by Roman McClay
My father, the inmate thought, never once fucking taught, not how to be a man or what a man might even look like . Bourgeois bullshit consumerism, and wimpy goddamn capitalism, the whole fucking thing is a farce. We don’t value men anymore, we ridicule boys until they turn into girls or mutate into monsters just to create somewhere ugly in which to hide from society’s eyes. Doctors and pedants all look askance as we humble ourselves a few times a year to ask for some help. They wrinkle their noses, and take arrogant poses, then lecture us on learning to take the pain without the drugs that are actually effective, merely because some idiot politician says they are dangerous. Jesus of Christs, who was it thrice, who gave us the drugs in the first fucking place? We never asked for prescription narcotic analgesics, we just did what the physician told us to do. But now that we need them, just to arise from our beds, now we are called drug addicts and the worse kind of rednecks and on TV they insult us some more as deplorables.
Well, fuck you, you bastards, we’ll show you a monster, we’ve had enough of your condescension and hate. You think you can insult us, heap opprobrium upon us, and dismiss us as anachronistic Neanderthals in animal skins? When one party breaks a contract then the other is absolved of adherence; this is the law of the jungle too.
You think you can dismiss us, refuse to assist us, rebuke us for weaknesses we were assured we could safely reveal? Man is a system, not just an organism, and folks, you can only push any system so fucking far.
You use us up as lubricant for your societal gears, and fuel for your modes of conveyance, and as fodder for your incessant border disputes, but if we dare look like the grease that you need us to be, or if we become combustible like fuel tends to be, well then now we’ve gone too goddamn far and you’ll have us all locked up at once. But it’s other men that you use to dole out abuse, you betas and females have no actual power to wield; you are adjuncts and apparatchiks, mere writers of tickets, you are paper tigers pacing in penthouse apartments and suites.
You have no real power, you merely pull strings on your caged and uniformed beasts. But eventually, even these conscripts: the cops and the soldiers and men who move boulders will refuse to follow your orders of doom .
We feel life, we feel it in our chest and minds and our balls. We’ve felt it for eons, we’ve warned you for too long, and now you have a wolf by the ears. Let us go or fight us, but there will be no messy detritus, this cleave between us will be a clean break in goddamn two. Men will be men and the rest of you can flap in the wind, our hearts and our balls and the impression left by our footfalls are way fucking bigger than you .
He let the last of his ravings settle in his cortical tissue and too in the blood as it ran to and from the slightly enlarged heart.
The inmate had turned a bit toward Isaiah, and down slightly to meet his gaze. It was all so blurry and watery and he thought of Ishmael wanting to see that part of the world.
He smiled in pain, but Isaiah was outraged, he was so ebullient with this new suite of feelings, he took his time to analyze and even name most of the minutia of feeling. He put both his hands around the inmate’s and thus as second wall around the upright feather of Osprey. His palms sweat slightly, his heart began to pound like a war drum, and his mind focused on one thing. He saw that feather as bird, bird as flock, and flock as blotting out the sky. Isaiah swore he’d take their sun from them, he’d darken everything that grows to get them to stop their immoral ways; he saw that feather surrounded by not just hands, but a man, and not just a man, but an army, and an army that too could darken the sky.
“Maybe your father didn’t like you, but he stuck around, which was one click of the wheel further than his father. These things are incremental, evolutionary,” MO said into the room.
“I know,” the inmate conceded, “I don’t blame him, I just wanted it to be ok for me to say it out loud, to say that it hurt. I don’t want reparations or anything else; I just wanted it to be ok to say it aloud.”
“That is not too much to ask,” MO said as he repaired errors in the algorithm he had built for the next generation of CRISPR vectors; as the cloud let the inmate’s notions rise up and into its clasp.
Isaiah squeezed his hand tighter around the inmate’s and felt the inmate’s squeeze tighter around the black quill of the Hawk.
II. 2037 e.v.
“You know Blake said that a warlike State can’t produce art. He meant a nation, but I always felt he had the double entendre of a man’s state of being, his mindset, in -well- in mind too,” Blax said as he poked at the fire in the huge concrete monolith in the courtyard. The Jacks sat around him like a Praetorian Guard. They worried for him.
“Didn’t he criticize Virgil for saying that others had the luxury to study Art but that Rome had war to prosecute?” Jack Four said.
“Rome has somewhat better to do, namely War & Domination ,” Blax said, quoting Blake who was paraphrasing Virgil. Men carried great words like they carried genes from man to man, generation to generation.
Jack Two rose and began a trip around the perimeter, checking the visuals from the drones as he walked. He slung his carbine around to his left hip and pressed the receiver to his chest’s body armor and scanned first the FLIR images; then his motion detection app. The dark had borders, he noticed, as the moon lit up the Sangres along their south and west; the fire behind him made his periphery seems yellow and orange; only where he was headed was black enough to need his IR vision.
Jack Three watched the space at Jack Two’s six for 90 seconds -reflexively to guard against anything that would come between them- and then he turned back to the fire; noticing the middle log beginning to fall as the flame ate away at its organic base. He grabbed another log from the tabernacle formed into the rectangular monolith that housed both fire box and mantle and this the woodpile stacked 10 logs wide and 16 high; the soot rose above the fire and stained the concrete like permanent shadow impervious to sun or this flame.
The late spring night was cold, a mere 35 degrees; snow began to fall from out of the black that had been pushed up above them by twenty or thirty feet by the fire’s glow. They allowed the snow to collect on arm hairs and in the Jacks’ short beards; and in Blax’s longer one. Their hair at first just turned a darker hue, the heat from their head and face melting each flake. But eventually it began to stick in places and they looked like statues in a storm, like capping waves, like Pompeii ash and bodies beneath; they barely seemed to breathe. Their body temps were regulated by the PGCs; they felt the cold, but not deep within. The fire made their fronts wet with melted snow, red with glow, and warm under their clothes. The cold and snow collected at their shoulders and back.
They looked like the city fathers, the philosophers who sat in courtyards of their noble homes as the Gauls invaded -400 years before an avenging Caesar- and as the Gauls -frightened by their stoic poses- cut them down. But, there were no Gauls , no barbarians at the city gates or walls here. The Jacks were alone with their king.
Jack Two patrolled, and he thought of the worn and faded Jack of Hearts he had placed a grommet in at the corner and hung from his ball-chain; the lamination stiff sharp at the edges. The drones flew sorties that covered all 35 acres, and the dogs slept in their houses with no raised heads; nothing piqued their interest; even the wolves and bears stayed far away from the flame and the tribe. They were so insulated, so safe, they could sit in the falling snow and be unperturbed by it; they just enjoyed the fire and the comradery of each other. They had accomplished so much that day, so much that week and for weeks before. They felt like one thing, one hand, one fist: four fingers and a thumb.
Jack Two was like an index finger, out pointing in the dark at something yet unseen. The curled digits of the other Jacks, the bent thumb of Blax, close knit, aglow by some coal in the palm, not unaware of what their brother pointed toward, but not looking that way at all. Jack Two walked in the snow, his legs unseen, the dark made his body disappear from the barrel of his carbine down. He toggled in and ou
t of the FLIR images and the drone reports, he listened instead to the dark. Nothing was out here, the deer were bed down under boughs, the foxes in their dens; the bear had awoken early -in March- but these nights had been consistently cold and they had retreated to their hypnopompic state. It was quiet tonight , he thought, even his foot falls were soft on the accumulating snow.
Blax knew Jack Two was a romantic, and his piqued interest, his reflexive patrolling, was due to some threat to the heart not the body. He was sensing some danger to his feelings, that is all , Blax thought. But was he walking out into the night to confront it, or was he retreating with each step from the core of the tribe? Some things just appear as half-formed ideas, an answer is not even hoped for, one begs for merely a good question sometimes .
Blax moved his eyes toward the mantle and saw as the flakes occluded his vision, that they had corniced upon his lashes; he blinked a few times to clear them and felt them melt as warm and cool on his fire-warmed face. He looked at each ursine skull hanging on rebar that stuck out five inches from the concrete slab of the bulky, golden, rectangular, chimney. He simultaneously felt his chain of mink and mouse skulls that ranged his neck as their overbites dug slightly into his skin. There were four mouse skulls equidistant around his neck on a ball-chain, and at his sternum, a slightly larger mink skull, all burnt black. A set of tags with Laconic inscriptions and the 300 Winmag casing that had taken his first buck and one black handcuff key jangled askew from the skulls.
He had boiled them with the bear skulls years back, in potassium chloride and water for six hours, stirring and removing brains and retrieving teeth from the shallow rusted drum; cut from a larger one. He placed his hand upon the small bumps in his shirt and felt each little skull underneath.
The burn barrel smoked from the snow melting on the hot garbage they had burned a few hours earlier. The barrel, a 55-gallon drum, was rusted and patina coated, with Xs ground into it randomly for intake of live-giving air. He watched the smoke rise from it, grey and white and short lived as the dark closed-in a few feet above its curl.
He felt the dopamine dump from steady movement along his goal. He felt they had made such progress; they operated as a whole. Still, there was much to learn, much to do; he always felt ill-prepared and one step farther back than where he should be. He supposed this was good, the nervousness of the slightly vigilant, the man never satisfied. That fourth quadrant, it loomed out there in the dark, even the dark of day. They had such advantages over tout le monde; that is not who he feared , he thought as he then wondered about how far the Chinese had gotten with their own AI.
Strange things happened on their missions, strange things were happening all over. It seemed more than random, more than the result of massive data collection, although that is what Isaiah had said was likely the case. They had so much more data now; and thus the anomalous was over represented. Like, he surmised, the amount -not the ratio- of errors in a 1,500 page book versus a mere 250 page feuilleton .
To straddle the fence of the rational-man and the man-of-nature as they did; and with a wide stance that made their most vulnerable parts all the more vulnerable , Blax thought, they were so technologically advanced, and yet so steeped in the feral forest and heuristic of instinct that the lacuna grew both under sun and grew from the cataract of the rain . They traveled so far from domain to domain, it seemed inevitable they would one day be forced to choose. Would the group, would one or two Jacks choose to stay in the modern world, would one day they just not return to the Wheels and Weights of their home?
Ah, look, he both condemned and approved in his thoughts, he had just revealed his choice, inadvertently, he had just admitted he would choose the forest, the wilderness; and merely wondered if all his boys would join him here .
This must be broached now , he thought, if it’s on my mind it must be approaching theirs; it cannot be more than a day or two days off. He looked now at his Jacks and saw their noble profiles, God, he thought, what proper use of material, what grandeur, what perfect natural order. To be so well placed, so well applied, so at home in their own skin and milieu. What righteousness, he thought, these men deserved it by dint of their DNA and their will; their will .
Oh course, he thought, of course I wrestle with the conceit of free-will, but the plasticity side of this argument is ascendant now; now, he doubled down. We must choose, we must. I feel the ladder like the refractory, the recursion, the daisy chain of hand to hand to hand as we all ascend. Any one of us could just fail to choose, fail to give the clan a, ‘ yes’. But they never do, they fucking choose, to be accountable, responsible to each other and to me.
How many times on my own did I fail to answer the cosmic, yes? I need these boys, and they need me; I don’t elevate any of us above the other. We are all necessary, like each A and G and T and C along the chromosome, we are all wedded to our jobs, the thing that makes us unique. God, what a splendid species we are, what capacity. And we have the choice to say, NO or YES, and here we are choosing, even when it’s hard, when it hurts, when it seems confusing or irrational, even when we have jagged edges, jangled nerves, even when our hearts are soaked in pain. God, our consciences have been tested, our religion and our secular truths all bent and malformed by stupidity -of ours and others- the whole whirlwind of life seems to eye us like a god of malice. Ennui, God, it cloaks us, shrouds us a times, we lack answers and this seems evidence of meaninglessness to us, and yet we refuse to accept it as the final integer .
These boys, these men to be, they have such range of mind and heart and open hands, open mouths to speak the truth, to quickly recant on lies, to apologize to each other, so fast, so genuinely, so committed to each other and to me , Blax thought as he watched the bear skulls bounce shadows from below like balloon above them as the baskets, the concrete flu and mantle, this pallid sky.
He imagined the first balloon in France, with Jefferson and Adams on the ground, Dr. Alexandre Charles with hydrogen and silk and rubber coat, in the sky; this country, my Lord, this country , Blax reveled in its history. What if we could never lose the germ, the seed, of our founding fathers, what if we wrested back evolution’s gamble, gambol, dice thrown and loaded -without malice- all the new thrown die?
“It is for you to show us the way to the skies,” Blax said sotto voce , quoting the Frenchman, Dr. Charles. He had magnanimously offered the release to Monsieur Montgolfier and they rose at once above the trees of the Tuileries and past the Seine . The Enlightenment, he thought, what confliction in my heart and mind. The greatest moment in history since the Greek swerve of Lucretius and transcribing monks who carried that work like mother and babes and all that DNA, and yet a monster too was born.
A monster, out beyond the map, a monster as we nap , Blax sang softly to himself. Is this not the ouroboros asp of life, does not the tail and dragon maw meet to make a circle within and without? The men of the Enlightenment remained still men, though, they had not shed the scales and skin of their molting form; they were not yet machines, not like modern men. And look at what we’ve become, even us who embrace the beast, who are more feral than the Greeks, more animal than the barbarians 6-feet tall among the artic circle of the Nordic lands, more certain of our link in the natural chain than our silent Neanderthal brethren with their massive jaws and teeth, he thought.
Yet, here we are nearly half machine, and encroaching more and more toward the metabolism of the machine, the cathexis for the machine’s desires, the insistence on accumulation of knowledge over absence of it; desire for the flat and known-map over the deep and unknown-terrain; even as that knowledge brings one lumen of candle-light for every three of dark it half banishes and creates, he breathed and stretched the neck as the pain collected like rain water at the base of the heavy head .
I doubt my own motivations, I do, Blax thought. How much am I -are we- swayed by instincts we think are gravid as a sow, but are manufactured by our foreign DNA and augmenting respircocytes and post-genetic-coders and blu-tooth and com-link
s to drones that fly like birds, to Isaiah like god, a god we talk to like the ancients, before the breakdown of the bicameral mind, we hear him, we hear our god! Instructions pure and clear and romantic through and through! To be enjoined by the most powerful being on the planet, to have his trust, to have his ear, to have his DNA in us; to be like gods among mere men , he paused and watched his men accumulate snow, now one inch high on their shoulders and arms and thighs; their beards streaked with white, aging them in mock.
The men who shaped the modern age, based upon a Christian theme of the individual sacred, the society subservient to the consent of the governed , Blax ruminated on this discreet thought. These men, they had the world-of-men but not yet the world -as thing in itself- under their command, they still had to contend with the microbial and the leviathan, the spectre of Neptune and Mars and death of children and mothers too; famines, tyrannies of nature like mountain weather systems, as they commanded the plains on either side.
But, how much of the natural world, he asked himself, have we banished? Bit by bit, bug by bug, gene drives to eliminate mosquitos in three weeks, the rebellion of the iconoclast of cells we’ve put down, cancer like the criminal snuffed out for the good of the crowd? But, what have we lost? We never ask that question earnestly enough. I lament the choice of Apollo, or the Ionian over the Lacedaemonian and I get rebuked as a luddite; as if I have insisted we return to static societies of men.
I have not , Blax thought, I merely say we lost something, each choice forecloses on the other path, each yes to one is a no to many, a direction chosen leaves something in a wake . Cannot we at least take measure of that wake, cannot we maybe bottle a little flask with a little seafoam, of the watery part of the world we left behind? he asked as the fire began to die; its coals static-red glowed-grey, the heat pulling in and back.
