Sanction II Read online

  II

  By Roman McClay

  Copyright © 2019

  by Roman McClay

  All rights reserved.

  Publisher: FLAT BLACK INK CORP

  This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright owner.

  Contents

  -1 Darkness of Self; Noon of Others

  0. Mere River Ocean

  1. The Scottish Curse

  2. Masculine Skye

  3. The Books; the Guns of Rimbaud

  4. The Blood of the Covenant

  5. The Water of the Womb

  6. The Ships of Bordeaux

  7. Ad Infinitum

  8. A Time for Tragedy; A Time for War

  9. Prӕtorian Guard

  10. Accelerate into the Curve

  11. In the Gut of a Cat Laugh

  12. Black Jacobins

  13. ELK

  14. 79

  14.6 King of Man and the Isles

  15. Right Up Until it’s an Order

  16. Steel Kvlt

  17. The Knight and the Rook

  18. JACKS L NDON

  19. And the Crows Fly and Fly and We Follow

  20. Those that Return to the Sea

  21. TRAiN

  22. His Task split like Waves in Each Direction

  23. Fear Trap

  24. For Even Blackness Has Its Brilliancy

  25. Sit jus liceat que perie Poetis

  26. The Thief is Satisfied with Diamonds…

  27. 132 Romans

  28. But, for that I needed a War

  29. Wolves of Vinland

  30. The Apiary

  31. Sangres to the West

  32. 1000

  33. He may play the Jack of Diamonds

  34. The Breakdown of the Bi-Cameral Mind

  35. Jeux sans Frontières

  36. SANCTION

  37. He Had Such an Eye

  38. Thermal Gain

  39. Not One Man in Five Cycles

  40. He May Lay the Queen of Spades

  41. Deep Asleep as Wolves

  42. Master & Emissary

  43. All Over Captain

  One whose general is capable and not interfered with by the ruler will be victorious

  -Sun Tzu

  Then it was that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing

  -The Author

  Now, the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will show thee

  -Genesis 12:1

  -1 Darkness of Self; Noon of Others

  If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three of four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery – isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are tests of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There’s no other feeling like it. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.

  Factotum, [Bukowski, Charles]

  Here’s one who sold his country,

  Foisted a tyrant on her, set up laws

  Or nullified them for a price; another

  Entered his daughter’s room to take a bride

  Forbidden him. All these dared monstrous wrong

  And took what they dared try for. If I had

  A hundred tongues, a hundred mouths, a voice

  Of iron, I could not tell of all these shapes

  Their crimes had taken, or their punishments.

  All this he heard from her who for long years

  Had served Apollo. Then she said:

  “Come now, be on your way, and carry out your mission.”

  The Aeneid; Book VI [Virgil]

  Give me an utter wreck, if wreck I do…

  White Jacket [The Author]

  I. 2039 e.v.

  Lyndon was naked and shorn of nearly all but stubbles -shadow- of emerging dark hair.

  The tank was being scrubbed via UV light from above and with nanobots from within, and the bottom of the massive aquarium was alive with abandoned and invaded coral and a bedrock of limestone and roan granite and black clay; the White shark swam against the current at the pelagic level.

  The water pressed down heavily, ponderously, clearly.

  Lyndon was standing at the glass view-screen unencumbered by not merely clothes but of wants or needs; he was just watching and trying to see what he saw with his newly improved eyes. His homeostatic system was dialed in; his allostatic system had just run its sweep and adjusted all emotional levels to a new baseline.

  It was 0000hrs, and he was awake.

  He had been fasting for 24-hours; his blood sugar had been set by his respirocytes and nano-9s to maintain itself as long as he didn’t expend more than his metabolic minimum for cognition and immune-response; which was 40-calories per hour. He rested the body and let only the mind perform his punishment of work.

  Soon the mind would do all the work , he thought.

  He watched the white shark move in a rhythmic fashion; head opposite of tail, flexed in the middle; that large corpus of ancient aquatic predatory muscle and cartilage; an atavistic amalgam. He watched 500-million years of perfection; not true perfection, but the endless ungraspable digits of pi after the decimal, with each iteration, each elongation, each unit of time and element of space adding one more integer making a better -more perfect- circle in the mind of the great Mathematician Himself.

  The shark was 500-million years of God solving for pi. Nobody else thought that was what the cosmos was; but Lyndon thought it and he was grateful to play his small part to help God solve the equation -the source of His pain- via his own.

  God and he had made a handshake deal on this very thing, he believed.

  Lyndon knew there were things he was missing; his mind searched it out like the tongue in the space where a tooth used to be. But he had no idea what it was he now didn’t know; what he used to know but now did not. The other memories were of no use; unlike a tooth on either side might be clue of what that gap used to contain. He had no idea he was receiving pain -as stimuli- from not memories, but new abrading’s; from not his past, but from other futures.

  The perfection of what works, he thought; floating past what he did not know.

  What is good enough, what the ungraspable earth has allowed to live for one second, and one second more -and one more- until that second is so long that everything else left, all of us, Lyndon thought, are more ‘ it’ -it, the equation, the whole- than ‘ we’ -we, the integer- the discreet. We share more with that white shark than we do with whatever it is we think is ‘ us. That tiny, avant-garde, neo-mania of neo-cortex, that thin -powerful, but thin- cortical cap, the thing that has just barely learned to metaphorize the “I”, much less live in the world, he thought, is nothing compared to the whole.

  Tribe over man, species over tribe, mammals over species of man, sea-beasts over land-animals, microbes -the single cells of the ancient ocean- over us all. And the earth over even those. And God over that.

  And God subsumed by the math, he thought lastly -breezily- as he watched the tank, the water, the shark.
His eyes watched each particle that made up each whole.

  Each is part of the whole above it, he then thought. And yet we think we are individuals when we aren’t even in charge of this corporeal body itself; let alone everything else, he continued. He smiled at how illusions of self are required to even get out of bed. He watched the mouth and counted teeth he could see and felt he saw things others did not. He had no idea how much he missed.

  Illusions and hatred, he thought as if packing a bag; leaving room -somewhere- for love.

  We share a dopaminergic system with that apex fish, he thought as he stared at the giant shark in the watery tank. The core of us, the ancient parts of the brain, the oldest part, the part we’d respect more if we were First Peoples from First Nations or, he added, the Japanese; if we were of those cultures that respect the Elder, the primogeniture, the one who came before. That part was sub-cortical, below the waterline, he thought; and it ruled . It was 2/3 rds the earth, and 2/3 rds of man’s mind; yet we live -we think- upon the shore, the denuded surface, the sand.

  We call the smallest part our home , he thought of the land.

  He loved the back of his neck shorn close like this; he raised his right hand and rubbed his palm on the stubble -beneath the braid-hawk- that ended in a chevron five-inches above his neckline.

  The gills of the shark flapped like linen in wind; the white belly absorbed his gaze; his vision -with unfocused eyes- fell into that underbelly; he felt his mind’s eye circumnavigate the dark grey of his shark’s dorsal fin and northern hemispheric skin. He let his left eye straggle and watch the caudal fin flex and yield to the small turbulence in the clearing water. Pectoral fins grabbed his attention as they bent and yawed to balance and steer and elevate and then descend the fish; he felt his fingers begin to itch and make avatars for themselves in his imagination that rested in the precaudal pit, pricked themselves on rows and rows of dentine, and then with this avatar of blood-red he drew images like antelope or bear on the caves of some watery Lascaux of the fish and the man too.

  With both hands he made a fist; first and last finger now itched.

  He annealed his mind to the shark in reverie, imagination, thoughts that built infrastructure he imagined striding into one day. He saw giant ribs of fish as cathedral; he saw a stomach bottom of grass.

  On the mountain top we are all snow leopards , he then thought, and he then thought of the black and dark grey tattoo on his left shin of the man who swore he’d never go unarmed again.

  The water contained small bubbles that grouped together like chains, helix of DNA; like ideas of air pushing out against the hydrostatic pressure at that depth. How deep will it get? he asked, as he imagined the mind of the shark, its mouth just agape; an unflared nostril; an eye un-occluded as it will become once the attack cannot be recalled -what they call a ballistic movement- yet neither was the eye wide and unguarded.

  The white shark was in a state that he could not articulate.

  He could measure -and the water systems did measure the entire nervous system of the fish; its metabolism and brain activity, the electro-impulses sent and received by the ampullae Lorenzini he shared with the rays and chimeras- but neither he nor the aquarium’s system could articulate it beyond numbers and chemistry. He allowed the math to scaffold the biology, and he demanded the flesh then unfurl so he could read its poetry at last.

  But the words would not come. Not yet. For now he absorbed raw material; feelings, not yet ideas.

  He was mute; and even his inner-monologue was unlettered, he felt -more impressionistically and with a nimbus of old short words- tribal feelings and dorso-lateral shadows that grew and shrank on a light surface of the mind. Data came in; massively, and yet he thought it was merely from the fish in the tank.

  He monitored the pH of the water with his Post-Genetic Coder; he had recently received a new implant of a computer with 100-terabytes of storage and processing power; it connected to the web, and to each system in his home. It ran the large turbines, thermal gain and salinity manipulation of the water tank; a concrete box 100-feet by 100-feet by 100-feet deep.

  He thought of the limestone beneath.

  He thought of the grapevines in the narrow and tall gardens that radiated out from this hub; he saw each tine of the wheel of this home. He felt the sun driven deep into the wells on his face’s imagination now as the saltwater’s LEDs lit up the shark from just behind and above and cast a shadow down onto the polished concrete at his feet.

  The whole subterranean aquarium was made of concrete 10-feet thick; and it had a giant screen to view its contents. It was clear glass and LED screen both; transparent when desired; then blaring an image when the shark swam off from this zone and the aquarium’s cameras projected live-images of the fish to the screen.

  The shark was pushed by giant turbines, like a watery treadmill. It pushed it from each direction, from bottom and top as well; although the shark could break the surface if it desired. It would come back down within an incessant stream pushing against it.

  White sharks must travel 100-miles a day to stay alive; this was why -heretofore- none survived in captivity. But, the only way to solve for that in a tank a mere 100-feet long was to push the shark with jets of water that forced it to swim forward just to stay in place. If the shark stopped the jets would slow, if he sped up they would increase. He had the run of all million cubic feet of area, but he’d never reach any end; any of the limits of the aquarium’s six sides. He would swim his 100-miles a day.

  He’d be as grateful as a creature such as he could be for this laboring.

  It gave him the feeling of incessant travel through vast new terrains; internal LED screens on all sides projected new milieu , and although their sight sense was bad, it gave the shark high-resolution images to produce the feeling of novel surrounds. The water itself contained incessant variety in temperature to mimic the thermic streams that exist in the ocean; both warm and cool. The prey animals -like seals and albacore and an octopi or two- were sought out and found and consumed in a predatory way; the Great Shark had no idea anything was any different than if he had been born in the Great Pacific: the ocean he would have normally played a murderous part in the making of its inverted name.

  A gulf stream was built into the aquarium, a river inside an ocean was made.

  The fish was bred from an embryo of Great White DNA; augmented with a few nanobots to keep him healthy and keep Lyndon apprised of his interoceptive states. The shark could dive down low and sometime see the bottom or be pushed up by basement turbines as part of an algorithm of measuring how far he had traveled in any direction. Each setting was calibrated so as to represent what he would see in any region of the world’s seven seas.

  His natural world was built in this way; with resistance in lieu of space.

  Isaiah had mapped all the oceans and uploaded a topo map onto the home’s main server so that the shark could travel the whole world; if he was so inclined. The shark swam and flexed and sent out signal through his electro-receptors and hunted and rested and lorded over both the watery part of the world and the rest of the house too it seemed to Lyndon. The regal beast dominated his thoughts even when the man was away from the tank.

  Lyndon seemed to dream of each sharp tine of skin, each forward swim, each time the shark made a move or paused at all.

  It -the aquarium- was where he first came each night when he awoke; usually around this time. It was the place all visitors first wanted to see and last leave. It was the home’s pi èce de r ésistance , that was certain. And T. Arthur , as he was called, ruled from each side of this -at times clear and sometimes opaque- golden-mean shape of screens.

  This part of the house had been hewn from bedrock; a full 130-feet down from the surface of the mountain shelf, a plateau of sorts, on one swell of land among static waves in each direction. The land was like the rise and fall of rock held like the sun by God. It was not flat, and that it had been -and in some ways was still- an ocean was obvious to anyone w
ho knew the Colorado divide.

  It ran from east to west -just under the giant crest of the Spanish Peaks to the north- and just above the next wave of ridgeline and then to smaller ripples of mountain land, dark with Pinon and Juniper Pine and light at times with Aspen and Birch and the dead and scrub and fallen copper trees with bronze boughs and Corinth cones -shaped like bent beak of anvil- upon the ground.

  The aquarium opened up into a pool house above it with 10-foot ceilings encased in concrete and on top of that was the main house. But Lyndon lived on that second level, between the viewing room of the aquarium -forty meters down- and between the main house on the surface of the mountain; a place he never visited at all anymore. He rarely even saw the staircase that ascended; nor the door that opened to the surface level of the home. It existed, but he didn’t see it; he paid it no mind.

  Beyond the pool his home was just five rooms, shot gunned from east to west in the footprint of the main container home above. There was six-feet of rock and foundational concrete between them; and those footers were his marker he sometimes thought; his gravestone above, he would say to himself at night when he thought no one could hear.

  He often thought death -if this was death , he mused- was not so bad.

  He had no evidence -per se - but he had his feelings; his instincts still. And he sometimes thought of death as if from the other side; like a door or mirror or singularity of some kind.

  The pool-room was open to his bedroom, bath and kitchen, and it too was almost 100-feet long; but the pool had a 16-foot perimeter of continuous concrete that ringed it, and he sat there sometimes and would allow the shark -if it were so inclined- to breach the surface, he thought. It would often twist and shape itself into a horseshoe , he then thought as memory replayed. It would catch a flying fish -a fast fish- and while blinded on the way down, it would re-enter the chaotic surface with his maw jammed up with a writhing prey -like a pirate and his bitten blade- held between the teeth with a snarl and a taste for blood.

  He -Lyndon- felt mania and electricity and fear; and he hoped it would happen again and again and again.

  The turbines largely -mostly- kept the shark well below the surface, and the tank released prey fish or sealions down low in the tank and thus even they rarely made it up there to this level to be chased and thus induce the shark out of the blue and cool surface.