Sanction

by Roman McClay

  As he stewed on the insults -they arose in his head like climbing, repeating, asymmetric leaf stem nodes on a branching flower, they climbed and greyed and filled in spaces and yet his garden never clotted or cloyed, he always made room for more rants and insults and hateful shit- he began to feel his emotions stir up like warm water vapor, haze over the sea, then cumulous clouds, carried by wind, turbulence, cavitation of memory and heartache, jealousy and the augment of heartrate, epinephrine and coritco-glucoids.

  He remembered a time in bed, when she had just nearly broke her own back writhing in orgasm from his sexual gifts, and as she panted and wiped the tears from her eyes, the slobber from lips, the re-collapsing of hips, the brushing away with the hand of the hair from the face, she told him, well implied, that he was mediocre as a man, in her most insidious of ways. He had asked her how he had performed -the first mistake of any sensitive man- and she had felt no compunction about ranking him in some bizarre and humiliating way. She took her pleasure and then smashed him and did it with blasé aplomb. This is what women are, he thought, this is how they get their revenge. Their bodies are weak, so they attack the heart, the soul of men, and this is the exact location of man’s deepest -weakest- part.

  He could barely form the words in this now of his re-lived memory; they were just that, just words, not sentences. Words, ‘grade school’ or ‘jack’ or ‘B-minus’ all said as compared to university level, king of the cards , or even just a flat A, as a well-earned grade. She battered him about the soul and to the body redounded the disease.

  She’d made use of metaphors always ranking him middling to average; as a dig, as a way to raise herself up by pushing him down. He turned away from the memory, he refused to allow her to run the entire farce out in full one more time, as he realized he had played this memory over dozens of times; had allowed her to say those lines over and over, each time a revenge she had on him. His own memory was her weapon , he realized as the dagger went in. Each time the body secreted cortisol and neuro-toxins that killed him from the inside out. She had once called him Lincoln -instead of Lyndon- when introducing him. Women have no way to calibrate their own malice, he thought. They murder men with their words that repeat and repeat and repeat .

  This is how sinister women are; they strike and wound forever; not merely, he thought, in moments they remember . They fight manifold battles at once, over decades between dozens of men. They are the Lernaean Hydra , the second and twenty-second and endless of the Labors. “Well, more formidable hydra stands within, whose jaws with iron teeth severely grin, ” he said as he thought of Virgil as he, of late, so often did.

  He wondered if she knew he was thus allowing her a win; all these years later? He asked the air if her barbs, her insults, her untrue but so femininely effective manner -function greater than truth as the evolutionists say- to lay his soul low was known to her? Or did women like that just toss off lines like that to temporarily stun, to get away, parry, using the jab to merely humiliate, then escape. Did they think their assaults were thus short term, he asked himself, merely acute, not chronic; like a punch in the arm, versus poisoning one’s blood; one’s bloodline?

  A man punishes acutely, strikes you down where you stand; and if you survive it you likely won’t have any long term affects to psyche or effects of corpus. But a woman, she cannot be so direct, so she injects you with corrosive and carcinogenic maladies that attack your soft tissue for years, decades, for life. And yet they claim to be the wounded ones; the sex oppressed. Did anyone know that women often use poison to murder? That is a statistic on DOJ.com , he thought with a wry smile as he thought of how much shit females got away with while they claimed to be so oppressed.

  As he was thinking and feeling and writhing with all this, he saw the movie end, and the wall go black, but the lights stayed dim as MO stood by the counter and stared at Isaiah as he arose from his corner and strode over to the inmate as the prisoner sat in his chair; shackled but not tightly. Isaiah handed him a long hawk -brown and satin black- feather, its quill also black, each thin membrane taut and piloerect.

  Isaiah stood close and placed the feather, quill down, into the inmate’s clasped, accidental prayer-hands; like planting a seedling into the dirt. The inmate looked at it and smiled, with just one corner of mouth. His lips seemed to vibrate, his jaw seemed electric to him, his eyes clouded over, his lashes got heavy with what must have been water, or maybe air pressure, he thought and then knew that was a lie.

  He gazed at the feather even though he desperately wanted to look up at Isaiah, a man he considered his friend, but knew it was another one-way feeling like all his relationships had been. He couldn’t look up, so he stared at that long feather and tried to smile larger than his slightly shaking and taut jaw would allow for. The gratitude in his head was untranslated to the face and thus unseen in the world.

  Isaiah placed his hand on the inmate’s shoulder and squeezed just enough to make the inmate feel his own scapular strength; the hand covered it like armor, he thought, close and guarding, and one layer deep-above . He knew Isaiah could read his internal functions, his neurotransmitter levels -and in what brain area- and his allostatic suite from epinephrine to glucose levels and even his glutamate production in his pre-frontal cortex. He knew Isaiah could read which chems and which thoughts betrayed his inhibitory function itself breaking down, waning under the onslaught from his now oxytocin -now vasopressin- release and uptake.

  Isaiah could read his elevated heart rate, pushing like torrent, jamming on sail, whipping like wind, hand on the tiller, the wind and the rudder obliquely opposed; the windlass as well. The Kraken submerged, the ship, a thing of trophies. His heart was lost to the ocean, yes, but not to the world as he had once thought .

  The inmate was subsumed by this internal storm now, the room was not the only thing crepuscular and verging on black; the feather blurred to a blob, his own hands now opaque, his teeth now biting on lip to steady its quake. Isaiah’s hand squeezed tighter, stronger and more reassuring, enjoining; and the tears like languid snakes rivening soft soil -sand- made rivers from the mountains of his eyes to the delta of his mouth; the saline taste and texture of slightly viscous fluid ran into the crack channels of his upper lip and onto his tongue, his chest began to rise and fall quickly, deeply, his teeth chattered just enough to scatter birds or jittery prey animals if they had been close around.

  “It’s an osprey feather, and I annealed it with your DNA. It’s as much you as a seahawk, and it’s as much me as well,” Isaiah bent down and let his eyes rest six inches below the inmate’s, a magnanimous move, not lost on the inmate, the captive; the king usurped on the throne.

  “It’s,” the inmate barely was audible, even to himself, “regal; beyond what a man can appreciate. But, I adore it to my capacity, Isaiah.”

  Isaiah placed the hand he had removed from his shoulder onto the inmate’s forearm closest. He barely squeezed it; but rather just laid it upon it and nodded as he looked at the feather and the inmate’s hands around it firmly, un-crushingly, perfectly right.

  “You are stuck in an unenviable spot Lyndon. You are jammed up. Limitless wind and lee-side rock in lieu of harbored shore; but finite sail and rudder width,” Isaiah said not in any way thinking or speaking of his being incarcerated by the mere State at all.

  The inmate seemed to know this instinctively, he just nodded and thought of the dialectic in his head; as if he and Isaiah were thinking the same things, at the same time, sharing these about-facing thoughts. It was as if Isaiah was sparing him the need to say it aloud, gracious and cognizant of this second-order pain that attached itself to the primary pain of being a man maligned by women worshipped; a man unworthy of his own gods. It was the pain that a man feels when he is incapacitated by pain; the pain of vulnerability, the pain of weakness shown to a watching crowd, a plotting crowd. And anyone who fails to see this, who rejects it as silly or wrong, or absent, he thought behind the watery face, has failed to fully enter the world. This
is the failure of angels.

  Anyone who thinks a man can show weakness, vulnerability, and escape the Sicarii -plots of lower, even weaker -but manifold- men and equally low-born women -with eye teeth revealed sharply and hands around daggers, and arms like Vishnu around their daggermen too- has been willfully blind like Osiris , like YHWH vulnerable even to His archangel’s worst plots.

  A man gives up his instincts for self-preservation, self-reliance and manliness just for a few seconds, like a buck shot in the flank; stumbling just barely from what he thinks are merely failing feet, not aware his heart is shot through and through , he thought.

  A man gives it up and admits to feeling just one or two of the thousands of barbs and landing arrows, run through with pikes, just one he’ll comment on -not even asking for its removal- and as his mouth forms the words that reveal he has noticed the damage done, his brethren, his family, his worst enemies, all will outflank him more quickly that they’ve ever done anything in their lives. He thought of his brother saying, “I don’t like the emotional Lyndon ,” and he felt he could have rested his case right fucking there .

  But there were 10,000 more examples of his so-called comrades and paramours and family kicking him whilst emotionally down. He knew that to even mention this fact would itself be mocked by the crowd.

  Normally sluggish and halting and lazy and listless and shiftless people, the great mass of men who own 80% of the biomass of the species but barely do 20% of the work, these people will descend upon our anti-hero faster than a calcium ion will traverse a synapse, faster than cheetah running downhill, faster than paranoid people will impute bad motives to every moment of silence between words used in a half-hearted greeting, faster than bad follows bad; and faster than punishment, he thought, follows the good fucking deed.

  The sequela of pain in man’s revelation of his own wounding, is what is lost on the collective psyche.

  Men of heart are coaxed and tricked and told it’s ok , assured that we can tell our story and admit to the pain, the loss, the feelings of doubt and inadequacy, the suspicion that our fathers didn’t like us, and that our mothers didn’t love us and that we were taught next to nothing of what life was about.

  But as soon as we do this, as soon as we believe we can share this, we are called whiners and ungrateful and paranoid louts. We are told to quit bitching and suck it up and act like a man when in doubt.

  So, we do, we bury the pain, he thought, but we do it at cost, at a price . The dirt dug up for us to lay -and bury- our pain in, becomes a mound the world must now go around; navigate , he thought.

  Metabolically, stoicism takes enormous energy, and it must be taken, robbed, fleeced from some other domain. Where, he asked inside the head and chest that still shook, do you people think Alpha Males get their bravery and silence and refusal to blame others for the tragedies that befall us, for the wounds deeply buried in a heart as far below our swollen chests and breastplates of arms-crossed and our refusal to talk?

  We take it from our empathy, our ability to enjoy, gifted with the high perception we lack the low enjoying powers . It comes from the ballast of softness packed into our once tenderest of parts, we pilfer it from feelings stored up for the winter, canned or freeze-dried goods that others can freely eat from or trade away or reveal to their friends. We grow hard because we must or all this shit melts and leaks out, we are men not mere beasts, we are soft on the inside, softer that you can possibly imagine.

  In fact, there is much biological evidence that alpha males are actually the most sensitive of all. And this is why we, he thought, overreact to each slight, each move, each feint or semiotic of ill-will; why we are outraged by infidelity from brother or lover, why we fight to the death over insults you people let breeze by you with barely any notice at all . It’s the great mass of men, mere betas and women who are inured, calloused, insensitive to the pains and the woundings and the insults and the slaps to the face that alphas feel acutely, and chronically too.

  We, he felt, feel everything that you all are too leathered to feel; and yet you call yourselves more mature or more rational or more reasonable folks . You, he condemned, aren’t any of these things, you’re brutish and calloused and impervious to the slight changes in windspeed or direction, in warmth from sunlight or the breath of a babe, inured to the miniscule drop in dew point or the slight rise in grade of the trail upon which you are carried. Carried by us, he thought .

  We are infinitely more sensitive to all manner of change in weather and tone and tenor of lovers and friends. Yet we are barred from revealing these perceptions, if we do we are quote -over-reacting- or accused of being a churlish or puerile jerk. If we explain how something hurts our feelings we are laughed at and told to get over it, or stop being so sensitive. And so, we steel ourselves and bury it all, like treasure on some far-off island, alerting not even the crew of our vessel. We jam it all down and build this body up like a wall, like a crenulated escarpment, like an impenetrable storm out to sea that no ship of the line would dare enter -follow us- into .

  We extract, we drink -like dromedary- the water vapor from the earth’s atmosphere, like lizard we absorb the thermal gain from the blackrocks, and we lap up the dew of the heart-like leaf, we eat of the forest like its lung-like trees, we turn the landscape into our forge, our venturi of fuel and vaporous atomized bits from each of the elements and one of four revolving beasts.

  We become a factory of adaptation, a re-purposed foundry and tri-pots aboard a whale ship, we sail out beyond where the great mass of men can witness what we make of our sails, what turns we try at the wheel, what we hunt down and slaughter, what -for son and for daughter- what we render from their corpus floating on waves. They do not see what we must take from their half-submerged offerings; what we drink in between, what we eat that’s unseen, what we feel as the wind and the spray and sun and shadow of albatross pass on and over our face.

  We learn to use broadsword, claymore, javelin and harpoon as we go; we train on bow and carbine and pistols and we fight with out fists; anything we can do to put distance and mail and border between us and your glares, your stares, you invigilating looks; all missiles that fly from your castles of contempt. We buttress our bodies with beards and hard looks, with muscles that swell like the waves, with bent knuckles, chipped by fighting losing battles with mountains that mimic our own topography; fractals of our vascular hands; scars that riven us like trails made by panthers and marks made by jackals and tracks left by three-legged wolves.

  We raise up Maginot Lines, we build Hadrian Walls, we dig motes and set traps, we tear away the bridges we built over the Rhine on our way back from these battles in Gaul. We set out to build as much tissue between our hearts that seem never to harden, between you and it, to protect it from all these heinous and barbaric and spiteful assaults.

  And when we’ve tanned it and tamed it, and let it grow large, when we’ve hardened and burnished and sealed it in armor, when we’ve tattooed it and carved it and scarred it with rituals designed by the gods and their emissaries the angels, when we’ve gone into the forest, abandoned the shore, walked into the weird wilderness to bring back what is needed and wanted and enchanted you all; when we’ve fought the dragons, and ballistically ceramic plated our consciences, when we’ve become the monsters we needed to be, because you people told us we were too sensitive & too fucking serious, that we needed to take it in stride, when we finally become men, ready to do our duty for society, we’re told we need a shave and shower and should smell like a girl. We’re told we need to civilize ourselves, rejoin the race that exiled us, soften our hearts for the sake of polite society; told to run a comb through our hair.

  Well, our hearts were never hardened, it was everything between these hearts and you that was tempered. Our bones were augmented with calcium deposits from incessant jamming and beating on them; our muscles were grown and hardened and covered in black body hair. Our mien was engraven, our emotions enslavened, our stoic faces built line by line by lin
e. We looked into the snow like the buffalo, faced right into the elements and got burned by the sun and snared by its choking brambles and plants; we wrestled with angels and trapped beasts with Wolfsangels, we put our endogenous respect for the forest’s best creatures to one side. We offered you all the deepest of oils from whales sounding a mile down to hydrocarbons entombed in the earth; we pretended you deserved it, as we skinned the animals we knew, we fucking knew were more noble that you fucking twits.

  We sacrificed, and we broke down our bodies, hardened in some places and weak at the joints; asps and ursine pelts over our shoulders, rocks broken in half, holes dug in the soil, rockets sent into the sky, we smashed atoms and linked carbon, and plunged prows into the oceans 10 miles deep. We extracted the blood from the leviathans that knew themselves gods over us; we sold our souls to keep you in clothes, we turned ourselves inside fucking out. We set our bodies aflame to light the way for our brethren to see their way clear to the foot of the steepest of climbs. We toiled at night, we lost 3 out of 4 fights, and we picked ourselves up as you turned and looked away .

  Our blood became black, the white of our eyes splintered and cracked, we looked right at what was most dangerous and likely too much for our best. We drank Spartan broth, we followed the moth, our entire vectors engulfed in that disorienting flame. We ate the goat’s remnants, we held in abeyance, anything that might make us be able to rest; we watched in silence as the women of Troy burned our ships in the bay. With stiff upper lip, we merely took another trip into the forest to hew water and wood. We rebuilt it all despite the goddamn Fall, and for millennia we refused to blame anyone else.