by Matt Cardin
A word for the collective impression created by these facts in toto steps forward from the back of his mind and announces itself, autonomously and unanswerably, as the appropriate name for them. It nearly makes its way through his fingers and onto the palmscreen, and thus into the Network’s permanent database, before he realizes its madness and stops it in time. He jerks his hand away from the screen as if it were a hot rock, his fingers curved into claws. Clearing his head, he saves his notes to the Network, shoves the word to the back of his thoughts, and searches for the Patient’s personal name below the listed PsychID.
To his astonishment, the name field is blank. To his greater astonishment, the PsychID field itself is simply a string of nils: “00-0000-0-000.” He blinks, looks again. He taps the Update icon to refresh the screen with the latest information from the Network database, but the blank spaces remain unchanged.
This is unprecedented. More than that, it is impossible. In Brother Frank’s twelve years with the Ministry, no Patient has ever arrived without a PsychID and assigned name listed on the case file. And this in turn is due to the more fundamental and all-encompassing fact that no person on the entire planet is without this vital locus of personal identification. The pairing of a personal name with a birth-assigned PsychID is tantamount to what a former age, with its imperfect and destructively naïve categories of emotional terminology (stemming from its imperfect and destructively naïve understanding of the human bio-psychic mechanism), would have categorized as “sacred.” The instituting of this planet-wide system by the Ruling Council antedates the memory of any living person and embodies the shrewd insight and compassionate humanism of the Founders, who, in one of the defining acts of the Global Reformation, recognized the necessity of accomplishing human individuation along dual lines: one for the Commonwealth itself, requiring a unique identifier for each Citizen that anchors his or her bio-psychic profile, and one for each Citizen to organize and define his or her localized perspective. The PsychID fulfills the top-down need for surveillance and predictability; the personal name fulfills the human need, revealed by extensive experimentation as ineradicable, for a sense of individual identity. Their pairing for each and every member of the pared-down planetary population in the wake of the great ecological and cultural cataclysms that marked the transition from one civilization to another is the undergirding socio-organizational principle of the New Era. Without this comprehensive identifier, a person would effectively be nobody, a nonentity, utterly non-existent in the eyes and mind of the New Society.
Such an utterly non-existent nonentity now sits in the metal chair of Room 23-Z with its back to Brother Frank and its face plunged into shadow.
The Brother searches for his voice and, after a struggle, finds it. There is nothing to do but proceed. He tries to take comfort in the ritual of the opening lines.
“My name is Brother Frank. I’m here to help you.” He pauses to allow a reaction that will determine the next step. The Patient remains still and silent, and Brother Frank’s heart pounds as he continues with the next line of the introduction protocol. “Do you know why you are here?”
At this the Patient emits a low noise. It may be a laugh, but it is humorless and vile, with a texture like the crushing of dry leaves. The Brother has to use a portion of his frayed but still considerable powers of self-control to suppress a shudder, which would draw the disapproval of the Supervisors observing the session through their multiple screens and listening to it through their multiple monitors.
“The question before us,” the Patient says, “is whether you know why I am here.” He speaks slowly, in a voice hovering between a whisper and a murmur, and with arch-precision, his words forming with a delicate grace that belies his ragged, filthy appearance.
Brother Frank recognizes both the tone and the content of this response as a matter of standard pathological gamesmanship, a combination of deflection and projection designed to throw a Curer off balance and involve him instantly in the Patient’s delusional subjective world. He has encountered it hundreds of times before, although never played in so thoroughly unnerving a manner, and he finds its familiarity blissfully reassuring. “I am not the Patient, sir,” he says, his voice gaining confidence. “I am here to help you. So let us figure out together how we can accomplish that.”
“You mean, good Brother, that you intend to help me in the way you helped Milton Adamah? Did he appear at all helped when last you saw him?” The Patient’s posture appears to shift in his metal chair even though he does not exactly move, and Brother Frank’s astonishment is as much at this evidence of a deformity endemic in the man’s entire physical frame—a deformity that enables him to bend and flow in ways unnatural for a human body—as it is at the man’s knowledge of the treatment session that has just occurred far down the hallway in another wing of the Ministry’s lowest level, past multiple insulated metal walls inset with a multitude of monitors, sensors, and security measures. The treatment protocol offers no response for a statement like this one, a response that flies in the face of possibility and reason, and Brother Frank’s momentary sense of comfort shatters as he feels the situation tilt suddenly, sharply, and horribly in a new and nightmarish direction.
“I . . . don’t know what you’re talking about.” His stammer is unstoppable. The unsteadiness of his own voice makes it sound alien, and sickens him. “The issue, sir, is you.”
“Then,” says the Patient in that same corrupted half-whisper, “let us talk about me. Yes, let me be the object of your attention. What can you tell me about myself? What does your holy electronic icon tell you?”
Brother Frank is sweating through the fabric of his rough brown robe, staining its stylized and streamlined representation of ancient monastic garb with the stench of his own body. He passes a hand over his face and looks to the palmscreen, discovering as he does so that it is bizarrely difficult to wrench his gaze away from this foul, shifting mass of a man who sits with his face plunged into the encroaching shadow. It is as if Patient #231-7 emits a gravitational aura that repels the Brother’s sensibility but attracts his sight and
(eats my eyes and rapes my mind)
[Purge the unreal—]
(steals my voice and swallows my name)
[Employ standard principles of—]
(consumes my heart and crushes my SOUL)
A sudden trembling seizes him deep within his core, spanning from heart to gut and feeling like a frigid absence, as if his torso has disappeared and he is a nothing but bare feet on the cold floor and a floating head full of encroaching insanity. This disembodied head tilts down to see the palmscreen. Below the awful lacunae where the name and PsychID should be, the bio-narrative field contains the following text:
Subject discovered inside the Temple by a Peace Enforcer making final sector sweep to verify full evacuation before building demolition. PE transmitted a request for assistance but was cut off from further communication by unknown interference. Additional PEs arrived to find subject emerging from Temple, walking backward. All reported cognitive, emotional, and multisensory perceptual anomalies accompanying subject’s presence and movements.
Apprehension of subject successfully accomplished, but arresting PEs suffered unspecified injuries. Cleanup Team dispatched for assistance. Sector sweep located original PE inside Temple suffering severe multiphase trauma. PE later expired at hospital. (See attached coroner’s report.) Enforcers transported subject through gathering crowd of Citizens for delivery to Peace Authority but were rerouted for delivery to Psychic Sanitation on special order relayed directly from Ruling Council. (See attached order.) Severe injuries and traumas sustained by multiple Enforcers and Citizens while en route. (See attached photos and commentary.) All require Ministry intervention by Curers with minimum certification level 5. (See attached documentation.)
Ruling Council requests full evaluation of subject and recommendation regarding treatment, detainment, and disciplinary action, including possible eradication. Also requests d
eep-interpretive analysis of subject’s pathology: its etiology, manifestations, virulence, progress, and prognosis, with special attention to means of transmission.
Brother Frank’s feet and hands have gone numb as well. While reading the account of how the stranger arrived here, in this room, to confront him with diseased unrealities, his extremities have lost all feeling except for a heavy, anesthetized deadness. He taps the screen with a trembling, frozen finger to call up the associated documents, and immediately photos and words begin to scroll past his vision, feeding into his eyes like a sentient virus, showing him human bodies littering the antiseptic streets of the Capitol, mangled beyond all sanity by monstrous transformations, with the remains of their faces frozen in a rictus of horrified agony and, in some cases, elation and ecstasy. Many of their eye sockets appear bruised and black, as do their mouths and joints, as if they have been sprayed with coal dust, or—a thought more true to the photos—as if this dark substance has leaked or erupted from their joints and orifices. The coroner’s report tells of an autopsy that revealed liquefied bones and calcified flesh, with accompanying clinical photos to substantiate the outlandish claim.
Along with these and other materials are several unexplained photos of the Temple, taken from various angles and attached without accompanying comment. There it rests in the city’s central plaza, a monolith of arcane architecture and ancient spiritual-psychological folly, serving its function as a museum of outmoded artifacts and beliefs about the world from before the great Transition, a nexus of ancient, irrational fears, cravings, and notions that had all but destroyed human life. “It’s a good thing the Ruling Council has decided to destroy it,” Brother Frank had said to Brother Nam’d-Law during yesterday’s mentoring session. “Its function is fulfilled. In the past it may have helped to promote the health of the populace by providing a psychic repository for atavistic attitudes and impulses. But we have passed the point of diminishing returns. Now its presence only exacerbates all these things. We’re ready to move on, especially since the Ministry has perfected its art. Religion and psychic hygiene are united in our work, and the Temple undoes this. How many Patients have we sent out of here fully purged, only to find them returning with the roots of their sickness reestablished from a tour through the Temple, or from the very act of walking past it or standing in its shadow?”
Nam’d-Law had not answered with the immediate agreement Brother Frank had expected, but had remained gazing silently downward in thought. Then he had said, “The ancient teachers of this science promised impossibilities and performed nothing. But we, with our great wisdom and compassionate expertise, penetrate into the recesses of nature.” Far from sounding confident or comforting as he recited the heart of the Ministry’s creed, his tone was weary, defeated, and ironic. Brother Frank stared at him in astonishment. The Mentor’s eyes rose to greet those of his Mentee, and the elder man intoned with a strange sadness, “We even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.”
Back in Treatment Room 23-Z, in the present, the stranger hisses in his dry husk of a voice, “Did you truly believe you could finish your great project of purgation? For every sickness you cast out, did you not see two more take hold?”
“The size of a shadow,” Nam’d-Law had said yesterday, “is proportionate to the size of the object that casts it. Remember that, Brother. It is not in our book of doctrine and treatment, but it ought to be.”
“For every one we cast out,” he had also said, “two more appear. Haven’t you noticed this? And haven’t you noticed how the shadow in your dreams has grown larger with each new cure? Hasn’t it led you to question the viability of our very mission? The validity of our psychic purity? Hasn’t it led you to wonder whose motives, whose promptings, whose ends, we are really enacting?”
The shadow in Brother Frank’s dreams. The shadow that has come to visit him each night for nine months, to stand at the foot of his bed, paralyze him with fear, crush him with unbearable weight, convulse him with a horrible energy, and burst into flame. The shadow that he has only spoken about in confidence to Brother Nam’d-Law.
The shadow Milton Adamah screamed about.
The shadow now elongating and rising toward the ceiling in a room buried a mile beneath the surface of the earth, where all extraneous vectors of contact and communication are cut off, and only two remain: the Curer and the Sickness.
“With each one you cast out,” the Sickness says, shuddering and flowing, rippling and expanding, “you increased your stature. And mine.”
The palmscreen emits a soft tone to indicate the arrival of a new communication from the remote Supervisors tucked safely away in electronic omniscience on some unspecified upper level. From his lower peripheral vision, Brother Frank sees the screen turn red, indicating that they have initiated emergency protocol. But no Restrainers arrive. No alarms sound. No one comes to rescue him from this budding, blasphemous nightmare. He tries to scream for assistance, but his mouth is gone, and he can only croak out a thoroughly atavistic sound, something not suited to a Curer of his level and reputation, nor to any civilized member of the New Society. He cannot tear his eyes away from the sinuous column of organically undulating smoke that has now begun to advance from the corner. Its surface flexes like feathers and scales, gleaming dully in the hot white light of the ceiling and floor strips.
His mind shrieks
(. . . Sickness screaming eating raping fire Sickness Temple . . .)
and no amount of training, no amount of intricately accomplished imprinting and programming with the psychic-hygienic defenses of the Ministry, can stand up to the truth of the ancient, rejected word:
(DAEMON)
“Yours,” the voice says. “Always.”
Brother Frank falls to the frigid metal floor. His breath exhales in a misty plume. The Sickness arches over him, cascades upward, crests like a wave, then turns downward and bursts into flames. His mind continues to shriek as the wave of blackness slams into him, crushes him, sears him—and enters him.
(. . . eats my mind in darkness screaming . . .)
If, at this moment, you were to pull away from the spectacle of the writhing Brother in the brown robe with his blackening eyes, mouth, and joints, and if you were to rise back through the three hundred buried levels of the Ministry of Psychic Sanitation, and were to emerge into the surface city and continue your ascent back into the fathomless sky, back toward your transcendent origin, you might look down upon the city’s panorama of cold brightness and sharp beauty, and see in it the apotheosis of alienated order and bottomless, infinite, tormenting desire. And in the seismic shudder now beginning to ripple through it, causing at first a mere blurring of edges, but now a breaking of windows and cracking of seams, and soon a catastrophic toppling and shattering of titanic buildings; and in the aerial crafts falling from the sunlit sky as their pilots and passengers erupt with darkness and twist into monstrous forms; and in the screams of the terrestrial multitude as they fall in the streets, crush their hands to their eyes, and thrash in tandem with the agony of their protector Brother Frank, whose doom is still unfolding a mile beneath them; in the sight and sound and smell of all this, you might intuit, however incongruous the thought with the sickening appearance of the scene, a full and final Cure, albeit a tormented one, being accomplished at long last.
The New Pauline Corpus
Seated at a small wooden desk, a humble piece of cypress wood furniture elevated to veritably mythic status by a heaping of fabulously ornate decorative flourishes, he spreads out the papers on the smooth surface before him. A rushing murmur, like the sound of ten thousand voices melding into an oceanic hush, flows through the doorway that stands open and waiting on the far side of the equally ornate room.
The papers are crammed to capacity with a chaotic jumble of handwritten markings. Rows of text run from left to right and then, often, meet the edge of the page and instead of breaking to the next line simply continue on, rebounding from the barrier in curling coils and trac
ing the paper’s edge in circles that effectively form a written frame around the rest. Some lines appear in ink, others in pencil. Some words are miniscule to the point of near-indecipherability. Others shout hugely in hysterical looping letters.
None make sense. Not on their own, at least. Fragments. That is what he has in his possession. Pieces of a puzzle. Scraps of a portrait. Shards of a mirror, each reflecting and refracting the image of all the others to create a dazzling maze of meanings whose infinity encompasses enormous blank spaces.
The more I dwell on it, Francis, the more I am convinced that the single most fruitful result of the frightful transition which has overtaken us is the resurrection of our collective passion for story, for the specifically narrative understanding of our lives on this planet. I now view the trajectory of my former theological writings toward an almost exclusive emphasis on ontological matters as an egregious error. More than any other religious tradition in human history, our own Christian faith, along with its Jewish forebear, has always been centrally rooted in a cosmic-narrative understanding of human life and the cosmos itself. A reverence for story—as we have now been forcibly reminded—is not symptomatic of a regressive intellectual and theological naïveté but of an unblinking realism. It may simply be the case that the story in which we find ourselves existentially involved as living characters lacks any obvious correspondences with the charming drama we were told from childhood about the Eden-to-Fall-to-New Eden arc of our race. Or perhaps these elements are indeed discernible in our new tale, but in a jumbled order or—more likely—as inversions of themselves. I hope to say more about this in a future letter.
In any event, happy for me, since it means that I do not have to jettison the entirety of my former theological corpus, is the fact that theology-as-story does not preclude ontology but incorporates it. In fact, what has now been revealed to us in our dreadful recent disruptions is the express unity of these two categories of thought. That is, we are living the story of a war between levels of reality. Our metanarrative is the tale of how space-time, the cosmos, the created order, was usurped by a reality that is more fundamental, primary, and ancient.
