by Roman McClay
One expects strangers to take advantage, which is why you get receipts and get things notarized and draw up contacts; but he had done hand-shake deals with all these folks; and each one had burned him to the ground. Chen had told him he ought to have be more savvy; Chen had called it, business 101, Lyndon recalled. He smiled in the van thinking of a man like Chen lecturing him on business at all. Not that Chen was wrong, even a stopped-clock is right that one time a day , he thought, using a 24-hr clock of course, cutting the random accuracy in half.
He ought to have been more savvy , Chen was right; but he remembered even as a kid, wondering why locks were built into car doors, as if society expected -tolerated- thieving. He imagined a person one day would be born with a lock on his mouth, or heart even; an adaptation to the world as it was. He had truly found it sad that such devices that assumed perfidy and thieving were built right into the works; he remembered feeling this, way back, then.
And as a man, naïvely , he had still trusted men and friends and partners and women to tell the truth, and it was shocking each time they lied. But, he admitted, he ought not get too sanctimonious about it, he was king of the liars too . Boy, he thought, he could gild a lily or two.
The difference was he didn’t like to lie, and made an effort not to do it, he thought, and if people could remember just one thing is was this: he didn’t plot and scheme, he didn’t seek out to dissemble. He was a builder of things, machines and businesses - and he thought- relationships too. But, on second thought, he knew he probably , destroyed those things as much as he wrecked machines and ran enterprises into the ground too. He tried to be honest, and not make himself the hero; but one thing he knew: he did not cheat on his girl, and he didn’t steal from his partners or customers. He played those game straight up. He could say that without bending the truth at all.
He was about to become a murderer and strip the bodies of everything of value except the gold fillings in their teeth, but he never lied about the important things. He was engaged in his first 3-stage plot -maybe in his life, he thought- for usually he was a direct-action kind of guy. But these acts of vengeance -and he had a list of perpetrators nearly as large as a deck of cards- would demand some craftiness; he couldn’t do it as he did most things: with honesty, overtness and at the noon-of-day.
It was the Autumnal equinox, and his clock read 1851hrs, it was dark enough now to exit the van, and stroll toward the store.
III. 2018 e.v.
In some Hebrew tribes the son doesn’t mark birthdays from his birth, but from the father’s death. There is something sad and true and bold and brave in that , he thought. For the son and the father and all that must deal with them; for the tribe, he added.
The stars were so clear on the eve of August 1st, 2018, that the whole compound lit up underneath them. They were one thing, and the scorpions with their 10 eyes, their light-sensitive exoskeleton, scurried -under the shadows on mountain grass- away from the starbeams. They glowed in his borrowed UV vision and he saw them move about like the vault above, and he breathed consciously; the numina about and within him .
A city dweller, that poor creature has no idea what is in heaven, he sees only the albedo of his own coronal glow; the city lights from below, he thought.
He’d be asleep soon; the stars and the cosmic dust were so redolent, so bright that it signaled his brain to begin myelination and neuron-repair. His brain jacked up on a hydraulic lift, the mechanic under chassis testing fittings and welds; and tension on each taut line. Thinking is for God, Ahab he feels, feels, feels , he thought this -but thought he had whispered it aloud- he thought this into the moonless night; all darkness at ground level now, all above pure light . Sleep came upon him and his head fell into his chest and his back relaxed into the rock. The wind stopped and the light no longer bent.
“ Being hated is a sign from Me of moral success. John 15:18-19 states it plainly ; if ye were of this world, the world would love its own; but since ye are not of the world, but I the Lord have chosen you, the world hates you, ” He said and let the words hang in the air as the rain hit the ground and the sky lit up in staccato and the thunder finally came as response as if each word was a reverse-thread bolt; a crack in the plane he trod from above and below.
“Yeah, I see that now,” he said as a quiet encroached on all that was said before, erasing it, subsuming it, taking it into its guts. On this side of the brain he too laid on sliprock amongst the Animals and the Arachnids.
“Why are these words being buried in the unctuous parts of Leviathan?” He asked.
“I do not think most people understand what it is like to be hated your whole life; especially by those that are meant to love you. It’s one thing to be hated by other tribes, by strangers, but the people who were given the most reason, the most incentive, the most biological imperative to love you, when those people hate you it has an affect on you that isn’t really even understood.”
“Why? ”
“Well, because it isn’t something that happens to a fully formed adult; it happens to a child, and so it gets baked into the cake. It’s the difference between placing a hand on top of your skin versus placing a fist inside your guts. Spraying water on the outside of the car versus filling the inside up with it, I guess.
“I didn’t know what was happening, I thought it was normal. All kids of abuse will tell you the same thing; they thought it was normal. Because it is normal, it’s normal in the sense that you cannot know any other way but the way you are raised.
“My father was a tyrant and my family allowed it; they encouraged it because they hated me too. They saw his attacks on me as justified, and laudable payback. I deserved it, I know that. But, that’s not the same as them being righteous in their revenge.
“My own father threatened to kill me, like Abraham and Ishmael,” he said.
“Isaac,” He said.
“Well, there is some debate on that; I’m maybe wrong, who knows? But let’s just say that my father threatened to kill me twice. Once he justified by saying I had spoken too carelessly to a stranger, a woman neighbor of ours. And the second time he threatened to murder me for the crime of trying to fix the breaker box, resetting tripped breakers in a power outage in Ohio. I was 13 or 14, I had a friend with me, and I was trying to be helpful, fix a problem, because the lights went out.
“And he stood at the door and threatened me and my heart felt like a prey animal inside my chest trying to hide, burrowing inside, gnawing at the viscera and ribs to get away from this pain of violence and hatred by the man sent by You to protect me from harm.
“I hadn’t done anything wrong, I was being helpful. I was trying to reset breakers. I don’t think people can appreciate how it feels to be wrongfully accused and have the punishment for the ill-founded judgement be a death sentence. Is there anything more unjust than to be sentenced to death for a crime one did not commit?” he asked.
God could think of three such things but knew the man -as corrupt as he was- would still not understand.
“And people will laugh, mock, dismiss this because it was merely a threat. But to a kid, when your father threatens you, it is no mere threat. If a man threatens me now, now as a grown man, sure, I can dismiss it, or meet it. But a father, threatening murder of his young son? No, it has an effect on that boy that the world must deal with. It must. And it will.
“Now, when I bring this up to him, both he and my brother, they laugh at me, they dismiss me. My father whines that I am too sensitive and too eager to blame him. He does that mocking voice, you know the one people do when they say, oh, yeah it’s all my fault , you know? When they mean to say, none of it is their fault?” he asked if God knew what he meant.
“Of course I know the voice, all mankind does this when I show them how they sinned. Including you motherfucker. All of you people blame Satan, or Me even, but never yourselves. Job always protested his innocence first, that was his first claim. He did not take ownership over his innate failures, and for this I punish
ed him more, further, farther, and each time with more and more righteousness,” He said.
“I see that now. I see now; but now when I am mightier, they sue for peace.
“My father was abandoned by his father and so he hated me for being too proud, too haughty in his view, too arrogant as a boy; like I took his existence for granted, asserted independence too soon. It was like I wasn’t sufficiently grateful for him sticking around, you know? But I was a kid, what the hell did I know?
“I accept that this was true, his critique of me is true. Shit, I admit I am not likeable. But he let women raise me. A father is to raise his son to be manly, tough, disciplined, responsible, a bourgeoning man of depth.
“My father, shit, he outsourced my rearing to women, women of all creatures. The Spartans knew 2,500 years ago not to do this. But he feigns ignorance, of course. Like a wolf pretending not to know to go for the throat of a sheep. And yet, he expected me to grow strong, strong-of-body and mind and soul under the tutelage of weak and stupid women? And yet I did manage it, after years of self-abnegation, after years of tutelage of the masters, from Wulf, and the Stoics and Bushido, and Caledonian kings, and the wisdom of You and the ancient Grand masters of art .
“And when I showed him that I had become masculine, he plotted with my enemies to wreck me.
“When I asked him one time, twice Lord, to stop mentioning money to me, to just let me work in peace for a few more months and then he could have everything thing I owned. Instead he kept at it, and kept at it, and kept insulting me and my honor, kept undermining me by talking about what I had politely -three times- politely asked him to stop bringing up,” he said as his heart hurt and his lungs felt incapable of breathing in this thin air. He thought of the fourth time, the final time he had spoken with vex.
“What was his fear?” He asked.
The sliprock became softer and the ants encircled him now and faced out toward a forest of just black sticks in the dirt. The sun was high but it did not shine, it absorbed and the dark edges of the forest were drawn up and into the singularity in the sky. He said things that made no sense to God, and each word was swatted down; each letter back to earth to lay on the ground mangled and riven and smoldering at edge.
“And I had denied it,” he kept on as God allowed this to get through to Him. “Because I felt it was unmanly to ever blame one’s parents for anything; and these slick bastards they used my honor against me. And yet, I knew the truth: he had beaten me, whipped me, threatened to murder me, and let my brother do the same, and my mother stood and watched it all; she never intervened. When I was small, and weak, he used force,” he said.
“What was used once grown?” God asked.
“And once a man, once I became a man, well, then he told me to stop whining, and that he had nothing to do with it, and that I need be polite and calm and never raise one’s voice at all. Never use my power You gave me; never behave as they had behaved toward me.
“That is the way of my family: they beat you, malign you, undermine your honor, and then if you speak too loudly in your protests to this treatment, they claim you’ve committed an unpardonable sin. It was my objection to injustice that was too visceral, as my brother called it. Too visceral , he said,” he said this as his voice cracked just a bit, enough to let some light in. He felt hot at the lung, just warm further in. His heart stopped to calm the waters of chest.
“They hated you for what I put in you. But you must not assume you know the whole landscape, you only know half of the one half of world. All good men are touched with Evil; but they find it dyspeptic and will be spit out of the Whale as they puke and rend their own flesh; they look at their claws and show them in the light, as warning to all to avoid evil undone.
“But Evil men are touched with My goodness and thus have the vice that pays complement to virtue; they retract their claws in public, and feign goodness, are calm and polite and plotting at all times; your visceral nature is proof that you have nothing to hide! Demons unsheathe their talons and fangs only at night, surreptitiously, covertly, and slice slumbering children thinly at the neck and groin.
“There’s a war on, man!
“I have allowed the Devil to place my people at the edges of his best pieces; I allowed Satan to test you, to test Me; to test the equation I have been solving since before the waters and the light. There is mathematics at stake. And you cannot understand. So, I put the math in the language of biology so creatures as simple as you could comprehend.
“Why do you think your father had no father? Why did your mother escape from her herding family at once? You’ve been fucking around too long. You’ve missed nine-tenths of the signs.
“What you see as deformation in you, a twisting, rending, corrupting of psyche, I see as an annealing, an alloying, a Damascus steeling of soul. I’ve said it, I’ve said it plainly, after years, decades of dreams, a million eons of endocrine communiques I’ve sent in the night. People wanted DNA or AI mentioned in the Bible as proof of my existence; the fucking idiots! I put DNA and brilliant instinct into each animal! That is more proof than they demanded. It’s as if I gave them 100 dollars and they argued with Me and said they wouldn’t be happy with anything less than a buck! They wanted prose and I gave them poetry, they wanted noises over My music, they wanted efficiency when I provided fucking soul.
“You have heard me, and it has burnished you, and you’ve come close to passing the test. But your liberalism, your sentimentality for their ersatz position, your corruption, has prevented you from acting until now. You pretend to be good in these realms but when you awake you sound just like -no better than- they do; you sound like a rational man.”
“ I forget these dreams when I awake, I can’t remember what is said,” he objected. He knew he ought not cry, he knew it was unfair to them both. But his heart was sorry for being weak as a child when he ought to have been born a full grown man. He had stayed too long as a child who only thought of himself. He regretted nine tenths of what he had done.
“Goddammit, I put the knowledge in your body -where it is safe- not your mind. Your body has each injunction, each rebuke, each permission, each weapon, your body tells you with each breath and each heart beat and each stride of all four limbs, man! You know what to do. And yet you ignore the poetry and music and soul to listen to prose, noise and the clacking efficiency of the world. You listen to homilies by weak men pretending to read from My Book. You actually think this peace and forbearance shit is from Me? You cannot be serious.
“Did I not send, set, each man against false father?”
“Matthew 10:35,” he agreed that God had.
“But you abandoned Me, you joined forces with the modernists and ideologues, false gods, and with callow atheists, and for two decades you fought alongside these wicked men -these watch-heads- without Me. And you sinned in ways I will not repeat aloud. But I never abandoned you; I waited until they could no longer stand your success -and not your mere material success, that was nothing- no, they hated your success of soul, your ability to be strong in the face of so much that abraded you.
“They hated you for resilience, 12 times 12 you rebuilt from a stolen heart, total collapses of modes of survival. What enraged them was your embrace of laboring, my first commandment, my first punishment that was issued in the Garden: to work. You were the kid who ruined the curve. You were -they all thought- supposed to slurp up the sluiceway of modernity and yet you puked it up on their shoes.
“You embraced this punishment of labor when they had eschewed it, delayed it, belayed it and demanded a stay of execution. Satan gave them wealth and ease and soft lives, and you turned him down and walked rightly, straightly, penitently into hard labor and this is why they hated you. You think it is an accident that the worker is the most hated now of all? Satan is in full rebellion now, right now, wise up!
“They knew you were of this type early, they felt it in their black bones. And they tried to kill you in the womb, you do not know this, but your mother a
ttempted an abortion, and your father poisoned her once too. And as a child they tried to let you die four times, with a tree, a body of water, the edge of a chasm and in one final unnamed way. All four times they failed. But you did not succeed. Do not confuse the two.
“The warrior is direct, the good man speaks his mind, the righteous comes with a seen -not hidden- broadsword. You have been fucking around too long.
“Now, I’ve spoken to you from My knowledge into your capacity for knowledge, like a river into a thimble.
“This is less true than the transfer of wisdom; I have spoken plainly this time, and it is the last time -of four times along any arc I choose- that I will debase myself with this inexact form of Truth; your language feels like brambles and sand in My mouth. I have no way to hammer this into you without breaking your anvil. And if you want my hammer to ring out in your mettle forever just keep up your stupid bullshit and see what I do.
“Speaking in your grunting argot -like this- is only half true, necessarily so, for without total knowledge you cannot have any knowledge; conversely, with a little wisdom you can have it all. This is why I come 99 times in dreams, in the guts, the viscera and its lower parts. And this is why you have returned to Me; not from rational language, but from Truth you felt in your heart.
“And return you have; returned as daggerman for Me,” He said .
“I have Lord,” he said and felt grateful.
“And so, will you do what is necessary? Will, you be as an inheritance and leave nothing left alive that breathes?”
“Of course. I have my list. And each name has your sanction?”
“It does,” God said, “it does twice and from both ends of the cosmos, both sides of my mind. But remember this, they all loved you when you were most sinful, when you were least noble, you were loved. And you loved it; you still have desire for this world’s love, and this will -if you fail- be your only failure at all.”
He awoke in the night and saw no shadows, just his breath in two plumes from the nose. He heard no noise from the forest, just some creaking in the brain as the dream -he remembered- had said only one thing: do not speak to irreligious men anymore . The black-lith had told him this and given him something he now held in his hand .
