by Roman McClay
His ears were the first to alert his eyes to a change.
A low resonant crack marched through the soil beneath him and rose up in the air. Like a tree branch splitting and waiting, wanting to fall; like a first thunder clap at the beginning of a classical performance of static and quick movements of dancing lightning unseen to the eye; the crack as overture to a gathering applause as the earth opened up beneath the lake and the water rushed in as the now stretching thunder strolled out onto this stage.
His feet, next, felt the vibration of the massive sink hole collapsing; and like a crushed trigger it shot a projectile of ballistic-frisson on a current of power into his body and brain. This is exactly the feeling, the currency that the outlaw is paid with; and it's a denomination unknown to, and thus refused as non-legal tender, by squares and civilians.
To work as a mere man right up until the point you can swallow other men whole allows you to feel grandeur in everything you do from then on; it gilds labor and motion and thought with the ornate brocade of revenge and potency and revolutionary praxis: the power to feel vindication in one's own lifetime; to mete out justice on the insouciant and fatuous civilians who thought they could ride over you as if you were asphalt and that they even had right to complain of the potholes if ever their travels upon you got rough.
If you live long enough, Jack thought, you'll earn some enemies; and if you are efficient you will spend your life making enemies; so many in fact that just when all of them think they've beat you, one of them will wake up to your knife in their one good eye. And the rest of them will hear of their comrade's fate; and maybe even see it with their own indicted eyes.
He shook his head at these abstractions like horse flies in his mane. “Goddammit,” he said under his breath. He spent so much time in his head like this; even as his hands worked so well in the real world; digging and pushing and flanging up ends; holding such weight and pushing fine wire through the eyes of infinite needles; hands acting as sentries for his large 4-star General of a man’s back; palms and fingers flanking and fanning out as reconnaissance soldiers for his two helmet-headed and long, strong, Sergeant-of-Arms.
You have the hands of an artist , she had once said, hands hovering like the drones of a hive in the boughs above his lumber-like legs as they ground down the surfaces of everything upon which he tread .
Such purpose and competency in this body , he thought as he clinched his fists; but this head full of chaos and inchoate thoughts; a thousand unfinished jobs. Praise be to Allah , he quipped to himself, that his hands and body actually finished a job before starting another .
“Unlike this goddamn head,” he grunted aloud in self-rebuke.
The lights on the building flickered in mock-Morse distress calls; some going out in a snap like a snuffed candle while others stayed on in defiance and tipped to the sky as their posts crashed in on the collapsing scenery of 30-foot concrete walls and sections of steel girders. He watched the lights swarming now like fireflies still signaling in staccato-like idiosyncratic patterns as they spun and dove in the sky above the black building. They had all the beauty of nature even as analogs; he kept waiting for their bleating, spasming flashes to synchronize like the genuine Lampyridae , but he had to settle for the large burst of a poly-phase transformer at the edge of the building's footprint; then, as he exhaled, total darkness as these analog flies seemed to drop dead to the ground.
Next, he heard the rush of water as the draining lake began sucking the building into its pelagic maw. He peered harder at the site hoping to see the walls of the building collapse further and ride away on a wave of flotsam & jetsam into the expanding hole of the newly gerrymandered lake shore. He saw nothing but black. For even blackness has its brilliancy , he quoted to himself as his eyes still strained for some bas relief of tumult and light against the background of the night.
Impatiently, he flipped his 5th generation night-vision down from his Kevlar helmet, down passed his high arrogant brow and onto the bridge of his slightly up-turned nose; another girl had noticed this nose and quipped that he was the only redneck in the world with such a snotty opinion of everyone else.
That's what you get with haughty Isle blood infusing a mercenary frame; half maternal Kiwi and half paternal Arkansas refugee that would claim Texas as his home to avoid the ignominy of mere southern origins, he thought as he re-read the slim dossier Isaiah had given him on his true genomic origins. Both sides of the family were ‘45ers, Scots pretending to be British, both sides pretending to be civilized when savage was more noble by exponents , Jack thought with pique.
Imagine an Amur tiger pretending to be house cat , he thought.
That portmanteau seemed to alloy the issue; the second son with a Damascus-type burnish and tarnish too; he was, this son, this grandson, obviously made of these constituent source-parts; but had become almost a phase-change as some catalyst in the knotty rope of DNA had lit him like a fuse to a much angrier incendiary . “As if haughtiness of head,” he said low, “potentiated the low gravid sow-belly of soul and gave up the requisite space between two vectors for a new kind of math to stretch itself and see what differential equations it could scratch out in the dusty lacuna between his two authorial integer sets.”
The mise-en-scène glowed in a coruscating green as each piece of the dissembling building appeared in his vision as oblique angles of bone-colored concrete and unctuous, fibrous insulation and the wiring that had run through the building like so much vascular tubing. He saw no humans yet; but could imagine them in that soup like carrots cut on a bias or cubes of potato. His mouth began to water slightly; his blood sugar had dropped as he waited and the thought of soup whet an appetite that refused to be ignored for long .
It was the only thing more demanding than his girlfriends, he thought and snorted a little laugh below the protruding monocular lens of his pilfered military issue infra-red goggles.
Anyone who believes they are excluded from the Hobbsean war that is life is delusional and stupid and slightly immoral , he asserted. Everyone, all of us, must take responsibility for what we do and what is done in our name. We have, he thought, the most advanced, wealthiest and best civilization on earth, here in the United States, and you don't achieve that kind of massive success at harvest time without a lot of turned up soil in the spring. Some of the largest organisms in the world are living in the soil: mycelium.
Does anyone ever think of these organisms, he asked in his head as the building fell in its own footprint, as they dig up the ground? And how many other creatures are mashed up in the chomp of the beast as it tramples and mangles everything within reach of its feet and in line of its sight? And the bastard itself is under attack by predators in packs from its flanks and beset on all sides by burrowing parasites; and its lungs are assaulted by the air itself as it fills with poisons and caustics from volcanoes that puke and plume as exhaust to the engine that makes the lava that flows like Satan’s own paving crew laying road out into the swamps of the great oceans like a million Huey Long hypnopompic day-dreams along the bayou.
All of us are at war; at all times.
Denying it changes nothing; but there is something unseemly about a child that never grows up. Some people find the retarded male in his 40's that works at the grocery to be charming, he discursively continued. He couldn't stand to look them in the eye; it was another one of God's weird jokes he thought, and he wouldn't give the White Whale the satisfaction of recognizing his lordship's implanted, ventriloquized, wry smile on the face of such a man-child. From the retard he looked away; he had no courage for such things, he knew.
The lake's bottom began to find its feet and the water started to circle; he could see the building's now feral I-beams, like broken ulner and femoral bones stirred in a coven's cauldron, standing up at attention as their lower sections must have churned in the lake water’s bottom and their upper length leaned into the air above the hole.
He imagined the building would have blocked this view had its walls
not all collapsed by now; so, he smiled and imbued the absence of the edifice walls with a mind's-eye impromptu white-screen that itself was absorbing the dusty light of cinematic visions of what was happening all over town as the alarm calls were landing in this lacuna like birds homing in on an annual location that had been razed by a storm. The birds, confused, assuming their winter home would be there while they had summered in northern latitudes with a uniquely avian and blasé aplomb.
“They had made a harpooneer out of him, and that barbed iron was in lieu of a scepter now,” he said aloud as the building's separated parts, large and small sank below the event-horizon.
And inside the edifice that had once absorbed every cellular and wi-fi and landline emergency call in the surrounding county, every person went down with its walls and guts quickly and with silent alarm; their incredulous and recursive thoughts of bewilderment pawing at the glass of their cranial walls of their own heads like timid cats at the face of a masticating dog on the other side of the invisible barrier. He relaxed into his smile now and let it stretch out under the shadow of his night-vision monocle that stuck out from his head like a Narwhal.
Dozens, he thought, of stupid and amoral cogs in the ADT machine would be drowned and buried under the rubble of a security complex that monitored the thieving businesses that his team was, by now, breaching . It was a candle that burned at both ends, he thought.
He could return to himself the loot his enemies had stolen from him -well, not him exactly, but from his code, he amended this thought in his head and smiled at the double entendre. And he smiled as he exacted revenge on the tools used to guard these sullied assets as prologue. It had a symmetry and a literary quality, he thought. If he told people why he felt justified in murdering everyone at ADT; if he mentioned the law-suit in California by the Attorney General over unfair business practices and the conversations with them over their early termination fees he had heard, it would seem petty and small.
But that was his strength, he thought, the capacity to go all the way over a small infraction that was obviously a good indication of a much larger malaise. His talent was to see the first symptom as it was: indication of a future death if left untreated at this small, admittedly small, level. He was the sagacious doctor who saw the carcinoma in just one small mole.
These people were crooks, he thought, and their employees went along with it; thus they, like any low-level criminal in a larger illicit syndicate, deserved what they got when the whole scam imploded. There were no innocents in a world of permanent crime.
He was an artist, he would insist now, and anytime, challenged; anytime referred to as a mere criminal. And while he wasn't able to be as honest as he liked, and this inhibited his artistic expression, even denuded it, stunted its development, he thought, he was still able to create -then enjoy- the aesthetic of each revenge.
He imagined it was the way arsonists felt when witnessing their own infernos; or when a mortgage loan officer foreclosed on the home of a deadbeat who had pulled the copper wire out of the walls and cooked meth-amphetamines in the bathroom leaving the smell -turned patina- of the underside of once-good things left to die; or how a warrant officer felt in his Apache on a strafing run as he saw the bodies fly away like leaves from a cluttered walkway just as he had imagined when he had rode his bike down Whippoorwill Lane so many years ago.
Every man has a desire for equilibrium in his heart, a heart that is only half flooded with blood, half with breath, like water and air in a sloshing bowl on the deck of some outbound whale ship; and one day, in one way, he, he thought, might just grab hold of that bowl and set the fucking thing right to his chest and refuse to let any more of that red water spill out onto the deck of this ship.
We, he admitted, so easily see the errors of entire cultures from the Baptist Jim Crow south to those Good Germans buttressed by thoughts of Valhalla to the Roman Colosseum filled with the unambivalent Pagans and animists who tied twigs to their hair. But we think we're all so upright and moral now; as if our pasts are shook off like the species' eradication of polio or shorn off like our uterine fur . However, maybe one day someone, maybe everyone, he hoped, will look back on the way the banal and the lazy and the stupid just refused to do anything good or decent or moral inside their emasculating jobs and pharisaic HOAs and shake their head at the baseline immorality of a modern American culture that didn't give a shit .
Phrases like, “that's not my job,” or even worse, “ I'm just doing my job;” shit like , “I don’t wanna get involved,” will sound as craven and horrifying as, “ nigger, don't let the sun go down on you in Maccum County,” does to us all now, he thought.
As life gets more and more complex -and since 2004 e.v., more terabytes of info have been produced by humanity than in all of human history- we have more and more chances to get the wrong answer. Being stupid and lazy and insouciant, he thought as more and more people did in fact die in the imploded building he watched, about the consequences of your banal job, or your useless vote, or your insipid purchases is no longer tantamount to a caveman choosing to piss on the fire versus covering it with dirt. No longer are your bad choices easily absorbed by the environment. If you come from a large family you're most likely poor and uneducated; and in turn you, yourself, are more likely to breed.
The planet is dominated, over-run, infested with the worst kind of people and their choices to not-care, and to lionize this cavalier attitude, is going to kill off the best humans extant and the best species left on the surface and in the sea.
And even if you do care, you're most likely concerned with the wrong shit , he grumbled. And even if you care about the right issue or issues, you mostly likely have the wrong answer as to how to fix it. “Your instincts are wrong,” he said aloud; he said louder as the building’s collapse made so much noise now he could speak freely about each man and woman of his race.
Scientific studies show that one death, one case of misery, that is to say, one little boy washed up on the shore of a beach in Turkey causes more alarm, more angst, more outrage, more empathy in the hearts of the morally average than the thousands of people killed, tortured, displaced and abused before and after him.
The prime minister of England had said that image of that one goddamn boy caused such horror in him that it changed public policy. And because man is limited, because man is impoverished, he thinks small, local, personal; he thinks in terms he can actually effect. It’s innate. It’s innate for a reason.
But the globalists, the big-thinkers, he thought with pique, will tell you, that your instincts are exactly, shockingly, stupidly, wrong. And we as a species have to admit we have no clue how to live moral lives in this world, with millions of so-called neighbors or fellow citizens we cannot know or possibly care about; and we don't need any more religions, or mantras, or healing crystals, or self-help books, or Yogis, or lectures from Dr. Drew. We need machines and science to figure it out for us and give us a list of things to do, he thought, we need a machine that can have each man act in accordance with his nature and make it all -like God did before he retreated- work out in the end.
That to care about that one boy was itself not merely the right instinct, but that it was the instinct he had too, was banished for now. Tonight, he thought he was thinking bigger, and the mess he made helped him entertain that fiction that it was more than personal revenge. Tonight was like taking in the largest breath one can before he goes down into the well, the hole, the sea.
Of course, he thought, the Calvinists and Christian reformers will say that man is innately depraved and cannot choose the moral action without God's grace . As a metaphor this works, he gave them that; and theoretically they could be literally correct, although the chances of that were risibly small. “But let's give them the trope and assume we need something above us to give us the tools to even know right from wrong,” he said.
We need a boss. And, he thought, we need to be good workers; and care about the jobs we are given by these superior instantiat
ions of moral thinking, whether in us or above us, whether speaking to us or through us.
“And the condemned man will have inscribed upon his body: Honor Your Superiors ,” he said aloud, as he ruminated on these polemics. Why couldn't DNA be that tasker? It was, wasn't it? he began the dialectic with this question. He seemed to burrow down into that sentence, to each word, then each letter; as if it could be unpacked like the alphabet of genome itself.
DNA had given each organism its raison d'être for certain; so why was mankind such a disaster if the blueprints were any good ? Were those instructions, those impulses: hunger, lust, anger, pride, fear, social sense; were they any good? Obviously, they were since humans were so successful at the only prize evolution handed out: the reproduction trophy.
“I guess in a way it was nature's first participation trophy,” he said.
If your folks bred, they won; and by showing up in the world you too were a winner; and if you bred then you won again and since all of us were obviously born, we all came from a long line of winners. Can you imagine thinking of every person on earth as a winner? he wrinkled his brow as punctuation to this horrid question. Even with those low standards , he thought as some kind of answer; and it made his tongue feel wretched in his mouth to give everyone such laurels.
If DNA obviously was a good leader; why are we in this precarious spot? The metrics of success now, are different: happiness, equality, justice. We all take survival for granted; mere survival doesn’t seem enough; also, social dynamics are more complicated now making the one metric for our survival and happiness more and more difficult to achieve. Alienation is more common as the social milieu is harder to navigate. But this, he stopped mid-sentence and felt a conceit travelling like sound across a long hall to him as he waited for the sentence to complete itself.
It's because DNA codes for short-term gain. Period. Full stop, he thought. All of evolution codes for short-term gain. There is no long-term planning in evolution , he kept on thinking as the outlines of God began to appear in the stars he saw above him and the wreck he had wrought.
