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THE MAN WITH A LAPSE OF JUDGMENT
by Adrian Silva
“Count down with me.”
“Four.”
“Three.”
“Two.”
“One.”
“Listen to your heartbeat.”
“Feel the way your heart rate raises as you inhale
“Feel the way your heart rate slows as you exhale.”
“Start at the base of your spine, feel your perineum as you breathe.”
“Muladhara is your root.”
“Muladhara is Malkuth.”
“Pay attention to the sensation of your pelvis, pay attention to the space of your sacrum, the organs you never feel while awake.”
“Svadhishthana is Yesod.”
Marco can feel clotting at what he thinks might be his root chakra beneath the soaked blood of his white linen shirt.
“Control…”
A sprawl of green canopies topping valleys and rainforest blur in front of Marco’s eyes as he labors through breathing.
“In through the nose, out through the mouth.”
Marco remembers the voice as his eyelids spasm. He struggles to keep them open. The guided meditation technique is his line between sleep and the sky outside. Marco guides the airplane through mist and rainfall as dancing droplets stream out onto the sides of the cockpit screen glass.
Inez’s voice is a whisper into his right ear over the tinnitus of persistent gunshot feedback. It snaps him back the moment his eyes shut completely for his first involuntary loss of consciousness.
“Y abre tus ojos.”
Inez’s voice is first only recalled as a memory.
It is the sound of the soft meditation she led over motorcycle engines singing through wide open yoga studio windows. Small windchimes on the building across the street hung from colored roof shingles. The soundscape is cast as though through a tape master and long-term audio degradation right into Marco’s ears in the present.
The sound is muffled, distant, as through the elevation sickness experienced mountaineering above the Tibetan plateau.
The sound is cast through days. It is cast through flashes of hours spent pretending he could forget Inez’s voice.
The engine vibration is deafening.
But after every blood loss induced syncope, the voice grows closer still. Until she is directly next to him.
She is whispering into his right ear.
“Y abre tus ojos.”
In the yoga studio Marco had felt sunlight against his right arm while in deep prana cycles. It was the only spot on his skin that was not shaded by draped overhead mandala blankets hanging between Tibetan prayer flags. On the wall opposite the windows were two wall sized paintings of the hundred peaceful and wrathful deities. Marco remembers thinking they all looked monstrous as if they could be split between both the heavenly manifestations and the Bön tulpas of death cycles. The yoga teacher was radiant. Inez Jäger with green eyes like those of neotenous arboreal birds.
But the 135 decibel mechanical plane engine drone cannot be the meditation circle in the classroom a year ago.
In the cockpit, the sounds in Marco’s memory are a sine wave over the tinnitus of begging gunshot victims, over the sound of Inez choking on her own tongue in delirium on the playback of a video8 mini-cassette screened on a lone television placed on a metal shelf at the center of a warehouse, the tracking lines on screen setting a glow over a blood-stained floor drain set in concrete.
Marco is bleeding out in the cockpit seat of a CASA C-212 Aviocar. It is winter 1984, the rainy season over Colombia. His abdominal wound is from a .45 ACP cartridge fired from one of the many Israeli submachine guns sold to supply Agrupación de Fuerzas Especiales Antiterroristas Urbanasthe, the AFEAU, Colombian special operations.
The AFEAU conducts operations with US intelligence against narco-traffickers. Most of the time it is less against, more for, one cartel against another. The sides change as seasons change.
Marco’s wound is a lucky shot from a competent eye that could draw a line from his center body’s heart chakra to where the second wound, the one that matters is cut into his right femoral artery. It is a graze that on an ear, or an eye, or piece of bone would be less terminal. It is a graze that cut open just enough surface sheath to let the red cells loose.
Marco grips his chest with his left hand, his right gripping the plane control yoke,
“Feel your solar plexus.”
Inez breathes into Marco’s ear from the empty seat next to him
“Manipura is Hod and Netzach, honor and victory.”
There will never be a healer to fix Marco’s wounds in the sky over Páramo Frontino. Noon sunlight is hidden behind storms over Antioquia. It pierces through rain clouds like the Qaballa pillars, judgment, mildness, and mercy cast down as white light from above into the jungles. The valleys and forests are as deep a green as the tight bodysuit Inez wore the first day she and Marco met at the yoga classroom.
Inez wore Givenchy Ysatis, perfume of orange blossom.
She once told Marco,
“Olfactory memory is the most powerfully resonant of any of the five physical senses. Scent signals travel from the olfactory epithelium in the sinuses to the amygdala and the hippocampus. The former for emotion, the latter for memory. All other sensory input is mediated by the thalamus.”
Inez whispers,
“Scent has direct access to the luciform body.”
The luciform, or subtle body of light, Inez once described to Marco, “is an aspect of the self, neither physical nor astral. It serves as a middle ground to access the spirit realm.”
Marco can smell Incense and essential oils. Spools of Peruvian native Alpaca wool twined on floor blankets of a yoga studio, a woman just a year ago drenched in perfume. But in other spaces are scents of the red-light district of Medellín with its odors of sweat, cheap body spray, hydrocarbons on lubricant wax, and leather tobacco. There are subterranean shipping tunnels, packaging facilities in the rainforest, a warehouse, death squad briefing rooms. Inez’s scent hides there too. Marco breathes in the scent of explosives, the iron of blood, human waste, metal, gunpowder, and thermite.
The meditation class was a recommendation by Marco’s former mentor, Silvio Diaz. Diaz was a flight school instructor turned military operations trainer. Fuerza Aérea Colombiana. Silvio never bragged about it but he would drop hints about things best never spoken about. His training at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia in the late 1960s at the School of the Americas, the Vietnam war, The Phoenix program. Silvio couldn’t have known the girl in the yoga studio would be the only reason why Marco could ever hold a grudge. Silvio taught Marco everything he knew, and will be written about in US – Colombian intel reports as Marco’s commanding officer and contact.
Silvio is dead.
Marco’s leg wound will never clot. Marco’s heart chakra will bleed until his final blackout. The cockpit floor is pooled with blood colored more black than red. It runs in streams in the direction of the plane tilt. Marco will lose consciousness over Las Orquídeas.
“Follow The World path into The Sun path. Follow it through the secret valley of Yesod.”
Inez’s voice in Marco’s ear turns into the smell of rain through hanging vines at the base of Cerro Tamana in the spring of 1984.
Six months ago, Marco was an operations lead for the largest scale grow operation for the Medellin Cartel. 200 farmers, cultivators, chemists, soldiers, prostitutes, and their families.
In the rainforest, coca leaves grow between warehouses, storage and processing. Besides the buildings and crops was a long airstrip.
The admin office was an antique Spanish Hermitage. Marco was sent out by AFEAU under the direction of Comandante Silvio Diaz to infiltrate, document, and return reconnaissance to the Colombian Army and its US allies. Marco stopped sending accurate reports two months before the evening he spent at the plantation office.
The office like Assiah is to Atziluth was the physical manifestation of Marco’s yearnings. The wood paneling framed mahogany and rosewood were the numinous spirits of Amazon mangroves. Marco’s desk was behind a setting of swords recovered from Latin revolution and conquest. Antiques lined shelves with fragments of the Catholic and the pagan native alike, history books, binders of shipping manifests, shell companies. Over a fireplace mantle was a statue of Francisco Pizarro astride a horse. As long as Marco could remember he preferred bedtime stories about conquistadors. The entirety of the room fit this theme save one intrusion: an object opposite the fireplace selected by Marco’s private interloper. Haunted fibers out of eastern mountain Mogao cave shrines. It was sewn together as snakes of Kundalini sex and mystery.
Leaving the office for the crops, Marco stopped at the wall sized tapestry in his office.
Inez had picked out the seventeenth century piece at an art auction at the Museo de Botero in Bogota at an evening ball in May a month before Marco stood there by the door gazing at it.
The exhibit and auction: Death is not the End – a gateway to Himalayan art
Marco rarely opened up to Inez about his line of work. Inez was not blind to it. Their meetings were few.
On the night Marco bought the tapestry, Inez was dressed in an almost medieval but minimal tight burgundy Spanish evening gown. She had led him through the exhibit explaining to him each auction piece, the significance of each deity, the placements of body parts, motion and meaning.
Marco frowns rarely, smiles even less.
He asked Inez, “I need something for the office, something to remind me of this place and our weekend here in the city while I’m away. I won’t see you again until July. It’s going to be hot. Suffocating. Have you ever read Conrad?”
Inez had stopped him, turned around to kiss him before pulling back and holding a single finger over her lips, her curly hair, blood colored approaching black like the pools on the airplane floor bounced under the museum exhibit lights. She dropped her hand and pursed lips into a smile, pupils expanding as she turned her back to the art lamps lit in chiaroscuro.
“No negative language. Ever, Marco. How you speak about the world is what the world is. How you think of the world, becomes the world. Never speak ill of it.”
Inez led Marco to a blue hued tapestry. At the center was the Adi-Buddha with blue skin seated in lotus position. The figure was in sexual congress with a feminine form. A landscape in green sprawled out beneath them. Spiral clouds in blue over an arch of floral mountains on either side were set above the horizon line.
Marco held his hand against the back of Inez’s waist, the two looking up at the tapestry.
“I know it’s a Buddha, but why is it blue, why the sex? What does it mean?”
Inez’s eyes followed the frozen motion of the two bodies on the tapestry as she explained,
“Buddhism did not arrive in Tibet until the fifth century. The myth follows that Lhathothori Nyantzan, the forefather of the Tubo Kingdom rested in meditation over the Yungbolhakang summit and witnessed the falling of treasures from the sky. He heard a voice telling him that the objects would teach the Tubo Kingdom of Tibet their meaning. Historical documents describe the arrival of Indian bodhisattvas in Tibet during the Tubo Kingdom. Bön represented the pre-Buddhist pagan mysticism of the Himalayas, preserved in the Tibetan Buddhist practices of Dzogchen. Ancient and primordial, Bön followed the ways of prediction, the ways of the visual world, the ways of magic, the ways of life, the ways of the follower, the ways of the ascetic, the ways of primordial sound, the ways of primordial shen, and the ways of the supreme way. “
Inez raised her right-hand palm out, fingers spread wide between herself and the tapestry. “Long after Bön was followed by Theravada Buddhism in Tibet, the Vajrayana mystery schools were still… so compatible with Bön.”
Inez curled the fingers of her right hand into a fist as she shut her eyes as she spoke, “Bön was like, blood sorcery, but even more ancient. Like the Gods of this country. Think about the native’s fire serpents and human sacrifice…”
Marco turned from the tapestry to look at Inez. The overhead lamp merged amber light through the blue of the Buddha’s body luminating Inez’s face, Marco tried to remember every hue of her before he responded, “Times change, the Church put a stop to that centuries ago. Cortez and his men witnessed sacrifice for the harvest during the Spanish conquests, they lost a handful of their own men to it, put the Aztec priesthood to the sword.”
Inez moved closer, the two standing eye to eye in front of the tapestry,
“Yes, and they’re fascinating, but nothing has changed. You can’t possibly believe that. Nothing from antiquity is gone, we merely pretend it’s not there. Sex is powerful, blood even more so. You can’t hide the old gods. They will just manifest somewhere else. Just like Dzogchen preserved the Bön traditions in Tibetan Buddhism, the Aztec pagan gods live on in Catholicism here. Don’t you feel worshiped yourself?“
“Not really.”
“Well. This one is good. This one is perfect. You are going to hang it wherever it is that you disappear to. You see, the Ādi-Buddha was the first primordial Buddha, the first tantric master to attain Buddhahood. The woman wrapped in him is positioned in the practice of Karmamudrā, the sexual yogas. She is Samantabhadrī, his guiding dakini, a female goddess or demon. She is the consort of the Ādi-Buddha. She is an expression of the inexpressible. She is the void. I think this is the piece you need. It will remind you of what you are trying to achieve.”
“And what is that?”
“The reason you came into my classroom to begin with. You had a slight stammer but you struggled through it anyway. I don’t know what it is you do, but I know you shudder with anxiety. Perhaps you don’t know why you do what you do. Perhaps you have no telos, no guiding tantra. I want this to help you find that someday.”
Marco wrote down the number for the tapestry. Later in the auction audience Marco held up a sign to bid $30,000 at 88 mil Pesos. Inez wrapped her hand into the inside of Marco’s leg. As the bidding went up to $50,000 she turned to him.
“Win it, take it with you, and tonight before you leave tomorrow I will be Samantabhadrī. There are stranger, more peculiar yogas I can show you.”
In the plantation Hermitage office, Marco could not look at the wall tapestry without remembering the night he first had the museum staff set the piece down into a long glass case, Inez calmly watching next to him as the auction staff handed it off to Gilberto, Marco’s assistant to have it delivered to the hermitage. Marco could dream that there was some symbolism for it beyond his memories of sex, his body wrapped in Inez’s in an impossible attempt to recreate the tapestry image with her that night. Marco felt more like Pizarro than the Ādi-Buddha.
The voice again, in his ear,
“y abre tus ojos.”
“Anahata is the heart.”
Marco is back in the plane. His heartbeat has slowed
Inez whispers into his ear again,
“The heart is Tiphareth and beauty.”
Another blackout. The scent of cigarettes.
One year ago Marco Moreyra reported for a Fuerza Aérea assignment at an airfield hanger in Cali’s Base Aérea Marco Fidel Suarez where Marco had exceeded flight training metrics, mastered marksmanship and special operations training. His hair was grown down to his shoulders.
Marco’s right leg is a half centimeter longer than his left leg. Complications from polio as a child. He endured the imbalance through parachute dives. The force of hard ground landings having sent an ache through his ankle he imagined could be as imperceptible as his limp.
The hanger was empty aside from two old single engine planes and a briefing set up at the far end center. Silvio called out to Marco, “You should wear a lift in your boot.”
Silvio was the first person since Marco’s childhood to notice his almost imperceptible staggered gait.
“If I had noticed the way you walk like a cripple the day you signed up, I would have never written your recommendation. I couldn’t have known. I am proud of you, you know. Sit down.”
Marco sat, one of three other men in the dark aircraft hangar in front of a long presentation board stuck with maps, intel reports, and photos of every member of the Medellin cartel known to AFEAU.
Silvio sighed, a rare moment of visible tribulation.
“This is all still very, quiet. We have made no progress. Moreyra, what do you have?”
Marco looked up, pulling at his collarbone.
“I’ve been at the estate with Rodríguez Gacha. It took me months to meet with him. But I can’t come back here again. I was tailed through every airport, they’re convinced that I am just running supply shipping for them from my family’s aviation business. This is an air-force base, with thirty-year old single engine planes. They think I’m buying parts. Negotiating contracts. But I guarantee you, there’s a guy waiting outside watching the car I showed up in.”
Silvio shirked. “I have good reason to believe your cover is fine. People higher up than me reviewed all the details. Your family background makes you unique. You could still be enlisted here, they wouldn’t care. Medellin has had pilots on the inside before, believe me.”
“It’s not that simple. There’s risk, not just for me. You know I had to drown a guy? Hold his head in a barrel of crop pesticide. He didn’t have any fingers left. They raped his sister in front of him but had the decency to shoot her when they were done. I don’t know who either of them were or why we had to kill them. I need to drop field reports somewhere else, and not to these idiots. I mean you all look like feds. Doesn’t matter how you dress, you’re not fooling anyone.”
Silvio kneels in front of Marco, taps him on his right cheek with an open hand.
“Moreyra. You’re a cripple but you’re a bull.”
With a smile and a laugh, Silvio stood up.
“It’s not stressful. Go back to the meditation classes I suggested, get your head on straight. But it’s fine, we will set up a new meeting site, less obvious. I’ll get one of the boys here to set it up and be more discreet.”
After leaving the airfield, Marco sat in a 1981 Mercury Capri ASC McLarena next to his cartel tail, Gilberto.
Next to his assistant, Gilberto.
Marco doesn’t frown. He smiles even less.
He directed Gilberto to start the car and drive to the airport at Gran Colombia de Aviacio.
Marco calm and distant, he remembered how to control his breathing as he started speaking.
“I’m certain Silvio has skinned at least five different men alive.”
Marco pulled a cigarette out from the console.
”He cut their faces off. Do you know what Contras are,” Marco asks Gilberto while digging for sunglasses and a lighter in a briefcase on the car floor.
“Salvadorians,” crooned Gilberto.
“Sort of. Communist faggots. It doesn’t matter.”
Marco took a long drag from the cigarette after lowering the passenger side window. Outside the severe heat of the Cali downtown business center bore down through pollen clouds, the scent of empanada street vendors contorted with folk guitarists, the twilight skyline of the valley city against mountains and black wasps. In the distance, Marco could catch the sight of Colombian air-force F-4 Phantoms touching down on the base behind them. It was the second aircraft Marco trained in.
“Centro de Entrenamiento Latino Americano, Division Terrestre. The School of the Americas…”
Marco told the story to Gilberto through smoke and neon pink lighting entering the car interior from street bars and restaurant lamps:
“…Silvio was trained in some US DOD outfit in the 1970s. He showed me the stuff the Americans taught him. He had this book called Mind War, written by some instructor he had who ran something called the Phoenix Program. The guy who taught him everything is a Satanist now, looks like a clown but serious. His mentor starved a woman he used as a sex slave to death in a dog cage because she tried to deliver a message to her Viet Cong cousin. Poor girl, they caught her with the note. She just wanted to know if the kid was alive.”
Gilberto was focusing on the road, he did not turn to Marco as he interrupted:
“Silvio is not that frightening. He’s an idiot. He’s not going to arrest any of us. He’d probably try to kill you if he found out what you’re really doing, but he wouldn’t pull it off. The Americans want Norte del Valle Cartel to get an upper hand. He thinks we’re going to give him all our shipping routes.”
Marco’s expression didn’t change.
“There’s three guys in my squad with AFEAU, Jaime, Leon, and Andres. I don’t even believe that Silvio’s commanding officers even know what he’s doing. You talk about me, what I’ve done. Silvio is fucking over someone above him too. He’s just unambitious, a coward. Silvio takes some cut from Norte del Valle. Maybe the CIA, maybe there’s no difference. Doesn’t fucking matter. The thing you have to keep in mind is there’s no difference between them and you. The cartels don’t exist, the agencies don’t exist, we don’t exist. It’s all the same.”
Marco imagined the Jewel net of Indra.
Turning onto an offramp exit to the airport, Gilberto asked, “What do you want to do with your old squad? I’ll get you addresses, family information. Send sicarios, just get rid of them.”
Marco answered flicking the cigarette outside as the car reached the airstrip: “No, I want to do it myself.”
At the airport Marco and Gilberto will have met with Rodríguez Gacha, one of the four leaders of the Medellin Cartel on a Mitsubishi MU-300 business jet. They will have planned a bright future for all involved. One not all that different to Marco had he remained loyal to AFEAU. Profilers on government reports will ponder Marco’s motives. What difference materially it would have made had he followed orders versus independently breaking away from Silvio’s operations. None of the reports will find the answers distributed at the hermitage office, on the shelves of Marco’s childhood bedroom, or in Marco’s internal experience of spiritual practices written about in AFEAU personal reports with nothing but cynicism.
Awake again in the cockpit, Marco responds to the disembodied voice of Inez, “My guiding telos. What is my guiding telos?”
Marco grew up in a well to do family in an estate outside of Cali on the southern valleys. His father ran a commercial air shipping business. His mother was a show dancer, tango and ballet. He would’ve been described as “bookish” if the books were exclusively classics, Greek, Roman, the dynasties of Ancient Asia. History only interested Marco Moyera in myths of heroism and war. The young Marco liked Achilles, Aguirre, Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
Read enough about ancient men and very little about the actions of the living will seem surprising.
Two weeks after meeting Silvio at the base and leaving Cali for Bogota with Gacha, Marco will have met with his AFEAU contact, Jaime to provide an intelligence update at a brothel in Santa Fe, Bogota. Silvio and the squad added the new meeting spot as a safer option. Gilberto, and a group of cartel soldiers will have dragged Jaime off the street into a van right after his meeting with Marco. At the second-floor window burgundy and plum fluorescent light filled the dark side street. Marco watched from the glass, expressionless as his former air force classmate was garroted in the back before the rear doors of the van slammed.
Minutes earlier, Jaime had asked Marco as the two sat across from each other at a table in the same brothel bedroom:
“I don’t believe that any of this scares you. That whole thing about drowning that cartel hit… If that’s even true. I’ve known you for years. You don’t have anxiety, you don’t have anything. We’ve gotten drunk together. I’ve never even seen you excited about anything. You know what I did when I found out you were the only one on our squad that asked Silvio for a stress relief leave? Meditation classes? I laughed. Anxiety? Anger? Happiness? Nothing. Why do you even do this?“
Chain-smoking and not having touched the glass of vodka Jaime poured him at the small coffee table under a buzzing red ceiling lamp, Marco did smile then.
“Everything is so dreadfully boring, Jaime. Don’t you think?”
After watching the cartel van drive off with Jaime’s body, Marco will have gone dark to AFEAU. Government reports will question whether or not his intention was to appear to have been killed, or if the decision was made without a thought, or worse with intent to send a message. If Marco were alive, he would have known well that the bodies of Colombian government intelligence agents, and American assets piled in the streets; like a web of thirty-two paths, would lead back to him.
Marco’s life as a decorated military officer and undercover asset would have been an easy path to respect, fortune, and family honor.
Never recovered by the AFEAU, or the Americans was Jaime’s last report after meeting with Marco at the brothel, a note at the bottom in quotations.
“Everything is so dreadfully boring”
At the jungle plantation outside the Hermitage office, Marco stopped to practice a prana exercise, to let the scent of the rainforest hit his luciform body.
Marco remembered Inez reading to him from a book by Theosophist G.R.S. Mead, The Doctrine of the Subtle Body in Western Tradition, at his apartment bedroom in Bogota:
“The sphere of the soul is radiant when it is neither extended to any object, nor is contracted inwards nor is convoluted, nor collapses, but when it is made to shine with that light whereby it sees the truth- the truth of all things, and the truth in itself.”
The forest smelled sweet cut with chypre, and foliage. Marco smiled looking at the coca crops, he remembered a question, more an intent he wanted to bring back to Inez.
“What is my guiding telos?”
Marco wakes again in the cockpit,
“y abre tus ojos.”
The C-212 is screaming pulling down against the yoke stick as Marco pulls it back up increasing the altitude. He is still tightening his grip on the abdominal bullet wound. The sea of trees through the cockpit glass rises like an aquamarine oil slick up from the center of the windscreen. Marco struggles to level the plane, regaining control of his breathing.
He looks to the seat at his right.
Inez is naked, her limbs broken, ears cut off, empty eye sockets. Her green eyes are gone.
She commands at him,
“Vishuddha is the throat.”
“The aether is Geburah and Chesed, justice, fear, and mercy.”
At the plantation, Marco listened to the sound of wind through the crops and tree canopies. He let the song of the forest blend with the soft wet scents in each controlled breath. Over the covered harvest tents, he gazed at the distant mountains imagining Pizarro’s men dreaming of similar landscapes, riding horses through the cliff sides, spears in hand.
“What is my guiding telos?” he thinks again.
Marco will have tended to the day’s work. He will have laughed with the harvester foreman, played a game of dominos with the chemists, taught the camp children marksmanship under the watchful eyes of toucans and tree sloths.
In the evening, as Marco slept at the Hermitage he woke to a knock on his bedroom door.
Gilberto outside with two, armed cartel soldiers.
“Los federales, I can’t explain, get dressed, come to the warehouse now.”
The plantation warehouse was a haunted place. The workers look away when passing, a subtext of carnal knowledge common to everyone at the site. Gilberto and the men had led Marco inside. Racks of explosives, engine parts, military grade weapons, and bookshelves surrounded the interior. The center was hard gray concrete with a drain. Streaks of brown stains stretch out from a chair bolted at the middle.
Gilberto explained, “Don Marco, I couldn’t tell you at first. How do I tell you this, as a man, without also giving you what I would want, as a man.”
Leon, one of Marco’s former AFEAU comrades, was tied to the chair bolted in front of the floor drain, a television racked over a VCR camcorder setup was directly in front of him, a camera on a tripod between.
“Don Marco, this was left at one of our drop-sites. I watched it. I had the men follow this man who dropped it off. You know him, no?”
Marco took the Video8 cassette from Gilberto.
“What is this? What did he do? He’s an idiot. We used to play footbol after training.”
Marco walked to the AV set up and inserted the Video8 tape.
On the plane Inez whispers,
“The Qliphoth are the shells and husks.”
Never included in government reports will be the image of the Qliphoth in Marco’s mind. A moment of precognition, the gnarled roots beneath the Tree of Life, set deep into the earth swarmed over by centipedes and mycelial branches as the Tree of Death.
One night the spring prior, Marco led Inez through Plaza Santo Domingo in Cartagena. She described the Tree of Life, the ancient Qabalistic network diagram from the Jewish Zohar passed down through mystery schools over centuries. She described each of its nodes, the Sefirot, and the meaning of each, their connections to the eastern chakra, the tarot, and the zodiac. Malkuth, Yesod, Hod, Netzach, Tiferet, Gevurah, Chesed, Binah, Chokhmah, and Keter.
“Everything has its inverse,” she described.
“The emanations of the Tree of Life are said in the Zohar to be mirrored in the Qliphoth, the Tree of Death. The other side. They are all emanations of imbalance and impurity.”
The television woke from its snowy static screech. The mechanical noise of the video head tracked against the tape before speaker feedback lit up into the room. Marco looked to Leon. He was struggling against his bonds, hyperventilating, moaning through his gag. Empty spaces in his gums were visible through the binding. Gilberto had extracted several of his teeth. At his wrist binds, edema and swelling spread over his hands, the stumps of his fingers cauterized over with what looked like burns. His wrists were degloved.
On the screen was Silvio in a brightly lit concrete room, two AFEAU soldiers on either side.
“My son, My heart broke when I found out you died. Is what I would say if I believed it. I know you killed my other boys. None of this is news to me. You are a bull. I respect you too much to bore you.”
On the screen Silvio stepped aside to reveal Inez chained to a steel bed frame at the center of the camera. He directed the two men to move to her.
“I didn’t think you of all men would believe in her kind of thing, this superstition. I also didn’t believe you were ever the type for anxiety either. That’s ok. I know you have been meeting her when you are not executing my men. I hope it was worth it. My son, you are better than this, you are a bull. Start.”
Inez screamed and pulled away on the tape. Gilberto and the soldiers looked away as Marco stared blankly at the screen as the men beat, raped, and mutilated Inez. The screams warped into choking liquid gasps.
“Count down with me…”
“Four, three, two, one.”
“Listen to your heart rate.”
Silvio did not re-enter the frame. The tape dragged on for an hour as Inez drowned in fluids, swelling, and ulcer. The tape continued, her body in frame until it cut off into white illuminating the warehouse center.
Marco closed his eyes and practiced the deep breathing prana.
He turned to Leon, walked up to him bound recoiling in the chair.
“Hello, Leon. Everything is so dreadfully boring, don’t you think?”
Marco stepped back, took a deep breath feeling his heartbeat before telling Gilberto:
“Burn him.”
Inez’s voice is not a demand, she is shouting into Marco’s face as he wakes up one final time–
“Ajna is the third eye.”
“Binah and Chokmah are understanding and wisdom.”
The plane is in an inverted spin, the locks of Marco’s hair flowing in a halo around his face as he levels out the aircraft again. The last pillars of sunlight under the Colombian sky are gone leaving only darkness and lightning over the forest valley.
Marco’s eyes are heavy. There is no light but the flashes of the storm, and a sound not in the cockpit, but in the past fading into the moment, a bird call.
Far away was the call of a Smooth-Billed Ani, the little black bird Marco remembered from childhood, a call he had heard a thousand times. It blends with the smell of smoke and gasoline.
Hours before Marco boarded the transport plane holding his wounds he was at a mountain pass several miles outside of Risaralda Caldas. Seated at a patio table under a tent shelter showered over by valley rains during winter. On the table was a map of tunnels through to a cartel shipping airfield at Villa Claret. Next to it was a Sturmgewehr rifle Inez had gifted to Marco. It had come from the very same steamer trunk in Montevideo, Uruguay where the young Inez had found her grandfather, Gunter Jäger’s journals. As a young man Jäger had traveled to Tibet to document the religious practices of the Buddhist Llamas while enlisted with the Waffen SS Ahnenerbe before World War II.
Out in the rain guarded by armed men were three men and a woman, their hands bound, mouths gagged tied around a pole set deep in the ground.
Marco prepared a group of twenty cartel soldiers to enter the shipping tunnel before having them corral his last former AFEU comrade, his wife and two brothers at front. Marco personally attached six pounds of Semtex explosive onto each of them, Inez’s Sturmgewehr, hanging from his back.
“Andres. You were the good one. I never disliked you. Thank you for letting me know Silvio is down right there with a lot of Americans. There’s a lot of product I need to get to the other side of this tunnel. Walk.”
Marco fired the antique rifle overhead, the four captives screaming and pushing forward in front of the group.
“Walk.”
Marco shouted as the four figures faded deeper into the tunnel mouth. The soldiers waited for minutes until in the distance, a small explosion like a pinhole in the depth.
“Now, go.”
The soldiers piled into jeeps ahead of boxer trucks behind, leading into the tunnel.
“Scent has direct access to the luciform body.”
Inside the odor of burning flesh filled the darkness against flames lighting the tunnel in harsh darkness like Caravaggio and the museum lamps over Buddhist tapestries months ago at the auction. The first shots of M-16 and Uzi fire struck the driver of Marco’s jeep, the driver’s limp body pulling the steering column to the left into an ashen truck on fire. Marco’s ears were ringing in a tinnitus symphony. He gripped the aged Third Reich rifle, sweat and dirt like sandpaper between himself and the wooden grip. He crawled out of the crash and watched as in shadows and light, his men broke hard, piled out of jeeps and trucks behind charging into the tunnel firing at moving silhouettes shaped like men, at the half burned screaming bodies inside. Marco followed behind catching up front. He felt his polio limp for the first time in nearly a decade.
Approaching sun at the tunnel mouth agape, the group of Medellin cartel soldiers were shredded down by gunfire. No bearings or cover, shrapnel and shell casings exploded into the open space of easy flesh.
Marco frowns rarely, smiles even less.
Through his falling men Marco kept a straight line, the centimeter space between the sites of Inez’s StG 44 rifle rising and falling with the breathing cycles of Marco’s meditative prana.
Deep breath fire.
Exhale.
Pause.
Fire.
At the tunnel exit Marco will have walked out to find Silvio already dead in a pile of bodies. No possibility of revenge. Here his only lesson pieced together from memory, to get what one truly wants, you must release yourself from desire.
Marco tucked the rifle onto his back gripping the aged leather strap, hugging it like it were the shoulders of Inez’s dress. His limp was no longer from bone, but from an acute gunshot wound, his root chakra also pierced, spurting in an endless stream of physical manifestations.
The CASA C-212 airplane was abandoned at the end of the airstrip in the misted valley. Silence behind him, Marco stammered up to the rear loading dock, he pulled the winch sealing it behind him and crawled into the cockpit. The front facing propellers hitting full speed, he pulled the yoke, lifting the aircraft over the Antioquia mountain range. His eyes grew heavy.
Hours later Marco will lose consciousness one last time over Las Orquídeas.
Inside in sleep, the engine noise is silent.
“Sahasrara is the crown, the crown is Kether.”
“y abre tus ojos.”
Now In the yoga classroom Marco opens his eyes. There are no other students.
The street noise is silent as nightfall fills the room by candle light. Inez is knelt in front of Marco in the same green body suit she wore when he first met her.
She touches his gunshot wounds, now gone as she whispers, “This is from The Book of the Law:
‘but to love me is better than all things: if under the night-stars in the desert thou presently burnest mine incense before me, invoking me with a pure heart, and the serpent flame therein, thou shalt come a little to lie in my bosom.’
“Now tell me Marco, what is your guiding telos?”
***
LIFE KILLS
by Detective Wolfman
“Man, I fucking hate these African niggas.”
Darius glanced over at Lamar in the passenger seat. The stocky man was ruefully shaking his head. He was always complaining about something. Seemed like all the dudes his age were like that. Mid forties. OG. Over-the-hill Gangsta. Fools getting out of lockup and shocked that it ain’t the nineties anymore.
“They’re Haitian,” Darius corrected him. He drove the car through Wilmington toward the waterfront. The fires in the hills were burning so damn bright that even this far south the nighttime streets were a spooky red haze.
“Haiti’s in Africa, ain’t it?” Lamar rubbed his fat fingers back and forth over his nose, scratching an itch without picking it. It was an innocent habit that annoyed the hell out of Darius, nevertheless. He didn’t like being paired up with the older man even on a good night, and tonight was not a good night.
Pickups and drops. That was what Darius knew. That’s what he liked. Quick stops, brief interactions, never holding anything hot for too long. But this was no pickup. This was no drop. This was a deal. Deals ran easy until they didn’t. Deals were where shit went sideways. It was a deal that landed Darius in the clink last time.
“Nah, man,” Darius said. “It’s over by Cuba.” He turned off Harry Bridges Blvd. The buy was at Slip Number Five. He stopped at a red light and watched a crew of youngbloods eyeing his ride from the corner. What would they do if they knew about the duffle bag of cash in the trunk? What could he do to stop them?
Cool it, he thought. Keep your shit together. The light turned green and he left the boys on the corner behind him in the smoke.
“Then these midnight motherfuckers should go to Florida,” Lamar said. “Why they gotta come here?”
Darius didn’t answer. He didn’t like the Haitians either but he was trying not to think about it. Trying not to think about the long drive back with the shit they were about to buy. Trying not to think about going back to prison. Trying not to think about his grandmama.
He tried not to think about these things until they got to the harbor and he could see the Haitians’ big ugly yellow eyes staring numbly at him through his headlights.
They were a hell of a pair. One of them was fat, with nappy hair and a black beard. Looked like one them bush niggas from Australia. The other one was as skinny and hairless as a skeleton. He had teeth like a bag full of dominoes. Naturally, this one did all the talking.
“Show me money,” he said. He was twitchy. Aggravated. The fat one just stood there holding a black bag.
Darius popped the trunk, standing with the driver door in front of him like a shield. Lamar limped around to the back of the car.
“Money!” the skinny one barked.
“Hey-o chill, man,” Lamar said. “I’m getting it.” He grabbed the duffle bag and limped back in front of the car. He unzipped it and flashed the cash to the Haitian.
“Where’s the shit, slim?” Lamar said. Darius winced. That asshole could never leave well enough alone. Always had to escalate shit.
The skinny guy nodded to his partner. The nappy fat guy tossed the bag in front of his feet.
“Show and tell, fool,” Lamar shook his head impatiently. “Bring it over here and open it up.”
The Haitians said something to each other in Haitian and the fat one carried the bag over and opened it. Even from the car Darius could see the little baggies of white powder.
The new shit.
M&Ms.
Mother’s Milk.
“Show and tell,” the skinny one said. “Now you give us money.”
“Sure thing, slim,” Lamar said. He shoved his hand into the bag of cash and the end exploded with a shotgun blast. The fat guy’s head flew apart in red and brown chunks.
Darius ducked behind his door screaming, “Oh shit!” He looked through the window and saw the fat man’s body fall over like an overfull trash bag. Lamar pulled the shotgun from the money bag, spilling bundles of cash, racked another slug, and shot the skinny Haitian in the back as he ran. The whole thing happened so fast Darius didn’t even remember he had a gun on him until it was over.
“What the fuck are you doing?!” he shouted.
“Grab that money up,” Lamar said as he scooped up the bag of powder. Darius ran and threw the loose bundles into the blasted bag. He fumbled it, spilling burned bills out the end. He wrapped it up in his arms and carried it as best he could back to the trunk.
Speeding away, Darius tried not to come apart.
“What the fuck did you do, Lamar?”
“Chill yo ass out, boy,” Lamar said. “And watch how you drive this bitch. You gonna get five-oh on our ass.”
Darius looked at the speedometer and saw that his partner was right. He slowed down and headed for the 110.
“Big Rome is gonna kill us, man,” Darius said.
“Shee-it. Big Rome’s the one told me cap them fools. I guess he don’t like Haitian’s neither.” Lamar laughed so hard it sent him into a phlegmy coughing fit.
Darius hit the freeway and drove North toward the fire.
Detective Johnny Jeong stood alone at Rex’s Batting Cages. The place was a ghost town. The fires had everyone’s panties in a twist, but Jeong was absolutely blissful. The sun barely piercing the red haze, the constant campfire smell, the zesty undercurrent of so much fear – with a loud CRACK he swung the wooden bat with his massive, heavy arms and watched the ball blast off. A home run at the end of the world.
This place should burn more often, he thought. Inside his shaved dome his mind went back to the Riots.
There’s little Johnny Jeong on the roof of his old man’s shop. He’s with his pop, his uncles, and all the other pissed off Korean shopkeepers. The city is on fire. They’ve got rifles, HAM radios, and coolers full of beer. They’re taking potshots at every jig who rolls up riotous.
Jeong had his first beer on that roof. He shot his first man too. He was twelve years old.
It had been the happiest time of his life.
His trip down memory lane was interrupted by the rattle of the gate behind him. He didn’t turn. He knew it was Darius Rawlins.
Rawlins walked past and went into the cage to Jeong’s right. It was where Jeong had put him the first time they had met here. At bat, it put Jeong behind him. The feeling of Jeong looming over the young con, occasionally cracking off home run hits like gunshots, worked wonders for his compliance.
“You’re late,” Jeong said.
“I thought I was being followed,” Darius said.
“Please,” Jeong laughed. “Your whole crew’s still asleep this time of day.”
CRACK!
“What have you got for me?” Jeong asked.
Darius sulked over to the rack and grabbed a bat. Jeong had a deal with the owner. They bat for free. The machine in Darius’s stall rumbled to life.
“Big Rome is losing it,” Darius said.
“Elaborate,” Jeong beckoned.
“You hear about those two Haitians getting blown away in Wilmington last night?”
“Was that Big Rome?” Jeong hadn’t heard. He didn’t work Wilmington but it was better for Rawlins to think that he knew everything. Even what he was asking about.
“He ordered it,” Darius said.
“Who carried it out?” Jeong asked.
WHIFF!
Darius swung and missed by a mile.
“Strike one,” Jeong said. “What’s the matter, Rawlins? Didn’t you play little league?”
Darius looked over his shoulder looking like he smelled a fart. “Brothas don’t play baseball.”
“I guess Jackie Robinson just had one hell of a tan,” Jeong said.
“Who?”
“Forget it,” Jeong said. There was no helping these younger guys. “So who killed the Haitians?”
“It was Lamar,” Darius said.
“No help from you, huh?”
CRACK!
Jeong snapped that one straight like a sniper shot. Darius flinched.
“That ain’t me, man.”
“Nah, not you,” Jeong said. “You’re not cute enough.” He put the kid off balance. “So why’s Big Rome beefing with the Haitians? They’re the only ones bringing in the Milk.”
“That’s what I’m saying,” Darius said. “The dude is buggin’.”
“Unless he’s figured out how to make it himself.”
WHIFF!
“Nah,” Darius said. “Nobody knows what’s in that shit.”
M&M. Mother’s Milk. The shit was sweeping the streets. You could boot it like heroin. It turned white and cloudy when you cooked it in a spoon. That’s where it got its name. But if you snorted it you got a psychedelic trip on top of a kickass buzz. Shit was laced with some kind of mushroom spore and some frog poison that they had down there. Around here crack was still king but the kids were going bananas for Mother’s Milk. It was a moneymaker.
“Strike two.”
Darius gave him a dirty look but Jeong just glared at him through the chain link.
“Is Big Rome planning any more of this type of thing?” Jeong asked.
“How should I know?” Darius clapped back. “He don’t talk to me.”
“But he talks to Lamar,” Jeong replied. “And Lamar never shuts up. Maybe I should talk to him instead and toss your ass back in the pen.”
CRACK!
“What do you want from me, dog?”
“I want you to fulfill the conditions of our agreement. You bring me solid intel that leads to arrests. For that, you stay out of jail. You never have to sit in front of a parole board. No one showing up to your house. No one springing piss tests on you that we both know your ass wouldn’t pass. I did that for you, Darius. Wasn’t that sweet of me?”
A ball wizzed behind Darius. He looked defeated.
The truth was Jeong kind of felt for the kid. He wasn’t a bad guy as far as it went. Just a fuck up. Born in the wrong place and the wrong time. Johnny Jeong had lived in and worked the Southland long enough to know that some streets just ate you alive, and if you were born on one of those streets you were just shit out of luck. But like him or not, the kid was on the other side of the battle line and even a fuck up could grow fangs and rip your throat out.
“Tell me how sweet I am,” he said.
“Get the fuck outta here, man.” Darius said.
“Tell me I’m sweet.”
CRACK!
Jeong hit the ball with barely a glance and put his eyes right back on the kid.
“Yeah, you sweet all right,” the kid admitted. “Sweeter than bear meat.”
Jeong howled. His wide, doughy face scrunched up with laughter. It was a high pitched chuckle like a kid has. With his bald head and beefy build it made him look like a buff baby. Even Darius had to laugh a little. He turned to take another swing as Jeong caught his breath.
“So,” Jeong recovered with a high pitched sigh. “Tell me about Machine.”
WHIFF!
The bat flew out of Darius’s grip and clattered across the ground.
“Strike three.”
Machine.
What was there to tell? Nothing but rumors, really. But from what Darius knew, the rumors started about a year ago. Small crews started getting wiped out all over the city. Youngbloods just trying to break in. They’d turn up absolutely massacred.
Not just shot up, either. But maimed, mauled, chopped to pieces. Real horror movie shit.
A chop shop near skid row.
Some dudes making book in Little Armenia.
A stash house in Crip City.
Bloodbaths. Cash and product gone and nobody taking credit for the hit.
But it wasn’t long before the targets started getting bigger. The kind of people you don’t touch unless you want a war. And then came the whispers.
Machine.
That’s what they called him. He was supposed to be a real big bastard. Over six and a half feet tall and yoked as all hell. A few rumors said that he was some kind of albino.
He had a small crew of guys just as bloodthirsty as he was. A lot of the OGs said it was bullshit. Urban legend. But that was before some vatos with the Vagos turned up with their skins missing. Before they found that lawyer for the Trey Deuce Mob under the Interchange with his head cut off. Before a top dog with the BHB got burned alive in his own crib.
Machine.
Now even the OG’s weren’t so quick to dismiss the rumors. Darius wasn’t sure what he believed. But he knew something had been different ever since he got back out in the world. The streets were changing all the time now. Hood today, hacienda tomorrow. As tiresome as Lamar’s bullshit was, the old dude was right about one thing.
This was no country for niggas anymore.
But there was more to it than that. It was like all the shadows in the alleys and under the overpasses were darker somehow. Like at any moment that darkness could just swallow you whole.
These thoughts stalked through his mind as he drove back to his grandmother’s house. He felt the truth of them settle on his shoulders like a heavy chain as he saw all the young vatos cruising up and down the blocks that used to be blacks only.
Grandmama’s house. His house now. He couldn’t get used to that. The little two-bedroom was still filled with her things. Her warmth. It even smelled like her.
Darius walked back to his room with his head down. He couldn’t face the emptiness. Couldn’t face the guilt.
He didn’t look at the framed photograph of his grandmama and granddad on their wedding day. He’d never known his granddad. He’d been in the Army. Built planes after he got out of the service. Never been in trouble with the law. He was like someone out of an old movie. Not real. Not like Darius.
Darius had been locked up when his grandmama got sick. Denied supervised leave for the funeral. She died alone without him. And now he lived alone without her.
He snorted two lines of M&M and laid down on his bed. It was a hell of a party drug but Darius didn’t party anymore. Lying down, he felt the rush to his head ooze all the way down his body to his toes like warm molasses.
Then came the feeling of weightlessness. He closed his eyes for a moment. Even though the Milk settled the body into a state of almost cosmic relaxation it hot-wired the mind, making sleep impossible.
When he opened his eyes again they darted to the movement on the wall. There was a poster from his teenage years of two fine honeys. One of them was climbing down off the poster. He watched her slink over to his bed and straddle him. He could feel her weight. Feel her body heat.
“Hey baby,” she purred.
“Hey,” he said. Surprised but not shocked.
“What’s the matter?” she asked. “You’ve been low ever since you came back.”
“I’m just trying to maintain, you know?”
She rubbed her hands over his chest and shoulders. He was getting hard, but that didn’t mean much.
“Let me take care of you, baby,” she said, moving her hips in a slow figure-eight on his lap. “I’ll make you feel better.”
All that warmth inside of him gave way somewhere deep in his chest, and the most awful, hollow feeling spread through him. And a great weight brought him back down to earth.
“Nah,” he said. “I don’t want to.”
He never wanted to. His mama had done it to him when he was eleven and kept making him do it until they took him away and sent him to live here. He had never wanted to do it again ever since.
He rolled over on his side and the girl just faded away. He closed his eyes again.
Every night he took the Milk, hoping to see his grandmama so he could tell her how much he loved her and how sorry he was for being a fucking punk all his life.
But she never came.
His eyes were starting to sting when his phone rang.
“I’m outside your place.” It was Lamar. “We gotta roll.”
77th Street Station. Bullpen. Detective Johnny Jeong rubbed his bald head absentmindedly while looking through mugshots. Adult males. 25 to 45. No subcategory for albinism.
After hours of pouring through this shit the only guys he’d come up with who fit the bill were either dead or locked up.
He was even looking into dudes who were just big and pale. Plenty of those around. But the only ones with the stones for this kind of action were cliqued up. Brotherhood or Outlaw MCs. And those guys lay claim to big moves. They don’t leave them on the street for a ghost story. So if Machine was for real he may not be local.
But then how the hell could he be so plugged in to hit all these crews?
“Is that good luck, rubbing your dome like that?”
Jeong looked up and saw Ramiro Rodriguez grinning at him. Ramrod was still nursing the broken arm he’d gotten from a bad takedown on a three-hundred pound crackhead who tried to stab him. It was still in a cast.
“I’ve got a dome you can rub, you fucking welfare case.”
Rodriguez laughed and sat on the corner of his partner’s desk. He was built like a linebacker and had a square jaw that he shaved twice a day.
“Where are we at on Darius Rawlins?” he asked.
“It’s all business with you these days, Ramrod.” Jeong said. “You used to be cute.”
“It’s all this fucking desk work,” Rodriguez said. “I got nothing to do but catch up on progress reports. Besides, I gotta make sure you stay on the ball so I don’t gotta pick up your slack when this cast comes off.”
“No slack here, amigo,” Jeong said. “Just like your waistline. Rawlins is gonna roll any day now. He’s already fingered one of his crew for a double murder and he’s scared shitless of Big Rome. He’ll come through.”
Rodriguez tapped Jeong’s computer screen with his knuckle.
“How’s your pet project coming?”
“Slow as the next rainstorm, partner,” Jeong said. “But just as certain.”
“It fucking better be,” Rodriguez said. “People are starting to talk.”
“Yeah? Well they can tell me all about it when I make Lieutenant off this bad mother.”
“Big Rome’s a bad mother,” Rodriguez said.
“Big Rome’s a pussycat compared to Machine.”
Rodriguez made a jack-off motion with his bad hand.
“Machine is street noise, partner,” he said. “Big Rome is real and ready to fall. And when he does you better be there instead of chasing some bullshit.”
“I’ll be there,” Jeong said. “And when Big Rome goes down six more assholes just like him will jump up to take his place. And by then Rawlins will be burned so we’ll have to find a new snitch and start the whole thing all over again.”
“Yeah, it’s called good police work,” Rodriguez said.
“It may be good but it’s not cute, though.”
Jeong’s cellphone buzzed. He held up his finger as Rodriguez was about to speak.
It was a text from Darius Rawlins.
1717 E Slauson Ave. Big Rome. $$$
“Ho-ly shit,” Jeong said. He turned the screen to his partner. “What did I tell you?”
The warehouse was a block from Slauson Station, in the shadow of the tracks. Across the street there was a shanty town set up in front of Kramer’s Metals. Seven campers parked along the sidewalk.
The place was a rundown one-story job with a paved yard and a concrete wall that butted up against 7 J’s Forklift Repair. Darius was doing his best to keep his shit together, still flying on Mother’s Milk. The fires in the hills were gaining ground and the air was like the bloody water after a shark attack.
Lamar wasn’t doing much better.
“Man, what the fuck is he thinking?” he asked. Even a killer like Lamar knew better than to come to a place like this.
As he cruised along Slauson he saw one of Big Rome’s boys open the chain link gate to the parking lot and wave him in.
The warehouse was for sale but whoever had owned it previously left a bunch of shit behind. Rows of shelves with dusty boxes and canisters. There was an office in the back and two flat carts parked in the middle of some open space to act as makeshift tables. There were black duffle bags piled on one of them.
Jerome “Big Rome” Lewis stood by the tables. Big Rome was big, dark, and immaculately groomed. He had high cheekbones and a v-shaped nose like a panther. And like a panther he had a relaxed way about him that contained a dangerous power that could lash out at any moment.
Darius could see several men moving around through the rows of shelves but he couldn’t be sure if they were real. He could see the girl from his bedroom dancing over by the office. He knew that wasn’t real. All he could do was try to relax and stay out of the way. He moved over to one of the rows of shelves by the west wall.
It was nice and dark over there. Only a little red-tinged moonlight through the high windows. He slowly reached behind his back and checked for the gun tucked into his pants. It was there, just in case. He’d have to remember to toss it if that motherfucker Jeong showed up in time.
“Right, kitty?” he asked the black and white cat on the shelf next to him.
Had it been there this whole time?
“Hey, you all right?” Lamar asked.
Darius started. He hadn’t seen him walk up. He was too busy looking at the cat that wasn’t there anymore.
“Yeah, I’m cool,” Darius lied.
“Well look alive, son,” Lamar chastised. “Be ready for anything.”
“What’s the deal?” Darius asked.
“We’re waiting on some Rollin’ 60s boys,” he said. “We’re supposed to get a lot of Milk off of ‘em.”
“Like we got it off the Haitians?” Darius asked.
Lamar shrugged and gave him a look that told him to be ready for anything. He limped away to the other side of the warehouse while Darius looked around for a good place to take a piss. He thought about doing it right there but he could see one of their guys at the far end of the row of shelves just at the edge of the light. He was pretty sure the guy’s name was Jacarlos. He nodded at him. Jacarlos nodded back. He was thinking he’d just have to hold it in when he heard a little bit of tire screech outside. He could hear a heavy engine idling out there like on an old truck or a muscle car.
That must be the Rollin’ 60s.
Darius looked over at Big Rome in the middle of the room with two of his top hitters behind him. He was stone cold. Darius took a deep breath and tried to emulate him. Feed off that energy.
It was hard to focus, though. He could hear Lamar talking somewhere. And the girl from his bedroom was dancing on the far side of Big Rome, now. Moving across the warehouse. He wondered what song she was dancing to.
He felt something brush his feet. He looked down and saw the black and white cat run along the wall but it turned to the right and darted through the shelf right before it got to Jacarlos. Maybe Jacarlos scared it. Or maybe it was the big dude behind Jacarlos.
Darius froze.
The big shape behind Jacarlos did not move, but was frighteningly still like a dog just before it bites you.
Darius called out but the boom of the gunshot outside hid his yell. He saw the big shape behind Jacarlos lift something above its head. Saw the blade of a fire ax gleaming in the red moonlight. Another gunshot outside set off an even louder explosion and the lights went out just as the ax came down.
Everybody in the warehouse was moving now. People knocking into the shelves. Into each other. Everybody hollering, guns cocking.
“Shut the fuck up!” Big Rome’s voice cut through the din. Everybody shut up. For a few moments the place was seized by a charged silence. But it didn’t last.
They could hear them outside. They were laughing at first. Laughing like jackals. Howling like coyotes. Closing in around the building. But Darius could hear a low rhythm that formed into words.
His blood went cold.
Somewhere in that terrible darkness inside the warehouse Darius heard the most God-awful sound he’d ever heard.
A roar.
It started low and rose, filling the warehouse with its thunder. Darius heard the roar moving fast through the darkness and caught the sound of a heavy, wet thud that gave birth to a scream and a panicked pistol shot.
Then all hell broke loose.
Whatever power Big Rome had over his men came apart in a hail of wild gunfire in the dark. Darius ran back along the west wall but someone crashed into the shelves and knocked them into him. He fell to his hands and knees.
In the darkness the roar became a laugh, and men screamed while the chanting built outside.
Darius crawled as fast as he could. The shelf leaned against the wall making a triangle tunnel. He crawled and felt along the wall to the door that led to the parking lot. He heard glass break behind him. He turned just long enough to see a pool of fire spread across the floor. The flash blinded him for a moment but when his eyes cleared he could see the blood.
It was black in the firelight. And it was everywhere.
Darius saw a figure limping beyond the fire and recognized Lamar. He was looking dumbfounded at two ravaged, bloody stumps where his hands had been. His eyes grew wide and he opened his mouth to scream but a shotgun blast to the chest blew him back into one of the carts. They toppled over together.
Darius looked where the shotgun blast came from and he saw him.
Over six and a half feet tall and two-hundred and fifty pounds of hard muscle. Black pants, black bulletproof vest, and black welder’s glasses. He was hairless and white. Not white-man white, but white like a sheet.
Machine.
Darius watched Machine blow off Big Rome’s leg at the knee with the shotgun, then bury the fire ax in his face.
Darius turned and ran out the door.
He ran for his life. He could see Machine’s men on the edges of his vision. He could hear them hooting and howling after him but he didn’t stop. He ran and ran and ran. He jumped up onto one of the cars over by the far wall. Gunshots popped off and bullets whizzed past him. He leaped off the roof of the car, grabbed onto the concrete wall, and pulled himself over.
He fell.
A crate of forklift parts broke his fall with a loud CRACK! He rolled off the crate and kept running. But it was then that he realized that the noise he heard wasn’t the wood of the crate snapping under his weight but the gun in the back of his pants going off.
The back of his left leg burned and buckled and he fell face-first into the concrete.
He could hear them coming up over the wall behind him. He knew somewhere in the back of his mind that he was in terrible pain but the adrenaline carried him. He pulled the gun out of his waistband and rolled over onto his back. He fired at the men coming over the wall. He hit two of them. He was pretty sure he got one right in the skull. But as they dropped off the wall more came over. Darius fired until he ran out of bullets. He tried to move but his leg wasn’t working. Then one of them came over and shot him in the gut. That was when the adrenaline wore off.
Pain. Pain like you wouldn’t believe. He would have cried out but it hurt too much to breathe. He waited for the guy to finish him but he just moved away. He looked around and saw them all keeping their distance.
Then Machine came over the wall. He landed on his feet with a heavy smack of boots on concrete. And he brought the ax with him. His white skin was slathered and spotted with blood.
Darius curled up on his side, shaking with pain and fear.
And anger. Angry that this was what his life had come to. Machine was only a few footsteps away but in each footstep Darius saw years of his own life that he had wasted.
He could have joined the Army like his granddad. He could have flown straight. He could have tried harder. And now it was all gone.
Machine stood over him. Darius looked up into the giant man’s black lenses and prayed that being dead wouldn’t be so dark. Machine grinned down at him. His mouth was a mess of crooked, yellow teeth.
Darius looked away. And there she was.
Grandmama.
She was standing ten feet off to the side, looking at him with a sad smile.
“Grandmama,” he said. “I missed you.”
“I missed you too, Darius.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry for all I did.”
“I know you are, baby. But it’s okay, now. Just rest.”
Rest sounded like just the thing. He was so tired. But he couldn’t go to sleep just yet.
“I love you, Grandmama,” he said.
“I love you too, sweet boy,” she told him. And Darius Rawlins smiled. He never even saw the ax come down.
Detective Johnny Jeong had caught some bad scenes in his time but this one was the worst. He thought of words like massacre, butchery, and bloodbath. They all fell short, though.
He didn’t throw up. He kept up a good face. But when he found what was left of Darius Rawlins in the forklift yard it stung him in a way that he knew he would never forget for as long as he lived.
His time on the job had warmed him up to the idea of fate. And he wondered if the kid was always going to come to that end, or if maybe he could have helped him avoid it somehow. He wondered which was worse.
They tagged the bodies, collected the spent shells, and canvassed the area. The officers interviewed all the poor bastards living in the campers across the street.
“There is one weird thing,” the officer told him. “They all said they heard people hooping and hollering but they could only make out one word. Machine.”
When Jeong finally left the scene it was still an hour before sunrise. He drove North toward the fire.
This place should burn more often, he thought.
***
“CONFESSION AT THE ALTAR OF SQUIRMING RATS”
by Will Ballard
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— EmptyCollective is an artist, a warlord and a thief. EmptyCollective sells clothing through the brand Luxury Spasm and posts art at @emptycollective and @_emptycollective, as well as through the website empty4.neocities.org. EmptyCollective can be contacted at forwardslashempty@protonmail.com for any inquiries artistic or otherwise.
— Adrian Georges Silva is a writer, artist, and engineer from New York City. Adrian curates theory and commentary project, Thirst Trap For Annihilation on Substack, and publishes short and long-form fiction.
— Detective Wolfman is a Man for All Seasons, hardboiled loner, and loved by the Moon. His fiction and essays have been published in APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL, Man’s World, and Passage Press’s AFTER THE WAR: STORIES FROM THE NEXT REGIME. He is the host of ON THE BEAT – the best Rock n Roll radio show this side of 1965, and host of BLOODY PULP – a show about all things PULP. And he has only just begun to howl.
— Will Ballard A.K.A. @20gaShotgun resides in St. Louis and is the books editor for APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL. He is working on a few new projects for the year 2024.