by Grefe, Jamie
And he looks down at his own hands, stained in octopus matter as they are. It makes him think that what if perhaps he, himself and his madness, built the accumulator and just doesn’t remember? No, that can’t be possible. And where was Reich when Ami was murdered? More importantly, how was Reich possible without being directly summoned? He hisses out the end of his mantra and blinks three times to snap himself from his mind-wandering trance.
Golo stands and bows before the orgone accumulator. Of course, Misao has wandered off. He would like her to be here for this, to ensure nothing goes wrong, but something else inside him is pushing him to enter, to begin, to continue whatever psychophysical journey was already in progress. And perhaps he, too, would be healed from the misery of violence and his wife’s slaughter. Perhaps, he would be healed from the trauma of the city. Perhaps, he would disappear into the folds of the Void, become a speck of the universe, an element. And that, he had come to think, would not be such a bad thing.
He enters the orgone accumulator and shuts the door, locks it from the inside. He sits on the chair, the metal cold against his back.
Breathe, hear breath rattle, wheeze.
Focus on the unending breath, on breathing.
The inside of the orgone accumulator is, at first, an intense darkness. Even with his eyes shut, the darkness of the accumulator presses against his eyeballs.
He feels weighted.
Shut eyes staring.
Until the black turns a wicked pink bending to touch blue, thick like liquid blue.
Golo folds his hands over his lap, back of his right hand into his left palm. He tries to voice the mantra, but no sound comes out of his mouth, and the silence grows heavier, so heavy he doesn’t notice the rumble outside the accumulator, for he is All and Everything in blue waves, until—
The disintegration of his body, a lifting.
Skin melting upward and outward.
The box of blue orgone radiating into his body.
The heat of his body flames under skin from toe to skull.
Golo’s lungs pulsate from the blast of blue orgone.
He can’t scream, mouth ripped open.
There is no sound. His open mouth becomes a ragged bloody channel for the orgone to enter. And it enters through his nose and his ears like smoke, permeates through the invisible pores in his skin.
Teeth turn goo.
But inside Golo, there is nothing but the sensation of a light lifting to wonder, a suspension in blue ecstasy.
When Misao dashes into the shed, sees the blue light rimming the edges of the orgone accumulator, she gasps, rushes closer. She slides open a small square window for observational purposes.
She screams.
The window is splattered in Golo’s blood.
***
Dorje comes to, fully clothed and refreshed, though wispy, body of light, like he could lift off the ground if he merely willed himself to do so. He’s standing on a great, vast plain of sheer blackness. If he looks hard enough, he can just make out great obsidian shapes. Mountains with their jagged ridges. In front of him, the ground is level and smooth. Marble. A light emanates over this space where he finds himself and a kind of vignette of a simple wooden table, a wooden chair, and an equally wooden door are feet away from him. And perhaps he is on a stage. He looks again to the darkness, but now he sees neither mountainous form or otherwise, just a simple unending black shield.
He smells of pickled hearts, fermented ginger.
Dorje does not remember being strapped to the table, nor Ukko, the sadist. He touches his body in feverish gropes, rubs his eyes.
Static blackens, cuts his vision.
When he opens his eyes, a crackly projection of Golo sits at the wooden table. Dorje screams, stumbles back. The door opens and Ami, very much alive, yet crackling in static bursts like Golo, stands before her lover. She’s pristine. Neither Golo nor Ami take notice of Dorje. Neither of them, he immediately thinks, are really here. And he’s noticed that the blackness hovering around him and the odd vignette is moving like thick liquid in a swirling pattern of black.
Ami steps to her lover, wraps her arms around his neck. He’s bent over that table writing, though he doesn’t hold a pen, nor is there paper laid out before him. “What is this?” Dorje says. “Some kind of mockery?” He laughs, but the laughter doesn’t help and the performers cannot see him. The blackness swirls faster and he feels it going to his head. The dizzy rush of disorientation—hot flashes, red spots in her eyes. And breathe. Regain control.
He walks to the scene, stands opposite the table and crouches. Ami whispers into Golo’s ear, causing Golo to raise his head and take note. A smile cracks across his face and he looks up at his wife. He is about to speak—
Pause.
They freeze.
Their images crackle and fizz, but the projection is still vivid. Dorje stares, mouth agape, but the horror sinks in. This moment of stillness is the moment he slaughtered Ami. It was this pose and all he has to do is move in behind her, raise his axe and hammer it down into her skull, explode her skull to bits. Repeat. But Dorje is alone in this space. And he doesn’t have his axe. He doesn’t remember when he had it.
He leans over the table, close enough to Golo’s face to smell the tape-like static smell of his synthetic visage. Suddenly, Dorje snaps out an arm to Golo’s throat, but his hand goes right through the holographic image. Though, now, Golo’s eyes lower from his lover’s gaze and affix themselves on Dorje, who jolts back at those eyes.
What they hold.
What they reflect.
For pinging off Golo’s eyes is the inside of the giant naked dead girl.
***
Misao gasps, appalled, rushes forward to pry open the door to the accumulator. She cannot. The door won’t budge, pink brain-juice seeping out from the edges, sealing the door to the frame. A low buzz like the sound of power lines sings out from inside the accumulator. She wrenches, pounds on the door, screams Golo’s name, but he does not reply.
She darts out of the shed, needs to find Reich.
The world outside the shed is still save for the sound of her own labored breath. Then, she spots him.
Reich is not in the shack. Reich has wandered to the hill to the west of their house; through the snow, she sees his body levitating horizontally several feet above the ground, his body surrounded by dark blue waves, neon strings of electricity encircling him.
Binding him to the air.
Back to the shack, Misao shoves open the back door, knocks over Golo’s bowl of half-eaten pig bits, and rushes to the vat.
It has come to this, she decides. To the fringe.
She picks up a jar of rooster blood, pours it into the bubbling mixture, and intones an elaborate prayer, her arms extended high above her head. Muscles clench. She shoves her head into the vat and drinks, vomits, drinks, cries, and drinks more, until her entire head is drenched in blood, puke, and piss. It’s the only thing she can do, this changing, this channeling, a reserve of divinity. It’s her way to Golo and the culmination of her shamanistic studies—secret studies of black sorcery. It was the one spell she had kept hidden from Golo; her ability to shift. Become Ancient.
Thus, it begins.
The hair on her arms thickens, fingers extending, hardening to wooden flesh-sticks, branches without veins, sharp and darkly wet. Her face twists, skin stretches across bone, fattens to the face of something not human, an animal. Her body seizures. She screams to Kala, who does not hear her, and thrashes about the room. She is turning wolf, turning bear and witch and hawk. And as her prayer intensifies, her voice distorts to a sustained growl, something warped and uneven. She snarls, fangs yellowed, tongue distended out of her mouth. And she roars and her roar shatters bottles of entrails. Dead snakes. Pickled hog skin. Skunk eyeballs exploding, slipping off shelves, melting in sticky plops.
It is almost complete.
The frenzy surrounds, becomes her.
The back door to the shed is shadowed in h
er awful presence. Misao’s bones crack out into the night. More bones jut from her back and sides, her legs like she is becoming spider. Her hair frazzles from her head and more hair has sprouted on her cheeks and arms. She throws off her robe, tears it from her body, a phantasmagoric sorceress of the night. Her eyes burn green, black, opal doom. She has become her own Death Head Beast, the incarnation of ancient anti-animism.
Her arms droop, drag across the snow, those wooden fingers digging into the frozen ground. She chugs her way up the hill to where Reich levitates at chest level, his arms outspread, his body spinning. Her inhuman eyes follow the electric corridor that stretches down from the sky as it encircles his body like a three-dimensional shield.
From beyond, animals cry as if something is coming.
Misao gags, spins around, sniffing the air with her deformed snout. She cries out a shrill jag of noise.
Reich’s orgone corridor to the sky roars as if pumping him full of orgone. She lurches toward where he lies, his body still spinning, spinning slower now, whooping like helicopter blades. She looks up at the falling snow, how it radiates off the orgone corridor, recalls the blood-spattered accumulator, the vision she suffered, inhales, drawing in the sounds of the animals. And she lets out a terrifying roar that blasts its way across the mesa, that stirs the ground to shiver, stirs earth to shocking life.
She stands before the spinning Reich, enveloped in his orgonotic glow. His head has shrunken, turned a striking white and his mouth hangs open, consumed by static. His nose has receded back into his head. His hair haloes around his head like a crown of white strings.
In one sudden blow, Misao raises her distended arm and strikes down through the orgone and into the vortex of his chest.
His eyes pop from his latex face, static rumble peaking.
Somewhere deep, stretching miles below the earth, drenched in mountains of skull-chopped ice, a humungous dead octopus eye twitches.
Awakens.
***
Never one to be satisfied, even among the New Golden Dawn’s hedonistic desert ceremonies of old, Ukko runs a bony hand over his skinless head and presses one final button.
A high pitched whine.
A wheeze.
Ukko turns to the table, spits a quick, “Shit,” from his mouth.
Dorje is not there.
No longer on the operating table.
From behind the table, something coughs over the crackle. Even now, the electricity blips, circuits shooting madly into the air from the wrist and ankle clamps. Whatever is in the corner, through its coughing and gagging, still has electrodes strapped to its head. Wires stretched to break from the console, across the table to what lurks in those shadows.
“Dorje,” Ukko says. “Dorje, come to the table. We must continue the procedure in the correct way. This is not the correct way. You must be strapped in like a good boy. You know that. Come now, come.”
But Dorje does not come and it is hard to see him from where Ukko stands. Slowly, Ukko moves out from behind the console and, back hugging the wall, cranes his head to see Dorje, to coerce him from a distance back to the table.
The man known as Dorje is no longer Dorje.
Instead, Ukko’s eyes bulge, nostrils flare in disgust at the creature before him. Something must have gone wrong, must still be going wrong, for the thing’s head pulses a bright orange where the electrodes—now fully sunken into Dorje’s head—hum and pulse power.
And Dorje struggles to stand.
Ukko staggers back, arm steadily searching for his chain, for one of his old machine guns, even for Dorje’s axe. In all of his years of tapping, he has never seen such a sight.
The restaurant shakes. A tremor.
Something undone.
Something ancient under the ground.
A stirring.
And in that moment, Ukko lunges for Dorje’s axe, the closet weapon to him. Dorje has risen, risen to his full height.
And he’s terrifying.
Whatever happened to Dorje in the moment of the tapping has completely obliterated his human body. Instead of the handsome young man who entered his laboratory, Ukko cringes at the sight of a hulking mass of fleshy black tar. The thing’s eyes are tiny red beads and the mouth too big for the head. Two small nostril holes flare, but Dorje’s aching in place as he rises, bones cracking, dripping, bulbous and gross.
Dorje cocks his head, black tar-slime oozing out of his mouth.
Ukko quickly handles the axe, swings it back, and rushes out from behind the console to the table, over the wire pile with the full intention of slamming the axe into Dorje’s head, a head still plugged into the system. But there is a quickness in Dorje that Ukko was not expecting, something foreign and fierce. The beast rages forward, knocking over the stretcher where he lied, and head-on into Ukko, throwing them both back to the console.
Wires rip.
Something cracks.
The axe skids from Ukko’s grip.
Dorje straddles him, still human underneath the goop that spills over Ukko’s skinless face. And through the screams and the howls for it all to stop, Dorje rams his slimed fist into Ukko’s face over and over, leaving Ukko nothing but a twitching shit-sack of spaghetti brains and blood.
Dorje stands, limps over to his axe and picks it up. He steps away from the body, but his head is still connected to the wires. He slips on a blood pool, goes down to one knee, back against the overturned operating table.
Something cracks again, behind him. It’s the electric current from Ukko’s Igniter.
Dorje touches the wrist strap where the current is circling.
The current: blue, sparkling blue.
The extreme blue sensation startles him, but he embraces it and something like a monstrous laugh roars inside him. He opens his mouth and shoves the strap fueled by the current of the Igniter inside. And he stands in the bloody green laboratory, axe at his feet. He shuts his eyes, feels something he’s never felt before, a feeling that drains him of the memory of why or who or how he was. It is only him now in this form and the lust for violence that spikes itself through his chest.
He is Kaiju.
His vision ripples with the image of dragons, reptiles, sea creatures roaming the Earth. Powerful land beasts snarling.
A Japanese soldier slicing the neck of a begging peasant. A skyscraper. The smell of fire and blood drops. Ice cracking for miles. Brains guzzled in the jungle. The scent of a lover. An explosion. A bleating lamb.
A severed paw.
It’s as if the entire world cracks open in that moment. It sends him laughing and he bends, picks up the table where he lied and sets it upright.
Black gloves reaching through the dark. A trigger clenched.
Shape in the dark.
White light in the corner of a dark room.
He lies down on the operating table and extends his goopy arms out. His thick legs dangle over the side.
Submersion in water.
Birth under moonlight screams.
Dorje reconnects, shudders.
A gigantic maiden of ice.
Fingers upon fingers.
Murky bog.
In the laboratory, the ground below shakes once again, spilling, clanging, clanging the entire room.
The ceiling cracks. Dorje opens his eyes, watches the dust float waves across the room. He can see every speck and how the specks join with other specks.
Together they go.
But he’s slipping into numbness. Something hot from around his temples as if his brain were enlarging, expanding to meet the universe.
To become the universe.
And he raises his hand. His human hand. Skin of a man. A clean, unbrutalized hand. In that moment, there is no laboratory. There is no separation from the churning underfoot to the vast reaches of outer space. But a face hovers above his.
It is not real, wavering.
And his eyes move from human to red and human to red. It is the face of a pale man. Little man. A shrouded-in-blue
man.
The face is hate incarnate. And Dorje screams himself to that tar-covered state. To be doused in hate.
To become hate.
It doesn’t work. He remains human.
And there’s a knock at the doorway, the door already open.
He pulls himself back from the table, looks up.
It’s her again, can’t be her again. She was just here. He remembers her here. The lifelike image of Ami as she walked across the room and bent close to Golo, Golo sitting at the table in this vignette of a room.
All around the black curtains.
The black fold-like mountains encroaching.
Dark matter.
A vacuum.
A nightmare Dorje doesn’t remember entering, only him and the beast within he cannot conjure to be.
Dorje strikes again at Golo. Again his hand blasts through the image. The semblance of a shaman. This is not a real man. Never was a real man.
Door opening, already opened. Ami stands at the door. She’s beautiful. The woman he murdered. And she floats across the room in crackles. A starlet. But Golo is gone. Dorje panics, can’t breathe, must breathe. He forces a deep breath, chest tightens. The image of the man he wants to kill. And he’s gone. But the door opens again. And Ami is beautiful in the doorway. Perhaps, he thinks, this is all there is, this coming and going, this loop upon loop until death and beyond death. Or this is death. And death is all there is. But it can’t be this easy. And where is his axe? How did he come here to this space?
Suddenly, Dorje turns and runs to the blackness, but he runs in place. The darkness is a pillow constricting. A jelly one cannot sink into. One that one presses into without moving forward. So he turns, trapped, being trapped inside this thick black skin.
But now, there is a man before him. A man sitting seiza style on the table. A man with his eyes crusted shut. And trembling. That man is Golo.
Golo’s eyes shoot open. He stands, but not on the table, hovers just inches above the table. Those suspenders. The same hakama and overcoat. He opens his hand and blue smoke trails up, up into the blackness, until it becomes the blackness.