drones all over the place. Not that anyone was coming for him, he was a ghost in their world. Out of sight out of mind; and that is the thing with city folk: they have no tolerance for rural life. If he stayed away they would not come get him. It was a deal they had made without words.

  Goddamn his hands hurt , he thought as he squeezed them into fists of angry rock. The hands had been the first thing to be ruined by his labors, that much he had felt even at the time. The incessant gripping of heavy things until the grip just fails finally, was warning that he would not ever get his grip back. White collar faggots don’t get it, when the body fails, a working man is fucked , he thought. He can’t do anything else but use his body to hold back the tide that keeps the rest of you people dry and when he’s weak, he is no longer useful at all; a doctor needs only his prefrontal cortex, a worker needs everything else . Nobody wants to hear his thoughts or ideas, he cannot parley his skills into another field , what will he do: become a writer? Blax laughed at that shit out loud.

  The arts are for connected people with college degrees and who already held jobs for magazines or TV. The art world is incestuous and cloistered and hermetically sealed. No man of letters is coming from t
he working-class, unbidden, unwashed and saying the kind of shit he would likely say.

  No, it was violence and the threat of violence from him, that is what he could still do in short bursts , he thought. He couldn’t lift hod or bags of concrete or jack hammers or work kellys all day, but he could put a man down at 300 yards and punch one out in a second or two. He could still actuate his power, but in short bursts and it was his mind that needed a rest after the frisson of anti-social behavior, not his body.

  He used hatred as fuel, but it heated up his neurons like twin turbos and it took alcohol and benzos to settle him down. His PGC helped, but he still felt like jelly after a job out there on the edge.

  He looked at the carvings of the Kakushibori , the hidden carving, often tattoos in the armpits or groin, or words hidden in images, like stippling on the ends of petals and daggers and dragon tongues. And he then -as the boughs moved wildly outside- thought of his own private stashes of dolorous ink with some churlish pride .

  II. 2036 e.v.

  He handed him a book, the Suikoden of Shi Nai’an , and watched to see if he knew it; scanning the brain, scanning the images of the fMRI and the PGC’s rechauffe of what the book meant to him. It was unknown, the Chinese hid and hid within; Matryoshka dolls, nesting within men; within and again.

  Those without courage make up for it with cunning , is the saying and the Chinese are cunning. The Japanese have more bravery Blax thought, a more noble culture and race. Japan has the seppuku , the Ronin , the Bushido; the Tokugawa regimes that isolated them from the emerging world of modern man . They had no designs on the world, but only on themselves. This is the mark of Greatness , he thought, to want only total control over one’s self; not others .

  This was the irony of their own plans -he and the Jacks- all their machinations, the ornate brocade of their politics and crime and razing of arable land. They, he, just wanted control over himself, but in a globalized milieu that meant one had to incessantly be pushing back one’s own borders. Of course, the Roman and Macedonian empires thought the same goddamn thing, for no matter how much frontier you conquered, he thought, you always have a new border dispute, and a new frontier.

  Maybe they ought to just retreat and disappear , he thought. But, he had a real desire to help people, to give them a shot too; to provide opportunity for others; his was not a solipsistic goal; despite the genome of his men being his own. Because they were not his, they were their own , he insisted. If any one genome in the world was incapable of being owned and controlled it was that one; his, theirs. They were romantic and extremists and open -and they fell in love easily and deeply and were given to folly- but, they would not be controlled, slaves, dupes, not for long , he thought. This was the single best prophylactic to corruption, that each of these men were radical individualists, they believed in their own hearts and minds and balls. Blax stared at his host as he thought these remote, far off, things and let the data from his coder pour in.

  The fMRI data on Jack Ma was inconclusive, it read out like a fortune, with vague bullshit that could be read either way. Pleased, humble, honored, surprised , the readings said; and on and on. What did he think of the book itself, not the gesture? Blax asked as he invigilated his own interpretation of the data, as he noticed heat in the nucleus accumbens , and the blood oxygen level dependent signaling -BOLD- and increasing as Ma looked at the book and opened it up.

  Jack Ma asked if it was, ok to read as they sat, not wanting to be rude, and Blax said, by all means.

  The accumbens , Blax repeated to himself, then he noticed small metabolic presence of k-opioid agonists around the caudal region, with no neural history; they were injections , Blax surmised and often used to inhibit disgust . It was as if time itself laid down and died right then. Jack Ma did not move, the pages held in situ , the meal’s heat collapsed on itself, and Blax’s mind froze on one conceit: Jack Ma has an AI implant that is regulating his allostatic system using microinjections to inhibit disgust, because the book disgusts him . The perusal of it -as if the interest is high- is a legerdemain, as is the over-activation of the nucleus accumbens as a secondary response , Blax thought .

  Blax -remembering the scene in the Rotam et Sacoma , in the walled patio of the Jack’s agoge , where he told his men to always assume their rivals know at least as much as they do, and thus only fight when necessary- immediately felt his own advice ought to be heeded at once. He tapped into the Landsat9 satellite link to gain a real-time image of the 25 square miles around him.

  He shut down his obvious augmentations and took a drink of the wine -a Burgundy , Jadot, Mesuginuy , 2009 or 2010 , he guessed- and let that rumination rattle around in his brain. He watched Ma, who gave no indication of anything now, other than appreciation of the book. He then began speaking, “this book, it is a famous one in my country, as you no doubt know. But it is more than that to me; for my mother read this to me in Chongming , you know this?”

  “Shanghai ,” Blax said.

  “Yes, and in 1970, when I was still a young boy, an aunt came to us and she too read from this book to me, but when she left, she took the book, and my mother never made mention of it again. I forgot all about it, but from time to time I thought of the book, and my mother and her sister and what might have happened; but it is not until I hold this book in my hand, that I feel what I felt then, that day, the day when I knew I would not see the book again, a boy of six, well,” he paused and closed the book, as if it was the pages themselves that were speaking out loud and not him; he closed it to stop the noise of his own marioneted voice.

  An apparatchik of Ma’s came and retrieved the book and scuttled away into the dark periphery of their dinner table; the waiters and staff existed like columns just in the penumbra of the stage.

  Blax thought that was either very true or the best possible lie, as it would account for the disgust and the suppression of disgust not as a phenomenon to hide the man, but to not ruin the meal; it could be a normal allostatic correction by a 2nd or 3rd generation PGC, and not the sophisticated version necessary for deception of Blax’s 5th generation reader.

  This was the most sophisticated use of his own system yet; to either be totally suspicious or not at all; Jack Ma had just gone all-in. It was brilliant, as any other move would have been obvious. This was either his only move or totally true. And Blax’s bias against the Chinese and in favor of the Japanese made him suspect it was all a nearly perfectly executed ruse.

  III. 2020 e.v.

  “Yes, sure, it’s true in some narrow factual sense. But, what I’m talking about is something larger,” Isaiah said and handed MO a cup of espresso.

  “Larger than the truth?” MO said, nodding in appreciation of the beverage.

  “No, smart ass, larger than your narrow-ass facts. Look, have you seen Donald Hoffman’s work? The work on reality being too complex for us to perceive so our eyes and visual cortex make a simulation, an avatar-based system in which we compress the complexity into avatar of simplicity in order to function?”

  “Oh, is this the email folder, the blue folder thing?” MO asked.

  “Yes, the folder is yellow on those guys’ computers, but yes, the idea that the very complex reality of email is too complex to comprehend so instead we use a user-friendly, i.e, simplified iconography or avatar to represent email. It is connected to reality, but it is not reality itself,” Isaiah said .

  “Right,” MO said.

  “Ok, so do you concede that in a cosmos of trillions and trillions of facts, things like the chemical composition of water to the number of corvids resting on telephone lines in the Baltics at 1300hrs on Christmas day 1999, are all facts, and there are endless facts like these. And we cannot possibly know them all, the genome of each person you meet, the number of cells engaging in apoptosis in that moment, their neural activity in the dorso-lateral pfc in any given second, the exact color their shoelaces have faded to over 2.34 years or the first song they ever heard, even if it was a song they heard at age 1 year and cann
ot retrieve that info, all of these are facts about a person and you know none of them,” Isaiah said.

  “Theoretically that knowledge is knowable, I can process,” MO began, but Isaiah interrupted.

  “Yes, theoretically, in an ergodic system, where we have infinite resources and time and iterations of this fucking game called life , yes. But MO, buddy, old pal, we live in a universe where we cannot -and let’s remember we are speaking of humans here- we, or they, cannot even comprehend email, so we have to build a little yellow folder on a screen that we click so their chimpanzee asses can talk to people via digital communications. They -and even we- are borderline retarded when you compare what is knowable and what is actually known,” Isaiah said.

  “Agreed,” MO said, adding, “humans are limited.”

  “We are too; just less limited. And even if that changes 1,000-fold in the next five years, we still will not know most of what is to be known, because the past is infinitely filled with facts we cannot know. And even if we locate the facts, we will miss the cause; we will invent the causes like we do now for wars and financial meltdowns. It’s a clusterfuck of noise and a few moments of signal. So, I beg you, please just listen to this,” Isaiah said in a slightly imploring tone. MO was not used to that.

  “Ok,” MO agreed and drank the coffee to be polite; even though he was not thirsty. The caffeine would be metabolized away before it absorbed into his CNS anyway.