“Get your cock out of the beast, Arnie. It’s time for sealing deals.”
When Arnold gives me his command, my knees are in the mud and my wang is dangling in the butt of a pig. Sunday. The day of holy sacrifice.
My affinity for animal lovers is shunned by most people but it is only because they are ignorant that they dare to judge my actions. My pig has more personality than half the humans with whom I’ve done the deed in bed. With an animal, you can do it outside, on the dirt, in the rain. Breathing the sky as you move and moan.
I finish inside the pig, remove myself, let the pig scurry off, and I stand. My body is proud. Its hairs eat the sun’s light that saturates the air. The day is bright, as are our prospects.
Arnold is my friend and I am his. Arnold and Arnie.
We board his truck, a rust-beaten Chevy that is loyal but lean. It is to us a humble servant whose physical weakness is compensated for by its dedication.
We are off to work. The work of angels. That is, if one recalls that not all angels are heaven-dwellers with pearly robes and halos. The devil below is an angel, too. Arnold and I, we’re not bound to either pole. Hell is too far that way, too heavy. Heaven is too lofty and indignant. We are angels of the space between spaces.
We are driving down a road paved through Arizona’s desert. A strip of tar lacing through miles of sand, snakes, and scorpions. Purple fire in the sky. We are humans—for now—but we feel like balloons. This is due to the nitrous oxide which we habitually consume. An angel bound to earth misses the sky. The angel longs to return to the blue ocean above but, as that is not presently possible for us, we settle for the next best thing. We calibrate the state of our minds so as to mimic the lightness felt by angels in flight. That is the highest we can hope for with our feet on the ground.
Arnold doesn’t know where he’s driving us. I don’t know either. The road knows. We know the road knows and we entrust our fate to it. It has yet to disappoint.
After some time, we will find our place of work. We will know the place because our hearts will tell us. Our hearts’ pace will slacken and we will be made to listen. The heart does not explain. It takes the follower by the hand and leads them along the path of necessity. You find your answers—and the questions they provoke—along the way.
Tonight, we are in the city when our hearts grow slow. The desert is behind us. It is an hour after dusk. The day’s last rays of light run to hide in hills and corners as the moon soaks through the air. It smells like fried death and oranges. The architecture is expiring.
We step out of the car. Matching black jeans. His t-shirt is a white v-neck. Mine is forest green with off-white text proclaiming: FUCK OR BE FUCKED AND FLY WITH THE EAGLES. I want to meet the author of this wearable prose whose poem consumes my body.
Our work is not born of financial deprivation. Arnold and I make a decent living from the royalties he procures from his work with edible chemistry. He has created and patented chemical formulas that are used to synthesize flavors which are made into powder form and then injected into the popular snack foods of the people. When potato chips and their kin are assembled, the little bit of real food used to make them is stripped of any real flavor. The product’s final flavor is synthesized and added to the foody pulp. That’s not the taste of potatoes or peppers in your mouth. It’s a string of chemicals doing a dance. Yum, yum.
He kicked the chemist gig after he’d accrued enough royalties to subsidize our life and work. Our real work. Our real work is done not to fill the wallet but to fill the heart. Our hearts, of course, but also the heart of the world. The heart of the world is not a physical form comprised of ventricles and aortas. It’s an invisible organ whose blood is collected from the thoughts and feelings of all sentient beings. Our job is to influence and alter the thoughts and feelings of humans so as to alter the contents of the blood that is circulated by the world’s heart. We are, all of us, the blood cells collectively working and shaping ourselves in order to form the infinite stream of blood that cycles through the world’s heart.
The angels in white, the ones with those circles of luminescent pride orbiting their heads, they’re an aggressive bunch. They’re trying to alter the world’s heart in their own way but they do it with violence. Like they’re on a crusade. They call it righteousness. We call it pretension. But alas, that’s their way and I suppose they’re entitled to it.
Arnold and mine’s way, the way of the limbo angels, is less forceful. We work by means of suggestion. Those white angels lay down their law and leave little room for other options.
You have been impregnated by the Holy Ghost…
You have been blinded by the light of God and must devote your life to the proclamation of his glory…
These are the commandments of the Father and must be obeyed…
These are the just a few examples of the risen angels’ work. They give orders and demand compliance. Arnold and the rest of our kind, we merely expose the humans to the unlimited field of possibilities at their hands. We then allow them to choose the possibility they want to bring into actualization. Manifestation. Matter. The condensation of energy.
We may emphasize certain possibilities over others, but we leave the choice up to them.
How do we do this? Well, we do it in small ways simply through the impression we leave on people in day-to-day interactions. But these deeds are small taters. The crux of our work, the deeds that create shockwaves of transformative perception within human consciousness, that is done through other means. This is what Arnold and I are doing tonight.
We wait outside the front door of a five-floor brick apartment complex. A hopeless and balding man clad in threadbare corduroy and a beater shirt punches his code and enters the building. We slide in behind him. He doesn’t see us because he doesn’t believe we exist. If someone doesn’t believe we exist, we must willfully activate their perceptual awareness in order for them to notice us. We can choose to be seen or unseen.
Our method is not entirely unlike that of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but we differ in our intention. You could say that we, too, belong to a church of latter day saints, but not in the same way the Witnesses mean it. It’s not a church with walls, words, and worries. It’s a nameless church that exists as an intangible, amorphous entity that incorporates itself into the lives of its unknowing followers.
Arnold and I approach the first apartment door. I knock politely. Shuffled mutters are uttered behind the door. It is opened. The woman is in her mid-sixties but is desperately attempting to present herself as a woman of her forties. This attempt of clinging is creating a tension that increases her wrinkles. In effect, her attempt is having the opposite of the result she desires. Her dyed red hair is ensnared by purple rollers. She wears an oversized faded pink t-shirt that ends at her knees with frilly white embellishments. She hasn’t told us, but we know her name is Eleanor. If your nose is clear and your nostrils are listening, you can smell a person’s name on their breath.
Arnold and I make a good team. I am the talker. He is the singer. I am the diplomat. He is the soldier.
Holding a steno pad, I commence with my speech. There is nothing written on the steno pad but it is a helpful prop. Holding it has a softening effect on the people we meet. A steno pad is relatively harmless. A hand that is holding a steno pad cannot be holding a gun, a knife, or a taser. This makes the person at the door feel safer. They are not safe, of course. Invisible weapons, the kind Arnold and I employ, are far more dangerous than visible ones.
We do not violate their body. We never touch them. Not with our fingers. But we certainly violate their consciousness. It is a subtle and well-meaning infringement, but a violation nonetheless. Evil? Maybe so, but there’s some good in there, too.
The speech I read is dribble. Something banal and boring. I adjust the vibratory frequency of my voice to a frequency that puts the unguarded listener into a state of trance.
This is my speech tonight: “Hello, ma’am. My name is Telly and this is my associate, Teo. We’ve come to speak with you about the electrical fate of the circuitry existing within your broadcasting apparatus. The state of affairs within your device’s climate is such that gray has become textured and rough while light has become slick and inconsistent. The seamless conduction of energy—” and so on. Hollow words spoken to lull the listener into a state of unconscious vulnerability. Such is now the state of tonight’s patient, Eleanor. My words have rendered her mind into a spongy state of indiscriminate receptivity. She is highly susceptible to all influences. Now that we have achieved this state, Arnold will conduct his work. The singing.
Arnold’s singing sounds like a quiet man humming with his mouth open. He’s a bass and his voice rumbles something just above your groin. It rubs an opium smile onto the face of your pelvis. He doesn’t sing words, just tones. Humans, like all material forms, are comprised of particles vibrating at varying frequencies. Change the frequency at which the particles vibrate and you change the form. You change the qualities of the current reality.
A human body.
An emotion.
Happiness.
Grief.
A snake.
A stone.
Oxygen.
Water.
Cum.
Gum.
Teeth.
A thought.
Dirt.
Voices.
These are all just different frequencies of vibration. Sentient beings, such as humans, alter and create these forms by observing and responding to them. Whether they know it or not, sentient beings alter the vibration of life. Those who know it can do it intentionally. Arnold and I know this. We use this awareness to alter life’s frequencies in accordance with our will.
Arnold creates a vibration by making a sound with is mouth. If you’re dancing with a partner, you feel the way they move and respond to them in kind. You match their movements with a complimentary movement. This conflagration of motions produces the dance. Arnold does this, too, but not with his feet. He gets a feel for the individual we are consulting. He intuitively, instantly, assesses their present state and he then produces the sound that best complements their state. To complement something is not always as nice as it sounds. To complement something is to balance it. The greater the imbalance, the greater the need for disruption. If something is relatively balanced—that is, if something in a state of healthy fluidity, growth, and movement—, then little disruption is needed. If something is drastically off-kilter—if, say, something is paralyzed by inertia—then greater force becomes necessary to achieve balance.
Chaos is necessary.
We do not hold ourselves wholly responsible for the changes we invoke. The earth’s inhabitants are being slaughtered by their own inertia. We seek to counter that inertia. They’ve become so still that they’ve started to stagnate. Atrophy. Chaos is the only force capable of disrupting inertia. This is what we do. We are components of universal chaos. It is impossible to avoid the universe’s constant process of growth and change. Those who cling to a state of standstill are those who resist the universe’s will. It is to these people that we administer our medicine.
Medicine carries benign intentions but it is only effective when it is openly received and permitted to carry out its mission within its host. If the host fights the medicine, then the medicine will fight back.
Our medicine is always successful. Our medicine does not fail to catalyze change, but the host must decide whether or not to accept this change. If the host surrenders to the medicine’s mission, then they will reap the benefits. The altercations will be uncomfortable, painful even, but ultimately they serve to benefit the host. They are changes for the sake of creative growth.
However, if the host resists the mechanisms of change presented to it by the medicine, then they will be choosing to fight a battle they have no hope of winning. To fight change is to fight the nature of the universe. Considering that we are all aspects of the one universe, if we fight the universe, we fight ourselves. Those who fight the universe destroy themselves. Once they are destroyed, their energy is recycled and the medicine executes its mission. Change. Re-creation.
We do not seek to render specific changes. We are not concerned with the contents of the results we bring about. Our only concern is that change—of any sort—is enacted. Change is imperative and inevitable, but the qualities of that change are irrelevant to us. The individual’s response determines the nature of the change they experience.
We seek to lubricate the world’s populace so that it may more gracefully yield to the universe’s will. The sooner we yield to the universe’s will, the sooner we absolve ourselves of unnecessary suffering. Arnold and I do what we do because it is all we can do to lessen the world’s suffering. Eggs have been cracked, pain has been caused, but the omelet is sizzling in the fry pan’s golden aura of transmutation.
Bless you, Eleanor.
∞
Eleanor is standing in her doorway with her mouth agape. Arnold’s eyes are half-open with his eyeballs rolled up into his head. What does he see when he looks up in there? Maybe nothing. Maybe that’s the point.
He’s doing his thing, the singing. He is producing the tones of the desired frequency. He projects these tones from his throat and into the ears and body of our patient, Eleanor. Because she is entranced, she makes no attempt at resistance. Her vibratory state absorbs and the vibrations emitted by Arnold’s voice. The contents of Eleanor’s being take on the shape and qualities of Arnold’s mouth-sounds. Her cells are shifting. Her thoughts are changing their patterns of movement. Her feelings are assuming new textures and intensities. She is, essentially, becoming a new person.
When she wakes tomorrow, she will feel it. She will feel and know that she is no longer what she was before. She will still have the memory of what she was but she will be unable to return to this state.
Sentient beings experience the world through the filter of their own being. We experience the world through ourselves. We experience life as ourselves. Each person’s reality is a reflection of their own being. When Eleanor finds herself to be altered, she will also find that her entire reality is altered. Appearances will not have changed. The TV will still look like a TV. Her favorite coffee mug will still look like her favorite coffee mug. But these are surfaces. She will find that beneath these surfaces, the contents of her life are no longer what they were.
This is the turning point.
When our patients realize that they are wholly new beings in a wholly new reality, they then make the decision to resist or accept this change. As said before, resistance is useless. When they resist, they are resisting the will of the universe and the will of the universe always has its way. It will counteract—terminate—any force that moves against its grain. When our patients choose to resist their new lives, they are met with termination. This process produces varying results. Coma. Stroke. Mania. Shock. Spontaneous death. Suicide. Homicide.
They try to kill the world, but the world is too big. So the world kills them.
At first, nearly all of our patients choose resistance, but few of them resist to the point of death. Usually, they fight the change, then they see that fighting is ineffective, and then they gradually learn to accept it. They adapt to the new shape of reality. They become less resistant to the amorphous nature of the universe’s contents. Less resistant to the amorphous nature of their being.
Arnold and I hop in the Chevy and eat lettuce from a bag as we drive back to our trailer beyond the desert.