by Matt Cardin
He lifted a hand and made a strange sign in the air, almost as if he were making the sign of the cross, but it was a different symbol he traced, one that shot a bolt of sickness through my gut. My face and eyes burned with the hot red glow that had overtaken the sun room. My body trembled with the volcanic-oceanic roar that had infiltrated the bass frequencies built into the acoustics of those sheetrocked, texture-splattered, white-painted walls.
And then poof! all was cool and silent. Except for the warm golden sunbeams and gaily chirping birds. Cool air kissed my cheeks. It was a beautiful morning.
And I was alone. No Corporate-Miltonic Satan confronted me from the hallowed folds of my La-Z Boy, which was now blessedly empty, although its seat and back cushions bore a phantom discoloration akin to smoke damage in the shape of a man.
I managed to stand up, and after testing my balance, hopped into the recliner and snuggled down into it for a moment, just to assure myself that I still fit. Which I did, although the trace warmth of another very warm body still clinging to the cushions was distinctly less than pleasant.
And then I did the only thing there was to do. I got up and went to the kitchen, where the coffee waited for me to brew it. In sixty seconds flat the splashy little burblings of the coffee maker were soothing my spirit while the sharp-musky scent cleared my head. Everything seemed so crisp and fresh. Even the texture of my bathrobe against my skin felt remarkably new and delightful.
“Is this for real?” I asked aloud of no one in particular. “Is this the leading edge of new inspiration?” Enough coffee had already trickled into the pot for me to pour a mug, so I did and then returned the pot to its cradle. “Because,” I said aloud again, “I can tell you right now that it’s no deal. I’m not writing for you or anybody else. That’s all over. This is my life, as crappy as it may be, and I’m going to suck all the misery out of it while I can, gods and devils be damned.”
Still facing the counter and the kitchen cabinets, holding the white china mug with the black steaming liquid in my utterly steady hand, I raised my face to the ceiling and shouted. “Do you hear me? No deal!”
I added one lump of sugar and stirred lightly. Then I took a sip and sighed in ecstasy. No more devils for me that day.
The room went red before I could swallow. The roaring of a titanic cataract set me to shaking like a victim of Saint Vitus’ Dance. A furnace blast of heat seared my flesh.
A voice boomed from behind me: “This is not a negotiation.” No melodious baritone there. This was a lion roaring in a hurricane.
I whirled around, hot coffee drooling from my lips and down my chin and chest, to find a shriekingly hideous Dantean Devil towering over me in full gothic-reptilian splendor. Black wings and talons. Ram’s horns sprouting from a misshapen head. Gray-skinned, rotten-textured, with yellow moonsliver feline eyes and a porcine snout surmounting an impossibly wide mouth whose lips were drawn back in a smile that revealed far too many silvery teeth, each one as long as a dagger. The creature must have stood nearly eight feet tall, and would have been obliged to hunch its head if the ceiling had still been there, but that cozy lid had been ripped off the top of my world, and the bare tops of my kitchen walls now outlined a blackish-crimson skyscape of roiling clouds where bolt lightning carved out jagged trails and leering wolf’s faces formed and reformed endlessly in the furrows.
The blackstretched lips of the mountainous Devil before me moved and formed words. “You will accept your gift and set things aright again. You will repair the damage you have wrought. And the pleasure you derive from fulfilling your deepest desire will be your damnation. That’s the deal.”
Then he reached out a taloned hand, plucked the little white cup from my fingers, and dumped the drop of dark liquid down his throat. “Mmmmmm,” he sighed. “The best part of waking up.”
And that’s what I found myself doing next: waking up. In my bed. At my normal time. With a hangover and a fading memory of some dreamworld encounter that could not possibly be real. No way. Not a chance.
But when I crawled out of bed all fuzzy-eyed and disappointed that the daylight had come so quickly, I was arrested in mid-shuffle by a curious phenomenon: the sunlight squeezing through the slats of the window blinds didn’t seem despicable, but delightful. I felt that if I were given to bouts of synesthesia, I might hear those delicate golden rays humming a hushed hymn to the beauties of creation.
I stayed rooted to the carpeted floor while the outlandishness of this development worked its way through me. Then I cautiously approached the blinds and raised my hand to pull the cord. It was a veritable Lux Aeterna moment, with the choral voices keening while the subhuman creature crept toward the ominous monolith with trembling outstretched hand. At last I seized the cord and pulled it.
A Hallelujah Chorus of celestial sunlight nearly knocked me back onto the bed. It flooded the room with divine joy and penetrated all the way to the heart of my dark misery.
No way. No way.
Next stop, the kitchen, where I peered anxiously into the adjoining sun room and saw nothing but sunlight singing like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir while dust motes swirled in the blaze like heavenly fireflies.
The only part of my usual schedule that this explosion of mind-blowing joy could not disrupt was the Ritual of the Coffee. I prepped the pot and pressed the button while the chorus continued to sing.
Without warning, before the brew cycle had finished, I was gripped by the knowledge that there was something I simply had to do, even though the thought of it elicited a stab of cold dread.
I crept to the spare bedroom and dug through the closet until I located my typewriter buried beneath mounds of deliberately piled junk. I dusted off the card table where my best work had always taken place, and gently laid the typewriter on its surface. Another quick dig, this one through my old file cabinet, produced a stack of fresh white 16 pound bond paper, which I hadn’t remembered still owning.
I sat down softly and rolled in a sheet. I caressed a key. Then I punched it. The letter appeared on the pristine paper with a satisfying thwack. I punched another, and then another. I raised my other hand to the qwerty keyboard and was soon typing words. And then sentences. And then paragraphs.
The tripwires had been removed and the concrete blasted away. The well of inspiration was wide open and brimming with cool waters of redemption.
I wrote, and wrote, and then wrote some more while the coffeemaker burbled and whispered in the next room and my long-pent-up craving for spiritual peace and enlightenment poured itself onto the pages. I already saw the full outline of the essay I was composing and, beyond that, the structure of the book of which it would be the opening piece. And there was another book after that, and then yet another, all perfectly formed in my head. Impossibly, after years of wretched emptiness, I had exploded in the course of a single morning into full-blown, super-genius Mozart mode, with fully finished works crowding in my head and just waiting for me to release them.
After awhile, when the stack of finished pages had grown thick and still the flow of words showed no signs of letting up, I found I was weeping as I wrote. Perfectly natural, I told myself. A function of joy, an excess of cleansing emotion at the lifting of my sterile curse. I already saw how the very fact of my sobs could be worked gracefully into the very paragraph I was then crafting about redemptive changes of mind and heart, by referring to the “gift of tears” the early Christian fathers wrote so much about.
Pointedly, purposefully, I kept typing and ignored the transition that came when the clacking of the keys began to sound like dry little laughs.
The God of Foulness
And what, Ananda, is contemplation of foulness? Herein, Ananda, a monk contemplates this body upwards from the soles of the feet, downwards from the top of the hair, enclosed in skin, as being full of many impurities. In this body there are head-hairs, body-hairs, nails, teeth, skin, flesh, sinews, bones, marrow, kidneys, heart, liver, pleura, spleen, lungs, intestines, intestinal tract, stomach
, faeces, bile, phlegm, pus, blood, sweat, fat, tears, grease, saliva, nasal mucous, synovium (oil lubricating the joints), and urine. Thus he dwells contemplating foulness in this body. This, Ananda, is called contemplation of foulness.
—From Pirit Potha (“The Book of Protection”), a Pali Buddhist text
Disgust at what things are made of: liquid, dust, bones, filth. . . . Turn the body inside out, and see what kind of thing it is, and when it has grown old, what kind of thing it becomes, and when it is diseased. . . . Stop letting yourself be distracted. That is not allowed. Instead, as if you were dying right now, despise your flesh. A mess of blood, pieces of bone, a woven tangle of nerves, veins, arteries. . . . The stench of decay. Rotting meat in a bag. Look at it clearly. If you can.
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Am now acutely ill with intestinal trouble following grippe. No strength—constant pain. Bloated with gas and have to sit and sleep constantly in chair with pillows. Doctor is going to call in a stomach specialist Tuesday. So I fear I shan’t be able to do much for a long time to come.
—H. P. Lovecraft, from a letter dated fifteen days before his death
As a foulness shall ye know Them.
—Necronomicon
1
At first I thought it was just a perverse reaction to several decades’ worth of bombardment by conflicting pronouncements from the medical establishment about what constitutes a “healthy lifestyle.” That was my working hypothesis, held with tongue firmly in cheek, when my editor at the Terence Sun-Gazette assigned me to cover the grassroots phenomenon known as the Sick and Saved movement. The movement had garnered an insane amount of publicity in recent months because of its shocking—some would say appalling—claim. Its members worshiped sickness and disease. The media had dubbed them the “Sick Seekers” and given them enough coverage to lead some commentators to call them the story of the century. The Sick Seekers came from all walks of life and boasted all manner of physical and mental disorders, and their defining characteristic was that they viewed any kind of sickness as evidence of a special spiritual grace. At least, this was the best guess the commentators could come up with, since the Sick Seekers were notoriously close-mouthed to outsiders about the particulars of their beliefs and practices.
The only thing anybody knew for certain about them was that they prominently refused all medical treatments. This of course threw the official government bodies charged with safeguarding the public health into a collective panic. In the United States, the American Medical Association, the Centers for Disease Control, and National Institutes of Mental Health all wrung their hands with great public display. “What if people start actively trying to become sick?” they asked with clockwork regularity on all the nightly news programs. Obviously, the media themselves thought this was happening already, hence their popularization of the term “Sick Seekers.”
The insurance and pharmaceutical industries were none too happy about the situation, either. The pharmaceutical companies in particular were scrambling for a solution, since their business was dealt a near death blow by the sheer numbers of the new movement, which was composed largely of elderly people who would otherwise have been their biggest customers. By the most recent estimate, which had been performed by a sociologist at Harvard and publicized in Time magazine, the Sick Seekers numbered around the million mark in the United States alone. This meant there were more of them than there were Unitarians.
As I said, my immediate reaction was to view all this with a rather cynical eye. To begin with, I decided to regard the term “Sick Seekers” with wry amusement, since it contained a semantic ambiguity, probably unnoticed by whoever had coined it, that didn’t specify whether “sick” referred to what the people were seeking to become or how they ought to be morally perceived. Next, I turned to speculating about the origins of the movement, and arrived at my above-mentioned theory about a collective disgust at the inability of the medical community to arrive at a consensus regarding how one ought to eat, exercise, and so on. (My theory didn’t explain why the same movement had cropped up in undeveloped nations where this information overload wasn’t a problem, but I put that item on a back burner.) I myself had grown annoyed at the way the morning news programs always seemed to present at least one new doctor per day, who advanced at least one new theory about which foods to avoid, which medicines to take, which tests to have run, and which exercises to do. I amused myself by speculating that the Sick Seekers were people who had just decided to throw in the towel and forget about trying to wade through the mass of conflicting information. This allowed me to applaud their audacity from the sidelines.
When I first came to understand that they were engendering real concern not only among government authorities but the populace at large, I realized I should take them a bit more seriously. Their arrival on the world scene had created a truly apocalyptic mood in countries around the globe, one that harmonized beautifully with the mass premonition of approaching doom that had already begun to grip the globe during the early twenty-first century. But even so, after reading and reflecting on the matter I still found it easy just to write the whole thing off as a mass hysteria, admittedly a repugnant one, but in essence no different from the millennial madness that had gripped the Western nations at the end of the twentieth century or the rise of the charismatic Christian movement and its bastard child, the “signs and wonders” movement or “Third Wave” of Pentecostalism that was still providing so much research fodder for sociologists and scholars of religion who were caught up in the perennial quest for tenure.
I had once thought that I would number myself among those professional academicians. My interest in the Sick and Saved movement was more than just an idle amusement. Early in life, I had found that I was possessed of a seemingly inborn fascination with religion and spirituality. I was raised in no formal religious tradition, but when I discovered the literature of Zen Buddhism at the age of thirteen, it was as if a door were suddenly unlocked inside me, one that I hadn’t even known existed. Suddenly, I was gripped by an intense yearning for spiritual knowledge, and by the time I graduated from high school, I was already planning to major in religious studies at the university and then go on to earn my doctorate. The thought of spending all my days walled up inside the comfortable ivory tower of academia, surrounded by books that fed my thirst for spiritual ideas, filled me with delicious feelings of security and comfort.
All had gone well for the first few years of my enrollment in the religious studies program at Terence University. But then, for reasons that still eluded me ten years later, everything had grown stale just two months before I was scheduled to earn my master’s degree. I had been shocked as I experienced the pent-up excitement of my imminent academic career leaking like air from a punctured tire. Somehow, without my knowing it, a sense of hollowness and staleness had crept into everything I held dear, everything I thought my life was about, and I suddenly realized that I didn’t know where to go or what to do. My sense of being on track with a life mission was gone, and had been replaced by a feeling of bleak hopelessness and confusion. Briefly, I fell into a personal and professional tailspin.
Then one of my professors, Dr. Daniel Baumann, advised me to consider another career. Since my awakening at the age of thirteen, I had never even thought of doing anything else, but when I turned my mind to it everything happened quickly. Within a matter of days, practically on a whim, I somehow fell into the journalism master’s degree program. All thoughts of a career in academia fled down the same invisible drain that had siphoned away my passion for religion. I set my sights on becoming a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, and for years I didn’t look back.
Eight years after obtaining the master’s degree, I was still seeking the Pulitzer. More than anything else, those years had taught me that the confusion I had felt upon the death of my former sense of identity with a life mission was merely the front end of a long initiation into the arbitrary caprices of the inner life. I tried not to
dwell too much on it, since I could tell that to do so would send me into a paralyzing depression, but eight years into my post-college career the foreground of my steady, normal outer life was paralleled precisely by an inner life of virulent nihilism, punctuated by periods of manic emotional abandon. The term “bipolar” played on my mind often, but I never sought a medical diagnosis. My spiritual and philosophical side wasn’t totally gone; it had merely undergone a mutation. My love of ideas had somehow evolved into a kind of philosophical schizophrenia that expressed itself in terms of a kaleidoscopic shifting of worldviews, many of them mutually exclusive or even actively antagonistic toward one another. In this condition, I thought it would be useless to receive an official diagnosis of a chemical imbalance, since I would probably find myself arguing the very next day against the logical axioms upon which the diagnosis was founded. To add insult to injury, my cognizance of my condition only exacerbated its severity. By the time the Sick Seekers arrived on the scene, I had reached a point of near-burnout where all my emotional reserves were depleted and I had trouble believing anything, even my own thoughts. At times I diverted myself with a kind of gallows humor by speculating that my philosophical schizophrenia might qualify me for membership in the new movement.
But when I was assigned to cover them for the newspaper, I saw no humor in it, for I recognized an immediate problem: so many things had already been said about the Sick Seekers that there was surely nothing left for me to write.
I raised this point to Bobby, my managing editor, but he countered by letting me know his reasons for wanting the story.
“There’s a local group of them,” he told me on a Tuesday afternoon, after having given me the assignment the day before via an e-mail. He was drinking coffee to perk himself up for the final few hours of his workday, and he stared at me over the steaming cup as he took a sip. I was seated across the desk from him with notepad in hand, prepared to take what I had expected to be meaningless notes.
