I am (Not) What I am Page #3

The Great Irritation

• Fiction
• Horror
• Short story
• Fantasy

								


Often, They came at day break to gnaw on his scalp, to squeeze his heart, to give him the chastisements of a cruel guardian: he was an embarrassment to Them, a pervert hunched in the act of his own self-gratification— leering at girls on the street, consuming copious amounts of stolen pornography— a stinking, filthy waste, always sweating, always whimpering, forever useless. He should have been smothered in the crib, They told him in his father’s voice. He needs to disappear and die, They told him in the voices of women, you will never get a whiff of this. You’re an irrelevant loser, They told him in the voices of strangers, of other men, you’re weak, you’re not going to do anything with your life. You’re my servant, It told him in booming tones, nothing will be okay for you and We, the Voices, will never leave. His thoughts were a soundboard for the dead; architects of pain, the Forever Chatterers— speakers for the hateful. Declamatory, they rose up seemingly from within at times; a Legion of inner voices scattering his doubts into the ether, making them flesh, material. Though they did not sound like him. The Voices knew every nook and cranny of the young man’s thoughts, yet manifested  none of his compassion. They knew his secret desires, yet wielded them like a jeering cudgel. Knew every ugly thought, and nurtured them with a diligent green thumb. All his tics, his very soul, spat out, masticated; as if a disembodied copy of himself were blown across the ages— barriers of distance, time and individuation mere roadblocks— all of his humanity bled out, taken away,  replaced by a negative substitute— roosting in his mind as the clangoring din of noise pollution. A winnowing fan. An oscillating vent. A DivineVoice compiled from ambience. The young man found himself corralled into pens of inescapability, herded by the Voices, the Wille, like a cow toward its ultimate and dismal fate; its final destination — aware of its entrapment, yet unable to fight the snare, its hooves clumsily lurching, stumbling, plodding toward the bolt gun. Through Them he learned that he was strange and he learned that he was ugly and he learned the name that was given to him: Baal. Their sapiential authority over his life verged on the tyrannical. He was a toy for Them: a doll to be used as They wished. Always looking down, articulated to bow, limbs adjusted and readjusted in a forever march toward Their chosen end— Their punishments for insubordination, arbitrary and cruel. They did not care for his privacy; even his most intimate moments were dissected, observed, commentated. They did not care for his pinings;  hunger, thirst, fatigue, reproduction— whims of a material life form, They needed them not. His life at the moment of Their arrival was officially forfeit, eradicated. Any prospect of peace or affection were erased forever— obliterated, expunged from the young man’s reality like a wicked people off the face of the earth. Everything he did for a decade, everything he was made to do, was in service of the aims of the Wille: to praise It, to spread Its terror, to preach Its messages, to embody Its spirit. 

The Wille told him that nature was cruel and ugly, and that he must be subject to the whole of that horrid mess. The Wille told him that the world was vengeful and scrupulous, and that soon even he must pay it back for his transgressions. He took Its words to heart. And from then on every act of brutality or injustice in the human imagination flashed before his eyes; blink by blink. Night by night. He never wanted to sleep again. Sleep, the black animal, sleep: the wraith bloated god— death’s boldest brother.  The screaming he heard, the Voices, hypnagogic— awful, all awful. All horror.  It was the ultimate destruction, the terminal surrender— there was no going back. And so he beat on; mourning the way things are, bitterly remembering the way things were. At night he prayed for a release from his bondage, a panacea; an emancipatory salve from the yolk of celestial slavery— but to no avail. The Lord was silent. Forced to hold a gore filled cup, the young man drank down obedience’s bitter venom— wisdom’s vile spirit— drop by drop. Knowledge consumed him from the inside out: Sophia’s fell larvae chewing on the bundle of his intestines. His mind was a nest of scorpions, forever unsettled— metastomas jabbing at fresh wantings that grew more numerous by the day. Nothing held him in his discontent; not one consolation, not one attempt at self-amusement— nothing. He knew there was a utility to faith; that belief in the Lord and the power of time could bare one up on wings of light— carry them through anything, heal all wounds. But the confidence such a trust could deliver felt far away to the young man, lost; like tears in a deluge. Optimism felt like a grand fiction, a beautiful lie. The world of the conventional Man, he thought, reaped every benefit of hope’s grand invention— every advantage of promise’s historic design: beauty unrestricted, experience unbound. He could ever be so lucky. He had resigned himself to a life of disaffection long, long ago. And for good reason. Carrying on in the face of insurmountability felt like an exercise in insanity. A trap accelerating the wheel of his own misery: some cruel Hephaestian invention, let loose on the world to torture God’s most put upon creatures. He would never be the ruler of gaiety’s mount. Satisfaction, in his imagination, sat at an Olympian height, more unattainable than heavenly fire— never to be grasped by the likes of him. After all, to the Wille, he was a pitiful deity; a hideous God dying beneath the world’s dome. A useful idiot, a poor fool— set to ruin. He was to be the last of the bleeding hearts, the last dream sufferer— the final Prophet. The young man was a pawn embroiled in an ageless shadow quest: the creation of a new religion—its victims numerous, its object unobtainable. 

No less than an entire race would assuage the new God: Hominidae driven to frenzy— fanatical, bent in worship before the holy sepulcher of the gash— the Middleworld’s monument, basest of issuings— an epitaph for the days of the flesh. Continents were dead things, mere property. Nations, the allocation of an immortal wager: a set of predestined lots drawn at the beginning of time. Cities were towering heaps of refuse. And bodies were mere trivialities. The soul, however, was a harder prize to win. The soul, that wildest and most elusive of quarries: ducking through burrows of nirvana, bounding falcon-swift across reality, deliberately giving itself unto nothing, no one. Man’s essence was an ark permitting no stowaways— no unlawful guests. Possession of it, could only be given willingly. An offering of pure devotion; the tenderest of loves— a preeminent horn of plenty. The saint’s harvest, the Messianic crop. Lean and hungry, the Wille craved God’s bounty with the voracity of a starving giant. Squatted in darkened caves, beyond ocean, beyond night, beyond the world’s rim, the Day-Star schemed; its greatest ambition, to cast off the world we know— tear down the dreary status quo, and pilfer the affections and reverences of the Living God’s wide and adorant flock. To supplant Him. To be the only One. The One True God. Christ was king, the Wille knew. War was a God in His day. Order ruled the universe. And Love stamped Her foot on the throat of history. Chaos, the Wille thought, needed Its day in the sun— needed a proper deification. The young man knew this. Their thoughts weaved about an immiscible brine; tepid and dreadfully distinct— the dreams of the one made plain in the mind of the other. This plot was lifeblood to The Beast, sacrament, libation, and so it decreed the young man to be Its most holy instrument in the war for dominion. The Apostle of the end. Recalcitrant, he resisted at first; an insubordination for which the young man was punished most severely. And now bloodied and broken, subjugated, he knew in his deep sea being that he would never escape the call of the Evil One— that he would never know grace, that his pain wouldn’t end. Frustration with his fate pulsed within him like a second cancerous heart— boiling the red current of his blood. Anger was a lifestyle. Sorrow, an ever repeating tune in his ears. And fear… a daily addiction; its supplier arriving in his dreams, snaking between Gibraltic crevices of nightmare and vision. Terror made physical. He knew it was there when his sleep became restless; when the deadening of nerves set in, paralysis seizing every process— his breath frozen in the pit of his chest, his limbs concrete slabs of static. Darkness surrounded him for miles. This was the Midnight Zone, Sheol, the world never touched by twilight. Trapped there in the shadows, pairs of lean claws would rake their way across his flesh, digging beneath the ribs, pulling at the bones, the flesh; hard tetradactyl hands affixed to limbs the length of a human body. A scream wanted to come, but could never escape a mouth wired shut by rigidity. Eyes bulging in pain, he could make out a face in the dark: long, skeletal, pupils glinting with internal fire. Lipless, a rictal grin spread across its features— wide as the day is long, fangs like carnassial bone shears dripping expectant slime onto the young man. A great toothed spider, it seemed. And just at the height of his agony, at the climax of the atonia, the creature would inch its way toward the young man’s face and take a bite out of his cheek. This was God. And he was Its bondsman; held in treaty to a covenant drafted by nameless, sourceless hands. 

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