by Grefe, Jamie
There was a bell within the body and the hands of men and women or worse—gigantic beasts of the sea, crawling, clawing, insect-covered, flutters of his own madness. And that feeling in his mouth, the pain—a weakened jelly he fought to force down, but couldn’t force out. A pain beyond the body.
The pain of helplessness.
Those were not soft hands, supple hands that help. They were death-hands, eager.
Certainly the vision was worse.
He could no longer tell.
In that moment: overcome with horror, Golo struck, kept striking: bite, lash, punch, tear, release. The sounds of the others’ death-gore warped to a hollow fuel, a gurgling from afar as if his ears were no longer a part of his body, but somewhere miles away, into the void.
Closer now to warmth: a cup of boiled cola extract and ginger, crust of bread, liver bits, pig bits.
He walks in crouched steps, coat tucked to his chin. To the door of his shack.
“Misao,” he calls out, stuttering to the slatted porch. He has forgotten the cries of the animals, though their chanting melts to a din over fresh thunder.
And more snow to bury him, whips up around him.
Under staff or lute—thunder.
Mallet to iron—the rumbling earth.
Golo’s legs stiffen in the snow. He drops and crawls, the front door of his shack, so close. Paws his way home. And yet, he is overcome by the sour smell of the inside of the giant naked girl: legs spread, dirty tongues, blood. Enough for him to see out of the edge of his blinking eyeballs, a swirling purple circle in the wild night sky shrinking.
And thunder, more thunder.
The door opens with a loud boom.
Golo’s blood-iced hand trembles outward toward the opening, fingers sliced hard as if the octopus brain trickle he swallowed has tingled to the nerves of his very being.
Golo shudders, arm trembling, vision blotting black spots.
And she’s there, standing, alive.
Misao—his shamanic savior—doused olive-drab in the candle light. Her ritual robe drapes in waves and obi sash fastened across her thin waist. A steel spike to hold up her hair so it fans out above and behind her back, beautiful. She’s radiant. “Golo,” she says. Thunder blitzes the sky and the purple contracts, spit spirals of light blue currents in tangles. “What is—where did you disappear to?”
She pulls him to the shack’s warmth, his stiffened legs limp in the snow, hakama bloodied and battered, and her touch is like a creamy blur, how he sinks to the floor, hears insects croak whirlwinds of peace from her breasts, and mouth open, he waits for nectar.
For all has gone soggy.
Pulled to the main room, face up, mind melting, shivering, she begins the healing operation.
Misao squats over Golo and pulls up at her robe, rubs herself across his face, souping him wet with her pelt while humming, and Golo mumbles his mantra: “Aum ramma salo kari. Orgone aum ramma salo kari.” But the crackling fire deeper inside the shack—something sharp burbling from a small pot—causes his eyes to sting. And Misao’s flush bud drips nectar.
The hot drip streams.
To flow a wave of honey down his throat. And drink: heal the weak, expel the poison.
To show Golo where she’s been—flat on her back, animal vision suffered. A cloaked man of blood. A man of the axe.
What she’s seen—the beasts, the cries.
Or the mystery that has been summoned to the shack—a present, perhaps, for Golo’s purpose.
A specter of lucidity.
Drink.
From tip to toe.
Phase Two: Complete
***
Upon stirring from his meditation, Dorje stalks his way to the edge of the city.
He leaves the giant naked girl where she had fallen in the snow, her flesh to become rotting nutrients for the frozen octopus landscape.
And the bodies inside.
The ruined pyre.
Dorje weeps, kicks at a clot of ice forming over the girl’s side. “May you be a haven to those who have lost,” he says. “May animals sing in your tunnels.”
Or beasts who stalk the void.
Thus, Dorje sets out.
As an adept of the New Golden Dawn, he would need to utilize Ukko, the cavernous seer, a man who could grant a wordless way into the nature of his journey, the help he sought.
Help to vaporize Golo.
At least, he thinks, Ukko could guide—elevate. Dorje needed a guide.
That was not going to be an easy task.
Orgone, no matter what form it manifested or was formed into, posed a risk the New Golden Dawn were just beginning to manipulate.
Its essence was valuable.
And Dorje had known the end of Ami—the original orgonotic shaman. Her death-energy had served his brothers and sisters well, served his own masters with psychic freedom.
Some shamans, he was told by others who came before him, must be ceased by any means necessary—when instructed by means of the proper channels, for the sake of order. For necessary power shifts to occur.
Ami’s channel was the end of his axe.
Other than that, she meant nothing to Dorje. Just a body.
The order had been passed to Dorje like how the elders of the secret commune in days long gone sent him to the outlying areas—zones of unpredictability—in search of rare unguents, gems, alchemical spices, limbs, and guts until the Day of the Homunculus buried the elders’ commune in a flurry of dust and bone-salt, death and dirt. That was years past.
The brothers and sister of the New Golden Dawn came in their robes and spells, so they said it to be, on horseback and pig-head skin masks, in ancient jeeps with spiked tires dragging the head of the Homunculus behind them.
Dorje surrendered to their strength.
Now, Dorje stands hunched at a burned-out restaurant, an awful building with a dilapidated burnt orange, slatted roof, broken windows and splattered brick, overturned tables inside like fallen chess pieces of antiquity. Something behind the counter, as he hovers in front of the building, slithers to silent rest with each glass-crunching step Dorje takes.
Behind him, the vast unfolding of the mesa, snow-covered doom, tinged purple and black streaks.
“For the light,” he mutters, “for the heart, for the unspeakable spirit of Horus,” reaching up to his shoulder, feeling the cold sting of his axe. He smells feces and sour blood waft on the icy wind.
Gunshots blare beyond.
Dorje dares not wonder. “No time like the present,” he says.
He hauls back, kicks open the restaurant’s front door, sends it crashing off its hinges. He swings the axe around, unhooks it from his makeshift straps. In case, he thinks, wondering about that slither, wondering who or what monstrosity remained in the dark rubble of the restaurant.
The stench of rotten noodles.
Eggs.
Fortuneless cookie piles.
And flies, bodies of them swarming over a goopy body—just a pool of slop on the floor.
Below him, the world itself rumbles for a moment, growls. It is slight and, in that moment, Dorje wonders if it’s just his heart-patters in the dark. Or his feet wanting to flee far, far away from this city, this mesa, and back to the comfort of his dojo. He has not yet grown used to the sensation of hunting atop a gigantic frozen octopus, doesn’t like it much either, and save for the purpose of the ritual power it apparently grants, the reason him and his New Golden Dawn brothers and sisters set out to the mountain in the first place—Ceremony of Orgonotic Mining—he prefers his sea level lifestyle: the temple silence, the cherry blossoms, the southern fields and the majesty of southern women.
Dorje cranes his head to see better in the dark folds of the battered restaurant. A scuttling sound hits his ears from the back. Or clawing up a wall, around paintings. The ceiling creaks. And yes, there is a door, a faint backlit rectangle, edges of green light. It’s the door he knows he needs to enter. He steps over fallen tables, broken chairs. An armore
d car clunks by outside. More gunshots from the depths of the city.
Orange shadows jump, dance across the restaurant’s exterior.
“What is this place?” Dorje says to himself. “Pray I’ll live to leave it.”
And that scuttling sound, more a rattle than a scuttle, scrapes from behind the door in the back. Dorje recalls the scuttle of Favian and Cross, the battlefield left barren and bloodied before he burned their bodies. He wept at the smell.
It was the smell of regretful indifference, of cowardice.
But before Dorje can react, a chain whips out from that door in the back and wraps around his throat, tightens, pinching his air, gulping up his heart to stop, and dropping him to his knees.
“Ukko—no,” Dorje chokes, but it’s too late for him. The chain is yanked taut by strong hands and Dorje is pulled to the floor, heaved, dragged atop broken glass shards, shit-stained linoleum tiles, animal innards, bones.
“Ukko—it’s—stop,” he gurgles. “Dorje.”
Two leathered hands feed and pull the chain shorter, shorter, skidding Dorje across the floor, closer to the monster in charge. A boot to Dorje’s shoulder kicks him onto his back. His purpled grimace stares up at a man with no skin covering his face—pure bloody muscle and lidless eyeballs, nose holes minus the nostrils, and a grinning lipless mouth. The man speaks tersely, his white button down dress shirt, black slacks, black shoes not a match for the destroyed decor of the Chinese restaurant: “Dorje, the sneaking backbone of night visitations,” Ukko says. “You should be more than careful, young man, or you’ll end up dead, head wrenched from your body like tearing the bud from a stalk of shit.” And as Ukko speaks, he loosens the chain wrapped tight around Dorje’s neck.
Dorje wrenches on the chain, his neck already cut from the chain’s jagged alteration.
“Could have killed me,” Dorje says.
“But didn’t.”
“Should have known.”
“Didn’t know you were coming all this way.”
“To wake you up,” Dorje says.
Ukko drops the chain, reaches into his pants pocket. “Must be urgent then,” he says, pulling out a packet of old rolled tobacco. “Or maybe you’re already a dead man?”
“Name’s Golo—common mesa dweller, but he’s an orgone shaman.”
“Name’s not familiar,” Ukko says, lighting a cigarette. “Nor does it have to—”
“Can you tap?”
“It’s possible.”
“What do you want?”
“You can owe me,” he says, smiling rotten.
Ukko would rather not think about how, something too much to handle on a night of this significance.
“Some taps are more,” Ukko says, “shall we say, intense, than others.”
“I underestimated him—mined his apprentice, though.”
Ukko releases a fog of sharp cigarette smoke, turns and enters the back room.
And Dorje, on his feet, looks out into the dark: the snow, the glowing death, and how the hard floor of the Chinese restaurant feels harder, more stable, on the lopped head of an octopus. He touches his thumb to his forehead and whispers to himself, eyes closed, and slides his thumb down to his heart.
A harsh white light burns his eyes. Ukko has slipped on a white laboratory coat, a pair of black-rimmed glasses, and a surgical face mask.
For a micro-second, the room blips green, swells.
Dorje swallows and enters, unsure if he’ll ever exit again.
***
A candle for each corner—red wax stumps melting.
The vat bubbles, has been stirred by a juniper branch, a fire crackling underneath.
Golo wipes his mouth, swallows the last of the stewed pig entrails prepared by Misao. He burps, spits a shred of gut on the floor.
Misao tells him everything she recalls.
The only answer Golo gives: “Some kind of spell—a premonition of your death. Or mine.”
She shakes her head, running her hand across her neck and down the front of her robe.
When Misao awoke on the floor of the shack, she felt her body become lighter, mouth parched, and a crushing weight on the back of her head.
Was there a man who had entered the shack?
Had she been attacked?
Why doesn’t she remember what happened?
So Misao bathed in the vomit of Golo’s performance, submerged herself in a peculiar concoction and sank, breath held, release, clench. This was Golo’s instruction, for he added the unknown contents of one of his blood-buckets he keeps sealed under the house.
And he blessed her forehead.
And he kept her there. At peace.
But the present. She said she had prepared a present. She would not say, unsure if what she had prepared was still among them and not just a figment of her imagination.
The present Misao offers to show Golo is in his shed behind the shack. She warns him of what he might see and when he asks her “How?” or “Who?” or “What magic she’s wrought?” she replies with: “The visitation occurred when I awoke, wandering outside the shack.”
“What is this about?”
“It must be about you,” she says. “I believe you somehow summoned this to be—like it’s for you, Golo.”
Golo buttons his coat and trudges out to the shack, turning back, says, “Boil me a cup of the vomit—if this is as heady as you speak of it.”
And he stands outside—in, two, three, four, out, two, three, four—still slightly shaking from the night’s barrage of happenings. He admits defeat in terms of the effect of the performance at the abandoned building—the sounds and smells of their psychophysical training. He had rehearsed, but the interference left him helpless.
Once the possession begins, there is no turning back.
He unlatches the shed lock and swings the door open to an inner swirl of insect chirps, swirling violins, and the underpinning rumble of his mind coming suddenly unhinged. The sight throws him backward, but he remains standing. And his skull tingles, pumps. An oscillating wave that destroys his perception of the outside world.
He stands haunted, staring at the figure of the long dead father of orgonotic therapy, the dead, yet not so dead—Wilhelm Reich.
He hears the back door to the shack creak open. Misao crosses her arms. “He is here for you,” she says. “Still here, no doubt, by your shrieks. And the serum is boiled.”
“For me?” Golo says, staring at Reich, but speaking to himself.
Golo had studied Reich’s breath work while at the Acrid Temple. His master kept a vast collection of books in the dojo’s second basement. Reich’s hermetic texts on breathing ranked among his master’s most prized troves. And Golo had studied them all—mirror work, the de-armoring of the body, character analysis, the bioelectrical energy of sex, the orgasm—and orgone, the root of Reich’s research. The diving board for the Acrid Temple’s guiding principles.
Indeed, Golo spent years of lotus breath work, orgone concentration, and summoning actions. His master revealed the Fourth Way, the Seven-Headed Release Pose, as well as Orgone Combat Techniques for Mental Stimulation.
But to have Wilhelm Reich standing before him was too much to comprehend. Golo and Misao were not versed in enfleshment magic.
Their psychophysical exercises aimed to sharpen, not harm. Yet,given this, Golo still could not explain the energy he had unleashed inside the chest of the giant naked girl.
Reich coughs, hits his chest to clear phlegm.
Golo mutters his mantra quickly.
“You called upon me,” Reich says, graveled voice, deep yet soothing, accented and strong, stepping forward. He wears a flannel hunting jacket, black wool pants, a wool sweater underneath. His hair sprouts electric waves around his head and his pudgy face pulsates even in the single-bulb darkness of the shed. “And we have work to do—ages to explain this anomaly of circumstance.”
“But how—where did you come from?”
“Heaven and Earth, Horatio,” Reich s
ays. “And beyond, I would assume.”
“Beyond,” Golo says, awe-struck, head still rumbling, pierced and woozy.
“I’ll show you, seems to be the way,” Reich says. “We haven’t much time.”
“Time?” Golo says.
“The accumulator,” Reich says, but his right hand fades in the green light, reappears. Reich and Golo look at each other and in that moment Golo realizes it was, somehow, the simultaneity of his and Misao’s mental connection that tapped Reich to materialize. But how is that possible with two minds? Materializations were meant to be triadic.
Unless the giant naked girl’s chest created some kind of amplification.
Or the animals.
Or the octopus brain, itself.
***
And across a vast plain of brain-tinged snow, flame-drenched buildings charred and pluming smoke to the east and north, within the back room of a dilapidated restaurant, Dorje lies prone, strapped to a gurney under harsh fluorescent neon bulbs. The room is a linoleum-tiled mess of odd medical gadgets—broken metal, mechanical contraptions gutted, wire piles—and blood-soaked smocks draped over workbenches: hammers, wrenches, scalpels, razor blades. A windowless room.
Yellowed walls.
It is a night to Transcend.
Ukko, so he says or has been called by the New Golden Dawn, is a doctor of psychoneurotics. Dorje was introduced to Ukko months back at one of the New Golden Dawn’s tantric desert ceremonies, an all-night affair beyond the mountain snow, near the Dawn’s encampment, near the bases and huts, just miles from where the squid infestation washed on the beach in bloody humps, bled the sand unwalkable.
A dead zone of nomads.
A dirty mess of a desert radiation.
And Dorje worries. He worries the procedure he’s about to undergo might leave him somehow lesser the man, somehow deader the man. He watches Ukko furiously pen some message in the corner, scribbles letters into a black notebook and laugh. The man’s laugh is like the cackle of a nightmare. Dorje’s heard that laugh before. And Dorje worries what he will confront when the procedure begins. Not having undertaken the procedure in the past makes him wary. In fact, everything about Ukko makes him wary. But he’s here to equip himself for the murder-journey to come, for a way to penetrate Golo’s universe from the inside of his own mind, and transfer whatever power he possesses back to himself—and from Dorje to the New Golden Dawn orgone shall rein.