Jig the Fortunate
A cultist summarizes the circumstances of his new promotion. 10 minute read.
I’m the luckiest goddamn man alive. To be above fortune. Ho-ho! To dream and eat dreams. Yaka ta! Raka tee!
See, I stand with God Gallaghan outside the oratory (we’re sharing a pack of cigarettes) and he’s saying, “Jig, you may be the luckiest man alive.” And I say, “I know it. Don’t I know it?”
We giggle, we cough. We glimmer gold beneath a pair of God Gallaghan’s good lanterns. Like fated fibers of the same strong rope, the eight lanterns that encircle the oratory twist us two together in red lipped exaltation.
Per my fortunate promotion I light and smother those censers once, twice, three times for our daily Angelus. God Gallaghan divined their erection some time ago, in the throes of glossolalia! he described a rain of burning paper within the deep darkness of a cave, before the entire congregation at mid winter black mass, as he carved a crimson saltire into the milky chest of his most plump and favored catamite.
Christ. The ecstacy. I made my brutal way! Blooded up the echelon! Guns cocked, hips thrust, eyes rolled back — I — the new General on Crusade. I tap the faucet of Him. I rape reap and kill and cannot sow. I.
The luckiest man alive.
And all because God Ghallagan made a single digit mistake. A little line: 1. I. One. A wee fraction of a foible and lo! I find my way up!
God Gallaghan’s eight lanterns, ey? Well when I was a mere pleasureless fawn, cleaning the shit-trough before my promotion, they once removed my fingertip for rowing the chairs by eights instead of nines! They called me pig-cunt and rat and squeezed my open wound, and for good reason! Simply, eight is a bad number around here. Because we know of Nine Able Ciphers, and Nine Ancress, and Nine Cruets, and that the Great Lustration calls for nines and all sorts of variations of nines and so nine is just the number. Eight lanterns is a finicky chord then, no?
Hmm, once thought I, hmm, whilst inordinately high on consecrate and ketamine, Hmm, mayhaps we add a ninth lamp?
Alert! it is a big deal to challenge the divinely perceived. Whose to overwrite divinity? Plus! you bungle the structure. The building is a body with spirit head limbs and all. Can’t just staple on a random phalanges to appease any old obscura no matter how sacred.
Thusly, the conceit with which I highly drooled, half-hanging from the parapet and which lead to my interrogation and promotion:
Fuckin’ hoist a beam up behind the oratory and put a bright star atop. There’s nine!
Round of affirmatives, gentle applause. God Gallaghan nods to me. The lights of the oratory dim slowly, I felt I was in a closing casket as the orgy began. In the rumble a man came at me and tried to destroy my brain with a fractured bit of wood. I ducked him and he lost his balance and fell and went unconscious. He was the General on Crusade at the time. He feared what was coming. He was right, I am here. And that night? we drank straight from his valve, from his aorta. It tasted like melted butter poured from an old coffee pot. With the thought alone I rub the crotch of my jeans.
Better to drink than be drunken. For sure for sure.
So to the subsequent interrogation preceding my promotion:
“In your years and in what years have you have found the inexplicable to be Purveyor?”
(This was the test. To be battered by God Gallaghan, Old Mel, and two giants in capuchin hoods.)
I replied, “Yo. My life has always been a circus, a proverbial monster slave trade. Every year. The year I was born, this year. Inexplicable purveys. I mean look at us nuts here now!”
I’d been blindfolded and taken to a Hatcher’s Office, a closet with stools. Our knees knocked together and a nude bulb dangled between us, I smelt all their breath at once but they smelt mine too. Hah!
They asked, “In one personal example define an inexplicable incontestable, through logodaedalus or perhaps malapropism, by the varied happenstances and likelihoods of human existence.”
I clear my fucking throat and…
It’s Autumn, my year twenty-two. Moribund. Galvanize. Sycophant. My study words for the week, I’m taking a class called, “Fancy Words, Fun Words?”
I signed up by calling the number off a slip of paper I’d torn from the public library cork board in the heat of a months long struggle with suicidal listlessness. Listless was one of the words. It was this class or going on a rape spree, as at the time I was ensnared by a rather thorough pill addiction and was far, far too content.
There’s five of us including myself and the lady-teacher. The others: gelatinous gray cheeses spread out and formed into the shape of humans. Hardly people. When they spoke they spit. First class we learned: listless, apocryphal, antediluvian. Teacher’s theory was such: it’s easier to remember one word a day and only slightly harder to remember three words a day so long as the two words beside the one word are disconnected in application and tone. Listless is a word that’s half asleep, apocryphal is grand, political; and antediluvian is a voodoo relic in the mud. I remember every word. I took six classes.
After the third class there was a kind of schism; a quarter inch smile in the dank stink of what was a gymnasium office. We lingered at the edge of a moment, and yeah— life changes just like that. Bang! The teacher’s name was Harriet, she’d read books to me and I got her pregnant but we took care of it quick and played it like a dream. That day she taught me the words: mercurial, cantankerous, dervish. A dervish is a whirly boy. Mercurial is what you are, she said. And cantankerous is like a grumpy old man with a sore tooth. I kept going to the class.
Class six (final): there’s a samba lesson across the hall and the closet in their space is Harriet’s office. We’re in there. Outside the samba is going and going and Harriet’s starting to cry for some reason and it’s loud, louder than loud. But the noise is not from the samba or from the crying but from a certain rattling, like a typewriter over the loudspeaker. Would you believe it? A guy from class had come (late, mind you) with a gun shooting up the place. The samba class samba’d their last samba. The other wordsmiths in our class joined them in that jig down the long hall to the big door, understand? But Harriet and I sweet as pie. No idea where she is now. Out there in the ether? Drawn to our light? Hope so. Hope so.
And boy, howdy — let me say, the inexplicable, in my life, is a little skiff on which I tarry tarry on. A bit of time passes. When Autumn folds in I’m a buck. Two hundred pounds fresh on the trail, a newly bred wordsmith.
But, I have night terrors. In my dreams I absorb the blood of those that danced and died and those dead with their spiral notebooks of nouns. In my dreams I turn from the mirror and there is a crowd. Everyone I’ve ever known is there, ardor splashed across their faces. In my dreams I’m in a mask, black, and it covers my mouth so they can’t see it’s me that’s lip-smeared in their blood. Oh, it’s me, alright. It’s me that’s lip-smeared in their blood.
So I went to get him.
It was the least I could do, to turn him cephalophore. Head in his hands, saintly inspired glow. Glee and violence for me. Happiness for all… I knock and I knock and I knock — and they invite me in.
Parent A: A man, fifty-eight, satanic sanpaku eyes. With his dead smile he considers the postman, the TV, the kids, his wife, then me — all with the same plain lack of interest. I think to myself I’ll take his lung out.
Parent B: A true Margarita. Too good for him. Forty-four with spirals of white in her hair. She swashes liquor pinched coffee in a black mug. Clearly she’d been crying since her kid shot all those kids. Her eyes are sunken, she has tree rings where her cheek bones used to be.
She takes me to her son’s room, she’s got an air that says, “This ghoul is hardly my son, this monster is basically a wash pole with eyes and a little dick. Of course he shot up the place what the hell else could he do?” And I wanted to hit her, I wanna hit her until my hand hurts saying, “I don’t know? Get a job!”
In time, the mother points her bony finger due west at the dead sun and I find the boy hiding at a neighbors. In the basement.
Twas once and twice and three times auto-da-fé when I squeezed him like a pigeon at the neck and released until he was destroyed.
Old Mel interrupts me.
“Jig, the inexplicable registers in an evasion of fate. Not unlikely that yours was to be shot to death: you were dastardly and cowardly. Undisciplined and full off abject malice. Compromised intellectually and without value. You fed from the life around you and watered nothing. Predestined to leech. An ample vapid callus on the palm of some smooth God who’d only suffered by giving you life. Your mother and father your siblings your friends detested and regretted you and you were nothing to them. But that was then, now you are here, a profound General element of the Nine, a chimera of extra-human morals and powers. The God has given you deodate and from this now your skeleton grows flesh, your blind eyes uncloud, your brain uncancers. This is where the story may end, the inexplicable registers.”
“Not so fast!” says I.
A knee knocks a stool corner. One of these giants anxious to leave. Fair. He was six foot eight and all men that size have blood clots around their knees but I wasn’t done, so I address Old Mel.
“Not so fast: before I got the kid, before his mother told me, I did my best to therapy the woman. She says to me, it’s like there was a time where things were a certain way and now she knows that that way was a bit better and for the rest of her life she’ll have to just know that things will never be so good again and that’s really just something she’s struggling to think about, to live with, she was sad even before her kid was blasting randos for God-knows what reason. I tell her, hey, whattayagonnado? Some kids are born lizards. If you don’t know what it is or how to fix it — just don’t permit it to exist.
She gets dressed, all tears. And she says to me, “What about my husband?”
I admit it, I say, “I’m going to eat one of his lungs.” She suspects this is a euphemism of some kind, unbothered, she says: “Okay please leave — if you want any of the stuff in here you can have it.” There’s a desktop and mouse, minimal clutter. But there in the out-tray (what was coming in?) is the pamphlet. Yup, that’s right: the fibrous raised blue cursive on felt red parchment you so surely know: “The Nine? Who Are They? Learn And Die And Be Born.”
Audible gasps. The truth. Old Mel coughs and nods. God Ghallaghan leans into the light, part antediluvian crag part Greek sculpture, his eyes are effervescent blue, and he proclaims: “Gobbledygook.”
“Deadly serious,” I say.
God Ghallaghan sees lies, a saints power. And yet — he does not rectify. So. That was that. That’s the story. Interrogation over.
Between then and now? All aces, all long red days on the carousel of my choosing. And the kids, my pupils, yeah they give me trouble. They come up from their pews, heads bloated with grand questions. Allergic reactions to algorithm and race mixing miasma and impotent art. They ask me oh sir, and why must the exarch bare her breasts on the fifth night? The gall! They ask me, oh sir, is it true? upon the death of a member of the dark curia is it true our archimandrite pulls from the ampulla a nine-millimeter pistol and shoots the youngest acolyte in the stomach for us to watch and listen to him or her wail and bleed to death? Yes. It never ends. It can’t all be cigarettes at night. Sometimes it’s work.
But right now, right this second, I let the cigarette smoke curl between my tongue and bounce between my cheeks. Seeping it through clenched teeth. It’s drizzling. The bog moans. God Ghallaghan and I are surrounded by heaven-reaching ashes and ferns so wide that moon and starlight touch the earth in tatters. I have an idea. I ask him:
“Where does my star-pole go? Anatomically.”
“Vitruvius designed churches to the measurements of man. Vitruvius did not know about the Nine, nor was he versed in the source of consciousness, the three brains, the pinpoint nebula of all information and existence. The pole is the anchor Vitruvius left up to god. Ignorance as solid form. A paten to catch God’s tears. The pole, the Ninth light: that’s our flag to claim. Nothing left to God anymore. It is not the head, but the Other Head of our oratory.”
In the glow in the dark in the rain in the smoke, he looks at me, eyes like coins of an alien culture. Positively edible. I have to do it. I’m hard.
I’m a hungy, hungy boy. So hungy I ask:
“Do you actually feel something sometimes, like actually get a directive from up there, or is it always made up on the spot?”
God Gallaghan looks up without blinking and licks some red from his lips, inhaling the arching branches and moon-rays, exhaling the salt blood scent of the soul and in a derelict hiss he whispers, “Johnny, Johnny.”
On the spot.
Hi! Found you on discord and I’m glad I did! Really enjoyed this piece