by Roman McClay
Nobody knew the price he paid for his chivalry; that he was furious and enraged -his allostatic system all in permanent flux- at the way sex was discussed and treated so cavalierly, and that he as a boy was a natural target for condemnation for the crime of- wait for it- being a boy!
He fought and cursed and spit on the ground, he never took any shit when others were around; he felt the eyes of the world on him, shaping him up. He knew that the real predators watched to see how you handled the first salvo and first volley from weaker rivals and random arrows and slings. He guarded his reputation as he earned praise and popularity for his size and strength and comedy and banditry and the all-around chaos of fun.
But, he was martial, and atavistic in mien and manner and lower down even. He was a tiger or shark or the first asp, growing up and larger and meaner as the world revealed itself as it truly was. He was the shadow to the tree of life cast by his father and the sun and as the wind of the world blew the boughs he tracked the thing and its shadow too. He was of the world, not something abstract.
One day he had been chicken fighting with two kids, he and his charge beneath him, they as their portmanteau of rider on top and steed below, wrangling and commentating as the playground sand was kicked around. Then as Lyndon had had this kid bent back and about to fall off -securing the victory fair and square- the kid had spit on Lyndon, right in his face.
It was an outrage, it was beyond the pale of the game; and the kid, the spitter , had been let down from his steed and began running away. He knew -this was Lyndon’s first introduction to mens rea , the obviously guilty mind- the kid knew what he did was evil and sinister and blackened Alaska, and he ran like a muddy bloodhound from the bath. Lyndon gave chase, and to this day, decades later, he could remember each detail, the expanse of playground, the large boundary on the Air Force base, the concrete stairs that led down to the next set of stairs that led down to the courtyard between two 9-story Department-of-Defense school buildings, with shatter-proof glass in the doors. He could still see the wire in the glass, like honeycombs, the feelings that attended that chase of the evil-doer, the brigand, the one who dishonored him, with ignoble behavior, he thought, on the field of mock-battle!
The kid had traversed down the first set of stairs, with Lyndon two meters behind, and Lyndon had known this was a grave error on that kid’s part, as he -Lyndon- ignored the implicit requirement that one step down each step and instead flew through the air -launched from the top step- and landed perfectly on the fleeing scoundrel and tackled him to the ground.
Later, in a whisper, Travis, Lyndon’s older brother -by five years- had told him that when he, Travis, came upon the two boys fighting, Lyndon on top wailing and slamming the kid’s head into the concrete, and screaming epithets and curses and wild incantations, that Travis had heard Lyndon say, I’m going to kill you motherfucker .
This kind of rhetoric made whilst bashing a 9-year-old kid’s head with your fists, was shocking to the 14-year-old Travis and he said so at the time.
Lyndon scared people; they figured his violence would one day end up in spectacular bloodletting and they were not wrong. Even a regular guy can be right sometimes. Even the man of average tastes can sometimes see strange things to come.
But Lyndon had instincts too; and his were that the moral feelings in a boy are what give birth to the man. His instincts were that anyone who is insouciant about right and wrong, anyone who eschews justice for expediency or refuses to point out something untoward merely to avoid a fight, anyone who looks the other way at an ignoble action that maligns the man while they can because he -that man- is still just a little boy, well, that creature will never mature into a full-grown man, never stand up on his hind legs at all. The boy at seven is the man. This is a fact. And Lyndon was born to fight back.
His brother was further proof of this conceit, proof from the other side of the coin. That bastard -as a boy- never stood up for anything or anyone, Lyndon thought, Travis kept his head down and stayed out of trouble at all costs; even at the cost to his soul . And to this day, Lyndon thought, at this age, the guy is still cowering and cravenly bowing to his wife, his boss, his whole environment. And the culture is no better; he could count on one three-toed paw the number of men who stood up for other men, for this culture, for the concept of sexual purity and decency and the innate nobility of Man .
And it begins in the boy, of this he was sure. Because it must be innate, or it will never manifest. Science now has shown political affiliation and proclivities are personality based, in other words, reason and discussion and dialectic -facts- have almost no correlation to political stance. It’s deeply rooted in personality which is buried in the gravel-layer and even beneath all that, in the limestone substrate 40-million-years old like the bottom half of terroir in the region, in the country, just on the other side of the Rhine that hemmed him and his family in.
And he had it in him to the bone. He knew this because he was born pissed off and surly and sour and angry at the whole sloppy and uncouth mess of them, he had laughed -to keep from crying- at the composite photo amalgam his parents had assembled from photographs over the last 40 years. It was their 50-year anniversary and they included four images of they -man and wife- and their two boys, and from age one to 18. Each boy -Travis and Lyndon- was shown and in each phase of maturation.
Lyndon was -in each photo- sagaciously scowling at the coming catastrophe, and Travis beatifically grinning as if all was right with the world. It was as if his parents had put it together with the intent of explaining how radically opposite the two boys were from the jump. It was night and day, sun and moon, Cain and Abel in proud display.
Lyndon stared at the picture of him as a baby, being held by Travis. It is not an exaggeration to say that he was a scowling baby; a baby who scowls! And Travis in this picture was, of course, grinning from ear to ear oblivious to the malice and revenge compacted in his 25-pound baby brother, compressed tightly, like the original, horrible, universe in the first second of the big fucking bang.
It would be decades before Lyndon read that his instincts were backed by the idea that moral thinking was primary, and that consciousness was first and not physics at all; he had been raised in the shadow of the 400 years of scientific nihilism of Bacon and Descartes and Newton and then Einstein and Feynman and JBS Haldane; but the cracks were beginning to show and by the 2000s there was an eruption of pushback against the materialist view.
Scientists and philosophers -like Bruce Lanza- were finally saying that feelings and intuitions and moral thinking and the biology that undergird them were phenomenon extant in the mise-en-abyme before the inflation that gave rise to the cosmos and that values may -in fact- come first. Morality was primary, first, it was finally submitted by someone other than the Church. It was posited and demonstrated that morality and ethics and values were not made up ad hoc by so-called rational men.
Lyndon had known this, felt this, but doubted himself when he spoke on reality to anyone else. But, to find out that he was both living this way and right to do so was as liberating as when his neck was put into traction; his compression fracture of C5/6 had been -and would always be- like having a weight placed upon his head. To pull the head, via the neck, taut from -away from- the body was to relieve that weight and decompress the spine. Biocentrism and innate moral hierarchies as prerequisite for the perceptual system were to his soul and moral code as analgesics and muscle relaxants were to his neck and body writ large ; and needed ones at that .
His friend Chen would reject all moral thinking as mere side-taking in evolutionary machinations and Machiavellian hypocrisies. And that was fine, whatever, Lyndon thought, but just try treating Chen as if that were true; treat him like morality didn’t really exist and that he was just so many atoms bumbling into each other in the night, as if he was just iterations in the Prisoner’s Dilemma and see what he did . Chen would fly off the handle over any slight transgression of his innate sense of being and dignity, condescension
perceived at 500 yards. Chen no more believed in his scientific rationalism than Lyndon did. But, he talked a good game, just as Lyndon had for 20-odd years. This is what modernity has done to good men: made them amoral at best.
It was a risible and fatuous state of things, to have an obviously offended and spiteful and hateful man pretend morality didn’t exists. It never occurred to him that one would need be ecumenical and borderline brain dead to be truly agnostic to moral thinking; nobody could possibly live in the world that way. It would be like claiming humor was solvable in a differential equation in the middle of Bill Hicks’ Rant in E-minor ; the held pencil moving like a Richter scale wire as one doubled over in laughter; as tears of side-aching joy fell and bombed out each stupid integer of your goddamn equation for humor .
Nigga please, Lyndon thought and laughed at himself each time he thought of Chen’s so-called moral detachment; his nonsense philosophy that he didn’t live by for one second at all.
Man, he hated everyone else, he thought. Anyway, the whole reason he had begun this discussion with himself was to remember Athena, this ugly girl in farm clothes with bad skin, really bad skin, the kind that scars you, literally leaves scars so you are fucked for life due to hormones that rise and fall between ages 12 and 18. She was poor and quiet and shy in the most painful of ways, the kind of diffidence that attracts more evil that it dispels. The school’s most popular and those that would go on to be the Good Germans of our little world, would make fun and gossip and have a real good time, but Lyndon never enjoyed that sort of thing, and did not make fun of her even once.
And it was not because he was a good kid, he was not. He sold drugs out of his locker, cussed out adults anytime they offended him, and threw books -while high on cocaine- at a teacher who had had to jump back to avoid this assault.
He was mean and rude and broke 11 out of 10 rules and nobody over 18 thought he was even human. He was popular with girls, his looks and charm overruled; but he was rotten in some disturbing ways. He drove drunk often, and twice into a ditch; he rolled joints as he drove with his knee. He fought kids for no reason anyone with a 401k could discern, at 18-years-of-age he coveted every freshman girl that came within 200 yards. He took almost nothing seriously it seemed, he like a rat in cage, searched merely for the edge. He mixed pills and whisky and by four balls in the morning he was puking up black shit all over other people’s floors. It was stomach blood and Bourbon County mash, and it was years before he’d clean up his act.
But, he did not make fun of that poor girl -not once- in the five years he was in that school district. And he didn’t like anyone who did.
It made him seethe, it made him hate the world, it made him not want to participate in anything named Human at all. He wondered if the world ever thought that their picking on the weak and ugly and sad, in lieu of ridiculing the stupid and shallow and the bad, was witnessed by God, and God’s emissaries; by the lying spirits of God? He thought of double pendulums, and how chaos begins. He thought; and he thought some more .
There were so many opportunities for wounding, and haranguing and malicious defaming, this was a target-rich environment as the generals would say. They had all manner of teachers and rich kids and shit on TV to make fun of; they had bad musicians, squares of all descriptions and people with no joy in their hearts, but one did not need to pick on the ugly or overweight or the poor , he thought; that was just too fucked up and ugly itself .
He didn’t repress the feeling out of some superego suppression, he just genuinely did not find any humor at the expense of the ones that life had already singled out for doom. He felt no desire to heap malice on those that Satan had locked on to and that God had abandoned already.
And this was who he was too.
In addition to the revenge and the haughty arrogance and seemingly idiopathic violence, this too must be taken into account. He had a moral code, and it was one innate and born into him; and he took it as seriously as most people take their mortgage or their jobs or their precious money.
And this is why he struck back at the world, not for profit or to slake some psychopathic demiurge; he wanted justice and respect, and honor. He wanted to act as God’s own messenger for sexual purity in women, God’s own angels here on earth, and courier for the epistles conferring respect on the alpha male; orders from on high issued to the beta male and how he should behave.
It was a revanchist policy on biology, and it required that he follow his instincts, and no more. But, because he was not a psychopath, he cared what others thought, and thus, he was not going to let them call him a psycho or immoral or worse: amoral .
No, he thought, he had a noble, innate, God-given , raison d’être and they were going hear it, if it was the last goddamn thing he said aloud . He wished he could round up every kid who made fun of Athena and see just what kind of adult they turned into. They say, give us the boy at seven and I’ll show you the man ; and it was certainly true for him. He had changed only in capacity and terminology, but he was today who he was born to be.
And he knew those bastards that picked on little fat girls and made fun of the poor farmgirl with bad skin were just as evil now as they were back then, he could feel them out there, he could see them in his enemies of today. Only, he thought with a bitter smirk, they would be swaddled in an extra 100 pounds now of fat and social niceties and hidden venalities and the cover of bourgeois manners that hide who the real monsters are.
People think nice is tantamount to moral; and nothing could be more wrong. Nice is amoral at best; and often it is an excuse not to do the right thing. He thought of how many times he had heard and seen and felt the amoral types bleat out: oh, I don’t wanna be mean, I wanna be nice so I won’t saying anything while the whole country falls apart.
He thought, these are the same people who felt it was 100% ok to make fun of the weak, the ugly, the ganged up upon, the low, the bent, the broken, those unpopular to the mob. For, what is more unpopular now-a-days, he thought, than men, or the white race, or the skin of country itself -the border- as nobody says shit as what is best in this world is invaded, run down and shit on by modern bullies and cretins and scum?
This, he reiterated, is the Tao of modern women, and beta males, it is weak and ugly and phony and yes, it is oh, so, nice. Don’t say a word, keep your head down, ignore the country, the principles, the men who make it cohere at all, as it is made fun of, shit on, and taken down like a regal lion by these fucking parasites. Sure, everyone knew -in their thinking, rational, modern brains- that it was immoral to make fun of Donna Ladd for being fat, or Athena Jones for being poor and unsightly, but who said anything, who stopped it? Nice people? he asked with a contemptuous laugh.
Nice is not moral; it takes teeth to be moral, it takes aggression to be moral, it takes violence to be moral.
They did not send moms and nice boys to stop Hitler’s machine, they did not send nice folks to civilize the west, they did not send the nice to end slavery in the south. They sent men, violent and rough men with malice and hate in their hearts; hatred for tyranny, and slavery and hatred for the enemies of mankind. So, he thought as he mused on his smiling and soulless brother in those photos, and his nice-as-pie mother, he thought, fuck your immoral, nice, bullshit. Nice is cover for the truly monstrous, for those who let evil go on and do nothing to set it right, all while being unctuous and gregarious and smilingly polite.
He thought of the ancient goddess Athena of Greece, and he thought on the fact that she was a virgin first and foremost among her devotees. And he thought of the sword in her hand, and the wars fought all around her. He felt imbued with the boy he once was, and the purity of his rage and malice and designs on revenge.
He stepped out of the car, and chambered a round, and walked toward the dark door with his gun locked and loaded and his mind unalloyed with doubt or hesitation at all.
III. 2037 e.v.
“The entire sewage system on Cherokee & Delaware and Colfax & 14th are no good; they’re monitor
ed due to proximity to the Mint. I had to find another way and the only viable option was via the north end bathroom added in 2019 to the detention center. It leads to a parallel tunnel that I can use to store the ingredients separately,” Isaiah said.
“Oh, what you can’t premix it?” Blax asked.
“No, it’s like JB Weld, you gotta keep it separate until about an hour before use,” Isaiah said.
“Ok, but what about the access is better now with- well, with whatever the hell you had put in that toilet?” Blax asked.
“It was a driver, and it has a chemical signal that will collect each particle of the nitric acid and thus the hydrochloric acid has an omphalos to adhere to,” Isaiah said.
“And what about the raw ingredients?” Blax asked.
“Well, we have three months, so I am extracting it from the waste facilities of the detention center,” Isaiah said.
“The inmates?” he asked without clarifying.
“Yeah, and staff,” Isaiah answered without saying it either.
“You can make nitric acid and,” Blax paused, “from bodily fluids and fecal matter?”
“Yeah. It’s easy. Now, look, what will happen is the amount we need will be in excess of 40,000 gallons. So, I will need 87 days to do that. I have already begun with the chemicals and nanobots delivered via the inside-man’s urine at the detention center’s doctor’s restroom. That is the hub for all this. I’ve got FLIR images from Lansat9 that show between 1698 and 1708 metric tonnes in their sub-basement. And it’s in a 50 x 40 room. With 8-foot ceilings, so I calculated what I’d need,” Isaiah laid out.
