And the openness could have been him but most likely was not, and each day was cracked open and blew its contents down on him like an handkerchief and no amount of lethargy or failure would stitch it up again.
And since most writing enjoys plotting its own destruction but can rarely summon the pallor and the impersonality required for it he could not altogether avoid the occasional eclosion of people through the crust of his solitude. And he did not seek such encounters nor did he expend the energy he needed for his yawning to prevent them. And these people were easilier exfoliated by letting them vent and expend their yawns at him in conversation than by cutting them off to look for good seats at the other end of the room.
And so the browncoat fell earnestly asleep during an earnester sermon on mathematics and differentiation – when he signed up he had foolishly read alterity for differentiation – and when he woke up the room was being warmed by men unconcerned with mathematics to a degree that could not fail to delight even the sleeping browncoat. And the men seemed angry and frustrated and the speaking man spake, long and longingly, upon his impotence and theirs and the ossification of the old ones’ cerebral fluids and the self-inflicted carrion nests that spiderwebbed across the cuntry’s thoughtscape and vampyrized Russia into the bankrupted old man of Europe who would only ever stand tall when he was finally buried standing up, tied to the planks of his coffin so as never to disturb the peace of them who walked above. And the cuntry needed new ruddy-cheeked thoughts forcing it to open its eyes into a burning gaze and close its hands into calcified fists and push out of Russia, with its fists of logic and moral clarity, the tyranny and the folly and the slavery and the travesty and the injustice. And then the fists would unclench and the open palm would attract science and prosperity like a precious bird trusting the palm for the small breadcrumbs that can feed it for days and the magical bird of science and prosperity would trust the palm because it would see the open heart in the cuntry’s open chest.
And the angry men nodded in immediate assent but the counters were manifold and the peasantry had failed to shake off its religious myopia and the atavistic inertia of its servility and the ruling elements treated the angry men’s rumblings with the catalytic acknowledgment of an elephant being assaulted by a raindrop. And they could sense the Zeitgeist melting away in their hands and dripping through their useless fingers, like quicksilver mixed with butter, slowly but painfully seeping into the streets and down the gutters and into the sewers and basements of history. And their European reason and their European lights and freedom, that bastard child of reason and lights, all brushed against the stagnation of Russia without eliciting so much as a disparaging laugh or a creak in the square wheels of its system. And the angry men would throw their Hegels and their mills and their Marxes at the silence of the system, all their projectiles heavier with underlined passages and sharpened by the hundred piercing exclamation marks on the margins, and the system fed on their projectiles, for it was not to be harmed by any weapon born of man, and it spat their projectiles back at them as disdainful bathroom tissue.
And the browncoat found this so insufferable he asked a question he normally would have cut himself ritually for asking and he asked the angry men why they weren’t in effect ever doing anything over authority not doing anything either and why they were so small and paralyzed in the headlights of authority. And the angry men did not recognise the brownback from other meetings but they believed so forcefully in their sacred anger they thought it fully possible he too had been lit up with sacred anger in the first half hour of this his first meeting of anger. And they asked him what was to be done, and he laughed at himself while he said it but he told them blood washes away authority. And the angry men wanted to know why this was, and the brownback said to the angry men that blood is how men are kept on this world and blood is why men are kept on this world and without blood men lose their grasp on this material world. And the brownback also said that authority is what puts men in the grasp of this world and authority is what sinks and buries men into this material world and authority is what sacrifices men’s awareness and spirit – which the angry men instantly and automatically translated to reason and logics – to the merely material of this world. And with authority drowned away in happy blood men’s spirit is free to grasp this material world and understand it for what it is and for what it lacks and climb higher than this world while controlling and understanding all that spirit has now left behind in it.
And of this the angry men could not hear without twitching and jumping from their seats, and they demanded of the browncoat whose blood it had to be to wash away authority, and the browncoat said that blood is blood and he told them all blood is the same and it could be theirs and it could be authority’s all it needed was life inside it and it would purify all and one. And the angry men could hear the impatience of truth in browncoat’s words, and they knew reality needed to measure itself against this truth and cut off from its real body what was extraneous or incongruous to this truth, and the angry men wished to know how much blood was needed to drown away authority. And this the brownback did not know and he told the angry men so but authority was an hydra of powerful poison and mathematics, and from a severed limb it would grow two bureaucrats, and from a severed head it would grow four German lines with claims to the throne. So the flow of blood was to be torrential and merciless and it had to race right and left, uphill and downhill, skyward and hellbound.
And the righteous sagacity in the brownback’s words made the angry men tremble and they saw in him the anger of earthen sainthood as they saw it in themselves in every transfixed mirror, and they embraced him for one of their own and the browncoat was laughing and surely his was the mirth of disseminating the truth and wielding truth as a luminous club against reality. And the brownback was not a frequent laugher but now he had his very own trainwreck to play with and all he had to do was to champion an echolalian accunt of the droppings of a noble mind so unlike his own that to ignore or forget its flowered logics would have been to walk past a fresh victim of murder and rape on an empty street without wondering whether there was still time before the constables arrived.
And the brownback walked with the angry men out of the room and out of the hall and into the street and past the great courthouse and the commissariat and the ministry of the interior and the royal palace and all the angry men smiled and for fear of policemen’s frisking they hid their daggers in their smiles. And the angry men divided in two when they reached the smallest and narrowest street, some angry men on the left and some on the right. And the angry men began taking down lampposts and breaking them up into sharp bolts of lightning and digging under pavement so as to hear the sea and draining strange liquids from the uncovered sewer pipes. And the angry men united the street’s offerings and made them smaller and leaner and stronger, and they clutched the street’s offerings tight against their shaven chests like crying icons and grew quiet.
And after some waiting three vehicles glided closer and when they entered the narrow street the angry men on the left side united their hand and dispatched their first offering unto the first vehicle which was the biggest of the three. And the driver of the first vehicle stopped when the offering stopped under his perch and the first offering went off and the horses and the driver were no more. But the first vehicle was powerful and sturdily built and it did not suffer excessively and from the first vehicle emerged some men of powerful beards and moustaches and then from the second vehicle more such men and then another man dressed unlike the others. And this the last man gazed upon the remains of the first offering that still drew smoke under the former driver and the last man told the bearded men to see to the driver and the horses and see whether there were any gold teeth to be pulled out for those were good for sixty kopeks apiece. And the angry men on the right side ran at the last man and ran past the bearded men and yelled at the last man that it had been too early to thank his god of gold and they lay with their one hand the second offering at his feet. So the secon
d offering went off and the last man lost even his last leg, and the angry men were no more either for the last man demanded his two blind coppers to fashion a silver boat from and a river of blood to sail that boat on if he was to leave this world, and the angry men acquiesced and from their bodies gave him his river and the last man built a boat so big that the angry men too climbed onto the last man’s boat and were employed as slave rowers until the boat reached its shore, and then the last man threw the angry men out of his boat and into the rivers of their own blood offering.
And the browncoat had managed to hide under a felled lamppost and was safe from the horses and the offerings and could not verily reconcile himself with how easy it had all been. And when all was over and the bearded policemen were arresting the only surviving angry man and one angry young woman, browncoat dusted himself off from under his favourite lamppost and walked next to the shackled angry man, the last of the angry men, and the angry man laughed with puerile joy and told browncoat that all was as it should be, and the browncoat had nurtured an healthy dislike for laughter since sleepy childhood. And the brownback told the last angry man that he the angry man, shackled and circled by silent policemen, had the most idiotic laugh tucked inside the most idiotic voice tucked inside the most idiotic smile the world will ever shatter. And the shackled angryman only stared at him, his eyes filmed with a dull cast of nausea, but the nausea was not for the browncoat but for the world that dared to persist despite the angry men’s rightness and logics and told the browncoat idiocy was the only conceivable deportment one could adopt before a world stitched of refusals to yield before truth. But the single angry woman looked at the browncoat differently and very much unlike the angry man and the browncoat saw she was angry at death rather than life and because he saw nothing no lambent red letters in her eyes the browncoat approached one of the tallest policemen and informed the tall policeman that the angry woman they had shackled was not angry at all but rather disappointed and precociously menopausal and furthermore she was his wife and mother so could they be so giving as to let her go, into his custody of course and he would assume all further and latent responsibility for her bearing and terrorism. And the tall policeman nodded with sanity and understanding and said he was sorry for the policemen’s brutality with the angry woman but she had after killed the last man but if the browncoat vouched for her future conduct they would release her unto him immediately. And the browncoat vouched for the formerly angry woman’s conduct and her shackles fell and they walked slowly away from the policemen, hand in hand.
And the young woman’s eyes grew fiery and she thanked the brownback for she could not go to jail and face trial because she was pregnant and she had only found out two days previous and she wanted to live she wanted most for her child to live so that the world and the future may die. And there was nothing more disgusting to the browncoat than a pregnant woman, for reasons of fucking and philosophy, so he turned the young woman around and walked her to the policemen and told them he was sincerely apologetic but he had been very mistaken and this was neither his wife nor his mother and he was very confused and could they take her back please. And the policemen were quite happy to no harm done no harm no foul another joked and the browncoat did not look unto the young woman but turned around and walked from the narrow street and into a wider street and then into a street that was wider still.
Chapter vii