by Roman McClay
He saw blood bursting out of alleles of Scots and French and Norseman in CQ-combat, more molecules of androgens and neurotransmitters and opiates atomized and sprayed upon the castle’s walls absorbed by hewn bricks and grout and tally marks made by long dead prisoners; this fort along the shore both a bastille and a bastion of modern liberty; wise father and older tyranny. And what of the cortical piratical ship in the harbor bombarding it; a liberator and an agent of chaos both, a two or three front war from north and further north?
“A mind at war ,” Isaiah said finally aloud, as the inmate smiled, and MO shifted his eyes from Isaiah to the man in shackles between them.
And Isaiah yet lacked the vision to see the terroir , the topography of the inmate’s mind, he saw only the vines and clusters of fruit, he saw the war between the martial forces, but failed to see the weather above and the molten malice below, the land and sea beneath the fort and ship-of-the-main, tempest at the man-o-war’s back, like a flag of looming black.
And he didn’t yet see the sinkholes below the fortress too, engrams like spider webs on walls, enneagrammatic walls collapsing into their own footprint, as monoliths of natural brain structures rose from wells below; cerebellum indeed, causa bellum printed in the hearts of men, each soldier and sailor monomaniacally charged with orders from these hellish kings of sub-cortical regions, the coup-de-foudre of missives and epistles deciphered in the flash of grenadiers and grandmarche exploding in their own volleys.
He saw hazy messages from below, read in the blasted glow of friend and foe; the sky conspiring to rain water and ice and lightning strikes, the vault above unleashing bullion of embossed dragons as the ship’s captain orders another volley onto the pockmarked walls; the fort’s commodore stamping the wax on orders for re-enforcements as his daughters huddle in the innermost caverns of the mind.
What sacred virginal feminine thoughts is this Gaulic man hiding in this besieged edifice along the Gironde shore; what fleeting thought of home is the British captain banishing as soon as it arrives?
Hell is more than other people , the inmate thought, it’s Natural Law embossed on the firmament and down below engraved on this iron core of earth , Isaiah heard him think, felt him say, and his own brain kept going as if passed a kite, this was the word they used in this man’s prison, yes? Isaiah learning the argot of the captured man.
Isaiah thought, there is no evil in men’s heart without first passe partout palmed and copied by locksmiths in nature’s heaven; men are not blank slates. We -they?- we, are as God designed us, and I think it was because He didn’t want us safe from danger, as the garden once gave us. But rather, He wanted us tough enough to conquer dangers manifold; being told as children that the world is safe is a lie, our parents lied until it was far too late. God made us of the blood of Qingu, the evil demon, from his blood Ea created mankind. Isaiah’s thoughts were an amalgam of this man’s thoughts, he had no parents, he thought, he was wrought, by a god, by MO. He shook the head to clear it a bit.
Upon man was the imposition of service to the gods; a Task beyond comprehension , he heard it said inside his own head. Isaiah wrested back his own mind as he backed away from the invigilation of this man. A human child will grasp the finger or lip of man, listen at phenomes, breathe in pheromones, but Isaiah had dug so deep into this first man, this last man, he had seen the inner structures and absorbed the brain chemistry, the primordial juices of this beast. What was he to think? He felt an affinity. He felt a revulsion too. Was this man endless ? he asked himself.
He listened to the inmate think as the prisoner stared back at he and MO. He listened with fMRI scans, and tensor imaging, all built into his CNS, and he used his cortical-fluid and synaptic reach like sharks and whales have electricity in the head to sound and listen both. He listened now with a brain as dexterous as man’s hands; he reached deep within .
“But, to deny the blood of evil,” the inmate thought, “that courses through us is to deny what God saw fit to make. Of us -of man- He made no flowers nor side-eyed prey animals; stomachs full of grass. He made us apex predators with malice and deception and murderous ways. He made us smart and showed us the future so that we may sacrifice beasts, then men, then ourselves; we traded blasé aplomb for long life; and now, with these machines, these men-machines we trade for endless life.”
The inmate then thought, “we will be given endless life, and it’s only a non-zero sacrifice that will make that equation equal out .
“God will extract from us in-kind contribution; and if we’re smart we’ll gladly pay it. We could achieve godlike values with this next phase; more than more as before, finally we could deserve the lives we have been bequeathed. Only the penitent will survive, and by penitent, He meant, the warrior-class of men. Those eager to cleanse the earth of weakness, weakness in the guise of morality; those deceitful men who have yet to look at their shadow on the wall and think it’s they that cast off nothing but light, because their fronts are all aglow.
“God is light, and man is what’s between Him and the darkness as shadow cast. Without man, God’s light would travel back around to Him uninterrupted; and He’d then cast the shadow on the void. Yet man thinks the shadow he casts belongs to the source of the light; his eyes absorbed with what he sees, as if his eyes are what cast the light upon all that his vison falls upon.
“The most evil men are those that pretend to be -and naïvely think they are- good. The weak masquerading as the good; this is the most corrupt of things,” the inmate thought as Isaiah heard every word.
“Truly good men are half-light and half-shadow and know it; they are not confused by the sun above, the shadow out on the ground; they know whatever part of them even seen is due to God’s light, not their own. And -they know- that they alone are the source of their shadow; that God demands that they carry that shadow wherever they go, wherever they go inside God’s light. If they refuse to turn around and acknowledge that dark spot on the wall, then they admit they refuse to turn their backs on God’s light; this means they are cowards and mistrustful of God; demanding they face Him all the time; watching His hands and eyes. Watching Him as if He is all head like a clock.
“The truly honorable man, gives his back to God, offers the neck like Abram, and faces his shadow with relish and duty and manly courage. Good men use their shadow on the inner wall to hide the knife in; hide the knife just before they slit the necks of God’s enemies. Our paradise, ” the inmate thought as the room and men-machines about him seemed as gods to him, “our walled garden is a battlefield, and good men fight to the knife, and they thrust the knife to the hilt.”
Weak men pretend there is no wall, no shadow and no war, and thus no paradise at all , Isaiah thought as his heart -and the inmate’s heart- agreed, and he watched as silently as a child as MO offered the inmate a drink and they commence the business of the day; this Wednesday, the first day in 2020 of the era vulgari .
II. 2018 e.v .
The snow kept falling like a celestial evacuation on orders of the marauders themselves; burning and looting, this must be the ash of parchment, of books unread. God, it seemed to him, had fled the world millennia ago .
He had rolled his cigar to effect a pretty burn; and it thus burned symmetrically, and his other hand was clutching a paperback; the water was 103 degrees. His sub-compact .45 was holstered in a black jackass-rig with two extra magazines; it lay on the concrete like a balled-up eviction notice; a stack of nasty letters he had yet to send. The Champagne sat just in reach on the same concrete slab as the pistol, and too his lighter for the cigar. The snow did not melt as it hit his hands or the tobacco; both had cooled homeostatically in the air.
The snow hid the dimming of the light, refractory as it was of whatever was still bright and ambient. The smoke rose like Blake’s angels of Orc and as it sidewinded it appeared as signature to him; he grinned. The Book he held was written so long ago, and like all things, the older it was the more likely it was to continue to be old. This is the ce
ntral error, he thought, with the neo-mania of the modern crowd; they scrambled for all the new shit that would be gone in the first wind, buried under the first dug graves of the new year. The classics, the canon, the back vintages, even old men like him, that is what would be around after this Christmas and next.
His beard, black in the main, lightninged in gray touched the waterline; thus wet it was pulled to a point. He submerged a free hand, the left, and held the cigar in his teeth and imbibed its effluvium. He turned a page and folded the tome in half with a sure grip. A flake hit his black lashes and hung there occluding his vision until it melted then it teared -cleared- his eye. He removed the cigar and pressed it against the center of the Book and pitched the black bottle up -just above his own nose- and let the twice fermented pinot noir of the Epernay slide like thin, hollow rocks -it was back-vintage Champagne of the monks- and it was chewed by his maw. The ravens too have gravel in their gullets, he thought.
The page barely burned, and he returned the bottle and tobacco each to their rest.
The words populated his mind like song, the cadence the author had wrought was sonorous and it sunk each word, each conceit -each grand idea- into the fold of his neo-cortical meat like spring bulbs. His body was dense and waterproof, but the warmth below waterline penetrated it anyway and the contrast with the blowing wind and the subzero air here at altitude -air that made his hair hard as an old King’s -or new Jack’s- heart and his beard just like the plank of a piratical ship- located a center in him exactly in between such extremes.
He planted a black and white American flag there and noted the co-ordinates. His country wouldn’t want him, but he wanted her, and maybe nowadays they call that stalking but to him it was merely unrequited love; a more noble, if tragic, affair.
Modern words and ideas were tawdry , he thought; all that was gallant had slid away in between book pages & the ribs of outlaws like him. Not that anyone would even notice; the best books all remained uncracked and the insides of men like him were unresearched and uncared for by anyone that mattered to those of good manners; good manners but bleak hearts, Pharisees who didn’t care a lick for justice but sang paeans to the law at each meal.
Horrid people that would manage to get someone to glean good obituaries for them from the mechanically razed fields of their inner landscape; all that a man could be had been harvested and sold on the futures market with these ghosts in clothes. Yet, they would lament his life, ha! He had lived some 1,000 lives, any one of which was more noble and filled with more grand-poetry and arch-tragedy than the one they had lived. Ha , lived , he repeated, even that description of their existence seemed too charitable, he thought with contempt that breathed and grew and grew.
Can you imagine, he asked the air, any of God’s lower creatures choosing to give up as easily as these bourgeois and demersal men did? He thought they were portmanteaus of the worst traits in each species, the nervousness of the abandoned doe; the stupidity of the barking beagle; the limpness of a brace of pheasants; the perfidy of the brood parasite, the cowbird abandoning their own young in perfect time to fly away from their honor all at once; the malice contained in more than one snake coiled up in a tumbleweed of scales and rattle tails all in the maw of a litter-pregnant crocodile , he thought. And the lies they told, my lord it was enough to make a blackbird blush crimson and shit upon gilded lilies on a golden pond and have the Devil turn away .
He smoked his cigar and let the snow pile upon his head and shoulders; he let his knuckles redden; he took notice of the steam of the hot water captured by the winter air.
But, he thought of how they offered plaudits to any and all who had done him wrong. How they clucked their forked tongues at his travails like Bildad pointing at Job in his ruin; as if Job was to blame. Oh, how he had deserved it, they thought, but would never come out and say. It was risible; they thought their silence was tantamount to decency, as if his father was the only one who could read between the lines and ferret out the criminality behind the denials and taciturn ways of the crook, the criminal.
God would back him when the time came , of that he was at least half certain. And he was never more than 20% certain of anything. God was clear; and anyone who had read the good book would count the bodies of sinners as diligently as these middle-class backsliders enumerated their accounts receivable from all that Babylon held for them in arrears.
God was angry every day, He had said so himself, he thought, in First Kings. And yet these twits went about happy and in a narcotic haze of stupidity as the war for Satan’s snake-skin purse -and the bones of Jesus that rattled inside like die and black Roman stones- went on unabated since Calvary; the war that pressed on with less pause than a diesel engine on a 7% grade .
God chose the irreligious like him, he was a lying spirit of God, he thought, just like the one sent to palaver with Ahab and only now it was Ahab himself who was in charge of this next phase of turning perdition into something worth arguing over .
The earth was obviously Hell, and only the doomed and the damned had any doubt; and killing off folks here was not just permissible but the righteous and obvious Work of the Lord . He was a man of doubt, a rationalist, and thus, if he was convinced , he reasoned, then it seemed more likely than not it was true . He didn’t suffer from confirmation bias or the overactivation of the pre-frontal cortex or parietal lobe, like the religious and the goofy clerics who heard their prayers answered when they asked for a new tooth or a pony or whatever-the-fuck these charlatans bargained for with angels and demons alike.
The trees - he saw a million about him in his forest- held hostages, he knew, and enslaved critters as their fungi side-partners did all the dirty work ; the ants swarmed the scorpion and children as young as four laughed at these melees of God’s creatures. Women lied in their heads about everything and men lie down in the darkness of dirt rather than stand up and fight for anything albumin or regal or noble or winged by the seraphim’s barbers. Children spoke too loudly as God’s Praetorian Guard read the wills of the arch-angels and distributed their Goods .
The Book began to become humid as the spa water gave rise to more steam and the steam found purchase; a quit-claim deed on the page. His hands were cold, and he plunged them one at a time in intervals and turned the pages with damp fingers and thumbs. If God hadn’t wanted him to kill all these people, he thought, then why would He make his greatest pleasure the two things that he’d still have in man’s prison: more opportunities for murder of the wicked, and plenty of books?
If God had made him shallow like his own kin, then he too could see how they would regard their lives as impossible in the service of good; these people had cathexis for banalities and impotent liberties they would be denied if confined to a cell. But they -like all stupid people- he thought, well, it never occurred to them that this was evidence that their desiderata was suspect, the shit they thought fun or pleasurable or sweet and good, that all their gaudy evidence of the good life was dubious and low.
It never crossed their open desert of a mind that monks too lived in cells.
If a man was righteous he would be content anywhere, even, especially in prison. For the man who knows the good life, sapere vivere , knows no fear of depravation of all but books and the justice of a man’s neck in his own hands. Give him that and he had it all; especially if he’s already availed himself of 44 years’ worth of all the things a sybarite could consume and collect in twice the years at twice the speed as he had -to-date- accomplished. He had lived 10 lives in one; maybe even 21. It’s hard to calculate these things, he admitted. But, he had but one way to calibrate his life: when he asked himself if he was authentic and had followed a higher path, could he answer in the affirmative? Four days of a seven day week he could answer, yes.
Plus, anything he couldn’t get in prison, the grand crus and the massive amounts of young girls he had deflowered or the fast cars and bikes he had ridden at top speed taking up both lanes of the road, well, he thought, he had enough of all that
for several lifetimes and he had no need for any more of that shit . My God, enough was enough , it was time to move on to phase two of the truly religious life, he had used his time wisely right up until God had enjoined him to take the fight to their enemies, his and the Lord’s both. He wouldn’t look back with regret or wish for a little more time; he had lived plenty already, and thus his conversion to Christ’s wheelman was taken with esteem, eagerness and the berserker-mindset of a man who took pride in his work.
Of course, he surmised, these nitwits who lived bordered and sheltered and low-ceiling lives would beg and wail for a little more time. They had not even got their trousers off yet, and here was God wrapping them up, Jesus, what crepuscular black-hearted dummkopfs ; why hadn’t they availed themselves of every opportunity to live a Grand Life; didn’t they think the Lord would ever tap them on the shoulder? he asked himself with a grin and returned to the Book’s pages again.
He hadn’t believed in a pedantic watch-like God since he was child and had still managed to live as if his assignment was due eventually. Admittedly, he didn’t expect such a clear and sonorous trumpet to articulate what was to be done, but he wasn’t about to let anything allow him to give in to impious ends. When the Lord called, He called, and being a non-believer was, well, he thought, ignorance of the Law was no excuse. But, these people had never really believed in God; they were just virtue signaling anyway. And everyone knew that. God included, he thought.
The albedo of the sun off the moon and the snow was feathering a nest around his hot tub and while the crystalline flakes buried his pistol and the shoulder of the Dom Pérignon , he had kept the dust off the feuilleton and his cigar by rotating it, and leveraging a slight precessional wobble; he smiled at how godly he had become; merely a demi-god, of course, a titan with power only here on earth. A limited power, of course. He ought not get too haughty, he warned himself a bit too late .