Camp

The sea was, in less than words - extreme. They had been brought out to the beaches, shovels and tools in hand, by the overseer and told, in no uncertain terms, their task. Wetsand, from this bank to that, on the narrow spit where the river and the sea met piling sediment against each other, half flooded and shifting daily.

The wind tore at their shirts and hair, Versace and Gucci and all the others they wore to flex on each other flapping it like sails across the air, cutting through the grey sky, the sun shrouded in a thick omnipresent blanket of cold, only the black water and white wind left to mediate across the indifferent sand.

He was in competition, that other cunt stealing his spot when he showed up outside-world fresh and clean more than money could be, his time and his taste invested… he couldn’t compete with that cunt. He had to sabotage him.

The guard towers turned into trees after enough observation. Cold soup became hot after days upon days of it. The guards stopped becoming unnatural, deer and bears and wolves stalking from the pines, no face no soul, a part of the world carrying rifles slung around anonymous brown uniforms.

They beat him when they caught him masturbating that night, gentle flapflap sounds under the blankets worthy of immediate and severe retribution. He stood outside, the northern mosquitos far lessened after dark.

They prayed as they worked, taking their hands off their shovels to lift them up to the muted sun, to God, to the cold wind and pleading whispers of the clouds, to hear someone else raise a cry echoing theirs, to hear someone answer their own, something, anyone, a sign a hand a pale whisper from a ghostly ancestor to bring back home to a warm summer day in seersucker and plaid.

Cats & Crows

Tyrant had left her, spun off in her own directions, her own patterns and instincts forced to find a way for themselves amidst an environment they were unattuned to. She allowed the disorientation, her senses trying to latch onto something in the alien metropolis, stranded without a ride or a way back, leading her along a jaunting ride through colored lights, schizophrenias of sight and sound barraging every direction to pull her in or push upon her. She found a hotel eventually, stumbling in half-drunk to take a room key and flop out on the bed. Comforting warm tones of clay-brown and carpet-white and all the shades of beige constricted around her, pulling her down to their darkest corners, for her to rest and sleep, a comatose body in the empty spaces promised behind the cabinet, under the bed, the little diagonal between the armchair and the corner it was against…

By her insomnia, Cecilia was sent journeying into strange diffusions of a full moon drawn like clouds over the blackened city. All the usual grime was now tucked away, the sun that fell down through artificially seeded clouds to become a dirty, fluorescent buzzing now hidden away and with it, all the little insects and pigs who feed on its degenerate state, off chittering and chuffing off no dreams in their rock hard beds. She was nearly shivering in forty or fifty degrees with low breeze, enough to pass right down to skin through her fleece quarter-zip, the cold seeming to conspire with the darkness in mutual deprivation, some lack palpable in the air, refreshing and at the same time terrifying. This was somewhere else she was navigating, not the city as she knew it, but a geography, a maze, some grand empty structure towering above and beyond her, with no architect, no human hands able to have possibly made such a thing. The city had become a vast wilderness, a concrete canyon, plaster forest, an empty land to track out guided by the forward light of her own eyes.

When the walking droned on, her feet got tired, her sense of direction suspecting she was fucked, she found herself on a quest towards provisions, taking wild detours, crossing streets she shouldn’t, entering stores ducking through underpasses to reach the mythical destination she hoped to find. She found it of course, a bottled water and a pre-made catering plate of sausage and cheese she ate in whole slices, stuck together by their preservative-slime, bitten off in whole, layered pieces like a fruit rollup. Restocked, eating as she went, she had a newfound sense of purpose, looking for a river to squat upon as if settling down for a camp on a nightly voyage. She found water, watching the hypnotic trickling of melted snow, the wind whipping her colder, her directions completely lost, lights and stars guiding her along through the welcoming blue of the night, shrouded behind the oceanic blackness of the city. A cat approached her, a regal grey shorthair, middle-aged and proud, haunched up on all fours, a kingly and measured strut to sit down beside her. They sat on the bank of the empty flood channel, munching on their morsels and slowly freezing in the stillness, soaking in the dewy frosted grass.

“You’ve forgotten about us.” The cat said, cocking his head up at Cecilia.

“Have we?” She handed him another slice of sausage.

“I have a friend. His name is Tamago.” He licked at the sausage and bit off a small piece. “Yet I’ve never smelled him, at least not fully. We meet in the summertime, when his owners leave the windows open and we can talk through the screen.”

“He’s a housecat.”

He nodded. “Cats like me are becoming harder and harder to find. I talk to a lot of cats like Tamago, trapped indoors. He said something interesting to me, do you know what he said?”

Cecilia shook her head as the cat contemplated his answer.

“He said his owners keep him because he’s cute.”

“That’s why most people keep a cat, isn’t it?”

The cat drooped his head, half-lidding his eyes. “You’ve forgotten about us. You forget we are not your children. We have worlds of our own, worlds you’ve forgotten your dependence on.”

“They keep me as an object too.”

He perked up. “So I assume you are a Lord like I am?”

“A Lady, I would say.”

“Of course. I can’t tell the difference.”

“How are you a Lord?”

“That apartment building and these houses all around us, along the canal, are mine. I know the cats inside and I make sure everyone who passes through is fair to them and doesn’t take too much food.”

“What if they don’t obey you?”

“Then my friends will scratch them.”

“Is the whole of the city divided up like this?”

“Not like this. It depends on the place. All up and down these canals is one way of organizing things. I meet with the other canal Lord and Ladies to discuss water related things. But I’m also part of all these houses, most of those don’t have clear divisions. Most of the cats inside all that are kept and rarely need to leave, so much of it is still common land.”

“But all of the canals are divided up?”

“Strictly. So strictly we gather to make sure it stays strict. The canals are very important, they lead us to the alleys and drains and many other types of empty places you humans will let us gather in. We can’t let anyone get too big in the canals, or they would control all of catdom as far as any of us can travel, they would control our travel.”

“Do travelers have to pay tolls?”

“No. We don’t want anyone to have control of the canals. We’ve lived alongside you for a very long time. We’ve seen what happens when you let common things, empty things, be owned.”

He licked his paw and kicked his feet in the arrogant fashion of a cat king, strutting off without so much as a word of goodbye. Cecilia finished the cheese and crackers alone. Wind blew, the last few birds who remained when it was so close to winter called, the moon hung wispy behind smokey streaks of fog, suspended high as clouds over the Earth. Cars receded, streetlights became stars, a thin creek trickled at the bottom of the canal. She stuffed the empty plastic in her pocket and hopped into the channel, walking on the dry edge to find the developer paths through the labyrinthine map.

The floodchannel lowered as more and more feeders branched backwards from her path, the walls now rising like the canyons of downtown, the moon-blue night sky visible in a wide blue band between two infinities of black concrete, running along her path in parallel. There was water now, half an inch of stale concrete-enrich scum that reflected the stars, making each stride ripple upon the fabric of the firmament itself, her body turning to a silhouette filled with the cosmos channeled by her path, onwards and into the horizon around the next corner, after the next feeder, the horizon of the rainwater spilling back to the lowest bodies where the abyss doubled down to brine and blackness, pressure upon pressure until you came out the other end, compacted with a weight in negative numbers, on the other side of the world, inverse, walking along the sky and looking down at all the positive numbered humans going about their business like you saw the constellations before.

Piercing the depths as her own body did, a black bird began to stalk her, swooping from ledge to ledge, grazing her head at the bottom of its arc. She walked along, feeling some draw between the two, dual orbits beginning sync. The bird cocked its head more and more, flying slower, sometimes looping back in the canyon to catch another glide beside her. She in turn had a newfound sense of direction, feeling compelled with her steps until they led her to force herself up on the ladder of U-shaped rebar staked into the wall. As the algal slime turned to crumbling rust, the bird took a final stalking glide to hover and then landed, coming to rest on her shoulder, claws shifting and cutting and releasing to balance along with her motion.

She pulled herself above the lip, climbing to stand on before the vast desert, fences with half a dozen gaps, shipping crates with no owner, office builders with only a scant janitorial fluorescent humming, parked trucks beside useless concertina wire, open gates, corrugated metal buildings opening to workroom floors, the light of a foreman’s computer still running the screensaver down in headache-blue across the steel tables and branded tool chests. The bird took off, a short hop to land on a pile of gravel, pipes, and a vaguely useful spool of steel cable.

“Talk to me about wind, Cecilia.” The crow said, its eyes reflecting red from the blinking alert of an opened gate.

“Hot and cold differentials caused by the sun exciting particles unevenly across the Earth’s atmosphere creates movement in the gases surrounding us.”

“So you’re in the right direction, at least.”

“You’re a man of science?”

“I’m a man of numbers. Pity you’re neither. But you’re still invited to come along and watch, I suppose.”

“What’s planned?”

The crow cocked his head towards a nearby parking lot. “It’s been observed that activity of humankind is limited on the sixth and seventh days in a seven day rotation. We’re holding trystero there, you passed through the underways well enough.”

“The underways?”

“You told me about wind, you can’t tell me about water? One substance, excited to motion by variations in environment. Like topological lines, it’s all happening in differences of degree and kind. You’d know this if you flew.”

“Or if I was a man of numbers.”

“Impossible to say, then. That’s only step one. You’ve gotten there without the usual ways, if you can comprehend this much.”

“What’s your vision then?”

“My vision?”

“In trystero.”

“The surface has water, the sky has air, people have information. You passed through the underway, a river of information. No one can own it. The cats think that’s so because it’s common, which is half-correct, but not for the reasons they believe it to be so. Our dream is to make a perfect underway, paths connecting all things at all times and all places. Anyone studied in topology would have unlimited ability to realize their potential, comprehension of the fluid dynamics could become the way of the future.”

“It’s not already?”

The crow scoffed, ruffling his wings. “Heavens no. You’ve met the cats, did you know they don’t even use coinage like we do? We’ve created ways to value every little found treasure, by a number system with no relation to any rare mineral or food item those fools covet so dearly. They won’t listen. We try to explain numbers and they fall asleep or go on reciting poetry, lazing about in the sunshine and talking about their little feudal territories until the moon comes up the next night. We can’t even penetrate them, how could we penetrate anything? The underway exists for itself, but we’ve yet to make everything else exist for the underway.”

“Now be silent.” The crow said, interrupting any response she could have formed. “The sun’s coming up. Go stand in that parking lot and be quiet. Leave when we tell you to. As man to, um, Lady I guess, this is goodbye.”

“This is trystero?”

“You’d call it court. I’m off for summons. You’ll see me again.”

She stood off-leggedly in the center of the parking lot. The doors of the adjacent building were shut, locked by internal deadbolt holding them stiff, the glass made into a window paned by its steel doors. Over the rims of the constructions all around her, the the sun began to come up, golden light glittering as it fell over steel now illuminated from black to silver-grey that shined every-so-slightly modern in the decaying mess. Crows began to circle, swooping in and out of the long-thin shafts of golden light, turning brilliance-onyx as the dew on their feathers glittered, shaking off in each twitch, dissolving to the air as a subtle rain. Their numbers grew without mechanism, each crow coming into the grouping from some nowhere behind the clouds to join in on the motion. Winds whirled in slight breezes as their swarm grew to a whirlwind, half a dozen flapping in a unified direction, down, down, spiraling to a circle around Cecilia, landing to surround her in a wide circle.

The crow she talked to was among them, not recognizing her, staring with the same impassive judgement as the rest. One form behind her spoke, a sharp declarative caw.

“She’s here on business.”

“The court demands what sort of business!”

“The court’s position is that evidence shows her dealings with a man named ‘TYRANT’.”

They were talking around her in circles, switching from all directions to the others seemingly at random, talking to her, responding as if eavesdropping on words from nowhere.

“Where has she been seen on this business?”

“She engaged in the thieving of ‘TYRANT’ that the court recognizes his longterm engagement in.”

“She has expressed compliance in the performed actions of ‘TYRANT’.”

“Her compliance is noted and recognized by the court. Is it fair to assume she will be acting in the ways of ‘TYRANT’ in the future henceforth from this court session?”

“It can be noted as a reasonable means of prediction that her behavior has shown predilection towards the intellectual forwardings of ‘TYRANT’.”

“Is this assertion backed by reasonable evidence, in order to secure beyond doubt its veracity?”

“The court recognizes it as such!”

“The court would like to make an assertion.”

“The court recognizes the assertion’s right to be made.”

“The assertion is now alive in order to be dissected in its stating by the court.”

“Then the court allows this assertion to be spoken!”

They went on like that for quite some time, back and forths with masturbatory pleasure in upholding the living selfhood of the assertion one of them was desperate to propose. Whoever proposed it seemed to be letting it fall, almost forgetting they had let it float onto the conversation in the pleasure of interacting with its floating spectrality. 

Somewhere through their rambling shouts, Cecilia walked off, both her and the crows ignoring each other as she stepped over their contracting circle. Feathers began to fly as the debate devolved into feral squawks, feathers flying, beaks out, claws jabbing. She made her way east, walking backwards towards the past as her silhouette melted into the glowing halo of the rising sun.

The Party

One

Cecilia took her meals in a nearly empty drawing room adjacent to her bedroom. The help brought her the fruits of a brief afternoon of preparation and stood by as she ate, taking robotic and slow bites while watching her phone, propped up horizontal on a saltshaker. From the third floor window beside her, the first early snowfall of autumn was falling, wet half-liquid clumps of snow unceremoniously smacking into the still orange October leaves, slumping over the crisp autumn like a sweater soaked in water.

“Cissy?” Her mother pushed the door to swing open, staring her down with indifferent surveillance across the carpet.

“Mom?”

“You’re not dressed yet.”

“For tonight? I thought I didn’t have to go to that.”

“It’s our house, honey. You need to at least make an appearance.”

“How much of an appearance?”

“Can you at least put a dress on and then we can talk about it from there? Just enough that someone sees you. I can’t have you holed up here all day.”

“I will.”

“You said that this morning.”

“No one’s gonna be here until this evening! It’s barely afternoon!”

“By four. Come and see me, we can talk more about this.”

She left, letting the door swing to rest unclosed on the latch. Cecilia kept her eyes on her phone, chewing with tensed anxiety at the barrier left imperfect.

Two

It was still too warm to consider ‘going out’ an event worthy of ritually swaddling in the coatroom, putting her in a chilly battle against  her own will to withstand the barely freezing breeze in her sweater and pajama pants. In the semi-trampled forest paths of her own making surrounding the house, she sipped off an energy drink, listening to the slush melt to water in the creek behind her. The ground has yet to freeze, still unsolid enough to accept the melting water and turn to muck and puddles that were already beginning to dampen her shoes. Snow was still falling like drops of rain, plopping to water upon contact. She regretted forgetting a rain jacket, taking another sip as a great gob struck above her ear and chilled as it dripped to her neck beneath her hair.

A pair of fairies alighted in circuitous mid-air ballet air before her. A ring of mushrooms was still alive beneath the sudden cold beside her, suddenly seeming vivid against the brown and orange and white backtones, the snow inside seeming drunken by the Earth faster than anywhere surrounding. Cecilia took another sip and relaxed, shutting eyes to extend to the nearby tree. From the roots to the sky, she traced its paths, communication with neighbors up to the highest sky, touching the sublime in every point, the drunken sugar, the glory of the infinite wind, the pleasure of touch in the root network, each leaf shaking in impact, falling off, shed as it turned from green to orange to brown to ground.

“This happens once a year, doesn’t it?” Cecilia said, reaching out to something before her, a human presence without coherent form yet.

“Yes. The October snow is an important time, an intermission of a few days winter before the real frost comes.” A woman’s voice, chopped in the frequency at strange intervals as if spoken through a sieve, the sound of her voice like rustling trees or rain.

A drop of snow smacked her temple, dripping down beneath her hair to fall to her collarbone and ice her skin deadly-pale, the pain dragging her body down once again. A hand of ancient flesh took her to the apex of a ridge adjacent to the manor, overlooking the river horseshoeing around the property’s extensive valleyscape, white falling over autumn orange to mix into November’s mudded brown to a smog-grey horizon. The hand guided time back like a clock wound counterwise, tracing time back up her palm. A deer stalked through a hidden glen, taking up the mass of a thousand grasses to fuel the heat of a chase, as wolves closed it down to bloody abattoir. On another plateau of the forest’s breath, a spark shot over the branches to cast a blaze, flames licked up the boiling screams as grass perished to dust. When wind cleared the excitement, the trees drank deep and bloomed anew orange, mushrooms came up and from their circular growths, fairies alighted to dance on rounded stones, eroding, withering beneath the grindstone of the river. Sand particles fled out to the sea from the rocks now half-smashed by water, flitting down to the bottom’s sands. A farmer plants his crops upon this fertile graveyard as Lake Agassiz has lone gone from memory.

“Some people would think this to be a bad omen.” Cecilia said, coming back to her eyes as her companion relaxed supine on her open palm.

“And why would that be?”

“Autumn dies early. Last year the autumn snow never left, the trees died before they should have, birds didn’t get a chance to migrate. It got cold too quickly.”

“Is cold death?”

“Some would say so.”

“Remind them, Cissy. Death is a human delusion. A comfortable one, one that makes the pains of life go down easier, one that makes the soul feel all the more singular, but nonetheless… Remind them that the only ones who die are the ones who hold belief in death at all.”

Three

Assembling one by one in the front of the house, the guests arrived like a funerary convention of the waiting-to-die. The ancient, the ruined, the engorged, they were deformed in various ways well beyond what should have been the halfway of their life, cackling over their poisons like gargoyles of American sin. They animated briefly, in their handshakes, bangles swinging off dressed hands and gloves being shorn off to show watches sweeping through small talking conversations, coats given off, individual meetings in private corners, Cecilia watched the help - the one she’d had an eye on for weeks - from the upstairs balcony. For him, it was catnip. She saw over his shoulder, even interrogated him on occasion, his fascination, his belief to be undercover in the secret world of the powerful. He was rolling in pleasure here, acting out his fantasies of jumping at shadows to see the Weishaupt's ensign flown up on the television with his name in bolded letters.

How she wished she could live in his world! Overweight men, bloated in the scum of overseeing contracting, wire-thin lawyers who come in their trousers driving through their daughter’s sorority, his eyes showed with childish glee as he imagined them about to don masks and robes, sacrificing some virgin as he watched, phone camera at the ready. To stand by the side of some permanent society in service to the horrible divine, to indulge her darkest urges in utter darkness, to have the freedom, the safety, the life of utter contentment he imagined her to have.

For Cecilia at least, she could escape into his delusions long enough to feel secure, like the bannister won’t collapse under her leaning, like the floor won’t crack to nothingness the next minute or the next hour. But would it be enough to last? They were nothing three generations ago and even in all their splendor, they owned nothing. They had no history, no truth, they paid their way into the halls of power, pretending to be in the same class as those whose family name was etched into the door in the era when the globus cruciger still flew as a solar emblem over Europe. They made their money in liquid cash, floating on the services performed for fees, her father’s medical practice and her mother’s corporate climbing ultimately no better than those they looked down upon and who would eat them alive if given the revolution to do so. And what of it after the end? Will they outlast Rome, or will they perish and become buried under volcanic ash and tells of forgotten pillages? Was this the first generation of primitive accumulation or the flash-in-the-pan of a briefly enriched middle class, fat on the excess of forces far outside their control?

She took another dip into the hors d’ouerves tray floating about and crunched into some momentary peace, hoping to preserve forever the singular instant when the food dropped like nectar upon her tongue. But she swallowed and the future ticked on. The party moved and with it the clock, terrifyingly forward. Outside, the snow was still falling, wet death separated by what? The thin walls of a house constructed not twenty years ago? How much kept them in that house? How much kept them from whatever may lay outside, whatever barbaric state of frigidity the rest were all condemned to?

“You look nice, dear.” Her mother held her lightly from behind, a ghostly half-hug to show affection before slipping away into directing the morass of the crowd.

Four

Staggered in the rectangular order of chairs around the dining table, several stand out, their form in the same style as the others, but elongated, the backs heightened past that to which a normal person would sit, thus shrinking their stature to the eyes of the guests. Around the table, while food is passed around, those seated in this chairs are marked out for this, the back and their form melding together as one shape rising over the heads of all others. It is these chairs for which the guests of honor are placed into, inducted into the mysteries of the house and put to stand before the eyes of all assembled, primary of which, the house itself.

Like a masonic ritual over the checkered floor, the help was intoxicated as he listened furtively to the conversations, not remarkable so much for their content, but the mere fact of their happening, the basic notion of contact from one to another above a certain net worth exceptional enough to prove himself right on everything. A pastor took his place on a highbacked chair to meet his obligations dutifully, accepting each passed around plate, eating with manners and perfunctory benefactions interspersed in each remark expected to be given. His wife was obedient beside him, the true focus of his obsessions, making sure she remained on-script for the night to function accordingly. A businessman in between formal titles at the moment made remarks back and forth, bouncing upon the ears of the VPs and private owners around their small city, joking in the jockish way they had been trained to, reciting plaques and idols erected on their desks from the crackling radios reciting game statistics over their factory floors, the sound coming up from electric undercurrents like an emanation from an underworld emerging into the world as little fuzzes and crackles of the announcer’s voice. A colonel and two captains traded applause, passing the buck of standing for performative adolation across their seats, bouncing the hot potato of rehearsed toasts for the assembled guests, all standing to politely clap somewhere between exasperation and wide eyed fanboyism.

For now, everything functioned fine. The world ticked on through the hollow bodies of these men as they dissolved, their bones flattening as their muscles crumpled to dust until they would become the decrepit semi-corpses tucked away in clubs Cecilia could only access twice a year on very special invitation. Money moved like water through this room, coursing like a flooding embodiment of the powers that be, the blood pumping in the veins of the grand clockwork corpus they all made up a piece of. Of all the things they discussed, materiality was never one of them, to the dismay of the help. He listened in, looking for codewords via some schizophrenic hermeneutics he hoped would lead to a final end of enlightenment, to find the true name of the demon that had diverted his society from the proper way. He found none and went home disappointed, seething over their casual joking and disregard for sense or morals. Cecilia would go home at night as well, sleeping off the drunkenness from lurking in a back corner and sipping porto all night, dancing small greetings upon her like-minded familial allies. They would all wake up and the world would continue on as it had at the party. The trucks still ran, the oil still flowed, the shelves still had food, the electricity still hummed. With a profound sense of easiness, with a profound disquiet at how shocking easy it is to maintain it all, as if there were no intelligences required to even occupy their coveted chairs, they all go back to work, back to letting the market flow through them, eroding them down until their bodies became the canyons carved through skyscraper passages, until their bones were crushed into brick to build the societies and manors of the next generation of anonymous, hollow men, just like them.

Fail(ed) State

It was too hot for much else, shirts stuck by sweat to the back riding against the unbreathing seats of the car, dropped out after parking as the driver entered the casino by the backmain. Too far ‘a while ago’ for me to remember, the driver became my Mother. She took her seat, out of my sight as I wandered around the shaded concrete parking garage. 

He showed off some plastic he found, amidst the piles of shit that had accumulated from various sprees of momentary guilt passing around on wayward journeys to and from liquor and cigs, all the legal vices piled up so we’re still “better than them”, cruising in the pickup that won’t run half-in neutral as Judas Priest sang us onto the casino.

She lost her virginity at the barbecue, bad meat retired to booze and stems-and-seeds weed. The backroom, a mattress on the floor of a ranch style home, dead grass, it was precumming for snowfall in the empty cold of early November. She couldn’t remember it, except that she enjoyed it. He went to prison at 21, both having forgotten the other’s name.

The game was several generations out of fashion, not that any of them could notice. The characters came alive as they were never meant to, shitty discount products made bottom-barrel even at the no-name team of codemonkeys that churned it out on a consumer license. The system was shoplifted anyways, that dying mall where the fat man in Nightwish and Evanescence t-shirts still shared secret knowledge about the upcoming hits of 2007, where he still rated Youtube videos on a five star system, where a shirtless weeb and his fat girlfriend still danced to Nightcore at the cashier’s desk of the only store still selling Tor paperbacks.

In the casino parking garage, two kids were surrounded in a betting circle as they began to fight. They fought in the way children grown past their maturity did, all sloppy grapples, a sort of hugging-sprint all around the predefined arena until one pushed the other down and got their half-punches to indirectly land and maybe get a few bruises in. Both their parents would lose that day, pressing slots until their bladders were near to exploding. That machine was hot after all. Both their parents were hot, once, in the latest fashions they spun out into the wilderness, expecting the same comfort they had been given back at home. They couldn’t find it. The forest was never as forgiving as the city, and back then, the city still promised and sometimes even delivered. They were weathered, having struck out at their own expense, and that of their descendants. Thus earlier than most, they were thrust out. Out of the 20th century dreams of suburban nothingness the others had come up, into the hopelessness that always pre-existed and post-existed them. They were weathered by reality, having taken the great leap of faith to escape the dream, only to find they were seeking the dream all along. So, they settled. Half in, half out, they listened to classic rock and did whatever drugs were legal, they beat their wives and husbands and children, but only to toughen them up. They lived in a facade, rejecting both the wilderness and rejecting and desperately trying to recreate the dream. In all accounts, they failed, and produced a mutated homunculus of no true becoming except the pain of desperation to achieve the unachievable. Their children would have three choices, the same as them. Most would find there’s no more dream to return to and mistake the wilderness for the dream. They’d buy in, foolishly, and the cycle begins again.

Longview

8am - I ran the sink, deafening whitewater rush in the stillness of the day. The air was orange, my house, the environment, bathed in the stale light of the world ancient and still, an old man retired to settle down in the dry heat of his own ruins, a parthenon of his bones making up the mesas and plateaus that stretched on for miles and miles beyond. I cracked the window, the rocklawn slowly heating up back into the triple digits as the sun showed itself in revenge for the long cold night of plummeting cold.

The television was too loud, too bright, like everything else here. This was no place for humans, our sensitive eyes and ears not accustomed to the extremes of sound, vision, and pain that the desert had to itself. When the old man died, he let his bones fall to be his mausoleum, to be a temple for no man to live. It was thus to his standards, the standards of an era long past, the standards of the world beyond the veil, death and antiquity, that forced us to knee. There’s rumors of the scant few who could acclimate to it. A man with pale skin, black suit, they trek out from Groom Lake, descend on orbs of light, they never sweat, they ignore the sun, they seem to turn invisible in the moon. Creatures come from caves, swelled with northern gigantism, finding some rich tundra deep below the Earth. The last time someone visited me, it was Pelley, gagged from speaking on what really made financial sense, now left to ramble to those chaste and receptive ears as mine.

I rolled and smoked a joint, I got off on the television’s pay-per-view premium 18+ channels, I ran to the store contemplating crisp dollar bills folded and unfolded grease rubbing off and mixing, a film of filth and adulteration on the once pure value, now crumpled rounded almost to a ball, the clean geometry turned to the curves and bulbs of fungal waste. I drank a beer with the money. I got off again.

The radio only picks up static, a relic on its own. I don’t own Sirius XM, but the knob is broken, allowing me to go off the standard looping ad-jingles and into the unknown reaches of nothingness, not giving the response-back to pick up the right waves, not decoding what it can, instead a steady stream of noise, high and low buzzes and hashes. I sat in the car, under the hottest sun, AC, all windows up, with the notebook to record.

Numbers become words in the book labeled for divination, each passage index out for paranoid referencing, the black cardboard, thin pages unique to its type, an oracle spread across the land, sown into the ground, multiple in every little home, the only thing we shared - our collective desire for poetry, line by line, truncated in random lists of new contexts created by arrangement and re-arrangement of a collection from so many sources it was from nowhere, gone through so many translations, it had no author and still a coherent style. Something I read in it could tell me what I had to do - I had to have faith in that, if nothing else.

A Thematic History of Narcotraficante

Act One - The King

Escobar rose out of almost nothing and was elevated to a position of power by the chance of seeds growing beneath his feet. He awoke and looked down, the roots planted in his small-scale smuggling operation now hypertrophying far beyond their natural capacity. Before it could be comprehended, the gang of thuggish Medellin gangsters were elevated to a status to which their egos struggled to grow in kind with. Escobar matched his scale of growth by doubling down on what he and his affiliates had always known, thus ensuing the construction of Hacienda Napoles and Escobar’s failed bid for political office. And like all things Monarchical, the fragility inherent was the destruction of the thing contained within itself. The vertical order before it was created already contained “The Tower” and lightning struck, as it was always destined to. Hacienda Napoles was razed and Escobar, going out in a tantrum of bombings, was tracked down by anonymous death squads and American law enforcement, finally winding up shot dead on an urban roof, his body posed over like a trophy kill.

Act Two - The Company

In contrast to the model of the monarchical Medellin Cartel, the Cali Cartel took a more modernist approach. Modeling itself after any public corporation, it diversified its holdings, ran itself above board, and made its existence as anonymous as possible. And in doing so, its own destruction occurred in the thing which it had inbuilt into its own fragility. As Escobar was laid out and slain as a trophy, Cali was dismantled thoroughly with light. Information exposed and tensions pushed to their breaking point, to eventually rend and grind them down to nothing. its leader died in prison, in a hopeless jungle.

Both Medellin and Cali suffered an identical problem - they were all built on the organizational level at the point of primary production. This is untenable for an organization which suffers the problems of the narcotics trade. The narcotics demand will always exist, no law can legislate away natural pathways of chemical ingestion, yet legal arms can reach easily to burn fields or raze labs. The narcos who survive do so as close as possible to the consumer, as close as possible to that which will never be removed from existence - the user and their demand for the substance. When the cartels adapted past the mistakes of these cartels, it was by moving forward, down the supply chain to that which formed the actual foundation of the very existence of their market. No wonder then that the porous US-Mexican border and the cartels which straddled, forming their business around transportation and distribution became the easy successors to Colombia’s once undeniable dominance.

Act Three - The Nation

In the first two meetings between Felix and the Minister of Defense in Narcos: Mexico, a tactic is employed by the Minister to twist the knives of power within Felix. Forcing Felix to wait for an extreme length of time as he deliberately delays him, he forces Felix to bend to his wishes. Felix has come to him and thus he will make Felix supplicate by waiting as well as trapping Felix within his grasp for as long as possible, keeping him entrapped to be used and manipulated. Such echoes the techniques of Phillip II, the Habsburg ruler of the newly formed Kingdom of Spain. A newly confederated kingdom, the smaller regional territories held by the crown were still tenuous in their allegiance to the central authority. Phillip II overcame this by forcing them all into his stiff machines of etiquette, drawing out procedures as long as possible, deliberately delaying, and strategically choosing when, where, and what, to either grind down or expedite. In doing so, all things in the Kingdom were forced through the narrow straw of the crown, thus forcibly centralizing all things upon the impassive face of the royal authority.

This is prophetic, in an occult way, to the downfall of the Guadalajara cartel. Felix, over time, became ingratiated into the realm of the centralized state, fulfilling like-attraction between them and his own role leading the Guadalajara cartel. Federalizing and centralizing the disparate plazas into a unified organization, his downfall was in the same which destroys other similar projects. A disunited patchwork is centralized, only for its inborn factionalism and chaos to come back with a vengeance as those old disunities are forged into larger, far more powerful chunks of power. Such happened to Felix, where each boss deserted him, leaving him alone as all of Mexico was divided into half a dozen or so nation-states of cartel activity.

It was this nature of the cartel that was seized upon and shown by the rise and fall of Los Zetas. Trained originally in the special forces (GAFE) by various BLUFOR powers (United States and IDF most prominently) they rose up quickly, taking advantage of the new way of things. In 2004, the state in which they were active was declared to be “lost” by the Mexican government - their power at such a level, that they had become equivalent to a breakaway-within. The same occurs time and time again now, as similar incidents happen across Mexico, with only increasing intensity as the central authority cedes more of its violence-monopoly (and thus its territory) to the cartel-nations.

Act Four - The Market

El Chapo’s success was in large part due to utilizing the same fitness-mechanisms inbuilt to every market against his rivals. In this case, the strategic deployment of information and tips to American law enforcement in order to get himself rid of his rivals, and using factional disputes as opportunities to insert himself as the power-that-is in the wasteland after war.

In all of these cases as in every evolutionary struggle, there are certain natural pressures that force the organisms in play to adapt. A history of the drug trade is a history of adaptation to id and superego of the self in pursuing its ultimate goal, teleological to its biological structure. As an animal desires food in discourses of constructed “wilderness”, the human mind is built to chase reward. Narcotics are the perfect match for humanity, the ultimate end of its biological being fulfilled in all ways. The compatibility is mutual, with all actions of narcotics being the satisfaction of certain mechanisms deliberately left constantly-hungry in order to provide the energy that must be sublimated into labor.

In the same fashion, the machine which desires to produce narcotics faces its own versions of these pleasures. The endless egos, libidinal fury of the sicaros compete for internal dissolution, just as the DEA and attendant organizations of the sublimating order compete for destruction from the outside. This tension is perfectly summarized in the dueling-competition between Rafa and the DEA agents in season one of Narcos: Mexico. Rafa finds himself destroyed by his passions, destroying himself in a blazing fire of lust in every fashion. His field meanwhile is targeted and destroyed, an act which is celebrated by a celebration of superegoic death-worship. After the destruction of 1/3 of the United States marijuana market, the largest seizure in history, the agents retire to a middle class suburban backyard to celebrate with 5% ABV beers and charred ground beef. Made bare here is the tension, that of the appetites inherent to the id and the social desire to destroy and limit at all costs their expenditure.

Those on the side of labor are always against narcotics for this exact reason, just as the human organism will find itself hollowed out and destroyed by that which can complete it. Civilization is built upon the healthy glow of starvation, the piercing stare of hollow cheekbones, muscles eaten from the inside to feed the eyes. The superego, the linguistic mechanic working to sublimate libidinal energies into social machines, is in hatred of both the desires existing and even moreso, their finding completion and thus starving the machines which were dependent on the libidinal input of the drug user. The history of the narcotics trade is through all of this, history of ancient tensions within all organisms and the evolutionary mechanism of organisms adapting against their dual pressures.