Mark Doten - The Infernal

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machine regards him almost curiously, head cocked. It dips gently for the arm, as though sniffing. And the boy stumbles back, his toes still on the lip of the elevator shaft. His body tilts out over the chasm, arms windmilling.

The youths bow again.

“Therefore, a mechanical bird to draw clean blood from a boy, and unclean blood from the teacher, and, when the switch is toggled left, to inject the Teacher with the boy’s blood, when toggled right, with his own clean blood.”

The boy windmills. The machine rears back. And it is only at this moment that the youths understand the danger to their ingenious device. And they sprint for the shaft.

But the boy’s balance gives out before they reach him; and he tumbles backward dowsWHhm# mwz EM

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“I need my eagle back,” I tell the Jewboy. “You can’t have my eagle.”

The head of the eagle peeks out from under the blanket.

But, I discover, it is only the head. I tear the blanket to find that the pig has fashioned himself an outfit from the bird. He cut off the wings and the tail whole, and spread the feathers open; then he drew off the skin, and divided it into two equal parts, one of which he placed on his back, while with the other he covered his navel and his secrets. The tail he wears behind, the wings on either arm.

“My eagle!” I say. “Look what you’ve done to my eagle!”

Behind me, at the very limit of what the ear can know, I hear the paired crashes of machine and boy.

Or not a crash, no, just the faintest echo of disintegration, no louder than a dirt clod powdered in your own hand.

Khakis and open collars …

The khaki and collar regime …

Your Baghdad criminal element, or I mean, put plain, your Baghdad element, they see him, Jay, they see a low person, an FSU/Shippensburger, and they know what they see …

Jay the first cause , Jay a god of shit …

This burqa thing, I’m stifling, I told retired ambassador Clay McManaway and Donny as Jay led us through the palace.

I have brought my understanding to this porta-potty town , I’ll undo Jay’s damage, unknot and abolish the khaki and collar regime , usher in a new era in the Green Zone, thus the world …

On its ear is where it woul FK2SW PPR PCBT4 FX04 H0#KZKB1P1

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where it would be straight up, and not just the Green Zone, our whole fallen world , set it on its ear, straight up …

Ker pow , it just came …

Boots …

Ker pow …

What it was going to have to be was boots …

Boots, don’t you see, boots just the thing, stamp out the khakis in the Green Zone, set the Green Zone on its ear …

Dark suits, too, suits and boots, straightaway establish it, brand myself, suits-and-boots man, rebrand the whole Green Zone a suits-and-boots zone …

Baghdadi criminals, Baghdad’s super predators , they want and need and beg for mental domination, it’s what they respect, culturally, you give them your domination and then and only then do they give you respect, culturally, so, footwear, boots, that’s what I had to get …

Domination what Arabs look for, domination and what and you know and let’s just say, cards, table, explicit sexual domination …

To be sexually dominated, Arab mind-set, Arab mental process, that’s how you get into all that …

But here I was, tarmac, without my brand, my boots, my suits …

Hume, what I need is an incognito …

A burqa thing, Hume, it’s the only way …

Outside there were photographers and dignitaries, I needed an incognito …

I sent Hume to fetch me a burqa thing, I’d hide myself in a burqa thing and remain in a burqa thing until I found it, the solution, a true-blue American outfit, not khakis and collars but something to press down on the Arab brain, something to squeeze the Arab brain, squeeze it good , and when the pressing and the squeezing were at an end, we’d have a whole new Arab brain, I told retired ambassador Hume Horan, I told retired ambassador Clay McManaway and Donny as Jay led us through the palace.

Tarmac a full hour, then another, concussive waves booming against the fuselage, waiting for Hume, for my burqa thing …

Newsmakers and dignitaries, one by one they got whirled away, it never comes on a breeze, this Baghdad air, only in reeking blasts …

They got whirled into the river …

Bodies consumed by the river, by the fire in the river, each man a new mausoleum lamp …

What I’m dead set on in the Green Zone and what we’re gonna have, hell, high water, is success, I told Clay McManaway and Donny as Jay led us through the palace.

My sister should be here, she should be shooting the palace, the Chinatown soundstage is what the mess in here reminds me of, I told Clay McManaway and Donny as Jay led us through the palace.

We were a pair on the soundstage, same as Monaco or Trieste …

Last assignment she ever accepted, last photos she ever took, shoot the publicity stills for Chinatown …

Guy the studio’d lined up, he was dead, he’d killed himself …

Photographers incapable of clean suicides, each death a showstopper, and good luck getting those stains out …

Condi a photographer, Life, People , a party photographer, the studio called her up …

Faye thought of my sister because of the Life photo, and Faye called my sister …

Let me tell you about Chinatown , that’s where I met Jack, I told Clay McManaway and Donny as Jay led us through the palace.

Jack, he’d just come from Vegas, or was it Ren TTQ6D530=X0NFW YUVCOV

I thought, Nicholson, yes, the drive to the desert, to the Middle East …

I thought Nicholson, the drive to death, the living death …

I had just seen The Passenger , and I loved Jack as I’d never loved any other, and so when my sister got the Chinatown gig I was her passenger, her tagalong …

Jack loved the desert, just loved it …

We made it to the soundstage, me and Condi …

A deep feeling for the desert, is what Jack said he had, a real deep feel for the people of the desert …

I was trying to get in close but lackeys were filling the soundstage with umbrellas, reflectors, tents, domes, shooting tables, with each step toward Jack a union lackey would roll a bin of apparatus right over my toes, and they just kept coming

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each piece of apparatus set on its own trajectory by a union lackey, vectors complexly cut through by other lackeys in white pants and T-shirts, all these lackeys moving with a complex and intercutting grace, never slowing, never hesitating, when I moved left they blocked me left, when I feinted right they blocked right, Jack kept talking , this swarm of men and apparatus cutting through and past itself burst into laughter yet again, me I had no idea what Jack was saying and I couldn’t even see him anymore …