Mark Doten: The Infernal

Beside and behind me the air tips and crashes; and a fine mist of blood fills the air as the blade slips into the neck of the naked Jew.

Forty-eight lamps, arrayed in three semiconcentric ellipses, each on its own stool, throw light and shadow across the floor of the central chamber. While the youths tend to my blood each morning, the boys tend to the lamps, topping up the oil. Youths, boys, each assigned his own task. I don’t think it’s mere fancy to say that for my birds this is the most pleasurable time of day. A dozen cages hang at the perimeter of the chamber, the red-footed falcon, the purple gallinule, corncrakes and bullion crakes, also an Indian nightjar, an eagle, and a quantity of jack snipe, as well as the oldest birds, a pair of ring-necked parrots with their incompetent, bovine faces. When the lamps are refilled, a warmer light spills through the chamber and the birds lift their heads to call to one another, black eyes flashing, as though the darkness had been banished through their own agency. All but the snipe, which flap away from the light, batting demented at the slender sycamore bars, crying for a night they think they’ve lost.

Of course, there’s no night in our cave system, properly speaking.

Heat, chills, such cycles: but no night.

And the smile of the Jew, which flicks on and off in another cycle, not, as yet, understood.

Yes, he is alive — for the time he is, and he will remain so until we have unlocked the Yid mysteries, until we have squeezed from him the juice of knowledge. This could be the key — in our world struggle, this little Jewboy might well offer us a decisive advantage. By the grace of God it has become my mission to replace, or rather augment, my current understandings of the Jew — instinctive, scriptural, and so forth — with something else.

Let us call it a scientific and contemplative understanding.

The lieutenants and boys venture outside, and thus they remain in touch with — trapped by — the illusion of day and night. In fact there’s no such thing, only a rotation of bodies, only a machine to clean the blood and swarms of beetles where once there were none — even a child knows this. But to learn a life without night and day, without the first idea of night (we say without night , and understand that the coin’s flip side— day —is also instantly invoked, instantly banished — this is the first step in understanding) — yes, to internalize such a way of being is a very different question, one that has gripped me for years. And as I study the pig it comes to me that the Zionists have always, in all their dealings with the Crusaders, kept an eye to the not-night, and our little Jewboy, his head now rolling in my direction, this Jew turning away from the wall we’ve chained him to, watches not only, or even primarily, me.

But here perhaps I go too far. It seems unlikely that the Jew at large is privileged to understand it — the cycle of days and years, the rotating and wheeling bodies, all of this not-night. And certainly not this mute and smiling fool. Nevertheless: how to explain the persistent survival of the Jewish nation, the Jewish race, how to explain the Jewboy, alive on the floor of the central chamber, knees clutched to chest, hands rubbing those snake-oil eyes then vanishing again under the blanket?

I sliced into his neck, but not through it — thus did he survive.

What stopped me were the tubes — the tubes that connected me to my blood machine. I was hooked up to my machine when they brought the Jewboy, and in my agitation I had quite forgotten it. The glass sphere shattered against the head of the blood helper boy, then the razor-edged remnants slashed open his neck, as the machine fell against him.

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elevator boy promoted to blood helper boy, lamp boy to elevator boy, and so on, down the line. The system functions automatically: any vacancy opened by death is filled from below with an algorithm not dissimilar to that which orders the ecliptics of the lamps’ circles, the number and type of birds, the schedules of drilling and target practice in the floors below, the distribution of rations. All these systems will function in my absence, mathematically; I am, all praise to He who has ordained it, a sick man, forever blacking out, and day by day the blood in my veins thickens. These blackouts have grown more severe in recent months, and worse still since my machine’s destruction. And yet — I insist on this point — we have never been so strong. That strength, when matched with our new Jew-knowledge, will elevate and purify our struggle still further.

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Is it really possible that the years have so compromised my instincts that at the first Yid I lose all sense of what surrounds me, cave and bird and binding tube? The lieutenants, too, in spite of their daily training, have likewise forgotten themselves, such that even as my machine lay shattered and tangled with innards, the Jew was their only concern: “Teacher, kill him, Teacher, shouldn’t you, Teacher, Teacher, do you need assistance, killing him …”

The tip of my knife was still lodged in the neck. I could easily have pushed in and through. Instead, I closed my eyes, and wondered how I’d forgotten — failed to understand how to react to a simple Jew.

It must be a dream — some dream of Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld, which came across the ocean, and even here to our cave system, to infect me.

I had not seen this new dream coming, but yesterday I found myself caught up — I saw the world not as it was, but as my adversaries might have wished me to see it — a world warped and blinkered — and perhaps the filaments even now cling to my face. But we will shake ourselves free, and if God wills it — all praise be to Him — we will awake to a new knowledge.

This is why I will make the Jew an object of study.

I must put the Jewboy through his paces, you see.

To understand the Jew — and through him our great adversaries across the sea, for whom the Jewish race plays dogsbody.

My head downticked in blackout, then upticked, alert. I eased my knife from his neck and worked my thumb into the hole, stoppering the blood. “We will not kill the Yid today,” I said, and I twisted the pig’s head, thumb still in place, so that the lieutenants could observe the blood-sprent smile. “There is too much left to learn. I tell you, there is no longer even a rush. For rightly did the poet speak”:

We tread the path where Fate hath led

The path Fate writ we fain must tread:

And man in one land doomed to die

Death no where else shall do him dead.

I recited those words. And as I blacked out, I felt myself tip to the floor, naked Jew in my arms, thumb in the clotting wound.

I could’ve told you …

Wasn’t just when we landed, wasn’t just taking in, my own two eyes, the khaki and collar regime, but way back before way back when I could’ve told you …

Day numero uno anyone’d asked me to state for the record my opinion, Jay not a leader, just not a true-blue leader of American men, Jay a serious loser , a viceroy of shit , I told Condi on the cell as we sped from the airport.