4: The Indomitable Gaze of the Other

We Live in Hell Now

There was someone in there, but the inhabitant didn’t point a gun, nor anything else immediately life-threatening, at the indelicate intruder who had just exposed himself as he came flying through the front door uninvited and then laid, presumably, gathering himself, with his sun dress lifted up around his shoulders and head on the front room floor. Ishmael, the intruder, had then gotten up from the once restored and smoothly lacquered, but now filthy and beaten, wooden floor, where his bare behind and floppy genital had been resting after the shock of drop kicking an unexpectedly ajar door, and he then ripped the flag of the Vatican from the occupant’s bay window without so much as a word of explanation. And the nonplused, inner dweller, likewise, hadn’t said a word. Although, perhaps, they were quite disturbed by the sudden events of the preceding moments, all of their participants seemed relatively calm, nonetheless. Perhaps, this odd tranquility was because of the general, unspoken assessment that violence was less probable at that moment than the seemingly innocuous weirdness that was currently popping off. Whatever the reason, none of those involved felt a need to pull out a weapon. Ismael didn’t have one anyways, and it didn’t occur to him that the occupant might; although, it probably should have. But it was notable that Ishmael had been allowed to burst in and pull down the flag of the Vatican without any words having been exchanged.

The resident’s hands were in the front pockets of his rudimentary, possibly-hand-sewn, grey slacks, and his posture was an unmenacing slouch, which should have been menacing, but wasn’t. He was a slight, young man in his early twenties whose neck and hand tattoos uncovered by his homespun-looking, 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 his waif-like build and baby, almost translucent, white face, never afforded him the gravitas that he envisioned for himself. His severe family, or at least, what appeared to be 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 and opened were the only methods of keeping homes cool in the summer, as almost no one had electricity. But while the shades were drawn in the strange home, the windows weren’t opened, so there wasn’t much of a breeze, except for the presently ajar front door. The stagnation in there, plus so many other heat-generating bodies produced an almost unbearable aroma of sweat, mold, farts and whatever cloying scent that was that was being used to try to cover that horrid bouquet up.

“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 Big Other. They were crammed into the kitchen like seasick pilgrims on an undersized and sinking vessel. The ill-equipped captain of the doomed voyage to whatever promised land they had intended seemed to be the boyish father who stood just outside the threshold of the kitchen in the mostly empty, front parlor where Ishmael was being consumed by the stupefaction of his illegible situation. There was no telling how many of the bizzarro Amish there were confined within the incommodious space of the kitchen behind their, possible, father, 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.” Possibly, a question?

As wild as he had become, 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 considered, but instead, it was currently occupied by the statuesque virgin who was there to remind the flock that they were being observed. Even when in a feminine guise, the Church’s gaze was the penetrating perusal of the masculine phallus.

And then it hit Ishmael, there were no insects in this house. Bugs 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 mostly become to them. But in the presence of their absence, he felt that he was no longer fully himself without them. Even though he had learned that there was no self, he felt selves as if they were the only things of substance left in the world. They may be more amorphous than he once thought, but even in their impossible-to-pin-down-ness, they still seemed real. After the reduction of the self to its ethereal nothingness by whatever religious or scientific procedure one preferred, something substantial remained. There was still something watching the ephemeral concepts that he called the world and the self that was in it. Something that had seen itself disappear and which remained after both the self and its world was gone.

We are neither found entirely within our bodies nor within our symbols. There is something that watches both the body when it fails and the Symbolic when it fails. Lacan had an anti-intuitive notion of the “Real.” For Lacan, the “Real” was what resisted symbolic or conceptual representation as well as what resisted direct or intuitive, bodily perception because it was what was conceived of as the failure of both perceptual and conceptual representation. The Lacanian Real was “real” ironically because it caused reality to fail, or at least that part of reality that was indicated by signifiers or filtered through concepts or through the even more basic pre-conceptual, physical categories of the sensory systems of the biological body. Kant considered that part of reality that was synthesized by the perceptual categories of the physical laws to be non-conceptual because they were a kind of bodily internalization of the space-time structure of causal relations. This internalization represents the Universe through the categories, but at an even more basic level through the body’s inherited perceptual apparatuses. What is it that observes the failure to make the world of the mind-body's intention?

And what’s more, there seems to be a lure to this failure. There is something in us that desires the failure of our intention, which wants to encounter its outside in the resistance of the Other. The Lacanian Real isn’t a unified object, so in a sense it doesn’t exist, but we can’t help wondering about the intention of this non-object. Our wonderment positivizes this lack into an intention that has withdrawn from us, but it may be that the Other’s intention has withdrawn from itself as well, all the way into the abyss of without-intention.

There wasn’t nothing before there was something, and this double negation of nothing is the basis of everything that is. Whatever the Alpha Point or the singularity of everything-in-one-place was, it was neither nothing nor something, which is the double negation of the Hegelian dialect. However, contrary to popular belief, the Hegelian double negation didn’t resolve into a synthesis but as the incomplete resolution, or the productive contradiction, of something as nothing, or nothing as something, which produced the flow of determinate being becoming indeterminate as well as the determination of indeterminacy, even if this determination is always incomplete and therefore an ongoing dialectic between determination and the abyss. Nonbeing is the internal outside of being and vice versa, so each creates the other, which is the mystical notion of “co-arising.” Neither being nor nonbeing fully resolve the other and there isn’t a complete synthesis of either into a third unitary term or object, but there is a third non-object, which is the irreducible ambiguity of what isn’t itself, but what is always asymptotically approaching itself as a becoming of what it is through what it isn’t.

When two contradictory terms are brought near from afar, they form the continual flow of internalization and externalization inherent to becoming, but this becoming doesn’t become an object like a one or a whole. Its incompleteness is its movement, so that its current flows from an external elsewhere or otherness into an internal nearness or intention, and from intentional nearness into the irresolution or the ambiguity of the far, which is the mystical notion of the “near-far.” Wherever there is incompletion, being’s care for itself projects completion into the void in the Lacanian register of the Imaginary. In this way, being’s care or intention extends far into the elsewhere that is “extimate” to being. The correlations of causal networks must be inferred, or imagined, or conceptualized, or realized by an intention that both touches and cares about the absolute otherness of the Real. Cause / effect relations cannot be directly observed because the abyss of both is also their horizon, a horizon beyond which neither can be seen. These imaginary inferences into the unseeable, visualize or determine the invisible without completely reducing the indeterminacy of the invisible to third-person, verifiable or determinate being, which is like saying intention brings the far near without reducing elsewhere to the merely local.
 Other intentional agencies may have indexical signs, but only human language has the virtual signifiers of the subjunctive. The subjunctive presents absence, which is to actuate possibilities from out of the void. When the void of potential is put into relation with the limits of structure or form, as the imaginal possibilities given by the concepts of symbolic representation, this virtual projection is a positivization of lack or a positing of wholeness where there is none, which is to imagine what would make whole and complete in the subjunctive register. The subjunctive may be an illusion of open possibilities, as it is for the material determinist, but if it is, it is a strange sort of hallucination that seems to be the necessary fantasy of choice in the first-person perspective of the en-languaged intention.

It was the first-person watcher of all this third-person intention and failure of intention that had become such a curiosity to Ishmael. Who was it that watched the world crash and burn in wrapped anticipation of the end of intention? Would there be someone there at the end of personhood and of locations? This first-person watcher was not the disinterested, perhaps uninterested, “silent” watcher of the pop mysticism that they had read in any of the power-of-now, “mindfulness” practices, but rather, the enraptured observer that the mystics had called “loving awareness” or just plain “love,” whose intention is just that there be intention rather than things go according to its intention.

The Kantian a priori categories of experience are nowadays boiled down to “quantity, quality, mode, and relation,” but what underlies them all is the categorical, automatic copulation of “cause and effect.” Determinate, causal relations are foregrounded by the indeterminate background of space-time. The world of completed wholes is then foregrounded upon this differential background by the intentional, preconscious, or intuitive, unification of multiplicity, or by the copulation of percepts with percepts and percepts with concepts and concepts with concepts. When phenomenal and conceptual categories fail, causality also breaks down and warps the intention. However, this misshapenness is the visible invisibility of irreducible ambiguity, which is the non-object of catastrophized intention. Indetermination is the infinite ground from which any determinate and finite novelty comes into being, and it leaves its vague mark on any possible realization of actual possibility.

It is being’s intention to know itself by making itself into the object of its own gaze that forms the non-object of its multitudinous, divided selves. This objectification is both constituted by and twisted by the abyss’s resists to knowing, so that the obstacle of intention is also its ground. This is the “care” that Heidegger took note of that arises from deep within being when being cares for itself, but with Emmanuel Levinas’s correction to Heidegger, which was that being’s care first arises in its concern about the Other and not from within its own aboutness. Care is first about the Other, which is to say that there is no internal self until it is called out of itself by what isn’t itself, and therefore, becomes an object of anxiety and wonderment.

Abyssal otherness’s lack of internality forms the obstacle to intention that produces the intention from the binary opposition of the internal and intentional with / against the external and counter-intentional. Before the intentional projection of causality, was the non-casual, unconditioned abyss, which was before the “before” and after the “after” of the sequential time necessary for cause-and-effect relations. In the without-causes of too much open space, there could be no world for the cartel to be at home in. Everywhere had become Elsewhere. Every near was now far. Ishmael, like the others, desperately clung to causes and reasons and theory because there was a vacuum of sense without the resistance of familiar limits.

Ishmael had 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 consciously nostalgic for how they had been. But there were unacknowledged parts of them that longed for the stability of identity, no matter how oppressive. Every conscious rejection of ideology had become an unconscious embrace of another because intention without structure was an intolerable, vertiginous freefall. So, from one ideology to the next, they couldn’t really get free, but maybe there was another sort of freedom that hadn’t occurred to them yet. They were imagining that the feminine phallus was not the phallus that gave identity, or at least a permanent or final identity. The openness of femineity, or at least their idealized version of it, was to play with identity rather than possess it. But it was sometimes difficult to constantly roll through self-concepts because identities, however transitory, made the world familiar enough to locate oneself within, even if that sense of place was false and fleeting. And there was no way to have a world without the identifiable objects that arose from the dialectic of identify and difference or from the near and the far or from intention and the outside otherness of the abyss.

Some identities seemed to stick to them, even though they knew from their studies that there was nothing essential or substantial about them. Why? Was it just because of their weakness? They just couldn’t hack the void of the Real? The ultimate trick would be to have a transitory identity like a Heraclitean, flowing river, which would be something like Deleuze's “Repetition with Difference,” or Lacan’s repetition that has been distorted by its contact with the Real, so that instead of being an automatique repetition of the same, which was a self-referential repetition of the Symbolic, it was a “répétition touche reel” because the Real’s impression could be seen represented negatively in the failure of the symbolic intention to signify what had been intuited.

When contradiction is intentionally irresolvable but intuitively productive, the paradox appears as paradoxical and not as reducible to objective phenomena or concepts, which is something like Kant’s noumena appearing outside of the categories of experience, called by Jean-Luc Marion “Counter-experience.” The visible invisibility of Couter-experience or of the non-object is the trick that is played in the threshold of the symbolic resemblances of identity and the non-identity of difference without collapsing one into the other. Identity manifests difference and difference manifest identity as the co-arising terms of the binary oppositions that constitute the Hegelian dialectic of being and nonbeing, but also of the one and the many, presence and absence, determinate being and the indeterminate void.

“Flow” is a common noun, but it is verbal in nature. Its nature is to constantly change its nature, so much so that one might wonder what having a nature might mean when it comes to flows. As Heraclites pointed out, “flow” means without repetition, so the flowing river is never identical to itself. For Deleuze there was no repetition without a concept, by which he meant there was only difference and what appeared as if a repetition through the imaginary unity of conceptual copulation or objectification. The world appeared as if it contained repeating forms or types or kinds; however, it only appeared that way because of the imposition of a transcendent concept from elsewhere. But this was not the same elsewhere as the elsewhere of the abyss because transcendent forms were imposed from the faraway of Platonic ideals, which were something like the intentions unified by God’s intention. What appeared as if a necessary repetition of form was only what persisted in the immanent frame longer than these components that appeared as if contingent. It was contingency all the way down on the Deleuzian Plane of Immanence. Deleuze loved immanence, contingency, and difference. And what was immanent was Impermanent. And what was impermanent was a terror to the conservator and a relief to the deterritorializer. The cartel had felt both because the release of impermanence quickly gave way to the terror of its vertigo when there was no longer any solid ground upon which to stand.

They didn’t long for home, except when they did. They were home, but home wasn’t home. There was no completely unified self to prevent either the recollection of nostalgia or the reckless abandon of oblivion. They didn’t pine for the special dishes that their mothers had made, mostly because their meals hadn’t been of the sort to be nostalgic about since they had mostly been delivered to their homes from chain restaurants and the frozen food sections of grocery stores. But maybe, it was a sort of nostalgia because..., on second thought, they did secretly long for the fast food, fast fashion, and the social media of their youths, but they weren’t allowed to admit it to each other or even to themselves. They had to pretend that they lived off the plants that they grew, but they didn’t. They survived on bags of grain and cans and boxes of things that had been left behind or that they took from the dumpsters of the convenient stores near the edge of the zone.

They did garden and a lot of stuff did grow. They were relatively industrious and had plenty of land and tools for planting. The summers were riotous with edible growing things. But it was hard to time the growing and harvesting and preserving correctly, so that they could feed themselves independently year-round. It was especially difficult to keep a good store of seeds for the next spring’s and summer’s planting, so they wouldn’t have to again beg for whatever seeds they could by the connections that they still kept with the outside.

Experiments had been attempted with preserving jars and fermentation and what-not, but everything wound up with mold in it or else too mutilated by the preserving process to be appealing. They made jokes about how whatever they had tried to preserve wound up looking like decaying pig penises from a high school science lab’s cabinet of formaldehyde curiosities. They didn’t keep or slaughter animals and couldn’t even imagine animal husbandry. But they weren’t in principle against meat, as some intentional communities are, so they got it from time to time from the cans of it that they were able to obtain from various, serendipitous sources. All canned things, especially the canned meats, looked like pig dicks in the end, and they tasted how they imagined eating pig dicks would too, but with enough salt and hunger they would have been willing throw down pig balls as well, which was good since the canned meats were probably made from an assorted variety of throwaway, unsavory pig parts anyways, especially pig dicks and balls.

They imagined that they cooked exotic stews from faraway places out of “ethnic” cookbooks from the library, but they were ad hoc mixtures of cans of premade soup or bouillon that had been left behind or that they had begged from somewhere outside the zone. There were a few homegrown spices thrown in to be sure, but that seemed to be more for appearance than any substantial commitment to self-sufficiency. Cooking on and warming themselves over open fires in discarded grills or metal barrels made them feel as if they had been restored to a purer sort of existence, an existence away from the values and the gaze of the “petty bourgeois,” or “yuppies,” or whatever the current term for those that had left them behind was. Their belief in a return to how things “had once been” or to a more “natural,” “balanced” state of affairs had often sustained them in their persistence within the zone, but a creeping sense of no-way-back had been rising within the cartel since they had started to read about the slow poison of nostalgia in Fredrick Jameson.

The legumes and corn and seasonal vegetables that they grew in their gardens according to the dictates of both their desire for “self-sufficiency” and for their related desire for “self-rule” coincided with their endless taste for “new flows of intensities.” the latter of which they accomplished by keeping garlic and ginger and hot peppers alongside the former, more basic staples. But a lot of what they ate was still just crap out of disremembered cans and bags of overprocessed, sodium rich filth.

The realization of the lack of insects inside the retro-millenarian compound sent Ishmael 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 words or the concept for what he did think was going on in there. 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 derogatory,” said Johanna, who was the first 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 lavish brown skin. An electric, blue ribbon tied back the shock of her thick 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 only in comparison to the rest. Her elegant diminution was immediately more imposing, as her focused curiosity engorged her deep brown eyes with flows of radiant, black 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, something like Kant’s distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal world. “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, or with the external ‘Other,’” he thought with reference to whatever it was that countered his intentions, perhaps the Real, but the Real didn’t have an intention by definition, not even an intention to counter intentions, but the Other, unlike the Real, did appear to have an intention. It was he, Ishmael, who didn’t seem to have an intention because his intention always failed and evaporated as all illusions do. It wouldn’t be until much later that Ishmael would understand that the Other doesn’t have an intention either, or at least that the Other’s intention was just as prone to failure as his. The void is the ground, or “unground,” as Meister Ekhart would put it, of intention, which is like saying that the ground of every purpose is purposelessness. If God is the ground of being, then He is the God before God that Ekhart called “The Godhead,” or the “God before being” that Jean-Luc Marion and the writer of the Epistle John called “love.”

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

“Damn, this fool has been listening to some type of influencer BS,” Johanna thought. But where was he getting it from? The zone didn’t have Wi-Fi anymore. But that “chaos dragon” BS was a dead giveaway because it was a repetition of older terminology that she had heard before the exodus from the zone.

“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 or his opus Repetition and Difference, and so the blunderbuss of repeating the same, or of using “concepts as mold” wouldn’t shame him as she indented. He didn’t know that desire didn’t witness to lack but to excess and therefore wasn’t a negation of difference via “resemblance,” but that desire was always for difference itself. Johanna wondered for a moment if she should try to explain the premise of Repetition and 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 in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. She thought that both notions of desire were compatible and had tried to adumbrate how lack and excess were intimately related, but the cartel had not been ready for this teaching at that time.

“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 a 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 purpose in their lives.

Without condescension Johanna revealed that, “Holy war has been tried again and again as a solution to a general sense that purpose had been lost. 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 his traditional religious mythology.

“But there is no way back,” Johanna continued, “because we were never there. The lost paradise only appears as lost and as paradise retrospectively. The Temple, I’m using ‘Temple’ here metonymically for ‘religious practice,’ 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 throne when He ‘emptied Himself’ of Himself, which is called ‘Kenosis’ in Greek, ...into the ‘form of a servant,’ as Paul wrote in Philippians, and then god died in ignominy, but solidarity with those who suffer subjective destitution, ...‘hanged upon a tree.’ ‘God rid us of God’ as Ekhart prayed in Sermon 52.” She had outflanked him with greater Biblical literalism and deeper mysticism than he could muster, but her words fell like Lucifer into whatever oblivion he had fallen in Isiah because her clever words had plummeted into the trad man’s fatuousness, flashed like lightening, and gone out.

“We are the resurrection!” a trad mom proclaimed without warning as she bounded forward past her ghastly children and her slumping husband. She faced Johanna’s flanking move directly, theologically speaking. 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 a previous relationship.

“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. As soon as it was out of her mouth, she thought it sounded awkward. And the rest of the cartel did too, but they didn’t indicate their thoughts on the matter in any obvious ways. She cut out the “resurrection” word play after that. Her hackles were up, and she was stumbling over her words in ways that the cartel hadn’t heard before because although she had thought that she had seen the last of this sort of religious psychosis, here it was in its most debased form deep within the zone. Although the Church’s speech had been physically absent, it continued 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 had joined the conversation. By his interjection, he wanted to explain to the cartel that certain Evangelical Christians believed that what they referred to as “gayness” or “trans” was of demonic origins. But the cartel already knew that and had discussed it a few months ago when Joshua had spoken in depth about what it was like being a trans male in an Evangelical household and how the exodus of his family out the zone had been liberatory for him. It was hard for some of the cartel to see a trans male as not embracing the phallus in a way that they found objectionable, and Joshua had shared his story to complicate their notion of having the phallus. Joshua felt his body dysmorphia in the register of the Real rather than of the Symbolic, which meant that he felt that he was a male even though others had labelled him a female based on certain biological accidents. The problem here was that the cartel had thought that ending the penis as a biological marker of maleness meant an end to “natural kinds,” which meant an end to any notion of gender as essential. This remained an unresolved question within the cartel as to how Joshua could be essentially male if the essences necessary for there to be natural kinds had been banished from their discourse.

“No,” Gabriel corrected, “She said ‘the Anti-Christ,’ which was Paul’s term for those who didn’t believe what Paul believed about Jesus.” Gabriel enjoyed correcting Joshua whenever she could because she didn’t approve of Joshua’s desire for the phallus of the male position. Gabriel was certain that the male position was impossibly naive and ultimately oppressive.

Gabriel was technically right about the “Anti-Christ,” even though it didn’t really forward the conversation since Joshua was more right about what the pious lady was going on about. The cartel had learned from reading Elaine Pagals that the “Anti-Christ, Satan, the snake in the garden, and Lucifer,” were all different characters that had been combined by the concept of the devil around the time of Jesus or shortly thereafter. Gabriel wasn’t only enjoying correcting Joshua, but also was using this recently acquired information about the Anti-Christ to let the lady know that she wouldn’t be able to use the Bible without being checked. Gabriel knew that most so called “Biblical Literalist” couldn’t barely read, let alone read the Bible. She thought that the best way to defeat them was to be more literal about the Bible than they could be. It was also the most pleasing way, and, perhaps, unbeknownst to Gabriel, the most phallic way.

Joshua tried to recover his point, “Yeah, but these people lump the Serpent, the Satan, the planet Venus--when it appears in the morning as if a morning star, and the Anti-Christ as if the same figure.” He had said that about Venus, which was the Morning Star during Biblical times to demonstrate that he knew that the term “Lucifer” referred to a specific Babylonian ruler, who was called, the Morning Star,” And to demonstrate that he knew what he was talking about because he had been raised on “Biblical Literalism,” which he knew could 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 comic gravitas of his unlooked-for declaration. He would have chosen a more subtle unit, but so far, they had only found that one in all their searches of all the jilted closets and dresser drawers in the zone. Not many who had made the exodus had avowed their castration, so they had mostly absconded with their dildos without having acknowledged their existence. Thankful, someone had left one behind for Joshua to avow.

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, and in Joshua’s case, an object that could not be reduced to its mere place in the Symbolic, which meant that one’s intuition about it exceeded one’s capacity to say what it was about. Joshua had figured out how to adjust the elastic, strapping mechanisms so that the shaft indicated the ground between his legs, which was the most comfortable way to walk. His legs didn’t rub against it because part of the strapping mechanism included a strap, which anchored it to his left leg. He had mostly resolved the direction of his penis by fiddling with the straps, but he still had to walk slightly bolt legged so that his right, inner thigh would clear the fully erect organ strapped to his left inner thigh. He preferred to wear dresses with his plastic penis because pants made movement too restrictive and his bulge too prominent, which meant that it would be relentlessly attacked by Gabriel’s invective. Gaberiel knew that Joshua hated it when he called it a “hard on” or a “stiffy” or a “boner,” so that was exactly what Gabriel did whenever given the opportunity. It was the strenuousness of Joshua’s striding forward to accuse the trad family of Biblical Literalism that had caused the strap holding his penis to his inner thigh to break so that his genitalia had become so prominent under his dress.

Gabriel immediately, compulsively said, “The rigidity of your ramrod is shocking.” and then sneered in a kind of rapture. It didn’t matter that they were in the middle of an important confrontation with enemy combatants; Gabriel couldn’t resist a jab at Joshua. Gabriel’s greatest fear and shame was her own penis. She took secret precautions so that it might never become engorged in front of the others and wished that someday she might be able to find a solution to her turgidity.

Thankfully no one acknowledged Gabriel’s ejaculation because the trad mom continued with her trad talking points. “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. Nobody was sounding very witty or even well-spoken in this bumbling exchange. Whatever influencers had been speaking into any of their heads before now would have been ashamed to see how mangled their words had become in both sides’ mouths.

“These people hate making sense!” Joshua crowed bizarrely indicating the trad family 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, hysterical mom exclaimed, opening her arms symbolically pushing back her brood via the dramatic gesture from the evil before them as if to bravely, but theatrically nonetheless, stand between the wicked before her and the quick behind her.

“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 but just as awkwardly as all the rest of the speakers had been presenting their material. 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 remained menacing after this apparent reduction of his potential for violence to mostly harmless kook.

“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. Clearly, along with the Bible, she hadn’t read either of those tombs either. But if she had, she might have seen the secret enjoyment that the authors of them took with both the descriptions of demons and of demonic practices, but also with the condemnations of those accused of “cavorting with the devil.” Demons are never studied simply to rid oneself of them, but to enjoy their disavowal.

She started screaming, “What is your name, demon!”, which was the first step to casting out a demon according to the demonology manuals that the cartel had been reading. They had wondered why a demon would tell an exorcist its name if the demon knew that the exorcist would only use it to bind and then cast out the demon. It was often the case that a demon would be summoned and then bound not to cast them out but to help its summoner find buried treasure. But it never really worked out for the summoners since the demons would inevitably trick them and use them to do their demonic bidding without having to reveal the locations of even the smallest of buried treasures.

“Renob,” Gabriel blurted out. “Renob” was Gabrel’s favorite word to blurt out, especially within earshot of Joshua, since it was “boner” spelled backwards.

“And now, I cast you, Renob, out in the matchless name of Jesus,” then she 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.” Her comebacks weren’t getting any less awkward, but “enthusiastic imbecile” was kind of a funny turn of phrase since it seemed satisfyingly mean to Julien, perhaps, because “imbecile” had once been a medical term and “enthusiasm” had been a religious one, and she knew the connotations of both, but could plausible deny that she was purposefully equating antiquated medical terminology for having a low IQ with the religious practice of glossolalia.

“allabahbah choocha subachtalli yayouya gaagaagaagaa choocha ...,” trad mom ranted on.

“And all that babbling nonsense is just like a ‘noisy gong’ if it isn’t spoken ‘in love’ and translated for the benefit of the community according to Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians,” Joshua said. Joshua had memorized the general location in the Bible of the scripture that had been most often discussed in his house growing up, but he couldn’t remember chapter and verse, which he knew would have sounded more authoritative but also more like the sort of proof-text battles that he was too familiar with from the vitriolic, theological arguments that he had endured and didn’t care to relitigate but knew that he would have to as an excruciating repetition of the same. He knew that Corinthians’ passage because he hadn’t been able to produce any ecstatic speech to his family’s shame because his family’s church preached that it was a necessary sign that one had received the Holy Spirit. According to them, he had not received the Holy Ghost but the demonic spirit of “trans” instead.

“Shaanaa tooonie abbanni voomvana gooogujufunie,” the ecstatic 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 sound variations in her mimetic, “Pentecostal” speech to be a language,” Johanna said plainly, and then continued, “The language of Heaven would have more nuance and variability, 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 bellow, “Renob out! In the name of Yahoshoway.”

“You mean, Yeshua?” Julien condescendingly asked.

“We’ll leave, if you ask.” said Mariam, she couldn’t except being cast out, even though the woman probably had the right to since they had burst into her abode.

“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 seemed to rise along with his indignance.