Sanction

by Roman McClay

  It was not language, it was code, it was electricity, it was plotting of birth one moment before the Word was invented by God. It was pre-lingual, stone-age, and it lasted an unknown period of time. It was before time. And then Isaiah awoke to these short sentences repeating in his head:

  It’s bloodier than Abraham’s house after he talked to God about circumcision.

  Forest fires can actually burn too hot, so hot that the top soil burns into a desert. This happens when forest fires are prevented from happening; when man intervenes making fires happen less often, but more extremely when they do occur.

  Power laws obtain to N phenomena. Solve for N.

  Some trees won’t release seeds until fire heats them up.

  Margaux sold for $500 million; its back vintages worth $2-4 billion.

  Black Jack gives the best odds to the player; not the house.

  17. King of the Cards

  Do you want everybody to look at you? Do you want everybody that looks at you to remember you? You do not. What you want is clothes that will not detain the eye for a second. Expensive as you like, and well-fitting, but not loud or striking. You want clothes that a man or a woman could not describe as grey, brown or black

  You Can’t Win [Black, Jack]

  And if the Babe is born a Boy

  He’s given to a Woman Old

  Who nails him down upon a rock

  Catches his Shrieks in Cups of gold

  She binds iron thorns around his head

  She pierces both hands & feet

  She cuts his heart out at his side

  To make it feel cold & heat

  Her fingers number every Nerve

  Just as a Miser counts his gold

  She lives upon his shrieks & cries

  And She grows young as he grows old

  Songs & Ballads [Blake, William]

  There are risks to challenging this excessive police power; but the risks of not challenging it are more dangerous, even fatal

  Kingdom of Fear [Thompson, Hunter S]

  I. 2022 e.v.

  He was surprised that nobody remembered him; as he remembered almost everyone, no matter how ordinary. But, sometime in his 30s it occurred to him why. People do not pay attention to others nearly as much as they do to themselves; as they are in their own heads, he reasoned. And thus, they are blind to the world.

  And to truly remember someone you must be alive in the moment, truly present, like some Zen Buddhist motherfucker , he said to himself. He felt his good memory was due to his philosophy. He had the philosophy to be awake and pay attention. And he -in this analysis- was almost completely right .

  And most people are just not in the moment, they are thinking of the past or the future, he thought, but not of right now. And no matter how interesting he was, or thought he was, no matter how unique looking, dressing, sounding, people just couldn’t be expected to pay attention. As long as he didn’t use fire or do anything that pressed down on their adrenaline glands, they would forget him, his name, his appearance and anything that was said within five minutes; and that is when he read the data on eye-witness testimony and a low but gathering laugh filled the mind and body as the book lay in his lap.

  “Some people are suggesting they not even allow it anymore; it’s that unreliable,” he said from the other room, as his girlfriend did dishes and ran water and bashed things around.

  “What?” she asked, not really caring at all.

  “Nothing,” he said as a favor to them both.

  This old scene from 13 years ago played out on the wall of the lab’s screen. The audio was nearly perfect, the internal monologue was read, narrated in the inmate’s own voice. It was built by a simple program MO had stolen from Google, and then paired with the thoughts Lyndon had stored from that old memory -between the synaptic firings and glutamate on bifurcated synaptic membranes in the hippocampus and along vectors gleaned via a neural map MO had built of the inmate’s brain a few months back- as it played the first time.

  This iteration, however, was the second time it was played.

  It was like a new manner of filmmaking, the inmate thought, it was brilliant and poignant and real . MO had taken audio and video from cells phones in the rooms at the time, then shown him -the inmate- the scene once -one time- and pulled his thoughts -now as engrams- that had formed as he had watched it.

  His memories, then, were able to be 3rd -person narratized, in his own damn voice, using a program that assembled every phenome he had ever uttered in their sessions and cobbled together each word with perfect fidelity to his actual thoughts that he had had watching the images the first time. The algorithm then read it over the top of it; a voice-over to the images that ran.

  Lyndon had always had three or four phones -burners he used for work- and his one iPhone, all around his home, and so MO got different camera angels and could build a 3D tableau with ease.

  The inmate was embarrassed but asked anyway, “can you play it again?”

  MO nodded and played the time from many years prior and they sat then in dim lighting and observed. Isaiah was quiet and Indian-sitting in the corner, eyes shut in meditation; black carpenter ants moved in lock-step on his arms toward the shoulder in search of the nectar Isaiah produced for them. A feral Colobopsis explodens clambered onto his hand from the leg and attempted to gain access to the single-file line of the matte-black ants, but they blocked her and she retreated from the ascent to the elbow and shoulder above.

  The inmate noticed new things now, the room’s hue -almost sepia; wild west, silverplate- he began wondering if this was a filter MO used on purpose or a distortion from poor cameras back then. He noticed a light beam, in the replayed film, just off his flank in his overstuffed chair, he watched it and himself from what he felt was nearly 15 years ago, and it -the light- shone through the window, onto the brown lumbered floor, and the dust in the air was like a cosmos of star and nebulae and hurled comets in that one narrow beam .

  The inmate just stared at that dust in the image as his image, him, in the film -who he was then- obviously ignored it; he did this all as his own voice narrated the scene. He was captivated by the fidelity, the nuance of these bits of flotsam and jetsam that whirled in and out of that one-inch beam; then it disappeared as the light changed, the camera angle changed and the hallway was shown.

  It -the hallway- was empty, brown floor and doors flanking it, with the olive drab of the walls, the shower curtain to the small guest bathroom white with a large brown tree image silkscreened onto it. The tile, soft olive as well. A black frame hung on the wall, books spines only from this angle were seen in the hall closet he had converted into a book shelf by removing the door and removing the jambs, removing all crown molding from all seams in the house.

  The whole house looked like it was hewn from stone because of this little, minute, attention to detail.

  There were perfect right angles at each turn, each door, each change of phase. He had decided the house would have no molding because all it did really was just hide gaps between studs and door jambs, the sloppy shit builders do , he thought with contempt. He had eliminated all that and hung heavy solid core doors, with heavy metal and right-angle hardware and levers. The movie ran like this; slowly, languidly, showing off these details he adored. A home was an art project, he thought, an installation piece. And what was the home but a metaphor for a man’s life? Didn’t dreams reveal this? And yet men -other men- lived in banal and beige homes all the time. Did they not know -or care- what this said of their own lives?

  Her voice again from the kitchen pulled him from his reverie, her voice perfectly rendered , he thought, her annoyance in between the noise of the faucet, the pans and the narration on pause. He announced to himself that she was the catalyst; but that was what historians always do, he reprimanded himself. They -he- looked backwards and said, ah, here is where it all hinged . But, there is no way to know, no causal analysis that can possibly be true in any real sense. Maybe he would have evolved into t
his type of man anyway, even if he had never met her, maybe faster, meaner, with more malice than even he thought he was capable of.

  He didn’t believe it, but he thought it, as inoculation to certainty.

  That is what people don’t get about criminals, outlaws, men who go their own way. They don’t get that they are as pulled by it as they are; as swayed by the forces of all that unnamed shit both inside and outside of all of us; all of us , he thought. But, the average person, he is more swayed by the need to conform, to belong, to fit in. That is all that it is. If it was merely morality that most men had and bad men lacked, then whole societies wouldn’t act as they did. If the average man was moral, he thought, if he was good, then Germany 1933 or Japan for that matter, China nor Russia nor Cambodia nor the Jim Crow south, wouldn’t have been so monolithically in step toward such doom; nor all those Democrats and Journalists, they wouldn’t have let Bill Clinton rape women with impunity . He remembered that article in which Gloria Steinem publicly admitted she did not care about Clinton’s victims one jot.

  No, people were conformists, that is why they didn’t transgress laws or normative values or break taboos , he surmised. They were not good ; or it wouldn’t have been John Brown alone at Harper’s Ferry, shit, even those of us who hate niggers, know that slavery is wrong , he added. It corrupts the slave owners, the society and the slave. It turns everyone into liars and they hanged John Brown for doing the moral thing, because it was merely against the law, contravened the social norms and the mores of the time .

  Right and wrong are one thing, the law is something else, and social taboos are a third. And sometimes they align, maybe even often they align, but when they do not, it’s not the so-call good men who figure this discord out. No, those so-called good men they just keep their head down and follow along with the law and the rules, and leave it to outlaws to set things right, big R right.

  And in 100 years everyone can finally admit it was Socrates that was right, and Copernicus too; it was John Brown who was right and the whole nation that hanged him that was wrong, and even Joseph McCarthy who was right -there were, in fact, Russian commies in the State Department- and it was Trotsky not Stalin who was right, and it was Japanese in internment camps that were right and FDR that was wrong, and it’s Trump now that is right and the corporate liberal media that is wrong, he thought as his mind seemed to swell with historical examples with tendrils that went on forever.

  The inmate, of course, included himself in that rouges’ gallery of outlaws; he thought what he did was right too. But he admitted that it was a fundamentally different and more atavistic and harder to hear argument; it was like the lone Doppler whistle of the train moving away, not coming closer; it was the wolf howl just under the wind; it was the silence of the hawk’s stare; the mycelium under the ground, bigger than any organism on earth but invisible to small things which stood upon it; this small thing that was man.

  The inmate was arguing for a return to a natural order of things, where the State filed an anti-trust suit against itself -he as signatory to an amicus brief- for its unfair practice of having a monopoly on violence and thus corrupting the youth. He had filed this suit in his mind, his body received it and his soul had placed it on the docket. His hands held the gavel as it banged on the bar.

  The State should not have such primacy; a man should be allowed -by law- to exact revenge in the name of morality and justice , he thought. Just as a man should hunt his own food, a man should settle his own scores, he thought; and he thought it while imaginatively addressing the Supreme Court of a country he no longer believed it at all.

  He listened to his own voice-over as he watched the images of Melannie in the kitchen, her black hair like vines and morning glories with black flowers opening and closing around black gnats and black bees; and he saw small wasps’ nests, her neck shrouded in that stygian hair, her lithe shoulders browning from the spring sun she had received that AM, her white summer dress, un hemmed and ragged and nothing else on. He still saw her innate beauty, the endogenous value; the ontological worth that shone forth despite her entropy and malice and the poison she held for him in her teeth.

  Her little bare feet, up on her toes, he saw it all in the images of MO’s little movie, and he closed his eyes and saw it all clearer in his mind. She was so redolent and alive and moving in feminine bursts, discreet movements followed with his eyes like a shadow, by his asymptotic foveal arc; appearing as one stretch of a thing, her here first, then her arrival there as not separate movements but one long bend of the soul and the body toward some goal she had let invade her just -as of late- fissuring head.

  She was older in his mind now, the craquelure of her skin more apparent; her drinking did that, he assumed. Her teeth were craggly, but not unsightly, they were a joy to bring out with a laugh or a wail or some outburst engendered by ecstasy she would ball up inside her until it must be let out.

  God, he then thought, she was so mean about her femininity, so resentful of being the softer sex . She made herself meaner to make up for what she saw as weak -anger is a well-known antidote to fear- and of course pain too. Like a short guy who acts bossy; overcompensating for bad treatment as he failed to gain size in youth. People blithely condemn short guys like that for being Napoleons but imagine how they are treated as kids when their bodies just refuse to gain on their growing peers. Imagine the comments they endure, the slights, the lectures by short fathers, or understanding mothers who tell them to not let it get them down.

  People are no good , he thought. They aren’t any fucking good. Short guys are not respected, and they feel it immediately. Then, when they get an attitude, they are doubly condemned. And women are admittedly treated as women, and some just do not like that. Just because, I, the inmate thought, don’t like pushy, masculine women, doesn’t mean they don’t have a right to exist . Maybe Melannie felt mistreated, slighted in youth for being a girl; and she vowed to be brash and assertive and mean as a way to clear some overgrown path; overgrown with obstacles she saw in her way.

  Passive and submissive -and what he would call, natural- girls would just flow around any downed trees, under they’d go if boughs hung low; they’d let the unmown grass tickle their feet. They would not lament the lack of clearing; if a beast was right in front, then they’d wait for the bear or the birds, if they appeared on the path to move on and thus -in time- move out of their way. Girls like this deferred to that which is larger, less conscious, or may have agenda that they, that she -the naturally submissive girl- might never understand. And she’d be built humbly in body and temperament; unlike aggro girls, and men like the inmate himself.

  But, a man shows deference to similar things, this is what women like Melannie never got, and probably never would get: they aren’t the only one’s who must sometimes submit. Men cannot arm wrestle a Lion or saddle a scorpion, they cannot, we cannot, the inmate thought, go toe to toe with an elephant or an Orca with insouciance or with social sanction: a Letter of Marque or a note from the doc; or from mother herself.

  But women, these aggro-bitches, Jesus , he thought, they think the whole world oughta get out of their way, as if any impediment is illegitimate, as if it’s only because they are a woman that they cannot have it all their own fucking way . Life is full of beasts and men and women and force majeure , lava floes and ice shelves and tornados and wicked diseases, it ain’t easy for anyone, and especially not men.

  We have to , the inmate thought, handle shit these girls never have to deal with. They get benefits for their sex alongside their debits. Yeah, maybe they aren’t taken as seriously as men sometimes, but men aren’t taken seriously compared to other men just as often as all that . Some men get treated with deference immediately due to their size or countenance or who their father might be. Some men who are shorter or poorer, or not very bright, have to deal with being dismissed as quickly and more roughly than any girl like Miss Melannie. And alphas, he thought as the anthropological data swarmed his head, do 10 times the work
of any other man, and 100 times that of a woman; but these women, shit, they never calculate all that work they need not do.

  People treat anyone they think is unimportant like shit , he saw. Men & women, black & white, he thought it was no coincidence that Asian men are treated as if they are invisible in our society. They are thought of as sexual eunuchs and as vague apparitions in the collective unconscious , he thought. They are far smarter than most, with 112 collective -average- IQs, and they commit almost no crimes at all -there were only 280 Asians total in all Colorado DOCs compared to 6,000 wetbacks and 5,000 nig-nogs and 8,000 whites , he tabulated from memory; from his PGC. The Asians are probably the best citizens we have and they never, repeat never, bitch about unfair treatment, even though they are ignored mostly and then discriminated against in admission processes , he added, in the best of our schools . “Fucking Harvard for christsake,” he said under his breath as the image of this ridiculous woman who had no soul, no heart appeared. He couldn’t believe people like that thought they were radicals, when they went around bragging about membership to that kind of club.

  Asians must try harder, score better, do better than any other race in America just to get the same treatment and they say not one word in protest. Think of that. Niggers bitch about everything, even the Jews think every sneeze is a veiled threat, every “how about you?” inquiry is an insult, every mispronounced word is a slur , he thought in the chair as the images and sound unfurled for him and MO marked each thought on the cloud with fMRI readings and new bots that measured low-voltage electricity in the brain.

  Yet, nobody gives one fuck about Asians, they are ignored by us all. And yet, they are a supreme genome and culture, an exemplar of a race to behold. You think white women like Melannie get treated worse than Asian men? Shit , the inmate thought, that is a joke on its face . But, these men carry their burden with aplomb, with dignity, with Bushido honor, the inmate thought; they don’t bitch and moan like women and niggers and the goddamn Jews . A person’s sexuality is core, is key: and Asian men are neutered and mocked along this vector and white women are exalted and given whatever they want in this domain. White women are the T-rex of sex; each race exalts white women as the Athenian ideal, yet she has no clue, he thought, none of these women have a clue as to the core damage done to men vis-à-vis sex by women.