IGNATIUS-1838
Theodore Ratchet, an unfortunately named 19th century naturalist from god knows where was the first to articulate the source of the peculiarity and irrational rage of Ignatian Puffins: a symbiotic relationship with the hallucinogenic gut fungus as unkind as the birds themselves.
Ratchet was well respected for a man with such a goofy ass name and an expert on aquatic fowl in good standing with Her Majesty’s academic authorities. He was all these things until he turned his eye toward Ignatius the cursed/accursed island (then looming off the coast of Scotland).
The idea that mushrooms were the source of the bird’s rage would get the man laughed off the Island (not that one, Britain) and on to the island (Ignatius) where he would die the death of so many curious outsiders psychedelic-ergotism transmitted via bird shit. Truly tragic.
But I know a secret first suggested in the mad rambling marginalia of a bird cultist that tended to Ratchet as he died his wretched, painful death. I stole the diary from the British Museum some years back and brought it home to follow the trail so that I may know. No, I’m not giving it back.
Ratchet ran off into the woods as so many learn-ed men are wont to do on Ignatius. He took the raw shit, no processed or derived drug or Puffin extract. No effort to extract the natural LSD from the decaying matter and gut fauna and fungus. Nope. Theodore Ratchet, disgraced naturalist, just chugged raw bird shit and promptly lost his mind.
The man began to dig, did so for a day straight, stopping only to scream nonsense non-sequiturs “all is all” type hippy dippy shit to the heavens and the bottom of his hole. Ratchet’s body did dig until it hit the mycorrhizal structure–the root-vein of some great-and-mighty Being running like a utility line from wherever-to-everywhere under-through the body of Ignatius. Theodore Ratchet ate of the thing itself: the body of the fungus from elsewhere that weaves its way beneath and through all things hospitable to it on the island. He was fortunate-unfortunate that humans are the second least compatible host for this particular fungus (Ignatian Puffins being the least compatible).
I don’t know if there’s a lesson to be learned (but fug it, let’s try). Mysticism is a thing. I’m not vouching for it or criticizing it. Done properly, not that I know what proper looks like, there’s some trepidation and rules and ritual that help one walk a path to that knowledge-wisdom nexus. Good mystics do like my dude Walter Benjamin: they’re honest about Ariadne’s thread. Have a vision and much-to-most of what you learn will not return with you (not whole and complete). All illumination is as profane as sacred, and bringing back knowledge from the other side of whatever doors you’ve gone and swung wide is difficult and dubious. Always. You return with the residue of learning on you (if you’re lucky). The walk to wisdom or a scrap or moment of enlightenment is a recursive–ever repeating–process that ends when you go back to dirt. That’s what the bird cultists do. I’m no fan of cults, but I’m not sure they are cults. There’s rules and organization and a path to walk, shit-sodden as it is.
The careful path is not the one Theodore Ratchet chose. Bless his heart, the man of bird-science ended his life half-merged with a mushroom. The thing itself failed to incorporate him and consumed him. Before the man went indecipherably mad–the mouth that had belonged to Theodore Ratchet confirmed that it was connected not just to a mushroom, but a hive mind that grew over, upon, and deep below the surface of Ignatius.
“We are in all; We are all” and pages of detailed and well-crafted charcoal illustrations of the man’s transformation. What’s the exact opposite of transfiguration?
In my mother tongue there is no direct and proper antonym for transfigure, but those sketches from the diary come to me when I sleep. The man is half melted matter and meat–like a kitchen abomination talking to a cook about its path from pasture to slaughter to moldy un-life in the bowls of a fridge.
He’s the extension of a local cryptid. Bird Man. I told you, my people are bad with names. Folk art beat fringe science to the punch. The monster is what happens when the mushroom that rules the roost finds its one-in-a-million(s) compatible-ish human host. Not quite a vampire. Not wendigo either. That kind of ‘gone’, but with the bird’s hunger and some limited capacity for reason. This particular ghoul’s capital-R reason for being, as relayed by generations of elders to terrified children on Bird Run Eve, is this: to clean everything humans have built off Ignatius’ back.
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NARRATIVE NOW
*
The one’s in tight pants, they are Consortium men all (even and especially the woman present). The goons guard-march five hostages (two families) through the woods. The gaggle stops to let a flock of Puffins stalk by. Late fall, all standing still on tall stilts in amber morning light while Puffins pass beneath.
“Lucas.” The man in the tightest pants, front of the formation. Leader or perhaps ‘manager’ of this little team stops and straightens when Ulysses says his given name.
“Miss Givvins classroom. Grades 1-5. You sat across the semi-circle from me.” That I did. “I thought we were friends, but you threw me under the bus for picking my nose” You were digging for gold quite in-discretely, You-You. “We were like 6.” I was seven at the time. “Well, we all picked our nose at that age.” Those destined for success do so discreetly and in private, Ulysses.
“He’s right.”
“Thank you Todd. Sincerely.” Ulysses continues. “Yeah, that was our rubber-band fake friend thing. I’d think we were pals and you’d run me over with a social bus.” Well, one can’t be friends with a cousin fucker. “Dude, I have no family on this island other than that woman.” Pointing at his mother. “You knew that.”
“Am I the villain in your little story, Ulysses? I’m the big bad in the Book of Ulysses?” Tight pants gets tired of letting You-You address his back and turns wearing boredom and the perma-smirk. “Did you write about me in your little diary in fucking crayon? Did you daydream revenge?”
The non-hero, the deserter responds: “Fuck you. I don’t waste energy on assholes. You’re just basic. You became more of what you already were. Congratulations. Got tighter pants. Nicer clothes. Really good weed, thanks for that.”
The man in tight pants who believes he is rich: “You’re welcome, but know that I’d shoot you if I could.”
Rosa Interrupts again: “So wait, to be clear? I’m the only person you can shoot?” Yes, for the one-thousandth time senile woman. “I’m not senile. I’m fuckin’ tired.” And Rosa takes a too long step toward the Consortium woman with the little sci fi pistol. Rosa hip-check and stilt-trips the Tight Pants whose long five meter fall ends in black: head on a rock or root.
Consortium Goon 2 steps past June to aim at Rosa. Preacher’s wife disarms him and drops him. Long fall and groaning injured man. June stomps on him.
Lucas, dragging on his vape pen, is stuffed-suit stunned. Drops his nicotine device and hand dives to the shoulder holster where a little sci-fi toy pistol lives just in time to feel the identical gun in June’s hands pressed to his forehead.
Still a hostage situation, but “We’re going to introduce Lucas to the bird people.” The cults? “That’s not really what they are, but yes. I need you guys to be cool cause shit’s going to get weird. We’re going to meet the oracle.”
Rosa leads the gaggle deep into the woods.
There’s a bit of “Every one of you just signed your death” yadda-yadda-ing from the fail-goon in tight pants. But Rosa shushes: “Look, your bosses let you do the teleport trick to look scarry. To bring us in? We’re walking through the woods with you. You’re like not even middle-management.” I’ll have you know. “Shush. If you had any juice, literal or figurative, Consortium men would be teleporter raining on us. Right now. So either you don’t matter or the Consortium is, finally, weak. Frail. Rotting. Which is it Lucas?”
At that the man in tight pants is silent. Stoic. Stone facade. No-name, rank ‘middle manager’, serial number: no-body’s business.
Rosa drew the kid close to her as they walked, bade her listen close, and began her story again. Not so much because she wanted to. The five and their hostage in tight pants absconded from the scene of the scuffle safely. But blood on the ground or wind and wounded groans and the commotion called the just-passed Puffins. The flock doubled back to feast on two Consortium men.
Near enough to hear the great clatter on the deadfall and the shrieking, the horrid shrieking that will last far longer than the prey. But under and around that horrible set of sounds, the walkers on stilts five meters high, listened to Rosa’s story until the birds faded into wind and distance and memory. They even relieved Lucas of some of that weed stashed in his tight suit of many pockets. They took his little teleporter (dead as the device seemed). And walked and talked on, deep into the heart of the Ignatian forest.
*
IGNATIUS 1966
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Every morning for the better part of nineteen hundred and sixty-six in that year of somebody’s lord. Really any damn morning, noon or night, any time weather conditions allowed it if we’re being honest (and we always are honest, even when we’re not). Any Ignatian, any passing vessel, all the critters that skitter \ fly \ swim saw Ameircan air-dick dangle-draped across god’s sky–graffiti sky-written in the firmament.
1966 was an oddly becalmed year. As if the Americans had bribed Poseidon and the asshole with the bag of wind to still the sea around Ignatius and keep the sky a canvas for condensation trail painting.
A year is a long time, and Enterprise had friends. Every American ship that passed, or could manufacture reason to pass the Pillars of Hercules did at-least-a-joyride by the island to shit-talk our people’s soldiers gathered the same. No violence, just posturing.
Baroque posturing. A year of dick doodling in the sky and an air-artist gets bored with the basics. From cubist to realist to the grand excesses of baroque and rococo, the Yanqui sky dicks multiplied in number and complexity as pilots pushed each other in terms of artistry, size, and detail.
As for the crisis on the firm Earth: only four of five pilots returned irked the Americans. The unaccounted-for-payload kept the Yanqui ships and planes and soldiers looming and circling and wagging their asses and bits to us (our boys in their father’s uniforms did the same)
It took three months to convince the Yanquis that their buzzing the island was both driving the birds to kill people and making safe access to the crash site nigh-impossible. The Americans rattled sabers at the anti-aircraft source and the Soviets joined the show. Both superpowers were “sick of this side-show shit” and cooperated in the spirit of getting back to their paranoid standoff with one another.
From Washington: “Give us back our bombs.” From Moscow: “Give us back our anti-aircraft missiles.”
The “Or else” at the end of both communiques was looming lazily and playfully overhead. Day and night.
The Soviets joined the Americans in the skies above Ignatius spring of 1966. No fighters, for they had no means to deliver them. But I shit you not, Tu-80-whatever-the-fuck big boy bombers showed up along side the B-52’s and those F-40 Ghosts were all snuggled up next to them.
“Mom. I think you’re remembering things wrong. Dad said the thing lasted a few weeks.”
“Because you’re father remembered the crisis wrong or he lied or both. He was a stooge, he had to tell the party version out in the world. I remember it right.”
“It’s a Tu-85 and an F-4 phantom.”
“You-You. Flavor before fact.”
Early one April morning, when the fragrant showers gave way to clear skies, a propeller driven Bear with nukes in its belly and vodka in the pilot’s belly did frolic with its enemies. When the Yanqui’s completed yet another great sky dick, the Soviet pilot wiggled and weave-careened his big bomber down the throbbing cloud member as if his plane were part that organ’s payload.
Once ejaculated, the pilot, perhaps a tad too whimsical (drunk, he was drunk as fuck) tried some kind of bastard-barrel roll in a very tired bomber not meant for such maneuvers. Some portion of the right wing gave way and the dick-ejected bomber dove toward Earth.
Lucretia, kid Rosa and Yanqui Airman watched the death dive with every other set of eyes on the island. They saw the plane plow toward dirt on the east end–the great Ignatian beast’s tail on the map. The little family–for a family is a unit of care and need not even be permanent–watched the wave that would wash safe harbor away.
*
Earlier-weeks-earlier, the fugative three walked a long circle-circuit made of towns that denied them shelter or were sure to turn them in to the cops. All people back home heard were screams, Lucretia fending off ‘Dimitri’ and cursing the little shit. All the towns folk saw was Lucretia waste the guy–shot him and kicked him off the promenade.
That’s a no-no. You don’t give blood to the birds when they’re pissed, and ’66 was already a hateful and horny year for Ignatian Puffins. Lucretia wasn’t particularly inclined to stop and explain herself. She just grabbed the kid and a bag she always had ready (for she and the child) and set about to ‘boogie’ out of town (even if she had to drag Airman’s half-conscious drugged ass with her on stilts).
*
Later. After the long walk-wander. When they’d finally found shelter with the bird people. Down came another bomber to try to wash the accident family away.
Five more parachutes. Five made it to the bird camp. One Soviet airman would lose his nerve and throw himself to the birds during the long shrieking night (the drunk pilot).
That choice would cost almost everyone in camp life and limb–save for three: Lucretia, Rosa, and Yanqui Airman, huddled high in a tree.
The accidental family found itself an Ignatian idiom-as-tableaux, a curse: “May you find yourself up a tree.” It translates to: “May your doom be slow-cooked. May you get to smell it a while.” It smells like piss, like having to piss in a garment and wring the urine between your parched lips because you’re days-dehydrated and death is quite close and those fucking birds circling the tree that’s driftwood will not cease shrieking at you or waiting to devour you and a few of each other in the effort.
My mom’s not as cool as Rosa. She’s not as important to Ignatian history as Bosslady or anything like that, but she’s momma and she’s that important to me. She’s got the best interpretation I’ve ever heard of the curse, and my dad agrees. Man should know, he’s been ‘up a tree’ (twice).
“May you find yourself with plenty of time to contemplate where you really reside in the food chain.”
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NARRATIVE NOW, IGNATIUS ISLAND, EARTH(0x2D3601DD)
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There is a mycorrhizal structure, many of them in fact, running from somewhere-to-everywhere on \ in Ignatius. They’re like neurons from nowhere. More accurate: neurons from elsewhere.
This is “elsewhere”: Earth(0x2D3601DD). There’s too many to choose from out in the multiverse for there to be one-just-one “Worst Timeline.” It’s not a competition.
But if ‘Most Miserable Iteration of Earth’ were a prize, Earth(0x2D3601DD) would be high in the running for that most dubious award. Honorable mention to the Earth where the dumb paranoid assholes smoked a UFO/UAP that was a peaceful effort at first contact and found themselves ‘occupied’ their last Millenia of existence. The human race got worked-to-death for throwing rocks at Apollo’s chariot.
The might-as-well-be-worst-Earth looks much like mine, You-You’s, maybe even yours, Reader. It does for much of its history. The Consortium is the difference. The organization on Earth(0x2D3601DD) is the fascists and brigands (not the charming rogue kind, the slave trader kind) and fuckup spies that found the place everwhere/when there’s a Consortium. The difference is that on this world, the tiny conspiracy of thieves (not the cool kind), set out to conquer the world and succeeded.
The result is the ‘Blue Marble’ turned iron-water green. Ground cover gone. Humans gone, save for a few withering in decline in COS spiderholes. Ignatius is still there. Nothing of consequence alive on her back, save for the Puffins and some hearty and quite poisonous vegetation.
But on the north peninsula, beneath a burnt chapel that served as decoy when there were eyes to hide from, there is a bunker. It’s the finest attempt at an apocalyptic hidey-hole my tired eyes have ever seen. And at its heart, beneath the Baby-Fusion in the basement of the sub-basement past the bowels, there’s a man getting a suit tailored to his grotesque form.
The tailor is the son of a tailor same brought here to produce tailors into perpetuity for the Consortium boss–the seemingly immortal man-fungus. All the tailor can ever hope to be is the tailor of fine suits for the man who ended the world.
The rotting man instigated the war that ended everything and tottered on, rotting, right through nuclear winter. In a fine new suit the man shambles to the desk where he gives the orders. Wall of monitors before him in the minimalist office. Wall behind him just not there, absent. The breeze of a great space that drinks light. He had a name, but Consortium Boss is not a man. He was a monster in life, and in un-life, I guess he’s Bird Man. He is a vessel for a sentient and very malevolent fungal being buried nightmare deep beneath his iteration of Ignatius and extending sideways to so many other Earths in the thing you insist on calling the multiverse.
Any world that ends itself is quarantined by authorities I’ve never seen or perceived. But every HVAC man can tell you air gets out/in. Simple air-flow physics. Fluid dynamics, Holmes. Ignatius is a naturally occurring bridge. It’s the house that used to be a speakeasy (or maybe the backrooms and passageways therein). It’s the duct-work not in the blueprints or on any document official and instructive.
Ignatius is a place; Ignatius is a passageway. The island’s irrational geometry allows her to be both at once. Some people can bifurcate mentally. Some places are two places–always straddling-astride–some place else.
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END IGNATIUS 6