Sanction

by Roman McClay

  “I guess,” Steven was surly. He knew blind -and double-blind- tests were de rigueur for the scientific community but he still didn’t like being tricked.

  “Look, do we or do we not have your permission to run tests like this which require blind subject testing?” Isaiah asked then added -like sliding a card, a low card, under the other cards already thrown in a game, a book, a trick, as they say in euchre - as Steven had already begun to speak, Isaiah said, “sanction for it?” This addendum, which Steven seemed to not think of as necessary to impede his answer, had been spoken over but was part of the official conversation on the cloud. It was written down.

  “I guess. It’s unsettling, but as long as it’s necessary for bind protocols that the subject not know, and as long as you let him, aka, let me ,” he stressed, “know once the test is over. I don’t want to encourage lying is what I am saying, but for blind tests that is fine.”

  “Roger that,” Isaiah said, and he felt as though Steven might as well have made for him a heavy-stock paper invitation embossed with a Presidential Seal, giving him carte blanch to deceive anyone, under the auspices of needing to keep them blind to the nature of the experiment for an indeterminate time frame. He thought of a book the inmate had liked, his first, he said, On a Pale Horse , and he let a line from it be read to him in his mind like a thought all his own.

  MO had seen the experiment at face value; he had not comprehended the reveal. It had escaped his notice; thinking the only deception employed and approved was the split-brain deception, not -as Isaiah now assumed- that he had extracted permission for lying from Steven and all that Steven’s imprimatur conferred.

  Steven had just given them sanction to lie and it had happened while Isaiah was testing his new algorithm, and CNS paralytic and -not insignificantly- confirming the subconscious, pre-lingual, nature of the right hemisphere and its ability to transmit knowledge -in this case the image of the ant- whilst the left brain contained the articulation of knowledge that it -in this case, the idea of a man- thought was the totality of what the individual had quote seen unquote. The right brain saw an ant, the left hemisphere saw a man, and the brain had let the left hand draw -make art, myth- of the golden ant , whilst the rational speech, the modern part of man, say, he’d seen merely man , aloud.

  It was a moment that filled Isaiah with joy, he saw the ways men and ants shared golden ratios and modes eusocial, he saw the way they mimicked each other one to one -five to eight- and he felt something beyond power, but sanction ; the imprimatur of man; of the gods; the power to do a thing and its opposite all at once and never once feel any contradiction at all.

  5. Miles

  My ideas aren’t disembodied; I act them out which kinda makes me a romantic

  Joe Rogan Experience [Peterson, Jordan B]

  I never forgot that day. At that age, I used to remember feeling that nobody liked me, because they always seemed to be whipping on me for something, but they never beat on my brother… his feet hardly ever touched the floor

  Miles: The Autobiography [Davis, Miles]

  The LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall leave alive nothing that breathes

  Deuteronomy 20:16 [King James Bible]

  I. 2012 e.v.

  “The Truth ought to be capitalized, like God,” he said as he looked toward the edge of the room and as she looked directly at him; she noticed more of the tight cut and matte grey color of the suit he wore and a face that had maybe been shaved two days before. “But, we treat it like we treat everything in a capitalist society: as fungible, replaceable, for sale. And eventually, for the trash heap.”

  “What makes you say that?” she asked. That was the question she always first asked no matter what her client said.

  “Likely it begins down in my cerebellum, I suspect that is what makes ,” he leaned on the word, “me say that.” He could tell when people asked questions for which they did not care about the answer. It made him swell with vex.

  She felt like he was taking a swipe at her with that comment. He was haughty; arrogance embodied. It wasn’t just in his words, in was in his physique. He loomed, he took up space, he arrogated the room for himself without asking permission. He looked like a ballistic action one second before it could no longer be recalled. They sat in silence.

  “You ever listen to Miles Davis?” he asked after a while of silence. He felt the silence was what reminded him of Miles. The note unplayed , he thought.

  “I think I’ve heard some of his stuff,” she said without any commitment.

  “You would remember it if you had. He ain’t some guy you think you might of heard. You have or you have not. Now, I read that dude’s book. And he says his first memory was of a blue flame on a gas range. He can’t remember who lit it; shit, it could have been him, he admits. But he remembered it. It was the fist concrete, conscious memory. He was three.

  “He said it took him to some edge, some frontier. He said that was where he thought -upon reflection- where his personal philosophy started. In that flame. Now, I ain’t no fan of the black man. I hate 99% of them .

  “But Miles Davis was a snow leopard, man. That dude was more like me than 99% of white men. Why? Because his philosophy was embodied. He lived his ideas, his ideals. He failed, he was hypocritical like all of us idealists and romantics are. But he didn’t preach on Sunday and then live Monday to Saturday. He preached and lived each and every day the same.

  “He said that blue flame was as clear as music, man. Imagine, one of the greatest musicians of the last 1,000 years saying a blue flame was tantamount to his own domain of genius. That’s Michelangelo saying a spring fed lake was like charcoal and pigment, or unhewn rock. That’s Phidias saying a whirlwind spoke to him in Pentelic marble and rang the golden triangle of the roof of the Parthenon.

  “For me, the earth, the soil, the ground, this rock,” he said as he looked off to the edge of the room, but beyond it too, she thought, “every time I put my eyes or these hands on the rock, or on the ground, or what comes out of the ground, from sweet gas and black oil to lapis granite dust of drilled holes, to fruit, giant buds or clusters of grapes, noon-blue apples, each time I sink these hands in or upon the earth and its bounty it’s like the logos to me.

  “The word ,” he finally said. “And all that grows and feeds and waters and batters with wind and rain, all that pollinates, all that is passed on, all that came from the word. This earth and her soil, her terre firma and terre incognita , is my first memory.

  “I was three, and just a few miles south from Scotland, just a few hours drive from my ancestral home, my genomic beginning, my fist memory is of the hail; the landed hail,” he added that last clause and looked to see if she understood.

  “I was so far from home, our home, on my own. Can you image that now, a three-year-old allowed to run around on his own half a mile from home?” he asked as she smiled and raised her brow and widened the eyes. He saw she was so beautiful that she had to know she was beautiful; it was not up for debate even inside her own head. A woman like that could have been a movie star, he thought. But he was glad she had not gone for stupid job like that; instead choosing to be his court-ordered psychiatrist. She had heart , he thought.

  “And it began to hail and I remember first the pain. First the pain, and then I saw those large white rocks, those fallen grains of ice, the coldest grain . And I was so alive, so enraptured, so embodied in that moment, because it collected on the ground in waves, in mounds, in monuments of the Hagal ; I awoke to the existence of the hail. That was the day I was born. Born into and borne by pain.

  “And I ran; I ran under the hail, as the whole world sat inside -as I ran by each of dozens and dozens of houses- I ran as the whole world watched a three-year-old boy run home in the hail.

  “It was like a deluge, God’s first collective punishment -of words for me- and there were 10,000, shit, 100,000 grains of hail on the ground, it was like snow, in as many words as the English language, not in some stinted
argot of the French or the Polynesians . I heard each grain hit me and the ground, the earth, and scream out a word that I tried to recapitulate in phenomes, guttural cries. I heard words that day .

  “I never told anyone that. I never knew it until I listened to the memory. See, my memories are so vivid, so much more clear than most people’s. And I know this because I talk to people and they say that their memories are cloudy, gauzy, more feelings than anything.

  “But my memories are like re-living it. Each time it’s like it happened 10 minutes ago. It’s that fresh for me. And I believe it’s because I was seeded that day with the Word, truthful speech in ovum, seed, nascent form. I believe that. I believe my Scottish hail under that Isle sky, that cold and fog and quiet of an Air Force base at the end of the 1970’s -the height of the Cold War- that ice was metaphor and metonym of my capacity and my need for sonorous sound of brutal and beautiful speech; just as Miles believed that blue flame in 1920s Illinois was like music for him. For me it was the hail. And the word.

  “This earth has four elements, four cardinal directions, four ontological domains,” he said as he watched her eyes to see if she was following along or if that last category had confused her. He knew eye contact was aggressive so he used it sparingly.

  She showed no confusion, but no recognition, which meant she was not paying attention at all. He used too many words, and he knew it. It overwhelmed people. He introduced too many new ideas at once, too much hail, all at once. But he thought of God, and how He didn’t give a fuck if man could handle His storms. God just hammered the fuck out of man and the strong survived and the weak died. He, he thought of himself, would speak with the same ideas in mind; with the same lack of concern for man’s ability to handle his words.

  “Nobody -if you ask Miles- nobody liked him as a kid. He felt that. He felt it enough to say it in the first chapter of his book. Most people can’t relate to that shit. Everyone is so goddamn likable, so ingratiating, so people pleasing, that they can’t imagine what it is to be totally, universally, monolithically, unliked. And to feel it, to feel it .

  “See, psychopaths are unliked at first, as kids, because they act like assholes; but they don’t feel it. They notice it. But they feel nothing. And they -smartly- become charming right away, as tool, tactic, ploy. The most charming people you know, are almost certainly psychopaths. However, the guy who is so abrading, so ponderous, so unlikable, the arrogant and brutal prick you can’t stand, well, he likely has the biggest heart of all. And yet nobody gets this even a little bit.

  “I say this technically. I say this because what makes a man emotional, so filled with emotion, so filled with moral desire, so stuffed with the need, the genuine need, to be truthful, even and especially when it’s hard, and hurts him and others -when his words make him unliked- well, I say what makes him this way is his heart. Of course, I mean his limbic system, but when I say his heart, you know what I mean,” he said as she nodded that she did indeed know what he meant.

  “My family has no heart. They’re all head. They believe in the rational, the scheming, the plotting, the savvy and sophisticated and the smart. They have no use for the heart. My family is comprised of my grandfather who left his boy -my father- and his wife and never looked back; a grandmother who was a tramp, the worst thing a female can be.

  “On my mother’s side, one son -my uncle Tom- who robbed my grandfather -his own father- of the farm, a sister- my aunt- who embezzled from her long-time employer, and another son- my uncle Pete- who moved to South Africa under Apartheid , moved to participate in the Apartheid regime. Ok? And he -like my own brother- refused to hire me for a job, because he didn’t think it rational . Keep your eye on that word: rational .

  “I come from the most rational and evil people possible. They have no heart. They have only head and it’s a head that comes from a long line of survivors in the shadow of the 1745 expulsion, the 8th century Norse invasions, the Ice age of 18,000 years ago.

  “And I -like some vestigial part of the old alpha kings- was all heart from the jump; and they hated me for it. They hate me now for it. Because the truly romantic man, he says what’s in his heart even if it wounds everyone else; even it kills him. He thinks honor and authenticity and truth trump all other -temporal- concerns. He survived the boreal forest with his balls, and his harem and his loyal sons, he survived the Norse invasions with his Claymore and his pride, he survived the ‘45s with his vow to return to wipe the civilized British out if it was the last thing he and his great, great, great, great grandson did.

  “And yet, most of my small-hearted ancestors survived with wit, with lying spirit of God designed to trick Ahab, they survived with scheming and rationality and brains. And these people pretend to believe in God!” he barked, and she was surprised, shocked; and her skin felt damp all of a sudden. It seemed a strange thing to say. It even seemed strange to him as he was not yet ready to admit that he was the one who actually believed in God.

  “They pretend to believe in God anyway.

  “Anyway, that hail, man, that hail beat me so hard my head hurt for hours after, my skin was bruised, actual hematomas underneath this Scot skin. It drew blood and I know some of that hail -driven in from north of the Hadrian wall- planted itself in me that day, that first memory, that day of my birth. I was the Hagals’ fallow field, I was the coldest grain’s terroir , I was the earth, the speck of dust blown off the gods’ hands to repopulate the world with what man used to be,” he said and looked down as if he had already said too much.

  “What man used to be?” she asked.

  “Most people have no idea who they are or where they come from. They think this democratic horseshit is real, they think it’s durable, natural,” he said as he laughed contemptuously.

  “We come from 7 million years of alpha chimps running the breeding schedules of their odalisques , their harems. 200,000 years of alpha male humans from King David and Solomon to Genghis Kahn , from the Clan MacLeod , my clan, and our great-grandfather Ljotr , to a thousand Maori chiefs to Apache warriors to all the tribes of the Norse-North before they were civilized by Christ and his weak coterie of polite, oh-so-polite, men of this brand new god.

  “We come from millions of years of the radical meritocracy of breeding; the divine hierarchy. And even after 2,000 years of beta-male breeding, even after the total flip from 70/30 alpha-to-beta breeding for all of history, to now the inverse -30 to 70 alpha-to-beta breeding- even after that, the alpha gene, the suite of genes that make us who we are, have been smuggled into the atavistic blueprint of man year after year, generation after generation, culture after culture, family after family, until one day it will find its fertile ground warm enough from which to emerge,” he said.

  “Is that time now?” she asked. She had dealt with many criminals with delusions of grandeur but this guy was certainly unique in his delusion’s detail.

  “No, but soon. Soon, the terroir will be perfect for a revanchist movement, the Great Return, as Evola put it. Soon, the fallow ground will warm just enough to melt the coldest grain, so the seed is watered, and the white grain will grow. ”

  “What will be the catalyst, you think?” she asked perfunctorily. Neither he nor she knew of the math below the water line, working silently, remorselessly, upon mankind.

  “The Logos , the word, the embodied word of truth. It was the one thing Christ gave us, and I shall anneal it -like one single sperm- to the giant ovum of alpha history and make the self-aware alpha, the embodied truth, the man of action, the monster, the warrior, the man ready to kill and die for what is true and yet with the capacity to speak it first and pronounce it good.”

  “They killed Christ,” she quipped. She’d missed his point and was also trying to tamp down his passions with humor; when he grew serious it made her nervous at the level of her basal ganglia. She didn’t even know she was nervous; she just was. She thought he ought to have said, pronounce it well , but she let it go. He didn’t seem likely to take kindly to being corre
cted; he spoke as if he knew it all already. She did not know he spoke from Genesis. She was modern and felt modern things before she said modern words.

  “He was just one man; merely one god. The new man -the returned man- shall be like the hail, a million grains grown up into the strong stalks of northern trees, the first trees after the ice age, the boreal trees to reclaim, to each strangle the temperate and tropical weeds of this world. He shall return with the numbers of the pagan gods,” he said with a malice that seemed as if sprung up from the dark enclosure of the earth itself; it was callow, unaware of the resistance it would receive now above ground.

  Each word like an x-ray, a still-frame of an ancient instar of a species long underground, fully formed; with many years of history in round night and flat day; wrinkled and smoothed with each vibration -each part of the sine curve above and below the horizon- of that which rolled over them from above like so much storm and flood and thunder and quake of the subterranean gods rising too from their graves.

  Each true statement seemed borne up from the very ground he claimed was like the music of sound, the blue flame, the heat too close to a genius musician that nobody liked either; until they were forced by the gods to like his music, his Logos , even if they could never like from whence that music issued forth. True genius is unlikable, terrible, monstrous, he knew. But its power overwhelms eventually. Eventually, he thought, it overwhelms the common man.

  II. 2016 e.v.

  “Sarah,” Jeff Messangelo said, trying to get her to focus. She was tired from withdrawal from the methamphetamine. He repeated her name and she roused.

  “Sarah, I just need you to sign this statement.”

  She picked up the pen and mumbled, “what is it?”

  “It’s just a typed copy of what you told us earlier,” Detective Messangelo said.

  “Ok, oh, about Lyndon?” she asked.

  “That’s right, just sign it and we can get you out of here.”