The singular path he followed had closed
and opened him up to a world of roads.
CONTINUES NEXT WEEK
THE ONE TIME by Rob Bliss
I’m fine, doctor, how are you. Yes, that is good. Yes. Yes. I’ve been following your regiment to the T. Isn’t that what it is, a regiment? Surely you don’t work alone, an army of doctors to invade my psyche – the Greeks, those chosen people, have named us all. They created me and you, two snakes intertwined on a cock. I know my symbology. That is a word because I just said it. I know you didn’t counter me, I countered me, I am self-countering, which is gold to you, nest-fucking-pas? These are the terms I use, my diction for expression, this is me laid bare. If you choose to censor at this early stage, I’ll have to advise myself to shorten our meetings to the bare minimum of technical information only. I do not abide, nor entertain the construct of, totalitarianism. Should I. That is not a question, I’ll tell you when a question rolls from the side of my mouth. I rarely ask questions, they’re a sign of weakness, of not knowing the self, even questioning another self is to shield the vulnerable self, and I am not vulnerable. Write that down as a prescription, I am not. Vulnerable. And I understand a repetition of strength can belie weakness, but not here. I am communicating. What you hear can or can not be guided by my words. Don’t you hear things I’m not saying? I hear them all the time.
Doctor. Doctor may I? I’m trying to say may I ask a question. Thank you. Communicating. Well, let’s see. I see you have a picture of your lovely wife on your desk. So one may assume you are a heterosexual man. But that’s no guarantee. He smirked. But assuming, pretending, you are, one could then move into the antithesis. The bias of what one isn’t may be illuminated by what one isn’t. Yes? Okay. So you could be afraid of a homosexual male. Or female. Or does that get you hot. Many homophobic males are erotically stimulated by homosexual females. Guilt by fantasy. If he gets to fuck the bitches, then it’s non-threatening. You are also a white, who has married a white woman clearly. Do you despise the non-white. Too strong a word. Hate? Put-out by. Could do without. Fine. You say that. I’m trying to see what you’re not showing. As with you, so too I.
You keep your wife in a frame. Freeze her for display. She is a merit, a trophy, a reflection of your manhood, which takes precedent over your humanity. If it didn’t, you too would be caught in a frame, the happy couple. Why not frame a fish next to her? Or your favourite tie? The articles of your manhood are showing.
Begging the question: where’re the kids? Grandkids? How far has your sperm empire reached? Little Billy and Susie smiling at grandpa as he analyses, attempts to reverse the tide of perversion that floods across his desk. Skew the expected, doc, that’s all I’m saying. Susie in overalls and Billy in a frilly dress, pink and lacy, his hair grown out enough for pigtails, smooth white tights fitting the twig shape of his legs. Shiny black shoes he can smile into. If you don’t put him in that dress, I will.
Did I ever tell you, did I ever talk about specific physical desires I’ve entertained. Fantasies unfound. Doesn’t that create and re-create us all. (Where’s the fish you never caught? How about the wife holding up a marlin, you standing, sagged at the shoulders, in the background, limp cock in your hand. Skew. Prove you’re human by defeating your manhood.)
I want my ass fisted. I am being serious. Everything absolutely everything I say and do and have yet to do is serious. This desk and its flood is not for swimming playfully. (Billy in waterwings, toenails painted by grandpa.) Don’t let humour veer you from the sextant’s path, the stars do not betray the sailor, but the sailor betrays . . .
I’ve asked each member of your staff, male and female and other, plus some of the fellow patients to shove their fist up my ass. Free of charge. Gloved is fine, if they prefer. With or without lubricant, even a good spit. Not one. Not one. And here I am, selflessly offering an opportunity for advancement, for anger catharsis regardless of their dilemmas, their unsatisfactory home lives, their friendless childhoods. What do I care about childhood – fuck me. The present will soothe the past and brighten the future with new traumas.
A nurse changed my bedpan and I shit in her palm. I was flirting. Alas, she did not reciprocate. I believe in rape. Every good boy deserves rape. I’m only ten years old, except on the days when I’m five. How could she not scold a little boy for the mess he’s made? Where’s the natural reaction to shock. I tell you, she’s not normal.
I like to watch people fuck. Guy-girl, girl-girl, girl-dog, girl-horse, guy-dog. Not two guys. Sometimes, but rarely. I’m a voyeur, one hundred percent, I listen, I observe, I don’t participate, hate it. Except for that one time. But that’s all it takes, right doc? The one time you decide to involve yourself in life, to act, to live, to seize, the will made manifest, that’s when. It all accumulates, but then the first becomes also the last.
The one time can get you pregnant, the one time gets you a killing disease – for all your mighty act of self and godless will, the one time gets you arrested, gets you in here. So the moral? Do not act. Ever. Do not be free. Foster the self isolated. Return to in utero. If we can’t cure it or kill it, re-birth it. Try again. Medical science has come a long way. Replace the cells set in stone with those of a foetal chameleon. We can rebuild, because what nature did, always does, is ever imperfect. So you are an imperfect physician, and I am an imperfect patient, and the court and its various judges are imperfect pieces of shit. Killing is wrong, or at least difficult to justify, except in anger, but birth is good. Always good. I’m good, aren’t I, doc?
By the way, doctor, I asked how you were. You didn’t answer.
THE INITIATION OF LANTOS
10.
Lantos was starting to remember. He remembered the first time he had met Sun and how they had an instant rapport with each other. Both of them had the same sense of humour and were naturals at making profits. They only needed to look at each other to second guess each others actions. Of course being linked in the hive helped. Yet Lantos was sure if they had lived in the before time they would still have been friends. Somehow they attracted each other as if they were magnetic forces.
The thing is no-one else remembered. Oshiba recalled nothing about his early life. “Who needs it?" He had told Lantos one time they had met. “It just clogs up and leaves no room for the deals we make. For me the most important thing is the next deal. The rest is history.” The next time they met though Oshiba did not even remember the last time they had met or what they had talked about.
Rain was just Rain. One permanent shower of energy. A non-stop elemental force that just simply was. Lantos had always loved him for this reason. He gave off light when he smiled and Lantos had always felt warmed by him. He had seemed to have a never-ending supply of energy. Lately though it was like standing next to a shadow. Rain just did not seem real any more When Lantos looked at him Rain seemed flat like an old time graphic.
He was spending more time with Pod. Last night Pod had told him another tale. It was all about a man by the name of Ahab who had been so consumed by hate for a creature called Moby Dick. In the end Ahab’s hatred had brought about his own death. Lantos was getting to know what it meant to hate. He was beginning to hate his life. He was beginning to hate the time he spent in The Pyramid of Burning knowledge. He was beginning to hate the constant chatter of empty babble whenever he was forced to link with the hive mind. He longed for places to be alone or just to be with Judy.
Lantos did not go into work that day. He walked up and down the mall and watched the crowds of citizens as they came from nowhere and headed off nowhere. What were they all doing? Where were they all going? They said the same things, again and again and again.
He had been in the square for about an hour when Lantos saw something really strange. For brief moments all time stopped. The figures walking toward the mall seemed frozen, the faces of each one blurred as if they had been badly drawn images in a virtual game. At times he was sure that he was watching events unfold t
hat he had seen before like repeats of a zing tune.
Now he was looking up at the tree of Life. It was flat and when Lantos walked around it, to the other side there was nothing there. He walked back again. Yes the side of the tree he could see from his office window was there. When he walked to the other side the tree ceased to exist. Was he going mad? How had he never noticed this before. The same was true of the all seeing eye of Pod which seemed to sway in the breeze like a street sign. He had assumed that whatever direction you entered the square you would see the eye. However the symbol like the tree simply vanished out of sight when he walked around it to see it from the other side.
He looked closely at many of the buildings around him. Yes, there was Shop till you Drop, and Big Deals and Sunny Profits. He had never been in any of these buildings but had assumed that if he walked through the door he would walk down similar corridors of light as those outside his office in the pyramid. It was only now he noticed that they did not have any substance. They appeared like sketches of buildings and reflected no light from sol or the crowds passing by. Had anyone else seen that they were not real. Indeed was anyone else passing by these buildings real ? Lantos felt cold and shivered . He was beginning to feel frightened and right now he didn’t like that feeling at all.
11.
Every night Lantos wandered about the city. He hardly ever used the stream now, the thought of his atoms slipping in the stream disgusted him. No he loved to walk when it was dark and he could hear his own breathing and his heart beating and the empty sounds of his own feet as he took step after step after step. All journeys begin with that first step he thought to himself.
He walked for hours. Lost in a world of his own thoughts as he looked within himself and brought to his mind some words or a part of a story Pod had told him he was unaware how far he travelled. Sometimes when he came back to an awareness of the helo lights burning on high or the greater lights that burnt in the night sky he would discover that he had not travelled as far as he thought he had. For there he was again approaching the square and there stood the Tree of Life and over it still hung the All seeing eye of Pod.
He saw himself now as on a quest. That night Pod had told him another story about a group of knights who sat around a table. One of them, by the name of Lancelot had gone off on his own to search for something called The Holy Grail. Pod did not exactly explain what this was but Lantos thought of it as something wonderful. He saw himself like Lancelot. He could spend the rest of time searching for such a treasure.
He had also made a place where he could escape from the world as he knew it. This was his retreat. Here high on a hill he had placed a dwelling. Here there was a forest and a deep lake and a stream. In the dwelling was a bed made from wooden planks and a mattress filled with straw and a stove and a shelf of books he had created from the stories Pod continued to tell him. David Copperfield, Moby Dick, A Tale of Two Cities, an enormous Bible and a copy of an Epic poem about a poet by the name of Dante and his guide Virgil who showed him all the circles of a place called Hell
Lantos often took one down from the shelf and reading would be lost in another world. He became Ishmael or David Copperfield or Moses or Dante as he followed a path through the pages. He was fascinated by a story in the Bible he had about a man and a woman who had lived in a garden and had been tempted by a serpent and were then forced to leave this place, forever. There were still so many words or points of reference that Lantos did not understand. It was when he walked down by the lake and watched the surface of water surrounded by trees or heard a noise of some creature in the distance (Lantos had placed fish in the lake and owls and nightingales in the forest).
He began to stay here for longer periods of time. He loved to see the sun rise and the sun set. To see the moving shadows and the ripples that skimmed across the surface of the lake while being aware of time passing by. He would sit for hours by the lakeside as if lost in a trance. Once he saw a burning bush, like the one Moses had seen, which seemed to burn and yet remained unconsumed. Was this a sign from Pod? Another time he saw a great ocean, spread out around him as he stood on the deck of a sailing ship. Out from the waves surfaced a giant fish, a white whale like Moby Dick and Lantos felt so small and humble, as if he was looking on the face of Pod
For days after these visions he felt charged with a strange new power and walked about his eyes shining ,his mind filled with powerful thoughts. He felt then that nothing was beyond him and that had he so wished he could have walked across the lake or stepped off the ground to fly away int6o distant space. He was discovering that there were truths beyond his life of the Pyramid. He felt his life back in the city was some awful nightmare and that he was only just beginning to wake up..
12.
Lantos was content. He had found a place where he could do some thinking and for the moment he was happy to stay where he was. He woke when the sun rose, ate breakfast, went out for a walk, read for a few hours and in the afternoon fell asleep by the lake. Life had never been this good before. He had grown a beard so that he thought he probably looked like some old prophet from the before time. He was eating food, bread and oats with milk for breakfast and fish and some rice for lunch. This tasted wonderful compared to the protein pills and chemical shakes he used to take.
Sometimes he just sat outside on the porch and watched the clouds moving. On days like these he felt as lazy as a cat , basking in a patch of warm sunlight. He watched the sunlight as it crept up the wall and the shadows as they lengthened and the branches of a tree as it swayed in a breeze. This, he thought, was living the good life. He had left that crazy life of Lon Cit behind him and hardly ever gave it a thought. He missed Judy but told himself that he needed to be alone, at least until he had sorted himself out.
Even Pod seemed to have deserted him. Maybe Pod knew that he needed some time out. His shelter which he had built from a picture in a book by a writer called Thoreau was good enough for him. The lake likewise resembled the lake in Walden and Lantos had a crude wooden rowing boat . Like Thoreau he loved the silences and the solitude and often rowed the boat out to the middle of the lake. The oars dipped into the placid water or left circles of glimmering motion on the surface as he watched fish swimming only inches beneath, moving in a dream like slow motion. Sometimes he splashed the oars, slapping one down, hard, and saw how the water rose up like a fountain. The sounds seem to echo far off and he laughed when he saw a fish, suddenly frightened, dart off in a sudden brief flash like a twisting burning electric coil.
Lantos was seeing this new world around him as a new dream. He did not want to wake up from this dream. Late at night when tired from the days exertions he slowly walked back to his new home he felt a sharpness within himself he had never felt before. He was being reborn. The old mould of himself, shattered and burnt out, had begun to fade away like a mist. He was a brighter, fresher, more vital being than he had ever been before. A fire was burning away in his belly and his brains and each step he followed on the path he was taking had a new firmness and faith they had never had before.
13.
Lantos decided to keep a journal. He was midway on a voyage of self discovery and he did not want to lose a single, new thought. So one morning he sat down outside Concord House, as he had decided to call his home, and began to write.
Day One:
Had to get away from my old life. I thought I was going crazy. I was trapped on a treadmill going round and around and nothing seemed to make any sense. What was my life about? I was making profits but at what cost? Besides who gained by my profits? Every day I moved the figures up and down, I made the deals and raised efficiency, but it all seemed to no avail. My life before was empty, cold and dead.
This feels like I am being reborn.
Day Two.
Is this Paradise? It does not get much better than this. This morning saw strange lights in the sky. Overnight it had been very wet, water fell from the sky all night and the air outside moaned and howled all night. These colour
ed lights overhead give me a kind of comfort.
Sat for what seemed an eternity doing no-more than sitting in a quiet patch of shadow.
Something landed on a leaf nearby. Oh what a wondrous thing it was, with wings that shimmered in the morning breeze like silver. Wings spread out it hovered in the air and took off like a heli-copt. Found a picture of it later in an old book. It is a dragonfly. Hope it comes back to visit me again.
Question waking in my head all the time now. Don’t know where they come from. They just surface within me and then will not go away. If this is the good life then why can’t we all live like this? Why do we need to trade all day? What are we trading for? I would exchange a million credits if I could stay here and watch Lon Cit become a distant memory. Not sure I ever want to go back to the way I lived before.
Day Three.
Walked all day. I seem to get pleasure from moving. Saw things I had never seen before. A crimson king butterfly perched on a leaf. Light scattered through the branches of trees dispersed in pools of cool grey shadow on the forest floor. Beyond the forest the sound of a river almost singing to itself.
It seems there are riches here I have never been aware of before. Back there, in my past life I was blind. Now it is as if I can see for the first time .Everything is heightened. Objects seem sharper, colours brighter, sounds clearer. I see and feel everything around me. The old Lantos has died. The new Lantos is just being born.
Schlock! Webzine Vol 3 Issue 2 Page 7