by Roman McClay
He walked a few paces and felt his chest swell like storm surges and his brow cloud over as light did not shine but the dark managed to light up and shadow his face in grey hues. The body dumped twice as much nor-epinephrine as necessary to animate; three times the testosterone to heal the ache in muscles now imbued with ATP and vascular flow; four times the beats of heart; five times the breaths like darts thrown at each picture on the walls; six-fold harsh thoughts as small-gauge shot hurled in a pattern at each bird on a branch, each thing that creepeth on the ground.
His left breast fibrillated and contorted so, he hooked his thumbs under his shoulder rig and pulled out to hoist some weight of the pistol and magazines up off his shoulders; he closed his eyes and saw bright red and black shine coruscate like sunrise mountains and moonset clouds as he imagined crows landing in the fields between the Aspens and the Conifers on shores beyond his ship’s bow.
He rebuked himself in internal monologues, pronounced sentences on himself even as they lacked the structures necessary to serve as scaffold. My God , he thought,
she’s just a young girl, she was trying to reach out to you through the language that she has had no time to learn, the code you insist she discern; from broken crockery and dish shards, the semiotics of your hippogriffs of the Sauternes and noble rot of autumnal praise and the vernal pregnant prose of which only you know the father and the baby’s name.
You hang skulls of coyotes and bones of common corvids, and weave the feathers around her hair, her hair around the shell casings that hold and dare the old thunder that scares even her former self in the daylight and on the shelf sit books that she think go on and come from forever both; she chooses one of three and tries to begin the set, and you lament all the rest she hasn’t yet.
And you are like a ghost itself spectre’d by some oracle, some Fedallah, some lying spirit of God with no apprehension of your tyranny until the republic has fallen to the mob. Shake yourself! If she tries, then you try 1,000 times more; for every attempt she makes you must succeed at least a score; you father her, you yourself are borne. Duty comes first, then your goddamn rage; your hurt feelings only on the 7 th day.
He bowed his head just a bit; heaved in a breath and felt water slip out from the corners of his eyes in just one or two wee drops and even those were lies. He had no power over his beastly prose, his poetry was even more remote.
He believed in love and in a moral universe; but the chaos of it all made him unable to tell if he was oriented correctly; he kept thinking his eyes out of focus, his heart out of range, his noble parts out of time. God was too high and the King too far away , he thought.
The story as map to a better world had him by the lapels and when anyone misread these maps, he trembled in moral terror as if the New World would never be found, as if he couldn’t trust his shipmates to read the stars or notice the Tell-Tale, drop the taffrail line to measure their speed. He saw in each slight, each insult, each humiliation a black dagger giving birth to the hands to grasp and the man to plunge it.
A woman who is with a powerful man best make sure she treats him as if he is powerful. And women do not do that anymore , he thought. And this invites tyranny. A man undefended, defends himself. And he defends himself with unrestraint. That man goes too far.
A tyrannical man is a man who cannot hint at his power sufficiently to maintain order and love. The mere suggestion of his power is not enough for her to get. He must demonstrate it. The reason tyrants exist is because stupid people exist , he thought as his heart raced and brain cavitated.
God blew it after creating the archangels. Man was his largest error precisely because they are too stupid to respect power that is holstered, scabbarded, left un-actualized. You see it in the way children -teenagers- will mock a caged tiger at the zoo; the way women will provoke a large dangerous alpha male, the way little dogs yap at big dogs. And all of this is due to the cage that the tiger is in, the social milieu , the taboo on violence the man is imprisoned within and the leash around the neck of the large dog.
And you have actual sociopaths like Steven Pinker calling decent men like Nietzsche a sociopath and I can envision a future in which Pinker is killed with a rolled up paperback written by Nassim Taleb at the end of my tattooed hand; a hand embossed with Zola’s injunction to the artist, he let his mind wander with these thoughts of revenge.
There is this line is Paradise Lost where Satan is lamenting that God isn’t just; and rules by fiat. He says, “ Farthest from Him is best whom reason has equaled, force has made supreme.” And I, being a self-styled rebel, agreed with the student of revenge’s point that God wasn’t better than us, he just had more power.
But, it occurs to me now that this power is what proves He is better than us .
Might does make right and I mean that it every way. The physical universe dominates, the predator dominates, the alpha dominates and evolution writ large dominates. You can’t argue with probability or gravity or evolution and you can’t argue with power instantiated with anything or anyone. All you can do is fight it; and then, win or lose. Whomever wins deserves to win by dint of their winning.
And I’m tired of the weak picking on the strong and daring us to fight them and then getting pissed when we smash them. Fuck you. That kid at the zoo should be thrown to the tiger, the beta or female provoking the alpha male should too be smashed and the little dog yapping at the GSD or Rott should be eaten in one fucking gulp.
We’ve had too much success bending the rules of physics: we fly, we elongate the time normally obtaining to terminal velocity, we breed defectives without consequence and we think we are so clever. But, evolution is never going to lose; physics will not be mocked, and eventually there will be consequences for this shit . Nature speaks in louder tones than philosophy and self-interest, he thought, quoting the passage that Toussaint read over and over too. He read side-by-side with the killer of 10,000 white-men, slaveholders, and he revered the source of such blood.
Revenge is predicated on a moral desire and system; it can and will be corrupted. But Panzram and Ahab are more morally constituted than Starbuck or some goddamn nice guy. Ahab wants revenge for the injustice of death; Panzram for the malice of life. Starbuck is pragmatic and commercial he doesn’t care about moral systems; for him -the modern Christian- he just wants to avoid poverty. Like my sister-in-law, she doesn’t want to be poor! What about poverty of soul! Do not these creatures ever wonder about that? he asked. He knew they did not.
But he knew he had been too hot, too visceral, again. His passions over taken his vessel and ran it too far out to sea so that no one dare follow. He had no capacity to lead callow youth, no tolerance for how far behind all were that he spoke to. What had they, what did they do with their lives ? he asked. He was as haughty with mankind as God was with him now it seemed.
Did they not read, had they no base of history or metaphysics or literature? But, he already knew the answer to this, they did not. His own family watched TV and fucked around and spent their days reading modern literature if reading at all. They bar-b-qued and ballgamed through life, they had no depth of soul. They worried not for justice or right and wrong, they just followed rules. This is what modern men -and their silly wives- do: they follow rules, he mused.
And if it never occurred to them that rule following is what stuffed ovens full of Jews, well, then it never caused them one jot of lost sleep, now did it? They -these people- were at peace. Ah, the life of the shallow: equal parts easy and restful. They have the best lives do they not? he asked. But he stopped and began to speak.
“Angel, I’m sorry,” he said, “I shouldn’t get so upset. I have lost the capacity to even have conversations any more. I apologize. Sincerely. I will do what my own father never does, apologize with genuine remorse,” he said -the insult to his father felt as general analgesic to the sting of apology- as he gathered in his vessel’s sail and told the oarsmen to belay any orders to pull. He let his ship rest at this faraway sea.
“It’s ok, it’s your favorite book,” she said with so much generosity he knew at once he was wrong, and wrong again in the large ways, all while being permanently right in each goddamn detail .
She saw him relax and she felt herself relax too, she loved him so much, but what was this world of his? she then asked. Why so often at war with the elements? He battled the air it seemed, each storm a thing to curse, each sunset a moral crime; he’d wait up all night to bark at the rising star as if to get first crack at it for its lack of fealty to keep his day lit like some endless candle in the dark. What did he expect from nature? What did he demand of her? To abandon, condemn, her own brother, a man, just barely not a boy himself at 21, when he had been there for her when her own father had not? she thought.
She was loyal, to Andy, and Lyndon would have to wait to earn her loyalty , she finally thought. But he demanded it all, and all right now, he turned everything into a battle of good and evil, a Manichean world as if Satan lurked behind each cobweb, each crack in the concrete, each chip in the paint; a blackjack between each word and bookend to each silent moment or two.
He saw malice where the world just fell apart; he saw demons where shadows of men merely fell; he heard evil spirits when it was no more that the wind. She stirred the food on her plate with the fork and felt her heart heavy, all air purged from the lungs, all hope exiled from her feminine mind. He was generous and made her feel all made of cotton candy and puppy tongues most days, he lavished her in praise; he shone a warm sun on her most ancient and hidden parts. He tended to her every need, and she lived in luxury. But, in exchange, he made her choose always, between two things she loved, and she thought him more and more insane.
III. 2005 e.v.
The factory sounded first, and the floor vibrated; that’s what hit you first -at .74th of a second- along the basal ganglia and auditory cortex, and motor cortex and orienting reflex crammed into the spine and the mind of the animal that is man.
It’s all faster than what you think you see. If you know that first, you’ll know why you react the way you do to industrial milieu . It places you on edge, subconsciously, like dark water , he thought, remembering swimming in the Atlantic by Diamond Head at four balls -midnight- in the Hawaiian winter with a girl so close to him he could feel her frantic breathing as her breasts bumped into his chest with each nervous inhalation.
His predator response had been making him want to fuck and then eat this girl, and he had laughed at his odd admixture of nebulous fear and lubriciousness and hunger for making her his. It was -in this memory from just a few years before- 2002 of the era vulgari -of what he would later learn was the Kali Yuga - and he was 27 years old and weighed 195 lbs and wore his steel-toed boots to the beach of Waikiki .
Now, the large loops in asphalt singles, yet uncut, were 10-meters long and there were 40 loops in the giant moving rack, as the fiberglass sheet, 3-feet wide and hundreds of feet long, maybe 1,000s, from coater to cutter. But it was over 6-feet tall as a roll, and it was run through a shallow bed of black asphalt, and then the sheet had colored granules dumped onto the hot viscous pitch. He stood on the concrete floor and watched the loops collect in the massive space between bearings and gears and grease fittings red and black and unclean.
Granules colored Sierra grey, Aspen Gray, Slate, Onyx, and on and on, were dumped onto the tar, and then it ran up the looper and cooled and collected in the large racks as it moved along to the front end to be cut and cut again and dumped in turning star-wheels that flipped them and dumped them on conveyor belts and in stacks of 21; out onto another moving roller bed while men checked for size and weight and look in comparison with the ideal.
Then each stack went into a white shrink wrapper that packaged each bundle; and then to a palletizer that stacked them in rows of 3 or 4; 10 or 15 high. Then a forklift came and ran the stack out into the yard and roofing shingles were made in 24-hour days, 3-shift and 6-crews; front and back and the smell and noise rose and fell in waves.
It was loud and smelled of hot petrochemicals and jams in the line were incessant; clearing them came to be almost all one did. Bundles weighed 67 to 88 pounds and you stacked them by hand and carried them off on shoulders and bent and squatted with them and you dragged the heavy sheet itself when it broke back before the cutter.
A man lost his whole arm, in February of 2005; lost it at the bicep when he stuck it in the teeth of two cogwheels to clear a jam.
OSHA came the next week and inspected it, and the plant manager -a guy with teeth that looked like a New Orleans graveyard, with stains that came from wet calcareous dirt and soil infused with biomass, jagged and pitching forward or to one side, and spaced with no rhyme or reason due to breathing room ordered by the priest and God and gravity and maybe even the curvature of the earth- and the manager watched as they looked at the area that took his arm. They looked at it the way a dead shark is observed once it’s been hauled in after an attack. It was nature, not malice, it was unfortunate but no one was to blame.
The rules were that OSHA could look at any area within eye sight of the disfigurement. And they stretched that by standing in pairs at the site and then at a place high above; and if the man on bottom could see the man up top then whatever the top man could now see, well, that too counted as line-of-sight.
It was a game, of course, as all things men do is, and Rick, the plant manager -with that graveyard of mouth- laughed nervously as he re-told how he -supposedly- objected when they moved to inspect areas beyond their ken. “You can’t do that,” he laughed and said in this retelling of the story as if OSHA were the enemy, the other team, and his objection was not somehow at the expense of each workers’ safety.
He did not realize that he was speaking to line-managers, hourly men still, men who lived in that penumbra between the salaried men who ran the planet and the workers who worked it. Like lieutenants, that’s what Lyndon and his back-end lead corollary, Reggie were; they were not in the office all day, but out too on the line. Rick spoke to them as if they too had the best interest of the factory in mind though, not the workers per se . Rick laughed as if he was right and OSHA was wrong, that they had no business looking there; wherever there was.
But a man, a worker, had lost his arm, and Lyndon didn’t give one fuck if OSHA sent in the 82nd Air Borne and looked right up Rick’s fetid ass if that would prevent another amputation. Lyndon had followed the blood trail, he had just come on shift when it happened, and there was less blood than you think. The worker, a Mexican American with a 93 IQ had been too zealous in doing his job, and lost an arm to the gears, and after the cleaving he had walked to the office and sat down, holding the stump above him. He never lost consciousness, and Lyndon had grabbed the mechanical crew to bring an acetylene torch to cut the cogs apart to retrieve the arm. It was too jammed in the gears to pull out otherwise.
It was like having to reaching into the lion to get back the man.
It was sanguinary work, but in the days following the accident, the arm had been reattached, and he had 40% use of it, and within a year could make a weak fist and had blood flow so sufficient the doctors took him off the thinners .
They had all pitched in to help defray costs. Lyndon had never been liked, but that did not matter, he paid into the kitty and sat vigil at the house like the other second-shift crew. This is the shit working-class men do that the rest of the world ignores. Workers behave differently than white-collar men, and this comes from how they first feel.
New mesh-guards had been installed all around each moving part, and it was a pain in the ass to get anything done now, no doubt , Lyndon thought. And yes, the boy had been too stupid to work around dangerous equipment, but 15% of the population has an IQ that low, what are they to do? Are they not to work?
He was a good kid, and he worked harder than most, even with the one good arm. And he was back at work with the bad wing doing 20% more than Javier -that lazy goddamn faggot who was cousins with the B-shift Team Leader, Juan - Lyndon thought this and
fumed as he thought highly of one stupid man and lowly of all clever men at once.
Juan and Lyndon did not get along, because Lyndon rode Javier for his laziness and Juan hated Lyndon for this demand. Juan was one of those bosses that never chastises the lazy, and instead heaps extra work on the conscientious. Yeah, a real good guy , Lyndon said in mock. Juan was the type of guy that is well liked, and makes good men suffer so as to not offend the shitty workers of the world. Lyndon’s Marxist bent had straightened out a bit as he had been more and more inside actual working-class milieu now for almost 10 years; and the workers were not all noble and oppressed at all. In fact, Lyndon wanted to oppress more of them, they needed some discipline , he often thought.
Lyndon thought men like Juan -liberal bosses- were all that were wrong with the world, it was they, not the lazy Javiers that were to blame. Javier just did what he could get away with, like all scum bags with no self-respect -about 50% of humanity- are apt to do. But, it’s their bosses who allow it, Lyndon thought, it is they that were to blame . Javier would shape up if it was demanded of him, but it was not. Instead Juan told Lyndon he was too mean to Javier and needed to “ask” Javier to do his job; not demand it. Lyndon had said of himself, well, he had asked; he had asked about 100 times and was growing weary of it since Javier never responded to merely being asked.
Juan was pissed, and in that Mexican way, taking sides with la familia, la raza, over the right thing , Lyndon thought; he was wised up to this shit now. Each race but the white race, was committed to their own tribe. And this meant each white man was alone against these other men, men who had sense to join up with their own kind.
The same thing happened between Lyndon and the first-shift front-end-lead, Alejandro , another Mexican piece of shit, who was lazy and effete and too groomed for proletarian work , Lyndon thought. Jack London said he was first “a white man, and only then a worker” and Lyndon, who had not been racist until he had to work with other men of other races, had begun to understand Jack London’s point. Before the factory Lyndon had worked in drilling and blasting with all white male crews. He never knew had good he had it. And before that was Zendik, again, 99% white and the three blacks Zendik had were so docile that they were easy to ignore.
