PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF IGNATIUS: CAPITOL / MALVERDE / ITHACA / VECTOR
A man in tight pants stands center of a room, and what an inadequate word ‘room’ is here. Who is this? Macbeth, we’ll name him same as the usurper in Billy’s big delicious play because he is the same man. No, this is not literal, but literafigurative. For all men are many men other than themselves; all men are the one singular instance of themself in time and place. Inhabit the contradiction with he and I. Your reward for finding the mind-body calm to pull off such a feat of hallucinatory empathy is to taste the fear of finality with him. The sour taste from nowhere. Heat in Macbeth’s face and blood drumming in his ears to drown out the flunkies flailing around the penthouse.
We inherit all that we are, all the non-tangible shit that makes a person do person things: language, gesture, bearing, belief, vector toward what we might be. This man inherited nothing, the one we’re calling Macbeth. He was born on a dirty dry rotting promenade of a float farming town far East end of the island in 1995–the region that might as well be the “rust belt” of the People’s Republic.
He stands, arms outstretched as staff and flunky and tailor stretch Kevlar-imbued Egyptian cotton over his lanky limbs. “I am an astronaut” he says aloud to no one, 150 stories above the dirt he was born in and the saying calms his nerves. Slightly. They’re coming for him. The bird-shit covered peasants that should thank him for their meager existence are coming to the capital to do horrible things to he and his and their money.
Macbeth King of the Consortium, having the contents of an arms locker draped over him like epaulets–grenades and spare magazines tacked on like the crown jewels. Funny thing, well funnier than the Suit in tacticool even: he’s not really the boss. Shroom rules the roost and runs the Consortium and the People’s Republic from the bunker beneath the North peninsula of the island (one of them). This has been the way of things since the coup in 1984.
King Macbeth of Kayfabe, the Consortium man supreme has plenty of power. Look at the Adderall-addled killers in fine kevlar suits all about him. Mean, hard, operator type men and women, meanest money can buy, bunkered up with him, ready to deliver and receive bullets as needed to keep him on a corporate throne literafiguratively in the clouds above the island. But the throne is gilded shit that never belonged to Macbeth, and the man knows this as sure as he knows his doom is coming–certainty in bone and bowel.
*
ERSTWHILE AND ELSWHERE: ISLAND’S INTERIOR
*
Leviathan’s spine refers to a series of low hills strung like a long string of vertebrae across the island from east to west or verse-vice. Keep in mind the island is but a baby Leviathan. We’re talking an island whose honest dimensions–reckoned in math irrational as her geometry spans a number of Earths you need scientific notation to write right. Ignatius is a big girl.
She’s got holes in her bones, Ignatius. Don’t worry, she’s built sturdier and weirder than we, and cave holes in her body are a feature of her kind (not a bug or defect). The good osteoporosis. Tube caves with walls cut-sculpted through the lava rock by the wind-impossible that still whistles through them from nowhere-to-nowhere.
There are pantries and supply caches. Generators with (and without) proper ventilation. Bird-caged bulbs at odd intervals dangling from poorly tacked serpentine cables in a rough hewn home like a human ant colony. People tripping over children and conduits. Sharp hint of shit smells, tunnel turns at an odd angle and it’s the rich odor of a community kitchen. Nurseries. Armories. Every tool of the permanent propaganda war against whomever-is-in-power are present: Ratchett’s printing press rots in the corner of a server room where Cat-5 Medusa carries the memes and the choreographed comrade dance videos and burning missive comradely hot takes on the events of the day (the progression of History) to the digital barricades.
Leaflet shops work constantly to produce paper that disrespects the sexual prowess and integrity of the Consortium’s leadership and graffiti teams practice their craft on every available cave wall (before deployment to the capitol).
Rosa spent the mis-spent portion of her youth here, the wild time (in so much as a driven one has a ‘wild’ time). She would keep one foot in the world of Bird People her whole life–for the place consumed her mother whole-literally and herself figuratively.
She finally told it, honest told the end of her story–when her accidental family met calamity and found itself up a tree. Yanqui airman beat his retreat to Utah or parts like it. Lucretia ate of the fungal root, it’s fruit, and for a time spanning decades Rosa’s mother became a slowly dissolving oracle.
The whip-chord girl felt the guilt, the special guilt, of neglecting to savor time with a mother that stepped past the veil. She stayed close to the camp where her mother rooted and hung on every word of madness that came out of the oracle’s mouth and the illumination profane-sacred pressed between the words. Those words of prophecy were what told Rosa to encourage young You-You’s wanderlust, and why Momma R thought life in the US would keep Ulysses safe from the fate he so recently chose: to consume-and-be-consumed by Shroom.
“Bitter irony” the last thing Rosa says. Finishes her story just as the awed people congregate around the Missionaries, Rosa, and bio-glowing Ulysses. The portion of You-You present in his body and on that iteration of the island of Ignatius would regard his mother’s story telling with admiration: her narrative timing was impeccable.
“Show don’t tell.” Fuck that. No. Ignatians tell. Forcefully too. But whenever Momma Rosa wants to leave the hermeneutics to you, to the audience? Ulysses knows, just the same as her neighbors, her students, the way dad knew–she tells it off a cliff. Rosa’s story ended as the group arrived at their destination just the way your favorite song sometimes coincides with your parking spot. It was the deliberate-accident that rebukes any and all questions from her tiny audience pertaining to Lucretia’s motivations.
Later long-later when all are rested and watered, the bird people gather. Each and every node in cave-warren constellation from tail to snout of the island gathered its modest throng. It’s a Connie–a Consensus (for they’re pretty certain they’ll come to one, Bird Folk are well practiced and efficient-ish in their micro-democratic process).
Mics dangle from ceilings or cling to bent-broke stands or pass from hand to hand and so on. Survivors account. Fact finding and accounting for the great many unaccounted for. Every Bird Camp on the island went dark, at best a piss-trickle of survivors came carrying accounts about the same as what Rosa saw when she took the accidental party to see ‘the’ oracle (her oracle): rot wrought by Consortium men. Every bird camp in the woods and every oracle, every person merged and being munched slowly by shroom on the island gone in one fell swoop.
Now, the survivors the massacred constellation of town-camp float-gardens after-action’s the experience: “It went like this…” the tight pants walked out of the woods or stepped out of the wall and started firing and didn’t stop until everyone was dead or the birds chased them off. Again and again-again.
“Are we in danger here?” Someone finally says it out loud to the microphone in another cave, a node some miles away. But the fear felt everywhere in every heart in every cave crawls wire and radio wave with haste and gets loud real loud: “They’re coming here next?” The question asked with panicked certainty.
“No!” Rosa. Momma Rosa, not her turn to speak but she sees need for the Teacher Voice she’s kept in her back pocket these years. She grabs the mic. One sharp shouted “No!” and then it’s velvet: “Whomever can hear me, This is Rosa REDACTED at Cite Central. If you are not cite central kill your microphones temporarily please.” She repeats three times. She holds a hand in the air in some goofy gesture, rotates so the whole room can see her hand gesture the people begin mimicking. “I’ll tell all of you why these caves are safe if you let me.” The panic clamor continues a while-long-while before one then another-other-and-another join her with their silent coyote’s in the air–hands held high and mouths closed. Then, only then, does the teacher speak.
“The Consortium already tried their little wall walking tricks on these caves.” The huh-wah? murmurs. “January, 1985. After the coup. Things were a mess. They’d just finished consolidating power in the capitol, for you young ones that means killing or imprisoning and then killing anyone who is a threat to the new regime. And they looked then to the next set of threats to their power, tried to come right at us, our heart.” She says nothing a too-long pause.
Lets silence hang stale till a young one raises a hand and Rosa answers: “Yes sweetie? What happened? They littered the walls. Took years to find and dig them all out. Something magnetic or magic or both in Ignatius’ bones messes up their little teleporters. And as we learned” gesturing to the missionaries and her bioluminescent son, “they don’t really have the juice for gratuitous teleportation for some reason.”
“So we’re safe?” from the crowd. “We’re safe here?”
It’s then that Ulysses gives his mother two great gifts. The glowing blue man pops his pecks and perks up: “We’re safe until we starve. They took your oracles and your gardens from you.”
*
The second gift: the whipchord woman is two places at once. Truly bifurcated in consciousness and being–Rosa at once addresses the crowd of crowds in person and over squawk-box and hovers cross legged and ethereal above herself. There, a meter or two away, her son floating astral the same and still beat-bruised rotten blue and bio-luminescing.
If she’s shocked, she’s not showing it. “I’m so sorry.”
That’s why we’re here mom. I forgive you.
“No. I failed you. This hippy astral shit is proof I failed you.” Mom, I’m Bird Man. I’m The One. “No, you most certainly fucking are not. You are “A” one. This thing eats you. The oracle showed me. Your fucking grandmother showed me, You-You. You beautiful dumb bastard, and I should have gone with you. I should’ve gone to the States with you and forgot this shit-covered…” Mom? “Yes?” You did your best, and I love you.
You know they both cry. The embrace. The whipchord woman wraps her arms around her baby all grown and finds herself whole–body and mind one-and-whole again–not one half a fraction of a second passed.
*
Rosa lets the crowd murmur, catches them again at the crest of an emotional wave nobody seems to see but she: “If we run and hide, we wait to starve. We die.” Here comes a heckler. “Who am I? Yah? I live deh-skah-un-a-Urth gonna come-an-tell how it is? I live both places. Scar on the Earth and the Woods. Speak both places. Walk on stilts. walk on streets. These caves know me, little one.” The man is not little. “We good?” Heckler nods, his challenge satisfied.
“I worked for the Boss in ’84. Coup came and we ran and we hid. We endured the Consortium running the whole show. When my oracle told me what was to be and what had best be not? I ran and I hid and I took my baby. I took my beautiful boy glowing over there and I cast him off this island like he was Hephaestus, let the Yanquies” hard-slurs the word, “take him to save him from a fungal fate. My whole life, I ran from fate and I failed.
Rosa finds eyes in the room. Lets the moment hang heavy again: “The Consortium is weak. They will not be weak forever. I am done running. I am going to strap on stilts and march on the capitol with as many Puffins as I can lure with me, and I’m going to remove the Consortium from power. This is my suggestion and contribution to this Consensus meeting. I am hoping for enough volunteers to form an improvised marching band.”
The next morning, Momma Rosa marched on the Capitol on stilts and wearing foliage like bird plumage, her face painted for war and carrying a base drum on a marching harness like she carried Ulysses third trimester: with a lil’ lean and wide set to her hips.
The old woman made of whipchord had requested a marching band. She high stepped out of the hills and through the woods with an army on stilts armed with musical instruments and dressed as great spindly trees five meters high.
*
IGNATIUS: EXCLUSION ZONE NORTH (EN ROUTE)
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Ulysses wanders North, bruise-beaten blue-purple and glow-strobing bright in the pre-dawn birds gaggle gathered about him. The throng keeps thronging and proper dawn falls through the trees on a second army of Puffins, You-You and Todd at its center, marching through the woods.
Why did you come, Todd? “You’re voice is doing that ethereal, otherworldly god-man thing from the movies.” Todd, Focus. “I have a million fucking questions, and it seemed like a good idea at the time?” We’re going to a Consortium bunker. The Consortium bunker. Armed goons. Get tactical. Please don’t say things like that. It’s dangerous, Todd.
Todd puts a hand on You-You’s shoulder, “Damn you filled out. You are jacked, man. But somebody has to bring home those nukes right? I need that win. Let me have that win. Let me look strong in front of my wife.” Ok, but you should probably know, I’m pretty sure I sweat LSD.
On they march, the two men and the bird horde, merrier by the meter and mile, long kilometer to the island’s northern reaches. The Exclusion Zone–named thus since the they brought the Yanqui bomber down (radiation they say, nope). By the time the two and their horde reach the burnt chapel that conceals the deep-bore bunker underworld elevator, Ulysses and Todd are both Blue and butt naked–the mere mortal covered in the hallucinogenic resin Ulysses sweats. Both wield the Consortium’s little toy-looking sci-fi pistols.
“How in the fuck do we get Puffins down an elevator?” Yeah I didn’t think of that either. After a moment, the glowing man-god closes his eyes and reaches at once within and without. All around the forest resounds, bough-creaking and dirt sighing as Ulysses grabs hold of the escape hatch. Every proper spider hole or paranoid dictator bunker has a concealed escape hatch (or three). Ulysses raises his arms high and the mighty web of mycorrhizal forces a door ajar a football field away.
This is how we get the puffins in. And the boys and the birds begin the long zig zag march down into the depths of the North Null Site. Once therein, and once they’ve fought past many a dangerous man in tight pants, they’ll pass seamlessly through the bowels of the bunker to bowels the same in a bunker under Earth (0x2D3601DD).
*
SOUTHERN AGRICULTURAL DISTRICT FLOAT FARM G4 / CAPITOL / ITHACA
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The rebels stopped at Rosa’s home to rest a while, for stilts and a drum is a lot. A younger one carried the boom-boom when the marching band army set to set out again. Birds. They need many-times-many Puffins, and her glowing boy took the flock-of-flocks a great horde north to battle Consortium men.
The lady who plays the town’s organ, the thing grafted-through a tree, is somebody’s nana. Her knee’s are too swollen to march on the capitol but she wishes the kids luck and promises to “play somethin real dank and nasty to send you out the door.”
Verily, nana shreds. The old-timer puts her chained-spectacles on and readies some old marked up sheet music. She lights the spliff pinned behind her ear, mutters a prayer to some private god, and melts everybody’s faces with a tune too old for any present to know.
The organ shakes the Earth and calls every perpetually-enraged-Puffin for miles, a fresh horde. They walk the rest of the way, all the way, to the capitol in long strides. Not a mapped route, but a moment. You’re expecting some Ignatian word, right? They don’t have a word one for those days after years of nothing changing when “ten years happen in a day.”
I choose to explain it this way: Ignatius likes rosa. The biggest girl likes the Boss Lady and just as she did for her son, sped her passage–squirmed-scrunched to bring her head and the Capitol closer to Rosa and her gaggle. Every marcher, stone sober or rightly stoned, marveled at the speed of their passage. The expected grim march became a dancing procession.
*
Road down from the woods is long enough to let the fear simmer. From the tippy-top buildings, there’s clear sight lines. No trees for three-quarters of a mile around the city–not coincidentally a quarter mile of clear cut for each time in island history the city has been overrun by birds mad enough to leave the trees.
Puffins dance, bird bopping in perfect time to the big drums. When the winds play, the birds stand tall shriek and trumpet. When the brass shouts they leap, try their clumsy darting flight, and fall back to Earth ready-as-always to fight.
Consortium Man Supreme has the full might of the Ignatian army at his disposal, for what that’s worth. When he does what any self-respecting strong man does in such times: tries to turn the guns on his own. The Ignatian army refuses to shoot. They’re all float farm boys in their father’s uniforms looking down the road at what might well be extended family. The officer that refuses the order formally puts it this way: “We shoot a bird and Puffins bee-line the town and murder everyone, sir” Last word is certainly a slur as the officer cuts the call without waiting for dismissal.
Here we are, caught up to beginning of the episode: Consortium Man Supreme donning armor while he watches the woods come for from the best seat in the house: 150 stories high, trapped, or about to be.
END IGNATIUS 9
MORE TO COME