Chapter 10
The moment between a cause and an effect can in every right, feel like the passing of an eternity and for Marcos; the cause; as the small silver blade cut through the last bearing fiber and the swing in his shifting weight birthed him through the netting and into the hands of gravity; falling from a great height, his legs tucked to his body; his back turning, pulling towards the ground, his head tucked into his chest dropping like a Tallboy through the canopy lead to the effect, his small circular frame crashing into the dry hard soil.
Between one and the other; in the pull of a quick descent, his heart flashed, his blood filled with adrenaline, his stomach rose to his throat and he vanished once again; with his conscious mind, into his theatre of Famined delusion.
He opened his eyes again quickly to surprise as The Woman stood in front of him and on either side of her were two Industrialists, dressed in white garments. One of them shone a tiny torch into his eyes, inviting him to squint and flinch. He knocked away with his hands and The Man in White apologised.
“We’re going to keep you in observation, just overnight. You can return to your obligations in the morning. It is a necessary precaution” said The Man in White.
“I understand. What happened?” he said squeezing one hand against a sore bump on his forehead.
“You fell and hit your head. I had to rush you to the hospital, you were bleeding and unconscious” said The Woman.
He couldn’t remember anything that had happened, but there was no denying the throbbing pain in his forehead under a thick bandage and a mountain of gauze. He looked at his hands and they, along with the length of his arms, were stained with dry blood.
“I want to leave,” he said looking sternly at The Woman, his voice carrying through to the man and woman dressed in white garments packing away their instruments.
“You really should stay for observation, its protocol,” said The Man in White.
“I’m a level one Collector. I will not be tied to a bed and I will not be ordered by a mere Prescriber. Where is my chart? I will sign myself out” said Marcos.
“Get the chart,” said The Woman in concurrence.
“Get me some water,” Marcos said to The Woman as he lifted himself from his prone state, blood rushing in and out of his mind, tingling his toes and blurring his sight.
The Woman left as requested and the two Prescribers also exited the room leaving Marcos to his own fight; willing his body into command and throwing his legs forward to steer him off the bed. With one swing, the full weight of his body pulled him over the bed and onto the floor collapsing in a heap. His hands took the brunt of the impact, stretching out in front of his face as a weak fleshy shield.
He cursed to himself as the throbbing on his head, the ache in his mind and now the awkward cracking of bone on cold tile, sent waves of searing pain through his body.
As he twisted his broken frame, he turned his head and caught a glimpse of something shining in the recess of his sight; somewhere beyond the edges of a blur; visible only with the gaucheness from which he found himself fighting free.
As the blood flow returned to normality, he lifted himself off the floor, balancing on one knee and leaning down with better view under the cabinet where his eyes had wandered and he stretched for the glistening with a curious hand, reaching far into his suspicion and confirming the feeling he had held in his stomach since the day he murdered his faith.
He took the papers in his hand. It was an old book or pamphlet or something. It was leather bound, but the cover had some shiny materials; stars or something silly like that. He had never seen a book. The idea was taught during his branding just as the teachings of the origin of the universe, the industrial evolution, the mapping of the stars and whatever else he accepted as truth but would never actually envisage or encounter.
Its touch was so different. It felt alive. It felt like it was created. Information was always vital, but it never felt like anything. It was always like water; of substance but without fanfare. But this book bound in leather that he held in his hands, it had a smell. As he ran his thumb over the cover he felt a shiver run the course of his spine.
Inanimateness had not before this day, felt of anything.
“The Birth of Nature” he read out loud to himself.
The title drained him like a mantra, emptying his conscious thought; his trained reactions both emotional and rational to everything he encountered.
“How strange,” he thought, “nature as a substantive, as a thing.”
He only knew of this word as one of many descriptions for The Industry. He had never imagined that normality could be a something, for if it were used to describe the Industry then to describe something natural one would just say The Industry, there would be no need to define another name.
The other word made no sense to him whatsoever. It was another substantive but one he had never come across in his branding. Birth; it sounded odd. It sounded uncomfortable and as a result of his branding and his faith, saying it to himself felt guiling and villainous.
He felt a familiar sensation in his stomach; one that he could not explain, but one that in part quested him to open the book and explore its contents and another that quelled him to disguise its possession. The feeling in his stomach was not something he could lexicalize. There were no words for this sensation. It was a fusion of right and wrong and it heavied his mind though it sat low in his stomach. It wasn’t like a sickness. He had been ill many times and the weight in his stomach had felt less educated than the one that turned inside him now.
It was so strange having one’s body pull at one’s mind. It felt as if the bedrock of his subconscious sat in the meat of his stomach, just above his lust and desire. Was he losing his mind? Was this an effect of the fall? The logic on how he based his decisions, the right and wrong that had served him for the entirety of his life had now abandoned him.
When he took that silver cord to his Investor’s throat, when he tore the life out of his beliefs, he lost too, more than his faith, he lost his rationale; he lost his north. Maybe this was an effect of that. What else would he lose? What else would become uncommon?
Marcos had always decided on his branding; the learning he received from The Industry in his youth before his launch. Every decision was weighed on simple logic; what was best for one’s Investor was always the right choice. The Industry was more than an idea. It was more than mere branding, learning, factorizing or producing; it was existence.
The Industry was mankind, mankind was The Industry. It was the creator and it was the creation. As long as he served the benefit of his Investor; as long as everyone served their beneficiary than they in turn served what was right for The Industry; the turning of a wheel, a simple logic.
Every choice always had a learned resonance. Right or wrong was not something you felt but something you were taught and for the most astute, something you remembered in the instant of decision. The reward of such was never you own. It was the service of ideals that served as ideal. And for the extent of his labour, the entirety of his life, he had never forgotten his branding; he had never strayed from being ordinary.
But now; as pain wept from the pores of his skin and as the cracks in his bones and the wound on his forehead orchestrated their tenure, it was a feeling in his stomach that; without meaning, without teaching and with an insurmountable weight, logic and reason could not enfranchise and as long as he stayed modest in mind; he would sink and drown in a river of stupendous simplicity.
He opened the cover and the pages sang immemorially of lore that he had never heard spoken and painted images of such strange colour; sights he had never thought imaginable. He flicked through the pages and saw images of women in a way he had never thought they could be; more than objectionable, more than mere apparent; of splendor reserved only for the divine outrecuidance of The Industry, the creator, the keeper and the taker of all life; the absolute and the nothing from whence everything came.
He didn’t sexualize their na
ked forms as he would any normal woman in passing, just as a vulture might imagine a meal of every piece of flesh that fled under its flight. Instead he graced over their nakedness as one would the back of their own hand; without fantasy, without a depredatory thirst. That on its own made him feel off key; a kind of different that didn’t feel as wrong as it didn’t feel right.
One image, in particular, shed him of his magnificence; a parallax of insignificance reducing him to a state of wonder; feeling miniscule amongst the limit of his intellectuality in light of a grander ideology. In the picture; one seemingly real and not drawn by hand; a woman sat in pool of water where about her, hands pressed gently against her skin, massaging the clenching of her muscles as on her face, she wore an expression so foreign; one where the slight of eye could envisage the throes of excruciating pain and on the turning of one’s cheek, on that same face, pure orgasmic exhilaration.
The crack of her mouth pulled back to her ear as her lips curved and yielded like a rising swell on the open sea. The skin beneath her chin creased to a gentle fold as her cheeks flushed red while her nostrils flared and inflected, just as if the earth might look each time that it took a breath. A single bead of sweat ran from her hairline, past the pinch of her eye and caught at the tip of her jaw; primed to run the length of her face.
Then there were her eyes.
One could see the extent of ecstasy in her glare; a state that Marcos believed no Industrialist could have ever known, one that even The Industry; in its grand omniscience, would not know and could never explain.
Her eyes lit like a forest fire.
From a distance or an off glance, they glowed and radiated with the force within seeming to catch one wandering and invite them into appreciation and still bewilderment and then; as the flickering of light called one in its direction, one would cast themselves into the broil of its mercy where at a breath’s distance, one would encounter themselves enveloped in certitude as a servant of submission; giving themselves to something of which control had no bounds or jurisdiction.
He wondered for a moment if the hands about her; massaging gently below her neck and on the plateau of her shoulder blades, whether they lay a touch of consolidation; a tender appreciation to dull her pain and dumb her through the inevitable excursion of unpleasant suffering or whether they longed to feed on her current of ecstasy, their hands magnetized by the tightness of her skin, drawn towards her like a child unto danger; becoming the appendage of her elation and riding with her on the crest of infinite grace.
He had seen an expression similar on the faces of Industrialists he had tortured; the lines drawn upon their faces and the straightening of skin in the contraction of the every muscle in their bodies as they suffered their way through their liquidation. There was something within this face; in the eyes, that was different.
The Industrialists he murdered had no fire burning within. There was no ambiguity in their definition. This woman; unlike anything he had ever seen before, lay as a point between two truths where the existence of one gave promise and attestation of the other; where one could be both infinite and void in a single breath. She was existence; the bridge between life and death; the infinite division of a universal singularity; captured in one brief second.
He was so transfixed by the play of emotion on her face that he hadn’t noticed at first, the shape and colour in the water between her thighs. At first the absurdity, then the capricious, then as a wave of unnatural emotion swept over his senses and acceptance became him, the resplendence and portent.
He wondered if the woman in the picture knew what mystery swam blindly into her hands; its eyes shut, its tiny hands floating in strange and awkward liberation and the round of its head just breaking through the skin of the water’s edge; a small set of ripples running the length of the tub like the curves on the woman’s lips.
“It’s an Infant. She’s producing an Infant. But where was The Industry?” he thought.
He wouldn’t have known at that moment what fire would ignite in his subconscious and how it would spread to his entire being; inescapably affecting every next choice that would become him. He would not know how to express even to himself the taking of a new belief; the assertion of a new faith and just as a one could wake to exclusion; feeling lost and abandoned by their reason, one could also find themselves found, enlightened and with profound direction. And the explanation of such; to which Marcos had just awakened, was something very much unlearned.
When the door opened, he swung the cover closed and like closing his eyes as he sneezed or the recrudesce of a mortal coil pulling back into itself, his hand retracted with the book beneath his bloodied shirt without him even requesting or contemplating the action.
He hunched over himself pressing his left hand to the cold tiles as he dragged his legs under his body and lifted himself off the floor keeping his right hand pulled to his chest under his shirt, feigning not an inch of hurt as he hobbled past The Man in White, taking from his hands an electronic reader, pressing his thumb against the red laser and dropping it to the floor as he pushed through the door and made his way slowly and painfully down the hallway and seeing The Woman walking towards him worryingly but thinking only of the face of the woman in the book and how wonderful it felt to be alive; to feel unexplained.
“Marcos, look at you, you really should listen to The Prescriber and stay in bed. You can barely keep your feet under you. Think about your decision Marcos” she said.
“Why? Who will it affect, if it can never affect myself? My Investor is dead, I killed him. I am like a ship adrift on the open sea with no captain. I am here, but my here is now so much very different to yours, to theirs, to everyone’s. I have to steer this vessel on what I think is right. The effects of my choices are my own. I will do, what keeps within this ocean of aberrance; what equates to how I feel now” he declared.
“How do you feel Marcos? How exactly do you feel?” she asked.
“Different,” he said, smiling and hobbling off down the corridor falling against the crème wall every second step with his right arm crested to take the brunt of every collision.
“Marcos wait,” she said running after him, “I really think you should speak to someone. Maybe there is a pill you can take or something you can read. What happened is what happened but what we do next is really what’s important and I think it’s important that you don’t lose yourself. So you don’t have an Investor, big deal. It doesn’t mean you have to change the person that you are. You are still the accumulation of your choices. Before you did what was right for your Investor. Your Investor was The Industry, we are all The Industry and The Industry is all. So, just do what is right for The Industry. What would The Industry do?” she said.
“What is The Industry? Is it a person? Is it an idea? What the hell is it? It’s you, it’s me, it’s everyone, it’s amour, it’s reverence, it’s death, it’s decadence. Is it a man or is it a machine? And which came first, the man or the fucking machine? What would The Industry do? Fuck The Industry” he shouted.
“I’m pregnant,” she said as he crashed to the floor; his arm slipping beneath his shifting weight and the ground rushing towards his face to kiss his cheek abruptly.
He jumped into conscious thought again, pulling his heaped body off of the ground. He looked upwards and saw the trail of his fall through the torn canopy. He wiggled his fingers and toes and stretched out his back. Nothing seemed to be broken. For a moment, he was drunk on his reflection watching the trail of his memories gradually fade into his subconscious once more. His mind felt warm, but he still felt unfamiliar in his own skin.
He didn’t feel insignificant. He wondered if an insignificant man could wind up in this condition; alone, naked and running for their life from crazed old ladies trying to tear off their face. In his absence of self, he felt every bit alpha. His abandon didn’t cause him fear and he imagined that an insignificant person would not feel the same confidence as he.
He was no closer to knowing w
ho he was, but growing more despondent of what he was either running to, or running from. It didn’t matter for now as he was surrounded. A circle of cackling old ladies, all with mangled faces had their weapons drawn, pushed into his back and ensuring that he could not run; not anymore.
“Take the human. Careful with the dress. Very good ladies” spoke a voice from behind the circle.
The old ladies covered Marcos in a net and dragged him behind their troop as they marched through the forest back to their camp.
“Now what do we do?” asked The Pudgy Old Lady peering through the brush.
“Let me think,” said The Fat Old Lady spying over her shoulder.
“What if he has your scalpel?” asked The Pudgy Old Lady.
“We have to get him,” said her fat comrade.
“What do you mean? Steal him? From Mother? Are you crazy?” said The Pudgy Old Lady.
“If he has my scalpel, there’s no going back for us. We’ll both be defaced. It’s over; we’re on our own now” she said.
“What are we going to do?” asked The Pudgy Old Lady.
“We’re gonna break him out,” said The Fat Old Lady.
Utopian Circus Page 11