Eric Vargas's Blog, page 8

The Mere Tide P42

Fish-A bitter sleep of good-The pilot-The rapacity of the intellect-The pilot’s conclusion.

She turned off the road into farmland. A fallow field where shocks of barely from a bygone harvest moldered like an abandoned hamlet and where random lengths of discarded fencing interrupted the furrows some with the tusked skulls of boars nailed to the posts, some with scapulars of gapemouthed trout or pike jaded a sulfurous gamboge. She crossed an irrigation ditch where past ondings had formed windrows and she crossed a dirt road in which were preserved the goings of machinery wheeled or tracked. A field of carrots. A mile saw a wood between her and the fires and she went another three miles and stopped.

In this rustica that was as a plane she bedded upon a pitted stretch of flintshards and shivered in the inevitable drawing down towards the sublime inertia of perfected order. A darkness absolute reminiscent of ran. In her nascent twilight of dreams she found herself construed in a bell of warmth. A beneficent alter mien boated in incense. Some atavistic mistrust of comfort vestigial of the protocrustaceans, the distaff suspicion that those things that comfort end roused her to investigate what dolor had beset her in the woken world and was it jackals hauling her to their lair or were vultures picking clean her bones. But the lines of her fathers supplied that competing sense that death was no curse but when she opened her eyes it was not the prefigurate gentleman in his sable cloak but a sun retrograding in the vault, a ghost of a fire pendant to buffalo chips troweling the garden and lo the snake’s inside but what teeth had she to bite the apple?

She woke. The fire of her dream was the fire before her but it wasnt day and these hyssop surroundings were other than the pleated pock bench of her choosing. She was pillowed in silk and scented down and two arms longer than she was tall cupped her at thrapple and heel and their ends needled her as if she were being trekked upon by cleated spiders. Sticks of sandalwood were planted round the fire and their smoke rose through torrents of snow and canopy like ink stencilings. She could hear their slow consumption. She couldnt hear the snow. Could hear a distressless anguine rasp seething behind her that smelled a sweet electric tang not like anything. The tidal pulse shunting through limbs and back. The beatless heart disassociated. Maybe better. Maybe. For sure this rancidness of heart. A gorge clotting grotesquary of terror and salt cyst sorrow. So many places for regret to lodge in. Rank odor of sickness in sweat. Drent above so below. A dank puddle hipped to. She tried lifting herself out but the slumbering giant draped over her was more than she could bear. She cried. Heaves delivered from the fetal hunch. Her face buried in the quilt of her own fouling but Anaya would behold her. In those pythonic irises glinted by firelight. In those. In those. Man was not made to receive pity from the serpent. Nor should the lips of men and serpent meet. Taste of rue and fear. Anaya cast off the blankets and lifted her out and placed her by the fire and took up the quilt on which theyd laid by the corners and bore it off like a diaper. She returned with a rucksack and out of it she took a thermos and lifted it to her lips. Benediction of steam rising out of the drink slit thawed tears iced upon her face. She drank. A rich velvet sweetness that warmed her from within. The pilot put the thermos aside and undressed her and stuffed the clothes in a snowfilled pot and put it in the fire.

As was her habit in winter seasons the pilot wore several free flowing coverings the outermost of which was a shawl that had replicated in the cross stitch moons and quasars and the kinds of suns and comets and nebulae and those endless vessels light does not escape and this she whipped off and imparted to the child. Wrapping her tightly then to sit her in her lap and draw the hair from her face a strand at a time in gentle cello pluckings while Dachni wept quietly a formless lament. Leaning against this totemic intellect for the maudled solace of her and failing to dam her tears. Anaya kissed her again. Then she laid themselves down and gathering the blankets draped them over their heads so that in that calid vivarium they lay face to face breathing each others breaths.

They decamped at the first gray alleviation of the dawn. The clouds had lifted and the snow was veiling off the waste in bitterest wind. The horses were gone. The pilot had risen early to smoke their clothes and she rucked them now and their stained bedding and picked her up and started back for the cathedral. In those arms Dachni felt a child despaired aimless upon an alien terrain weirding her into vestibular uncertainty. Dimly perceiving that it was more than her ears she had lost. And well to do without these insights altogether but unbidden they had come how then could they be bid to leave and her terror was of an earmaggot whispering secrets corrosive to life. And who bore her the prime evincement. She who had not even a word for intellect recognizing its fathomless brutality that accomplished nothing but a pigsty of misery in which to wallow. And yet the pilot suspecting the topic of her susurrus gibbering replied that for all its unbridled rapacity it was what only prevailed. That there was an elegance in the linearity of logic that yet permitted its own transcendence. And that this was what was feared. The confrontation with the irrefutable. For the proof of any minutest trivia indisputable was the rearing of the face of god. Because it could do anything. That wheresoever it roved became its domain. This limitlessness of possibility paralyzing to most was the preferred state for there is nothing so potent as the monomaniac mind, that purpose that has dissected the unconscious and made slave of it. The wild determination that tolerates nothing, that can be placated by nothing, that unlike the stomach that must void itself before it can be fed again can imbibe oceans of blood without satiation. The desire that in the last ruins of the last city would upturn rocks to snuff out what life had survived the scouring and she said to see the buildings tumble in on themselves and the ravenous machine sloughing through the wreckage, its overgravid belly and bleeding udders and partdelievered litter of doomprophets vomiting prognostications of death between its bloody thighs and eats through the head of a shrew faster than it can bleed. And she said there was nothing that could stand against it. No institution, no title, no sentiment could forestall the impatience that rages at the most inconsequential impediment and so obliterates in totality in a time ten times as long as it would have taken to wait it out. And for this the deadly blade was forged that the obstacle could be destroyed quickly and as these weapons evolved even great obstacles became contemptuous in their vanquishing and with the same haste so that what might have taken a million men a hundred years was foredone in an hour. That who believed long lines a defense did not understand that even the longest line can be cut, that lines are not more perdurable for their length. Inhabiting a world where the ghosts of the unborn already roam. That the purest horror was that the intellect not simply could but would tear that world down to the last fragment of speculative bone and install in its place the bleeding epistles out its own mauled soul howling out the godhood of its own doom.

But its ok, said the pilot. Because I have thee and thee hath me and while castles burn and kings perish it must be so, for everything is perishable after the soul.

The Mere Tide P41

Runs away-Conceit-Suspicions of nature-The sacrifice unwilling-Night mirages

She regained the road about the dawn. There was no traffic and the iced over potholes were like vestigial eyes sealed over by cataracts. In this new day the bosk thrawns looked like collections of spindles bereft of their nocturnal menace. As if there were something inherently fraudulent in the tides of light masking the world. And what would happen were it unscabbed? Would fangs be bared? Or would the skiddish weavers of the world scuttle away like insects befrighted by day? Or would they wick cackling reseam the weft?

She crutched all day the same dystopic pastoralism alike for miles. Where colporteurs in their thousands fled the predations of heathen they sought to convert. A few winter crops were undergoing harvest by automated tractors. Flaughts of crows. A passenger jet en route to Nihon. A naked ragpicker of a pelican rummaging through a loess of trash in the apron of a culvert. A phlegmatic sun languorously entrained upon a route traceable by the faintest bilge of light through the overcast. She watered frequently at sike and trough and as often wet herself. She fashioned a pad of grass to wear but she couldnt make it stay and eventually gave it up.

This while she had been keeping her wounded foot aloft to clear it of the disfigurements of the road but now she convinced herself it was exhaustion that dipped her leg so, self-pity abiding the assumption that righteousness accompanies self-persecution, and her foot snagged on the fissured humps or the frost heave or the longitudinal ruts.

A little before noon she rested at a turnpike. Sitting on the curb dropping bottlecaps through the spokes of a windspun bikewheel. All marked by a flare of their corrugated rims. Tokens littered the floor of the booth whereby she recuperated. Laminated receipts and timestamps and a few electric scrolls or pass cards, their photoreceptors damaged beyond repair. From amongst them she picked up a quarter and about to drop it into the blur of spokes the wind twisted a snowspout out of the field across the road in a sudden revelation of the linearity of time. That if a road were followed long enough there would be an end and in the ensuing panic realized there need not even be a road and then she realized that things could be as a road and perhaps this mastic once hide of thing or things flensed in a long ago, cured by means arcane and nefandrous and stretched out for the conveyance of traffic and who gambreled up the beast of time and dressed it of its meat and what mad tailor more horrible yet parceled it out just so? The twister swelled a ponderous suspension of spiral tabasheer strings and raked through the heather towards her and she rose to receive it and it did lurch into her and break in its chill breath that resolved it to nothing.

And she turned back to discover a pattern, some stitchery flaw by means of which it would be possible to discern news yonder of the veil or nature of the flayer and not without a vague dread for what hunter knew not when it was hunted.

In two hours she found the the pelican still at its pickings in the culvert. Regarding its glabrous hide the color of lead she suspected the god of this world unversed in the proper manner of his creatings. She eased down the embankment. The pelican looked up with dull beggar hostility before returning to its picking. Dachni hobbled almost within reach and it looked again. Even in its wretched state it seemed contemptful, imbued with that same disdain that keeps those cups empty which the dregs hold up in supplication from sidewalk and curb. She stood one footed and lifted the nagant to a right angle and fell forward. The bayonet pierced the breast of that featherless fowl and it flapped its batwings and honked wildly and drew blood from her forehead with a stab of its blunted bill. It got her hand in its mouth and she seized its neck and closed its windpipe while it beat at her with its wings and dragged her through the garbage. She got her hand free of its mouth and groped for weapon and came up with a can lid. She sliced its edge against the offorange leg and the leg retracted upwards. She let go the pelican throat and grabbed the leg and pulled it down and sawed it off. The pelican pecked a bloody shotpatch out of her neck. She cut it again. Her own palm bled, a spur ratched in a fingerbone. She cut the bird to the ribs and the bird jabbed welts out of her shoulder. She got the bird’s neck again and made a wicked slice and the neck deflated in her hand. They toppled together. Her with head under a wing as if it was comforting her while she gathered breath. Her front freshened with blood. After a minute she pushed the wing off and threw away the lid and searched for something with which to put the things eyes out. A teaspoon. She pinned the bird by its bill and scooped out the jelly of its eye. It honked, its neckpouch inflating like a frog. She levered the head the other way with the bill and foredid its other eye. The bird lay quietly then. As if the darkness were a comfort. She felt the ground what of it wasnt covered by trash but the earth she clawed would yield to no less than a steamshovel. She dug in the trash. When she had made a sizable pit she committed the pelican. A froth bubbled out of its neck like a leak in a hose. It reared up squawking with a last strength and she pushed it back down with what felt the last of her own and then she buried it.

When she climbed out it was almost dark, a faint beige dusk draining in the west. Cresting the breezeblock wingwall she saw a fire ahead on the road. A geist fire. Maybe a mile distant, maybe less. Radiant like the corpse of ouroboros racked to a wheel. She sighted low to see were any set to it but it was too far to be told and she climbed out the rest of the way and went on stopping to check and little by little divine a figure kowtowing to the flames. A pensioned homunculus or so she surmised reposed as the weary glumpish goodsire contrived to this forlorn waste by circumstances not much removed from her own. Nearer she thought him hatted. Nearer still Catholic yet just as she was about to conclude him he was dispelled into darkness. She stopped. The fire had flared over him and then he wasnt there anymore. She studied the fire but there was no one there. She circled the fire as if he might have gone there to hide. The coal had been laid out well and the mud was tracked but nary was any traveler. She walked out into the dark and stood a long while listening and she heard a screechowl and the rustle of mammals in the grass and heard trains threading a more distant part of the night and heard the wind and thought she heard other things but didnt. Of those sounds heard and misheard she heard no travelers and she went on but in another mile there was a second fire, mirror to the first. She looked back. The first fire was unchanged and someone did seem in its attendance, some retrograde wayfarer owing his existence to the hearsay of parallax. The fire ahead also appeared to warm a traveler and though more cautious in her approach and circumspect in her observations yet the figure assumed the character of a fugitive, concretum felon of indubious reality that at the moment of full perception evaporated. As if she had transgressed upon the lines of a palinode wherein those alluded to are at the moment of their witness recalled. She looked back to find the first fire sat now two fragmentary hints of wayfarers and a sickness coiled in her throat and the bloodfilled timepiece suspended within hammered at its brindled cage as if it would desert and leave her with her adulterated logos alone.

The Mere Tide P40

Disassembly-Muldoon’s opinion-Supper-The pilot’s entreaty

Midday next the company imbursed divided into its constituent parts, the aboriginals hazed off like wolves and the cultists pulling their gutcart chanting their crackbrained homilies. The pilot called a transport and saw Blake Muldoon out while she waited for it to arrive.

At the edge of town he spat and observed dryly: Shes not worth it. The pilot didnt demur and they parted ways, him south to another contract, her to invert her journey to the basilica. The transport arrived just as the bell in the governor’s hall tolled three o’clock and her retinue boarded and flew off and then she and the child rode out of town. Riding past the burnt and smoking lurry of man and hoof and saddlegear all in carbonized emaciation still with a few green flames licking out of the leather and them shutting up the households with their passing, the hauteur pilot like an aristocratic avatar of dread, the child slouched so low it looked as though the breath of life had vacated her, and the doors did not open again until the two were distant of the town, out from under the coal black umbego into the sight of a frigid sun.

They stopped at a ford overgrown with cottonwoods the wind was in. Hotels for gabbing dotterel, their wing flashing out to allow the pick of beaks between the feathers. In the east night was drawing down and the horizon was a vibrancy of death pastels.

Such were the thorns of fever in the child’s heart that the pilot had pitched half the camp before she even knew they had stopped. She studied the camp. It was blurry. The fur leanto and the quilts laid out under it and the pilot dredging cottonwood out of the river. She wiped her eyes with the heels of her palms and when she looked again the pilot was at her side and she was being lifted out of the saddle. Dachni fought and the pilot bit her in the nape and she froze like a kitten and the pilot carried her to a quilt laid out before the fire and sat her there. She got her rucksack and untied two blankets from its sides and flapped them out over the fire until they were hot and then she draped them over the child’s shoulders.

Dachni cowered under the good cashmere. She had her fetish back and she clutched the silver chain.

Its alright, said Anaya. Youre alright.

She sat down beside her and got a skillet from the ruck and slapped two venison steaks in it and seasoned them and put the skillet in the fire. Gol’joq, she said. Thats what we call it. Theres a new cuisine arising out of the mixture of American fauna and our seasonings. Theres a chitinous thing lives on Garshii and it purifies its bladder with a secretion thats best kinned to butter. Youll like it. Its very popular.

But when it was done Dachni wouldnt touch it. The dark green plastic plate balanced on the snow. White commas snapped in arcs out of the fire and the sap whistled in the hollows. The last light exhaled out of the east and then they were in darkness.

The pilot smiled and pulled the quilt a little higher up on her shoulders. I meant to ask how you are but then I look at you.

Dachni drew up her legs and hugged them and stared into the fire.

I want to talk to you and I want you to talk to me. Were not strangers. You can trust Ill go my way but Id want to know your way too, to know if they are concomitant. Where wouldst thou go?

Dachni shook her head. She picked at the scab under the bandages and a yellow serum leaked out. Jess go.

It was barely a whisper. The pilot’s ears quivered to catch it.

She began to cry.

Anaya enveloped the child in her arms. Listen. Come home with me. I wont bother you and you can come and go as you like. You can even pay if you want. I dont see why you I dont care for you. You have to believe at least that.

Tuddint. Not leaveabell.

You think every I say is a lie.

Mostlese.

But those men are dead. That is not a lie.

Dachni looked out over the arms that held her at the shivering cottonwoods. Their fats roots shining blackly. She shaved the tears from her face and wiped them on her pants.

Come on. Lets go to sleep.

They lay under the leanto in their heated quilts and Dachni trying to stay awake slept and woke still in the darkness. The pilot was breathing evenly. She rose and put her purse by the fire and collected her rifle and went on.

The Mere Tide P39

Muldoon’s Deception-A dangerous pleading-The slaughter of O’Cuinn

On the third night there was a blizzard and the balefires roared and twistered like drunken jinn. Muldoon set out with his lieutenants towards blooms in the west and radioed shortly after midnight that a Governor Quint had found his terms for room and board agreeable and that the company could be received immediately.

They broke camp and rode the five miles into town. The horses snuffling, their legs lifting hugely out of the snow. At the edge of town a few servants greeted them and attempted to direct them to a stables but the pilot would have them to the governor’s hall where they then did go.

The governor was in. You could see him backlit and framed in a dining hall window like a priest holding a vigil. When he saw their approach he raised a hand and walked out of the frame and a minute later the porch light turned on and the front door opened and he stepped out. He was slightly drunk. The pilot rode up the porch steps and circled him twice and then demanded under threat of a razing the brigand Aedan O’Cuinn and associates.

The governor retreated before the horse. Well what the hell duh ya want with him?

Thats my business.

You dont have to tell. I can tell that.

Then why did you ask?

I cant turn him over unless I have some proof of nefarriety.

The pilot leaned towards him. Either you bring him to me or Ill go find him.

The governor rubbed his arms. He looked out at the company where they sat their horses. He couldnt see them in their entirety so enshadowed they were but visible shapes seemed harbor to a malignancy restrained by threads.

Hal lord, he muttered. Hah lord.

In the end runners were sent house to house and the offenders summoned but when the pilot saw that only the heads of the houses were arriving she ordered that all the occupants aught be turned out.

Nahd nahd thats naht what ya wanta do or youda done us all in from the beginning.

She drew a dragoon revolver and placed the muzzle to his brow.

Aye plug an old codge whos plumbing dont flow on command and holds the affections of half the county. Take the men responsible. Aye mundify the soiled souls an you might even get a thanks outta some for a favor. You take more than whats right an theyll hate ya proper even if you are inda right. Dont hurt no clean souls laddie.

The pilot cocked the pistol. Trot them out.

The governor was resting his forehead against the barrel and he turned to a runner. Go fetch the wives. Get the ables. But thats it.

The runner glanced to see if the pilot might amend these instructions but she didnt and he took off.

Over the next twenty minutes older men appeared. Women with wedding bands. They were made to give their names and then to stand against a wall and they huddled and shivered and the governor went down the line explaining the situation. He stopped at an elderly man.

Look at this old twig, he said. What would he be guilty of?

The pilot spat. She didnt answer.

He patted the old man on the back. Go on home, youre fine.

Muldoon called out to him. You might want to get the fuck on yourself.

The governor smiled nervously and moved down the line. He explained how an old suffered disease of the liver.

Were a good breed but with the susceptibility to enjoying a good drink maybe a little too much.

He took her out of the line as if this were sufficient and walked her to the road and with a slow exaggerated heft of his arms imparted her a momentum that could plod her home. The next a young woman and he removed the ring from her finger and threw it in the snow.

They married weeks ago an set ta divorce this Friday. The best man twisted his ankle and couldnt show, the father of the groom passed out in the aisle and the father of the bride had to be removed for disorder in the heavenly court and half the congregation objected but shes a little deaf and was madly drunk too.

He pulled her out and went on to a younger son, as he called him, whom he had employed to mow his lawn six summers running. He shoved him him and his younger brother out of the line and almost yelled for them to run.

By the time he started back up the line the runners reported their job complete and there were thirty souls against the wall and Dachni was brought up. Still slumped in the saddle. A man was holding a light to each face and asking for her consideration.

Say who, said the pilot.

Dachni wouldnt raise her head. The pilot lifted it by the hair but she didnt say anything and when she let go her head drooped back down again. She turned to Muldoon.

All of them then.

The governor stepped forth.

Baldy again, guffawed a man.

Hold on hold on, said Quint. She didnt say anybody. You there miss you have to say the names who.

I have the names.

Well then take them.

No.

Can they not get last words? And them first words?

They can scream.

He turned to address the line. Who here hasnt writ out a will yet? He swung back. Give them a minute to tell a will. It doesnt need to be in no legalese. They dont even have to write it down just say it. Ill remember. Recall is a gift of mine.

Jesus Christ, said a mercenary rolling his sleeves.

How about a last rite? For some itll be a first rite.

Another mercenary suggested genially that he get the fuck out of the way.

Quint turned to the runner. McCabe be to the priest quick and bring him back.

Were not waiting for a priest, said the pilot.

Run get him anyways, they might not be done by the time he gets here.

And the priest would arrive in the midst of the carnage and the governor beset him to give rites unto the dying lambada of gore through which the company sloughed with their instruments. The torsos limbless or gutted or flayed, skinless forms flopping in the snow like wounded seals, the muscles starkly red and smoking and the blood splattered butchers industrious in their live dressing of the condemned as those employed in slaughterhouses who quickly graduate from the indifferent mien to barbarism. Houses on the street were being actively barricaded. Horses were feeding on the living and two set upon the same woman and they tugged her from either end until she ripped in two in a deluge of blood.

The governor left the priest in his stunned paralysis and circled round the livid rim of this massacre to the pilot where she stood supervising.

I hope youre proud, he said.

Tired, said the pilot not looking at him. Those beds are ready aye?

The Mere Tide P38

Arrival of the aienee-The assembly of the company-The fate of the Samaritan-Abroad in the steppe-On the nature of war-Setting out

An hour later they entrained upon the road east and thereon some miles advanced an aienee transport broke the cloud cover in a heavy rolling hum not unlike a brash symphony of whales. It had hard angles, a prow for ramming. Its landed in a nearby potato field and the spires installed in its keel retracted into the belly of the ship and the downwash shunted up a bowl of dust and snow all around it. The bay doors folded inward and a ramp extended to allow the egress of a detachment of those stranded extraterrestrials yet of their of their own terraneous obloids spinning senselessly in the void. Uniformed each as befit their class, the shosti in loose sleeved tunics, the hem strings tied through the belt loops of fur trousers, the shalki the same with the additions of familial heraldry. They were all unshod. The bony talons clutching up like dead spiders before spreading forward to grip the soil.

They went on. Even before midday their ranks were augmented by blood cultists. Who kept with them a fodder of swine for the carnivorous ponies they were aback. In their stinking rags and headgear of cattle or goat skulls and rags of dried human skin and wearing spiked harnesses of iron on which were strung the scalps of their enemies and profaned relics of the church they appeared eaters of the dead as they were and the grim carreta their acolytes drew had in a casket the gorged misshape of a high priest of Hectavasad. His rotting bulk regularly stuffed with new organs and his exterior strapped with new skins.

And still their numbers swelled. Men persuadable by money-for that was how they had been diverted-and the furor behind their eyes belied the hostility of the mood. Roosters crowed late morning.

The road was as a ruler tabbed by mileage signs that counted down to Uralsk. Agriculture abounded, Schrieffer or Calico brands of winter wheat the indigenous tended to. Nomads domesticated with rainbow paper. As the company passed they ceased their work to watch and many removed their ushankas or boriks as they would in respect of a procession or funeral.

Or they rode country where chernobyl prevailed. Country set aside for graze. They watered at lakes. No need to stove ice for the lakes steamed. Tourists from the grad vacated the surf and the young girls were put away in tents on the beach or the log cabins that overlooked the beach with its bikinied pilgrims. They requisitioned what meat was cooking upon the grills and whatever coin was dolled out for it was acceptable.

Two days from Uralsk they left the road and behind them on a sign the flapping skin of the stranger boy and his musculature to pupate in the chrysalis of his gutted mount.

Concerts of wind did orchestrate the Batys, a quiet harmony of flora and leather and metal, that most minimalist obbligato of an army’s journey. Men have meet the earth the foot and there is something of their solemn tattoo that stirs the heart.

The town of Basali would not spare them lodging and when they camped without outriders were posted to see that they did not stray into their jurisdiction. That night they were joined by a number of aboriginals and as they arrived the aienee closed ranks around the child where she sat folded facedown at the waist in a hassock. Beyond the fire’s edge the horses glutted on the living swine and their screams silenced the night about.

Last of all and early in the morning Blake Muldoon arrived with his addled mercenaries and while they ate their breakfasts under the eggmoon Dan Bowen, middleaged partisan who had served five years in the army at his father’s behest, cut about his equanimous comrades where they drank their coffee.

What makes them do it? he said. I dont wanna do it. What is it? No one wants it. Do you want it?

Jeffrey Mason scraped the ash out the floor of his cob pipe and shook his head.

I dont either. I dont think anyone even thinks they want it. But we cant stop. Why cant we stop? Theres something in us. I dont know what it is. Im not resigned to it. You show me a petition Ill sign it. Ill get others to sign it. Ill lobby it. Ill talk Ill go on TV. Ill pen an essay something. I aint resigned to it. No one is. Everyones workin their asses off to keep it from happenin and its still rolling on. Like were all pushing it as hard as we can. What is it? What is it that makes us do it? Do we really want it under the knowing we dont want it and under the thinking we do want it do we really want it? I cant imagine anyone wanting this. How insane would you have to be to want this? Theres something wrong. Or theres something in the air. I think the world is poisoned. Theres got to be something wrong. Something in the water maybe. Maybe makes people crazy. They dont look crazy. They dont act crazy its the thing its the thing thats crazy. Everything that leads up to it is sane and rational and theres no craziness to it but the thing itself is crazy. I dont know what to do. I dont know how to stop it. I dont think it can be stopped. Im not going to leave. I know that. And I know no one else will either. Everyones gonna show up not wanting to be there and gonna go through with to the bitter end things they with all their hearts dont wanna do. And then when its done theyre gonna do it all over again and then the ones who have done it and say it should never be done again are gonna be the ones who run it just like the ones who came before them. And everyones gonna say we shouldnt do it its the last thing we should do and theyre gonna march right up to the door and knock knowing the doors gonna get answered. Why do it? I dont understand why we do it.

When they rode out at late morning the pilot was at the head of that long column and behind her was the child riding limp in the saddle like a marionette. The mosin-nagant scabbered along the flank of her bay. The few rounds she possessed jangled in a leather bandoleer. Surrounding her were a parcel of aienee who rode in the same reprobatic silence as their dagestai whose unwavering gaze fixed to some distant point of compass like a doomed general and she did not stir but to warn off the aboriginals who would from time to time try to corral the child out of their ranks. The sun that monitored their ride was like a hollow sphere of ice that yet in the evening seemed to boil off the horizon.

The Mere Tide P37

Awake-The Fourth Crusade-The Good Irishman

Out of this revelation into incontinence. A puerile river spreading over her thighs. No urethral stricture but that bridge between will and lower function was severed nor could her pain be mitigated. A heady admixture of excretions reeked the room. Her pillow sweat drenched. She threw off the blankets and eased her good foot to the floor. When she touched down the other the pain would have wept a leper. It was a long time before she recovered. When the pain had subsided she undid the bandaging. Her foot was unlike a foot and the lateral malleus resembled the ball of a shillelagh. She had long been reconciled to the absolute indifference of bodies but it was this unrelenting mutility she could not purpose. For allowing injury inevitable or even necessary yet not these loathsome dungeons with their unlimited capacity for misery and affliction.

On the nightstand was a copper lidded mug. In its bottom was a festive light and when she thumbed up its lid its switched on and shaded the vinyak a neon blue. She gulped it in two goes and the heat diffused through her being. Numbing the pain. When she searched the room she found a cherry staff leaned against the door. Polished and with a cleat installed to its base. She rewrapped her foot and hopped to the crutch and fitted it under arm and went out.

In dim corridors now shouldering against the cops of crusaders enroute to Constantinople. Knights and pages wending through the dusk winey vistas of Venice. Now past the sturdy boats of sagdge yaphilii readying to drag an armada of waterspouts whirling on seas sloshing upon the pestilential seat in the void out which the aienee did spring.

In the nave there were voices. Echoes that in their accented traceworks diagrammed the architecture of the throat. She hobbled past the altar to a column in view of the gate and peeking out beheld the pilot conversing eye to eye with a stranger giant on horseback. The threshold divided them and though their statures were at ease when the pilot offered the hospitality of her house the stranger must politely refuse. Dachni crawled to the next column. A more expansive invitation resounded through the cloister. The pilot’s arms were thrown wide. The stranger was young, she could see that now, and his shoulders broad as a lintel. No one she recognized. He held up the wide spread of his hands but the pilot in Belfast brogue offered a third time and before he could decline took charge the bight and lead the horse inside and confronted with this insistence he consented and the pilot affably yet rimmed with the sadist’s hue said: Ah lad yahve made the beggest mahstake of yarn jung life.

The Heretic’s Warning

I have born my rage against the night

And at last waning in might have seen it right to yield

But should I be waked twice from darkest slumber or see again life’s morning twilight

I with dry thigh or knee for hammer

Shall drive another nail

In the Christ

The Mere Tide P36

Anaya-Her plea-A comment on blindness-Valley of wet flesh 

Twenty minutes later set to a table glaring at the livid movements of Anaya. Her leg throbbing. Hands so palsied as to suggest the advanced stages of neuropathy. Between them was a pauper feast. Country steak with a hairless toupee of congealed gravy. Rice glutinized into a lump and apple slices brown in the flesh. She wore now a green sweater that was as a dress on her and under it a gray jute onesie.

On the floor was the shattered glass of a glass of water and the glass before her now was a second glass of whiskey. The first swam in her and the distortions in her vision seemed shaped by its swirls. All her vengeful had sobbing had burned down to a smoldering coal of numbness. She looked at everything save these her gifts. There were striations in the table’s laminate. A fluvial imitation. Anabranches of pseudobark that had they not been fabricated would have blossomed towards the sky, into ears. Trees in winter great mirrors. Like halves of these candelabras on the table set, the flames on the wicks white, their light lapping at a nativity on the wall. Aienee now in attendance, bringing their own bitter wisdom, their druidess gifts.

The pilot leaned back against the counter.

Youll not kill me starved.

A fire burned in a woodstove. Smokeless pit wherein a dance might be descried. A joyous waltz all damned invited.

Dachni picked up a fork and dragged its tines to the edge of the plate and let it fall again. The crystal ringing filled the silence.

Anaya grabbed a chair and sulked to her, pulling the chair up alongside her and sat. Her arm slid down her side and pulled her close. That preamptu jointure tensed her high hackled like a cat and she squealed and squirmed away. As if at risk of being subsumed like the weaker of two siamese cannibals. Anaya chopped a chunk of the steak and forked it up.

You have to eat.

Dachni stared at the table. The food pushed against the gate of her lips that would not open. The pilot took her jaw and lowered it and thrust the meat through and raked the tines against her teethbacks to dislodge it. Dachni’s mouth lowered more and the meat capsized over her lips. The pilot caught it and put it back in and covered her mouth.

Come on.

The chunk sat cold on her tongue. After a while it warmed. The gravy slowly liquefying and spreading towards her gums. The hand fell away and she drooled and Anaya downcast whispered: You can still hate me in the morning.

Dachni’s head sank to her breast and the meat slopped out and then she fell forward. Would have into her plate but the pilot caught her.

Ashkigo lixao, grytafal beshkata nohkon iskaii iskigo, said the pilot propping her back up. Thrones and principalities what misfortune hath wrought thee out of my remembering? Eat. You have to eat.

Dachni stared blankly at her inanimate half. Her mouth opened and food was put in and her jaws worked for her and she swallowed. Two cold lips touched lightly her temples. She ate and it was a long silent hour.

When her plate was clean the pilot cleared the table, sinking the dishes and running the faucet, the water fanning over saucer and plate. She bagged the untouched apple slices and put them in the fridge.

A fork jutted from Dachni’s fist. Her head kept drooping and when she raised it again the pilot would be in a new place and once she raised it to find her fist empty and another time to find she was bedded, her foot propped on a pillow and Anaya stroking her forehead.

Maybe she said something. Words delivered from far away. She tried sitting up but there was not even the strength in her to want to try.

Riakis vae vae sagli ophos. Ciasii.

She did. And woke in the unwinking darkness. A heavy weight draped over her. Mint breath cooling a wetness on her cheeks. Something over her heart. The weight lifted of her. Water was poured. Ice clinking in a glass.

Sit up.

She didnt move.

Anaya sat her up and put the glass in her hand.

Go on.

She sat. The rim found her lips and tilted up and the water filled her mouth. The water was cold.

Stop this.

The pilot squeezed her throat and she drank a little and coughed up the rest. Her head began to ache and she grimaced against the pain.

Did you forget how to drink water?

The occlusion of the dark took the glass from her and refilled it and put it back in her hands and she drank again and her head hurt again.

It is not in the hours of right commerce when the heart is wont to confess regrets and trespasses. The quotidian obsession with abolishing night has bereaved us of our communion with the blind which is our right and half are natural habitat. For blindness is the common condition best perceived through lack of light hence it may well be that the felon in his midnight escapades and incarcerations is priven secrets denied the righteous.

Anaya turned on the light. Dachni’s face was run all down with tears and Anaya turned the light off again and tucked her back into bed and went out.

Cold wombed her in the sleep that followed. A rudimentary awareness tenuously limned as perhaps squid possess in the egg clutch. A brief gestalt presence before the horror disseminates into the abyss. In this unvectored matrix a feeling of compression as the downwash of a bird. A voice spoke. Hardly more than a murmur or from far away. All at once that porous cognizance contracted into a locus of aesthesia extreme. A singularity of sensation that fragmented into a thousand clarities of pain and yet no architecture wherein they could manifest. As though each agony were noumenal. The voice came louder. Coordinates in this plane of chaos decayed of their erratic wanderings into an aggregate, mud as became as rock and rock as became as bone of a pedocidal curse unto the revolt of meatless phalanges out a yolk of mud and followed ulnar, followed scapulae like a knife, clavicle swinging hingeless, grangrel ribs grimacing, a hollow skull rearing sidelong in a wordless howl and fixed to a writhen spine, all dissected incomplete, the stones still with terrible velocity spalding the dread skeleton even as it was made. It stood in a sooty globular pour of rain slanted in a windless valley and the sludge at its feet sleeched up the bladed shins and became as muscle and sinew and the horror clawed at this terrible bemeating but it was tide like all tides and now eyes bubbled in the sockets and she gouged them, the opal jelly tearing down her maxilla, enameling her teeth, assuming into the creep of her fleshing-for the pilot would say that sure as thou art to die thou art to be born-and mud seeped between her joints and became as cartilage and her eyes blossomed again and the muscle slithered out of her ribs and fused into a tongue and she strangled the chords of her voice that let her cry and that ground that had vomited her surged through her and she unthreaded these veins so that they hung by the bolt flaccid in her halfmade hands like the spew of a loom.

The Mere Tide P35

The prospect of nonexistence-Supper with the Deuterenne’s-The coal eyed monster-Escape-A dogpath-The basilica-The pilot-Draining Pus-A barbarous surgery

They left Dachni to rest but a few hours later when they returned to invite her to dine she hadnt so much as winked for in that solitary interim she had undergone an epiphany adjacent the concept of suicide. The man got her out of bed and conducted her out of the room with her puppet legs dragging senselessly under her.

Supper was pilece belo. An onion and cabbage salad and fries and rye bread. Her utensils were wrapped in a napkin and balanced on the rim of her plate. She stared at them and she could not see the friendly faces smiling for for the uplift of her spirit. Emily proclaimed the bestness of the meal but Dachni was staring at the knife.

Did you have a name?

Emily.

Im just asking.

They dont have names.

Blunt knife shallow salamander toothed. The girl leaned into her view.

Im going to be a detective when I grow up. What did you want to be? I passed the academy exam last year and the detective exam last month. I got a certificate for both and a picture with the police chief. Ive got letters and formals to boot.

I think it wants to be left alone, said the woman.

Do you want to see my badge?

I dont-

But Emily had already sprung from her chair and was running for her room.

Try to eat something, said Mikhail.

They dont speak, said the woman.

He placed a heavy hand on Dachni’s shoulder and that shoulder sagged until the hand slipped off.

Sorry. Вы русский?

Emily slid back into her chair. She had a picture. This is me and Chief Aires. The man of whom she spoke was a bald rotundity of belt loose law and a slothful oculus. Sun shades pushed up on his forehead. The badge next. A junior detective badge advised a precursor to the soon enough real article to be acquired. A blind double headed eagle bossed into the shield, banner in its talons, Horus eyes socketed at extreme of its extended wingspan. And the letter. Good papyrus mayhaps affirming all the girl had told.

Emily she doesnt understand.

Mikhail forked fries into his jaws and chewed and took a drink of water to help them down. He looked at his wife.

Wash your hands, she said.

Why?

You touched it.

Dachni wiped her eyes with her wrists.

Oh I think shes crying. Dont be sad.

What otherwise to be? Her gaze drifted across chicken, off plate, across a gossamer tablecloth of diagrammatic embroidery of galleons and mans of wars to an arm of sparse blond down, bony elbow toeing the shield. Nouvea iteration of chivalry in nickelplate, in adversum malum. Eternal adversary of natural evils. Emily requested the salt and when it was passed she craned the shaker over the stiff folds of cabbage in a liberal dosing and flagged her daint arm to restore the shaker to the side of pepper in a restoration of the yin yang of the seasonings. Dachni shoved the butter knife into her arm pit. Emily screamed. The mother. She snatched the letter and the badge and dropped to the floor and scrambled through the kicking legs and burst out in a flare of tablecloth and clatter of cutlery and charged the door. The frame bulged outward in a loud crunch. She threw the knife at Mikhail and threw herself again into the door and fell out into the street.

A colder rain slanted down now. A gravid coal blue overcast. Dachni sprinted upstreet, her unshod soles sliding viciously over the granular macadam where puddles twinned lamp lights spinning round their stringed axis. Mikhail burst out the doorway beseeching the storm for an apothecary, Emily wailing in his arms. Windows heretofore blinded slitted to reveal tintype ghosts alarmed at a sprite fleet Ptolomean tearing bandylegged through the street. She hurdled a fence into a backyard and leapt back again and lunged at the pug polycreased mug of a pitbull bulging the waterbloated picket and dug her thumbs beneath the fat wrinkled eyelids. The pitbull whimpered and twisted, its saggy jowls throwing strings of slobber but it had lodged itself in the gap and when Dachni let go it howled against the sudden abruption of sight. Someone slid open the glass patio door of the house and yelled for her to quit harassing his dog and she ran on. Farther back from whence she had fled voices were gathering alarmed and speculative, their flashlights parceling out the darkness in whiplash illumination.

She scrabbled clear of the meager urbanity and turned towards the creek. Entering the bracken her foot stubbed a root and she tumbled down to a path paralleling the chopping waters. A recreational path favored by hikers and the domesticated and that in an hour’s painful travail let out next a lake where docks undulated upon a chopping tide. A thin board where some landlocked bohemian surfed the disturbances. Who waved. She turned to receive the charge of what wheeling pursuants bore down but there were none and when she swung round again the surfer was gone.

She went on and there was violence yet more in the inclemency of the storm. She took a second path winding through a thready anorexia of birches to a road where beyond and alone in the blanket whiting of the heaven strife a cathedral granite and goth loomed like an apostolic horror house. Dachni sallied across the road and lambasted upon its asylum gates blows you would not have heard, that she did not hear herself. She jumped to grab the stolid pig iron bob of the doorknocker and hauled in vain against the portal. After several essays she gave it up and circled round the cathedral past the ribbed flank buttresses with their elongate gargoyles spewing gutter water and past a garth wall with painted tapestries of medieval battle, the placid combat wherein squires seemed fond of their braining. And past a cemetery where stacks of tombstones like playing cards awaited dealing. In the musty confines of the groundskeeper’s shed she might have sheltered but didnt. Among garden tools was a barrel therein an axe and armed with thus returned to the gate and split the oak along its banded grain. Were that it was some enemy. The lodging of the axe was of a high tenored prate of splintering not unlike the thunder. In ten minutes of mechanical assault she mutilated the wood and now she hacked sparks out of the furniture mindless enough that she failed to perceive through the rents a gliding occlusion. The gate creaked away of its mangled double and the axfall shoved it back and then it shot open. Its corner struck the prominence of her ankle and that ankle folded and she went down.

Towering over her was the pilot. Lithe apostate of the mephistophelian conclusion. Who in her stopaed vastity seemed collared by all the tragic martyrs of the archivolt like a of the ecclesiastical attic. Dachni reared howling and swung the ax one handed. The pilot knelt catching the haft twixt two talons and scrabbled her from the polished crepidoma and spirited her from the rain through a portico, past its font and sterin candles impaled through the waist on prickets like sweating grubs and down a long pewless nave with solomnic pillars relieving the scourgers of pale immanuel and where acrylic renderings of the bellwether watched with the twelve and the traitor from their ikons on the walls and past an altar where hung an enormous slutlamp, a dark hellish lyric of a flame twisting in the bier like a spirit, tandem to a cross hung from a hoop at its base and through a door on the altar’s dexter flank into a hall and from thence a toilet.

The pilot threw a switch and a warm morgue orange glow suffused the washroom. A tiled floor graded towards the drain in its center and a showerhead overhung it. The pilot flipped a shortlegged wash stool upright and set Dachni upon it and no more had she done so then did the child lance her with with blade of a straight razor. It slipped straight up the pilot’s face and stuck fast into one of her tendrils. The pilot leaned back and angled her head and the child looking at her with her face all covered blood seemed to recognize her and no more had she done than she kicked her in the shins. An ugly pain bellowed up her thigh as though it were being stobbed by a piton and what she saw when her eyes could finally drift down seemed not her foot but a mauve club.

The pilot tore a strip off her limbus and tied her foot in place. Wait her, she said running out and from the hall admonished her. Dont move!

Dachni fell onto her back in a paralytic shock and after a moment she rolled onto her belly and crawled towards the door on her elbows, her hands shaking, her wounded foot raised with the strip drooping sadly like the flag of some vanquished nation. There was a distant crash, two crashes and then a scratching on stones. The pilot appeared footfirst, foot cocked outward to grip the narrow mortar joints of the wall and lunged to seize the hingeside frame of the door and swiveled inside like a toy at once smooth and swift. She carried a hardcase and she slid it past the child who pushed herself up on her maciated arms in time for the pilot to peel her from the floor.

Geyshla, she said. Geyshla.

But Dachni would entertain no peace. She squirmed and bit and and swung and Anaya collected her wrists in a smooth intercept whereupon she sank her teeth into her forearm and tore her head side to side. The pilot watched her tugging weaken and then there was a moment when their eyes met that she might have forfeited-for many would forgive if first allowed to revenge-but something in the unhurt melancholia enraged her the more and she tore and tore until cold ebony sickles traced her throat caressingly and a sweet voice spoke to her.

Its ok.

In half the span of half the wince of her heart she let go, struggling against an embrace and gagging protests through a blackblood drool. She was told everything would be alright but the speaker of that platitude failed to believe and the pilot herself asked why she had said it and she knew not why only a second for her soothful pawing of the child’s face strayed over the vacant seat of the pinna, recognizing immediately her droitrual obligation to revenge, that there was no path so secure as what even a king could not be wrenched from and that the presence or absence of even the least most thing had power yet to post men to destines far of their choosing and that to decline was tantamount to attainder, the fate being in the nature. What more to say of her story here? This being the great stall of her progress.

The pilot lifted her into her lap and against her fending bunched her hair and turned her head towards the light. To see a slight infection on the left, a pus dripping mount on the right. Anaya stretched across the room and lifted a towel from the wall hanger and dried her. Then she clawed near the hardcase and unlatched it and threw it open. Among the full surgical ward of aienee implements she lifted out a bottle of mescal and put it in her hands.

Filth was caught in the glass. A chicory twig twisted up from the malformed vortex of the throat wherefrom wafted a perfume suggestive of portents and illusions.

Tis a dampener of hurt. Nature in its unbridled explorations did indeed plumb depths of sensation not to be visited. These creations endowed and separate knows too well, too well. The pilot brushed her hair. I dont have an anesthesiologist on call. Drink or do this sober.

Dachni would have endured more hurt more to hate but she was never able to hurt so much as she would have liked to hate. She drank. It was the first her stomach had roomed in almost a week and a dizzy vertigo befell her instantly. It brewed a landlash in her gut full of hail and vapor lightning in her lungs. While she caught her breath the pilot laid out the instruments necessary of the present operation. A rune bossed bottle, an electric scalpel, antiseptic wipes and swabs. She lifted her hair and Dachni fended mewling.

I know. I know.

The pilot disinfected the wound with the wipes and Dachni squirmed and punched but the pilot dislocated her own pelvis, such things aienee can do, so that the child was sitting on the shank of her thigh and she crossed her other leg over her so that she was steadied in a vice. A hairthin cold settled against the sidemont of her skull and a whining sting raced across it. Thick pus ribboned out the incision’s wake. Atrocious noxias. She howled and the howls echoed like a howl from the depths. The pilot stuck the scalpel in her fangs and rimmed the hole with two foreknuckles in an equal application of pressure that blurted out a yellowcake slime. Dachni clasped to her torso then and bawled. The pilot turned her head to let the pus drain and wiped it up where it had streamed down her neck and kept milking the wound until it oozed a watery dilution tinctured with blood. Then she curetted the wound, debriding the brimstone incrust, the rimpled malpais of scab and the contaminants of loam and leaf debris favorable to virus, arable to disease. When she down there showed a bitter aperture channeling viler news to her brains. She tripped out the cyst then and delivered it with forceps. Then she took up the bottle. It had a proboscis she dipped into the pus. It hummed a moment and a purple light flicked on and she sprayed a cloud of nanomachines into her ear canal that it would target the bacteria identified. The second ear received the same treatment and when she was done she muffed the wounds in sterile gauze. All the while Dachni quaked against her. Her tremulant breathing coming raggedly in starts while the cyst of this puslette oozed in its own swaddle like an abortion in amniotic filth.

Ontario P4

It may be prudent before the next episode, to mitigate as much as possible future outrage among the readership, to explanate a particular idiosyncrasy of mine by way of admitting that the first leg of my journey was in fact not on a train but a bus (those silver tubed Grayhounds if my recall is correct totally unremarkable-and after all what bus is remarkable?) though a train I did ride in later on. By virtue of a nature the storyteller is always tempted to sacrifice factual truth for abstracted truth. Essence as opposed to sidewalk. Nevertheless as I review and discover that this or this event did not happen here or then or to me I feel it is best to be upfront about it and at at the soonest opportunity admit the mistake so that like Montaigne I profess the worst I aught be charged with is a faulty memory.

Ah interiority alters all. Of a man sitting in a chair all we may be able to factually say about him is that he is sitting in a chair. We may go on to describe his surroundings, the chair he sits in, his company, what if any a beverage stands chilled or steaming before him, but if he is a disciplined gendarme, journeyman to the stoics, we pedestrians in the margins of his seeing blindness might never realize a whole universe may be collapsing or erecting in his brains. Thats the factual versus the real, the speculative real.

And here was the truth. My ticket had a bus’ logo stamped aside its watermark but my spirit (though at the time I had never even ridden a train) was guided by those slender seething rails and the spirit in six or seven hours (no omnipresence here) ferreted me to New York.