by Matt Cardin
I don’t have the heart to describe what came next: all the gasping and panting as my pulse began to pound and my face began to throb like a beating drum; the collapse into quivering panic that laid me out on the sofa; the hateful care he gave me like some sort of surrogate mother; the long night of hallucinatory dread in which I saw smoky black tendrils drooping from the ceiling, reaching down into the living room from the attic above, waiting to sink whiplike fingers into my skull. All night long I kept reaching up to touch my face and registering surprise when my fingers found only the smooth, unblemished surface of my skin. But the flood of relief I kept expecting to wash over me never came.
I left at dawn, when I found I was strong enough to walk. The early-morning air whispered against my skin like a mantle of damp silk. As I emerged from the house and stumbled down the porch steps, I heard the forest sounds blended together into a smooth chirring like the electrified whine of a telephone. I thought I had risen early enough that Mitch would not see me, but as I backed out of his driveway I saw him framed inside the black border of the screen door. His hand was probing his throat, and I could feel his eyes seeking out mine. I tried to tell myself that the voice I heard speaking faintly in my brain over the roar of the engine was merely the sound of a morning bird chirping in the forest. But it didn’t go away as I picked up speed and shot down the highway toward Terence.
I had no idea what day it was. The enormity of my disorientation only made itself known gradually as I tried to figure out what had happened to me. I kept fearing that I might blink at any minute and find myself seated once again on Mitch’s sofa, or worse, in his attic, with the other members of the body manifesting the God all around me.
Terence had not properly awakened when I reached the city limits. The residential areas were still cloaked with a gray blanket of pre-dawn stillness, and the downtown streets were deserted except for a police cruiser that paused at the corner of Grand and Broadway to let me pass. The sight of the fresh-faced young officer seated behind the steering wheel pricked an unexpected bubble of hysteria in my chest. Here was a man devoted to keeping peace and order in human society, but now I knew that those two principles could never coexist. Peace could only be bought by sacrificing oneself to the God of chaos, by identifying oneself with the disease at the center of infinity, where there could be no unpeace, no pain, no dis-ease, because there was no longer a conscious self to feel pain or anxiety. The thoughts felt alien to me, as if they had been implanted in my head through the agency of some external will. But there was no way to escape them, as they seemed to form the foundation of my perspective now.
I’m confident the young policeman must have thought seriously about stopping me as I swerved and braked to avoid wrecking my car in a fit of laughter. But in the end he just let me pass. Maybe he had his own concerns to attend to, and harbored no wish to face the possible difficulties of dealing in the early morning hours with a hysterical man cackling like an idiot behind the wheel of his car. Or maybe the God was making my crooked paths straight and my rough ways smooth.
When I got home, I locked the door behind me and wandered from room to room in a dreamlike daze. My apartment was untouched, but everything had changed. It was as if somebody had taken away everything I knew, all my familiar possessions and surroundings, and replaced them with exact facsimiles composed of smoke. I felt they might dissipate at any moment to reveal some unthinkable vista of infinity lying behind their façade of solidity.
But the real revelation did not come until I looked down at my own body and saw the same insubstantiality built into my flesh. My vision pierced like an X-ray through skin and muscle, blood and bone, and found a seed of corruption implanted in the very workings of what I had always considered to be health. This body was a vapor that would be consumed by a principle of decay built into its innermost workings. All that would remain was the God.
I could not be certain whether I was laughing or crying as I congratulated myself on having attained the enlightenment that I had been seeking for as long as I could remember.
This new perspective has proved to be a permanent conversion. As those first days and weeks passed, I found that I was operating from an unknown center. Some new framework had been successfully erected like a psychic scaffolding behind the façade of my self, and my thoughts and sense of identity were now built upon and around its distorted shape. I saw infinity in everything and found comfort in nothing.
It was impossible to continue working at the newspaper. I could not bear to face anyone from my former life. Bobby asked me what was wrong when I phoned him to tender my resignation. At first he didn’t think I was serious, but then he became concerned and angry, and said I couldn’t just quit on him like that without giving him a reason or a warning. But that was exactly what I did. I made my resignation effective that day, and we never saw or spoke to each other again.
Dr. Baumann never returned from his sabbatical, which didn’t really surprise me. I followed the stories in the newspaper about the search for him, and I laughed or cried when I saw them sometimes situated next to AP wire pieces about the Sick Seekers. Even though nobody knows what happened to him, I feel certain that I do know, if only I could articulate it. But I have no particular desire to envision him being torn apart by the whiplike fingers of the God.
Physically, externally, I have remained whole. I check the mirror each morning to see whether a black spot has erupted on my face, but every morning I find that I am still clothed with the same meaningless, beautiful mask that once sat at the center of my world. Now I am amazed and disgusted when I think of how much stock I placed in such a worthless layer of muscle and fat. Sometimes I fancy that I am engaging in the corpse meditation that Dr. Baumann mentioned, and that the object of my meditation is my own body.
On my own I have continued to speculate about the Sick Seekers. It is an idle amusement, as I now know life itself to be, but it passes the time. I indulge my vestigial passion for the study of religion by looking for similarities between the Sick Seekers’ theology and the doctrines of various world religions. On some days I seem to find echoes of the ancient chaos religion resonating in the trinitarian theology of orthodox Christianity, the mystical identification of the individual soul with Brahman in Vedantic Hinduism, and the “meditation on foulness” recommended by the Buddha in the Girimananda Sutta. I speculate that there are sinister hints of something ancient and monstrous peering through the seemingly innocent and life-affirming ideas of non-resistance and wu wei, effortless action, in Chinese Taoism. I fancy that I can see the words of the God of Foulness shining through some of the more outlandish pronouncements of Yahweh in the Hebrew Scriptures, despite Mitch’s belief that the god of the ancient Jews is not his own God. On other days I realize that these speculations are worthless, and that I am just using them to while away the hours on the way to my certain annihilation.
The media coverage of the Sick Seekers continues to proliferate, and the size of the cult continues to grow. In Haiti there is a body that claims to have an AIDS sufferer among their ranks. The stories say they view him as a kind of avatar, since his flesh is an open channel for every pathogen in the environment around him. When I first read this, I realized that other Sick Seekers around the world must have started talking openly to the press, just as Mitch talked to me. They are spreading their gospel of disease, and I cannot doubt but that their ranks will grow even faster as people discover the freedom from suffering that awaits them in the embrace of the God. In the midst of an increasingly insane global society, they will surely find many miserable people who welcome such relief.
Locally, I have no desire to seek out Mitch and the others. They have remained silent toward me, probably—or so I presume—because they expect me to join them eventually of my own free will. On some days I am tempted to visit the hospital and seek out Lindy to see whether she really is a part of all this, or whether I am just the victim of terrible delusion. It might be comforting to know that I am insane, and that none
of what I think has happened to me has really happened. But the thought of looking into her soft white face and maybe seeing a hunger in her blue eyes to kiss my cheek keeps me away.
As my state and situation continue to degenerate, and as I wait for the numbers of the Sick Seekers to reach some sort of critical mass that will signal the moment for the God to set in motion His master plan, two things have come to dominate my newly enlightened thoughts. The first involves my mother. Mitch told me that his wife never stopped believing her god would heal her, right up until she died. One of the last doors to be unlocked inside me brought forth a memory of my own mother experiencing a deathbed conversion to the Christianity of her parents. She had always been so brittle and empty, like a porcelain doll, that to see her wasting her dying moments on a futile attempt to atone for a life lived in self-absorption and empty vanity made me hate her. But I also knew that she had passed the same traits on to me, and even though I locked away the knowledge of it in the same psychic storehouse where I hid all my other unpleasant feelings, it followed me through graduate school and eventually became the pinprick that deflated my spiritual passion. I could never escape the subconscious thought that I was just as false as she was, and that my pose of spirituality was just a clumsy compensation for the emptiness and pettiness of my true nature. But now my awakening had purged me of all that. How much easier, I now understood, simply to drop the whole sad charade and be nothing.
It was the remembrance of that sorry chapter in my life that brought forth the second factor that has come to dominate my attention. During my college years, while I was under the sway of all those buried motivations, I became fascinated by the novel Invasion of the Body Snatchers and its cinematic adaptations. This became bound up with my ersatz Zen perspective, and I sometimes found myself thinking that the arguments of the pod people in Finney’s novel were correct. What does it matter whether the body, or even the mind or soul, is replaced by a facsimile? There is only one ultimate consciousness looking out from behind every set of eyes, and to insist upon the absolute value of any given individual form is to buy into the very illusion of separateness that constitutes the unenlightened state. An enlightened master faced with the threat of replacement by an alien replica would not view it as a threat at all, for he would know that in the end there would be no real difference, and thus no loss to mourn.
I have found myself returning to these thoughts more and more. With increasing frequency and intensity, I find myself doubting whether there really is such a thing as authenticity, since there is no real “me” to which I should feel honor-bound. At the deepest level, the level of absolute, unconditioned truth, there is only the one Self churning in infinite chaos, and It does not know or care whether I am real. I feel sickened when I dwell upon the fact that I am backed into a corner where the only authentic act I can perform—the most authentic act of my life, the one that will redeem a lifetime spent in pretension and falsehood—will be to give myself up to the God of Foulness, the manifest presence of the infinite corruption that constitutes the heart of reality. This God speaks to me constantly through the disease of my individuated selfhood—the last and truest disease—and shows me that the only way out, the only way to reconnect with what I once thought I had, is to choose the inner over the outer, peace over beauty. It is a soul-searing choice, for I know that when I eventually give in, a virulent cancer will erupt on my face, and the God will reclaim what is rightfully His.
I can put it off as long as I want. He says He gives me a choice. But then, how can it be a true choice when nothing else is real? Everything is empty and good for nothing but to rot, except for this chaos, this madness, this sickness, this filth. In the end, there is no real choice for me to make, for I have nothing else from which to choose. Nor do any of us.
PART THREE
Apocryphon
I have had much trouble getting along with my ideas. There was a daimon in me, and in the end its presence proved decisive.
—Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961)
There is something at work in my soul which I do not understand.
—Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
The lunatic’s visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait till you arrive there yourself!
—William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
Chimeras & Grotesqueries
UNSIGNED PREFACE TO THE UNPUBLISHED AND
UNFINISHED MANUSCRIPT
“CHIMERAS & GROTESQUERIES” BY PHILIP LASINE
I realized early on that it would be necessary for me to introduce the following manuscript with a brief preface explaining my involvement in bringing it to light. I can only hope that the unorthodox nature of this involvement will not cast doubt on the manuscript’s authenticity or, worse, detract from its impact by distracting the reader from its profound implications.
For years I tried to explain to myself the unearthly influence that Philip Lasine exerted over me with his writings. My fascination with his bizarre, horrific, outlandish, and thoroughly transformative stories revolved largely around the fates of his protagonists, who, speaking in the first person, encountered things they could not explain—nightmarish things, awful eruptions of unearthly monstrousness in circumstance, event, person, and entity—and were invariably destroyed in the end. But they were also, somehow, transformed and preserved in a permanently shattered state from which they could meditate eternally on the impenetrable mystery of their own doom.
Lasine’s success in depicting such things and conveying their full, devastating emotional and philosophical impact was an authorial feat of sheer, shocking genius that I tried to emulate in my own stumbling way by writing stories that aped his signature style of marrying narrative prose fiction to Montaigne-like essayistic explorations. Eventually, and fortunately, I recognized my singular lack of literary talent in this vein, and decided to aim my desire for spiritual depth in another direction. A philosophy degree, training at a respected Protestant seminary, and an ordination to a ministerial career as a Methodist pastor were swiftly forthcoming.
But still, Philip Lasine had assumed for me the status of a distant master, and even when I grew up and out of my childhood attitude that imparted a permanent mystique to the authors of books, and finally came to understand that real people with real lives and bodies and voices and histories really do stand behind all those printed and bound volumes—as witnessed by the fact that I myself wrote and saw published a number of modestly successful books of Christian theology—Philip Lasine still seemed an iconic presence, a beacon of impossible literary perfection shining like a star from the peak of some intra-psychic Sinai. I could not keep from regarding him as an embodied archetype, and found myself thinking of him from time to time and feeling, even though I knew it was childish, that the author of those books could not possibly be a real, living, breathing man with a real physical appearance and a concrete geographical location. He had to be a myth, a nexus of daimonic-divine power that had somehow focused into the form of a man for long enough to produce that perfect and powerful body of work, after which the body dissolved and the power withdrew back to the astral plane. This was my private fantasy, which I never actually articulated to myself, holding it as a kind of half-belief that surfaced occasionally into conscious awareness, at which times I observed it with an attempt at ironic amusement and made certain that I did not breathe a word of it to my parishioners.
Here my preface ends, for the spiritual and artistic relationship between Philip and me is more important than the later, more literal one that arose. There is also the fact that this literal relationship resulted from such an outlandish set of coincidental circumstances, and was of such a bizarre nature (especially considering my longstanding literary worship of the man), that I would not blame the reader for disbelieving it and therefore doubting
the authenticity of what follows. When a man finds himself standing beside the deathbed of his idol, having been summoned there in an official capacity because he is a professional clergyman, he may begin to mistrust even his own perceptions and memories, and would not want to impart these doubts to his readers by giving too detailed an account of things that may or may not have happened exactly as he recalls them.
Here, then, is Philip Lasine’s last story, which is especially striking for being both like and unlike his other writings. I do not know whether it was meant to be self-contained or part of a longer work. I do know that it is clearly unfinished in its current state. I will admit to indulging in the thought that I might try to finish it myself, so close was I to its author when he died and bequeathed it to me, and so intimately do its ideas resonate not only with my thoughts but with my very being. But in the end I have decided to present it exactly as he left it, on the suspicion that some sort of hidden conclusion resides within the work as it stands. I have limited my editorial involvement to the minor expansion of a few key passages that were embryonic in their received form. The reader may well recognize these passages by their heavy-handedness and overly expository tone; I did not seek to emulate Philip’s style but to clarify the vision he was incompletely expressing as he wrote by hand while lying on his deathbed.
The story as a whole may be intended as an allegory of sorts, although the grounds of its metaphors are obscure. Then again, they may not be as obscure as they appear; they may only seem so because of their extreme spiritual intimacy to us all, the repercussions of which I have not yet begun to work out for my ministerial vocation.
This last suspicion is at least partly verified by the experience that I have just had between writing the preceding paragraph and the present one. I paused in my work to step outside and rest my eyes. It is a frigid December night, and I stood perfectly still in the icy air, gazing up at the panorama of the night sky, which bristled with stars. As I watched, they seemed to take on the imprint of a vast human face—not looking down at me, but pressing outward, as if the entire glittering expanse were the inner surface of a cosmic mask.
