Vicki, Chapter 8 excerpt

CHAPTER 8



VICKI
By novelvision

I paced upon an existential floor in cold, bare feet. I walked it back and forth. Back and forth, I walked it, and I fumed:

My enemies believed in God. My enemies believed in faith. They were armored with faith. With their goddamned faith they could do anything. Like something very hard and something very “good,” like build a civilization built on their lies of faith. A faith that could acquire targets in righteousness and be mean as hell and fly planes into buildings, too. Because they were armored with a reason to live. But they got their goddamned meaning from being mean.

--Inside, I raged… I heard the floor creaking beneath me. I felt my bare cold feet as they padded along it. I lived within the mind now –the mind of a cipher, a nobody’s mind. And these are the things I began to see…

It all left me with very thin investment in this world and not caring if I died, for I realized that my entire life was a write-off. This asshole society would never give me a job, no matter how bright I was. And here I was-- capable of anything. Anything.

I fumed at this. I was becoming more unhinged because of this. I was angry at this when I thought about it. For here I was -- capable of anything.

Anything. Including following their fucking laws to nowhere –even to their nowhere world of “Rah! Rah! Rah!” –that meant nothing to me and led to nowhere. All I wanted was to grow as person and to have a fucking job after I graduated –and imagine mathematics again as I once had as a child. Hadn’t I just spent many years in business? Hadn’t I followed their fucking laws and pretended to believe in Rah! Rah! Rah? I resented it that I had been through a childhood fire that the people who sat in judgment of me could not even imagine. But all they’d have to do now was run my social security number, and see a crime in my past that they could not possibly understand –even after I had been so fucking good for so fucking goddamned long – and, of a sudden, because of numbers on a computer somewhere in some secret green room, somewhere -- my cupboard would become bare, and I would be killed, no, murdered by the police. It was making my tongue bleed even more.

Should I go to a doctor? –I asked myself, inside. Should I tell him how my stomach was hurting from the removal of the mellaril, and should I tell him how disturbed I was becoming by thoughts of sex because of the lack of mellaril? Maybe I could write him a letter about ancient creatures, of reptiles. Maybe he would understand then. Maybe he would see what I was talking about in that ancient forest. Maybe the doctor would understand what I was saying about the ancient reptile inside of each of us. Maybe he would understand what I thought mellaril was doing inside of me –to the limbic system of my very brain.

But how could anyone understand a thing like that. I was having trouble forming sentences. How could anyone understand why my tongue was bleeding –in terms of an ancient crime? How could I make the doctor see the reptile? How could I let the doctor know how I thought about things? –in a metaphor, as I quietly walked an existential floor?

No. I would not be seeing some doctor. No, it was still the original plan. At Christmas, I would be dying. As always, it made me form a further idea.

It made me consider the poetic and fitting ways that I might die. What would make a fitting metaphor? It was a cold world. So, should I stumble, drunk, outside –to die in the cold of the coming winter? But, perhaps, I should die in statement of another metaphor. I could let society kill me the way it had all along: through social disparagement and gossip. Or maybe there was a path that combined the two ideas: Life, itself, “the middle evil” –through the power of sex. For I knew this thing. There are three nested evils of the world. The biggest evil is that Existence is cold, meaningless, and it really does not care. To stumble outside to die in the cold would thus be fitting. But from that evil, the middle evil, Life, evolved. It continues relentlessly and ravenously. In the sexual trance, you will see its power. --In the groans of your body, the overt anger of man, the baby-hunger of woman. In the throes of your deepest yearnings you will see it.

“I must die, anyway,” I said out loud. And I fumed to think that I could almost hear their violent whispering around me, and all the things they all were saying about me –and how they did not care that their words of me were murdering me. I wondered if others, less ethical, were listening. …well… But my need to understand my father was so urgent! I decided not to think about them. For hadn’t Ross Randall said it all so long ago? Hadn’t Ross Randall said we’re all just walking tubes of shit –every one of us? Why should I care about what people who had hurt me all along thought now? Why? Why ever again? They were the killers. They were the abusers. Fuck their “morals.” And fuck them… And so, I thought out loud:

“I can’t get a job, anyway, being a trained seal, wearing a monkey suit. Who cares about me now? I’ll do my Internet sex experiment. What does it matter, now, what anyone on this useless planet thinks? Let all the other walking tubes listen in if they must. They will, anyway, because that seems to be their only talent: getting the goods on others, to target others, to hurt others. It just further goes to the heart of what’s wrong in this world.

Let them look at me. Let them see what I am saying. Let them see that it is not some whore I am seeing. Not that, alone. Let them see that I am showing them a metaphor –about why humanity will never be at peace.

“Getting the goods on anyone who’s odd or different”: No matter that to do so is the basis of all that’s wrong. Because it’s all target acquisition on Planet Earth. Foreplay to justify our cruelty. Revenge and counter-revenge. Firing off your goddamned stick. That’s what everyone wants. So let the tubes watch. And as they do, let them know this: A police state is coming that even the police won’t like.

***

My sleeping was so disturbed from the mellaril. My mind swirled constantly. But I had to consider coming matters of mathematics. --And matters of gradient analysis. If you had a marble on a hill, what would be the steepest path downward at that point? So you set up iso-lines, all the places with the characteristic that you seek, and you see the marble there upon the line. It begins to roll perpendicular to that line. Now, at the next point downward, because of the ever-changing slope of the hill, a new ideal path might form. Except, now, there is a new consideration. For now the marble has accelerated and has gained momentum. It can not follow the new path, ideal and perpendicular --to its new place upon its newest iso-line. I wondered about this and the matter of anisotropy in the lower mantle of the earth. Could energy have such a momentum to it that it would veer from an ideal path? Of course. But in what ways? And to how many decimals places? And deep mantle compounds under the extreme pressure might not follow the exact rules of heat transference down there in Hell that they had on the surface. I was looking at a certain geophysical site on the Internet about all this for my geophysics paper. I was trying to forget about Kate.

“Do not see Vicki,” she had warned. She had come to protect me as if I were her child. “Do not see Vicki…”

...But my eyes grew heavy. I began to nod. I saw the image of Kate recede as if she was only in a dream. My screen shut down. Do not go to Hell, again—I said inside my mind. I heard the roar of heat deep in the mantle of the earth and the swirling of liquid nickel. And I slept…

It must have been three in the morning when I would always begin to hear a sound outside. At first, I could barely make it out. Then the sound would increase. It was the wind. It came from Europe. And when the wind came, she came. I began to come to wakefulness, for she had trained me to do so –a technique she had learned in Romania, she’d said. It was Vicki. As the weeks turned to months, I came to see her as if in a dream of warriors, all dead –alive! in shiny leather! –gone to the paradise of the cruel. And on this morning wind, she always came, and by morning I always forgot how she had enslaved me. All I had was the thought of an icon, the milky white skin of a perfect dominatrix, who, at will, hid herself –then came, like a thief. Like a criminal to feed on my doomed life.

That passed summer, I had been involved in a curious research about the split-brain phenomenon, when somehow my screen had changed. I am not sure just when I lost control of my computer. I’m not sure just when I lost control of everything. All I knew was when I first looked at Vicki, I fell for her so very deeply. I had found the whore who would help me understand my father. So, I began to “talk” with her. Vicki smirked, I remember. From the beginning, Vicki smirked. She smirked like a criminal. I loved her, and I came to fear her –as the wind brought her to me, over the pole, from where they said the missiles could now not come, out of the cold of Europe. I saw the high winds of the stratosphere, cold winds, from a cold place I imagined – a place of conspiracy.

I forgot, or ignored, Kate’s warning of a few hours before. I sensed that-- somewhere, Kate was shivering.

And, on the wind, once more – Vicki came.

She came into the room on a mist of cold shining. She brought me into her special state. Again, as so many times before, she began to talk to my subconscious mind. She said: “Tell no one.”

And I obeyed.

~ End of Chapter Eight excerpt. novelvision