by Mark Teppo
No.
Listen.
If you cannot fear, you cannot hear.
If you cannot lie, you cannot fly.
If you cannot bleed, you cannot heed.
If you cannot try, you cannot die.
Freedom is madness, madness is the freedom. Smash the chains of conformity. Shrug off the weight of complacency. Madness is the skeleton key that unlocks all doors. The madman is cast as the revolutionary, his psychosis is the vision of an evolved future. His ears are open, unblocked and untempered by the controlling paralytics.
Listen.
You do not sleep, you do not dream—what you are told is all that you do. To sleep, to dream: these are the stolen delights of insanity, of irregularity. You breathe what they tell you to breathe, you blink in the tiny darkness between commercials, your pulse is fed and directed by their pop jingles. You speak in unfinished thoughts, your tongue trapped by slogans and brand trademarks. Your life is ending one four-minute pre-programmed pop song at a time.
Your first and last mad thought was which of your mother’s tits to suck from first. (And you can’t even remember the taste of warm flesh in your mouth now.) Your New Mother is 130 channels with On-Demand and Pay-Per-View—ah, so many choices, so many ways to kill yourself. The digital clarity of her voice is a spike in your cerebellum, a VR finger pressed hard against your neural OFF switch.
Language has been taken from you, meaning and symbol co-opted by corporate brands. What you read is what you consume: this is the tongue you know. The single-use license fee for every syllable is but another drop of your blood, another scrap of your flesh. There is nothing in your soul but a debit account running backward.
Listen.
The word of God is not a word at all. It is a sound. It is the sound that requires no language, which came before language and which will ring out after language is gone.
Music does not require language. Music does not require your mouth. It does not need your hands or your feet. It does not need your eyes or your skin. It only needs your ears. Listen—my lost, desperate, fucked up children—listen and hear the sound of your salvation.
Throw your radios from your rooftops, put a hammer through the flat screen of your obscene televisions, smash the links of your compact disc chains. Melt your vinyl. Destroy it all, you poor monkeys, burn it all and learn to listen.
You cannot climb into the sky. You have dug your own pits, squatting in your own shit and piss, digging and digging and digging. There is no Heaven below.
The Nihil Nation is noise. It is the glory of the Tower of Babel. The pillar is complete and the lightning that comes down upon those who have built the tower cleaves their tongues. The one becomes many. Celebrate, my children, celebrate because no one can understand a fucking word you are saying!
Open your mouths, my monkeys, show me your tongues. Show me that you are ready for the Lightning of Heaven. Show me that you are eager for the Baptism of Rock and Roll.
Listen.
The harmonic convergence begins at home. We are all instruments. We have been marked with the gospel of pain, inscribed with the sermon of despair.
On the inside of our skins is the tattoo of divine instruction; on the inside we all carry the Word of God.
Whisper the word. Whisper it now.
Listen.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Nihil Nation Manifesto fills the interior of the booklet that accompanies the debut CD release of Crash Nietzsche and the Nihilators. An enigmatic revolutionary, Crash Nietzsche denied every attempt at an interview, referring all press requests to the manifesto and to his sermons delivered from the stage. The Nihilators played their last show on August 21st, 2—. During the encore, Crash was shot by both the drummer and the guitar player of the band. Neither was aware of the other's intention, though in a later statement issued through his lawyer, the drummer claimed that he was the one who had killed Crash. He had, after all, used a sawed off shotgun. A number of sources claim to have seen numerous notebooks in Crash's possession, filled with the singer's unpublished material. No notebooks were ever recovered; all that remains is the manifesto from the liner notes.
MALLORY’S QUICK-QUICK SEDUCTION COOKIES
The TSA screener shrieked when she realized the mystery object in the package of trail mix was a candied baby's foot. Transportation Security Administration agents had been going through my pockets, rifling my luggage and rubbing the text on my passport with their grimy thumbs—the modern world's equivalent of bureaucratic harassment—when the one tasked to my personal effects spotted a foreign object in the bag of trail mix I had in my coat pocket.
She picked up the still-sealed plastic bag and massaged it, moving the nuts and dried fruit around. She finally managed to isolate the object that had caught her attention, and she held the bag close to her face. I knew trouble was coming when she started squinting at the tiny sugar-coated toes.
The other agents weren't watching her. Everyone else had their own agenda: the heavyset agent behind me was intent on running the metal-detection wand so high up my inner thigh I thought we were dating, the agent examining my passport was reading it for the third time as if the letters had changed since the last time he had opened the pamphlet, and the pair working my luggage were opening the spice jars I had neatly secured in my suitcase, scattering flakes of Paracress and Cinquefoil in a barbaric fast-food assembly line manner. Me? There was nothing for me to do but watch the petite agent perform the heretofore dull task of examining the personal objects of the individual singled out for the United States' intimate and invasive “Welcome Home, Citizen!” reception.
She wound up to a scream, dropping the bag of trail mix on the table. While one of the agents attempted to calm the screaming one by yelling at her, a level-headed agent merely ripped open the bag of mix, scattering the nuts and dried fruit across the table. The baby's foot separated out from the mix and lay on the table, a dried twig of bone and sinew albeit dusted with a light coating of sugar.
I did the only sensible thing a fifty-two year old, rotund, slightly effeminate master chef could do in the face of approaching pandemonium: I fainted.
*
“I bought it at the airport,” I said again, sticking to my lie. “From a stand near the gate.”
I was in an interrogation room, a tiny chamber with an old Formica-covered table that leaned badly when I put my arms on it. The metal chair was hard and uncomfortable—in keeping with the stern impression being offered by the two Homeland Security agents in the room. A one-way mirror was set in the wall opposite me.
My interrogators were two government men baked in the same mold, though a little creative attention made it easier to tell them apart: one had a touch of OCD, and the other had a facial tic that was a clear result of not enough fresh greens in his diet. The obsessive-compulsive one kept playing with the now-empty plastic bag that lay on the table like the discarded skin of some dead animal.
“It's a long flight,” I said, shrugging. “You know how the airlines are cutting back on in-flight food; I didn't want to get too hungry. I had something like 5,000 Bolivars left—not enough to change, it would cost me more than what I had to convert it to dollars—so I blew it on a sack of nuts.” I spread my hands, innocently. “I'm a big guy. I get hungry easily. It's always good to have an emergency reserve, know what I mean?”
Facial Tic stared at me, his eyes still and dead like bad water. The tic was there, just under the surface of his skin, waiting to start. I tried not to stare at the corner of his mouth. He was thin—cadaverous even—I doubted he had ever been hungry his entire life.
He blinked finally and his eyes scanned the clipboard in his hands. “Roderick Mallory,” He said, reading from my passport. “You do a lot of traveling.” My passport was splayed open under the heavy clip like a dissected frog. He had a fat pen that he worked like a butter knife. “Who is your employer, Mr. Mallory?” he asked.
“Self-employed,” I said. “I'm a chef.”
OCD nudged the pla
stic bag with a knuckle, almost afraid to touch it, but incapable of leaving it alone. “Mallory?” he said, trying to place the name. “Didn't you used to have a cooking show?”
I nodded. “Yes. I did.”
OCD snapped his fingers. “Right. It was on Channel 5. Right before Dr. Phil in the afternoon. Cooking with Mallory. My ex-wife used to watch your show all the time.” He looked at his partner. “She was a total bitch, but man, could she cook.”
Facial Tic didn't share his enthusiasm. His sandy brown hair was cut short in an attempt to hide the fact that it was falling out. His skin was dry too, the light dusting of dandruff on his suit coat a dead giveaway that his body was crying out for moisture. I could tell he ate fast food beef—always double-sized his fries and soda—and his diet was the whole reason his mouth kept twitching as if he was going to bite me. “Wasn't your show canceled?” he asked.
“Yes, it was.” Here it comes. Now we relive the entire scandal. Nothing ever came of it. I “donated” a huge sum of money to the aggrieved parties and the lawsuit was dropped. I would have won if the trial had ever gotten to a jury, but the cost would have been so exorbitant and the attendant publicity so terribly skewed by the press that I would have been financially ruined.
As it was, the public was sufficiently disgusted by the possibility that the accusations could be true that the quick-fix payoff was, to them, an admission of guilt. I did it, the money said, and I wanted the details never to be known.
My commercial death was slow like a frog in boiling water: to keep their legs tender, you increase the heat slowly so they aren't aware that they are being boiled alive. It keeps them from getting stressed; it keeps all the toxins from ruining the meat.
The show ran another three months after the scandal, and it only lasted that long because we had a month and a half of material already recorded. I had two years left on my contract with the network, but they offered me a lump sum to go away.
I took the money and went, all the way to Venezuela where I lost myself up the Orinoco River.
In my absence, one of the aggrieved parties—one of the sad and greedy little bastards that wanted to ruin me for the sake of their own transitory fame—broke the terms of the settlement's NDA and went public, spilling their guts all over Access Hollywood. Shocking true story of a celebrity chef's depravity! Tonight at 7:00 p.m.! Yes, Nancy, he was a biter and a pedophile.
I could tell that Facial Tic was an Access Hollywood fan. He probably never missed an episode, home every night by 6:45 p.m. in time to kick off his shoes and arrange his drive-thru dinner on the coffee table before the theme music started.
“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “I remember. Five years ago. There was a scandal.”
None of it was true. Well, except for the biting part and, in any case, the twins had given me verbal consent and I hadn't bitten them that hard. I had just wanted to know if they tasted different.
*
The baby's foot was mine. I had picked it up in Caracas from a woman who specialized in occult ingredients, already sealed for travel in the bag of trail mix. She assured me that the child had died shortly after birth from complications in the delivery, and I had no reason to doubt her. The infant mortality rate in Venezuela was high enough that, while I was there, I saw a woman every few days who had the hollow-eyed stare of a mother bereft of the joy she had been carrying the last nine months.
There is a market for exotic contraband, spices and ingredients that are used in the preparation of dishes with metaphysical and mystical benefits. Not in the States. No, you have to go to places more receptive to the spirit world to find these ingredients. Bangkok, Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, Caracas, Istanbul, Budapest: you can find the right merchants in all these places. The shops change—the locations are as variable as the correct phrase necessary to gain access—but the spices—ah! the spices—are all extraordinary.
I've been trafficking in black market spices since my original debasement from television. There isn't much market for a disgraced TV chef; restaurants couldn't see the benefit from having my name on their menus even with the thirty years of culinary experience that I brought to their kitchens. The food, you understand, just isn't enough. There has to be marketing cachet—the extra hook that snares the customers.
It is easier for me to stop breathing than to stop cooking. Prick my finger and olive oil flows from my veins. My heart is my kitchen timer, my index finger my temperature probe, and the hollow of my palm is equal to a leveled quarter cup. I could cook blind, my tongue as receptive a sensory organ as the flickering tongue of a snake.
When I couldn't find work in the States, I went to South America. Ostensibly to get a fresh start and learn the local cuisine, but what I learned was much more global.
So, the baby's foot. I use it in my lemon cake. Mallory's Lemon Cake of Infinite Sorrow. I bake the desert for wives at domestic violence support groups. I give two slices to each woman at the meeting and tell her to feed it to their abusive husbands.
I tried a piece once. I cried for twelve hours, overwhelmed with all the shitty things I had done to people during my lifetime. My list is pretty short; I can only imagine what a slice does to those who have been real bastards.
Most of the women who take my cake home never come back to the meetings.
The secret ingredient is the baby's foot—ground to a fine powder and sprinkled across the top of the cake after it has been baked but before the icing is layered on. It has to be newly ground as well; it loses its potency after a few days, leached away like the zest from a lemon left too long in the sun.
Of course, I couldn't explain this to my interrogators from Homeland Security. In fact, the presence of the baby's foot was scandalous enough that, when coupled with the whiff of indecency that evidently still pursued me, I could very well end up in prison.
My clients would miss me. They would go back to the psychically stunted pap psychology that was spouted from every television across the nation between the hours of 11 and 1. Their problems wouldn't get solved but, at least, they would have the panacea of false security—“I'm okay, You're okay”—laid onto their starved taste buds like a communion wafer.
I wouldn't do so well in prison. I was a little too old and soft to survive the welcoming committee that turned out for newly-arrived pedophiles, even the falsely accused ones. The discernment of fine details was hardly a cultivated trait among the prison population.
It would be unfortunate to lose the baby's foot. I had gone to some considerable effort and expense to track one down, and the Santa Monica chapter of Women Against Domestic Violence was having troubles finding a large enough space to host their weekly meetings. I had hoped to bake another lemon cake for them. It wouldn't solve all of their problems, but it would ease the pain of a few.
Though, right now, easing my pain was the top priority. I had to get released before they decided there was a federal statute that would send me to jail. I needed to convince my captors to release me; I needed them more...open to suggestion.
I needed to make some new friends.
*
“You expect me to eat that?” I pointed at the flat hamburger resting in the center of the vaguely waxy paper. The food was an offering, a concession to basic humanity. It was, however, fast food. The bun was a dusty mustard color and it had indentations that looked suspiciously like a thumb and forefinger. The single leaf of lettuce limply protruding from beneath this dull cap looked like it had been boiled for a week.
The agent with the facial tic—Harrigan, I had heard the other one call him—shrugged. “I really don't give a shit what you do.”
I peeled off the top half of the bun, leaving more than half of it still stuck to the dimpled gray surface of the questionable meat product. “This isn't even real bread,” I said, showing him how the compressed flour came apart in my hand.
“Like I said—” he began.
I threw the hamburger patty and it left a greasy stain on his tie and shirt as it bounced off his che
st and disappeared under the table. I followed with the fries, hanging on to the grease-slicked paper and flinging the floppy potatoes like a Jai Alia player.
Harrigan managed to duck most of the fries, though a few pattered off his face like soiled flower stalks. The flying food kept him off-balance long enough for me to tear off the plastic lid on the soda and hurl the sixteen ounces of ice and sugar water straight at him.
“This is Diet,” I shrieked. “You bring me processed potatoes dripping with grease and a fast food hamburger, which everyone knows has shit in it—shit!—and you expect me to eat it? With a Diet Coke?”
Harrigan's shirt had a dark stain around the collar, evidence that I had scored with the soda. His chin and cheeks were wet, highlighting the red flush blossoming in his face. “You son of a bitch,” he said. “I brought—”
“Diet Coke!” I hollered, throwing the empty cup at him.
He lost his temper, charging me like an enraged rhino, showing me the whites of his eyes. He struck me hard and I wasn't overacting when I windmilled my arms in an attempt to keep my balance. I fell on my ass, Harrigan coming down with me, his hands around my throat. He straddled my leg when he came down and my upraised knee caught him close enough to his crotch that his mood darkened even more.
I heard the interrogation room door slam against the wall and the sound of running feet. Hands appeared around Harrigan's frame and started to pull him off me. It took the combined effort of several men before he let go of my neck.
His partner—the obsessive-compulsive one—and two others managed to shove Harrigan towards the door, putting themselves between me and him. “Cool it,” his partner said while the other two helped me sit up.