Journey Man

The prediction of a lengthy trial filled the television reports. In his own imagination, the possibility of a court battle was laden with steel doors that opened into caged terminals of a grayish hue. He remembered that it had been June when they knocked at his door. A certain conviction was already in their eyes, while a warrant was held in their hands. A doctor of animals, plants and invisible substances, his laboratory was covered in pencil sketches and colored photos of ferns and foxes. Did they have either of those in Iraq? He could not remember now. He had lived in the foggy Empire for years, coming here before he had learned to talk to women, long before he had ever mounted a porcelain skinned woman with painted lips and frosty colored hair, still smelling, as he leaned his face into the side of her neck, like chemical spray.
He was a doctor of unseen ailments, the kind the people behind windowless rooms complain of, the kind that are never treated. He would find them, he would go to them from the comfort of his padded rocking chair, projecting himself into the night sky when the world around him was asleep, yet awake with shining stars. In the ammonia drenched halls that would never lose their stench, he would wander unseen and look through the nurses desks and up their skirts. He might have felt a little guilty peeking into areas that usually required invitation, but the guilt added to his pleasure, it added to the bulging heat that pressed his cock to the front of his pants like an animal roaring to be freed from its cage.
Night after night, the conspiracy between darkness and his projections continued as he slipped into their sleeping minds. As their bodies twitched with dreams and their mouths drooled with backwards thirst, he poked inside, twisting memories and erasing old habits. Into the spongy fabric and folds, he sowed bright thoughts so that when they awoke, they were taken with the sudden urgency to write or draw or copulate. The nurses, thick legged women with large bosoms and a missing smile where often dragged into janitor closets, held steady and helpless with the aid of wooden broomsticks in at least one of their holes. Others were overtaken on the smooth Formica of cafeteria tables, spread-eagled and invaded while on-lookers in pajamas sipped their coffee and held onto the small Styrofoam cups with renewed strength and awakening libidos.
The conspiracy was silent, a combination of nature’s endless cycles and his own creative will. The minds he danced in were already bungled, warped by years of medication and outdated psychiatric methods. In the green hills of Glasgow, the patients exploded and pounded, gleeful and alive with rage and raw sex, pouncing upon small cats creeping in the night.
It was reported that the judge could not figure out what to do. The charges reeked of a time when the air was foul with the aroma of fires and burning flesh. Surely, they were beyond these sorts of accusations? This was a time for logic, for true science and detective work that went beyond the accusations of sleepwalkers and violated women still wet with sweat and semen. In the night, their sentences were vague and scattered. The patients in white, stumbled upon their words. The nurses, no longer white in their uniforms, gasped with each breath, each sound born with eternal pain while the cellular memories of flesh ripped violently apart, red and steaming were their words, each syllable plunging with cries.
Could the engineering of this plan have been so precise? Was it a plan? Or just a tinkering with pattern and light? A fusion of innumerable cords buried deep within the brain. Nothing died. No, perhaps something in the women died as their mental burns continued to eat through their failed power. The structure came down when roles were reversed, when the power of locks and needles and charts failed, it was this that ignited the long-flaccid army of cocks. The cylinders that had been protruding flaps of skin without the ability of attack.
Some nights, within the same district, he would watch from the rooftops of high brick buildings as bombs were abandoned in silver trash cans and metal canisters of mutated air where buried beneath trash heaps or the sleeping drunks that crowded within doorways. He watched as the nails of the city began to rust. Parked cars moved without drivers. The busy lights of intersections failed to light and attackers ran forward in zeal as the banks spilled money into the littered streets.
In that area, slightly less modern than the nearest city, there were still pay phones on every corner and every one seemed to be wired to his mind. From the comfort of his chair, he saw evidence of the mayhem. He could hear every call ringing, he could listen in on their conversations, thousands of them at once. Could all this be because of his two dreams? The timer was set, ready to explode when the signals from his body arose. Perhaps it would be in the morning, when he reached for his woman without another thought in his mind. Maybe it would come when the faulty plumbing failed him yet again and cold water burst forth from their tubes, a cold straight from the arctic. The bombs within him were ready, and yet, the codes were vague. Clouded from his waking consciousness like a wonderful insurance plan safely kept within his laptop.
And through this, he lived. Air continued to circulate within him, moving down and along each vein in a cycle that lasts only as long as men do. Perhaps the bombs would detonate on the moment of his last breath, as his body finally shuddered with its last release, or perhaps, on the precise moment of his next orgasm, just as he reached the cliff edge and toppled over the side, down, into the waters of sleep below. Extremists danced by nature, and he was indeed one. He intended to drink his wine, fuck his woman, laugh heartily and often, tinkering with it all until fear overwhelmed him. Until he saw the black mouth that awaited him, the colorless void that waited to swallow him once again. It would not kill, it was not a prosecutor. It only took back what was always One. From the height of his flights, he knew that he knew almost nothing. The crowds below him were large compared with his small scraps of knowledge. Could he even call it that? Entering their minds was a skill, an ability, a way to push around the day and play at night. But was it knowledge? He aimed for a discovery and he could take himself beyond the earthly confines of his skin to manipulate the tactile world, but he asked himself, was he indiscriminate? The third year into his initiation had commenced three moons ago. They had given him the title of "neurosurgeon," was it a joke? Perhaps this is why he took to venturing into sleeping minds, twisting and reorganizing their contents while their thoughts cavorted in other realms. The realization hit him like a brick, the title was so obvious, his tendencies so opaque that everyone could see his evolving tendencies but him. On that night, they had known. The health of his heart quickly spiraled into a void as he felt flush with embarrassment. They had seen him before he had understood himself, and this, being so naked, brought the blood out of his cock and into his face.
In his room, upon the soft sheets of his full bed, he remembered the charges against him. They were speculative at best. Cash would easily take care of the prosecutors, and perhaps he needed to counsel the defiled women as they slept. They would never know he had entered their dreams, they would only wake with a sense of finality, an overwhelming urge to release their resentment. Soon, they would be cooperating with his will. He would ready himself for his visit, he would focus late in the night, as his woman lay sleeping in a silk robe with nothing beneath to conceal her fleshy thighs. He would shower soon, preparing his body for the venture, although it would, as usual, stay behind. This night, the hot water ran from the pipes, scalding his skin with fires from Hell. The water washed away his doubts, his fears, his worldly life. He was loaded with pure intent, his mind fixed as firmly as a blackened terrorist. He sat in his chair, a soft yellow lamp faintly illuminated the far left corner of the room. He rose above the lawns of Britain, beyond the residential community, beyond the city. He had not earned their scorn. He had merely changed the tables on them without permission. He had brought up to down and down back up. Their university training could not have prepared them for the raw bestiality of men awakening from slumber. The bars of prison and the medications of science could not contain the twisted synapses of freed men. No, they were not really free, but momentarily, they jolted out of their stupor. For a brief time, before tougher men came with batons and needles, they moved down the halls like lions searching with hunger for prey. This is what the legal system would never understand. This is where all the verdicts in the world could never rectify the wrongs of cages and electrodes and pills that make zombies of men. He was a hand that twisted their contrived worlds, a wave of dark thought that turned the battle into a covert struggle of visible violence. They could not judge, they were the players of Britain, the small actors that blink beneath the bright spot lights high above the stage. There could never be a trial, these people were not subtle enough to prosecute a terrorist of the mind. Their world, which he was indeed a part of, fostered the need for this role. His was the player with risk tattooed to his forehead. Attack was spelled clearly across his chest. Suicide leaked from his penis. His body resided in this system. Within the mass of these people, he moved with a different sort of intelligence, at least some of the time.
His brothers had not warned him. His task now was greater, much greater than before he had swallowed their blood and piss, before he took their beatings. His ass was opened with heated poles, like the nurses he would one day see, his mouth filled with the thick cream from a dozen spurts of semen…but he withstood the pain, their inflicted wounds singed him with pleasure. While his ass burned, while his back was marked with a whip, while his legs were pried apart; all the while, his cock remained hard, almost steaming with heat. After the seemingly eternal night, his sisters came to lick him clean. A dozen warm tongues moved up and down like liquid snakes, an endless journey that, unfortunately, did come to an end.
Beyond the pain, discovered by another part of his mind that escaped the torture, that had, actually, watched his humiliation with innumerable tingling sensations; that part of him recognized a ghostly feature of the room. A light that slipped from his consciousness just as he reached to grab it. A hazy blue, a cloudy orb of purple that moved like feminine vapor past brutal raptors. His attention would involve itself with the color for a moment, then quickly jolt as a new blow to his back was delivered.
In his padded chair, as he steadied himself for the journey, he felt, in his deepest cells, the history of his body. The journey of his DNA from the mountainous caves, close to what is now known as Pakistan. His mind’s eye could feel the pattern that etched itself out of clear maps, his eyes, a part of that map…his lips, a part of that marked territory. The impending trials were based on the contemporary fear of Pakistan and its dark men, that he knew for certain. He was a terrorist, but not in the way they wanted him to be. Investigated by the police, he was devoid of any political ties. His only links to another society were the vertical scars across his chest and back, but these could be quickly explained by other agencies, other doctors. Pakistan was just another word for Other. He was indeed, Other. Within this population, within the population of earth, he was Other, as purely strange as the touch of the night upon the delicate flesh of the moon.