Chapter Three: I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning, Part One

The conspiracy theory of society...comes from abandoning God and then asking: who is in His place?"

--Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (London:Routledge, 1969), iv, p.123

There was a rumor of war in the night.

I should not have listened.

A curse and a thrash in an empty lachrymose dark.

Reaching for a phantom, I startled myself awake. I gasp for air. Gulp in silhouettes.


I hoped in the twilight between wakefulness and sleep I hadn’t murmured my fears into the shadows. I didn’t want the dark to hear. The gloom to listen. Didn’t want to paint my doubts upon the bedroom walls.

But the dark listened.


I woke up. Not in my bed.

Limbo.

Where the dark was frozen and couldn’t move. I was bearing an endless penance.

Theologians call it penance. The Limbo between worlds, the limen of salvation and damnation. Doctors call it hypnogogia; the mental phenomena which occur on the threshold of consciousness and sleep, which project into the air like phantoms, you are frozen and can do nothing because sleep still has you. But you are awake and become enamored with the reality of the vision. It has many names (I am a worshipper of God, if nothing else I know the power of a Name): the presomnal, anthypnic sensations, the visions of a half-sleep, oneirogogic imagery, phantasmata, the state of the borderland. But I have always loved the name my Doctor used to diagnose me: Dreamlets. You suffer from Dreamlets.

Dreamlets? I asked, enamored with the words mirth and whimsey.

He looked thoughtful for a moment.

Dreamlets. He said again. They are little bits of dream which have escaped their proper realm, found a way into reality. Burst the bounds of the doorsill that stands between our world and theirs.

So...are they real? I asked.

No. He shook his head firmly. Though they are real in a way. Here they are the most real dreams ever could be. Just contrails grasping for more solid bones in the night. But they are still two dimensional. Phantasmagoric.

But, he said, pausing. I think as if he was debating whether or not to say what he was thinking. Sometimes you can have conversations with them. Its not so bad. They know what you think. They can respond.

They can read my mind?

They are your mind. It is only you in the dark.

But when you are frozen in the dark, bleary with sleep, and see a figure or an idea, standing next to you as if reality itself was just there, by you in the watchful ebon, my doctors words are never much of a consolation in those moments.

And I woke up, the Dreamlets were like fear, loathing. I saw a man at the far side of the room, standing, watching (I have seen him since I was a child. He never speaks, just watches).

And the air was thick with emotion, like my soul had been turned outward into the contours of midnight.

Like I was in the middle of yesterday, feeling the love, the pain, all the things I thought I had.

I was depressed and drained; how I was horrified with myself for not acting. How I felt like a coward. I was burning hot. The sheets were soaked with my sweat. How I felt the world at large would have judged me for how I had acted. Quiet. Peaceful. That’s when The Plan began to form.

I say The Plan, like it was something grandiose, complex. The truth was, the plan was anything that would let me beat the hell out of your lover.

The truth was there was no plan; and the truth was every plan that would lead my fists to his face was the truth. The Plan was everywhere, and everything. It was like the illogic behind any conspiracy theorist or hermeticist: everything is connected to everything because they know only one Idea or one Truth. Therefore everything is a piece of truth. Everything is linked to everything else under this one guiding Idea. Any sophist can prove anything. This was the method of the Pyrrhonian antinomies. The plausibility of any premise is dictated by its host assumptions. Thus any generally held falsehood could in this manner be shown to be true; and in this same manner any generally held truth could be turned slightly, a prism rotating faintly for the light to catch it askew, and become false. In some sense this made The Plan easy for me. Any pathway or connection that led me to my conquest would do. Every line and series was a possible thread of Ariadne. Thus the world became one great conspiracy, a great web of pathways leading to possible revenge.

I fancied myself like a criminal mastermind in some movie (I could only wish I was that clever. That devious). I had the perfect alibi. I was at my dad’s, asleep. My father stayed awake downstairs outside the room given to me for the moment, waiting like some great saint for the sound and rumor of despair or unrest. He had stayed awake, sleepless eyes marching the night watch, pensive in the dark for some sign of my need. Awake in the living room under the pretense of finishing some program for work, not wanting to let me know he knew I was in a moment of weakness. He was a sentinel in the sleeping house, staring past and through the binary and digital, the pulchritudinous dance of code within his hyperterminals. Silver and thin.

How he would have thought I was still there lost in dreams.

How I felt I was betraying him now. I slipped out silent as he left for a moment to make his way to the bathroom and then restore his watch. I whispered to him I was sorry, so sorry, as I slipped through doors in the dark. I grieved. I tried not to picture his disappointed face. But my anger pulled me like a shade from my grave.

And I bought gloves. The Plan said I bought them for this moment. Though if you had asked me a year ago, they were for shoveling barkdust. And matches to burn the gloves. The Plan told me they were not for my pipe and tabacco. Like I was planning on erasing a murder or something. (No, I thought. I just wanted to punch him. A couple times maybe. But really hard I murmured back half heartedly.) I even knew a barrel under a bridge ten miles away on the East side where I would burn my gloves, and whatever else. All your sins The Plan told me. I had befriended some homeless people who warmed themselves there on some of our church excursions. They wouldn’t even question me, just think I was generously giving offering to their heat. Ecstatic that I had come to talk to them in the stretching night.

Who knew that Christ was such an excellent cover for killing? Probably the Crusaders. I don’t think Christ himself knew though.

But The Plan did.

(Not killing. This would be something different. Im not sure The Plan was listening).

Anyone would react like this, in this situation, I thought. Ha! What a justification.

Paul was wrong. I guess that means in some sense the Bible was wrong (was God wrong?). I’m the worst of sinners. The Bible was wrong. I needed Christ the most. (Was the Bible the most right then, where it was wrong? God my head had no space and time for these paradoxes just now).

God help me.

(I don’t think I prayed it. But I think my muscles ached it. I think my heart pumped it).

Maybe I was planning a murder. And the soup kitchen was my accomplice. The irony did not escape me. I am nothing but hypocrisy and flesh and bone. The Plan spoke to me of necessity. How everything before became this now, leading like arrows to the action. Where will you run to, when wherever you run to is where everything was going anyway? Even your grave could not then hold you.

There was a homeless man under the bridge with the burning barrel who dressed (I kid you not) like Scooby-Doo. He had a t-shirt with the mystery-mobile, a hat like the cartoon dog’s head, and some weird Halloween pants that looked like fur. And he always had that crooked grin. An oddity that I would have better avoided had he not insisted on conversation. But you find Christ in the oddest places. And he was an interesting (and interested) conversation partner.

And there was Opal. A lady who acted as elegant as the stone of her name but who dragged a shopping cart full of the most caricatured amalgam of goods imaginable. If schizophrenia had a physical manifestation, this was it. PVC pipes, twigs, fake tiny Christmas trees, an urn, a forgotten guitar, some new-age novella on metempsychosis, a Zine on capitalism, a pink feather boa with six erstwhile rainbow-spanning cousins, a Rolling Stone’s cardboard album cover, a half-fragmented copy of The Essence of Christianity by Feuerbach (the first sections gone away, now only the final movement of the infinity of mankind), an old Rice Crispies box, and an old half-broken plaster Nativity scene. There was merely a whitened chip standing out from its hand- painted surroundings where baby Jesus used to be. This made for some humorous situations when well meaning evangelists would come to her, asking if she had found Christ.

No, she said, I’m still looking. I hope soon.


I asked her why, once, in a moment of indiscretion, why do you carry this burden with you?

Why? She smiled at me coyly as we stood outside a Starbucks, as if I was naive, as if I was the strange one. As if she was the High Priestess of the rites of the Eleusinian Mysteries who had just been asked a very stupid question by an initiate.

Because this is all I have. Thus it is the world.

But I heard, Because everything is a sign, a symbol, a mystical joint. This is the world, here in my cart.

This mystery was increased in the fact that she had the tan, chiseled look of an Inca. Or an Aztec. I always get them confused. As she collected everything, I’m sure she would merely claim she was both anyway.

And she gave me her crooked-tooth smile again. And I heard, Everything points to everything. If God is the great secret then nothing can point to nothing, nothing points to nothing, everything is a piece of the map. I take as much as I can. As much as I’m allowed.

But she said, when it is mine, it is precious.

And it became clear she didn’t think that she was dragging junk along with her. It was like, in her shopping cart, she was gathering together the mysteries of God, the remnants of his tracks as he walked through the world during Creation. The beauty of the macrocosm. Every pastiche and tchotchke was a microcosmic fragment, a mosaic tile of the cosmos. She wandered and collected in order to express this hidden secret. This collection, golden with God’s primal music. All of it was her Gnosis, her secret wisdom as she walked unnoticed through alleyways.

Just outside a Starbucks, somehow I doubted it.

But you never know.

But what would it matter, anyway? They would all be silent watchers, who would never betray my own madness as I tossed it into the fire.

And even if they spoke, who would believe them?


----------------

I had watched too many forensic crime shows. Devoted myself to too many mysteries.

I had already watched him for days. Your faceless lover. I knew his schedule. No rage of passion would let me leave an outburst to chance. I felt all the pathways, the topography, wind into my bones. Every tree and road, the migration patterns of shoppers, of the wait staff. The cook who left habitually late. I couldn’t forget him, let him wander in upon the final hours as a witness.

I began to see blanks between movements, a chance for a strike. For equilibrium. I stood so still for so long I myself became a monument and the earth welcomed me as a stone. A poet I read once spoke of mountains and stones as great monuments, ruins of a now lost world. Colossal, stoic wounds of the earth. I was gladly added to their number.

And to disguise my stillness, I would also move. From shop to shop, place to place. Motion and stillness are often mistaken as opposites. But in their purest form, they are the same. What is infinite motion, how would it be perceived, except as absolute repose? As silence?

And so I moved In patterns that would be marked by some other regularity; lunch, dinner, the gym, the coffee shop. I moved around, but did not leave, I circulated but did not expand. The restaraunt was the eternal point around which this little geographic corner of the earth rotated now, and with which I too now rotated. And so I moved but stayed the same. Like a planet in its perihelion; only I maintained a perfect circle, the fullest vigil, Newton be damned.

I don’t even know how many useless things I bought from the Target across the street while I watched everything else but my purchases. Murderer? No, the courts would say, even if they saw me. He apparently just needed a lot of socks and DVD’s.

I waited until the night he closed. As chance would have it, the manager, a friend I made through you but who went to my school, slipped that the restaurant would be short handed tonight because two closers called out sick. But the best part? He didn’t even tell it directly to me. He mentioned it generally to another friend in class as I pretended to ruffle through my bag. In the forgotten seconds before the history of theology and philosophy began to be jotted on the whiteboard by our professor with an Oxford brain.

My murderous clues thus were clandestine amongst the syllabi of graduate studies; between radiant Platonic Forms (Moral, Mathematical, Natural, Artifactual), and the neo-Platonism of Plotinus (The One beyond Being, Mind, Form, Composition, whose fulness flowed like a fountain into Nous, the Mind, who looked upon the abyss of the One, its creator, looked in awe of God, and tried infinitely to describe Him but was unable and unequal to the task, thus creating countless, indeterminable forms of description called Soul, which then again in an attempted but even less able and less creative panegyric, sought to describe its creator, to praise the Nous; but it, too, failed, and produced base matter and composition, pain and tragedy); I was hidden beneath the Sibylline Oracles, masqueraded within Pythagorean numerology, the diabolical nature of my nascent plan eclipsed and sequestered by the ruminations of Scotus and Ockham, were hidden just somewhere to the left and out of reach beside the elegiac Calvinist supralapsarianism and Irenaeus’ anakephaliosis. (And who could consider murder among such a muddle of words? They were a forest to hide in.) My rage was lost upon my friend's furious pen and keystrokes as notes were recorded. Filtering the ghost of my mania.

The Plan was invisible, Beyond, Unknowable. Like the Kantian noumenal. The Levinisian Other. Lodged and shuffled off and away between musings in class on the hidden irreconcilable reconciliation of Cusa’s Coincidentia Oppositorum or the merits of Anselm’s definition of God as id quo maius cogitari nequit.

And so I was an invisible assassin gathering information on a target, wandering behind crates and alleyways of jargon.

And who said theology and philosophy had no practical consequences?