ORGONOMICON
copyright 2016 Boris D. Schleinkofer
Smashwords Edition
ISBN 9781370771417
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Cover image and author photo created by Boris D. Schleinkofer, with assistance from https://deepart.io
This book, like all the others, was always for Mary.
Well, you know I have a love, a love for everyone I know
And you know I have a drive to live—I won't let go
But can you see its opposition comes arising up sometimes
That its dreadful anteposition comes blacking in my mind
And then I see a darkness
And then I see a darkness
And then I see a darkness
And then I see a darkness
Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - I See a Darkness
CONTENTS
0: A Clockworks Butterfly
1: Appendix
About the Author
Chapter Zero: A Clockworks Butterfly
The movement had no single point of origin, and neither did it originate in motion.
A strand reached across a vast, expansionless deep-purple nothingness and pulled there upon itself, a rippling assemblage of the microcosmic point big-banging andbecoming the universe; light and dark exchanged ascendencies, and then again, and again.
With an upheaval of magnetic lightning, an infinitesimal number of one-dimensional gestures changed their orientation in unison, and joined their resonance to a greater vibration singing itself through cracks in the gridding void and into boundless existence.
The movement so began itself.
"I am a complete and utter failure." It was Scott's newest and oldest mantra.
He was on the street—again—with no idea of what to do or where to go, with a single suitcase full of whatever she'd thrown at him and a backpack stuffed with his dirty work-shirts. Things looked miserable; he was miserable. The screaming—fifteen years of it—still rang in his ears, her tones harsh and strident, stunning him with their awful truths. She was right to say it to him, he was a complete and utter failure, and now he was out walking around without any shoes in the middle of the night with nowhere to sleep, again. He was almost starting to get used to it.
He'd begged her not to throw him out and she'd screamed something unintelligible and grabbed up the heavy cast-iron frying pan; when she was this hot under the collar, he knew that he had to get away from her immediately or suffer violence. He went out to the back yard, grabbing up the telephone and bringing it clenched in his shaking hand. He'd begun carrying his keys at all times; you never knew when you'd be unexpectedly taking to the road. He knew this time was different, though, much more final. She'd been working herself up to something for a while, bottling up and pressurizing an inner disaster that could no longer wait to destroy everything in its path. The thing he'd been staving off for years had finally come crashing home, the tornado touched down.
It wasn't just that she'd thrown him out of their dismal apartment, threatening to call the police if he didn't move fast enough—what exactly had he done?—or that she kicked his ass verbally every other day, or even that she'd gotten pregnant by another man. Any one of those things would have been enough to drive any sane man far, far away from her long ago. He didn't know at all why he'd stayed with her for as long as he had, why he'd dedicated so much of his life to trying to make an unappeasable woman happy. The worst thing about it was when she said that he didn't love her. Couldn't she see how hard he was trying?
He was so, so thirsty.
Scott left the apartment building in his bare feet, walked the streets with his eyes unfocused and pointed at a spot three feet on the ground ahead of him, a tunnel-vision of his afterlife and how the world was ending. His world, anyway; he was pretty sure she intended to go on without him under the pretense that everything would be just fine... and the rest of the world wouldn't care. Maybe it was fifteen years of hell, but it was his hell, it was what he knew and what he'd created and what owned him, what he'd been destined by Higher Powers to endure. He probably deserved it. He didn't know anything else, and he didn't understand it at all.
He'd had a job to do. She was his soul-mate. The stars had pre-destined it. The old gypsy was right. It was all life would allow. Whatever. No matter how he searched his mind, the end made no more sense than the beginning, and was strikingly more dream-like and surreal than all the time in between.
The last time he'd looked at her, actually seen her, he realized that he no longer recognized the woman beside him, her countenance and mannerisms totally unfamiliar to him. He'd been aware of strange adjustments in her personality over the past years they'd been together, witnessed the slow slide into depravity she'd taken and knew it couldn't be going anywhere good, but he hadn't allowed himself to imagine it going this bad or ending like this. That was how hell happened: things got worse, all the time, and never got any better, and then that was it.
"Do you love her?" The voice, unbidden, came from within his own head.
This was a bad sign. He had to get away from everything, quickly, before it all became too much and he lost his shit altogether. People like him didn't last long once the carpet was pulled out from under. One fall and you didn't get back up; there was nothing else to stand on.
Jaime pulled his bike out of the street, gathered up his schoolbooks and moved to the sidewalk. He could feel that his knee was scraped up and he had a gash on the palm of his left hand, but it could have been worse. His bike was okay, and at least he hadn't torn his clothes.
Growing up poor was about learning how things fell to the bottom. He always ended up with his older brothers' hand-me-downs, and they were already half torn to rags by the time they made it down to him, but his mother would stitch everything with big ugly patches and insist that he wear them. Fixing patches was one of her pet peeves. He couldn't help but to put them to their paces, and then she would get mad at him. She got mad at him about a lot of stuff, not much of it really having anything to do with him.
His father was pretty much the same. Neither of them really counted as people, not in his world.
He tried to wipe the blood off his hand onto the grass next to the sidewalk, careful lest he get any on his clothes, daring the people in passing cars to judge him for falling. It was embarrassing. He didn't even know what had caused it.
He sat down and rolled up his pant leg; the knee was bruised and he had a pretty good rugburn. He rubbed at the hurt, willing it to get better so he could go on and get himself to school. He couldn't see anybody actually looking at him, but he still had the feeling of being watched. After a moment, a white van with two men in it drove past him slowly, and the man with the thick glasses riding in the passenger seat had a camera pointed at him. The van sped away and Jaime watched it go, the feeling of being watched slowly being replaced with a deeper disquiet. The van stopped at the intersection and then turned the corner.
At the end of the street, some men were fixing a flagpole; at least, it looked like a flagpole, but they'd taken out a section of its sheath around the middle, and underneath there were wires and paneling and other strange gizmos. It had to be just another phone-t
ower, like all the others everywhere. You didn't really notice them.
He picked himself up and walked the bike the rest of the way.
He'd gone to school, dodged the bullies and teachers, and managed to get back out again without incident; home was as adversarial as school, with his three brothers who beat him up and his parents who didn't pay any attention to him unless he was being punished. He didn't feel wanted anywhere, and the only place he could be safe and relax was the library. He knew it was where the nerds were supposed to hang out, and he supposed he fit the description and didn't care. He could lose himself in books because books didn't care if he didn't fit in anywhere else.
All his life, he'd had a spark about him, a life to him that others didn't have, that he had no idea what to do with and that kept him apart from the rest of the world. He wasn't the smartest, or the strongest or the best-looking; there was no heavenly chorus that followed him around and told everybody that he was different, but there was a light to his eyes, and a glow that came from within that he fought to kept hidden so that the others wouldn't hate him as they did, and he spent his days in isolation immersed in his imagination.
Nighttime, at home with the group of familiar strangers ignoring each other, was reserved for TV, anything that could take him out of himself, away from where he was. TV was usually good like that.
His mother had yelled at him, saying there was probably too much salt in the chicken-and-dumplings and it was his fault because she was distracted worrying about why he was so late coming home. It was his fault. She hadn't been paying attention and it was his fault.
The family had gathered in the living room and taken up their places around the couch, waiting for their favorite show, "Glitterati," to begin. It was something he didn't understand—not that he didn't understand the subject material, most of it was pretty stupid stuff that even a kid like him had no hard time getting his head around—he couldn't figure out what his family had for the show. It was a pretty average soap opera with just enough humor mixed in to call it a sitcom; it wasn't very funny but everyone acted like they liked it, so he tried laughing along with them to fit in, even though he felt like a phoney the whole time. He really didn't get it.
He took his place on the floor at the end of the couch, and joined them in the middle of the show. The male lead was talking to his romantic interest, a woman who was already engaged to another man that she didn't actually like, about her lover, a bad man: "Think of all the awful things he's done to you—you're the victim!"
The woman on the TV said, "Yeah, I know," while his mother brought in the pot of food and the dishes and snorted derisively and said, just loud enough for the room to hear over the TV, "All men are alike."
The tension in the room rose and Jaime wished he was somewhere else, but then the scene changed and new characters took over, and maybe they could all start laughing again, and everything would be okay. The family served the food.
"But she couldn't ever give you what you needed, could she?" said the TV to itself, speaking in the voices of two men wearing pink and blue dress-shirts.
"Never could!" his stepfather nearly yelled, and plunged his spoon into his mouth. The dissatisfaction and discontent were now chokingly thick, and he couldn't stand the thought of eating his chicken-and-dumplings, and asked his mother if he could be excused.
"What are you asking me for? Go to bed then, you have school in the morning. Brush your teeth first."
"This tastes terrible! What, did you forget how to use salt?" His stepfather was often unkind.
"I knew I should have listened to myself when I thought that there was something wrong. There's too much salt."
He went to the bathroom and cleaned his teeth, peed and washed his hands, and gave silent thanks that he could now close his eyes and call the day over.
Home was where he ate and went to bed, so that he could wake and do the same things again the next day.
The two men sat on opposite sides of the small table, immersed in their works upon their arcane machine; they neither spoke nor looked at one another, one of them inhaling cigarettes lit off the butts of the last, and the air was yet thicker with evil than it was with smoke.
The machine was government issue, sleek molded plastics and chrome plating, the size and shape of a home stereo-console, with long trailing cables that led to the bulky headsets they each wore. The equipment was eight years out of date.
At last, the smoking one broke the silence. "My turnaround-time is better than yours by exactly thirty-seven percent. Suck on that."
The transceiver-unit in the machine broadcast the freshly-processed horror-signal to the electrical wiring and it rode through a series of relays, piggy-backing over a variety of infrastructure networks and communications systems to reach the orbital satellites emplaced by Cold War technocrats. Something hideous rained down upon the land and coalesced on the sharp edges of the radio-towers in the targeted area.
Emmanuel's brows furrowed, and he jerked his head to the side and grunted, and his nightmare continued:
He wanted to work his jaws happily, sitting with his friends and enjoying himself; it was a simple, animal pleasure, but something had gone off.
The spoonful of mashed potatoes had turned into some kind of bitter, black slime in his mouth and he spat it out; he tried to clear his mouth by taking a drink of water but the glass was filled with the same evil filth. He couldn't find anything on the giant banquet table that didn't turn into the black slime when he looked at or touched it. It dripped down his face and chest, it spread across the table and ran off the sides, it oozed down the walls in sheets. His friends happily devoured the vile slime and each other, their auto-cannibalism whipping them into a carnal frenzy of mutual consumption.
He couldn't vomit enough, couldn't sick it up out of his gut; there was no way to prevent it from invading his body.
And then he was able to shake himself awake; he spat violently into his pillow, shouting incomprehensible gibberish and punching at the air. The woman sleeping next to him was jolted awake, and yelled at him, "Out! Out, get out!"
"Do you love her?"
"Get out of my head!" No matter how many times he made the demand of himself quietly, within his own mind; no matter if he screamed it out in public, frightening strangers with his craziness; no matter if he carved the words into his flesh, rubbing black soil over the wounds to stain their letters into his spirit—it made no difference. The voice wouldn’t listen.
He'd answered inside at first, making the decision and reaffirming it to himself, taking it as the voice of his conscience trying to tell him that he'd forgotten something basic, that he'd lost who he was and what was important to him. Its puissant tone spoke of a knowledge far greater than his, of experience and power impossible to ignore, and it kept on asking and asking and so he'd started replying out loud.
Most of the time it was yes, sometimes it was no—by the time he'd gotten around to admitting to having mixed feelings, the voice's insistent regularity was starting to get on his nerves. It was a test. Of course he'd loved her—with everything they'd been through together, how could he not? He owed her that much.
And there was so much blood on his hands...
He would prove himself. If he was persistent, something would change in his favor.
The hours turned into days, the question hammering him all the while, and passed like a dream. A couple nights sleeping under the bridge wasn't so bad, was it? He'd been worse places.
The awful envelope had turned up in the suitcase she'd packed for him. Anything that belonged to him had gone into the case—and there was precious little of it—jammed in haphazardly with the manila rectangle sitting smugly on top. It was the last thing he'd ever wanted to see. She'd gone ahead and filed the divorce papers; this was his copy.
It was real.
The other papers tucked in with them were just as bad. He'd spent a moment to look them over later in the bar when he'd finally gotten his head together, quit shaking an
d come down from the bad adrenaline; there were a couple bills with staggering numbers to which he couldn't relate and a summons from the State, regarding his welfare-status. It was being reevaluated. Regulations were changing and they needed to discuss a few things with him. The finality of it all crossed over into absurdity.
He spread the papers out across his little tabletop and pinned them under a candle. So this was what his life had come to, the next in a series of endings.
"Yo, Scott, whatcha doin' buddy?"
Great, he had a witness to his failure. This was a long-time friend, though, someone he'd known most of his adult life.
"Nothin' Mike, it's just..." and then he'd spilled the whole story. All the ugly details came flooding out, things he'd kept bottled inside safely where they couldn't hurt anybody but him, the things he'd regretted saying the moment they came out. And now his story was out there, and his friend was being supportive; it was almost too good to be true.
Mike looked him intently in the eyes and asked, "Do you love her?"
Somehow, he'd managed to stop himself from screaming. Spending a couple days sleeping below sidewalks gave you that ability, if it didn't break you. He looked back at Mike and answered with a straight face, "What do you think, man? How could I? But yeah, of course I still do..."
"Good," and Mike was almost too quick to say it, "You better. You need to," and Mike hit him on the chest, rapping him with his knuckles like he was knocking on someone's door, and said something he couldn't hear. He'd have been insulted, if only he'd had more time. The blackness rushed up on him almost instantaneously.
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