City, Sister, Silver, page 8
To be brief … sometimes we were like spiders in cloisters, and the feeling of eternity and frustration, the fear of life and the fear of death, of cold and heat, were unbearable … sometimes you could drop acid and glimpse life pulsing in everything around you, and the trees were friendly creatures, just like you, and then it snapped and the trees were just another scary life form trying to take you out so they could suck the sun’s warmth without interference … and both were real, and you have to know and cope with both, and you have to know when not to fear and when to be full of dread … only he who doesn’t dread his fear can cope with both in the now and here … and live in time on the move … so we crossed paths in the perpetual war of the creatures to get a spot at the watering hole … and every battle was so tough that sometimes even when we switched off, hopped into Micka’s mobile, and drove out to the Rock in the countryside, it didn’t help.
The Secret concerns small creatures … the unfinished ones that can’t defend themselves … and also children and small dogs … we were waiting for the Messiach, so we weren’t gonna lay a hand on any little kids, that was obvious … look at the first Jesu, rolling around the manger in his diapers … he had the good animals standing guard, and no doubt old chief Joseph gave a proper going-over to everyone who came bearing gifts or “gifts,” confiscating the juveniles’ knives and turning the adults’ fiendish devices right back into their guts … and sixteen-year-old Mary with long black hair was a mighty sister with a soft, hard gaze, she kept an eye out too … checking Jesu’s lollipops to keep some fool who didn’t know about the contract from handing him a sucker laced with smack … the first Jesu had a good bunch around … customs agents, sturdy carpenters and masons, whores, actors, and Peter the skillful swordsman … and in the end they got him anyway, but that’s just how he was, that was the way he used his power, and as he died his ears and eyes filled with the soft, golden light of God, which in fact according to Bohler and other authorities he was … but having a hotline straight to Starry Bog might not be enough for the Child of today … who knows what cold urban hole our little Messiach is shivering in now … who knows if his plastered dad’s not wavin a carving knife at him as we speak … the Devil knows if his strung-out mom isn’t smotherin him under the sideboard … me and the guys would sometimes wonder, spitting tobacco and nodding our heads … jingling our silver, Bohler fingering his eagle, me patting my Black Madonna … we gotta be careful, Micka summed up every time … no weapons or drugs, no porno with fleas, David spoke the living parts of the contract aloud and Bohler raised his eyes to the heavens … Sure, sure, I’d add at some point when I wasn’t adjusting my mask.
An maybe right this minute those Burmese hunters, with their golden velvet Czech AKs, are sneakin up on some forest hideout where the little Dalai Lama is playin around with the first signs of his power … Bohler said … an they’re soft as tigers, not a claw click on stone … an the little Dalai Lama doesn’t suspect a thing … an he doesn’t have any protection cause his disgusting father’s off in the nearest village gettin tanked on the local Fiery … an his dirty old mom’s out makin bacon … an the hunters’re after his little scalp … Bohler had us hypnotized, standing over the unconscious Goldie, then he whipped out a garrote from under his cassock, ready to terminate the poor guy … we had to step in and subdue the priest.
We went by the contract, and though we decided to use Goldie for the byznys with the gadgets we kept our ears and hearts locked tight against his black chicanery.
Our other American, Shark Stein, was a man of the contract. His dad had been born in Terezín,* and for the first year of his life his world had been confined to the inside of a shoe box, good old Batas,* Sharky said. He survived to have Sharky only thanks to the fact that in every one of those foul camps, where his childish soul had its eyes opened to all the worlds and where those worlds began to merge into reality, he always bumped into people of the contract. He hung around the mass graves, collecting the knowledge that he would later pass on to Sharky. After Shark Stein became a member of the pack, he taught us a few things. Probably the best was the one with the box: the trick is to watch the world from inside, especially when it’s a world of metal-tipped boots and you’re on the smallish, fragile side, and then, when the right moment comes, you climb out and put your power into play.
Taking after his dad, Sharky was a survival artist specializing in the many discomforts of mass graves. You could sense it in every light and heavy move he made. Sharky had a face as sharp as mommy’s morning razor. We all admired him, and Micka glowed, because he was the one who’d brought him in, just like he did David. Only this time we didn’t have to bother with teaching. Sharky already spoke the Organization’s language, along with slang and argot, plus a host of other tongues the usual way. Every language you know makes you another person, Micka lectured us one morning. Every language you know means you can lick my bunghole, I said like a proper actor. Bohler caught on: Hey guys, know this one? This lady goes to the doctor an says, hey doc … I got this like itch in my throat an … I’m all sweaty an dizzy … an I’m sittin there stark naked, Bohler got confused … I broke out in mad laughter, David turned red, Micka opened the door, and in walked Shark Stein, sprightly, swift, and silent, in a pair of black leather shoes.
Sharky knew about the Secret, he knew that you have to treat every unfinished small human creature like a vessel full of light because you never know which one might be the Child, the Messiach. And here in the hostile territory of the spinning wheel, he’s got a mission. Namely, to gather the salvation that’s always going on, gather it into the ultimate noose, and kill the pain. Once he’s had a little stroll through the vale of tears and taken a look around … that Child’s got a real big job waiting for him, namely to persuade the Old Bloodhound, Starry Bog, that Dogass Fuck, in other words his plastered dad, to turn a blind eye to all the filth and murder. And that’s quite a job. So why not make it a little easier on him, huh? On that we all agreed.
Luckily our new buddy wasn’t as overzealous as Bohler, who’d already been to court a few times for snatching sons and daughters away from their plastered degenerate mothers, who in his opinion were treating them cruelly.
Roaming the city parks, Bohler handed out chewing gum and holy pictures to wild boy thieves with keys around their necks and snot running from their noses. Bible in hand, he prowled the city scrap heaps, blessing the runaway brats who went there to lick out cans. A few times they chased him off with bolts cast from their homemade slingshots with fiendish accuracy. Loitering around supermarkets, he kept watch over the little shoplifters whose tricks he’d come to know well. And they came to know him too.
Hey, y’old Cassock, they’d sneer at him. Hey, y’old vampire, Terminator, Alien, Golem, Nosferatu, Medoosa! hurling video lore in his face. Rabble, I bring you God’s word, Bohler would begin when he managed to get hold of a few. Shuddup n fork over the moola, the grins, the jingle, the duckets, ya wormy old Dracula! He gave them the cash every time. But instead of buying soup with it, they’d get smokes or toyfils* or toluene.* I force charitable acts of baptism on em, said Bohler, like with the Apaches. Once he got shot with a police special, and a few times the little do-badders stabbed him. But Bohler would always just sew himself up, rinse himself off, and head back out on his crusade.
When I imagine our little Messiach joltin along on some train right now, Bohler said wistfully, his good, hardworkin carpenter dad an his kind, virtuous mom lookin out for some Egypt-type place to escape the Balkan or Angolan or Kurdish or maybe Cambodian … Herodiad … an the Messiach’s got just one sweater an only one pair of socks … an there isn’t a single country that’ll take the saintly family in, since they’re obviously economic refugees … Bohler let out a savage howl and rushed off to the train station to reward the next trainload of Gypsies from Romania.
But there was one other thing about the scamps that disturbed me, and that was their toys. Those abominable toyfil spiders from space … time flew by so fast in years 1, 2, and 3 … that all of a sudden there were totally different toys … I shook my head in disbelief, and when me and the guys talked it over we reminisced about our own childhood worlds.
I think those dolls and teddy bears littering the ground outside the German Embassy were the last normal make-believe beings before the Atomic Galactic Skeletons burst onto the scene … the Pearl’s toy store windows looked like ads for a Vampire Ball … hideous bloodsoaked grapplers everywhere … Nuclear Asexual Homonucleoids … all kinds of extragalactic wicked witches instead of that good old hag Ježibaba, alias Baba Yaga, the one the Grimms’ Hans and Gretel, or their Czech siblings, Jeník and Mařenka, polished off at the end, giving children’s souls a chance to recover from the horror … me and the guys reminisced about our childhood castles and teepees.
Back in the time before I had sperm or She-Dog, who relieved me of it with childlike innocence, I too played at the world, fighting countless battles with miniature knights and Indians, learning the ways of war to avoid getting lost in the Jungle, or at least not right away … just as my grandpas waged endless battles across the floors, golden soldiers in the castle, pinecones in the village below, tin soldiers everywhere imaginable … and in that world of childhood games, the Cheyennes and the Arapahos won, tearing across the prairie and stealing horses while the villains yowled at the martyr’s stake, and not the other way round, and the white knight struck the black knight down, and not the other way round, and Captain Cormorant and his bro the tiger saved the day instead of rotting up in the rigging, that’s the way it was and not the other way round, and maybe Brutus had a dagger but still he gave old Julius a chance, don’t try to tell me he didn’t … and maybe the real, cruel world turned out to be different, but at least that sweet little kid was clued in to a few of the basic rules … at the age when we’d towed around wooden ducks and dug through coal trucks, playing miner, the scamps were inventing worlds full of all sorts of fascistoid bolshevist Freaks and kapitalist Phantasms … Alien Space Invaders … toyfils and toyfilkins … the un-Christian Japaneez of course produced most of the merchandise … all sorts of small-scale dragons, spitting images of that blind old serpent in his underground lair … Gamera vs. Gaos, Monster X from Outer Space … in the end old outer space was just too scary and there was no use trying to be happy and quiet and wary, like a dolphin gliding through the sea. I mean if you don’t believe you’ve got a chance even in outer space … then what? … a dumb ending with no beginning … just one trapdoor after another … Spiders … El Beso de la Mujer Araña … Thinking Machines and Unthinking Furies … all those toyfils and not a single positively charged hero in the bunch, an accursed band of demented postmodern pests … apart from cute little critters of every race and species, all of our creatures were people at least, in most cases knights and men, whether cowboys, Indians, old carpenters, soldiers, scuba divers, or maybe, at worst, cosmonauts … little girls had princesses or Ribannas* or babies or elegant ladies with changeable wardrobes … all that’s left of that now is that stupid Barbie, the robot clone, may AIDS drag her into its pestilent grave! I cursed as Bohler and I drove out to Toy Central in his hearse.
He turned off the headlights, and then we went a pretty long way on foot, which irked me a little since I’d just put a nice good high on with some weed. He dragged me over to one of the windows and switched on a flashlight. It was hair-raising. Toyfils filled the shelves, and those freaks were alive! They busily communicated among themselves, the Thinking Machines whirling about spewing flames at frightening speed, Draculas jockeying Spiders, Gargoyles of Zador bearing down on the valiant Batman, the Mutant King and the Purple People-Eater chatting away in the corner, and Barbie … yeah, doin the nasty with a team of grapplers … good God! … talk about a wild ride … The most awful part, though, was what the nine-handed Blinking Martians were doing to a few Cheyennes I must’ve somehow overlooked back in my tough childhood … they had them bound and gagged, and in each hand they had a … nah, forget it.
When the freaks spotted us, there was a big commotion. Squirming like worms in a hunk of old cheese, they were back on the shelves in the blink of an eye, safely wrapped in boxes and cellophane.
Now you get it, said Bohler.
Yeah, you mean …
That’s right, he plants em here, the Dark Prince, he’s after the kids, it’s obvious.
An those stupid dads …
They buy em like robots …
I guess the problem is the human tribe’s fallen apart, said Bohler, yep, families aren’t what they used to be. I’d even go so far as to say the reason why moms an pops buy toyfils is cause they hate their offspring, deep down in their souls they’re happy to bring the dark stuff home, only …
the stuff’s power turns against em, I finished Bohler’s thought …
yep, they’re scared a their own offspring, wanna destroy the kids before they grow up … but a lot of kids survive their dark upbringing, an then they go out an start stranglin old codgers …
which explains all the family murders these days, I tossed out …
Raskolnikov, before he killed, had to train his power pretty hard in old Nietzsche’s superman theory … Bohler filled in my knowledge of literature and philosophy …
an nowadays scamps bump their weary old dads off just for a fistful a coins …
yeah, but Raskolnikov at least had that painted slut Sonia, said Bohler, she helped him out …
what? he had a sister? that caught my interest …
nah, said Bohler, just some whore … but she did bring him a Bible … later on … in the slammer … an before, he had that crybaby Marmeladov … an his mom an sis came all the way to mangy Moscow to see him, an he had buddies too …
wait, Bohler, what about that sis?
… yeah, I guess the problem is scamps’re so lonely these days, TV’s all they got, so they fill the hole with toyfils …
wait, Bohler, did Raskolnikov have a sis or not?
… the human community’s fallen apart, just a bunch a tribes fightin in the dark, Bohler mused … allied or opposed based on commercial considerations
… an the scamps’re so all alone, he said, choked with emotion … an they take to the warpath, them against the world, but they donno the rules, they don’t have any contract, they’re either on their own or they belong to bad tribes, pseudotribes, an since they donno about the contract they smother everyone else, an then they turn around an have more forsaken scamps … an they do it all over again … it’s just one great big circle …
