It takes about 80,000 years to build up an inch of top soil. Heard it, read it, saw it.
#
Heard it, read it, you don't remember; but, in Judaic and Islamic culture, an animal that is slaughtered, whether calf or steer, or lamb, is not killed instantly, polluting its body with adrenalin, but is, rather, bled slowly, ritually by rabbi or imam, lead by the rivulets of its blood from this dream of life, and woken up to death.
Of the monotheists, these are the wise ones.
The Christians blew it, somehow. They did.
(Ah, but the Buddha of the Tibetans, with his lake of blood, lapping against his shore.)
#
You read somewhere once, was it in a science magazine, or in a letter from The Professional, that a probable reason for people doing really evil things is that they lack a very necessary enzyme or gland or organ or licensed skill that regulates the Id, the fulcrum of desire, and prevents excess of a psychopathologic sort. You wonder if The Professional, perhaps, lacks this very necessary enzyme or gland or organ or licensed skill, and is in thought and in deed, fucking whacko. You'll have to watch out for him. Maybe. He could blow up; could blow you up.
#
And he's blowing it, the techie who you followed to the car; he opens the hatchback, and swings the groceries from the cart to the car's hatchback trunk, and you.... You.... What did you do? He's gone, eyes dilated, pixilating; the movements in response to your knifework are reflexive, the body protesting when the mind cannot register...when done, you reach into the shopping bag, for the cereal; it is good that he had bought two boxes, because he is loosened from the dream of life, his lifeblood in rivulets leaving him high and dry. The cereal crackles as you sprinkle it, distribute it over the wounds: Snapple crack pop. You would swear he has been trying to talk through his new mouth, the one you installed across his throat. It is the gurgling of an infant, an infant just born into death.
#
"Sorry yes how are ya."
#
Alone in your room you stare at the videotape you clutch, and set it next to other videotapes on a shelf (some of them very messy and stained and covered with flakybrown fingerprints).
A bundle of letters falls from your coat pocket, seven, you note (with gaudy Brazilian stamps, depicting the silver rainforest and satellite screen and Amazonian dishes), and you even remember the woman who carried these letters, and your puzzlement that she should have a penis. (But there is so much you know not of).
You set these seven letters from the heart you set on another shelf, your Dead Letter Office.
#
Somewhere, you read, the word for seven in Spanish:
Siete.
#
In Portuguese:
Sete.
#
There, alone, in your room, you remember something, something you read, read by Melville, from his journals, something about the silence. Which presses down on your chest as you lie on your sofa, like a Chesire cat with no grin. You try to remember, and turn, and see it, where you wrote it with a black marker you took from work: Of Strange Silence, the Thing the Ancients, "Old Greeks," kept at the Hatcheck Counter of High Mysteries.
#
Who were the Old Greeks? You cannot find them in Websters.
Greek.
Greeks. Late Greek Medieval Greek. Modern Greek. Greek to one. Greek Catholic. Greek cross. Greek fire. Greek letter fraternity.
Old age.
Old Arabic. Old Baily. Old Castile. Old Catholic. Old Celtic. Old country. Old Cymric. Old Danish. Old Delhi. Old Dominion. Old Dutch. Old English. Old fogey. Old French. Old Frisian. Old Glory. Old gold. Old Guard.
Old Hand Harry Hat Hickory High German Icelandic Ionic Irish Ironsides Italian Latin Low Frankish Low German maidish man.
Old Man of the Sea master moon Nick Norse Northwest Persian Prussian rose Saxon school Serbian Slavic sledge South Spanish Squaw style Testament Teutonic wive's tale World.
But who, you still ask, were the Old Greeks?
#
You take a frozen head from the freezer locker. Who, you still ask, were the Old Greeks?
No answer. That is not the deal. In death, they are supposed to belong to you. Is it because you do not have enough parts to make yourself a Golemstein monster? And have not the helicopters and projectors and time clocks and cash registers with their whurlhums told you this, over and over and over again, time after time, the whirlhum and the beam? For to learn about silence, surely you must have a true dream, not a dream of a dream, and to have a true dream, you must have a true dreamer, like the Golemstein monster of Jewish aboriginal dreamtime dharma. Would your new dreamer teach you about Silence? About the Old Greeks? About the hatcheck stand in the vestibule? You bet that the people at work know who the Old Greeks are. If you captured one of them, interviewed them, woke them up so to speak from the dream called life, you suspect that they still would not tell you. The motor to your refrigerator clicks on. Whirlhum. It tries to tell you something, something that perhaps the Old Greeks know nothing of.
Would The Professional know, you wonder. You must write him.
#
You grab a video from your shelf. It is a recent acquisition, from where you remember not. A label says "Sleep Disorder Log." You play the video, and someone you vaguely recognize, wired up like an astronaut, lies on a bed, asleep, with a halfclosed book. This astronaut reminds you of the many parking lots. This astronaut snores, snores loudly. It annoys you. You turn the sound down. A thought occurs to you. If this is one of the many you have un-moored from life, then you should not witness him in his chamber of dreams, but, rather, should play this tape while you sleep, so that he can guide you, and perhaps reveal the Mysteries.
#
In your peregrenations down and up the coast you have yet to see an apple tree.
Apple trees lose more than 100 quarts a day to evaporation; succulents, on the other hand, lose a third of an ounce a day to evaporation.
They do not blow it in this coastal subdesert.
They dream a succulent coastal subdesert Silence.
#
The co-worker punches in, and sees you eating your tatertots and green onions, and your tofu enchilada.
"Hi," you say, "how are ya." If you remember correctly, he is the newest cryobiologist. Or business administrator. "Hi, Gordon." You notice that he has marks around his neck, marks that look like they were done with a red fine point marker, a marker not unlike one you have used in your parking lot investigations. "Hi, how are ya."—"I'm here."—"Yes sorry. What'd ya do this weekend."—"It's Friday morning. The weekend hasn't begun."—"Yes sorry."—"Yes sorry, my ass, have a fucked day." —
As he leaves, you remember who he reminds you of: The Professional.
#
You take your hand off of your heart.
#
You do remember this much, you remember now:
"The right of the People to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, & effects, against unreasonable searches & seizures, shall not be violated, & no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath, or affirmation, & particularly describing the place to be searched, & the persons or things to be seized."
#
Again.
The Alpha Ralpha. This one in Oceanside.
The Lotto.
The Canonical Hours.
The hamburger meat. The cereal.
The parking lot. A mother and child. A Volvo station wagon, very spacious. More room in the back than you have ever had.
Still....
...This is harder.
You have to know:
Of:
Old Greeks, Silence, The Hatcheck Stand in the Vestibule.
You still have to know. Even with their second gurgling mouths, the mother and child will not tell you of the Old Greeks, of the Silence, of the Number Required to Claim Your Secret from the Vestibule Hatcheck Stand. This mother and child reunion shuts you out entirely. They spit on you as they wake into their deaths. You not only pour christ crispies on them, but rip open the dried dog food.
#
You watch a documentary on TV, about rain forests in Alaska, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil, and in Central America, being destroyed. You already know this, and the knowledge so disturbs you that you tear the chord out of the wall, and take your TV to the nearest La Jolla fast-food babel pit, off Torrey Pines Road, and throw the TV through the plate glass window at the front. The glass flies, and the pigs and piglets are hurt, injured, one seriously:
He has a new mouth, just where his throat says hello to his chest.
You stick a bumper sticker to the door, and leave.
#
"Hi how are ya yes."
#
A large parcel arrives. From New York. Several hands, index fingers pointed, poised in imitation of the right to bear arms, are all over the address labels. Of course, you forgot to register your changes of address. Still, it's here.
You open the parcel, and find a smaller parcel.
Inside that, a smaller parcel.
Inside that, yet a smaller parcel.
Inside that a tiny parcel with envelopes containing designated amounts of cash, with specific dates, and instructions to drop by a storage facility in Santa Ana each month and pay the rent.
There is also a note from The Professional:
"Dear Enthusiast,
It took a treztrez beaucoup lot of wheedling with those Witness Protection assholes to get your current handle & address, took a fresh hell of firepower nudged against a federal marshall's temple to do the trick.
If you could drop the monthly payments to the local establishment I would be greatly beholding to you.
I'm going deep deep deep cover, shit's hittin' the fan here in the Apple...might never get out that way again...
You were either my best student, or my worst, & it doesn't look like I'll ever know."
#
You go to the storage facility the next day, to pay, and say you lost your key.
They charge you five dollars for another key.
You go right, then left, to the storage locker and check out this space:
Two Uzis, one a semi-, the other an auto-; and a Magnum bigger than a porn star's dick.
#
It has been staring at you all along:
The gotta-sing gotta-dance biomechanical audioanamatroids at the House of Usher Pizza (with its disappointingly-well-lit parking lot), the vietvet in the wheelchair and sewagemouth kids at the home electronic center who play with the remote control joy sticks, the Brazilian stamps on that bundle of letters (one with a drawing of the puniest television on the envelope's back), the sleep dis-order dreamtape which has cured your nocturnal restlessness, the endless renewal notices from Greenpeace, the saltpepper Dalek robots careening around on deteriorating BBC tapes broadcast on the local PBS outlet and screaming "Exterminate! Exterminate!"
You have assembled the armatures, complete with remote control for the electric wheelchair, and for the trigger fingers, and cables and wires and aluminium and steel braces flopping around like the snakes on a gorgon's head. All you need now for your guardian avenging exterminating blue fallen angel of light is a few good rounds of ammo and a few pounds of flesh.
#
You take all the parts out of your freezer. You nearly have enough for your Golemstein. But the parts are inconsistent. Two left feet, three left hands, but only one arm. Two porn star's penises. But only one testicle. Two torsos, one without breasts. Three breasts, two without nipples. Four nipples. Two tongues. Five ears. Seven noses. Three heads. A whole lot of fingers. A set of blue eyes, a brown eye, a hazel eye. You are reminded of a picture you saw in an old Life magazine, of a painting by Normal Rockwell or that Picasso, you cannot remember which, but you are reminded.
And for the life of you, you cannot remember which were "borrowed" from the Cryo vaults, taken from the stainless steel stacks of dewars by the Par-able loading dock, and which were from your myriad supermart parking lot expeditions.
#
"Hi how are ya sorry yes."
#
And in the lunchroom by the timeclock over the time card rack your Golemstein greets each co-worker, and you sit in the corner flipping your red joy stick, and the flesh-enmeshed armature of trigger finger squeezes the Uzi trigger, and the Uzi fires quaquaquaquaqua, and a pre-recorded voice, your voice, says, "And what'd ya do this weekend?"
And so your weekend begins.
R.V. Branham is author/compiler of Curse+Berate in 69+ Languages (Soft Skull Press). His fiction has been anthologized in Dinosaurs 2, Full Spectrum 3, Ghosts 2, Hybrid Beasts (a Red Lemonade e-book anthol.), and Midnight Graffiti; and in magazines including Back Brain Recluse (UK), Ellery Queen's Mystery Mag., Midnight Graffiti, Isaac Asimov's SF Mag., Tema (a bilingual Croatian mag.), 2 gyrls quarterly, & online in In Other Words Mérida, & Red Lemonade, with further stories forthcoming in The Writing Disorder and W*O*R*K. He is publishing editor of Gobshite Quarterly, a multilingual en-face magazine (now in broadsheet format) and publisher of GobQ/Reprobate Books.
"The Insect Ecologies of Death, or, Amateur Hour (Towards a new order of the phylum)" is part of one of four intertwined short story cycles, some of which have already been published, called Moral Fictions, or Orders of the New Phylum.
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