by Roman McClay
Lyndon knew right then, that he was alone, and that the old man was not fit for command. “He had failed me with the ships,” he said aloud one day, apropos of nothing obvious, as if when he spoke everyone had been along for the internal dialogue the whole time; as if all had read the same books and learned the same lessons from life .
His father was not all bad, in fact at most times in his life he was righteous and behaved with nobility and honor. Lyndon was as certain of this as he was of the fact that -conversely- the old man had now become corrupt and weak and shallow and a fool and that he held no place in the tribe any longer; a man with diminished vision. He was a king in name only, with an obsequious but hating wife, a craven but unfeeling eldest son and a youngest son once begging to admire the now failing king; a youngest son who was now out for blood.
And whether the old man could understand or respect this usurpation was no longer a concern of the heavy scion who carried forth the genome from the Ben Nevis of Caledonia , and the ponderous malice through the new world and the avoirdupois of revenge over the mountainous south like so much cargo that Lee had never saw much use in carrying.
Lyndon had learned that his thoughtfulness, his willingness to see both sides, had been a liability now.
Nobody else did it, and so his ecumenical mindset had been a unilateral disarmament. He learned that he must learn to act without thinking, without rumination, without hesitation, and the only way to do this was to become inured, insouciant to the shallow and deceitful and evil feelings of his enemies; and his own family had become -and maybe always were- his natural enemies. He would learn to no longer hear his father or country when they bleated and wailed. He’d cut first the throat.
This was not because they had done him wrong all the time; on the contrary they had done right by him more often than not. No, he thought, they were his enemies because they hated him, and had -instead of killing him in the crib- merely played the middle way, the Tao of rearing, the halfhearted raising of the troubled, haughty, oedipal boy . The leadership of the family and the country had fallen in the hands of the weak who were tyrannical in execution, but chaotic in their fiats.
His family nor his country loved him. And he took that as tantamount to a declaration of war. He wanted, he needed , to be loved. It was in the genome. It was there if anyone had bothered to look. He wondered if the country knew what they had on their hands as some contingent -was it 10 or 15% or more?- of men who felt maligned, unloved, and would soon too be out for blood. TV shitheads talk of money and jobs, but biologists talk of feelings and love. Men need to be needed, wanted, loved. Alpha males need things deeper-in than their wallets and lower-down than the thoughts in their heads. Mathematicians talk of primitives , but does anyone bother to listen?
Facts may not care about your feelings, but one’s feelings don’t give much of a fuck for your facts. Those are facts too . The world runs on feelings not fucking facts, he thought.
They had taken their shots when they could, insulted him as much as they could get away with, and punished him by never articulating his worth. They’d fed him, kept him in clothes, and provided for his education; they had not damaged him so badly that he needed surgery, and had not abused him overtly that the bruises would long show. No, they had just undermined him the way unthinking and unfeeling people do when they have a sensitive and open boy in their midst. They’d made sure that he always felt that his instincts -his feelings, the way he saw things- were corrupt and wrong and black hearted; even as he knew his feelings were anything but. They cut him off from his past, his genome, and told him he was the one wrong, and that nobody in history had been like him at all.
This is in fact what modernity tells atavistic men. It tells us all life can be measured with wealth like Ceausescu’s babies’ health could be measured with availability of food and water. It tells us that life expectancy can be measured by material luxury, like they thought Romanian orphans’ chances of survival could be measured by homeostatic warmth. But actual life spans in the US were dropping now for the third year in a row despite our goddamn wealth, he thought. Modernity is Ceausescu’s orphanages all over again, and nobody noticed at all. We are dying, from lack of touch, lack of fraternity and love. Humans -modern humans - are dying from scientific rationalism writ large .
But men are starting to see back into history, down in the genome, and in toward their own souls and can see it isn’t them that are wrong, it’s modernity that is sinister and totally corrupt. Men are starting to talk to each other and listen to their own balls. War is coming and there isn’t anything society can do to stop it; for war is the natural state of man. And war is a virtue not a vice. The fire of the forest is what opens the cone and adds nutrients to the soil. So foul as sky clears not but with a storm.
He had stood up for the weakest of the tribe, the women and children maligned, from the earliest ages, he had been the defender of principles at great personal cost . He had, he thought, they had not.
Lyndon -at age 8- had stood up to a dozen bullies to defend the little fat girl; he -at age 9- had beat a kid about the head for spitting on him in a chicken-fight, for dishonoring him so; he had -at 18- taken a charge of criminal trespassing, two of them in fact, for his friend Todd, when his friend had driven across two jurisdictions so that they could drink whisky and shoot guns in the night. Todd had no license and when the cops came he had barely gotten the conceit out to ask Lyndon if he would say he was the one driving before Lyndon said that, he would .
Lyndon believed in friendship -men as more than means , but as ends in themselves- more than he believed in keeping himself out of trouble; for the real trouble would be what it meant to his soul if he let his friend take a felony of driving under suspension merely so Lyndon could avoid a misdemeanor of trespassing for himself. He wasn’t dumb to calculus, he just placed honor and loyalty here on earth, here among the tribe, higher than some clean record in the sky. He laughed with all but the eyes when he thought of what people did and said when he asked for one one-hundredth of such sacrifice. Everyone else only cared about their permanent record, their unblemished skin, their precious bank accounts.
He had given away all -literally all- his worldly goods to the cause when he went to Zendik, and he worked for $200 a week so he could go door to door in poor and black, working-class, neighborhoods to organize against the capitalist swine who preyed upon the underclasses by poisoning their water and air. He had stood up for what was right and now that it was he, and his Nordic brethren, that were the underdog, he would stand up for them too.
And he vowed he wouldn’t be called selfish, corrupt or immoral by people who cared only for money and conformity and lies and lies and lies; he’d not be called this without a vigorous defense. His family were disgusting liars and they had tried to make him feel as if it was he who was immoral when it was they all along. They would use these same examples against him as proof of his low character not his nobility. His violence, or arrests, in defense of others, and honor, were just called criminality by his bourgeois relations and, anti-social behavior, by the white-collar world.
The world was upside down and so, he asked, how do you climb out of that- except by digging further down as they beckon you to their inverted top? He thought this and breathed in the mountain air, even as he was down in the ravine. He kept walking even as his pack now chaffed his neck at the strap and was rubbing, a hole or a callous , he thought, into his back. He let the soles of his feet ache, he didn’t stop due to his hamstrings feeling taut and vibrating like strings to a lute. He let the sun move to his aft as he headed east into the forest.
His own family hated him with this same smile-to-the-face but undermine-in-the-dark style, and it showed two things: weakness and bleak, cold, hatred. They were too weak to challenge him directly now that he was grown, and they hated him too much to make amends. It was a permanent cold-war between the races, and between he and his family, between each type of man. Either someone loved you and showed it, or they
hated you; and thus, if they hated you, then you ought to destroy them as they sought to destroy you. There would be no compromise with the group.
He knew his need for masculinity, for honor, for independence and bravery and autonomy were not anti-social, but natural, but they -his family and society- never let him hear that as anything but a squeak nor from anywhere but his own strangled heart. Those with history of strength, a long chain of power and honor, going back tens of thousands of years, cannot be allowed -not by the modern world- to see how far back -and how strong- the chain is, lest they are buoyed by such things. When tethered to the gods, chains can lift a man up.
Man is social, he’d think as the data from his lineage had come to him a few years previous, and to know his native, martial, righteous, instincts are older than trees, as old as the oldest tribes, would give him the power, the confidence, to never back down. He was a part of something larger, much larger than just himself, he would think as the alleles showed him blood sequestered above the Thames and the Norwegian sea .
He overpowered them with his anger and righteousness and a life well lived; he lived his honesty, he lived his authenticity, he spoke his goddamn mind. He admitted error, thought about it from their POV, and expressed gratitude and demanded only an even exchange. But, they were all out of remuneration, were constitutionally broke, and could not reciprocate even when he gave all that he had. These were greedy, grabby, spiritually impecunious, weak, and cowardly and unprincipled people who did the right thing only out of inertia or fear or convention, never from thinking about it too much. So, when he demanded a conversation, a dialectic, a reasoned approach, well, they couldn’t handle it, not emotionally not intellectually, not in any way at all. They always changed the subject when he spoke of his heart.
However, if they had no time or place for conversation and debate , he thought, if they had no tolerance for musings on the vagaries of fate, no give and take, then war it would be . They couldn’t admit that they had failed him by letting him be raised by women -mother and female teachers the entire time and the whole fucking way- and failed to instruct him in the ways of men: hunting, fighting, and care of authentic females; how to separate the wheat from chaff. But he would not be ignored, he insisted as he came to a pass in the forest with man-height boulders now round and stacked like sea-foam and brook-bubbles discreet here and conjoined there, and he chose a path between them based on his eyes and the way each footfall led the next into space.
And so, he too would stop all bilateral talks and launch his air and ground assault. They say that war is politics by other means. If they wanted war, then they’d get one , he thought; and he remembered how they had acted -what the rules were- when they were big and tough and mean, when he was just a little thing. He remembered everything. He had a brain that was so loaded with epinephrine from fear of the tyranny of youth that -as science shows- each memory, each lesson, was hardwired in the central nervous system now. He had more than a memory; he had an actual past that led right here and right now. He had a past like a fist has an arm, and an arm has a man and a man has a tribe and a tribe has land and that land has the sea .
High cognition, and high adrenaline, equals a memory that ought make everyone scared, he would think with a wry smile and fingernails digging into his palms. He kept thinking, recursively, endlessly, maniacally, of each crime committed by each side, and he attached three words to each one.
Now between the beige and clay-red rocks that rose above his own head, his hands on the smooth sides, his feet up and down on sand and sliprock, the shadows before him from the western sun, he thought of Theseus’ advice to his fellows of the Bull Court, leave the tale so, dear comrades of our mystery, you have told them all that they will understand. Don’t cry against the wind.
III. 2017 e.v.
He shook his head in mild contempt; as she fiddled on the tablet. He looked at his boots, cut along the top of the steel safety toe, the hard backing making the leather more susceptible to fissure when pressure was placed upon it.
This too is why taut skin slices open easier than the doughy parts of a beast’s flesh. The soft part of the boot gave -yielded- when contacting an abrading source, and thus was merely marred, but the steel under the front toe-leather, between the world and his toes, gave the shoe-skin nowhere to go, no retreat from anything he might kick or anything that might fall upon him.
And thus, the toes of the boots, square and taut and brown and mottled black from soil and concrete and blood and the flotsam and jetsam of his rural, working-class life, were scarred with open wounds of leather, wide apertures, obvious wounds, stuffed with more grime and small grit and sand.
He looked at their size, a UK 12, a European 45; their broken soles, riven at the place of articulation between fore and aft of the boot and this the foot. He breathed out finally, the CO2 levels had built up in him due to his shallow breathing, and he exhaled in a huff. She -the doctor- heard this and looked up; he was like a half-wild and half-tame animal to her; she was 33 and had been in Trinidad, Colorado for two years. She had taken this job at San Rafael Clinic in a town of 8,056 people; she saw five patients a day. She was part of a larger staff of 12 doctors, and she was still accepting new patients, like this man, Lyndon J MacLeod , she read his name again to herself.
He was 44, Caucasian, 74” tall, 204lbs, brown hair, brown eyes, no known allergies, except cats, which he told her not to prescribe to him as a function of this allergen. She had barely smiled at the quip and he had noticed this lack of mirth, lack of generosity; she was front loaded with contempt for him. He settled in now for a contretemps .
He fit the profile of drug-seeking behavior, not that she would tell him that. Doctors lie incessantly to their patients; not that they would tell them that either. Their errors are the 3 rd leading cause of death in the US, while the opiates they all hate so much -that are so dangerous they say- kill only 7,000 people a year when prescribed by a doctor -less than from bicycle accidents- not that they’ll tell you any of that, he thought.
Abagail Norris DO, had reviewed his chart and noticed a recent automobile accident in 2013, a motorcycle accident before that in 2000, and a gap in the record between 2004 and 2008, in which he reappeared in the charts for Arbor Family Medicine in Thornton, Colorado .
They had prescribed him hydrocodone 10mg/500mg at 90 pills a month beginning in 2002 for 15 months until he failed to show up for a visit and did not reappear until 2008. He had suffered a compression fracture of the C5/6 vertebrae in the neck and several additional broken bones, healed, with bone spurs and radiating nerve damage -verified by EEG in 2013- from unknown sources. It was merely diagnosed as sequela, she read.
He was a non-smoker, non-drinker, no drug use, he had tried Medical Marijuana for four months and abandoned it according to the file; he was unmarried, no kids, had been treated for prostate infection with Cipro , twice, and was also on diazepam -2mg- once a day. His BP was 121 over 78; pulse was 77.
He had been on pain meds for 10 years straight at the instruction of his physician in Denver, but he had moved to the Trinidad area this year -2017- and was seeking to establish himself with a local medical provider.
She marveled at how a man could be prescribed pain medication long-term -like this- from a family doctor; it just wasn’t done anymore; but - she conceded- when it began in 2002 and 2008 it was not controversial as it is today.
But, his behavior was mildly aggressive and cloying in equal measure, he presented a charming affect one moment then hostile and confrontational the next: the classic behavioral ideation of the drug addict and she was disinclined to even take him as a patient. But, her practice needed the body count, so she decided to refer him to a pain clinic instead and keep him as a patient for all other maladies he might acquire. She had decided all this in the first 90 seconds. She had barely heard one word he had said. She was like the mechanic that throws parts at a problem on a vehicle before even truly looking under the hood.
Everything was sta
tistics now, everything was probability and percentages and efficient as fuck. But humans have redundant systems, two lungs, two kidneys, two eyes in their heads; two hemispheres of the brain too , he thought in passing. Efficiency is for machines, not men.
She would ask him some question to make it look good; but her mind was already made up. He would get no drugs from her. And she would cut this visit as short as possible. He had been late, with some annoying excuse of a flat tire , and plus, she was nervous around him. He was big and rough looking, with a big black beard, and neck tattoos and an entire arm, massive and vascular, completely black with tattoo ink, down to the hand knuckles. She saw scars than no man she knew had. They had not come from rescuing kittens from fires , she thought.
And he spoke in a hyper-constructed English, brimming with medical terminology and 25 cent words, all designed, she was certain, to manipulate her into thinking he was not what he was: a redneck drug addict ; not to put too fine a point on it, she amended, but that was what he was .
He was probably even a sociopath and had convinced his doctor in Denver, some old white guy no doubt, to keep shoveling the meds at him. Well, she was not going to participate in what the ADA frowned upon; she agreed with their conclusion that opiate pain medication should never been used more than once or twice for acute trauma or surgery recovery, but never long term. No pain was that bad , unless one had cancer and was in end-of-life care protocols. She knew this, because she had read books that explained it. She was educated and these working-class roughnecks didn’t know what she knew.
