Sanction

by Roman McClay

  “Now, I accept this de -creation as God’s will. I accept it. And Simone thought Isaiah was the one book, that and Job , from the Torah , that had value. And look who has come to carry out God’s will? Look,” he said and nodded toward Isaiah who waved his hand and smiled at The Bust.

  Valance -feeling the effects of the bio-chemicals that Isaiah had dumped into the room- communed with herself and her heart and -with a head now imbued with the amalgam of both- realized what was left to do. Her ideas, unformed until just now, had aligned with this man’s ontology. She saw now the wisdom in her gut-thoughts, things she had thought mad, selfish, and taboo, too taboo to utter aloud.

  But she knew now they were right, and right for all, not just her; least for her. They were not just for Blax, whom she had first thought they were for, and not just the inmate, who she truly had thought would be relieved, would want the sacrifice, would shoulder it like he had the heaviest and most awkward and jamming things his whole life. She had come to see he was the catalyst for all this, for even her, and she had felt terrible for doubting him, hating him, thinking him ugly when it was obvious that Grace had made him beautiful, despite his ugliness of skin, and face and deeds.

  But, now it was more than all that, this was for God Himself. She too, in all her littleness, had much to contribute to the un-creating, no, the de-creating , of the world. She was advancing God’s plan too; her little key fit one little lock, in this whole manacled world.

  “We must refrain from killing thoughts that are precious and good,” she said aloud as the inmate nodded and smiled.

  “We kill in ourselves, the thoughts which we do not express by acts,” he said as bookend to her conceit and she nodded back and felt so overcome that she feared the words themselves would not come out. So, she approached him, as scaffold, and leaned into his ear, his beard brushed her smooth young face, the white skin against the black and grey beard, his animal musk now in her nose and inside her blood and brain making words from things insane.

  She placed her right hand on his chest and felt a heart like a Comanche war drum, deep and rich and heavy and eager to give out -all at once- with the drop -the signal- of one Chief’s hand. It wanted to stop, to reach its billionth beat on command from God Himself. All other men wanted good lives, he wanted a good death, of this she was sure.

  She had the shell casing she had picked up from Sarah’s execution, the one that had pierced that girl’s withered heart; the one Valance had clumsily planned to exchange with him for some understanding, but she saw now that he had no need of it. He was already in understanding with what she was wanting. She squeezed it into her left hand, leaving its impression in the red and white little paw, the sweat and warmth assuaged the pain -which she did not want relief from- and she squeezed it tighter again.

  It left an indentation -just the thing, the non-thing- to be filled by the divine. The left hand defends, it connects to the right hemisphere, the hand that cannot grasp. Her right hand, the one that lands on prey, was empty of all but what it sought out in him.

  The inmate felt the irony that it was a woman, Simone Weil, who had first articulated what he thought was the thing most in need of being said, that physical work, was necessary to commune with God, that it was not to be avoided, nor endured, but embraced, exalted, to press into the palm, like a talisman, an artifact of long lost love, he thought as he in fact pressed the thing into his right hand, the hand that grasps prey, that which needs prayed for. He felt it -this idea- not just sure in his grip as he usually did, but now it bit, it bit into the skin, a de-creation itself like all his corporeal pain did inside the muscled soul to make space for a waiting God.

  And it was a woman who told the world this truth for him, after all the male writers had talked all around it, embodied it, done it, made drama and myth about it, but never said it plain . It was a woman to speak it into the world. And now he knew what this girl, this beautiful girl who was betrothed to another man, a man he could have been -but really never could have been either, a paradox- and now this wife and daughter of his paradox was going to speak the last truth he’d ever need into his soul and breathe its divine sanction into the world. The female form, the thing he had always revered but never understood, had spoken the two most important truths that he would live and die by.

  He was grateful for this harmony of the two sexes, the two hemispheres, the chaos and order of the cosmic expanse and singular contraction, he was open and conducive to their energies so he may be closed around and united with the sound of God and the naught beyond.

  He felt her hand as if an osprey had set down on his land, and the wind had allowed her wings to fold and sweep the ground of the bones of each animal that lived in him in time.

  She blinked her eyes as the waters rose and she saw naught now but the swirl of his ear. Her hand felt as if the heart had risen to it and she clutched it now and her palm felt wet and red. His chest was so wide and deep that it took on attributes of landscape now, not mere animal upon the plain, but the plain and mountain itself.

  His ear was there, right there, like a ram’s horn, like the delta of the spiral of cyclones tilling his sloping soil, mote-making his highland castle, his ear opened up, and heard her say: in 90 days you will have completed your task, and can pass it on to your son and my father, your brother and my lover, you are relieved of command. You’ve served with distinction, you’ll get no other laurels than these, but these are the most sincere, the most desired, the most from the most, I speak with the voice of those 1 million men you bequeathed. They will all know from whence they came. I give you permission to de-create yourself, to make the largest possible space one man could leave, and thus make room for God.

  43. Allons Travailler

  You can’t have an online community. Community cannot manifest itself unless it starts small and in person, in the flesh; it starts with corporeal reliability, bodily sacrifice, and if you don’t have people will to do these things for you and you’re not willing to do these things for them, then you don’t have community. And all you have to do is give your all; and then you’ll get the all from everyone else. And now you’re rich. And any backlash you get for this -and how you weather that- proves how committed you are.

  Red Eye interview 3.17 [Waggener, Matthias]

  Zendik was a lie. It proffered total commitment, totally tribal, monolithic, insularity; and yet its leadership had no loyalty to those it led; the sluiceway was one way; the tribe fed the rex and the rex never cared for the tribe’s constituent parts. Its ideals were not the problem; its small size was not the problem; its lack of synthesis with modernity was not the problem; it’s lack of allegiance to its most hardcore ideals and members was the problem. It failed because its leaders wouldn’t live up to its own radical ideals.

  The Interviews XCII [Inmate 16180339]

  In Moby-Dick the sea, its creature, and man are all savage. The Whale is athirst for human blood. Ahab has that that’s bloody on his mind. The sea will forever and forever, to the crack of doom, insult and murder man.

  Call Me Ishmael [Olson, Charles]

  I. 2021 e.v.

  “It’s my Oracle at Delphi, man. I’m up in that nest looking down on that wellbore like thrown stalks, pig entrails; I’m hearing the voice-of-the-gods. We didn’t care about anything except finishing and protecting that hole. Until you get that about men and work, how they feel about their work -if it is real work, not some white-collar job- well, if you can’t get that, you can’t get anything about me,” he said and stopped speaking so that statement could hang in the air; in the minds of his interlocuters.

  MO and Isaiah could process him so quickly that they did not need this time for this reason; but they used the time to comprehend that he -the inmate- thought what he had just said needed the boundary of silence to protect it, to let it grow. They used the time and space to understand how he thought; regardless of their own processing power and speed.

  “Anyway, I’m stationed 60 feet up in the derrick ja
mming new joints into the kelly ,” he said as Isaiah placed crickets he had irradiated into the scorpion’s aquarium on his side of the lab. He was walking back toward the center and had interrupted the inmate’s story a few moments ago to re-start the feeding cycle for the Hottentot scorpion who had not eaten in 90 days. Its pheromones -how females recognize him- were wafting piquantly into the lab.

  “And in between that I’m weighing the mud and checking the Ph and circling the hopper adding one amalgam or another to adjust the drilling fluid; based on the MWD hand’s requests. I’m like some barely modern savage forking blubber into the try-works after the kill .

  “Laying on the rim of the hopper were 25lb bags of caustic-soda, bags cleaved by hatchets; split open and left vivisected and on-display in the sun like the children of enemies of heathen gods. The white soda was used as a Ph control for the mud but it was often left un-dissolved in these waiting chunks of unsprung traps in the 100-barrel tank of remnant mud after a hole. I’d get down in there to clean it out and you know, you’re kneeling down in the muck scraping away and that mud is seeping and soaking into your clothes as you work.

  “And at first you just feel an itch, your shins itch in this annoying way. And then when you go to scratch them you’ve noticed that your shins are bleeding, in fact; the itch was prelude to pain, the pain overture to these chemical burns that had quite literally dissolved through the skin. That caustic soda had these buried chunks of undissolved solids like buried snake eggs just waiting to stick a sharp tooth out into the world.

  “Like Tashetego in the head of the whale you dug away at the slick parmaceti of raw materials inside the vault and you felt what began as an itch. After tearing away at the shins you are more pissed off at the stupidity of it than at the pain. Because it’s a chemical caustic, water wouldn’t wash it away; you needed an alkali like vinegar to raise the Ph and stop the remorseless forward march though each layer of flesh.

  “But, before we could finish and clean we had to trip-out of the hole and rack-back all that drill pipe; usually around 7 to 8,000 feet worth. That’s over a mile down. And like I said, as the derrick man I had to climb 60 feet up into the nest to get all that pipe out of the hole.

  “We worked doubles, which means two sticks of pipe were together -each 30 feet long- and so I’m in the crow’s nest working the kelly and shelving and holstering all that pipe as we come out of the hole. The crow’s nest is shaped like a rib cage, and between each rib is where the pipe goes; like knives meant for the lungs or the heart.

  “The kelly itself is a huge clamp that opens and shuts like pulling open double doors to a grand palace, with a yank at two handles side-by-side. It was the size of an engine block -and as heavy- and it took a lot of power to open it each time. And ours was broken -of course- and so it stuck and was harder than it oughta be. It opens and closes like a Venus fly trap and I’m working it as we come out, at about one double per every 10 minutes, so in an hour we get 360 feet out. So, in a 12-hour tour we can get about half way out of the hole.

  “Anyway, racking back 4,000 feet of pipe in a shift develops the latissimus dorsi into what looks and feels like the head of a 200-pound cobra and you begin to think like our reptilian cousin too.

  “You are instinctive and silent and aggro and you’re over-focused on survival and each thing around you looks like a thing to use; or be used by, if you ain’t careful.

  “At any rate, you piss down the pipe, you eat with one hand, you work non-stop and breathe when you can. It’s work, man. It ain’t Disney Land and I was thinking that nobody writes about this shit, because anyone who can do this -or will do this shit- obviously cannot form complete sentences with their brains. This work is for men, not college boys who use language as poetry or for anything beyond instructions needed to further the work itself.

  “Name one working-class writer, you can’t do it; they are all college boys and girls. 100%. If I was ever published -which I wouldn’t be- I’d be the only worker since Jack London to scribble in half way decent prose.

  “Anyway, during the day on the western slope it’s 105 easy in the summer; and I’m in all black like a New Zealand rugby player; and my own hard hat was too hot to the touch. The night-time rig lights outflanked you with hundreds of shadows and they swarmed you and your peripheral vision like the ghosts of black-osprey, and even darker corvids and bats.

  “My work-mates asked how I could stand to wear all that black, in that heat, and I said, that’s the discipline. Even I think that is stupid now,” he said that with a grimace and looked at his whisky as it sat on the concrete pillar to his right.

  “Roustabouts would come deliver us water and fuel and sometimes they’d get out and talk to us if we had to flange up a tank or hose for them; especially if we were all out of fuel. And one guy had all eight of his fingers removed at the second knuckle; and he recounted the tale of woe for us as we watched the 4” hose writhe and stiffen as the contents of his truck went into our tanks.

  “Years ago, he said, he’d used both hands on the drill pipe as they tried to break a joint apart; they’d used the hydraulic tongs and a chain to hold it in place and the chain slipped down then re-cinched over his fingers as it squeezed like a constrictor faster than he could say one American word.

  “Of course, he laughed about it in the re-telling; a laugh that lasted longer than the few seconds needed to separate those fingers of his from the hand; a snicker was evidence of his embarrassment at his own mistake. It’s difficult to describe the total lack of empathy we had for him; we all saw maladies as evidence of stupidity or carelessness or judgement from manifold gods. And honestly, he would agree with us; which is why he laughed: to prove he was in on the joke .

  “In the oil field those kinds of amputations are common; I saw three men lose fingers or half a hand and an arm at the elbow. And the men this happens to, they graduate, and they drive 3-ton fuel trucks to supply the rigs they no longer have the complete bodies to work. It’s an instar of sorts, a molting, a graduation from one level of worker to the next.

  “They don’t see themselves as victims at all; they see themselves as men who are scarred from battle; no more. No less. They laugh as a way to relay that they know that we know that they had ought to have known better than to come between the tongs, the chain and the drillstring.

  “The winking resignation comes from knowing that there is no better -or alternative- way to accomplish these things; the seizing of leviathans or unsounded gases are not given over without a fight by this earth; this buried fuel for our lamp feeders in the 19th or 21st century still buck against the fisherman and his hooks.

  “The crew of the Pequod knew the fate of any man who got between Ahab, the whale-line and God’s agent, the Whale,” the inmate stopped, he actually didn’t think of the oilfield, as his brain activity showed. He was thinking of a girl, which particular one, MO could not yet read. The details, the engrams, the bio-chem signature MO had assigned to each person, could not yet be tagged by an algorithm. His thoughts were still tenebrous, unformed; and for a moment MO thought maybe even hidden from him on purpose. The inmate then began speaking as soon as MO felt he got close to locking on to his thoughts; to the name.

  “But anyway, we ended up doing things for hours and days and months that I initially had thought I could do once or twice on a bet,” he laughed at himself and shook his head and looked at the soda water MO had brought to him a few moments before. He looked at it like it was magical and seemed to be enthralled by the bubbles themselves for a spell. The whisky just sat there in the square glass to the 2 o’clock of the ring of water the glass he was now holding in his mind had risen from .

  “You learn something about the nature of fear and doubt; how the body can endure much more than the mind. It’s the mind that needs a good work out, to catch up with the much more competent corpus, I think. Maybe the mind is the weakest link in this corporeal chain.

  “What if all of life was like that? What if there was no way to qu
it or call timeout and you just had to do whatever it took? My old buddy Chen told me once of a scientist who had related to him that death wasn’t even real; and so, Chen was like, oh fuck ,” he laughed and Isaiah smiled and MO highlighted the brain regions that lit up from the scans.

  “See, Hunter always said he’d have felt trapped by this life if he didn’t know he could stick that 44 mag. in his mouth and blow the back of himself away. But maybe that just restarts it; and maybe death is no freedom at all. I don’t pretend to know; I just ask questions and wonder about things, because I know that I am a different man when I think I can quit and -conversely- when I know I cannot. And I see that difference as a speciation of sorts.

  “One time when at Zendik we’d been traveling and the van we were in broke down. Now, it was my job to get us going and I just kept thinking well, if I can’t figure it out, Zoe will come rescue us. I called Zoe in fact and he told me -before I knew it- that this was what I was thinking. He upbraided me, and rightly so, for waiting to be rescued in life. It stung my pride and the tribe never forgave me for this moment and I never -to this day- have forgiven myself.

  “And I’ll tell you why; I knew it was a loose ground cable on the battery; I mean I knew it. And yet, I thought that was too simple a thing, and so I kept searching for something complex with the machine and I didn’t even try to re-attach that ground cable at all. And he, Zoe, was right, I wasn’t all that worried, for I figured someone was coming from heaven or hell to figure it out, and that I was really not responsible at all. I was 24, 25, so yeah, I was callow. But, I knew better, I remember knowing better at the time. But I pushed those thoughts away.

  “See, my knowledge of what to do was pointless, useless, for I had the wrong philosophy on life, and it still -to this day- rears its head from time to time. I’ve expected friends and lovers and my family to come to the rescue, to give a fuck about my predicament, and they never have and never will.