The Reverend, He Turned to Me.

A normal brisk morning, followed by a normal hot shower, followed by a normal cup of joe, followed by on and on and on. Needless to say, everything was quite stagnant, the tyranny reigning the outer side of the walls we call our homes. The camera watching our every benign movement, withholding their presence from those who were inept to the sociological changes. The dawn breaks, the clouds part. An alarm goes off a few blocks down the street. Hours go by, people afraid to leave their houses. Once an alarm rang, no one knew whether it was a raid or a routine check in. The guns dripped the love of law, the finality of the upper echelon, the totality of an eclipse which overshadows the sun in its beautiful incandescence. The dusk falls, people scurry inside. The hunger starts, gas begins flowing. The hissing of air vents, the striking carbon flowing through the exhaust. Nothing so ridiculous as freedom, nothing so desperate as a protest. We the people had laid that down years ago now. Old lady Maggie, near the Court Marshall’s office. She was one of the few alive still from before the revolution of industry. She was there when civil no longer meant the common civilization. She told story after story to us in the dark, just beyond the fence of her apartment window. Story after story of grand adventure, the sights of the north, the blistering heat of Texas. She missed it, she said. She said something along the lines of this. “O’ it's a shame, Mikey. If only you could’ve seen it. Those were glorious times. She always had called me Mikey, much to the dismay of the enforcement. They hated nicknames. She would always say things like that, prompting me to wonder: was it really so great? “Why, of course it couldn’t be!” I thought. These were staunched quickly by the morning of a snowy January day. A normal brisk morning, followed by a normal hot shower, followed by a normal cup of joe. This time, however. This time it was different. The alarm rang early, surely a sign of a raid. Let me rewind, if you will. Maggie had always been on the farther side of hope: will. She was absolutely willing (sometimes capable) to do whatever it took to announce her opinion, drawing large crowds in the process. She was silenced nearly every time. Pepper spray. Rubber bullets. Hell, even thwacks from a baton. She didn’t care however. She told everyone there was power looking like a raisin that had been ran over a few times. Her everlasting sense of presence was a miraculous thing to behold. Now, if reading this from somewhere besides here, this may sound naive to try and publish. You may have (for instance) picked up on our “customs” of complete lack of control. Those others, they’re fine with it, basking in the relentless joy of not having to make any decisions for themselves. Think something like Logan’s Run, Repent Harlequin! Said the TickTockman, The Running Man. Complete lack of social intelligence, not in small part to the drip feed of “vetted” “content” that was supplied to the poor folk that lived here. Me, well, I rigged a television set with a custom antenna, allowing me to get signals from far beyond our isometric walls. Same as this book, I’d be put down like a dog who got a slight bit too defensive for the humans liking. See what I’m saying? We’re like animals. Hyper-intelligent sloths living only greed lust and some-of-us envy. How we would laugh and laugh, running down the alleyways after knocking over a loose bottle of whiskey. Now, let me tell you about how our town functions. I’m too young to actually know where we live. They stopped letting us know about anything outside the walls (apparently) decades ago. And our only hope of knowing (Maggie) was starting to forget. Perhaps that was the constant beatings to the head, or perhaps something more insipid. Either way, our town. We were called the “Last Resistance” To what? No one knows. They won’t tell us and if we ask they beat us. Oh, I’m terribly sorry for wording this as though it’s common. I suppose people outside probably wouldn’t get assaulted, or worse. We are a group of people, say, 500-600 in size (not including the guards or businessmen). Local shops don’t exist. We live on a system of time-credits. The longer we go without incident, the better off we are. Maggie, naturally, is very, very poor. So far in the ground you’d think she was buried. After that, we’d go to the local thrift shop. Find some new dresses or whatever we were into that day. My good friend Joan, she used to find these incredible leather jackets. She’d make them into concert going attire. ‘Was never really my style, but I loved how intricate she was. We have currently four local stores. Well, again, “local” to us means owned by The Tyrant. A grocery store, a liquor stop, a pet store & a gas station. There were no cars, it was to feign the idea, to sell the illusion, to market the afterbirth of a nation to those who remembered their lives prior. On top of that, we have no shortage of entertainment. A cinema, a strip club, a stadium for sports & a once yearly book-show. At the stadium, we got to see throneball, a game in which people would whip their arms at others with foam padded balls, striking each other to eliminate one, among some others. At the book show, we got to see reprints of older stories that I suspect are highly edited to keep any and all political messaging out of. Some authors were even banned in entirety: Neil Gaiman, Harlan Ellison, George Orwell, Franz Kafka, J.R.R Tolkien, Homer, Dante Alighieri, etc. Those are just some of the bigger ones, at least from what Maggie says. There are (as of now) One-Hundred and Forty-Eight pages of banned authors. It wouldn’t matter either way, considering that I’m one of the three that go to them. And yes, you’ve read that right. Only three people inside our Six-Hundred go to the book show. Now, I’m no one to criticize, considering the state that The Tyrant has us in. Then we have the cinema. The cinema is the second favorite place of people in our small parish. We get to see movies about war, violence, death. That’s it. Movies that are long since out of date, but nothing that would be considered ancient work. Until Maggie had mentioned it, we didn’t know non-color television used to exist. My other girl-friend, Michelle, God rest her, she was very into music back in our day. She used to be a charting musician! Her band was called ‘The Spoonbills’ after her favorite kind of bird. They used to play this glorious orchestra of magnificent melancholy. Pardon me, dear, I just miss their tunes so much. You’d probably liken them to sound like ‘Torch Carriers’ if you had to imagine it. Just with a teensy bit more synth. I was a part of that band for just a little bit, back when we were teenie-boppers. Some movies were more psychological, they would show us films by a certain filmmaker named Stanley Kubrick, though they would not let us see all of his films. Two of his movies were banned: A Clockwork Orange & Dr. Stangelove. Beyond that, we got to see just about every war movie you could possibly think of, including Kubrick’s own Full Metal Jacket. Everyone agrees here that he was a damn good director, even if some people (well, nearly everyone, actually) were lost at the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey. On top of every war movie, we also got every horror movie. Friday the 13th, Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Phantasm, Hellraiser, The Shining, The Living Dead, etc. Again, those were the ones Maggie noted were big in her day. There was only one that was banned from that genre: The Exorcist. As far as comedy goes, we got people from our higher ups, doing stageplay. As far as fantasy goes, we got more war: Damnation Alley, Hawk the Slayer. There were a few films that they didn’t understand how to market, those were run on sundays: Eraserhead, Taxi Driver. I want to illustrate why I left the strip-club for last. And it’s a simple reason: it’s all people did. I mean that with no form of arrogance or hastened withdrawal of the senses. That is truly all this town is built on. The men grow up addicted to increasingly shorter videos, projected through their smart mirrors onto a vacant gray wall in their house. Fifteen seconds, Ten seconds, Five, Four, Three. They grow up on videos of soldiers fighting a war, fighting a grand battle as a battalion of altruism. They grow on tradition, fear, religion, superstition. That’s what they grow on, like a parasitic plant growing inside a host's corpse. O’ a good time it was. We never had to worry about media, war or anything like that. We just lived for each moment, planning new events to try like we had infinite money. *Chuckle* We were always broke by the end of the week, but money is only temporary, dear, The women? Well, talk about brainwashing, even more so than the men. I was lucky to be one of the last born before the invention of SmartVision™, or so they called it. The women are also born, seeing the videos from when they begin thinking to when they die. Except, they see it in reverse, a twisting venomous version of Yin and Yang. The men see more and more faith and tradition and war and hatred and all encompassing death of the mind, while the women see increasingly detailed videos (still in short form) about their role in society, their future, their looks, their looks, their looks, their looks and looks and looks and looks and looks and looks and looks and looks and looks and looks and looks and looks and looks and looks and looks. It’s practically all they see. I’d wager a bet with you if you were here to attack one of the enforcers senseless with all your might if there were a woman below Thirty that wasn’t completely brainwashed. I would simply be amazed, no, astonished if I ever saw more than three people outside of that Club, but it doesn’t happen. And it’s not like it’s a nice place either. Club Plaything, as sleazy as the name sounds, was an attempt to subdue those, same as SmartVision. Once more I must reiterate, everyone here is dripfed only what the higher ups want us to see. We don’t even truly know how many there are in the top end of the totem pole. It could be one or one-hundred. and now it means even less than it did then. Just worthless paper with the vague idea of a dream still attached. Isn’t it funny how fast life can change? That we could go from wholly independent to locked in tight cages, like animals? The club was as successful as something could be with no physical monetary system. The men who were taught that women were essentially slaves to the system and deserved to serve their every need, the women taught that they were merely toys to appease the men, subduing their pent up anger and war-hungry minds. Of course, two people, the Acolytes of Maggie we’re called now, knew otherwise. After a long day of sitting in their chamber, the men and women would clamber to the streets, seeing the glowing neon sign of a woman clad in a bunny suit, which Maggie says echoes what a “magazine” by the name of “Playboy” used to be. Inside the Club, it was grungy, the walls purple and red, glowing with lights towards the bar. The poles adorned by various women in the tightest of clothing you could possibly imagine. The floors were mung. Complete and utter death of all things clean. The men sat around, dumbly smiling ear to ear while the fibers in their pants (mostly shorts) began stretching at several lengths. Their wide mouths drooling while watching the dancers fly around in hypnotic motions. Every once in a while they would get too aroused and, thinking only with the rationality of a common wildebeest, began grabbing at the dancers. Of course, this was met with retaliation - is what I wish I could say. They would lean in and personally “help” them. Overall just a horrific sight. There was one however, that must have been appointed by the higher-ups. The one that everyone with high credit came to see: Magnolia. Magnolia is by all definitions the perfect living model of what it looks like when all someone cares about is their appearance. Workouts, tailored to give her a pleasing shape. Makeup, to make her look like an undressed mannequin of pure pleasure. Golden hair curled in an opulent fashion. Blue eyes that could make an emperor fall to his knees. Frame that would make the second best so envious they’d quit. Sensuality that would make even Aphrodite blush, and Sappho jealous. Legs and thighs as pale and soft as a warm bed. You get the idea. They’d go wild for her. Literally, wild. Some would come in screaming at her, some begging on hands and knees to touch her. A sickening, dark, outright twisted vision of how far we’d gone from Maggie’s vision. The sick pigs would pin her to the tables, surely hurting whatever was left of her insides and - God - don’t even get me started on the bruises. The makeup could only do so much. By the end of the night, she was practically brutalized. Desecrated with the heinous stains of over eighty, sometimes hundred, men a day. Every day. This was commonplace for her. Common. They tortured her. For days. Weeks. Months. Years. Decades. And yet, she saw no wrong. This was how it was supposed to be, in her eyes. All this, to stop people from truly thinking. From realizing the vapid world of this life they were born into. That was, until one day. Why should we just sit back and ignore that the rest of life continues without us? Why should we be harbored like murderers and rapists in maximum security? What good has come from this? You can’t even ask a simple question such as that without being beaten, and your food robbed from you. One day, something very strange happened. An impious act which changed my view from “against the system” to what they would consider a “radical” opposition. They don’t know it yet, because unlike Maggie, I knew when to shut my mouth. I knew when the wolves began howling it became time to listen. We all went about our day, I began reading a book by a man named Mark Z. Danielewski. It was a several hundred page novel about a family whose house began growing on its own. Everything was seemingly normal. Raid siren. A proper raid siren. We hadn’t heard one in so long we forgot how distinct it was in comparison. I say we don’t stand for it anymore. I say we raise our fists in defiance, con lentitud poderosa. I say we take our stand and let them know who they are! A blaring, high pitched squeal that would make dogs run in fear of bursting their eardrums. A zealot sound which took over all others for the time being. A bountiful noise of unabashed hatred. So I say unto thee, as did the lord to his followers, may we take our arms, hand in hand, displaying that we, the people sti-” Silence. Pure silence. The sirens turned off. The wolves hid their fangs. The women stopped doing their makeup. The men stopped thinking about being the next action hero. The pure, unadulterated silence rung through the ears even louder than the gunshot. Like that, like a flickering lantern, the threat had been extinguished, except, this was no threat. It never was and never will have been, no matter what they say. That was poor old Maggie, taking her dying breath. The people looked on in an abstinent gaze of petrified dread. The enforcers smiled and laughed, one remarking that she finally had quit talking. And within a day she was labeled a terrorist and an enemy of the town. Within a single hour, they had come up with a reason. Within a single hour they reduced someone’s entire life to a single sentence: “There was nothing we could do. She was just too violent.” The next morning began like nothing had ever happened. The Enforcers had a normal brisk morning, followed by a normal hot shower, followed by a normal cup of joe, followed by a normal day of abuse. No thought at all was given to their atrocity, smiling and talking about money. The Tyrant held a funeral, her living family either dead or outside the walls. They had now just one man from outside: the Reverend. With a heavy heart I attended. I looked on while they didn’t even bother to dress her nicely. I looked on while one of the Enforcers smiled with glee as he spit on the casket, the one next to him molesting her lifeless corpse. I watched in terror. Finally, the Reverend arrived, telling them to clear out. See, the only people that had more power than the authority were the holy ones. He knew what he’d seen that day. The Reverend, he turned to me with a tear in his eye. He said one sentence in regards to the fact I knew her quite well. “My dearest boy,” he leaned in closer “Hold your tongue as hard as your Bible. God would not have done this.” I gave an earnest smile, picking up a flower from the tables, preparing to give a biased speech, to appease The Tyrant. I think we can all agree, collectively, in hopes that there is a hell somewhere. Whether you’re an atheist, a believer or a pagan, there’s a few people we’d like to see burning. Forever. Some wear arm bands, but a lot - and I mean a lot - wear suits and ties.