by Roman McClay
How come no one talked about the anger and malevolence of God anymore? he asked. Not since Flannery O’Connor had signed the last piece of art of the pantheon of True Artists had anyone discussed what was obviously true of life: God was the first instantiation of hatred and He cast that mood off like a sheath or scabbard or holster for his now brandished weapon; and that scabbard was merely Satan who fell to earth.
But God’s malice had just begun, what planet were all you on? he wondered as he walked into the ER portico, the lightings crowding, jamming on, across the sky in horizontal cries, so bright in white they gave him a shadow-cast across the lot; upon the blacktop. His shadow appeared just off his starboard side, thrown off from his form, and the cat conjoined; a chimera of man and beast, black on the ground, coronal glowed in sheet-lightning-white, the red blood turned black between the two, the gait uninterrupted by this shaking fist of God, limping only from a re-injury of ancient wounds, joints smashing, cartilage compression under the weight from manual labor, the labor men do, the labor forgotten alongside God’s wrath , he guessed.
The rain fell like ragged sleet, like icepicks, and his face winced unconsciously, his eyes blinked reflexively, and the wind sucked itself up and left a vacuum in the air around the hospital, then it burst concussively and tried to take him out below the knee. He migrated just barely in the direction of the blast but had kept walking as the nurses under the ambulance portico held their hair and heads and turned their backs to the gale. They crouched a bit, and then headed in the double door, as he walked toward them.
The original malice of God was blown into the lungs of nature , he thought, and nature made a seed from that. A mottled, tortoise-shell of pearl and ammonite bell, slick and beautiful and cast out into the sea among the shark teeth and the tentacles of squid; the leviathan and kraken soaking in the sea, the earth’s first womb. And when the endless blood of pelagic pandemonium washed upon a treeless shore, the remnants of God’s bequeathed malevolence assembled itself in the reptilian brain of reflex and hearts that squeezed sanguinary and saline fluid like sponges in the sea; but these hearts beat back against the waves of other animals, against the populated battles of God’s armies with monkey head and tiger teeth and the appetites of mothers and cubs alike. Ah, he thought, the limbic brains of mammals, emotional and two heads and two tails of two coins, cunning with a dewy eye, courageous with empty hands, palms up in revelation.
From all this man grew, the last of the bad batches. Men born with malice articulated like the thumbs they had invented, inherited. But who among them would even give voice to that god-like ungodly man? Who was left who felt the imprimatur of the Madman in the vault? I don’t curse God, he thought as he reached the doors, I revere Him and His total mien, His face in light and shadow both, I bow to the Father of jealousy and wrath. I won’t neuter Him, I won’t take His balls, I won’t do to Him what this pious lot of phony Christians -and even more ersatz irreligious men- have done to Man himself.
I clothe nor cloak God in investiture of the skins and skeins of asps, in the heavy coats of bears and mastodons, the ambergris of leviathan as eau de toilette. I allow Him to walk among us naked to the bone, to the genome . I stand, I stand in awe . “I know God better than all the rest, I have his anger in my breast,” he had mumbled -he recalled- into the air of the waiting room as he strode past seated men and weeping women & their children toward the intake station. He approached the counter bloody from two beasts, heaving, stretched taut about the shown muscles, pulled tight about the mouth .
The cat lay on its back, supine and flowing over shoulder to back and chest, absent of its head. He heard a small gasp when the duty nurse saw what he had, and not just the cat. He owned a gash 6-inches long on his face, flanked by three more fissures she now saw, narrower than the open cleave that was black & blood, hand-in-hand. He flashed his teeth to speak, activating the fear response in the nurse, like the lightning outside, and a low rumble of a voice following, said:
I need this cat invigilated for disease and I need a saline-antibiotic drip; I’ve lost some blood and can feel my BP dropping. I also need to irrigate the wound, and possibly re-stich me up; I had to do it myself with my rearview mirror and an arthritic hand in my car on the ride here. I’ve managed to steady myself, ma’am, but I could easily lose consciousness as my blood sugar is low, I have sub-clinical hypoglycemia and with the loss of blood I feel a bit faint.
“Honey, let’s get you a doctor and,” she turned to her left and bellowed for another nurse to get a gurney and an attending physician. “Randi will you get a gurney?” He stood and she moved around the station elliptically on her way to his body as it held itself there. He felt no rain, no air. He felt only the elements inside him now.
“You just hang in there, ok?” she said as he felt the warmth about his skin from which side he neither could tell nor care; and the artificial lights made his hands seem further away.
He nodded and thought more of God, that grand master of malice and love and the only other things that meet like that: the pain of child birth, the oxytocin and bonding drugs, the fraternity of combat in our opening scene and as we charge along, from ditches and trenches of work and war all along with murder and maudlin song; we twin pin all of it to God’s original chiral clasp of hatred and amorous accord .
Even the sex act was violent and beautiful in equal proportion, he thought, the death of man was comparatively soft and forgiving in many cases; only those who demanded greater death were granted a closing day to equal their opening night . He felt he was one of those who demanded such things of God; and as a faithful servant, and a prideful man, a man made in God’s own image, his Father - he felt- would agree to such a fiery demise . He owed him that, he felt, he felt he’d go out with his fist in mankind’s guts and man’s eyes like this cat laid upon him both in attack and retreat and eventually from behind the lids that remained with half a head still up on the mountain top; he wouldn’t let man avert his eyes, they’d bury this cat like he’d bury man, without its head and thus without its lidded lies.
“Sir, can you hear me?” the doctor said as he leaned over his body on the gurney.
“I’d never hate God for his voice of wrath; it but a sacred call,” the patient had mumbled.
“Sir?” the doctor asked as he checked pupil reactivity with thumbs on the patient’s lids and pen-light laid upon his eyes.
“To pay the injury of some on all,” he had said back then; but now -this morning- he saw himself from above the way tribal people do, as if witness now. He let the light of the mirror of his home now show him his face and he saw no scars there where his memory said they’d be and the tooth, the eye tooth, was as white as the rest. The memory -or was it dream?- faded as he -or his dream- lost that last thread of consciousness; feeling like the whale-line slipping from and cutting the oarsman’s hand.
14. The Doubloon
The rates for argument-related homicide were twice as high in the south
Why Honor Matters [Sommers, Tamler]
Writing assumes fraternity. It presumes someone, someday, will read these words and nod appreciatingly if not sympathetically. Writing counts on vindication before the end. Only an optimist writes.
Any pessimist can think; but in order to bother to speak and even more, to write, one must believe they will be paid attention to. And this is our deepest anxiety as a species: that we do not matter to anyone beyond the shores of our own sanguinary fluid as it breaks back against the sea-wall of our own flesh which is not yet sand
Interviews XXI Vol. 5 [Inmate 16180339]
The Hypothalamus pops up micro-goals that are directly relevant to biological survival and then produces a frame of reference. Now, these are not goals, it’s not a drive, and not a collection of behaviors; it’s a little personality. And that personality has a view point, it has perceptions, and it has action tendencies. You see this with addiction, there is a little personality in there who is addicted, and they spent years lying to themselves
and others to justify their addiction. They will do and say anything now, because those words, those lies, were how they got their drugs each time in the past. Lying is now who they are
Lecture 45 May 2017 [Peterson, Jordan B]
I. 2037 e.v.
Isaiah ran more game-theory models for MO, although it bored him now.
He also checked on his sea barges and had noticed his own fuel algorithms had begun to use plastic found out at sea to make a carbon-neutral fuel; using his transesterification-bioluminescent method via the unctuous lipids in polymers. He was surprised that his nanobots had improvised and found such a solution for both the plastic in the ocean and need for fuel. Sometimes machine logic impressed him.
He then took a look at the inventory from the New York heist, he liked used that word, heist ; it made it feel poetic to him. He had watched the camera footage from inside as Blax had cracked that security guard over the head with a power move that almost killed the man. The guard was a 220 pound African American with a 103 IQ; he was 39 years old. He had not been armed; had just a truncheon which he still had grasped for by his hand when he awoke in the hospital four hours after the robbery. It was no longer there.
Blax had come straight at him with his own blade, a short -one shaku- Kodachi ; a Japanese blade he had forged and shaped himself and drawn from his scabbard in lieu of shooting the man with his M4. As he moved forward with the blade low toward the midriff, the man hunched down and in a protective crouch as Blax spun half away -just 90 degrees- and raised his blade above and instead brought the pommel down on the crown of the black head and sent a vibration through him he would never quite forget. The memory would redound. Blax knew this for he too had -more than once- been knocked out with just one smash to the head .
The guard had felt his whole body go gooey and lost consciousness before he fell in his own footprint. But he had survived, which was not -strictly speaking- likely when coming in contact with Blax’s and his Jacks.
Blax thought of cutting his throat but declined; he stationed a nanobot there to make sure if the guard awoke to dose him with a sedative. Blax was being liberal, and felt it was fine as long as the man didn’t get in their way.
They had invigilated each vault and door marked by Isaiah three days before the job; as the pieces came in he had monitored the CCTV and blue tooth cameras so he knew just where it all was. The Lady Blunt Stradicari had been in the same vault with the 295-year-old Vieuxtemp Guarneri violin and as Blax opened the doors the browns and tortoise shell of mottling warmth made him reflexively rub his hands together. Isaiah had actually laughed out loud to see him warm his hands over them like two logs in a fire. Blax often made Isaiah feel things, and laughter was so rare that it shocked and surprised the system.
Those instruments alone were worth $58 million at low estimate and Isaiah watched as they floated away in a crate loaded by the bots. That same crate held four paintings at bottom, with foam between. The Origin of Species first edition, half-morocco over marbled boards with the inscription of Leonard Darwin, the son of Charles, correcting the omission on page 184, also lay at bottom and covered in the tarry cloth towel just at edge. The omission was in regards to a black bear, and Blax thought of how many such ursine he had dispatched; thus purifying the line of these curious cats of the San Isabel forest.
The bears had become too worldly, too comfortable with man. The ones that got near his camps as he set out into the forest he had shot gladly, knowing that the ones that never came within 50 miles of him would be safe, he’d never stalk the truly feral ones. This was a subtle code of ethics that only a few people would understand.
Darwin had thought maybe the black bears had some relations in the aquatic realms and said so in this first edition; later to be omitted in the successive ones.
Blax paused and thought of that decade from 1851 to 1860 and then the war between the states. What a time to be alive , he thought, the 20 years from 1850 to 1870 saw more momentous things, more clarifying, more revealing, more damning things that any 20 years since. He thought, excepting maybe 2018 to 2038 , and then he laughed a bit. What they had done for the country and what they had wrought too, would be seen as momentous Blax had no doubt. He still spoke of the country, reflexively, only now he noticed that he did it and he noticed how it abraded .
Jack Four came to him and asked him about the ferry and the route out. Blax thus explained the timing and that they still had 16 minutes; he then said to go and see if Jack Two needed any help with the Aston Martin .
Blax walked into vault #3 by the south wall and saw Jack One looking at the painting of the Di Vinci, Jesus . He noticed the Gustav Klimt , of Adele, in all its food-grade curry yellows and breathing -mottled- dark hues.
“You think it’s an accident of fate that Jesus’s mom and Athena are 100 other goddesses were virgins? It’s the ideal state for a woman, in man’s deepest psyche, and he will do anything to keep his wife chaste,” Blax said as Jack One nodded in agreement and paused before lifting the Salvator Mundi that the Saudi Prince Bader had consigned to Christies just 24 hours before. His own man -a royal guard- had been on the street patrolling the grounds when they arrived; Jack One shot him with his suppressed 9mm Scorpion II and pulled him into the alley off Imslay street and dumped his swart body in the bin filled with white Styrofoam peanuts.
“I think Hawthorn made a mistake pardoning Hester Prynne,” Jack One said, and Blax’s agreed by being silent. Silence was seen as tantamount to an assent.
“The liberal mind,” Blax finally said, “had a place in that time, the religious had too tight a grip with no poetry of soul to explain why things needed to be so strict. The liberals had no idea how far it would go once the ball was let to roll. But, man must know these things if he is to be wise; Hawthorn was not as wise as his Pittsfield friend who had the wisdom to be ambivalent.”
The painting was set to sell for $870 million and had a guaranteed price of $833 million which was not expected to dissuade the auction of this piece. The corruption of auction houses was well known, but some pieces managed to escape the dampening on bids that irrevocable bidders seem to have. This reserve pricing scheme was not unlike what car auctions like Barret Jackson do, but in the reserve system, nobody gets the car if it fails to reach a certain threshold; this was different in that a bidder was in place to take it unless it reached their price. It was a fatuous way to do things, but the art world is one of the largest collections of stupid people outside of government or media.
“Did I ever tell you about that guy on eBay?” Blax asked as they waited for the bots to load up.
“No,” Jack One said as he checked the DMs from his team of nanobots.
“He had a 1959 Lafite , right? Now, he’s got this story of finding it in some friend’s uncle’s cellar when the uncle dies,” Blax said.
“There is always a story,” Jack said and laughed lowly.
“I know, and this one is hilarious. The fucking guy say his friend let’s him keep the bottle of ‘59 since that is when he was born or some shit. And he then says he doesn’t know what it’s worth and blah blah. Right? And I’m thinking this is some scam that this guy is baiting us to try to bid on this bottle that he is pretending not to know its value and that he picked that vintage due to his birth not its actual -innate- value, right?” Blax was shaking his head and Jack One was doing the same, “and anyway, but he blows it by saying, well, and I quote here, well, I put it in my closet when I got home and that is where it is now and has been ever since.”
“No,” Jack One says.
“I shit you not. The guy puts a $5,000 bottle of wine in a closet at 72 degrees. I mean, just ruins it. I wrote the guy on eBay and just was ruthless; I suggested he use it to cook with.”
“Why am I not inclined to argue with you?” Jack said and Blax laughed .
“So, you know me, I start asking him if maybe he found a 1970 Hemi Cuda convertible four speed and while it was for sale he was -temporarily mind you -was letting bums and mic
e sleep in it,” Blax said with that crooked grin they all shared and Jack One was starting to laugh louder now. “And if maybe -you know- he had discovered a first edition of the Jefferson Bible and was using it to level out one leg on his card table, or had it tied to his feet so he could reach the pedals of that Cuda? Or, I’m asking him, if maybe he had been bequeathed a,” Blax was ramping up now in his ornate story of insult-porn but Jack Three came in to the hall and interrupted them to ask about the explosives.
Blax explained that the bots would set the charges once Jack had placed them. They merely had to sit in place for 5 minutes and then they’d automatically arm for detonation 30 minutes after the bots had determined that the men had left; which was slightly different from what they had trained for since the bots handled the actual setting of the charges.
Jack One was smirking still as Blax continued telling the details of him hammering this eBay guy.
“So, I ask him if he found a Guarneri del Gesu in his gym locker and was selling it as soon as he retrieved it from the cast of fucking Hee Haw?” Blax said as Jack laughed so hard that his broken rib stabbed him acutely enough to make him wince and cease all jocularity. His laugh closed up, the smile became grim, his body bent and he walked -limpingly- away.
Blax saw this and remembered his own history of three broken ribs -one torn from the sternum- and knew that this was a horrid malady and laugher was not the best medicine at all; it was -in fact- contra-indicated.
“I’m sorry man, I’ll shut up. But, can you imagine ruining one of the best bottles of wine ever made by stuffing it in your closet and bragging about it? I offered him one dollar on eBay. One. He was angry,” Blax said but Jack was just walking away at this point holding his right flank as he allowed the coder to inject lidocaine at the affected area. He was not listening to Blax.
