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Intimations of Annihilations--No. 10
by Philip Brunetti 1. Then one day, all of a sudden, I was old. I didn’t ask for it to happen. I was looking out the window of a local café and felt a minor collapse inward, into myself. And then I felt myself as old, even though I was only middle-aged. But middle-aged was not young—was no longer youth, and was pointing and proceeding daily toward old age. And suddenly, I was old. It didn’t really have anything to do with my numerical age. And it had only a little to do with my outlook. No, mostly I was old because I felt old in that moment. I felt myself like my father even, my father with a young woman—the strange aloofness of my father. The young woman almost always walking away, bewildered. And the fear and trembling of my father’s face grown old. He’d grown old and I’d taken a step toward his grave, which might be my grave someday too. 2. Simon had done it, in his way. He’d brought the Revelation of John back to life, brought it back to the place it, and we, should’ve been and had unconsciously gotten to. Simon’s words were bricks—bricks to the face. They were short and firm and forceful. Every word or clipped sentence and one’s head was knocked back. That’s how I remember it at least. Reading excerpts of it in the boys’ bathroom initially. It’d been left on the windowsill by Simon. We’d—some of us—wanted to read what the King had raved about. But Simon wouldn’t allow anyone to take the manuscript home or to have it copied. In fact, no one could read it for stretches greater than 5 minutes—or they’d face the King’s wrath, breaking his 5-minute bathroom edict. “Take five,” he’d say, grudgingly releasing the hall pass. “And no more than five,” he’d add with a wicked wink. The controlling of the bowels, Simon called it, and we would laugh. The King would grin slyly. Sometimes he would sigh. He knew of Simon’s defiance and the strange air of suspicion he received from Simon. The way Simon circumvented him, dismissed him, and disbelieved his praise even. 3. Deep down, we were afraid. Afraid of Simon and his renewed Revelation and announcement of the 12. Afraid of the kind of world he was setting up inside of us. How he had gotten into our heads and would hold our futures hostage until we wrote our own dark parts. It was ingenious and sacrosanct and troubling. The kind of thing only 13-year-old boys could believe in. Maybe some 13-year-old girls even. Morags was caught most roughly. And he’d been living in two ways from the time I met him at age 9. In third grade. That morning I was wearing a Captain America-Red Skull sweatshirt and had my broken left arm in a sling. It was October or early November—but cold. I blew frosty breath in the schoolyard. I strayed over to my class’s lineup line, waiting for the whistle to blow. I wasn’t playing anything. The kids ran around the yard manically like any morning. No one seemed to notice my injury. Except for Morags. Maybe he’d seen weakness or an easy target. Anyway he approached me and commented on my shirt. I learned he was a comic-book freak. I'd seen him around before then. He was a big kid and he’d fought my neighbor Mick Rouse on occasion. They’d had several fist fights that I’d witnessed. At the time, I’d rooted for Mick Rouse to win. And Rouse usually won, though he was shorter and smaller—but much more savage and vicious. A fierce hyena child, snarling. And Rouse was probably one of the 12 too but, being a born artist, wholeheartedly resented it. He exploded a few neo-Pollock-like affairs on canvas later in life to expiate himself from the mission. Or maybe to fulfill it. Anyhow one of those works was especially incredible and, at least for the time of its creation, allowed Rouse to break free. 4. Morags acted like a doomed man even at age 9. I might have myself. I’d already been through the ringer, the ferocity of my father’s house. I’d been tamed by him and I hadn’t been very wild. I’d been trapped, boxed in, inverted—obliterated almost. I barely had a spirit left. I had watchful eyes. I had a lifelong wound. I had crap poetry. None of this was enough to create or recreate a person. No, I’d been indoctrinated, drilled into with words. A severe course had been set. Eventually, I’d feel anger. I wouldn’t merely feel it. I’d bathe in it—as one bathes in a deep bath. I’d bathe in the deep bath of hate. Wallow in it. It’d keep me filthy. And let he be filthy still. It’d keep me lowdown and demeaned. No, I hadn’t stomached him well, John Baptist. I’d been born to love him, and did, as his son. But then I’d been born to become him too. Metaphysically he forced his way inside me, raped my ego while still in its formative stage. Then left me as scrap. Over time I suppose I reformed and all the dispersed shards regrouped. I claimed a kind of identity—but with severs. With cracks and fissures. Anyhow, an identity. And not very long after that, I met Simon. 5. Metaphysical rape...call me a victim. But no, please don’t. The seizing of my ego—the attempted overtaking of it. Sometimes with stealth but most times with an uproar. With lots of wall banging and household drama. “Get your fuckin’ face out of my fuckin’ sight!” Just the gist of growing up then. Anyway it was years later and I had a manuscript to write. It’d been deigned or deemed from the beginning. And now the time had arrived: I was responsible. After all, Simon Baden was dead, my father was feckless, and Todd Morags was in a state of paralysis. For years his poetic efforts had excluded him from the testament. The testament that masqueraded as a revelation. Still, Morags wrote some of it. A few dozen or so pages, out of thousands produced. It would highlight the future, predicting ever-oncoming dooms and tribulations. It had creatures. It had blackness and darkness. It had wit. It crept upward through states of being. It exacerbated sensations. It tricked itself with language like tabs of gum—one went chewing. It used facts. It used fictions and myths and labyrinths of language. It used visions and marijuana words. It used Greek and Latin alphabets. It used cheese, Gouda, Blue and Feral Goat. It had surprises—sluices of justice and feeling. But it was a bridge that had busted. As Todd Morags had busted. As Todd Morags—and all of us—would have to bust to live again. That was the implication. It was inside the holy cross and it was inside the Bodhi Tree. The bare symbology, extrapolated. The inner-outer way, redeemed. But mostly something that had to bust and break free. Like old Romantic Blake’s mind-forged manacles—busted open. 6. The reintroduction of outlaw Jesus. That was part of the purpose of the new Revelation. That,—and the things that had come and would come. The terrible state of the world: the diseases, disasters, and mass deaths. These fit in too, poetically even. It all made lyrical if not literal sense. But Simon’s style transitioned this, as it leapt from lyrical to literal sense. Fiery truths excised from a thimble of nonsense. More surreal than the Revelation of John but more real too, somehow. He’d deadened it. The Island of Patmos revisited—but caustically. And Simon calling on the ontological phone, communicating over time and space, surpassing the trite and the mundane. But the mundane still present and overwhelming too. And if a man was sipping a glass of water, that man suffered too. The water was poisoned—and filled with toxins. A water of revenge then. A Second Coming water. Wine becoming water again. Other reversals of fortune...Todd Morags wrote there too but got lost in it. Or stymied or spit out. “Write the next lines.” That’s what Simon would’ve instructed. And the next lines would have to be better than Simon’s because they’d been anticipated for more than 30 years. But never penned. Never put down in words. Not by me. Not at the moment. But maybe yesterday, today, tomorrow… 7. John Baptist only believed in the invisible world but he didn’t really know it. And for that I guess he had to suffer. We all did, as a family. I suffered the most because I was the youngest, the most ignorant and innocent. I didn’t know what he was getting at, searching over and under and around the walls, like he did. I didn’t love a wall inherently either. But I wasn’t ready to bust through. Instead I’d sit in its shadow for years with John Baptist crucified against it. The wall. Quasi-crucified against it. Banging his head there—speaking in half tongues. Sometimes threatening me. Sometimes just slouching away. There’d be the ones to come suffer after us but they’d still be me. The Jesus Girl, the Tree Girl, Simon Baden, Mick Rouse, Morags—Trunky even. They’d all be me, and not me. Because I was them, and not them. In better moments I felt our infusion—all of us as one giant entity of energy working in synchronicity. A hive of human bees, not any better than that but good enough. And still these others were significantly apart from me. They’d insulated themselves in their own egos and I had my ego too. We were people, persons, individuals. There was that solemn task—of being alive. How it was done. How one went about it. It seemed that John Baptist had some objection to this. A severe objection that started in the first person—but then blitzed into my person. And I’m a toddler still, having to wrap my head around it and trying to understand it. But I couldn’t understand it. So instead I’m filled with fear and trepidation. And I’m never sure what will be my next move—or what’s the right move. But of course it was a situation without logic and so there were no right moves. Just your instincts and even these would be turned into burdens, repressions, half-truths. 8. There were a half dozen or so nurses on shift at the Facility. I couldn’t keep track of their schedules. They weren’t attuned or regular or steady. Unusual for such a facility—this improvisation of nurses, this stutter-step approach. If it meant something its purpose never materialized, not to me, and it remained a pattern unset. In general, I had no public presence at the Facility. Meaning I almost never interacted with the other habitants. When inside, I stayed in my private room. I even ate my meals there. In the garden or common room, I said hello or nothing at all. Usually nothing at all. I was conserving myself. One day Margo Gwidder called the Facility. She sounded panic-stricken and manic. I assumed she’d tracked me down because she’d awakened—her time capsule had initiated. My clue was she was ranting about the Revelation and Simon Baden’s writings. Anyway I told her to calm down. I told her not to worry, even if she was one of the 12. I told her I was gathering my strength. I was going to take care of it. She didn’t say anything back for a half minute. Then she said: “I know what you’re talking about. But why do I know what you’re talking about?” I tried to explain to her about Simon. About mesmerism and the wild and weird workings of the unconscious mind. “I’m not really getting this,” she said. “Even if I’m getting it.” “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m making it my problem. But I appreciate the call.” “It wasn’t exactly my idea,” she said. “It just…came to me.” We spoke for a few minutes more. She confessed she had “made love” to the King back then, which we’d all always suspected. She also admitted she wasn’t 100% sure who I was. Yes she had called the Facility and yes she had asked to speak to me by name. But, she wanted to know if somehow she was speaking to Simon Baden. |
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