by Dave Brockie
If we wanted to eat and stay warm we had to work, and work hard, and I saw nothing in my future but becoming my father one day, with my own children, probably living in this same house. And if the party men took too much from us at the end of our harvest, well my mother (yes, I had a mother as well!) always hid something to take away the sting of their state-sponsored theft. But when commissars came to lecture us about the growing storm, which would become “The Great Patriotic War,” my mother did not think to hide her child.
They had smart uniforms, and a wondrous machine called a motorcycle, and being a boy I was very impressed, running up to them as they addressed the collective. It was 1941, and the Germans had just invaded us. At this moment they were raging eastwards, a murdering mob, coming to burn our babies.
My joy became horror. I was 16 years old, large and muscular for my age, so I was amongst the first that they grabbed. They put a gun in my hand, a WWI relic, likely to explode, although they gave me no bullets for it. Words pumping from a well-oiled throat, we are ordered into formation.
“March!” the commissar barks, pointing across the fields to the West, beyond which the monsters known as “The Huns” are gathered.
We are not given the option of saying “no” as a small truck full of soldiers rolls up. I am not able to say goodbye to my parents, but my dog, Nevsky, catches up to me, bounding and frantic. He paws at me, imploring me with his eyes and mouth. I feel the grief of my parents as the dog jerks about, trying to reach me in the most basic of terms, annoyed at my human stupidity, not understanding the guns. Bundled figures clutching obsolete weapons stumble past, warning me of “the commissar.” But my dog and myself have become a steaming tableau, and I follow his beckoning head to the far-off figures of my parents, who had realized the end had come but were still trying to deliver unto me a bag containing food and warm clothing.
I dreamt of love. Love, and the sudden loss of it. My brain was warm, my face flushed. I think I began to cry. A memory of tears I never had, wept for a family that never was. My father’s huge beard bobbing towards me, helping my mother across a puddle. His mission fulfilled, Nevsky gives in to ecstasy, barking messily and rolling in the grass. And now my father and my mother, their voices calling to me, their only child . . .
But I didn’t have a father or a mother. I didn’t even have a name, except for Whargoul. This dream didn’t even surprise me, because it was my fondest wish, to be human. Yes, that may surprise you, but I would trade my life for yours in an instant. My existence is a curse. With the perspective of hindsight, I saw that my life had become an atrocity.
I am grabbed roughly and do not resist. Smiling blankly, I ignore my parents. There is a gun sprouting from a black glove, and I am shoved forward. It feels good, but I don’t know why. Watching from the truck, smoking a cheroot, the commissar—well, he smiles too. After all, he has come here to get me.
My parents are led away, along with wailing others, but not before everything they carry was confiscated. The village is looted. There is a lie that the goods will be “adequately distributed” even as brutish hands violate my mother’s sack, pawing the treats into their greasy mouths. Nevsky follows still, barking from a distance as I walk away from everything I have ever known towards something no one ever should. I am lucky—most of the conscripted “soldiers” of my village have neither coats nor weapons, just an order given from the end of a gun.
We march towards the arena, feeling as a Nubian would, brought to Rome to fight and die, brought to Harlem to shoot dope into his heart. Ahead the Coliseum looms like a beckoning tomb, the crowd within raging with wine and lust. The New York skyline swirls with hell-dust. A lion trots about with a human spine in its mouth, glorious droplets of blood staining the thirsty ground.
That day they stole all the young men. They beat my father and took his coat. They shot my dog and raped my Mom.
Know what? I didn’t feel a fucking thing.
***
My eyes open as I snap from a drug-induced coma to the lair of the living dead. The familiar angles of my space, the flickering TV, my gun rack, and another slobbering dog . . . licking my face. Another drug-drenched reverie is over, and I am back in Harlem.
How had I been made? Had I actually been human once? I knew the answers were in my mind, but how could I distinguish between fanciful dreams and actual memories? The fact was that I could not. But wasn’t that as good as truth? After all, what really mattered except what I thought?
This story seemed as good as any. I’d been born a human, a strong and healthy one. Then something had happened that had turned me into Whargoul. I had been unleashed upon the world to rape and slay. My mission was both to create and destroy life.
The mere fact that I existed seemed to contradict rather radically a number of popular mindsets, most notably the idea of a benevolent God, which ruled the Kingdom of Heaven, and Earth, was all-powerful (created everything), and only suffered Hell to exist as a punishment camp for sinners. This seemed rather quaint after visiting Auschwitz. I could believe perhaps that this god was an evil one.
Hell’s domain existed on the surface of the Earth as well as in its bowels—and its estates were spreading. If this white-bearded, male, cracker-assed God was supposed to protect the humans, and he does claim you as children, then dock that God a days pay for napping on the job. The innocent (weak) were usually the first ones lined up against the wall, and their murder supplied the evil ones with the energy to thrive. This is how I lived. Thriving on the harvesting of souls. The killing continued, unabated, all sides thinking they were just. Men did much of the killing, men who were devils, who followed devils that were not men. I was a devil. Where was the “all-mighty” while all of this was going on?
Man created God out of wishful thinking, granting him the powers that men could never wield, and transcribing his laws into words for the humans to govern their lives by. These “Ten Commandments” are supposedly the WORDS OF GOD, but even they are open to interpretation.
For instance, lets look at “Thou shalt not kill.” Sounds pretty straight-up, huh? Don’t kill each other! But no son, God didn’t really mean that. He meant not to kill the good people, the ones on our side. That’s why you joined the military, to know who’s who. But what about when good people got killed? Well, that was God’s will, son, and we can’t question his cosmic designs. There is a greater good he does, even as he allows children to be thrown into pits full of starving rats. Now get in your plane and drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
I’d come to believe that their God was a lie, often used to seduce and suck choirboy cock, or lead millions to their deaths. You’d be better off without him clouding your senses.
And your Jesus was highly overrated. After all, I’d come back from the grave half a dozen times, forming whole bodies from the juice of dead ones, growing new skin, tissue, hair . . . and I’d played the martyr, with the best intentions a martyr can possibly have. I had thrown myself on grenades to save others, taken bullets that violated me in the most hideous of ways, stayed behind to cover my men’s retreat as shells tore my guts apart—who was to say that his sacrifice was greater than mine?
Mine, the poor Whargoul who has cried to your heaven for mercy countless times, and had never received anything but pain. You are not good and you are not all-powerful, for you simply do not exist. And I’ve come to the painful conclusion that you cannot help me.
God was a misdirection play from the other side.
But I was alive. And I enjoyed playing the martyr. I was recyclable. I had already outlived Jesus by at least 20 years, but had died five times. Maybe there was something of the savior in me. The only thing I truly believed in was that anything was possible. Why couldn’t I transform myself into a redeemer, why couldn’t I save the world? But there were reasons, reasons that had to be destroyed. And the biggest one was that I had been designed to do exactly the opposite.
They make me do bad things. They make it feel so good that I want to do them
. So I shoot-up and sprawl around, ignoring the call. But I have to eat, and they make it hurt so badly when I don’t.
I lie on my couch for days. The drugs are wearing off and I have none left to prolong my narcoleptic stupor. In about a day the inside of my bones will start to itch. I’ll try to ignore the signs, fight back with beer or food indulgence, but sooner or later I will have to kill a human.
My gut will start to grumble, my head will begin burning, and obsessive thoughts of bloodlust will return with increasing frequency. A craving, a necessity, that I am ultimately powerless to control. Over the space of a few days the pains will grow from annoyance to agony. Ropy veins will bunch about my temples and heave with fluid, causing excruciating headaches that threaten to blind me. My muscles will start throbbing with their own life, sending me in circles, walking from place to place in my house, dizzy and twitching, forgetting what I’m doing and losing things I’ll need. The sweet spew of the cortex kiss is all that can relieve my torment, but still I resist.
Now, even huge doses of alcohol and sedatives are powerless against the surging tide of hatred that encompasses me. Then the visions begin, the nightmares, the horror of myself. First come whirling patterns of rotting flesh, which drape my inner eye. I can’t turn it off. The dead rise from within me, muttering their accusations, as they approach my paralyzed form, across which spiny maggots writhe.
I am re-wounded, and sometimes I replay episodes where I have been tortured. I relive the pain, all the pain, made even worse by my pre-knowledge of it. I bite the carpet so my howls won’t be heard for blocks. And then my victims are upon me. I become them for their final seconds, feel them being throttled, or stomped, feel knives being rammed into their guts, feel improvised weapons, like cinder blocks, smashing their skulls, and then finally the guns, bombs, and shells which have been my greatest tool of harvest. I feel what it’s liked to be raped to death. I feel what it is like to be destroyed by the Whargoul, and it is the cruelest of fates.
The worst part about it is that I do not recognize the vast majority of the people I have slain. So far, I had not repeated any of these episodes, so I really had no idea as to the scope of my crimes. Suffice to say that they were vast beyond comprehension, brought me unimaginable suffering, and could only be temporarily relieved by committing even more hideous acts.
So I roll around on the floor screaming, bellowing at the walls and smashing up my apartment. That is the extreme state of the deprivation, and I don’t often go that far. I usually cave-in as soon as I run out of drugs, before I reach the final and most unbearable stage, the pure and raw physical torture of starvation, unfulfilled bloodlust, and heroin withdrawal. Usually I kill before it gets that bad, but sometimes I wait too long, and that’s when I make mistakes, like the one I made the other day, another mistake . . .
The man in the expensive suit had come into the neighborhood to stump for votes. Any attention from the city was rare but what really surprised me was that he was white, with a mixed-color entourage of supporters, including a couple of security goons. The guy was running for city council, and his name was Moyer. All this I discern through binoculars from my upper observation post, as I examine the parked orange van, the politician and his cronies, and the small crowd of people that is beginning to clot around him.
A banner goes up—MOYER NOW! it proclaims. Moyer removes his jacket and rolls his sleeves up around his beefy arms, facing the locals who eye him with suspicion. I can’t hear what he’s saying, but he gestures with vigor, sweeping his arms across the wretched landscape as if he could magically transform the rotting structures into tenable dwellings.
Normally I would have applauded the man’s courage—it took nuts to come into the projects, especially this one, and try to talk to people who generally despise you. But my thoughts were not my own, and my hunger burned like an atomic ulcer. Who was this white motherfucker to come in here and pretend he gave a damn about these people, just so he could get on the evening news? You have damned us, and your pathetic attempts to right these wrongs are as transparent as your skin is pale. His admirable qualities become highlights on the menu, and I decide to kill him and as many of his lackeys as possible.
Pulling on my black ski mask, I am instantly flushed with relief, as if I am being rewarded with a blessing from hell to affirm in myself the correctness of my decision. I pause to grab a couple of items I’ll need, and then leap to the elevator door, moving through it into the open shaft. My pathetic attempts at morality have vanished, my burgeoning humanity again postponed by my irresistible lust, though I don’t yet realize it. My mind is too full of the contemplation of my attack, the review of my positions and the anticipation of all possible variables. I fully realize the consequences of the situation. Racial tension was high and the mid-summer sun didn’t help much. This would really aggravate the situation. But for reasons at this point unknown, it doesn’t bother me. I have become my original self again, and the more violence that this spawned, the happier I would be.
I move into the underworld, knowing my passages are secure, as I don’t allow the terrain to go too deep. I’d blocked holes, drained certain areas, and installed supplies. I even had a boat down here somewhere. Reasonably cocky near my Harlem H.Q., I barely encroached upon the underworld of New York City, 2001. I suspected that it was far vaster than its surface-oriented counterpart, and just as populated.
Scurrying up a concrete tube, I elongate my body. My hunger pains disappear as I rush like water, and it feels so good to shift my strength to where it propels me the quickest, lightening and lifting, and plunging my now snake-like form through a web of difficult passages, finally entering a main artery half-filled with rancid sludge. Moving along the edge, I shake myself back into form and enter a pentagonal intersection of several tunnels. Rudely, I realize they probably put more effort into the construction of this place than any of the inhabited buildings above. Graffiti is evident as is trash and other signs of subterranean activity, highlighted by the slashing sunlight, which shafts into the pillbox from two street-level gutters. To one of these I go, sighting Moyer and his liar’s party engaged in a lively debate with a now 50-strong group of locals. I hear the word “ bullshit” repeatedly as I remove the first of the two items I have brought, setting it up facing the street in some weeds, just inside the aperture. Now I hear shouts concerning “Baby Kiesha” and “rats,” angry shouts. I connect the wires and arm the device as the shouts grow to that of a belligerent mob.
“Now I know you’re upset,” blares a bullhorn in the hands of the candidate, slowly backpedaling in front of the pressing throng. There is an unexpected shriek of feedback from his loudhailer and he stares at it confusedly for a split-second, a split-second that several men in the crowd use to good advantage by stepping aggressively forward. He raises his horn just in time for it to catch the sound of him being struck in the head with a sweeping fist-to-elbow blow. Horn meets head and both break, sending Moyer reeling onto the van. Blood rushes to his face as his attacker melds back into the mass, which instantly erupts into cheers.
I also hear a helicopter.
The mob surges forward, held back only by the two goons who become the new victims. Ironically, they are both black. A smartly-dressed female helps the bleeding politician into his van. Laughing hysterically I remove the manhole cover above me, and then scramble out of the sewer, trailing wire. I stand behind a pole and observe the vehicle, now fully loaded. People pound loudly on its side as it begins to pull away. A bottle strikes it, glittering shards expanding like the voluminous throb in my skull, and then a volley of rocks. Moyer is behind the wheel with blood streaming from the bridge of his nose, his face pale and terrified. Clearing the milling crowd, he guns it towards my position and the exit beyond, leaving the security guards behind. As he passes I detonate the Claymore anti-personnel mine at what I am certain is the perfect time.
The weapon blows, hurling 500 steel balls of buckshot in an expanding cone with a one-foot base. The van is only
ten feet away and hopefully takes 100% of the balls. It’s as if a giant shotgun were discharged into the vehicle. The swirl of flame, the report and impact all occur simultaneously, as I leap behind the blast as close as I dare to behold the ruined thing, shuddering to a halt in a gush of smoke. There is a great hole where the driver’s door used to be, surrounded by a perforated expanse of smaller holes, each denoting potential death and covering a wide swath of the vehicle’s hide. The tires, the windows, and mirrors are all blown-out, and flames begin to sprout from beneath the hood. The tank will blow soon so I have to work fast, bulling through the hole and over the mangled corpse of Moyer—a bloody potato with protruding ribs, devoid of clothing from the waist up, headless. The van’s interior and all victims are pasted with most of his head and upper chest, and everywhere are jagged bits of bone and soggy brain, mingled with chunks of meat sprouting hairs or draped with smoking skin. The body of the woman next to him is jerking in her death-throes, charred face graced with 12 black holes, running red. I elbow her aside, jumping into the back where three of them are still alive. One is gagging from the fumes of the wreck, and I move to him with my second item, a polished metal tube a little bigger than a common drinking straw. Its sharpened end finds easy purchase in the flesh at the base of his skull. I grind it in, and then deliver a sharp blow to the other end of the tube. With a crunch it bites through the skull and lodges in the cerebral cortex. I suck.
“It’s in the brainstem,” would read the cover of my brochure as to why I coveted the consumption of brain juice, and recommended it for all. Why? I don’t know for sure, but I had arrived at certain conclusions: your brain is the most complicated and mysterious organ in your body, and it thrives on the finest of nutrients and proteins. Think of it as the engine of a sophisticated racing machine. This machine is made up of wheels and cables, fiberglass and wire—a variety of parts that would be totally inert unless driven by the engine—an engine that could not start unless it was primed with high-octane racing gasoline. Before the gas even reached the engine it was strained and filtered in a variety of ways so that only the most volatile mixture was ignited, ensuring top performance. The brain is much the same. All the shit you humans cram into your festering pie-holes is broken down into essential elements for the continuation of life. The finest of these elements go to the brain—high-octane gas for your mental engine. This substance collects in the brainstem and is drawn, as needed, into the vaulted spaces of your mind, and for whatever reasons (which I did not yet understand) I required it for the sustenance of my own existence.