Strange Violence Read online

Words spring from the dry earth of my mind like oil, blasting into the air, making connections. The suffering Christ, sexualized, glorified, beatified - torture transmuted to salvation. Circuits alight, connections paint into visible eye’s mind.

  Letters:

  B

  D

  S

  M

  Words: Bondage. Discipline. Sadism. Masochism. All evocations of the naughty idol.

  Times New Roman thoughts, a ticker-tape of ingredients, letters, vowels, concepts, spurting like death from the wounded top-soil of my frontal lobe. Oil - ink floods it again.

  Not ink.

  Diethylamide.

  Breathing it in now, feeling the slow death of reason. Order spins away from me as the maw of the beast, of Satan, of Grendel, gnashes away at even the peace of silence. My mind is devouring itself, a Jungian Ouroboros. One side of me cannibalizes the other, then plans to starve to death.

  I look up, painting the world with insight since the memory of it was first dissolved in the acid pool a few short moments ago. A steeple hangs high above the puppet messiah, sewn together with fabrics of sugar and poly-cotton blend, effortlessly intertwining the realm of dissolvent lunacy with stoic sanity. So easily the myth made truth, even the puppet savior strung up above knows that he has been forsaken. The image trapped within the glass, a ghost in the machine, is Mary, the Mother of GOD. As if in Hell, she stares down eternally at the suffering and sexual degradation of her only son, the fuck puppet Porno-Christ.

  My eyes notice a new distraction upon the graven image. On his torn mahogany flesh rests a crown of sculpted wooden filth, anointing the mannequin lord as royalty over those who desire to eat his very skin, and drink his life’s blood, and piss and shit all over the very spirit that his fiction was meant to inspire. With their ignorance, they flog him each day, praying upward to nothing, wasting their energies on a useless dream, while the inanimate tree rot suffers high above. Their prayers lash at him like razor wire, tearing open the wounds from which they greedily suck, all the while feeling righteous.

  “Son?” a voice asks me, a voice of the voice of God. It echoes, vibrates throughout the cold singularity that has poisoned every atom of the church. “Would you like to pray?”

  “Yes,” I say, waiting, wondering what will happen. Lost in the LSD.

  Drip.

  The priest grabs my shoulder, bows his head, I realize he’s a preying mantis. He chirps his insectile recitation, judging me all the while. An Act of Contrition. For me, the sinner.

  “Merciful Father, I am guilty of sin. I confess my sins before you and I am sorry for them. Your promises are just; therefore I trust that you will forgive me my sins and cleanse me from every stain of sin. Jesus himself is the proposition for my sins and those of the whole world. I put my hope in his atonement. May my sins be forgiven through his name, and in his blood may my soul be made clean. Amen.”

  One word on repeat in my head:

  Sin sin sin sin sin sin

  I turn to look at him. I want to laugh at his clothing, his rituals, desire to bathe in the blood of his supposed savior, but I can’t laugh because he’s staring directly into my dilated eyes, into his own enlarged reflection, bounced back to his cognition by twin lakes of pupil singularity. He knows I’m dripping. Tripping.

  I gaze around, shaking the chaos from me like an animal flings water. I‘m still soaked. The preyers are mantises, rubbing their claws together, waiting to fuck and cannibalize or be cannibalized. All the praying, all the preparation, all for a swift and brutal end.

  Philosophy: The mask some would have these lost ones wear. But I see Entertainment. I see the Porno-Christ hanging high in the rafters like the phantom of the opera, I see a Crayola Virgin god-bearer trapped in magicked crystal above her inanimate still-born maso-Christ. I see people in funny hats, drinking blood, eating flesh, devouring their living selves until nothing is left, not even a scale or a snake-skin. Closing the circle. Dying. Not really understanding why.

  Hypnotized by Entertainment. Worshiping their very devil.

  “What are you reading?” the priest asks to me, honestly curious. It snaps me from my drug-trance, my pupils constrict, the priest catches it. Tossed ashore onto sanity cove by the merciless ocean gods of Discordia, I run away from the waters, back toward reality, lucidity, logic, and yes, the dreaded Order. I know I will not make it, the tide will sweep me back out again. But I run harder, faster, my eyes on the prize. Escape from the trip.

  I finally look down at his book, my schizoid thoughts feeling too uninspired to dissolve me. I expect to find a Bible, picked up from a pew. The world swims around me as I stare at it, wondering where it came from, why it’s here with me - why I’m here, why I would ever set foot in a Catholic Church on LSD.

  Or a library.

  Drip.

  Lucidity is slipping. Autonomy flakes as a sickle strikes in the blank abstraction that exists just outside of the confines of the idea.

  I open it to the last page, a book-mark falls out. A torn and folded curse from the book of Deuteronomy. I pay it no mind, but the mantises look immediately putrefied and ready to swallow me whole. Their preying palms rub together in synchronicity, the dry friction becomes a part of me forever.

  The letters on the page jumble as my spirit rises, the world is juicy once more, tasting as cherry as the virgin Mary. They form a face. A young boy, an angel, a fiction, a truth - Mark Twain’s inner child. Bitter, broken, outraged, and old. The angel says to me aloud, speaking through me, telling his name, speaking the words of the mysterious stranger.

  "It is true, that which I have revealed to you;

  there is no God, no universe, no human race,

  no earthly life, no heaven, no hell.

  It is all a dream -

  a grotesque and foolish dream.

  Nothing exists but you.

  And you are but a thought -

  a vagrant thought

  a useless thought

  a homeless thought

  wandering forlorn

  among the empty eternities!"[3]

  Twain must have slipped it to me as I was walking out the library, a phantom narcissist, before dissolving back into the chaos like so much static.

  Empty eternities glitter across my mind, scanning space, dimension, until finally they are caught in the super-massive black pupils of the Entertainer. I hear the atoms popping light-years away. In the center of the inner circle, cloaked amidst penumbra, a clenching abyss, lined with jagged incisors, bloody gums, the mouth of my beast Grendel, the Entertainer, the devil. It gapes, reeking, polluting the air with decay beyond the most putrid natural entropy.

  Dante saw this. I shall be less fortune.

  The face of the monster bites out toward me, gnashing and gashing, whispering, soothing, hypnotizing…

  “A nightmare. You’re having a nightmare…”

  Fade to black…

  Open my eyes. Looking up. Porno-Christ looks well-endowed. Naughty. I see the grin of Loki on his face, the golden apple of Eris tucked into his crown, the euphoric secret of Lucifer locked away behind his eyes, Jesus Christ, the self-proclaimed Morning Star like a shining light amidst the dark, naked church rafters. A maso-Christ, the big secret; the crucifixion his penultimate masturbatory act. His seed spilled to the ground through the hole in his side, fertilized the dirt, and out of it grew absurdity.

  Chaos.

  Entertainment.

  The Grendel-Priest speaks again, to someone else this time. An angel in white, though I see two devils on his shoulder, one smarter than its opposition. He doesn’t notice me.

  The domination of gravity ensues, my body lifts into the air like Christ out of his tomb, and I make a quiet suggestion to his suffering wooden arbiter as we leave the border of the joke;

  “For God’s sake, be entertained.”

  Porno-Christ doesn’t laugh. He only stares jealously as I leave behind this upright absurdity, and the doors of the church close behind me, cutting off the hat
eful glare of Mother Mary. I cross myself absently.

  The angels carry me to the ambulance and take me away. I can even hear what they’re talking about.

  Entertainment.

  The Negatives I: Vessel

  1. Vessel

  Reality transformed in an extravagant display of color, sound, vibration; abstractions baked together by the heat of nuclear fusion. Purple-orange flames rose into the sky alongside a wall of smoke and particles, the ground shook as the atomic warhead detonated, erasing everything in its path for miles. Erik Silas watched it from a great distance - far enough away to escape the irradiation that he knew would waste this landscape for many human lifetimes. Radio-active heat baked his face as the atomic blow-back razed the desert. A gnarled leather trench coat blew out behind him, poisoned atoms clinging to its tails, and he felt the electro-static tug of his soot black hair crinkling in the micro-waves. Beneath the trench-coat he wore military fatigues, faded and ancient - from before America fell.

  He whispered ‘good riddance’ as Las Vegas disintegrated. This event was but a reaction, a negative to a positive. This was the purpose he had assigned to his existence: to create chaos where order thrived. If one built a tower, he would knock it down. If one created a god, he would become its devil. In his heart, he believed that nothing had the right to exist without resistance. He had met others who shared his philosophy, though their number was low. They called themselves “the Negatives.”

  Successful operations - resulting in utter obliteration, as he was witnessing presently - were rare. The group had been running through a stockade of atomic weapons discovered by one of Erik’s subsidiaries in the Southern California area, which was presently headed by a small city of Seventh-Day Adventists. Using subterfuge - not hard to do amongst such gullible fools - they were able to secure the materials to build three dirty nukes, the last of which they had successfully detonated as of three minutes ago. It was not easy to infiltrate their target and plant the weapon. Las Vegas, since 2182, had been heavily guarded by the city’s Mujahedeen - the brutal secret police of the Islamic Republic of Nevada. For thirty years, those religious fascists had reigned viciously, and Erik laughed at what it had gotten them. They were so much non-sense, vapors now; not even particles would remain once the explosion climaxed.

  So much for power, he thought, inhaling the entropy of the Nevada vacuum. He knew that the only true power was in death, and he was its willing, anxious vessel. Even Allah could not save the oppressors from the chaos that they had so feared.

  Behind him were his two companions, Pixel and Morgan. He turned to face them, gazing with deep brown, serpentine eyes, and felt the explosions continuing as he stared at his makeshift family. He imagined what the mushroom cloud must look like towering high over his black silhouette, knowing it hung above like an ominous sentinel, their dark God, Obliteration; a symbol made into reality – a demon wrought and summoned by Erik himself, the black-hearted nihilist, and self-proclaimed harbinger of all-encompassing chaos.

  Morgan stood tall and brave as ever, with a reverence spinning in her strange irises for both her master and his summoned demon, the distant mushroom cloud. Her hair was short and black, standing stiff in the unnatural heat of the fallout, and contrasting sharply with her pale, anemic-looking features. She wore the same faded fatigues as Erik, and as the youth standing beside her, quavering through the tremors of the explosion - an androgyne, whose gender had always been in question. Pixel seemed to prefer reference as a female, though her discovery at an androgyne mill for the wealthy Mormon god-fathers that ran the Central American state proved beyond all doubt that Pixel was neither he, nor she. Such genetic mutations had taken place over the course of the previous few centuries. She was dressed in much the same way as her companions, and stood beside Morgan gripping her hand feverishly.

  Morgan and Erik were a few years older than Pixel, both being 29 years of age. He had recruited her before any of his other associates and subsidiaries, before a coalition had been formed under the moniker that now gave him identity – before the Negatives. There was something in her that he knew would reflect the eccentricity in himself. He could tell by her spinning irises, which sometimes appeared almost purple when the two of them successfully created moments of passionate, harmonic destruction - such as now. He thought of her eyes as demon’s eyes. They glared at him, and he saw twin mushroom clouds in the black pupils, reflected, surrounded by the violet halo that he had become familiar with only in their darkest and most intimate seconds. Her hair was short, black, and almost masculine, her face was hardened with painful wisdom, and like a wounded animal, and she always appeared on edge and ready to lash out.

  He gazed at them, but said nothing. No words needed to be said. This was the third mushroom cloud that they had witnessed in their three years together, the third successful operation resulting in a massive blow against that which they considered their enemy: order - of any kind. Order was the fuel for tyranny, for fascism, and chaos its only antecedent. Erik Silas thought himself to be the vessel for that destruction, the cure for suffering - and these two were his strange reflections.

  His purpose was to be the vessel of Satan, or Xenu, or Abaddon, Apollo, Hades, or whoever displeased the reality-fascists most. All roles had to be filled, and he would play the devil’s advocate, the joker.

  Erik would not turn around again to face the destruction further, their angel Obliterate, their knocked over sand castle. There was more ahead of them to break, to contradict. The entropy had just begun, and the world was begging to die; death was the only thing that could validate its tragic existence. The Negatives had come to this realm as destroyers, harbingers… savages. The world of light needed darkness, and a hole poked through the luminescence. It was this very hole that gave Erik Silas birth.

  2. Liquid

  The answer was lysergic acid diethylamide; “LSD”; liquid chaos. Of nuclear weapons, Erik had run out - at least for the present moment, but there were other weapons, in some ways more potent. The war on the world had been equally as fascinating to him as the war on the mind of the world - or more specifically, on the minds of those who lived in it. He could forgive humanity its weaknesses; he had weaknesses of his own. For all his love of chaos, he knew that some degree of order must be achieved for its fruition to take place. Structure was necessary in order for him to formulate the various ways in which he planned to inflict torment upon the sadomasochistic terra.

  At a Negatives Cleveland outpost, he had been told, a recipe for an insanity-inducing chemical known as “lysergic acid diethylamide” had been discovered, and successfully used to synthesize the compound itself. Experiments upon the beastly villagers living in the nearby Christian Scientist settlement had proven, according to his informants, to actually induce insanity; in sufficient doses, permanent insanity. It could be said of human history that insanity en-masse was a rather normal trait, one that any reasonable observer might expect all human societies to manifest in the due course of time. This new weapon, so striking in its poetic sentiment, would be able to exacerbate that natural weakness. The thought had been on his mind since even before Las Vegas had been atomized. He was anxious to test it on a large population of his chosen enemies.

  Argus, an associate who had not accompanied the rest of the Negatives to the viewing of their nihilistic artwork on the Nevada landscape, stared down Erik while he gazed at nothing, contemplating oblivion. “What’s wrong with you?” Argus asked sharply, agitated, and hesitant to break the contemplation of Erik, the clear alpha of the group. “Don’t you ever pay attention?” Argus stood about five-foot nine, a few inches shorter than Erik himself, and was significantly younger – barely 19. He looked severely malnourished, and hadn’t eaten in days - not for a lack of food, but because he did not care for the sensation of digestion; everyone had their quirks, especially those days. His hair was bleached blonde and stood on end, and his face was perfectly contoured, soft like that of a child, and vaguely androgynous. Argus was A
sian, but like Erik, he was raised in the Middle-Eastern Neo-Baptist citadels which lined the Great Lakes. He wore, like the rest of the group, faded military fatigues. Erik assumed the clothing had come from what used to be known as the United States Army, before the cataclysmic two-week nuclear exchange between nearly every “civilized” country in the world over two-hundred years ago.

  “Sorry,” Erik replied. “I’m just thinking.” Because he considered the concept of nothing to be quite substantial, he was not precisely lying when he made this response.

  “You’re always thinking,” Argus answered, perhaps a little too quickly. “It’s disquieting.”

  “I’m deciding what to do next,” Erik replied, cool and calm.

  “We have a few options,” Argus said, trying to take control without even realizing it, and gazing over Erik’s shoulder at both Pixel and Morgan, who stood behind him, clearly already having chosen their side in whatever argument was heating up. They waited presently inside of another bomb shelter, one that they had been using for a few weeks while planning the Vegas operation. Erik didn’t typically think beyond a present target, and made decisions as to what do next only after the successful achievement of the operational goals - namely, mind-numbing destruction.

  Pixel walked past him to a chair beside a broken dinner table. Half of it had been used as firewood while doing an overnight stakeout around the city’s eastern Mujahedeen surveyors. The surviving half leaned against the wall, held up by a folded steel chair and stabilized by the smooth, cold concrete surface of the bomb shelter’s interior. She seemed disinterested in the conversation entirely, as usual. She always did what he asked of her while they carried out their - his - plans, but typically she was apathetic about their conception. Morgan, on the other hand, liked to play a prominent role. She stepped up beside him.

  “I think we should go with the LSD idea, targeting New Mecca,” she said, trying to steal some of Erik’s attention away from the energetic Argus. New Mecca was once known as New York City, before Armageddon. “It’s time. What have we got to lose?”