Strange Violence Read online

  MICHAEL CHEN-THOMPSON

  STRANGE VIOLENCE

  by Michael Chen-Thompson

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, or are used fictitiously.

  Strange Violence

  Copyright 2013 Michael C. Thompson

  “Diethylamide” appeared originally in print in The Big Book of Bizarro, by Burning Bulb Publishing.

  “The Negatives I: Vessel” appeared originally online in serial form as “The Negatives” for issues 151-153 of the Bewildering Stories e-zine. The included text has been heavily altered since original publication.

  “Bulletproof Faces” appeared originally print in the November 2010 issue of Collective Fallout, and was later re-printed in a Static Movement anthology entitled “Speculative Long Fiction”.

  “METEO” appeared originally online on “The Mustache Factor” blog for bizarro fiction.

  “Shadowless” appeared originally online in the Winter 2011 edition of BlazeVOX magazine.

  The first chapter of “Bubbles” appeared originally online on Weirdyear.com. The included text has been heavily altered since original publication.

  “Aldo” appeared originally in print in the June 2011 issue of Icarus: The Magazine of Gay Speculative Fiction. It was later produced for webcast as an audio-short by Dunesteef Audio Fiction magazine, and was featured in Episode 119: Aldo.

  “A Portrait in Flesh” originally appeared online on Weirdyear.com. The included text has been heavily altered since original publication.

  Note: The first edition of this book was titled: The Negatives: Selections of Strange Violence.

  “Should I kiss the viper’s fang,

  Or herald loud the death of man?”

  “Quicksand”

  by David Bowie

  for eris

  STRANGE VIOLENCE

  #

  Diethylamide 6

  The Negatives I: Vessel 28

  Government Hooqueret 73

  Bubbles 82

  Devil's Work 104

  The Negatives II: Qabal 111

  METEO 147

  Shadowless 152

  A Portrait in Flesh 182

  Aldo 185

  The Negatives III: Anarch 207

  Bulletproof Faces 249

  Diethylamide

  1. Drip

  “Philosophy is useless. Only entertainment has value. If one is going to waste his time, he might as well enjoy it.”

  Drip.

  The EGO on the monitor elucidates with absolute authority, a spiritual attribute of his explained greatly by two immediately preceding self-proclamations; a) that the speaker is a nihilist, in foremost sentiment, and that b) he is an entertainer in post. These abstractions float inside his aura like innocent bolts of counter-charged reiki amidst the fluorescence of his electric personality. A contradiction, yet fully self-aware, self-realized, a symptom of a viral negative too true to be good.

  The curtains melt around him, the Technicolor flickers and for a second I see the static unreality of television blinking before my heavily dilated pupils. I witness the lie behind his own eyes, choking out his abused and defiant shame for the last time, finally murdering it. This crusaders’ existence is revealed to me in a flash of lightning, a popping illumination above my head, showering hot sparks to the ground below. Nihilism is but a devil’s advocacy to him - his true nature is evident in his fanciful perversions. He is an Entertainer, with a capital E. Foremost, an archetype. And he knows it better than anyone.

  Drip.

  The first few LSD blotters are kicking in.

  Took four more a half hour ago… supposed to wait… they may have arrived ahead of schedule. Blur into my pain like paint splatters and I know it immediately:

  Drip. Drip.

  Puts me up to six blots of Apollonian blood, needle-fire ambrosia rocking up my veins, shooting a novel mania behind my shimmering eyes like fire in a furnace, like the eyes of Ifrit. I heard it; the sound God makes when the bubble pops, when man transcends his boundaries and finally eats from the perpetually rotting fruit of knowledge.

  When the drugs start working.

  This is the instant;

  SUCCESS.

  SUCCESS is when the world becomes animated lysergy, when matter becomes magick and magick becomes power; when energy can be snatched from the paint of a wall, or the tie of a preacher, and made to weave fresh stars anew, waiting to be possessed of identities.

  The eyes of the Entertainer pierce through me, I can see the galaxies in his irises spinning, blue, green, purple, circling a dissolute Ouroboros, a singularity, shifting hue with the magnetic contrast of the television screen as they try to escape the sucking graviton. The hallucinogenic mirage poisons my consciousness… evolves it…

  Ambrosia, nectar of the gods, as rotten as spoilt fat, as nourishing as the milk of Mother Mary.

  “Philosophy itself has no end, no answer, no purpose save the dissolution of human understanding by promoting worldviews which attempt to boil reality down into a simple formula, one which can be easily understood and thus controlled.”

  Black blinking, an intelligence broadcasting from behind his komodo retinas, telling the true lie.

  “The truth is that there is no control.”

  The galaxies spin faster, crunch into the abyss, popping out of the wavelength like dying sparks.

  “Only chaos reigns. Only discord. All attempts to control order will inevitably be thwarted, because order is a vain construct, a particle amidst acid needlessly suffering to prevent its own demise. Entropy is the God of this world. And only entropy.”

  Entropy.

  Acid.

  It’s like the Entertainer is talking to me. The rabbit hole widens, and so does the Stygian black pool at the bottom of it. I watch it as my mind falls, I know what it is, a lake of bottomless diethylamide, and me, I’ll be the particle, dissolving…

  The Entertainer stares on, as if waiting for me to pay him mind. The moment is frozen. His brown hair waves in slow-motion like stalks in a field, likely caught in the artificial gale of studio fans, and the moment of dread creeps in my skin, goose-bumps erupt on my arms, my legs. My balls draw up in my body, needing protection from the blossoming drug-cold, the LSD washes over me with a great wave, dragging me out to Sea/to see.

  Only the Entertainer exists. He preaches the awful truth, the euphoric lie, opposed only in perspectives, constructed of the same rotten reflection.

  “When deprived of entertainment, a man may resort to its intellectually bankrupt counterpart; philosophy. It is through misery that religion and ideology have been created, constructs which fail to escape the natural rule of entropy. Who can say what sort of history a world of satisfied, artistic men and women might have created?”

  Trip

  WHO?

  WHAT?

  WHEN?

  WHERE?

  WHY?

  ?

  Questions. Riding the question mark down on a wave of liquid dream, the Entertainer’s face hangs overhead like that of a deity, a static emanation speaking through the aethers, writing himself into my trip with the pen of the rebellious creator Lucifer. I sense the workings of fate amidst this lysergic arcadia. I hear the Entertainer in my own soul, vibrating chills with each intonation of this televised kin-spirit’s dissolvent social virus.

  | Saint Michael, where are you?|

  “Every empire that has ever existed has fallen, every institution, no order ever reigns supreme save for the order of nature alone, by its very definition a state of chaos. It is only by the hubris of man, a symptom of philosophy, that such material disease erupts in the first place.”

  Disease. Entropy. Natural attachments to philosophy�
�� parasitic, or endemic?

  The Entertainer continues: “What lasts? There are but two constants throughout the span of recorded human existence, two mortal enemies; GOD, and its challenger. Both spirits emanate from the same source, the inescapable symptom of intelligence: EGO,” he reveals. The black holes in his eyes grow larger, the irises swell outward into the vacancy of purgatory beyond but a moment fore’ their devouring.

  Do I see the devil in those orbs?

  “EGO is what man refers to when he speaks of GOD, for EGO is but the philosopher‘s stone so long dreamt of - possessing the power to create slow self-destruction. It is EGO’s symptom, GOD, that leads man to create order. But EGO has two aspects, two emanations in constant flux during the play of human shadows.”

  I fall down the O in EGO and land somewhere in “I am.” That’s the name of THE LORD. I expect it to echo through the syrupy diethylamide.

  Nothing.

  Back in reality for a merciful moment. Staring at the entertainment box, the digital picture show has gone as black at the bottom of a deep pit. I drive like a demon from station to station, the remote control my vehicle, and disappointment abounds. All channels are creepily vacant of energy, news, advertisement; my living room grows cancerous in the dysphonic vacuum. Only blank onyx glass presently maintains its existence amongst sociable atoms, my other-dimensional doppelganger peering outward through the modern wizard‘s ball that is my television screen, a dark reflection. On the chrome palate, my face, captured in its simple design.

  Entertaining me in an electric coma.

  Though the screen is black, the voice of the Entertainer remains.

  “GOD remains constant,”

  ART

  “And ART.”

  My reflected face stares back at me through the magicked mirror, I scry with intensity, swimming through pools of Thetan laughter and the corpses of drowned Narcisses. The image looks like a modern-day Caravaggio. I zoom out, de-focus, the world is lit stardust for a moment, quarks reflecting lights, beaming ultra-violet hallucinations into my optic receptors. My mind goes epileptic and I am suddenly drowning in a lake of cold, cracked television screen.

  “ART as a concept stands in direct opposition to GOD,” says the nihilist. “ART is the celebration of chaos, of disorder.”

  I see the arabesque Grendel at the bottom of the TV lake, glaring up at me with ink-stone eyes, his gills sucking up the liquid LSD like nutrients. Black sand kicks up, catching in his scales. The beast. The only beast, the archetype, the spirit before me as I trip on drips. The man in my mirror, twisted, made naked, shown for what he is.

  Drip.

  “Philosophy is the propaganda of order,” says the Entertainer. “Entertainment, however, a sewer of dreams; and from each discarded lucidity can still sew inspiration to dissolve, from each reflection there is an opportunity to break free of the bondage which captivates us to worship order for a false sense of security, of sanity in a world of abstractions.”

  Grendel reaches up for me, the pitiful substitute for Beowulf, I choke on the liquid dream. In reality, worlds away, I choke on air.

  A smile breaks out on the face of the Entertainer God in my mind, a grin, confusing me on an almost primal level.

  “So for the love of GOD!” he shouts, “Be entertained!”

  Grendel is he, and I, the monster parted like light through a crystal, separate yet the same. The realms are as black as the holes in his eyes.

  I’m afraid.

  Reality flashes for a moment. Still sitting in front of the blank TV. Lights are out. How long has it been?

  (Drip.)

  Another wave crests, a tidal quicksand grabs me and pulls me out to drown. I see it now. The nihilist is right.

  The devil is an Entertainer.

  2. Poison

  The air smells like machine oil, but I inhale it anyway, let the grease dust cling static to the burst capillaries in my expanded lungs. Breathing the world in, getting high on the fumes of nature. The sidewalk brightens in front of me as the beam of a car lights upon it, painting it with effulgence, reminding me of…

  Lysergic animation…

  A voice, shrieking. I turn to face it and remember where I am; in existence, a pinpoint of focus, cursed to walk the world amidst the hysteria.

  But public. Still in public. Under the influence of highly restricted…

  “Once you a dope fiend, they never trust you!” shouts the ragged lunatic, trench coat blowing out behind him in the breeze, the source of the wretched, vacuous shrieking, creating a satellite of my attention in spite of my drug-induced displacement. The character throws his hands in the air, almost comically, but it appears as though his desire is to threaten. I can’t even hallucinate his target, but it’s likely he’s already doing that.

  “Give me a fair fuckin’ shot!” he commands the world, his fists still shaking comically, arthritically in the air, blaspheming against his caste. I can see the steam of red aether rising off of his fists, repelled by gravity into the bruised, purpling pre-dark sky.

  He looks directly at me. I can see the snake in his eyes, eating its own tail.

  “What about you?” he interrogates.

  I say nothing. He is a drawing, a sketch, charcoal lines blinking him in and out of my present distortion. He expects nothing.

  “You motherfucker,” he mumbles resignedly, cursing me to fuck my own mother.

  Drip.

  A heartbeat, reverberating throughout the kingdom of my own consciousness. Echoing, haunting even upon its initial creation. A flash of light, a cue card, a marker snaps.

  The scene shifts. The world is as black as the bottom of Grendel’s lake.

  Ink diethylamide. Still feel like I’m floating, sinking, caught in a paradox like a man in the jaws of a shark. It devours me whole, and inside of its atoms I feel the world twisting, drowning me. I’m caught in a whirlpool, letters everywhere, I try to grasp onto one but they’re all heading in the same direction: down, into a sea of letters.

  A

  A

  L

  S

  D

  T

  h

  en

  words.

  I see it now. Tattooed tree flesh, scarred, bloody with black ink. In the chaos, a natural formation. A phrase:

  “Then I will swear beauty herself is black,

  and all they foul that thy complexion lack.”[1]

  Are the words part of a story? The numbers make themselves visible.

  1.

  3.

  2.

  Sonnet.

  I close the warm flesh of the book, more gold letters leave scars through the leather. Then a name, I recognize it.

  Shakespeare.

  I gaze around the library. No one minds me. It is as though I am invisible. I look back down, a lucid moment commencing. I cling to the shore of sanity, the diethylamide ocean of quicksand yanking at my heels. My fingers dig into the dirt, clutching at sane order, back into the skin of Shakespeare. It bruises, calluses, bleeds, rots. I drop his corpse onto the mutilated corpse of a table tree. Other dead philosophers lay beside the Bard, rotting and stinking with toxic vanity, necrotizing until their foulness is dissolved to sterility.

  On the way to the exit, I spot Friedrich Nietzsche. He gazes at me vacantly, a soulless meme, unreal.

  Drip.

  Lysergic waves crest again, nearly yanking me back into the crawling chaos, the ocean of ideas and ambitions, of wasted nightmares, rotten fruits. Still I manage to hang onto reality, if only by a fingernail.

  Lucid. Stay lucid.

  Should have stayed home. But the lysergy speaks to fate; the animation penned about me reminds me that I had no choice but to come here. Lines drawn into confines, no escape from the track…

  “You,” says Nietzsche, rudely interrupting my paranoiac possession.

  I gape at him. Am I dreaming? I ignore the manifestation, looking at the other patrons of the library. They move about like insects, whispering, chitt
ering, conspiracy to scavenge the dead cells of the defenseless, snacking on the corpse of Shakespeare. Strangely, all female. All cockroaches. Pale imitations of human beings, disguised with cheap Xerox.

  Drip.

  The chaos finally pulls me under, I drown in artificiality, thirteen letters, I choke on this sentence, but swallow it whole, gagging at its absurdity. And then I am stranded upon the ocean, entangled in a reef of vanities. A cloud of words bursts overhead, drenching me, I try not laugh at the absurdity of it all.

  “I know why it is man alone who laughs;” says Nietzsche, as if on cue, a symbol simply waiting for his place on stage. “He alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.”[2]

  More philosophy. The enemy. The true distortion. A jagged paradox, the nihilists ascending the throne of order to respect.

  Nietzsche, another hack, another rotting Shakespeare, another--

  Mark Twain by the exit. I stand up, walk like an LSD-fueled machine to the door, twitching junkily, still ignored. Twain brushes past, but I put on my Ray Ban, my screen between the world and I.

  Drip.

  Losing grip again. Peaking.

  Out of the eye of the storm now.

  I see William S. Burroughs in the parking lot, being devoured by a skittering pack of whispering cockroach women. I walk by, head down, low-key.

  Listen to what they’re talking about, chewing on withered junkie jerky.

  Philosophy.

  3. Sugar

  Porno-Christ judges me with cold wooden eyes, crucified high above his Catholic captors. He’s trapped inside of a sculpture, an idol, sexuality, mortification. He hangs low, weary of gravity’s bondage and suffering for the sins of science. A chiseled masterpiece, the face of an androgynous angel save the mahogany beard, an ancient Roman ward against faggotry.