“Angelus Novus”
*
It’s 1933 in Germany on Earth. Many Earths. Where in Germany? Everywhere, or at least the feeling of it. There is a man named Walter who has consumed a pharma-potent cannabis concoction as part of a study. In doing that, he begins to perceive (if only in the throes) the shimmering tangle of threads that link all life, here and beyond. He follows a few of them, finds similar versions of himself doing the same in familiar circumstances.
There, where he wrote illuminated fragments, sentences still contemplated quite infernally and with sacred effort and solemn patience by those who don elbow patches. There, in the almost-comfortable chair where he wanted for cookies and discerned “profane illumination.” That’s where he began writing.
What’s Walter got to do with anything? Not a damn thing, except everything. For it was Walter, in one of creation’s many playthroughs and endless new-game-pluses that wrote the first “distributed” text penned by a mortal. He composed it with himself, across Earths and iterations when he was illuminated, when the threads binding he-to-he and to the broader “we” were quite clear.
Some portion of Walter’s text exists, dense and delicate and beautiful, in every iteration of Earth in which there was a Walter.
But he paid the cost of reaching laterally across: what he brought back was barely intelligible to him and took great effort to translate into what would-have-been-a-book. While mortal elbow-patches elaborate on Walter’s Earthly fragments, immortals have access to the text whole and complete.
Infernal scholars and scribes understand that Walter’s soul sickness was at once a product of self-association (contact with other iterations of himself) and what was told to him by the Angel of History. You know that angel well: the one that’s always weeping.
*
FRAME: Earth (42); LOCATION: Detroit, MI; Lake Manicouagan, Quebec; DATE: 1975
*
This happens twice: weight of a burden over time determines the future field of possibilities, it determines it absolutely.
In Quebec, water brought the heft. There is a lake, two-lakes made one, in the remnants of a 214-million year old impact crater. The weight of water and ten years brought a not-unexpected subsidence, a shimmy that showed up on seismographs. Nothing wild. Not a quake. A tremor. The Earth, sensing its hand tremble, quickly made a fist and stuffed the fist in its pocket. On the artificial island at the center of Quebec’s eye, Mt. Babel grew a whole-fraction-of-a-millimeter, and a substance un-like oil began to seep to the surface.
In Detroit, history and the parts “not even past”, the parts carried across generations–that was the weight. There is a neighborhood cut twice, by interstates. Long stretches of tall homes on small lots between downtown and a factory belt like a donut, at this point barely rusted. There is a road rendered a dead end by many-laned-car-artery and the great ditch it sits in. There is a squat concrete pillbox looking thing down near the freeway, and another and another, each within eyesight of the next (and the last), on down the road.
There are, here on REDACTED Street, families who came from Montgomery, Prague, Kiev and places like them at times like these: through luck, providence, or paranoia some people self-preserved by fleeing something awful.
When the freeway cut the neighborhood, and when the flight to the burbs started in earnest these families, none particularly wealthy, stayed clumped in the homes they’d bought near the road-side bomb-shelters, maybe-in-part-because. Oh, ignore the impracticality of fighting for shelter with commuters scurrying off the freeway. It was about the symbol that sat, the visual equivalent of an electric fan when you’re falling asleep. Symbol, totem of safety, and a freeway to get-away if they had to run from something again (doesn’t matter what). And they raised kids, and some portion of “that”–lodged in between genetics and learned behavior–found its way into generations and multitudes. And so some portion of the population of humans can, in a very real way, sense calamity. Not prophecy as such (unless you count self-fulfilling, the most common kind).
House closest to the freeway, there is an attic apartment, the kind where the stairs stand on stilts tacked to the house. Looks like an insect, like its about to collapse or run away. Inside Sam, a young man who missed Vietnam by accident of birth (year not privilege or wealth) lays in bed with a young woman, Lilith. She passes him the lit roach and curls up with her head on his chest.
*
FRAME: EOT ; LOCATION: Church (MISTRANSLATION: SANCTUARY); SUBJECTS: MANIFOLD
*
Two women, equal and opposite in all things, occupy the pulpit with two more. Robes, jammies. Coffee. Weed and contemplation. There is vigorous discussion. The Parson and Maddie hover cross-legged. The Witch A(79) and Kid pace.
The words of each woman contribute a portion of the ghostly holographic, infographic display. Fae-fire flicking in and out, light dripping down the clouds of weed smoke to compose the visual aid.
“Hell, heaven, and we want the same thing: the next one-in-a-trillion.” Maddie.
“Woland wants the Trillion, has an infernal horde.” Kid. “And a universal machine, nothing like the machine, but it speaks math quite well.”
“And god’s machine?” The parson, baked as fuck. She is informed that god’s proxy, the machine is engaged in the search, with all the g-men in heaven’s host. “Ok, so why can’t I say it will take them a long time to find her?” Who says it’s a her? From the pacing witch.
“I do.” The stoned Parson. “Cause the un-time shit here.” But there’s consequence. “Without time” See you get it. “I don’t though.” And the parson consoles herself levitating a cookie to mouth, by will alone.
A(79) “so how do we find her?” blowing smoke that does not calm her.
“Make our own machine, out of mushrooms.” Not funny.
“No that’s a perfectly valid building material for a biological computer.” Kid, dead-serious. “The two machines are trying to search every Earth in the Fruit of Creation. Good for them. The answer is 42, in your terms Earth (42).”
*
FRAME: Earth 42
*
Later Lilith and Sam will make comic books and children’s books. Lilith will illustrate and write and Sam will write, and they will be fabulously unsuccessful (except for an apocalyptic graphic novel in the early 90’s).
They’ll have a kid long before that, and he’ll get the job with the tie. The one for the auto contractor that leads to the one with the oil company. And he writes copy. Little advert love-poems to nature while the company pisses all over it.
She teaches art at a Uni (pronounced: you-knee) and a Comm College (or two). They both raise the kid, feed them the same steady diet of sci-fi, ghost stories, tall tales, and myths that sustained them. They watched the kid’s imagination flourish, though she was a weird one.
*
FRAME: EOT (GREAT WASTE); DATE: (NULL(B.O.E))
*
The Witch’s lonely liminal shack on the edge of the Great Waste, the endless sea of identical dunes marching to nowhere, is empty by the time the wandering congregants and the former Custodians find it. Mary’s brew remains.
Some portion of the Custodians drink the brew and suffer as “I” did, and some are given speech. They begin the work of teaching that gift to their comrades. And some portion die in pain.
And the congregants drink the brew, unable to resist the temptation of profane illumination. And though they are dead, some die again. The rest can see the path forward.
*
They walk, two bands on the scorched plain at the end of time, half the congregation, poisoned with ichor but free of their want for war. The former Custodians now speaking or quickly learning to, will not stop for any reason. They chatter, chat, story, and sing. They run up and down the length of the long pilgrimage, looking for new beings to talk to.
The two bands merge and walk along the scorched plain at the End of Time, certain of their destination and clueless of their purpose.
*
TO: MANAGER (REDACTED): TOPIC: EARTH(S) (0x28- 0x49); AUTHOR: DEMON 2nd Class A(48)
*
On one of these primate-infested hell-holes, there is a perhaps-significant lead: a short-series indie comic. The plot is a plague from a parallel Earth, as told through a child’s prophetic dreams.
The illustrations are particularly promising. Requesting permission to investigate.
*
RE: EARTH(S) (0x28- 0x49); AUTHOR: DEMON 2nd Class A(48)
*
You were a primate. Permission granted, tool.
*
FRAME: EOT; LONELY LIMINAL: 0x2A (PROXIMAL TO)
*
A(84) is driving back home, so much as any of he-and-his can claim to have one, when he sees a red streak across the ‘sky.’ He pushes the accelerator to the floor, through the floor, and follows to it’s end. The thing is flame trailing sparks until it finds its mark: a Lonely Liminal by the side of the road that runs over the scorched ash at the End of Time.
The skeleton of a roadside diner has a hole in the roof and crater behind the counter. In the kitchen, on the timeless linoleum there shimmers a pool of light that leads to a world-entire*1 beyond. A demon, in a scorched cheap-suit much like a g-man’s, is on his hands and knees, it’s face pressed to-through the floor–buried shoulder-deep in the pool of light.
A(84) hobbling on a cane in the Plague Doctor’s nose. The fuckup with the big nose missing-tip, kneels a few feet away from the Demon, produces a pistol from his robes, points it at the creature. He cocks the weapon and leans his head into the pool of light to-and-through the floor.
Two near identical beings, in shape and heft, opposite entire in all measures ephemeral-aethereal are in two places at once: the ghost of a diner on the scorched plain and Earth(42)
What follows is what they saw, as the demon (pursued by the Plague Doctor) wove a web of specific intersections about Earth (42).
*
*1 TRANSLATION DISPUTED (ALL TRANSLATIONS ARE DISPUTED)
*
FRAME: Earth (42)
*
Fracking and tar sands exploitation came to this Earth decades early, oil men dug in Canada as if called, and a world thirstier-than-most fed its cars on what was buried in the North. They dug deep, and prospected far and wide. Soon, for reasons no one could entirely explain, (for sweet crude is so sweet) Canadian oil, became the most sought after on Earth.
They’re running off the climate cliff quicker than your world, reader, and they’re even calmer about it than you all. It’s as if something over the edge is calling to them, something behind them pushing them off.
*
Sam had the dreams, nightmares actually, and Lilith illustrated and strung an “end-of-everything” plot over the dark drawings like holiday lights. And the book, the comic thing actually found an audience. But life got heavier. The dreams got darker. They were broke. Then the kid was coming, and he got on meds, and the dreams stopped. Then no dreams at all. They never finished the comic. Never concluded the story.
*
Now the daughter has the dreams. Dez, Dezzy, brat. The sullen one. The moody one. The one always scribbling. The one with the attitude. The one who doesn’t see the point of cleaning, because it’s just going to get messy again. The one that’s the pickiest goddamn eater in the history of the world and gets her melodrama from her mom (or the father would claim). Dez is the one who sees the future in her dreams quite accurately.
She admitted it so freely, the naiveté of a child. And Sam, her dad, was scared he’d passed his madness on to her. Mom said, it’s the mark of an imaginative one. The child scribbled and wrote what she saw. And she grew closer to her mother. Lilith said she believed the dreams were “just dreams” and certainly not madness or sacred visions. And the child, Dezzy, learned not to freely reveal to people that she had visions of the future. She kept her gift close, for it was hers alone.
*
The kid is in a sleeping bag turned blanket. In bed in a small bedroom turned laundry pile, she wears a thing her mother gave her around her neck, always around her neck. When the chain broke, she laced a shoe-string through the old-metal eye on the pendant–the little amber thing, ancient-beyond-ancient.
Fitful sleep. She sees the dark Earth, night sky pre-dawn. The Earth opens it’s eye, the Locust wakes and shakes off the dirt of ages to rise and lob death.
She snaps to ground. Earth shakes, the pre-dawn stars blink out and sparks fall and set fire to everything. It is hot and blinding for a moment and then the exhalation of ash. She sees her mother walking, in chains, behind a procession toward the source of ending. She tries to run, dream run, legs churning in sand, against strong current. The way one runs in a nightmare. When the mind lets space betray us. Next sound goes turncoat: she screams to mom and can’t.
She wakes up gasping. Grasping the little thing that is so old. ‘It endured as I endure and we endure” the little litany from mom, and her heart slows. And the lines of the laundry pile (the room entire) become clearer. In time, sleep finds her again.
*
The demon A(48) rises from the pool of light, the phone-infernal already in his hand to call for more brimstone. The first bullet rips the phone from his hand, flicks it off, thrown through the pool of light with force. The next bullet and the next and so on miss the flick-twitching demon until the pistol clicks.
The demon, a fallen A-iteration, lunges–smirking-fangs.
Wrist-flick, the pistol bounces off his forehead, A(84) grips the betrayer’s throat and slams the thing to the floor. He presses through and casts the demon down.
*
FRAME: Earth(42); DATE: 1-JULY-1763; LOCATION: Detroit River
*
There is a flash in the night sky seen by few, a shooting star in a firmament a lot-less dim than you are used to reader if you live near a settlement of any size. Electrification is lovely in terms of life span and reading past sunset without hunting whales to extinction, but what I’m saying is this: before all the light pollution the sky was just rotten with stars.
So the demon who-was-a-man, falling fast (and on fire), was either a shooting star or attracted no attention.
Nobody saw the man on fire plunge into the river, far from any settlement. Nobody but wildlife heard the hiss of steam or observed the man, red-hot, long-nosed and butt-ass-naked walking out of the river and cursing the name of one that cast him there.
He would find a hole outside of town, and later a shack, and as the settlement grew, he found a place in the town off to the side (and out of sight). And eventually, never having captured or truly observed the demon, but sick of his bullshit, the townsfolk would gather to cast it out. They’d make noise and carouse and curse the red devil. And in their revels, a mundane miracle would happen: the demon-devil-whatever would be cast back out as if a taught rubber band tying his ass to some hell had finally won.
It’s then that whatever power A(84) used to cast him down would kick in again, and cast him back into the river–all aflame and cursing his name REDCTED. And when the folk felt like gathering to party-and banish, boom, he’d be cast-out and snapped-back again, red-hot-butt-ass-naked into the river. A few times, he even missed and hit the Rouge instead, and once lake Erie (about the time the lake was temporarily declared “dead”).
Even being routinely-recursively cast out-and-back, the demon’s stubbornness and cunning allowed it to find and elevate the readers of a silly apocalyptic comic book about an 80’s-style-pocky-clypse-told-prophetically. And these people did prosper financially, politically, and culturally. That prosperity paid dividends.
When the demon wasn’t clawing its way out of the Detroit river (Lake Superior more than a few times and the Cuyahoga twice) it was utilizing the web it wove and it’s memory to flick about Earth(42) and prepare the place for the Locust’s coming. Demons are many things (foul, childish, ill-tempered, rash, foul-mouthed, just like the heavenly host). They are never, ever powerless. It remembered, quite clearly, the child’s dream, as it set about persuading and bribing, manipulating and murdering, scheming and scamming to ensure that a family found it’s way where it needed to be before the locust’s re-emergence in 1999.
*
“They want Illustrated Dreams, somebody actually wants the mess.” Sam laughs. And the kid’s free-ear, the one not in her headphones perks up, and the game system in her hand is paused and Lilith is “huh-wah?” From the other room.
By a stroke of luck or providence the movie studio that makes the comic movies wants to buy the rights to their work, the apocalyptic comic that failed-least (you know the studio, the hero is always Lord Byron, a CEO, or both).
Of course they sell, and they’re off, moving North-far-north where mom and dad will write the sequel to the comic that will pay for the future of the freak-kid who graduated High School at 16 and needs “some time” before college. There’s hope and celebration of the lottery-luck of a sweetheart-deal. The suffocating passive aggression that the kid hides from lifts, and the family is a family, for a time. It is the spring of 1998.
*
Headquarters sits on a particularly-perfectly-flat portion of the scorched plain at the End of Time. Good lines of sight in all directions.
The underground parking garage beside the great brutalist block roars to life, loose ash does the beat-drum dance. Heaven is great at SIGINT, fucking fantastic at the sniffing and decoding of infernal traffic and chatter. This is the result: a convoy of g-beings in SUV chariots bursting forth to chase the lead, every available fed truck blazing red-and-blue-red-and-blue, racing to an undisclosed location (Earth(42), it was Earth (42)). From a balcony on the executive level, miles upon miles up, there is the building-shaking thrum like cannon-shot of demons being launched (from an actual-fucking-cannon). The fed-truck convoy and the steady stream of lobbed demons all ends at the same Lonely Liminal: the skeletal remains of a diner with a shimmering-pool of light that leads to a world-entire.
And the thrum of so many engines, and the force of so many demons flung did shake and vibrate Headquarters, where the micro-fissures and invisible spider-webbed cracks grew, many times and many times again, until great weathered fissures, cracks one could place their hand in, appeared in the building’s façade.
*
When A(84) finds his screen-cracked cell-phone on the floor of the 1990-something Ford Sedan, it’s already ringing. He answers and the Witch A(79) and the former fuckup speak same time: “The Trillion is on Earth(42).”
That’s when the first demon strikes the pool with a dull thud, a hissing fart of brimstone and in the foul thing goes to some time/place kinda-sorta near 1999, and again and again-again. The fed-truck convoy full of g-beings in suits and shades and some in heavier gear plows straight into the damn building. A bolt of lightning meets every SUV and deposits each into the flow of time and traffic in Quebec from 1999-back-in-time–the perimeter in time/space/place they’ll sweep for the fugitive.
*
On the scorched Plain at the End of Time the band, the congregants and the former Custodians arrive at Headquarters. They are seen from some ways and there is some time for the occupants to consider their response: welcome and refreshment or violence or something else.
Management is occupied and the remaining g-beings and demons are too sparse to trust their strength. So the not-wandering band finds a building with riot cops, demon and g-being identical in the armor and masks and shields, barring the doors. And that was humorous to them for there was no violence in them, but they surrounded the building and sat down, and they ate (though they did not need to) and sang and talked.
The custodians, so recently given the gift of speech, were eager to use it to keep cultivating intellect and imagination and for the simple joy of hearing others. They sat and visited and wandered doing the same, a swirling social circle around the great square brutalist-block.
An antsy demon with a megaphone shrieks in a pre-arranged parlay because even the g-beings are sweating it out now. The question on every mind infernal-or-other is this: “What do you want?”
“We’re waiting” “I” was voted speaker by the former Custodians, who love a good vote.
“For what?” “She’s coming home.”
“What the fuck does that even mean?” Squeek-shrieks the demon into the bullhorn. “Custodians, get back to work doing whatever it is you do.” Nope. No thank you. We refuse as politely as your response allows us to. The demon retreats inside from exactly no threat. And the g-beings nod sagely (perhaps understanding what is happening, perhaps faking it).
Outside, all sit and chill, and an outnumbered and nervous bunch of demons and g-beings do not dare demand they “get back to work” again for ironic fear of the peaceful mob/mass.
*
A 1990-something Ford sedan, A(79) driving with Flannel Man shotgun streaks toward the light-pool-portal to Earth (42), the speed impossible. A(84) crouches just off to the passenger side of their path.
Flannel casually rolls down the windows and the holy-hotbox burnt-offering escapes. A(84) catches the door frame of the passing car with his hand, snatched and flailing like a flag–inhaling the rich smoke.
Lightning, the car falls through-and-pops-into the skies over northern Canada, at 50,000 feet and falling fast–driver, passenger, and the man missing the tip of his nose clinging by a hand to the nose-diving car.
*
PAUSE FRAME; REVERSE (IN FRAME: EARTH 42): DAY OF LOCUST (-6 MONTHS APPROX.)
*
Reader, be sick as this narrator is sick, then strive to join me in an effort to give his sad little piece of pastiche some perspective. I am narrator. I am demon and expert in what follows. Put judgement aside. Let us stride toward a more clinical or at least distanced perspective on a phenomenon quite common on your world (at every point in history and social/economic development): you eat your young. You just gobble them up like they were spare protein you never loved. It’s what you mud-beings do.
Oh, when “lower” species do it, you can attain that clinical/critical distance. It’s not cruelty, but the cold logic of wild calories (and their availability). It is a matter of the “free” energy in a system and a trans-historical fact. A fact at-least-as-firm as any human law: you–your own–are always the greatest and most ruthless competition for that never-“free” energy in a system, a habitat, a nation, a town. It seems to this observer, that so much of what goes on in those habitats above/below is you papering over the ritual sacrifice–in a million ways, on a million altars–of your children, of your most vulnerable. What’s it to me? Nothing. I applaud your creative ruthlessness and every-day sadism. What’s it to you? Perhaps the gravest threat to your self-conception in existence–to whom, or what, is reflected in the mirror. Who can say?
This was the logic of one of the kid’s parents, one of Dez’s. She’s the Trillion. Of course she’s the Trillion. You expect this lazy fuck of an author to write you a red herring? No. Dez is the Trillion, and one of the parents is going to sacrifice her to the Locust.
Now, before I go persuade all the driest, most should-retire (but won’t) English teachers to assign all the most dreadful and dead poetry and the worst stories (this demon gets busy), I shall give you the gift of doubt.
Reader, am I the first demon to narrate in this mess they call a “story”? Or am I the first who has named himself so?
Toodles, Tool.
*
FRAME: EARTH (42); LOCATION: QUEBEC
*
Freak-genius kiddo was lazy as a kid can be. Sam was eager to prod her to go see colleges and make plans. He wanted to push her to chase all the things that she would not pursue in her early-improvised-gap-year (after graduating High School 2 years early). The look in his wife’s eyes said he would not push her to do anything she was not ready for (or risk losing his once-favorite appendage).
There’s that “fresh air” everyone’s always talking about, and freedom from the factory-time and school bells. The real reason the kid plowed through: she hates bells with every fiber of her being. She gains weight instead of fidgeting away her appetite (she still fidgets, just joyfully), and the pall of permanent exhaustion has lifted from over the child.
Things are not perfect, nor were they ever, nor would they ever be. Mom and dad found this place adjacent to love and across the street from loathe.
The kid dreams, deep and intense. And she writes in that “damn journal”, and both parents love that she does (though only one sneaks to read it regularly).
But the beginning-of-the-end is embedded in this relocation. Mom and Dad aren’t happy with each other. And there’s this thing that the kid feels, that “that” wedged in between genes/habits, nature/nurture. That sense that’s not the sixth (but the culmination of the many you already have as par for the course, you just ignore). The kid smell’s death on the wind, but she doesn’t know to name it that.
Mom and Dad “have it” this itch-sense too, because Sam and Lilith come from a long line of dodged-or-survived-catastrophe. And the calamity carried in their code and their whatever-harbors-ancestral-memory is not quiet.
So they bark at the wind. They fight. They write two scripts that are mashed into two movies that will be remembered as “good flicks.” They are fabulously wealthy, relative to ‘before’, but the food’s turning to ash in Sam’s mouth. Lilith frets and picked up smoking again. He catches the kid with one, and “it’s a federal fucking case.”
*
Reader here’s what did it, see Sam is suspicious. And he sees kiddo bopping on the back patio, beholding nature’s majesty in the small lake and the short pine around it. She’s talking to someone that’s not there.
For a real long time, as long as they’ve been “up here” he said “nah, she’s ‘rapping’ or singing along” to whatever is on the other end of the headphones. Or it was “she’s got weird ticks.” When it was actually, in his horrifying clarity: “My kid hears voices. She’s schizophrenic.”
When Lilith and Dez walk a mile or two down the road for mom to buy cigs, for daughter to get a pop/soda, while smoldering for (but never flirting with) the similarly young awkward clerk behind the counter. That’s when Sam sneaks into the bedroom to violate his daughter’s trust for the first time.
“Jesus” The words, his child’s dreams, are prophecies. The charcoal and the pen and the marker are exactly what he saw. And the words follow a similar arc to his dreams–the apocalyptic inspiration of the movie(s) he and his wife wrote.
Reader, when a man spends so much energy convincing himself a lie or delusion is true, as Sam had, he will defend that delusion with great effort. To do otherwise? To undo the contortion of the self, to do so suddenly, risks madness. The second film. The second script, with it’s ending the couple-authors never completed in the comic, is a lie (in fact, the whole second book can be thought of as a lie).
Sam dreamt, quite clearly and sequentially, the lead-up and aftermath of the end of Earth(42). The delusion we are focused on here, the lie he fed himself in the wake of a nervous breakdown, was that he had not dreamt the future.
So, like any reasonable man, he set his daughter’s journal open on the dining room table, and when the rest of his family returned accused his daughter of having lost touch with reality. He used words of power: “You are mentally ill.”
*
The family did fight, a lot a lot, and there was the rending of garments and the grit teeth. And both parents demonstrated that they grew up in homes with holes in the walls. And dad’s icing his knuckles, and then he says the absolute wrong thing: “You need meds, hon”, and puts his hand on his daughter’s shoulder. She was head-in-hands-sobs, now she’s rigid. Sam doesn’t see it, but his wife’s eyes burn both literally and figuratively. The kid’s head lifts, “No!” and the force of it propels dad back over the kitchen-island, into the fridge and into a broken-necked heap at the foot of the appliance.
No nononono, and the kid is shaking dad, dad’s dead and when she turns to face mom there is a luminous being, many arms arrayed behind her as a peacock’s feathers. Mom, I killed him, oh my god, I killed him. Her mother, more than mother: “Be not afraid.”
*
END. SISYPHUS AND PROMETHEUS PART 5.
MORE TO COME (BUT NOT MUCH MORE)
THE CONCLUSION OF THE ONE TRUE SECOND ARC