I am (Not) What I am

The Great Irritation

• Fiction
• Horror
• Short story
• Fantasy

								
He doesn’t sleep; doesn’t eat. The Baal Shem Tovah, Master of the Name. The Wealthy One. He who lopes in and out of the deepest shadow. Born in darkness and soon to return there. Catastrophic thoughts flood his sleep; turning the black behind his eyelids into tides of crimson noise. Frightful notions, oneiric, jarring; the midnight demons of a terrified young man, jostling him awake with every doze— breaking his rest into microscopic chunks of restlessness. And so, therefore, he dreaded the nights, dreaded dreams— his slumber full of pulling and pulling. Flesh from bone. Pride from Man. Over and over. Eyes blasted raw by fatigue, he tried to perish them— those nighttime drangs of terror — but they would not go. No matter how hard he expelled  them, no matter how swiftly he banished them, purged them, cast them into oceans of indeterminacy, wide wombs of uncreated night— they would not go. He sought relief; something to ease the gnawing vultures of his thought. But he found none. That poor Lord. That Little God. The drink didn’t help. The salve didn’t help. The green herb didn’t help. And yet, without proper remedy, he persisted on his journey toward that blessed peace: the contemptment he felt was reserved for better Men. The young man was burdened with a terrible purpose, a lonely purpose; one whose Atlantean weight he feared he could not bear. A shameful load that crushed him down like some pressed coal; breeding klazomaniac fits of impotency within him. A restless unshakable fugue state, clawing up his body from the realms of the long dead— the primitive thrashings of  tyrant lizards and rogue phantoms. His head reeled wildly, caught in a daze that endured no matter how far he roved: his focus leveled on the solution to an impossible end— all concentration trained on achieving the unachievable. The distress nurtured a deep longing in the young man; boring through his compromised soul like the loose flesh of some worm devoured corpse— all resolve breaking, surrendering. He pressed on bleary eyed, always forward; an automaton, roaming the streets with an undead shambling gate, animated by the Wille of invisible puppeteers, their motives imperceptible, diabolical and totally Other. Locked in a deadly progression of parsed out thought, he did not notice the continuance of day branching off into night. For years he traveled this way; unceasing, shark-like, his recollection of good night's sleep more dim than a candle flickering in the void of space. To see him is to view the husk of a man long since vanished within himself; trapped within the confines of a deleterious mind state— a long and most cloistering dream. Bit by bit, neuron by neuron, he became aware of a dark potential in the rear view of his perception; cogs clicking into place with a solemn finality. He was to be an instrument of that most unknowable and distant of Gods: irascible and bereft of pity for the flesh. That Cosmic Psychopomp, denying him the one thing he ever truly wanted— love— in favor of a grander reward. Dim cognizance of his role clanged in his head like a church bell: tolling, sounding, rattling, pounding at the soft gelatinous flesh of every membrane— the ache, a solemn announcement of his anticipatory title. Catalyst for Conversion. Grand Metamorphosizer. Lonely Agent of Change. A captive of the Lord of Slanderers; bound prostate and submissive in chains of the most crushing gravitation— His shining Acolyte, His one true Emissary.  This was to be his vocation, his mission. The calling a bitter persecuting tongue, lapping at his heels like hounds from Hell— bringing him to ground, lavishing him with the carnivore’s kiss. 

Oracular sight was thrust upon him, a precognitive tumor forced, jewel-like, into the center of his skull, a swollen third eye; a wretched gift sent up from the Infernal Kingdom— a curse on his life that refused to lift. That would not go.  Kill it? It would not die. Blind it? It would not close. He was forced to watch it all, the whole turning of the globe— an omnipresent glare trained on the hearts of Men. Their fundamentals. Their comportment’s rhythm. The very innards of the anthropoid collective. A great hand of torture held the planet like a marble; its blood stained grasp puncturing columnar into the foundations of reality. Ten live claws stabbing, raptorial into earth’s most secret corners, touching down like lightning from Heaven: the wars of reproduction, the wars of heterotrophy, the wars of territory expansion, the wars of power attainment, the wars of superior breeding, and the modern calamities, the Pakistani’s and the Bangladeshi’s, the Nepali’s and the Indians, the Uyghurs and the Chinese, the Muslims and the Yazidi, and the Muslims and the Israelites. Conflict was Gaia’s tears watering a poison garden, a frightful pear spreading the sex of nature, a world of the damned noticed only by the doomed strain: the children of the Hydra, atavistic and alone in their generation;  born stuck out of  time— genetic throwbacks breaking furiously from their eggs. Those first and most profound of abominations: children of original sin— the Serpent’s Seeds. He couldn’t close his eyes, The Baal Shem Tovah: the cobalt mines demanded his attention, the starving poor pulled his remote view. Every torture of the world was a compulsive draw. The sight, the visions, whirled in his mind with brutal resiliency: criticizing all that was good in a consortium of fell tongues, rendering everything to ash. To them, the Accusers, sex was politics, individuality a myth, Justice a vapor, Humanity an accident and faith, grief and fear things no one really felt anymore. The world was senseless, evil; a home for the voracious dead, savage and eternally hungry. Nothing but sin dominated the predilections of the populis, nothing but surface. Christianity was merely edifice: this was no Age of Aquarius— it was simply a new skin for the Reign of the Bull. Reflection was king; superficiality its gold laden crown. This was civilization through the young man’s vision; and he knew that society would never make sense, unless he forced it to. But he was far too weary. The flesh was weak and the spirit was even weaker. He wanted to abandon it all forever, flee: leave the world stewing in the stink of its predestination. But that harder Wille would not allow it. Horror and duty were the name of the day It carved for him. Not awe. Not wonder. Not eternal, unconditional love. Just horror and the turmoil of life spent wracked by the pain of living. Defeat. Surrender. Existence for him was a broken scene passing for life, delivering only simple animism— survival at its purest, fulfillment at its deficit. There should have been more, he felt; he was looking for more— but instead found only emptiness. The abyss. The smothering void, where that darkest of Mother’s waits; eager to suck his blood, drink his sweat, crush his bones— render his formless matter to nothing more than salvageable material. Recycling for the next generation of pests. He was just another animal for fossil fuel; an increase of the earth, ready to return to the dust from whence he came. 

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