Under the Nihil, page 3
Asking myself: is THIS the low point? Or do I CONTINUE to sink? Only one way to know. Go on. And on and on and on.
December 24:
Christ is aborted, nah-leluja.
Never got to see the animals in the manger. Mary, bloody Mary—what became of your Divine Son, murdered before he was born? God so hates the world. He hates us all. Christmas is “stopped.”
Mary, Our stained Lady . . . do you not weep to see your infant Son’s body mangled and twisted, to feel God’s blood between your legs? Holy Mary, what has happened? Your boy a stillborn, killed by his Father, the great Abortionist of the universe! The author of death! The deity of nothingness! All behold the savage mangler of his own spawn! All hail the “stopped” Son of God! Dilated, extracted, crucified, perfected: never to rise, never to breathe! His little guts squishy on your hands, oh untouched perpetual Virgin, his little fetal face frozen in a wretched grimace.
Let it now be said . . . EVERY day is Good Friday. No exceptions, no exemptions: the deal is done. The price is paid. The womb is the tomb: all is death.
. . . After that, it all goes hazy. I glided in and out of awareness of my surroundings. I began to drink, an activity which had never previously interested me. I must have figured “Why not?” though I honestly can’t recall “figuring” anything. Assorted neighbors (meth lab owners, domestic abusers, and other fine folk) later told police that they often saw me outside my apartment, stumbling about, stupefied, looking like a man who wasn’t all there. They even apparently grew a little bit concerned about me, these sweet, big-hearted criminals: finding me collapsed on the street one day, gasping and shivering in the bitter cold, one of these Good Samaritans called 9-1-1 . . . after stealing my wallet, of course.
I wound up in the hospital, fast on the path to mental health again, thanks be to fucking Jesus, Amen.
Yes, I was “saved,” but not really. I came “back,” but only partly. I hadn’t hit bottom, because in spite of everything I still found myself hoping against hope for hope. Still a poseur: not a hardcore bone in my brittle frame, my spirit still pitifully seeking its Savior, aching to fill its God-shaped hole with something, anything, unable to reconcile my God-hole to the Void that is, in fact, the very essence of God . . .
The fools who treated me, of course, mistook my relapse for a recovery. It’s the typical response of the world to one who almost escapes its clutches, only to be pulled right back into its infernal orbit, as I was.
My parents came to visit me, of course, as did my brothers and my sister, who was now an official novitiate, a fiancée of God’s, soon to be brought into the divine harem. She gazed upon me with sincere pity, which was new, though of course it was mingled with and marinated in the same smug sanctimony I recognized from our old days together. The new compassion disconcerted me, but the latter, familiar condescension actually made me nostalgic.
(Why, Mr. X, do we so often yearn for the past, even when the past was a singularly horrible time? Isn’t it all a part of the Curse that afflicts us, the fact that we want what we cannot have, for no other reason than the fact that we cannot have it?)
I don’t think my sister and I exchanged even a single word for several minutes. She reached out to touch my hand, and I let her do so, but didn’t reciprocate the gesture. I felt ashamed, embarrassed, mortified, defeated. I experienced a strong desire to unilaterally damn myself to the fires of Hell for all of eternity. I didn’t ever want to be heard, touched, tasted, smelled, or seen again; wanted to melt away into my hospital bed, to evaporate into the ether . . . Yet a part of me also felt vindicated, like I’d finally risen above all of my adolescent terror of making a fool of myself, that I’d at last sloughed off the frantic, looking-to-my-left-and-to-my-right nervous, self-conscious, ticklish tendencies that had plagued the mindset and behavior of my waking life.
I think I closed my eyes eventually, and my sister and everyone else must have left me behind, because I floated out of consciousness again. When I came back to myself, I was quite alone, and the room had grown perfectly dark.
If only that darkness had stayed, enveloping me forever! But alas, it was not to be. Dawn would steal upon me again, and its rays would light my way to the irresistible precipice of a still more formidable abyss.
Part 2: Into the Nihil
When I opened my eyes the next morning and saw you standing before me, Mr. X, I didn’t at all wonder who you were; I didn’t care. What occupied my mind were two very different questions, rooted in my palpable sense of extreme bitterness: I wondered how long you had been standing there before my creaky hospital bed, and more importantly, when would you at long last leave?
I closed my eyes, pretending not to have noticed you. I feigned a return to sleep, thinking you might just go away, whoever you were, but felt your unwanted presence lingering all the while.
Just think, Mr. X! You could have scampered off at that moment, and all the trouble incurred by you and yours could have been avoided. But you stayed where you were—an implacable force, not easily to be willed away, and I groaned inwardly at your damnable tenacity. When I opened my eyes again, your smiling face infuriated me; I would have spat into it, had I the energy or the necessary saliva. But my mouth felt as dry as Christ’s, so I just scowled.
You were, of course, utterly unmoved by my grouchiness; you took it in stride, pretending not to notice. You called me by my name, and introduced yourself, not by name but by corporation, whose name you also declined to mention. You said you were from a privately-run organization which sometimes consulted for the interests of American security. I think I snickered a little at that, in my feeble, sickly way, and you nodded apologetically.
“I know it sounds a little ‘cloak and dagger,’” you allowed, “but it’s actually pretty boring work most of the time. Wish I could tell you I was James Bond or Jack Bauer or whoever, but nope . . . Just a mid-level paper-pusher, I’m afraid. Not much to see here, folks, move along!”
I remained silent, scowl unabated, but you refused to be daunted.
“I know you’re not a man for small talk,” you said, “so I won’t insult your intelligence. And I know you are a man of very high intelligence, by the way, which is part of the reason why I’m talking to you now . . .”
I said nothing, pursed my lips, narrowed my eyes. Though I wouldn’t admit it, my curiosity had started to assert itself. I still wished you would go away, but I also wanted to know just what exactly you wanted of me. You’d probably banked on my interest being piqued at this point; you could no doubt glimpse the gears of my brain starting to turn, no matter how hard I tried to arrest their infernal rotation, to cease to care about anything, to become one with the free fall, the eternal death drop. Much as I strained against it, I still in fact did care, and the persistence of my interest drove me to a kind of impotent, fumbling anger; I raised my hand and tried to wave you away, petulantly, like a childish, emasculated, deposed autocrat trying desperately to assert the authority he knows he’s lost.
You chuckled lustily at my ridiculous gesture, and I’ve never hated you more than I did at that moment. I am sure I would have murdered you, in fact, had I the means and the physical strength just then. You told me that you would “get out of my hair” at that point, perhaps sensing that you’d worn out your welcome, even though in fact I’d never welcomed you in the first place. You left a card on my dresser, strolled to the door, then turned to face me one last time.
“Give me a call when you’re feeling up to it,” you said. “Maybe we can come to some kind of agreement, one that may be lucrative for you and beneficial for me and those who sent me . . .”
I giggled mirthlessly at your attempt at enticement with the adjective “lucrative”—of all the forces that fought for possession of my soul at that moment, lust for lucre was certainly not one of them. You smiled at my bitter laughter, as if both of us were in on the joke, before wishing me well and taking your leave.
* * *
In your immediate absence, I pulled my covers over myself and scoffed and harrumphed loudly and ostentatiously, as if you were still there and would somehow feel wounded by my overwrought, dismissive mannerisms. You cut such a ridiculous figure, talking aw-shucks-it’s-not-cloak-and-dagger-or-anything-like-that while you stood in your impeccably casual clothes with your charming smile, except I’m not a woman or a fag, so I wasn’t taken in by your good looks and your fashion sense and the gaudy class ring on your finger from your Ivy League college. The Big Man on Campus bearing, incongruously clashing with the foot-shuffling false modesty, really made an unbearably insufferable combination.
Yet if you were ridiculous in your handsome uninvitedness, I cut a far more ludicrous figure, lying abed in my poseurish mental patient garb, all fanged and dangerous on the exterior, but a shivering little puppy dog beneath my hospital straitjacket.
And again the curiosity arose: what in the world does Big Man want with Little Boy?
Of course, you were cockily self-assured that I’d go along with your “lucrative” scheme, whatever it was, but what was in it for you? That question had me stumped. And much as I wanted to throw your card away without even looking at it, just to spite your arrogant assumption of my interest in joining forces, I found that I couldn’t pass up the forbidden knowledge implied in your offer. I needed to know exactly what made you feel the need to condescend to appear in my hospital room, a redemptive, resplendent deity gracing a wretch like me with the present of his immaculate presence.
So you stayed in my heart, Mr. X. And through the following days of my so-called “recovery,” I made sure not to lose your card, which, when I examined it more closely, proved to have nothing inscribed upon it except a telephone number. No name was engraved, nor was there a name of any “security consulting firm.” I began to wonder if I were the victim of some kind of prank, before realizing that I didn’t even care—in fact, I welcomed the prank; I tipped my hat (though I wore no hat, which made the gesture all the more fitting) to you at that point, a handsome, successful man evidently getting his jollies from “punking” the loser defrocked would-be priest-cum-demented freak. Reality TV gold, surely! More ballsily tasteless than bum fighting on YouTube! Hell, count me in, I decided; I’m so there!
I called the number on your card, with the notion of punking the punkers, of pretending to be ignorant of the setup, biding my time, then springing it upon you that I’d in fact known the score all along.
And behold! That’s exactly what I did! Dig me, the usurping fiend, daring to disturb the universe; kicking ass and taking names! Before your buddies with hidden cameras jumped out from behind a curtain, I jumped out on all of you . . . Revenge of the freak.
* * *
After getting discharged from the ward, my first act as a “free” man was to call the phone number written on that blank card of yours. You answered after two rings, greeting me like an old friend; I got the impression that my call went directly to a cellphone which had been purchased for the express purpose of me calling it; otherwise, how could you have known it was me? Yet you did, and I didn’t question the circumstance. I had a role to play here, and I’d play it to everyone’s satisfaction: I was the Unsuspecting Victim, who in truth suspects his victimization all along.
You asked if I’d had a chance to think over your proposal. I said there’d been no “proposal,” as such, made—merely vague talk of mutually beneficial activities and “lucre.” You laughed at that, and asked when might be a good time to meet and talk. I told you that my schedule, surprisingly enough, looked quite open for the next couple of decades. You laughed again, and I wanted to tell you to shut the hell up, but didn’t.
We met for supper the next night. It was “your treat,” you said. You gave me the address of an expensive restaurant that I’d never heard of, and I met you there. You were dressed to the nines this time, in a fine, double-breasted suit; I looked like a homeless person, in rumpled, stained rags. The contrast could not have been more marked; we were an odd couple: the have, and the have-not; the sane, worldly, important Prince of the Universe, and the soiled, shaggy Nowhere Man.
The hostess led us to a private booth, and handed us our menus. I ordered the least expensive item, which caused you to regard me quizzically, asking if that were really all that I wanted. I nodded, and you shrugged.
“Suit yourself,” you said. “Remember, it’s on me.”
The food arrived; we ate in silence, the din of happy, convivial, rich people soaking through the booth’s partitions, along with the clatter of fine plates, the popping of corks, the tinkling of glasses, the bubbling exuberant splashes of expensive wine being poured. Finally, obeying the promptings of an inner impulse, I asked you directly:
“Who are you, and why are we here?”
You took this pointed query in stride, as always.
“____,” you said (calling me informally by my first name with an over-familiarity that set my teeth on edge), “you can gather that the world has changed a great deal in the last decade or so.”
This seeming non-sequitur caught me up short, I’ll admit, but I sat silently, prompting you to continue:
“The War on Terror was joined with great enthusiasm after September 11th, 2001, but as the years have gone by, it’s become something of a tough slog . . .” Your careful, patrician voice just then betrayed your Kennedyesque Bostonian accent, which I hadn’t detected before; you pronounced “terror” as “terr-ah” and “slog” as “slaagh,” which struck me as funny, but I didn’t laugh; I just nibbled at my food. I wasn’t terribly hungry.
“One of the difficulties,” you continued, “is inherent (‘in-haah-rant’) in the very nature of the enemy.” You leaned close, for the first time projecting an almost boyish excitement.
“Imagine,” you said, “the mindset of the suicide bomber (‘baah-mah’). What makes that guy tick? What can you do against a guy like that, someone who wants to die? You kill him, so what? He was gonna die, anyhow . . . He’s got nothing to lose! Why does he do it? Is it because he’s just horny for those seventy-two beautiful virgins that await him in Heaven? Or is that just a cop-out on our part? I mean, maybe we just go on about the vah-gins because we want to lower the enemy to our level . . .
“I mean, geez, how to handle that: an enemy who aims to die, and to take as many of us down with him?”
You evinced an obvious admiration for the standard-issue jihadist, which startled me a little. If I’d really pondered the matter, it would have struck me the way it does now, the fact that you really seemed to envy those guys. I had no idea how your discourse and observations bore upon me, however, and I asked you to clarify why any of this was important or relevant to why you and I were sitting in this private booth, eating expensive food on your gracious dime. You rubbed your lip with your cloth napkin, unbuttoned your suit jacket, as if to indicate that we were finally getting down to the nitty-gritty.
And once more, you called me by my first name.
“_____,” you said. “I know you’ve been through a lot. Now, I’m not judging you, or anything (here you raised your arms, palms out, in a kind of “Please don’t shoot me” gesture—which was odd, under the circumstances) . . . I don’t judge. We don’t judge. But a man in your position must know what it’s like to have been put through the ringer (‘ring-ahh’). Not unlike our boys at the front, eh?”
I took a sip of water (I’d refused to order a drink to accompany my relatively cheap meal), and mumbled that I didn’t really know about that—nobody’d shot at me or tried to blow me up; I still had all of my limbs, and wasn’t being carted around in a wheelchair. You nodded vigorously, as if to say, “Sure, sure—don’t misunderstand me or anything!” But even if I were something akin to a wounded or psychologically scarred soldier, I still failed to see the significance or relevance.
And then, do you know what you did, Mr. X? You again called me by my first name! Holy hell . . . for a bureaucratic bigwig, you sure could come on like a cheesy little salesman! I mean, three times with the first name intro! Now, looking back, I wonder: were you trying to make me despise you by aggravating my chagrin at your backslapping “we’re-just-two-regular-guys-talkin’-here” pretense? Was it all carefully calculated? Did you want to press my buttons?
If so, do you have any second thoughts, considering where it all led?
“____,” you said, “I’ll get right to the point. “Brevity is the soul of wit, after all, so let me be brief.” You leaned close, really close, inducing me also to bend my head forward, my irritation notwithstanding.
“We’re losing this war,” you said, in a voice barely above a whisper.
I nodded solemnly, thinking that this was an appropriate response to such a portentous revelation. In my mind, of course, I’d grown far beyond caring about the meaning behind the words. I didn’t feel possessed in the least to care about a bunch of camo-clad GIs facing off against a lot of grubby ragheads against a blandly arid backdrop teeming with sand and cracked earth. It failed to capture my interest who was “winning” and who “losing” this grim game of grab-ass in the dust.
“Yes. We are,” you insisting, nodding emphatically as if you had been challenged on this point by an invisible heckler. “I don’t care what you’ve heard on the news about ‘surge’ this or ‘tah-garted strike’ that . . . I’m telling you, we’re losing. And I’ll tell you why, although this is just my opinion, of course. It’s because, what have we really got to fight for? Our freedom? Yeah, sure; that’s all well and good; I don’t demean it, but who gets all hot and bah-thahed over ‘freedom’? It’s way too obscure and highfalutin’ a concept. But our enemy? Well, they may not have our superior weaponry, but hell’s bells, who needs it; they’ve got Allah! I mean, who the hell cares why they’re stuck in the Stone Age with this untenable ideology and this death wish? And don’t give me that bleeding heart gah-bage about pah-varty breeding hopelessness; hell, most of the 9/11 gang were from well-off families! But they still want to die, and they still want to take a big chunk of us down with ’em.”
