delirifacient (30 page)

and the bored man renounced his dialogue with the brownback and told brownback he was tolerated to take leave and the brownback stood up and for the first time looked around the police station and was not reminded of the hundreds of homes no not homes residences and trashroutes he had lost and of course he had nowhere to shelter the night and that welcome mat will probably have been claimed by a vagrant dog yes probably and dogs of all iterations and persuasions repugned the brownback absolutely so he told the bored man he had acquired a new mind now and it said that he the browncoat indeed was guilty and the bored man did not quite outskin his boredom but nevertheless exclaimed in unhealthily vital tones that he knew it and that something of the wrong had truly been done otherwise why should the system have made him meet the browncoat who was not the most collaborative of conversationalists and his confidence in the well-greased conduits had once again been repaid not that it mattered much and would the brownback be so kind as to follow him the bored but suddenly mobile man to the holding cells the nominal jail in the back of the police station.

but the browncoat bade the bored man stay and not perturb himself for he the browncoat was certain he could locate the jail lands on his own and the bored man had no objection to this and he sat back onto the left side of his desk and doodled on the margins of some arguably important reports and filled in the cavities of the fat capitalised letters of the titles and the subheadings and when his doodling pen had spilt itself exhausted the bored man used it to prick his finger the very belly button of his finger and he kept on doodling and the next day his supervisor lauded his creative mindset and ability to channel his unconscious via mediation.

and the browncoat lost his way and made time by poking under various employees’

desks with his searching feet but it was rather a linear construct the local police station so he could not fail to end up at the entrance to the jail and there were two guards there and they found him suspicious and detained him but he told them to make way for he knew them and he knew their names and his purpose was his own but his knowledge he gave them gratis and in the adoration and the shrug of the shrewd and the powerless before the myth of the thundergods. and one of the two police guards told the browncoat that when he the guard grows up he would have liked to be a mummy and at this the browncoat retreated to the nearest desk and extracted from it the nearest bored person working the nearest desk and brought the bored person by his hand to the jail entrance and the guards nodded and the browncoat sliced off the bored person’s inner thigh and his calf and threw them as well as the leftover to the guards’ imbalanced and immobile obese dog and the dog caught the calf and the inner thigh in his elongated jaws but produced no audible signal of either satisfaction or lack of satiation and the taller guard placed himself just behind the shorter guard and the guards both spread their legs and the browncoat crawled under the two guards and entered the holding cells.

and once there implanted the brownback had the pick of the cells for they were on the whole empty and sparsely populated and the few men that did fog the air between the thin bars had congregated in the three leftmost cells and two of the cells had three inhabitants apiece and the last held at least twenty men although there were only four beds and these latter were but thin blades of compressed hardness encrusted by a volatile sheet of lies. And the browncoat chose of course to enter the cell holding the twenty men and the twenty men declined to notice or react to the browncoat’s arrival and merely continued the turbulent fluxes of the inner economy of their undifferentiated mass speech.

and the brownback turned around and walked his steps backward and raised the torn sleeve of his gray shirt to his eyes so his face was hidden and stopped in the center of the cell and he had left the door open but again none of the men noticed or spoke to him or interfered with his steps. and most of the men were given a long time ago and they had all been given to the only man among them who was standing and not seated on the beds or the jail floor, and the standing man was speaking at length and the browncoat leaned against the bars of the cell and the standing man was not even looking anywhere or at anyone his eyes were milked and he chewed on his words and harassed and flattened his words for a long time before loosening the cage of his mouth and as his words sped across the cell they were imbibed in blood riches and intoxication and guilty mouthfeel and all could feel it even the brownback whose organs responsible long unused were not quite attuned to such insolent hints of phlogistic deliquescence.

and the standing man was actively deploring the coiled humble state of his nation and the present was merely an endless attempt to evade the trophied glories of the past and this his Russia had been majestic and mythical once and even the variegated oddities and fairy tale deformities of their elders stood for will and character, for something humanly achieved, in comparison with the obsessive, pathic health of modern Russians, infantilism raised to the norm and holified, the cuntry baptised in translucent streams of pure weakness, and the entire system was whipped into undead locomotion by sleepless bureaucrats with false benevolence and empty liberty tattooed onto their tongues, and the bureaucrat, however, was tolerant, that ravenous predator, his acceptance of the administered people as they are only stemmed from his hatred of what they might be, a powerful nation swift in its purity and merciless in its life appetite, their impolite hunger, and the raging potencies of ancient Russia, the fatal equanimity of the nomadic Slavs bred with the screaming blood and clean iron of their warlike children, a power that had been slipped into catatonic obsolescence by the comfortable lies of the chinovnik state and the peaceful requirements of modern life and coexistence such an absurd notion was inimical to the Russian heart for theirs was the vehicle, the hardened sacred vehicle, the chariot of affirmation, the machine of absolution, and which driver is not tempted, merely by all the power of his engine, to wipe out the vermin of the street, pedestrians, children and cyclist pederasts, the rationalistic impurities of the new continent, now so old, its vision blinded by all the godless illuminations of centuries past, and this was spreading, other peoples were falling, such diseases recognized no borders, even in the forests of Russia for many men it is already an impertinence to say ‘I’, no sacred ‘I’ granted by god and ancestral right, for cherish and worship, only microbial manifestations and hypostases of goddess reason, the individual a guise of the total, united under the social blanket to further progress and spread their sterile light, and this was to move forward and bring prosperity and advances and mendacious liberty and social health but in this all the movements of health resembled the reflex movements of beings whose hearts have stopped beating and Russia could not exist without its hearts one could not take away the mujik’s heart and offer him a clean new brain in return, such was not the path, no not the desire of the land and its god, and to-day’s youth refused to think in the old tongue and would not look at any issue but in the whole and assault the problems fearlessly, frontally, and do away with the whole of the problem, but the whole was the false, and the thinkers and the travellers sought to draw Russia under the emblem of the whole, to render all its magics and stories thinkable and fully knowable and free in form, dry them into single-faceted trifles, and charting flourished systems of connection and similarity and everything was to become thinkable under the same terms and tools, but to perceive resemblances everywhere, making everything alike, is a sign of weak eyesight, the blindness that was eternal sister to illumination, but this was suicide and the impotent rust of such fallow minds would be razored off by the sharp laugh of any holy fool, but this was the weak-minded protest of minds that could not contend with the plurality of greatness, the unthinkableness of transcendent power, and Russia was allowing its power to hibernate in distant caves while the greatest and most vulnerable siècle unfolded and thought itself to death mere minutes away, all the mother cuntry need do was rouse itself from the torpor of logicked knowledge and take it, take the century, teach corrupted impuissant reason and its withered little men the purity of will the sacred rightness of plenteous victory but alas Russia did not have ears for him and the standing man stood alone while others sat down to western plays in westernised theatres or in western homes to read western newspapers and ruminate western thoughts, and that which to him was most wonderful, eyes on his eyes, Russian eyes on his Russian eyes, Russian ears on his Russian words, these were not to be found, the hypnotised masses were beaten into wasting soporation by the fata morgana of comfort and complacency, the people had been tricked by the wails of liberty into stopping atop one single point in history and resting there and as its rest extended for the head lacked the will to bid the body stand once more the sands of history grew to like the resting people’s form and kissed it and came to rest on the people and the sands swallowed more and more of the people and if the will did not expurgate the cowardly instinct for rest from the story of the people, Russia itself would soon become merely another sand hill in history’s desert futile and forgotten but the will to move would not let itself be roused by the screams of the standing man and he had been fighting his cuntry’s morbid stasis for years and would drown out this corruption like a rat in Russian blood if need be but so far the standing man was merely rediscovering in revolution all the platitudes of conformism and few would listen and when the standing man spoke up where more could hear the bureaucratic response was impeccable in expedition but it was all a diverting game for them for the standing man was only taken in sufficient seriousness to be warehoused in jail from time to time and allowed to marinate in the prickly frustrations of his own unmated fervour and such was the reach of the intellectuals and the semitic elements and the office dwellers and the lesser bloods such as the merchant poles or the trickster armenians whose vegetal interests were well watered by Russia’s lapse into irrelevance and namelessness and were but a few men of worth and heart to lend him the standing man their soulwindows and let in let inside the spring of his voice the parasitic elements and the rationalists and the profiteers and the nihilists and the liberals would all be erased from the history of Russia and Her greatness in the plenitude of its dulcet irrefragability would be written in their blood on white walls, their wasted brains would paint Russia’s visceral triumph against the white walls and the borderless maps of Russia’s supernal hereafter.

and as the standing man’s winds were failing his will and both his boom and he ended in the timors of giving up and growing old and silent and watching his cuntry fade into a mere clausal afterthought worlds and dreams away from the immediacy of the subject or the majestic cruelty of the acting predicate and the twenty men started to disperse and their disbanding appeared imminent the browncoat spoke up and asked the standing man why he the standing man was renouncing his holy prerogative of rightness and clarity of vision, his prophetic honesty, when all around him yelled wrongness in garish letters and whore’s promises and the standing man looked at the brownback and saw nobility and belief in brownback’s heart and replied that he the standing man had been trying to awaken the cuntry to his truth for years and years but their the people’s commodious stability was not to be broken by one man’s truth even if that man jumped and wanted the sky while the rest were content with the peace of an arrested fœtus. and the browncoat told the standing man that he the browncoat would not hear of such despond in a man with the destiny and the drama nay the tragedy of agamemnon mythmaker and uniter etched across his lifeline and it was his the standing man’s unshruggable responsibility to take his cuntry by its broken bridle and sing to it on the fragility of the instinct of liberty in mankind and human beings both aspire to liberty in their sleep and exult each time they lose it to the mourning and only visionaries and ordained emperors can reconcile the dreams with the lively passion of the wake the waking and with due belief in the cause’s greatness from the standing man he the brownback one man saw with ruinous limpidity how the russians would raise their hands toward a willing leader and demand impatiently to be enslaved by the story of their own destiny and to be led into the sunset of their collective greatness by a man whose keen eyes saw the greatness as it was in its violent form and whose boom voice materialised the amaranth greatness the bridge of victors’ steel under the penitent feet of his willing but untrained believers who thought they had been walking on air but their march was sacred but their march was true. and of what import was it ultimately that the standing man’s own eyes might be cut by the savage discharge of russia’s power and destiny when the splinter in one’s eye is the best magnifying glass and to be blinded by truth was no more a paradox than the echo and the slap of immortality and of what import was it ultimately that attempting to teach westernised comfortable narcoleptic russia to think on and in itself and to sing its thoughts was at present nothing less than the sentimental education of a zombie, lesser men than he the standing man had braved it and history had not forgotten the weight of their shadows. and the browncoat said to the standing man that if the truth the nation’s higher truth was too large and too untamed for their soft spirits then just give them the people just use a substitute for truth and they shall swallow it like bait greedy and the truth inside the bait will gestate and feed on their own weakness and burst forth rupturing the past and their soft beings and refashioning them into the russia that russia’s truth had always wanted. and the brownback who could not stop speaking now told the standing man that finally who would remember all his the standing man’s failures, and even if the standing man had failed and would fail again no matter just try again and fail better. and if the meretricious sleepers who tolerated no speech louder or more meaning than a snore sought to make the standing man lie down with them in the softness of the mud then he the standing man should tell them they could swing all the bomb-spilt horseguts they liked and remonstrate and spray the horseguts’ loud blood all around their dance of guilt and declare transgression but he the standing man would still just string them both and their horseguts onto his harp and bleed beautiful music that would force the name of russia to rise tall in all but the most oligophrenic of its throats and the weak would choke on the holy name and cowardice was burning and the flags would meet their wind in honor wind for their flags and his the standing man’s was the sacred thought the only logic the logic of triumph and power and should his thought span beyond the people’s legibility and should their weakened margins their shrivelled persons prove insufficient scroll for the magnitude of the thought’s curls and scintillating pirouettes and sheer mass should the people prove unable to contain the writing of his thought within them then the standing man in his love of the people should use instead speeches and screams to pierce the walls of russia vulgar yes cheap of course and certainly to the standing man speech-and-scream may be all thorn but still cousin to his rose the rose of his love and of his thought.