I am (Not) What I am Page #2

The Great Irritation

• Fiction
• Horror
• Short story
• Fantasy

								


All preconceptions of identity were vapor, fabrications. He was a non contingent human being, an aberration: a statue hewn from the rock— unannexable. Now and forever an alien amongst the other boulders of the quarry. Whatever name was given to him at birth was lost a long time ago; whatever connection to the human race, extinguished. The vision, the prospect of an internal exile, stretched out before him long and cavernous as a tunnel with no end in sight— no light; the whole of his life, from beginning to end, laid naked clean and bare. A detailed charcoal-paper schematic. A blindsighted map; its course diving head-long into dread, shadow. He was afraid, afraid. Afraid of the Wille, that demoniac presence and its demands. Afraid of omniscience, afraid of its eyes— sapphic, piercing. Afraid of time; its passage predictable, slow, wasted— an invisible suck ticking down to the final and most agonizing of disappointments. Afraid of God, the Almighty Shiddai, whose back he feared was turned on him forever;  punishment, he thought, for some ancestral crime— perhaps the atrocity of his birth. Afraid of his purpose; who he would become at the end of the road. Afraid of Men; their ways perplexing and mysteriously irritating. Afraid of cruelty; its ramrod station in his mind firmly set. Afraid of death, the Emperor Worm. Afraid of everything, the whole widening gyre of creation. But chiefest of all, he was afraid of the Voices. They appeared one night, manifesting out of a cross-faded stupor. They have not left his side for over a decade now. Whispering. Chiding. They call to him by name: Baal Shem Tovah, Wolfman, patterns of words woven out of patchworks of wind and sound— irresistible to his crumbling sanity. He was not sure if They radiated from within or emanated from without. But he did know this: Theirs was the way and the light of the Wille— the Dark One, The Day-Star, wealth streaming at His lap in some underground cavern. He, that Son of Morning, was no more inexorable from the young man’s flesh than the very hands that crafted Him. That crafted the whole of reality. In the imagination of the young man, the Wille was as integral and concise as a breath of oxygen, a splitting of cells. Matter, to him, was Lucifer upward groping to an unknowable and alien God. Invisible, forever cold— distant. A Janus faced being: sometimes sunshine and light, sometimes darkness and sighs— forever unimpressed with the whimperings of Men. Their pathetic ribald strivings, small trifles measured against the scope of the cosmos. The Wille shared the same nature as its gelid Father. It was selfish, cunning: Its ejaculation serpentine, eternal— a bursting of cloud, an explosion of atoms, the perennial rhythm of a world bent unto chaos. A great ouroboros of creation and annihilation— fire and rebirth, the nature of a malicious Phoenix. The mind of that vast penetration— dark as the night, immortal, prodigious— was as injurious to the young man as a gangrenous sore: its workings  given up to chronic fits of hypocrisy and emotional whiplash— a schizoid bipolar musculature, tossing the young man to and fro, confounding him. He did not understand, could never hope to understand, such an impenetrable entity; his scope finite, mortal, locked within the confines of a human mind. Even the most perspicacious intellects of an age ten centuries away could never decipher such an immense codex. Intensity of intensities, the Wille knew not the pain of limitation, exertion— a life spent working by the sweat of one’s brow. It killed where It wished, when It wished; the whim of an emperor. Exalted and miserly of hand. 

That Old Man of the Mountain was everywhere, everything: omnipresence incarnate— Its size eclipsing small moons of hate and desire, love and regret, pain and death. Regeneration Its nonfluctuant state. Meanwhile, evanescence colored the esse of the young man’s life. Everlasting loss: his father the first casualty, cut down in his prime by a gushing brain hemorrhage— the light of his life stamped out, his finances the second, every digit of his social security and bank account numbers mysteriously exposed through a series of internal hacks, rendering him penniless, his home the third, its foundation fuel for a vicious gas fire, never to be rebuilt, rendering him homeless,  his complexion the fourth, infested with flesh eating contaminants— fungus, parasites; reducing him, effectually, to a leper in the eyes of his fellow Man— scalp mottled with hair, yellowing, flaky, skin cratered by pores, putrescent boils, cysts— a Job-like affliction, his health was the fifth,  his body rapidly declining through grave infections and continual fasts, his career prospects the sixth, an unfortunate series of sudden firings and failed job hunts, culminating in a ruined reputation— no one would have him, and so, forced to steal, his record was seventh, his multiple robberies thwarted by the authorities, landing him in jail on several occasions— wherein he was assaulted, battered and processed. Every turn introduced a new misery, a fresh tribulation; his bad luck, a life's curse, distinguished by perennial impermanence— the final sentence for the sin of living. Everything he ever had, everything he ever could have, was taken away in the blink of an eye. Save his life, of course… the Wille would not allow the theft of his life. And so, like some dragon envenomated victim, dull and uselessly clawing for escape,  the Baal Shem Tovah was persecuted: hounded second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour for the rest of his days— stalked by some phantom of the past. The very air oppressed him with the wagging of vile tongues: pillars of wind and noise striking down his fragilities. There was deceit in the Voices: They told him that he was loved, that They loved him. They came at night to sleep in his bed: he felt Them in his dreams, scooching in behind him, hugging him, kissing his lips, pressing against his ear, giving him the promises of a woman to a man— that everything would be okay, that They would never leave— only to snicker in his face, smiling like exploding spring. There was hatred in the Voices: They told him he would never be happy, that he would never be accepted, that he would never have a wife nor a family nor a casual lay, that he would never own a property, that They would take away everything from him,  that he was better off dead, that he would die eventually, that the hemorrhage that took his father would come for him, that the cancer that claimed so many of his family would ravage him, that a heart attack, stemming from his drug addicted lifestyle, would asphyxiate him (and that in a sick way, he would enjoy the breath play), that he deserved this treatment, and that he might as well try to take his own life again. Jump from a bridge if you want to, They said. Take a fist full of pills if you want to, They said. Hang yourself by the neck if you want to, They said. Walk into traffic, if you want to, They said. Drink yourself to death, if you want to, They said. 

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