by Roman McClay
“Feel it; feel like a helpless fucking loser, fellas,” he said aloud, “and feel, and feel like it's gonna get worse before it gets better,” and with that fiat command he looked just beyond the Heads-Up-Display of the car's meta-data that appeared in his field-of-vision, and watched what seemed an apparition on the road ahead -a hallucination as real as any memory- as her face broke open into a smile, her teeth warped and were allowed to put on weight until they appeared as a still-frame of large mud-wasps fleeing -first- a cave as overture to the vampiric bats that took the dusk as a cue -as inverted as their sleeping position- and awoke to the darkness.
He saw the sounds of her face, a ukase issued by her Russian Politburo father and apparatchik mother, their DNA swarming her facade until her mouth relented and broke open wider and wider to accommodate their Lysenko -inspired multiple-harvests of teeth, a dictum that hovered around that mouth more than issued from it in these visions, a booming command swollen in the air pockets in his ears and his other perforated organs: Do you even eat; you're so skinny! Eat something! she said again and again to him and his kind. These were not mere memories, Isaiah assured him, but they were evidence of the people who had insulted him for all time.
“Indeed I do,” he answered -this memory of her impertinent query- aloud. Then he was forced to pause as he searched for her name; he wanted to punctuate his wry agreement with this memory of her by using her name. But at 160km/h the road maintained its emptiness as the car's lights illuminated only a hundred meters of space between him and his home in front and the tail-lights imbuing a few meters of the road to the city behind him; and his head remained devoid of her name. He saw and thought only of her fucking face as his DM’s populated his mind with the code from his team leader: “5 by 5 – Daniel One.”
He acknowledged the message to his number one and smiled at his pure vengeance as her face evaporated into the black. The first edition book with that one error on page 161 lay on the seat as if hidden from the new universe itself.
II. 2038 e.v.
He waited to make sure the question was finished; completed. Then he spoke.
“Why surround myself with all these books? Why do I fetishize such things? These are my friends. I'm a social creature and I want to go to the best parties with the best people just like any social climber. You can hang out with local drunks and banal neighbors, but I'm dining on whale stakes with Melville, imbibing the Amber Restorative with Hitchens, and maybe even dancing in the pews with Ms. O'Connor. I want to converse with men who understand me and my ideas and better yet, I want to be flanked on each side and cornered by Great men who do not share my opinions. I want to be beset on all sides by the crank, the iconoclast and the impolitic brigand of letters and pirates at the helm of commandeered ship outward bound and looking for a fight with the Main.
“You may find conceits unlike your own dyspeptic and distasteful and shun them appalled. You feel the force-fed goose liver embalming your normally undisturbed corpus and soul; the foie gras that results from such discomfort no consolation you say as it is others who feast upon your torture. But I merely feel cloyed on a surfeit of delights as the ideas of history’s great men and worst outlaws; the ballast and cargo in the hold of the ocean-ship's farthest out commanders and runner of guns, drugs and slaves; the blood the mud and yes the beer in the streets and the fields of each author's literary tableau under my nails and wedged in the ears and smoothing out the fissures in my brow and the corners of my shock-white eyes.
“All this and more is stuffed into my guts through the feuilleton and the feast of volumes alike; it's fucking books man that flank me with defending spears and dousing water when the church's censors and heretic hunters are at my door with the pyre outside; it's literature that blankets me and defends me and keeps out the cold when the universe herself is expanding the murderous vacuum around us at speeds faster than the light we once thought we could harness to witness its advance; it's the tomes and page-leaves all alone both that feed and fete me when the morally-gaunt rabble and stinting stupidity of the masses trample the crops and poison the wells as they turn and whirl and jabber at djinns and devils in the deserts of their impoverished internal landscapes.
“No, I'll take my library and the writers who populate it with the profound sound of the mind's thoughtful silences and the coruscating glow of man's intoxicating inner coronal show over the general din and bathtub gin of your fatuous and low-brow bar-b-ques,” he said to the little girl who has asked, why-for, he had all these books in the room.
The room itself was well lit, and he himself was half drunk, and the girl was just 3 feet from the floor. He picked her up just then as she instinctively hugged him and he felt certain she would fall asleep right there as they both faced the spines of these tomes.
He awoke in the silver jet of light from the waxing moon; the air had turned cold in the night. His body ached, that is how he knew he was awake. He rubbed the crook in his neck and then turned to the side. The wind was brisk, he saw the tree boughs moving, but not so much that the trunks themselves swayed. He thought of Jack, he knew he was out there, he could feel that the little boy -oh, but it was a little girl wasn’t it- in the dream? he correctively asked of himself.
But he still felt it was Jack in the dream. Jack asking why all the books, all the knowledge, if he wasn’t going to do what he wanted most? Why , Jack would ask, was Blax willing to sacrifice his own desires for the larger group?
Blax missed him so much, and he wished he could speak to him now. He pinged him via DM, but -as he suspected- Jack Four’s DM and PGC was turned off. He looked at his chronometer, it was 0233hrs, and he had no answer for the boy, the girl, in his dream.
The answer he had given in his dream was flippant, and doggerel, and fun. It was true enough, but it was too jocular, and it missed the point. Blax had missed his shot, and so he was making the best of what he had left. He was choosing to build instead of destroy.
Jack had rightly said there were more enemies to be had, to locate and extirpate. He was not wrong, but the only ones Blax truly wanted were already dead, and untouchable. To just go and kill the B-sides was not fun enough to justify it for him; maybe he was too old. Maybe he had mellowed and sold-out, he thought.
But, he had done great things with the Jacks. He had done a great thing with The Bust. He had helped Isaiah and been part of a genuine team. He had built something, for others, and thus, by extension for himself. Jack Four didn’t see it, but it was there. And each man has ghosts of his own to deal with. What is seen and unseen is not clear to man himself, how will he make his visions, and apparitions appear to anyone else? But Blax knew that if he truly believed all this, he wouldn’t need to justify it at two in the fucking morning, worried, anguished, bereaved.
Why must all four Jacks believe it, isn’t three of the four enough? Why, he asked himself in the dark, must he convince every goddamn person that he feels like he made the meaningful choice, the one that aligned with his own inner calibration device? Was it not true unless a monolith of all four believed him? He wondered if his assertions were dubious if he awoke in the night with qualms himself. Could not a man have doubts and still move ahead with one path, one chosen Tao ? Or did a man necessarily have to be monolithic, and adamantine and perfectly just? “That was the psychopath, not the artist,” he said quietly as to not awaken her.
The artist is always filled with doubts. The artist sees it from all angles, light sources, from the dark of the scuro , and the light of the chiaro, too.
But, he thought as he yawned and his jaw vibrated and hurt from that old injury, he must paint one version, he cannot have a piece that itself moves . Caravaggio made two and three versions of Judith, of course, and Szukalski made many drawings of his sculptures before they were cast. But, eventually, the wave collapses, it must. Eventually a choice must be made. And Blax had chosen to teach and encourage and help edify and burnish his Jacks and raise and love his little girl.
He had chosen that. He
had forsaken vengeance against those that personally wounded him. This was not righteous, it was what was required, as his enemies had all died long ago. If they were alive, then sure, he’d then have to debate it. But, he wouldn’t just make up new fucking enemies so he could rampage and drain his spleen, he thought. He had talents for creative-destruction; he was a goddamn artist with grandeur and plans . He felt good about being in league with other men, men as competent as Isaiah and his Jacks who shared each of his genes and alleles. These were men worthy of combinatorial efforts, not like any geek off the street.
Jack Four, he thought, and as he thought it his head shook upon its damaged neck. Jack Four is that voice in the back of the room, the back of the head, that makes you feel like a coward, and a sell-out and tells you that you are scared to live how you want . 99 out of 100 times that voice is correct; you are a coward and are just playing nice to avoid the conflict you know in your balls you must have. But 1 of 100 times, that voice is wrong, it’s a black pirate, a brigand, a selfish Satan who is rebelling against the justice -not tyranny- of God. But try telling Satan that, try telling Jack that. They think they are always right, he thought as the silver light made the books upon the close shelf cast shadows down like jagged buildings or teeth or markers in a crowded cemetery.
He felt the saliva build in his mouth as he thought in the dark. He needed to get his spit to Jack soon, the month was ending in less than four days now. Blax almost regretted his use of the Medea gene, as it had become more of a bargaining chip against him not for him; as Jack was using his own life as hostage. It was the inversion of all logic: the kidnapper held the gun to his own head as the ransom victim pleaded with him to put it down, saying she’d pay anything at all if the man would just not harm himself .
But this is what love does to you, and the love between old parent and grown child, man and woman, and woman and son has always been unequal like that. The parent loves the grown child more, the man loves the woman more, and the woman loves her babe more. This is life.
He -so paranoid after all he’d been through before the Jacks- had developed the Medea gene to protect himself from a putsch . He had used it then to bond them. And it had become a weapon in the hands of Jack Four now as the rest of them just watched with wounded hearts -hearts that sounded angry- as they loudly bled out all over their ribs. He knew he was to blame, shit, he was that boy, that man, he thought. He was no different, not genetically, not temperamentally . He understood. Understanding wasn’t the issue, it was reaching him, reaching Jack and explaining to him that it could be another way; that it didn’t need to be all one way for it to be the right way.
But, he knew that when he -Blax- was that age, he was just as Manichean as Jack. Jack had been raised at lot 45 , the Rotem et Sacoma, since he was 15. He was nearly 18 now, and he had matured, no doubt. But, he had had a slightly more austere childhood than PraXis corporation and Tania -and even Isaiah- had preferred for the first four Jacks. But, his bloodwork and CNS readings and gene expression and behavioral work-up had placed him in the top four of the original 20 boys. In fact, he had scored the highest.
“That should have been the tip off,” Blax said with a snort and a weak smile against the pillow and sheet and the mercurial light of the moon as it had moved between the tree branches splayed out like fingers over the eyes. Jack Four had the toggling genes for quick adaptation to milieu ; he had the genes they all had, that allowed for a harsh and violent response to any perceived injustice or slight. In childhood, any meanness, injustice, coldness, lack of affection, would be used to toggle into the vindictive and vengeful version of those MAO-A/L and DRD2 and HRHT1 alleles.
The other Jacks had truly loving and decent parents; but Jack Four had had a strange sub-clinical placement family, who were like machines that mimicked love, but didn’t feel it, and the boy was too savvy not to notice the subtle differences. Their genome -Blax acknowledged, admitted- saw, read, between the lines no matter how closely each line was stacked.
Jack called them his adoptive family, even though each Jack was born from his mother just as any boy would be. Their genes were manipulated, and so the parents contributed no genetic material, but the mother carried each Jack in her womb, and felt the pain and oxytocin release from childbirth and lactated and nourished them with mother’s milk. Each father was there from day one and loved each Jack as their own. But Jack Four had noticed something amiss, and it allowed those specific alleles to code for different response to stimuli; and by age seven, he was hardwired for payback and revenge. And yet he was the most cautious of them all. Blax saw this as a riddle still to solve.
The Jacks were not his boys, they had parents, real parents. The Jacks were him , they were genetically identical to him, and he only thought of them as his boys.
It took an honest man to live outside the law , Blax thought. He reaffirmed that they weren’t necessarily against the law; just outside it. And Jack Four had bristled at that. The other Jacks got it, they got that they broke the law when necessary but not incessantly; from need not desire. They were building islands, archipelagoes of autonomy, to use Hakeem Bay’s term.
They transgressed to save things, like kicking in a door to rescue a boy from a fire; like shooting a rabid dog. But they didn’t just go to war with every asshole on the planet, killing each knave, fool and murderer there may be, smashing each black nationalist, anti-white racist and Antifa, each feminist manhater and corporate greed head and journalist in the contiguous 48. Jesus, that was selfish, solipsistic, and it missed the larger point, he thought. They had a chance to create something different, not just overthrow the current order and replace the mechanisms of power with their people; new bottles for old wine.
Blax winced a bit, because they had - in fact- gotten several hundred of themselves elected to congress and the senate in 2038. But, that was not the point , he assured himself.
They were there as bulwark to prevent their experiment from being rolled back; not to advance some agenda; they policed the borders nothing more , he said with almost no doubts. But he didn’t know if that was true or not, Isaiah ran all that, he finally admitted. Blax just handled the training and educating of the four Jacks; and that is what he had done. And he had raised The Bust, that was his other job, and really that was his payment for the delay of all his deepest needs. She had given him the grandeur of purpose that he craved. She had smoothed his legacy of females both abusing and abused.
He’d eschewed the wife & child version of life, thinking these conceits too low, too banal. But, he had done so because all modern women were unchaste and thus unsuited to be wife and mother in his view. Because the water was dirty, he had refused to acknowledge his thirst.
But Valance , he thought, as she slept right there small and lithe, her small but dense muscles angular and hewn like a cubist sculpture, her black hair and raven’s feathers woven into it, the white bones of mice and squirrels around her neck, Valance had been pure, and her child -their child- was building itself right then as he thought of all this . He placed his hand on her side, and let it feel for the pooch of the expanding womb. She would give birth soon, he thought, likely between Christmas and his own birth day just a week after New Year’s.
He thought that at just 18, she was already a goddess, a beast capable of building a man, men even, which was a talent, a power he would never have. And Valance knew she was powerful, and never looked down on this feminine trait. It was what women were designed for, best at, and unrivaled in, and unlike the modern female, Valance took pride in it, and never sought for anything else. She was a mother now -for as she said, she was already a mother regardless of which side of the womb the babe kicked on- and she was a wife since age 15. And he was the only man she had ever known; or would want to know. This too had made her something that no other woman would ever be able to be.
She got what life was, from the jump, from day one. She knew -on instinct, he thought- what it took Blax 64 years, and a tortuous, circuitous route of stupidi
ty and malice and cowardice and error and disaster and shame to discover. She had instincts and instincts supported; he had to give himself that much. She had -as the Jack’s had- something he had never had: support . He had never been encouraged to be bold, or artistic or thoughtful. And yet he was allowed too to ruin his soul over this lack of will to instruct him. They -his elders- had been liberal and tyrannical in all the wrong domains, just like the State itself, he thought .
He had -instead- been told to play it safe, by the rules, make money, and sell out. He had been looked down on for his adventurism, and quest for a noble life, his desire for something as large and grand as his soul. He had been ignored, and passive-aggressively given silent treatment when he had spoken his logos into being.
But she had been raised from age four and nine tenths, by him, and had been shown the feral life of the forest, the law of the jungle, the liberty of God’s bounty alongside the punitive correction of the black hand of doom; the threshing sun and its shadow under the moon. She had been raised to be an apex predator inside a system that was enclosed. She knew that there was no way to push entropy to the periphery, that all waste -error and lies- would be returned to her 7-fold, and that she ought live righteously from the start; that fitness in one’s domain and truth were the same thing.
She had been raised to be fearful of sin; to be wary of missing the mark; to know that Hell was here and now if one failed to be the Truth.
She had been taught to shoot straight, to kill the prey animal, never just wound it; and to fear error the way all animals do. But, she had been shown, that errors will be made and that this must never dissuade one from trying, for the trying, this action, is the most important part. Increasing error is the best way to succeed , he had told her, and he let the paradox worm its way into her little head.