by Roman McClay
“Are you drinking?” she asked.
“I will if I am not forced to yield to your invigilation; speaking prevents drinking,” the inmate said as he held the glass of beer to his lips so closely that his words rippled the surface of the amber. He did this to make the point more apparent and she heard his cadence and rhythm and word choice as all-too-familiar and it clanged a door shut on her from behind. His voice had changed something inside her.
She was stuck in here with him now; stuck unable to hate him. She saw -immediately- the good now. And this made her sweat and feel queasy and she took one step back with her little feet and he refused to look her way .
“What do you know about war?” he finally asked as he had drank half the glass and felt sated.
“Which war?” she asked and stood still.
“Well, any war, but World War Two pops into my mind now. So, what do you know of it?” he asked and began imbibing again.
“I know who won and who lost,” she said curtly.
“Well, I guess that it is a good place to start. But, let me tell you a little known fact. And I have no idea what kind of woman you are, if you are one of those feminist types who think women have been treated like shit throughout history, that all of history is one long line of men abusing women such as is the zeitgeist of the modern age,” he said with some bite.
“I am not modern,” she said with pique and accuracy.
“No, I suspect not,” his tone softened immediately. He liked that answer. “Forgive my presumption. But, let me tell my little story and you can use it then, when some modern woman starts in with her bullshit,” he leaned on this word, her , to indicate that he now thought The Bust was on his side and that she’d likely want to school some modern woman some day on behalf of he, or her man, or men in general.
“So, it’s after the war, in liberated France, and the resistance, the Combat ,” he said with a slight French accent, that reminded her of Blax, “the so named resistance, began to clean up after the Nazis had hightailed it out of their country.
“And part of the process was ferreting out collaborators, those dastardly and pragmatic Frenchmen and Frenchwomen who had made common cause with the Nazis during the war. And the women, once found guilty for their crimes of collaboration were punished -sanctioned- with what were called coiffure ’44; their heads were shaved so all of France could know just by looking at these women that they were collaborators, traitors.
“Now, the men, who were found guilty of similar collaborations were given a slightly closer cut. They were shot outright and dumped in a ditch. 4,500 Frenchmen were killed within a week for such crimes, and as many Frenchwomen were shorn of their hair for similar -sometimes worse crimes- than the men.
“So, I wonder, given that this is true, how do the Marxists, and post-modernists and 3rd wave-feminists square this with the idea that all of history is just the sad fact that women are treated worse than men? How would they still insist that women get paid less for doing the same job as men?” he paused, and Valance said nothing.
“Oh, I guess they can, now that I think of it, since the women were certainly paid back less than the men. I suspect that is how modern women will still put it, eh?” he said with a punctuating laugh that she did not like at all. He may be right, she thought, he may be right that women have been treated in fact better not worse by men throughout history, but he need not say it with such bitterness. He seemed unwilling to let women learn such things, she thought, he indicted us all for the stupidity of the loudest and most public women; women who did not even represent the whole of women at all.
III. 2024 e.v .
The sun had been up for four hours and he had hiked into the wilderness at about 3-miles an hour; he had followed the ridgeline down into a clearing, scanned the ground for tracks, found some old ones of coyotes and a fresh set of both grey squirrel and what he thought was mule deer, but were whitetail, a species rare but extant in the San Isabel forest. His coder could have corrected his error but he had it turned off.
He felt sweat upon his brow, and around his chest and arms; his neck was wrapped, as always, in his shemagh ; his black cap felt wet at the band.
He followed the deer tracks as they went west into the forest, and once inside l’enclos he rested beneath a large oak amongst the Pinions and Juniper pines and the grey Aspens that appeared here and there just like his few but long and stark grey hairs. He sat on a downed pine, blown over by the wind, no doubt, and saw the heads of mushrooms along the shadow of the felled treed below him. It was moist down here in the ravine, and under the shadowing arboreal cornice, and in that environment the mycelium had poked its heads up -like periscope- to have a look around.
He bent at the knee, bowed his head and then placed two fingers around the caps of three mushrooms and pulled them up; the soft ground gave way, the stems and caps came up in one mass, and three others remained.
He brushed off the black soil and bark and as much of the flotsam as he could and stuffed the dose into his mouth, chewing whilst looking up now at the canopy above him. He remained kneeling for 12 minutes -breathing and feeling expansion of lungs, clearing the mind of all but this numina - and then he slid his pack around to his front and removed the water bottle he had packed with snow this morning; it had melted to 40 degrees as it absorbed both sun and body heat as he hiked.
He drank and allowed his tongue to invigilate his maw and teeth and gums, sweeping away the grit of mushrooms and he began to feel the first effects of nausea and euphoria, as the psilocybin metabolized quickly.
He had eschewed breakfast, as his dream had given him enough to chew on for his morning and now the blood quickly flooded with the hallucinogen; the entheogen , as he had first heard them called many years ago; he often thought of them as the alien technology that had combined with man’s fusing corpus callosum to produce a slightly less schizophrenic -but no more sagacious- beast .
Man used to hear voices as normative, as built into the hardware/wetware of the brain; as injunction, as guiding and helping hand. But as those voices waned, man built dolls and figurines with larger mouths and ears to entice the gods to return. The African practice of stretching the earlobe with plates and bushings were thought to add technology, boosters, to better hear the receding gods and their faraway voices.
Self-direction is scary; as anyone who realizes that their own parents no longer know a goddamn thing about life anymore will attest to ; he thought. Once you realize there is no one smarter than you in your inner circle, that you’ve outgrown any wisdom or knowledge they might once have contained, you are both free and adrift in equal proportion and that is scary at first, and at last.
“The gift of liberty is achieved by that price,” he said aloud, “and you cannot blame people for wanting the voices of the ancestors to return.” Plenty of people thought the ancients were superstitious and silly, but Blax knew, that for most of human history people were fucking dying at alarming rates from predatory attacks, parasites they couldn’t see and from entropy that made 30, old age. His own ears were stretched and kept open by black bushings 21 mm in diameter. He too listened to the wind and for the signals that bounced off the moon .
And yet they -the ancients- managed to carve out a civilization or two , and thus, raise us all up out of the muck. These were people, real men and women , he thought, they banished physical ailments and starvation and disease and chaos with their bare hands and limited knowledge . And yet, all they had been promised was that Christ would alleviate their suffering, their spiritual suffering, for the body would continue to decay. So, with hearts buoyed by God and treading water in their deep souls, they tilled the earth, saved seeds as they starved. They planted in the spring for an autumnal harvest, they sacrificed for a future they rarely got to see.
Science had then flipped it , he thought.
Science had promised to alleviate the corporeal suffering in return all we need do is sacrifice our souls , he thought. And that is exactly what we did; we dr
ained all the deep waters from our insides like a swamp and filled it with secularism and rational facts; and for that we could live forever and never be poor or sick again.
He remembered that Bordeaux was once a swamp; and it too had been drained by the bordelaise .
The irony that we’d live long, forever in anguish with no meaning and no souls, the sarcasm of this bad deal, was lost on the literal ears of most people; not that they didn’t feel this anomie and ennui, oh they felt it, he ruminated as the psychotropic compounds metabolized further in his body. But modern humans denied it was a spiritual crisis, they took SSRIs and made more money and took up ideologies to stuff up the hole in their culture.
He saw the trees haloed now, the leaves moved in geometric accretion, building their forms like the architecture of computer programs, the combs of wasps and bees; he watched the boundary of the forest from his clearing just under the boughs of four or five trees.
The sun consumed the area he had left to come into the woods, it was white and washed all the rocks, the grasses, the tracks in the soil; even the air above his canopy was now white and it outlined the tenebrous canopy itself.
The silvery light fell through the trees and was liquid and slicked all that he saw; he vomited once, feeling nothing leaving but everything at once entering him.
His chest was capacious, and as he breathed he felt all of life bow once to him then wait for his return nod; which he then gave. His hands felt large, and flexible, he shunted his shotgun to his right flank and wrapped his hook and loop tie-back around it to keep it there.
He thought of the injunction by God, that he was an inheritance , and he breathed in that knowledge deep into his lungs. He commanded them -the lungs- to take such knowledge to the edges of his body. “The four corners,” he then said aloud. He saw a silvery shard of light stab down into the ground like God’s own sword and he stepped into it at once and looked above. The light splintered like Newtons’ discreet rainbow and he squinted in recoil at first. He then opened his eyes widely and allowed the primary colors to blind him for a few moments as his body appeared upon the light-wave claymore like a reflection in its alloyed and folded and un-filigreed steel.
And the tears began for a period of time outside of time; and they flooded the face and lifted up the lower lid and lower lashes and occluded the vision and made the light bend and prism and color all the silver light with its red and blue borders, and slick his beard and soak it and make his eyes wash into his first and frozen words, his metaphorized mind-space just behind the eyes as entablature. Like a boat tied to the cleat of a dock, rocked by the harbor waves, the embayed vessels beat against the pier in rhythm between water below and stone above. His consciousness moved back and bowed and dropped a note into the boat and stepped away.
He felt an ego loss, not uncommon with this ancient food of the gods , and the tears were not his, as they were the rain of the earth, the pain that engendered them was also no longer his and his alone, but was shared by the forest, and the forest’s mother and that mother’s father and that father’s first embodied thought; when all language was metaphor and all comparisons were between the gods and their works.
He stood and yet kneeled before it all; proud but not arrogant, vulnerable but not in any danger, he stood and wished for nothing, sought nothing, and allowed his frame of reference to collapse.
He became a hole within which the universe could travel, and pass kites along to lost friends and he could forget all about the woman who had had his heart. The universe could return it, dusted off, whole. He could feel his eyes behind the four-chamber heart, down low like the first men of the Iliad and Odyssey , the men who felt their self in the midriff, he felt it there and bent down and upon all fours became a beast again; and it was neither suspected or praised by the cosmos, but merely was how it was seen.
He remained on all fours and felt his self travel to his paws, they felt as paws now, but he still knew he was a man. But he was a man who had, made a beast of himself to get rid of the pain of being a man; the pain unique to man . He reduced words where he was full of them, he reduced memories where they did not serve him, he reduced desire for anything beyond his Task.
He knew then that Satan had brought consciousness to man, because God had wanted a strong son instead of a son free from danger; a competent son instead a man free of hard choices, a good son with the capacity for malice and mayhem instead of a prey animal weak and stupid and dependent on the kindness of strangers and the benevolence of dictators and the wisdom of crowds.
God had made man awake, to see his death, his need for work, his need for sacrifice, his vulnerability and insecurity and his anguish all so man could become substantial; and no mere silly thing.
God loved the beasts of the forest, but he wanted Man to be slightly more; Mannaz, Blax thought for some reason, he thought in a word, a language, he did not precisely yet know; he stayed the hand of his coder and left its source hidden for later. He did not want it explicitly defined. He had begun to see that more and more knowledge could be an impediment to wisdom; so he tried to clarify what he already had taken on board, eschewing any more details -laterally gathered- until he could make sense of what was extant in his mind.
A thing of substance was what Man should be, and God knew that the only way to have depth and substance and gravity was with the weight of the world upon us, he concluded. It was gravity as above so below .
This is what silly men, men of leisure, men of safety and timidity never know; they rejected the hand of God, the offer of the fruit of the gods. He accepted, Blax now did, the blood of Quigu, the worst monster - the unskilled laborer- the brutal force released by Tiamat, in the Mesopotamian tale; the blood that made man; the touch of evil.
He had wrestled with this, a man so divided, maybe never before in history -a lonely solipsism he both thought and denied- a man perfectly, achingly, balanced between two extremes, pulling himself asunder.
He had, he thought, now figured out how to live with oneself in this condition, the silvery light between the infrared and ultraviolet, the ground that holds the lightning bolt, the air that crushes us down with storms and oceans turned upside down, the ribs that bend outward, the teeth that cave inward, the soul that pulls about its Arc de Triomphe, the mind that never listens except to everything ever said all at once.
He knew what he was to do; that his role was to corrupt other men with grave-depth, to give them the responsibility of God’s first task; to free them from the frivolity and femininity of the wrong fork in the Grecian swerve; the Apollonian , that winking, ironic, speech modern men spoke in lieu of the Laconic silence sincere .
He accepted his subservience to the godhead, to the original gift of sin; the ability to grow up and out grow God, by becoming one in the Nordic tradition he still needed to learn. And not the power of a God, the responsibility of one, and this making all the difference, he thought.
The responsibility, the duty to be a man, and make other men of this world, to re-instantiate the male essence, the duty, the primacy of duty, not rights. Let the weak march for rights, he surmised, let women insist on rights; but men, men would insist on duty, and they’d do it with reverence for themselves and each other and for the gods .
His heart had been rent and twisted liked the fabric of reality and there would be punishment for that; but he would shoulder that punishment, not one bit of it would accrete to his love, his wife -whomever she was to be- he’d protect her honor in his own mind. She would never even know these feelings, she would escape judgement, he would shoulder it, and that would be his task.
His father, and all his failings and weaknesses would also never be revealed, Blax would incorporate the shame of that failure in himself, and the weakness, the terrible irresponsibility of his genome, that too would be carried by Blax into the future, a sacrifice made each day so that his kin would never know just how much he -that older father and brother and uncles and cousins for more generations than they knew- had each fai
led.
But his actual mother , he thought he saw something hidden from him heretofore. He could see her now, a girl brought into a lab at 15, untouched in the birth canal, he had emerged from untrammeled ground, and he knew this was a kind of purity unknown in modern times, his skin at birth unsullied by a whore’s viscous, vicious fluid, he had been truly born of a virgin. God had known he would have had contempt for any other kind of mother; He had given him the one true start.
He would offer up all he had to any man who could match it; he would give his massive bursting mortar of a heart to detonate the powder inside, latent and warehoused, in modern men. He would take only the best, only those who knew the value of what he offered, he would never be disrespected or doubted again; he would make his monomania toward the true depth of man, the grand and glowing character known to his sons; and they could thus be his sons.
His beard touched the ground, his face touched his beard, his mind walked up to his spine surveying each side, each flank, and tapped each vertebra with a Leyden Jar of wine and coiled asps, and the aqua regia from Abraham’s eyes of blue; the blood of Isaac, the parchment of God’s list for man; the ants, the wasps, the slaves of planets -the moons- the tiny looms upon which the treadle shunts and speeds and slows and dooms.
He felt it all concretize his spine -and each nerve that fled in inflationary red- and link it to his eyes that ringed his new head, his apex upon an apex predator like a King on a throne of whale bone itself; His holy ghost that lifts the arms of Christ upon the cross. “Bear it,” he mumbled, “bear it, and bring the species as far as your betters did, in one moment across one generation, bring us all as far as Jesus did when he did his fucking duty on the cross.”
