4. Deep Calls to Deep

We Live in Hell Now 

There was someone in there, but he didn’t point a gun, nor anything else immediately life-threatening, at the indelicate intruder who had just ripped the flag of the Vatican from his bay window. His hands were in the front pockets of his rudimentary, possibly-hand-sewn, grey slacks, and his posture was an unmenacing slouch. He was a slight, young man in his early twenties whose neck and hand tattoos uncovered by his homespun, white shirt appeared as if from a past life in which he had wanted to be taken more seriously than he imagined he was, maybe because of his waif-like build and baby, almost translucent, white face. His severe family was packed in behind him in the narrow, yellow kitchen. None of them were wearing sundresses, but rather a lot of clothes for the middle of summer cooped up in a home without electricity. In the zone keeping the windows shaded helped keep homes cool, as no one had electricity, but the denizens generally opened their windows for the breeze, and they didn’t commonly reside with quite so many other heat-generating bodies.  

“Were they some kind of bizzarro version of the Amish?” Ishmael wondered. 

All of them wore long-sleeves and long pants or dresses according to the genders assigned to them by “The They.” They were crammed into the kitchen like seasick pilgrims on an undersized and sinking vessel. The underqualified captain of the doomed voyage to the Promised Land seemed to be the boyish father who stood just outside the threshold in the empty, front parlor where Ishmael was being consumed by the stupefaction of his illegible situation. There was no telling how many of those outlandish curiosities there were confined within that incommodious space, or what sort of indoctrination they had all been forced to yield to, to wind up in this phantasmagoric state of affairs.  The smooth-faced patriarch was mostly unreadable but clearly unimpressed with Ishmael’s rancor towards the flag of the Vatican, and he unperturbedly said, “You tore down our curtain.” 

As bemused as he was, Ishmael was still mannerly enough to apologize reflexively. And then he got distracted for a moment by the empty den that was down the stairs and to the left of the kitchen, which was empty as the rest of the house, except for the elaborate shrine to the Virgin Mary in the middle of the far wall where folks used to put their TV’s. “The den would have been perfect for the vagina diorama,” he jealously pondered, but instead, it was currently occupied by an inflexible woman who had kept her virginal void beyond the male gaze. Ishmael was assuming that God had impregnated her without looking.  

And then it hit Ishmael, there were no insects in this house. They had become such a ubiquitous presence that they were hardly ever noticed until now in their absence. Ishmael felt an uncanny shiver of something unnatural come over him. It felt something like what he had heard about Phantom Limb Syndrome. The insects had been indifferent to him as he had become to them. But in the presence of their absence, they had become closer to him than he was to himself, as he now felt that he was no longer himself without them.  

He liked not feeling like himself when the cartel had first started to challenge the gender and sexual norms of the previous society of the zone. None of them were nostalgic for how things had been. They didn’t even pine for the special dishes that their mothers had made, mostly because their meals had been delivered to their homes from chain restaurants. They now explored cooking what they perceived to be exotic stews from faraway places out of “ethnic” cookbooks from the library over open fires with various sorts of left-behind stores of legumes and bottles of lemon juice and fresh ingredients that they specifically grew now in their gardens according to the dictates of their endless taste for new flows of intensities, such as garlic and ginger and hot peppers. But a lot of it was still just crap out of disremembered cans and the endless stores of seal lock bags of chips and things. 

The realization of the lack of insects inside the retro-millenarian compound sent him searching for his internal “Default Mode Network,” so that he might be able to bring himself to speak again from a place of familiarity, and to somehow extirpate himself from this situation without drowning in the Real. But he could only find his bearings well enough to stumble over a few words of explanation about his intentions towards the flag, “I thought something else was going on in here,” he started apologetically without being able to find the concept for what he did think was going on in here. And then to his own surprise, he abruptly switched to a sort of confused accusation, “Wait, why are your curtains the Vatican’s flag?”. 

“The Neo-Orthodox group that we’re starting here in the zone passed them out to reclaim this territory for God. And we needed curtains.” the father said plainly. 

“The Neo-Orthodox group?” Ismael puzzled aloud. 

“Yes, we’re returning meaning to the area through traditional religious practices and beliefs, he answered, and then continued with his homily that clearly echoed the talking points of some Other’s agenda, “We’re in a meaning crisis. This is my trad family.” 

“This is your ‘trad’ family,” Ismael repeated in bewilderment. 

“I thought ‘trad’ was kind of slur,” said Johanna, who was the first of the rest of the group to make it through the front door. She was normally the quietest. Her summer dress was an electric blue, and it beautifully accentuated her luxurious brown skin.  An electric, blue ribbon tied back the shock of her lavish black hair. She was smaller than the rest of the cartel, but they were all relatively large in stature, so it was hard to say if she was a petite person or not. Her elegant diminution was immediately more imposing, as her focused curiosity engorged her deep brown eyes with flowing intensities. 

Ishmael didn’t know what to be more shocked by: the trad family, the non-presence of the insects, or Johanna’s sudden verbosity. His beard had turned into a wild black bush in the last two years, and he began to stroke it as a means of self-soothing. As he stood there dumbly looking smart in his short, green summer dress, long hairy legs, and combat boots, he thought only about the difference between what he imagined and what is. “I am never who I think I am, there is no “I” that I can already know about to project into the present nor to project into my future projects. Nothing ever goes like “I” think it will with me,” he thought with reference to whatever it was that countered his intentions, perhaps the Real. 

“It’s only a slur to demons who oppose us,” the trad father said. “Without our heritage, the Chaos Dragon wins.” 

“You want to repeat the past?” Johanna asked, but to make a point and not because she wanted to know his answer. She forgot that not everyone had read Giles Deleuze’s book on Nietzsche, and so the blunderbuss of the repetition of the same wouldn’t resonate as she indented with the trad family. They didn’t know that desire wasn’t a negation of difference through a concept of resemblance, but that desire was always for difference itself. Johanna wondered for a moment if she should try to explain the “Repetition of Difference,” to them, but then remembered that many in the cartel had not yet forgiven Deleuze for his direct attack on Lacan’s negative formulation of desire as lack. She thought that both notions of desire were compatible and had tried to adumbrate how lack and excess were intimately related, but they had not been ready for this teaching yet. 

“The plague of insects, and now of sexual deviance...”, the mannish-boy said with the vitriol that he associated with saying something that made others think you were important, “...are signs, like the plagues of old, and are God’s judgement against those who reside here.” The young zealot continued, “The Devil intends for this place to be the porthole to Hell from which to launch his attack on this great nation, but we intend to put a stop to that.” 

“So, you Neo-Orthodox are fighting the so called ‘Meaning Crisis’ by means of a Holy War,” Johanna sincerely considered. It was then she fully realized that she would have to forgo Deleuze and Lacan entirely and directly address the historical failures of the martial approach to their general sense of the loss of meaning in their lives.  

Without condescension Johanna unrevealed that, “Holy war has been tried again and again as a solution to a general sense of lack of purpose. It never works because it requires ‘othering,’ which just shifts the problem to some imaginary Other who has supposedly taken away, or somehow vitiated, a lost purity, or ‘Edan,’ if you will,” she said thoughtfully appealing to the context of their traditional religious mythology.  

“But there is no way back,” Johanna continued, “because we were never there. The lost paradise only appears as lost retrospectively. The Temple cannot be restored because the Temple as imagined never was.” 

Upon hearing something that he could relate to, the neophyte traditionalist interjected, “We are rebuilding the temple and restoring God to His throne here at the mouth of Hades.” 

In a trice Johanna’s temper flared, and she ejaculated, “Father-God abdicated the temple throne and then died hanging, and therefore ‘cursed,’ upon a tree.” She had outflanked him with greater Biblical literalism than he could muster. 

“We are the resurrection,” trad mom proclaimed without warning as she bounded forward past her ghastly children and her diffident husband. She was a small, slight woman wearing a full-length navy dress that completely covered her legs, arms, and neck, and she clearly had the phallus that her enfeebled husband lacked. She was at least twenty years the elder of her cuckold, so that the older children, at the very least, must have been hers from previous relationships. 

“Pretty solemn resurrection,” Julien suddenly adduced from the trad family’s severe countenances. She along with the rest of the cartel had now breached the front parlor. “You still look a little undead rather than having been fully returned to life,” Julien scoffed in anger. Her hackles were up, as they were for the others, because although she had thought that she had seen the last of this sort of religious piety, here it was, "resurrected,” so to speak deep within the zone. The Church’s speech may have been physically absent, but it had continued to be present as a voice in all their heads and in many ways formed their “new” religious ideas from their unconscious opposition to its lingering, internal prattle. 

The God-fearing mom tabled both Johanna’s intervention about repeating the past and Julien’s about the lifelessness of her self-professed “resurrection,” and then turned to the cartel to proclaimed, “There are two genders. Look how the Anti-Christ has had his way with you.”   

“These people don’t believe in science. They think we’re possessed by demons.” Joshua joined the conversation to explain to the group.  

“No,” Gabriel corrected, “She said ‘the Anti-Christ,’ which was Paul’s term for those who didn’t believe what Paul believed about Jesus.” 

“Yeah, but these people lump the Serpent, the Satan, the planet Venus (when it rises in the morning), the Devil, and the demons altogether as if the same figure,” Joshua retorted. And he knew what he was talking about because he had been raised on “biblical literalism,” which can only be sustained when you don’t read the Bible very much, but which gave him insight into how “these people” think.  

The impression of Joshua’s prosthetic penis was showing through his orange summer dress, which added to the gravitas of his unlooked-for declaration. He would have chosen a more subtle one, but so far, they had only found that one in all their searches of all the jilted closets and dresser drawers. Not many who had made the exodus had avowed their castration. 

 The repurposed dildo was very awkward to keep in place because it had been what was once referred to as a “strap-on,” and was designed to shoot straight out, which was a weighty inconvenience for peripatetic endeavors, but perfectly appropriate for sex rituals. Joshua needed it to point down, so he had to learn how to adjust the elastic, strapping mechanisms to indicate the ground between his legs. He had mostly resolved the direction of his penis by fiddling with the straps, but he still had to walk a bit bolt-legged to keep it in place and to stop it from rubbing too badly on the inside of his thighs. He could only wear dresses with his penis because pants made movement too restrictive. It was the strenuousness of his striding forward to accuse the trad family of Biblical Literalism that had caused his penis to become prominent under his dress. 

“We believe in Christian Science, which is the only real science because it, unlike secular science, hasn’t been infiltrated by Satan’s lies. The Bible is one hundred percent, literally accurate. And science can prove it,” old, trad mom haughtily retorted. 

“What? I don’t even know how to begin to try to make sense out of that,” Johanna said.  

“These people hate making sense!” Joshua charged as he pointed at them with all the indexical means available to him, which include his index finger, his leering eyes, and his out-of-order penis.  

 “Your coven seems to be well-versed in at least one of the sciences, the science of demonology!” doddering, historical mom exclaimed as she dramatically opened her arms to push back her brood from the evil before them as if to bravely stand between wicked before her and quick behind sagging ass.  

“We know a lot about demonology, as we are a very active book club, and we’ve read both ‘The Lesser Key of Solomon’ and ‘The Malleus Maleficarum’,” Michael said earnestly. His unkempt, truly dirty-blond hair and beard made him appear as if some giant, Viking wizard, but his clear lack of malevolence, and his ill-fitted sundress reduced him to the category of the “sweetly” insane even as his sheer size endured this reduction to niceness as an unavoidable warning of violence. 

“And it shows,” neo-classical, archetypical mom said scornfully because she apparently didn’t understand that both Medieval manuals were written from the perspective of authors who were merely contributing to the Church’s work of the binding and exercising of demons. Perhaps she hadn’t read either of those tombs either.  

“And now, I cast you out in the matchless name of Jesus,” she cursed and then fell into some ferocious, but well-cultivated, form of ecstatic speech that resounded with Contemporary Charismatic Church notions of Aramaic-sounding syllables thrown together in rapid, repetitive, not-altogether-random succession.  

“You what?” Julien catechized. “Sorry, I can’t understand that babel. I thought the point of Speaking in Tongues was to reverse Babel and to be universally understood instead of rambling on like an enthusiastic imbecile.”  

“allabahbah choocha subachtalli yayouya gaagaagaagaa choocha ...,” she ranted on. 

“And it’s also just a ‘noisy gong’ if it isn't spoken ‘in love,’ as Paul said,” Joshua said, but maybe not from the place of love in which Paul had spoken. 

“Shaanaa tooonie abbanni gooogujufunie,” the ecstatic, venerable mother continued. 

“We’ll leave, if you ask us because this appears to be your home, but not if you cast us out, so just ask, and we’ll leave,” Mariam kindly appealed. 

“There are not enough syllables variations in her Pentecostal speech to be a language,” Johanna said plainly, and then continued, “The language of Heaven would have more nuance, I think.” 

“Yeah, and Aramaic doesn’t have the English “V” sound, I heard her like “voom-ing” or something a second ago.” Julien submitted to suggest that the vexingly staid mom wasn’t speaking in Jesus’s native tongue. 

The Materfamilias instantaneously switched to Modern Midwestern English to say, “Oh, yes, how could I forget, you need the demons’ names to cast them out. And there are many of you, so you must be ‘Legion’,” she needled. 

“We’ll both leave and give you our names, if you ask.” said Mariam, who was still the kindest of them, but she couldn’t abide being cast out by some other name besides her own. 

“I want an apology also, and not a Christian apology, like as in apologetics, or whatever, but a real apology,” said Joshua. His rubber, member was beginning to rise along with his indignance. It was being tugged by one of the straps running through the middle of his backside’s crevice as his ample ass was contracting with exasperation.