Static/Orgone

by Grefe, Jamie

  Yes, he thinks, to the future of orgonotics.

  And in the process, he’ll kill Golo for what he did. He’ll kill the woman Golo keeps by his side, too.

  The Ami experience all over again, only bloodier.

  Only better.

  It is true she conjured Dorje to Golo’s shack only hours before during his walking meditation. He knows she is not to be undervalued.

  And she has seen the murder.

  An animal priestess of the highest order.

  “We’re ready then, are we?” Ukko says. He stretches a pair of dirty brown plastic gloves over his skinny fingers.

  Dorje nods and adjusts himself on the gurney.

  “First time is the best,” Ukko says. “Take off your clothes and we proceed.”

  Dorje sits up. “For what purpose?”

  “To receive your new body.”

  A new body. Dorje didn’t know about this part of the procedure, but was in no position to argue and it was too late to turn back. The brothers and sisters have been slaughtered by the man they were set out to study—slaughtered by Golo. He needed to get to the inside as soon as possible. Ukko was his key.

  The first patch to left temple.

  The second patch to right.

  Three clips to the skin over central cortex.

  Clamp the spine.

  Syringe the spinal cord—let the patient sleep.

  Let all sleep and be sleepy, awake to the other side.

  But Dorje, now strapped to a gurney, naked and shivering, was not going under smoothly. There was a hate festering across his body, the likes of which Ukko had not seen.

  Not that that was a surprise.

  Tapping a patient’s brain to ether always came with some kind of unintended consequence. Every patient was different—unique, beautiful.

  Ukko palmed a hunting knife and slid it across Dorje’s forehead. By now, Dorje would not be able to feel the pain, overcome as he surely was by other forms of unpleasant grandeur. So, Ukko reached behind him and pulled out two tabs connected to red wires. He carefully inserted both tabs under Dorje’s forehead, so they rested comfortably on his skull, on the outside of his brain. Ukko then reached under the gurney and switched on a small metallic box. He turned a dial on the box and waited for it to warm up. A needle in the center of the box flickered back and forth, settling in the middle. Ukko cranked the dial.

  Something rattled outside his back room laboratory.

  “Not now,” Ukko says. “Always in the middle . . . ”

  Breathe—

  Fingers twitch—curl and sag.

  Dorje’s body stops shivering, goes limp. Ukko smiles, strokes Dorje’s head.

  But the sound from the restaurant persists, pushes into Ukko’s eardrums—snap, snap, snap—such that, breaking the tradition of how these things are normally done, he sets the metallic box’s dial to its highest amplification, places it beside Dorje’s body, and, with hunting knife in hand, unbolts the lock to the door, forging out to handle whatever critter needs handling at this hour of the night.

  In the destroyed dining area of the restaurant, Ukko fails to see Dorje’s limp hand twitch again, twitch harder fast, suddenly consumed by a shell of purple electric waves. Dorje fails to see that purple electricity completely consume Dorje’s face.

  Under the sedation of the tapping medication, Dorje does not scream.

  From the outside, Dorje’s body is being existentially mutilated.

  Breathe—

  Follow the purple (swelling, deepening, intensifying) under fluttering eyelids and up into his brain-chasm, past the vertex where it sparks, to where twin hemispheres meet the horizon of outer mind.

  And there, one will find the body of Dorje.

  But it is not fully Dorje.

  Something grows.

  Brain-nectar drips of him.

  Becomes—

  ***

  It’s all too odd for Golo. He shivers, tastes pink, clears his throat. The white-haired wraith, the father of orgonotics stands before him—Wilhelm Reich, a dead man risen. Or the semblance of him. Flesh sorcery.

  There’s something not right about Reich’s visage, a pale radiance. A fake fleshiness bordering on a substance other than skin surrounds his body.

  To touch, knead, sever a false history.

  “Come, sit,” Golo says, arms folded tight across his chest, stepping backward toward the shack before he even knows he’s moving. “Mr. Reich—our traveler, our savior.”

  And when Reich speaks—a mumbled garble of choppy static oscillations ring—it’s his mouth Golo peers into, how that mouth is a pitch black oval of nothing, a toothless abyss between the lips.

  A rumble. More gunshots pitter from afar.

  The three of them hover as strangers for a moment, triangulated toward each other, unable to comprehend. Not knowing what to say.

  “Please, Doctor,” Misao says. “We are eager to—”

  “Orgone,” Golo says.

  But Reich places his index finger to his lips and blows a shush to cease the talking. His mouth smoothly moves from a pursed tightness to a toothless laughter of static warbles. The sound sends shivers over Golo’s back, until the laughter cuts off.

  Golo squints, remains skeptical, though he doesn’t doubt—can’t not admit—the reality of the man standing before him. So lifelike and thick. Blood under skin. Too glimmering, though, as if his insides were stuffed: gears, fluff, sky. Reich laughs again, more maniacal.

  Golo waits for the laughter to stop, hearing it squelch itself within the falling snow, the vast distances of the mollusk mesa. “What then?” Golo says. “What else is there, other than orgone?”

  Reich nods, turns to the shed and extends his arm, fingers outstretched like an ancient showman gesturing for the cage to open, to unleash tigers, lions into the meat-pit. He’s gesturing toward the shed. His fingers shake.

  “It can’t be—you came from there, my shed?” Golo says. “Misao, did you . . . ” he tries to say, but his voice trails. For he knows what lies on the other side of that old wooden shed door. Yet there is magic in Reich’s gesture. For in that moment of Reich’s gesture, Golo is aware—an awareness pressed into him from Reich’s inner being—of what Reich was doing in the shed. Maybe he has been there for days, weeks upon weeks. A time of Immateriality—the sacred zone. Golo has read about such conjurations. A materialized being operating not within the realm of the ordinary, but the supernatural. Beyond time. And of course, if the conjuration had been that strong, then surely there would be more secrets to reveal. Perhaps there are hundreds of Reichs roaming the countryside.

  The ground tremors, blurring Golo’s vision. It doesn’t matter. This world could burn, melt to a slab of nose-lard and Golo wouldn’t budge, for, indeed, he knows the other side is nearer than it’s ever been before.

  He wants to enter the shed, is ready to enter the other side.

  Whatever project Reich has brewed.

  And maybe, he thinks he can find Ami on the other side, too.

  Reich’s head snaps toward Golo—jaw clicks, clicks opens—startling Misao, who counts spells on her fingers, trying to piece together the proper preparatory materials for orgone sharpening if the need arises to retaliate or flee. Or something stronger, transformative. She won’t say. But her wavering mind is still a whirl of where Golo must have been: the blood splatters on his hakama, skin stench, the fear and the violence wafting off his skin as he ate his dinner in a blind rage, calm silence, earlier in the evening, unblinking. She’s worried for the safety of their souls. Realms unfathomable. In what he won’t tell her. She’s worried whatever murderer she knows cursed her with a hallucinated visitation earlier in the night will be back for more—at least in her mind. That figure will return, spill her blood in the snow.

  When Reich speaks, Golo and Misao know they are supposed to understand the significance of his words. What he teaches, has taught from Old Europe to this New America: bioenergy, orgone therapy, character analysis, armoring, li
beration, body healing. The possibility of hope. They can’t understand him, though, ears craned to listen. A blast. Again, his voice sparks a radio signal out of focus, a blur of warped bass glitches and distorted blares at once close and far as if from a control tower in the city. But he goes on and on, orating nothing but static. The message lost. His brow tightens, arms flail. And the speech is heightened, shifting the sounds to an orchestra of blaring noise bending to a hiss.

  Hiss shifting, fades to a shut mouth.

  And silence.

  Reich shakes his head in disapproval, and grandly pulls open the shed door, revealing the enigma of a human-sized metal box placed neatly in the center of the shed.

  He reveals an orgone accumulator.

  The accumulator’s door creaks open.

  And it’s a thing of wonder.

  Of psychic divinity.

  Golo draws a quick breath, boot-steps feverishly to the shed door, past Reich and his sour stench, to the inside of the shed. When Golo enters the shed, he finds the space feels larger than normal as if the walls had been extended by meters wide—wider than that—and the ceiling, too. And the orgone accumulator beckons before him as a foreign obelisk, so distant, yet something he would have created by his own mind. He hears Misao’s soft feet slide into the shed. She gasps when she sees the accumulator.

  It’s brilliant. A simple mystical brilliance.

  Golo is already at the device, its metallic door open, calling for him to come and sit. The only light within the shed is the dull blue moon light above in the sky, one that flickers as the snow blots out its faint luminescence.

  An electric light burns on above, Misao’s finger on the switch. And indeed, the shed is larger on the inside as if the accumulator had pushed the entire room back, bending space so the shelves of jars, rusty tools, and piles of gory powder Golo had amassed for his rituals were somehow pressed neatly further.

  Up close, Golo observes the alternating materials that compose the accumulator’s edges. He pulls back to consult with Reich, but Reich did not enter the shed and is still outside. Even if he were, Golo wouldn’t be able to communicate his joy to this strange man of this very strange night. He reaches his hand in to touch the materials. Fingers on metal. Slide fingers and touch a layer of hardened octopus brain. Seven layers deep. Yes, it is true. He didn’t know it was possible to solidify the substance, had not thought to do such a thing, but he was not the Doctor, nor the architect. And still, he bites his own lip to reassure himself he is not dreaming. That this is really happening.

  And it is.

  Inside the accumulator, the metal layer reflects silver and a metal chair has been placed in the center. The entire box that encloses the accumulator is just larger than Golo himself when seated. And he touches the accumulator like a mad scientist in love with his creation. With longing. “Reich,” he says, eyes still fastened to the box, glowing from the potential of what comes next. “This is an incredible—we can’t waste anymore time, we, just—Misao, did you—?”

  She’s smiling in wonder at the accumulator, can hear its hum like a thick fog calling out to her. Outside, an animal whines and mewls in the far distance. And she blinks away the image of a giant naked dead girl frozen in the snow. She touches Golo on the shoulder and he stands to face her. “It’s your time,” she says.

  “How did he . . . ?”

  “There’s a third, Golo.”

  “So it wasn’t a hallucination.”

  She holds his hand. “He’s coming to kill you in there.”

  “You can’t kill orgone,” Golo says. “It becomes Other.”

  “There are tortures worse than becoming a corpse.”

  “I will not die, Misao.” His skin is feverish, palm suddenly clammy. “Orgone breeds life—a new life—and chance for liberation. It’s all we have now.” But he does not move to touch her, to hold her or kiss her on the lips. “This is the way it has to be.” He’s looking over her shoulder, struggling to see Reich still out in the snow, but the light in the shed burns to its fullest illumination and the outside is a black hole, a thick dark, like the inside of Reich’s mouth. “And any tortures, here or elsewhere, worse than death are worth whatever psychophysical mysteries this accumulator holds.”

  But Misao clenches her fist. She doesn’t believe him.

  ***

  The screams of a suffering man belch out from his teeth to the shit-sucking grin of the man who strapped him down.

  A dilapidated restaurant on the edge of town.

  Ukko flips a switch. Turn knob to maximum penetration. Mind infiltration. A panel lights up. A backroom laboratory gone neon streaks: green lights, electric pulse on the temples, a body with skin melting, emptying arcs of blood. Liquid skin revival. Ukko reaches into his lab coat pocket, lights a blood-stained cigarette.

  The skin on his own face has been sucked off by years of psychophysical experiments, perversions—time ill-spent in the radiation zones. Too many desert rituals to count. And now, this neophyte on the table.

  Watch his muscles burn.

  Teeth grind.

  The tapping procedure is an orchestra of pain unfolding. Better than the last four, Ukko thinks, not looking to the storage closet—the buckets. The pails and bags. He’s learned since then how to use the outer shell to seep inwards and beyond like a portal. But it’s never the same trip for the participant—deadly fun for Ukko.

  A final twist of a palm-sized blue knob and the pressure’s been set. Rarely does the participant awaken in the middle of a tapping session such as this one, but he can never be sure. For now, though, he listens to the buzz of the electric lights streaming the ceiling. Glitching.

  Ukko fails to witness the transformation.

  The lights flicker as Dorje’s body mutates on the table from human to monstrous mass of skin and eyes, bones, innards and a heart rapid and racing.

  Ukko fiddles with coins in his pocket, lost in thought—the flickering lights—and sucks the smoke low into his lungs, breathes out a cloud, coughs, clears his throat, remains turned away from the thrashing monstrosity that is now Dorje; Dorje has become Other.

  Dorje’s eyes are sealed shut, fleshed over, unseeing the outside and the rage bubbling up from his guts. The initial blast of Ukko’s electric concoction drilled his entire body in a blinding splurt of horrifying pain. The final image in his imagination as the mad doctor fiddled with buttons, cables, electrodes, blue wires, was the slaughterhouse scene inside the giant naked girl. For a brief instance Dorje pieced his image of Golo into the imagined scene, how it must have taken place, and tried to reassemble the chaos to a more profitable outcome of Golo as the ritualized body, held down by force, torn apart by savage hands for the sake of the New Golden Dawn. The orgone energy seeping from his dying body, being sucked into the souls of Dorje’s brothers and sisters. The rancid air swirled with violins, bells, flutes and drums. The sound of rejoicing.

  For in that image of Golo, with the introduction of the awful pain-waves sent by Ukko in the lab, the entire image conjured by Dorje’s mind, changed for the worst.

  A snapping jaw enflamed. Blood. Yellow teeth grit, grinding, mashing skin to—

  Veins spilled open, splashing. A gush of guts.

  The sisters flayed by skinny fingers.

  The brothers encircled by the feeling of tangled viscera.

  And the sound of the violins, the bells, the flutes, drums switch to a harsh chasm of noise. A shock of distortion: scrapes, shreds, cackles, roars of mutilation.

  The blur of Dorje’s mind slips into the flow from Ukko’s tapping experiment.

  Dorje doesn’t grasp the shift, but the image in his mind is shielded by the noise as if the curtain were an amplification system to the Void.

  The pain does not permit thought, blots it to blank space.

  Nor does Dorje realize the gruesome twists of his new body.

  But it doesn’t matter to him, for the intense mind-blurring pain is an exit and a corridor.

  To a naked body, sh
rouded in black space.

  Filled with a heavy silence, thick tundra.

  And a tiny blip of bright white. The distance, spinning.

  Dorje looks to his hand, but it is liquid and clear. He gropes toward the tiny blip, can’t yet move.

  The blip shifts deep red.

  And the blip shoots across the darkness toward Dorje too quickly for him to grasp the oncoming horror.

  ***

  Outside the shed, Misao scans the dark for Reich. Wolves call from beyond and suddenly something crashes inside Golo’s humble shack. She patters to the back door to check.

  She touches the door handle, stops, presses her ear to the door. The smell of sliced meat boiling. Inhale. A heavy shuffle and that static garble. Reich’s voice, she thinks. But within the sounds and the smells, with her ear to the door, she feels a distinct unease about entering. Something is not right.

  And Reich is not on the inside.

  She turns the handle. Quietly.

  Behind her, back in the shed, Golo kneels seiza style as if preparing himself for a tea ceremony. His eyes are shut and if one could pry open his eyelids, one would find those eyes completely rolled back into his cranium. Eyes to the vertex. Scanning his inner light, gripping at the edges of his internal vision. He mouths his mantra, unbuttons his coat in deliberate gestures. Rigid hands shivering. Fingers straight. And underneath, his naked chest, still stained octopus-pink and his suspender straps black and bloodstained.

  He throws off the coat. It reminds him of his time in the city. The Bullet Era. Fire and Misery.

  He repeats the mantra, turns to face the accumulator, does not shut his eyes as he invokes stillness. The box is a thing of beauty. Mystery par excellence. Golo has heard stories from the lower chambers—tales etched in blood—of those who disappeared within its orgone power.