Fallen Nation: Party At The World's End

by James Curcio

  Fallen Nation: Party At The World's End

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Epilogue

  FALLEN NATION

  Party At The World's End

  © 2006, 2010 James Curcio

  By James Curcio

  Copyright 2011 James Curcio

  Smashwords Edition

  Co-written by Jason Stackhouse

  www.joinmycult.org

  Based on FALLEN NATION: BABYLON BURNING,

  a screenplay by James Curcio and Jason Stackhouse

  Special thanks to Anna Young Kelland

  and the rest of the initial Fas Ferox team,

  To friends, family, and lovers for putting up with me

  in the process, and my wife Jazmin.

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-4524-9372-5

  Print edition ISBN: 0615512771

  MythosMedia.net

  “Fallen! Babylon the Great has fallen!

  She has become a home for demons.

  She is a prison for every evil spirit,

  every unclean bird, and every unclean

  and hated beast.” Revelations 18:2

  Chapter One

  The day nurse put on her jacket. Her gray, veiny hands looked fat. She scrawled the final lines onto her daily report. Date: March 15th, 2012. Signature: Stephanie Anne Heickle.

  She explained the events of the day to her replacement, handing her a clipboard in the process.

  It had been an uneventful day, she explained. No orderlies with oozing compound fractures. No flailing and howling. The worst was trying to get “Dionysus” to take his meds, which was more like arguing with a pedantic philosophy major than dealing with a schizophrenic. He was tedious, but not usually dangerous.

  Eventful days provided distraction. Home was a furnished apartment with a stained rug, an ungrateful bitch of a house cat that liked to urinate on furniture just because she could, and the obvious absence of a significant other to share it with. The invalids drooling on her at work were as close as she got to hot and heavy.

  Dionysus was one of two patients brought in after some stunt at a diner that turned ugly. He was a maladjusted paranoid – most paranoids were maladjusted, right? – and his cohort was a gender-dysphoric turnip with a genius IQ that referred to itself on good days as Jesus. Neither had ID, and both refused to go by any other name. Definitive evidence was never found, but guilt by association was enough to prove terrorist conspiracy.

  Supposedly, Dionysus was the head of a cabal of domestic terrorists. She doubted it. It seemed to her that he was just as bored as she was, spinning imaginative yarns for the doctors for the sake of juvenile entertainment. The only sign to the contrary was that anyone who spent too much time with him had a habit of going insane.

  After signing in, the night shift nurse started walking down the hallway to fourth ward, where she would begin checking on the patients. Her shoes squeaked loudly on the yellow linoleum, making her task – confirming that the patients were asleep – slightly counter-productive. She clicked her tongue at herself, trying to walk more carefully.

  Scritch, scritch, scritch. The night nurse waddles through the hallways on those god-awful rubber-soled shoes. Back and forth. I can’t rationally blame her pacing for my insomnia, but I do it all the same.

  I feel the walls leering in at me each night as I roll around in my lice-infested bed, my eyelids clenched shut. They will probably look like two desiccated grapes by morning – swollen, sticky, and purple-veined – as I toss back the meds with bitter-tasting water. I just finished counting the blocks again. (There are 551 cinder blocks, 104 and a half floor tiles, and 25 asbestos-dusted ceiling tiles in my room.)

  I was atrophying. No sex, terrible food, no music. There is no worse imaginable hell. Bored is bad. Bad for me, and even worse for the staff. I get creative when I get bored. Maybe those who tend the mental health machine are as much slaves as we are. I wouldn’t know, stuck as I am on the inside of the metal-insulated plate glass.

  It’s “depressive ideation,” the doctors say, to think about the poisonous PCBs, polluting our bodies’ water by proxy. It is an “obsessive fixation” to mention the soil, leeched of its vital nutrients, leaving us all hollow as dried gourds. Granting dreams equal reality with waking was “magical thinking.” They had a nifty name for everything, and a real obsession with sickness. They saw it everywhere.

  These things are just the realities of our lives, if we open our eyes. The lie is grinning talk show hosts, Prozac, the American Dream of normalcy, homogeneity, safety. The natural state of the human animal in troubling times is not happiness. Show me a man grinning in the trenches as the bombs fall, and I will show you a lunatic.

  The first couple months, I was sure the story wouldn’t end here. I held out hope. I was, after all, just an overeager, idealistic kid. I thought I could break the cultural brainwash by hopping on a table with a toy gun and scream “You’re free!” Apparently that gets you a twenty-to-life sentence these days.

  The terrorists didn’t just fly planes into buildings. Somewhere in that twisted rubble lies the shattered remains of this country’s sense of humor. I admit that the Shahada flag flying behind us in our propaganda video may have given the wrong impression.

  Bottom line: ideas don’t count for a whole lot in this world, but on their own, they’re mostly benign. Ideals, on the other hand, get you a special jacket with one sleeve. Ideals get you shot.

  I lost that idealism as months turned into a year. Our guerrilla street teams of lunatics – whole lot of good they were to the two of us that got hauled in. And Jesus was lost to us all, wandering endlessly in an inner world of possibility. I envied his Eden, where he was a she and all was as it should be. That wasn’t my dream, but I knew what it was to be consumed by an ideal. It sure beat the hell out of the reality that the doctors were trying to adapt us to. A world that deifies the flat-line of an EKG, a world without moods or personality, a place where stability only equals stagnation and where genocide and rape in the name of National InterestTM is fine, so long as you choke down the meds and ride the neon escalator to zombie-land.

  Socrates said, “An unexamined life isn’t worth, living,” didn’t he? Well, a life inside a black box isn’t a life at all. Each day atrophies my soul. And with this goddamned three foot tall Venusian goddess squatting just behind my shoulder? – Cow teats jangling and flapping wetly, her breath sweet like honey and milk with the copper tang of blood – I mean, how can anyone expect to get any rest with that? It’s just not right.

  Fuck is it ever hard to get to sleep around here.

  The next day, I was in the rec room. The drugs they pumped me full of were just starting to wear off, and there was some awful cartoon playing on a beat up TV that hung above us.

  Watching cartoons in a mental asylum is disturbing. Please understand, this is coming from someone who might find talking to a Goddess while the world burns an entertaining but not otherwise abnormal experience. Maybe serpents writhe out from under her skirt. Maybe your nose is overwhelmed with the smell of sandalwood and you discover that she has a head like a rooster. Maybe you’re both Egyptian Gods. She has a screaming orgasm, and only then you realize you both ate a ten-strip a few aeons ago. Et cetera, et cetera. My point is, I can handle that. That’s normal, but the routine...that’s what kills me, a piece at a time.

  It isn’t just an enemy, though. Routine is essential to keep you sane in a place like this. I realize the irony of saying that. Ti
me is different when you’re locked up. The building takes on a life of its own. You are just a parasite in its metal and concrete bowels. Clocks dictate your movements. When drugs are administered. When it is time to eat, when it is time for walkies. Saturn rules us. This is the underworld.

  The routine won. The story very well could have ended here: an endless procession of days lost in these hallways, living on anti-psychotics, industrial food, coffee, and nicotine, if it wasn’t for a series of events that brought my soul to light once again. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Routine said today was Wednesday: one-on-one time with Doctor Fein at noon. I took a quick glance at our ticking overlord. It was eleven forty-five.

  At eleven forty-seven, the first glimmer of hope arrived in an unexpected place. A package from FedEx. I was scrawling another page in the journal Doctor Fein had asked me to keep for him. (Instead, he got a jaunt through my head. Poor guy.)

  As I looked up and paused to chew on my crayon, I locked gazes with a familiar, mischievous face. Loki. He gave me one of those “don’t blow my cover, asshole” stares. That is how he usually looks at me, though.

  I lean back and take in a deep breath. The first full, down-to-the stomach breath I’ve taken in months. Loki was up to something, and if anyone could spring us, it was him. Birds flutter outside the barred windows of the commons, the first signs I’ve seen of spring. Suddenly, time was on my side.

  The orderlies walk up to me; two shambling Golems with brains rendered little better than off-brand Jell-o by years of American Idol and a strict diet of high fructose corn syrup. They drop a sorry-looking teddy bear. It stares back at me from the ground with button eyes. I’m not sure how buttons can look simultaneously cute and forlorn, but these do. Just a little lost Mr. Teddy.

  “This came in the mail today, it was from your family,” one of them said.

  I pick it up.

  “Mr. Teddy! You’ve come back to me!”

  I ambled back towards my room and try to look like I’m having a conversation with little men in the ceiling. My fingers run a pattern across threadbare fur. They come to something solid, deep inside its fuzzy little belly. Oh, Loki. If these are as good as the last batch of psychedelics, then the staff of this ward are in for an interesting evening.

  I’m sorry Mr. Teddy. It looks like it’s time for exploratory surgery...and I’m no doctor.

  Doctor Fein sat at his desk, rigid as a statue. The late day sun filtered into his room through the slats of the blinds behind him, revealing all the dust, fragments and detritus freely dancing in the air. Filth. He paused from writing and ran his hand across his desk, leaving a trail of dust behind it. Filth.

  He sat in front of his journal, reading it over and over again, looking for signs of mental illness. It was a project he’d secretly started since certain irregularities had appeared in his behavior.

  03/15/12 11:39:31 AM. The Journal of Dr. Fein, M.D., Ph. D.

  Here is the life I have chosen for myself: I arrive at the hospital every morning at seven. I am not expected until eight, but I use the time to digest the reports from the evening staff and have a cup of coffee in my office. Pink, blue, yellow pages, I match checked boxes and phrases of jargon with known faces and emotions. “Unusual or excessive emotional reaction” dryly encapsulates bloody shrieks and hoarse-voiced prayers for death. “Weapons prevention violation” neatly condenses hours spent patiently honing a length of table leg, visualizing my face slit to ribbons.

  This new patient — he has a gift for lessening the self. I have been sorting for references to him. The reports indicate that he has quickly gained rapport with the other patients in the ward. They shuffle into a loose circle to hear him rant, whether his glazed eyes focus on them or not. He draws diagrams on his body and shares self-coherent madness with paranoid schizophrenics.

  I imagine their thin hospital robes transformed into vestments. They become agitated when staff acts to redirect them, protect them. Shared Psychotic Disorder is interesting. It is unstable, contagious, like a virus. The carrier, the new patient, is calm. I believe he plots.

  I open my desk, pop out a sample of Wellbutrin, and drink it down. Wellbutrin is indicated. Clearly.

  Dionysus slouched in the door-frame. He was flanked by orderlies, but despite their hulking menace he seemed to somehow strike a casual pose somewhere mid-way between Shaolin monk and Hunter S. Thompson in his prime. The orderlies glanced at Doctor Fein in concern, but he waved them off.

  “Won’t you come in?” Doctor Fein asked. Dionysus nodded and sat. “What is your name?”

  “Same as yesterday. Dionysus. Well, Dionysus Chthonios, but we don’t need to be so formal.”

  “What day is today?”

  “E Tu, Brute?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s the Ides of March. That line is apocryphal, anyway. Can I ask you a question?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “What experience gives you the right to be my shaman?”

  Doctor Fein blinked for several moments before replying. “I’m sorry? I’m a psychiatrist. And I’m here to help you, but only if you want it.”

  “Alright. Try to follow along with me here. I’ve been driving myself nuts trying to figure out why my stomach was in knots last night. Could be repressed childhood trauma, right? Could be the awful ‘food.’ The meds. It could be the displaced, angry spirit of an Ibo tribesman who, for reasons passing understanding, feels the need to take out his vengeance on my bowels.” Dionysus was gesturing rapidly with his hands as he spoke, his enthusiasm building. Plunk, plunk. Doctor Fein, in his distraction, didn’t notice pills popping in his coffee.

  “This is the problem with diagnosis. Any excuse we use to explain the sensation begins as an excuse. And then it is a guess. Have you heard of Chaos math?” Dionysus asked suddenly.

  Doctor Fein stared off into space.

  “Figured not. Linear cause and effect is the result of short-sighted presuppositions. Our bias determines our attribution of cause. Now,” Dionysus leaned forward suddenly.

  Doctor Fein jumped.

  “You seem tense today, Doctor. Now... if you don’t know what is giving me heartburn, then how the fuck are you supposed to treat me?”

  Doctor Fein shook his head and made some quick notes in his file. His delusions are getting worse. The patient-doctor relationship is clearly breaking down in a fundamental way.

  “Scale. See? Scale is the key. Nothing in the limited span of a human life amounts to anything...if it wasn’t for the secret that eternity hides in the smallest spaces between each moment.”

  A fly buzzed on the wall. Filth, Doctor Fein thought, swatting at it. Chaos and filth. He took another slurp of cold coffee.

  “Think of rain drops falling from the sky. Splash! They hit a windshield, grip on, slide down slowly, mingling with dirt and grit. Things behave differently at different scales. Sub-atomic, atomic, molecular...this room here. The fluid and sedimentary dynamics of a riverbed. An ecosystem. A fucking solar system. Galaxies! Scale is a frame of reference, an idea, much like molecules themselves. Some things recapitulate on any scale, and some things change. The matter that composes this desk is mostly empty space. This is just basic physics. They didn’t teach this to you in school?”

  The fly was rubbing its legs together, and it was cacophonous. Like steel wool on a rusted pan played through the speakers at an AC/DC concert. Its eyes were huge, a fractal rainbow of fruit flavors. Synesthesia, a new symptom. Time is passing, but how much?

  “Find it, Doctor Fein. Find eternity,” Dionysus said, tapping on the desk.

  The tapping snapped Doctor Fein back into time and Euclidean space. His hands bit down on themselves, curling into tight balls, as if his fingers desired escape from servitude to the almighty Hand. Fingernails parted flesh.

  “NOW!” Dionysus screamed, slamming his fist on the table. Files flew into the air, containers full of pens and the Doctor’s remaining coffee toppled end-over-end, c
rashing to the floor.

  Dionysus paused, his arms in the air, waiting for the great reveal. There was none. The Doctor stared dully at the droplets of coffee on the ground.

  “I’m sorry, Doc. You missed it. Maybe next time around. Just pray the Buddhists are right about that. Sorry about the coffee, by the way. Oh, have you heard of the Zen stick of encouragement?”

  “No.”

  “See the way you attain Satori, that’s what they call enlightenment, is by sitting. Just fucking sitting. But you need to be constantly jolted into the present, so that you can grasp it. Grasp eternity now. It is here, or it is nowhere. So the Roshi, the teacher, walks around and whacks students with a stick. The stick of encouragement.”

  They locked gazes. A rivulet of sweat dripped down Doctor Fein’s nose.

  “I can talk at you all day. There is only one way to really show you.”

  Dionysus grabbed a pen and drove it into Doctor Fein’s chest. It stuck out like a mini-erection, a BicⒸ Priapus, spurting blood instead of semen. The Doctor screamed and flailed, ripping it free.

  “Breathe, Doctor Fein. You are alive!”

  “HELP! GET IN HERE!”

  “Oh, calm down. I didn’t stab you that deeply. You’ll be fine. Now take this opportunity–”

  Two orderlies burst into the room and grabbed Dionysus so forcefully that the chair beneath him spun and crashed to the floor.

  He offered no resistance, but looked at Doctor Fein with concern. “You tell me I’m sick and need to be cured but you’ve got issues, my friend. I think you should talk to somebody.”

  The orderlies managed to slam a syringe into Dionysus' neck. The world, an Aristotelian universe of clockwork, slowed down and unspooled itself. Gears and glass clattered and crashed around him. His eyes fluttered closed as he was carried through the door.