Down at the Texas border, in the fluid zone between clearly defined loci of control, you can find what might be described as an alternate state of reality. It is not a formal political state, maybe more of a state of mind, or even a state of flux, since at the edges of society the excluded predominate.
Nigel Rodriguez stretched in the sun just beginning to slant over the roofline. He gathered up his sleeping bag and air mattress, then headed down the ladder of the one-story cinderblock adobe house his parents had built in Matacristo, Texas, which while technically part of the USA behaved more like an offshoot of Mexico, Cuba, and Dahomey.
In this town, the religions existed in uneasy harmony, as did the gods. Nigel’s father was a mestizo from Mexico who practiced the “indigenous campesino religion,” but his mother was a Jamaican Christian, giving Nigel the thick florid features of an Italian or Irishman from county Galway. People treated him as Asian, Hispanic, Negro, or White depending on where he was and how much money he had.
So what is the indigenous religion of Mexico? Well… that also depends on who you ask and how much money they have. Originally it was the faiths of the Aztec, Toltec, and Maya, but after invasions by Christian and Jewish Spaniards, then exposure to slavery and Chinese labor, and finally the victimhood politics of modern democracy, they ended up with a religion simply known as el mezcla, the misgendered article conveying an otherworldly nature to an otherwise common noun. The “mixture” as they thus called it combined Catholicism, Calvinism, Santeria, Vodoun, and elements of Palo Mayombe into a primitive worship of a god and land of the dead in which spirits accrued power based on the number and strength of their devotees. Like OnlyFans, it granted godlike status to those with the most payers on stream.
Consequently Nigel grew up in a home where the Catholic icons shared shelf space with chicken feet, gipsy dolls, a menorah, and a sparkling butsudan. His parents, like most consumers, took a little from one philosophy and a little from another, then combined them to invent a legal, moral, and philosophical theory that justified whatever they desired at that time. They prayed to the Christian God, yes, but since we have one world all gods are the same, so they prayed to Him in different forms, and added other gods and lands of the dead as well to their pantheon. To them, religion was a buffet or like the shelves of Costco, bursting with options that could be infinitely recombined so that each customer had a unique pattern of items in his cart. We were all shopping carts, Nigel thought, each just a unique snowflake design of different fragments of God.
At school he found himself increasingly unable to relate to the airy theory and memorized solution sets. After the third class where he came, in sat down and opened a book, then tuned out as the rambling from the overweight pink-haired person with thick glasses at the front began, Nigel started drawing in his notebook. Symbols of the ancient occult merged with anime on the pages, crested by a giant mushroom cloud. He looked at it: this was crap, but it also expressed about where his thinking was right then.
When the last bell rang and he was finally free, he sprinted to the front of the school. His friends Shoii, Tang, and Sapo stood in the lee of the corner of the facade, smoking the light cigarettes Tang pirated from his mom’s purse every morning. “Wat do?” said Nigel, taking a smoke.
“Chilling,” said Sapo. “Gonna go down to the DQ and troll for females.”
Nigel nodded. In his experience, these expeditions led to nothing more than catcalling obese women. “You buy that bag?”
“Yeah,” said Shoii. “Here’s yours,” he said, handing over the corner of a bag tied off with a couple thick nuggets of ganja in it. Nigel slid him a twenty.
They were just finishing up their cigarettes when suddenly Nigel found himself lifted up off the ground.
“How’s my favorite little faggot today?” said a deep voice. Nigel sighed inside as he squirmed. Bifstec, the local bully, had found him after seven hours of careful evasion by Nigel, who knew how to duck between halls to avoid areas where the football team could be found.
“Knock it off, Bif,” said Tang. “He never did anything to you.
“Except be a giant faggot,” said Bif, expertly dropping Nigel and simultaneously grabbing the rear hem of his tighty whities.
“Aaagh,” hissed Nigel as his testicles flattened. He ended up in a heap on the ground while Bif twirled Shoii like a top by twisting his shaggy hair that he hoped someday would be an impressive mane.
A cold wind brushed over them. Ori Marlowe, the kid who wore all black and even scared the teachers, had entered the sphere of their interactions. “The weakling must demonstrate his strength,” said Ori, “because he has none within. Begone, cullfodder.” His fingers semaphored out some kind of sigil and the cold northern breeze returned. The boys looked uneasy, since Ori seemed untouchable in this town of mostly religious people who feared his rumored associations with the dark arts.
“You gaybait loser–” began Bif, but Ori flung up a hand and Bif felt the emptiness of mortality gnawing within him. With a final homophobic slur, he retreated.
“Jesus, get a life you little worms!” Bif rejoined his group of football players, all half-Anglo, and they hopped into a convertible, roaring off to somewhere fun and expensive, thought Nigel. He dusted off Shoii, and when they looked for Ori, he was not only not there, but not visible anywhere he might have walked. “It was great he was here, but that kid gives me the creeps,” said Tang.
The small group disbanded and Nigel walked home. He looked at his homework, but could not recall anything from school that day. Instead, he embarked on a time-honored tradition for youth, namely rolling a blunt and then trolling the internet. In the smoke-filled shed behind the house, he perused websites on his laptop until his social media profile popped up a link to a short looping video.
“Man, that’s a nice tight ass… bet it smells like beans,” Nigel said laughing as an Irish girl from Philadelphia began chowing down on a massive turgid penis.
Without him thinking about it, his hands remembered the ritual, and soon the zipper of his jeans flew open and he was stroking himself. Now the little leprechaun was getting railed from behind by a ripped Polynesian covered in tattoos who kept sticking his tongue out.
“Look at dem titties sway,” said Nigel, pulling harder on his rock-solid five inches. At that moment, a sudden pounding on the door interrupted his fantasy.
“Nigel! Is that you? You’re not masturbating in there, are you? You know what happens each time you touch yourself… a billion potential children are condemned to Hell. Do not practice Onanism in my house!”
He heard the key in the lock just as he approached a desperate, groaning climax that burned in his prostate and sizzled in his testicles like a swarm of PCP-addicted wasps. Soon… very soon… there was going to be a sticky mess full of little swimmers dying in the heat of the Texas summer. Too late he realized that he had forgotten the Kleenex® and Aveeno™ that he kept in a little beach tote for such moments… in panic he looked around, and after quickly discarding the lawnmower and leaf blower as possible targets for a horde of homunculus Nigel Jrs, he settled on an old cauldron in the corner that seemed to be full of bloody rotting bits of flesh, burnt tobacco, and human teeth. He had never seen it before but it was the only option, so he steered his stubby flesh warrior toward it.
“Aaarrrgh!” he expelled, biting his lip as he fired loose stream after stream of thick sticky proteinous fluid into the mess. Flies disturbed by the impacts flew up in a cloud. Nigel hurriedly zipped up just as the door opened.
“Nothing, Ma, I’m just doing homework,” he said, hitting the emergency key that transferred his screen to a spreadsheet of wind conditions over Nome, Alaska during La Niña.
“Oh… I see,” she said sheepishly, crossing herself. “You know how I worry for your soul, Nigelito. Come inside, I made mu shu tacos with french fries.”
Nigel sat down to dinner with his parents, hoping his eyes were not too red. Inside his pants, his penis withdrew to a stub, exhausted by the recent discharge. His father bounded in from the living room where he was watching History Channel documentaries about Santeria and Palo Mayombe, the two “native” religions that were popular in the region.
“I have to get ready for our ceremony tonight,” said the father. “We are going to bless the nganga with our blood so it can start to grow.”
“What’s an inganguh?” asked Nigel’s mother.
“In Palo, the nganga is the sacred cauldron in which we place sacrifices, like items personal to us or living beings we give to Nsambi, the sacred spirit behind life… and death. Over time, the nganga takes on the spirit-life of what is given to it and becomes conscious.”
“So this inganguh… what’s it look like?” said Nigel, suddenly nervous.
“It’s a cauldron, usually with a ceremonial skull and wand, which is how we invoke Zarabanda, the messenger of the divine and the dead. Mayomberos add to it things of power, and it absorbs this power, opening a portal to the spirit world. Tonight we bless it, and then it begins to grow in its power. All of us add our blood to the fundamento and commit our souls to Nsambi!”
Nigel’s mother got up to go read her Bible. The father departed for the shed, and Nigel went upstairs to get in a few rounds of vidya on his Alienware gaming laptop before bed, aided by a bottle of cooking sherry he had liberated from the pantry below. Somewhere through another round of Minecraft he felt the urge to stroke himself, but the sherry blanked his mind, and he passed out with his penile nub nestled among his weakened fingers.
Saturday dawned bright and hollow in the morning. Out of weed, Nigel tread shoe rubber onto the sidewalk outside the flat cinderblock patio home where Kuri, “a guy I know” — not quite a friend, not simply an acquaintance, and also a contractor — was probably asleep inside. Once he got a response to his text, the word was clear: the house is closed because Kuri is out of that spectacular Arizona northern lights hybrid he could get for Walmart prices. Nigel did a little dance of frustration then walked home, cutting through the southern half of his neighborhood which was comprised of similar one-story cinderblock bungalows with concrete plates instead of a lawn. Each side of the street had a row of houses with a narrow alley for electrical lines, and it was down these concrete troughs that Nigel now navigated.
“Hey.” The voice came out of nowhere, resonant and heavy despite sounding youthful, somewhere between a female baritone and a hastily speaking husky teen. Nigel looked up, then scanned lower, and saw Ori peeking out from behind a bower of grape leaves above one of the cinderblock walls.
“Hey man,” said Nigel uncertainly. “What’re you up to?”
“Got a crisis,” said Ori. “Have to sell a quarter ounce of high grade weed by sundown.” He hopped over the wall and slid down into the alley with what seemed like minimal effort.
Nigel let his eyebrows rise. “Well… uh… how much?”
“What you got?”
In a daze, Nigel handed over his wallet, which had the sixty bucks he had saved up to buy weed plus some miscellaneous change and a few grubby dollar bills.
“That’ll work,” said Ori, handing back the wallet sans cash with a fat sack of weed that smelled like it might have Sinaloan origins.
“Wow… thanks man! You’ve saved me twice in a week!”
Ori winked and disappeared over the wall. “Call me sometime, we’ll hang out,” his voice echoed disembodied through the empty alleys, cinderblock rooms, corrugated tin roofs, and hollow fears of third world suburbia in a dying first world nation.
Nigel was a good kid, basically, or at least a generous one, so he stopped and rolled an Optimo with Tang and Shoii while they played Mario on a vintage Nintendo on the big 85″ TV Tang’s Mom had brought home from Costco. Then they went out into the backyard and threw a basketball around on the broad concrete surface. Shoii brought out a few Milwaukee’s Best cans and they drank to a nice buzz, rising with the high from the blunt. Eventually the munchies hit, so they rolled down the street on a luggage rack and pushed it through the Taco Bell drive-thru. Tang covered Nigel since Nige had brought the weed. Then they got up on the roof in the shade of the parapet and smoked a quick joint rolled 50-50 with the ditch weed that Tang’s Dad kept in an old ammo tin in the garage. At that point, the sunlight had become saturated and was starting to fade to grey, so Nigel went on home.
Passing the shed, he felt his erection rise. Thoughts of every supermodel whose nude poster or video he had seen flashed through his head. Fumbling for the key, he unlocked the door and stepped inside. The open mouth of the cauldron, with its contents below seeming to swim in the half light, beckoned to him. He unzipped and thought of Rosa Gonzales-Rosenberg, the librarian at school, until he had catapulted his load like a mature Ecballium elaterium at the end of the grow season. He looked into the half-lit opening, which still seemed to writhe and pulse when he viewed it out of the corner of his eyes, which made him shudder. Shrugging, he zipped up and went upstairs. He stuffed the weed in his hiding place, behind a loose piece of molding in the corner where he had chipped away enough sheetrock to have a fairly spacious cache, and watched normie television until he fell asleep.
At some point he opened his eyes. The television was off and the room was dark, but he did not remember doing this. He rolled over and then opened his eyes again. The memory of a strange sound haunted his semi-conscious mind. It had been a grinding, or a rumbling, maybe a heavy door sliding open, or solid wheels crushing pavement. It was an alarming, incomplete and yet final sound. Just as he was drifting off again, the grinding resumed, a metallic scraping with immense weight behind it, like steel girders sliding down a rocky mountain, and he thought he heard a deep hoarse voice whispering behind it. It disturbed him but seemed so remote that he slipped off into sleep again, letting his subconscious listen to the voices.
Sunday his mother went to church and his father went to the shed, feeding the nganga the livers of ritually slaughtered chickens, raw tobacco, sage, methamphetamine, salt, and bones dug up from a local cemetery last night after a dozen Negra Modelos at the local watering hole, El Ardiente. For a moment Nigel thought he heard the grinding noise that he thought at this point might have been from a dream, but when he looked up it was only his father pushing the nganga back into the corner of the shed closest to the house before locking the door again. Nigel showered but for the first time in years, felt no need to touch himself. That was a ritual he relegated to the shed, now, and even images of Christy Turlington in her prime could not rouse his slumbering fleshworm.
Cleaned up, he headed out to the only mall in Matacristo, basically two strip malls with a courtyard between them which had food carts, a BitCoin kiosk, and a stonehenge of concrete benches on which kids milled to smoke, talk, drink coffee, and goof off on skateboards. Called the Fallen Oaks Mall, this area was the escape valve for kids who could not bear to be at home, found their schools and jobs intolerable, and wanted nothing to do with the church, Army, Costco, or other activities for the good compliant normals who just wanted 2000 sq ft homes and a Tesla in order to feel the touch of the hand of God in their souls. It was the emptiness at the center of emptiness, requiring nothing but a lost soul to join.
Nigel camped out with a couple guys who knew from school, talking to a couple girls from town, when he found himself nodding off. I must not have slept well last night, he thought. Damn, he had hoped for a chance with one of these girls, even if his sexual response was dead like Freddie Mercury outside of the shed with the waiting gaping aperture of the cauldron. He remembered a thread from the internet where one kid created a “cumbox” out of a cigar box that he ejaculated in as part of his thrice-daily masturbation routine. Nigel had made a cumbox out of the nganga, but now he felt like it was a vampire feeding off his precious bodily fluids, drawing him into its vortex of madness. Each time he squirted his genetic code into the abyss, he felt slightly weaker, like his life-force was being drawn away from him.
Screams woke him. He must have nodded off… a kiosk crashed over as people ran by in giddy panic. Already smoke rose in the distant sky. Loud impacts radiated through the concrete that covered all of the city and suburbs, knocking him off his bench. He looked up and saw a creature blotting out the afternoon sun, indescribable in its complexity and alien nature, conforming to no known human aesthetics. It simultaneously had one limb and infinite ones, two eyes and a mirrored chrysanthemum of ocular apertures, and both form and a smoke-like imprecision to it. His gut and muscles screamed in terror while his brain remained transfixed, but his feet would not work, as if his whole nervous system had collapsed. He watched as a great hand, or maybe a tendril, possibly a pseudopod, reached down and scooped up a wailing girl. When the crunch came, he reverted to the knowledge of his ancient mammalian ancestors and ran as fast as he could to the nearest safety he could find, the big drainage tunnel near the old smoking area behind the school.
Tang came sliding in after him. “What was that?” he said.
“Some kind of demon,” said Nigel. “We have to get away from it.”
Tang looked at him with wide eyes. “Didn’t you know? There are lots of them, all over.”
Nigel shuddered, then peered out at the smoke columns and moving figures as the city was crushed under the onslaught. “They stink… sort of like…” — it couldn’t be, could it? — “semen.”
At the word the monsters stopped and howled simultaneously, a sound like choral music mixed with gravel crashing through glass and flesh. Nigel and Tang held their ears until the scream stopped, then flattened themselves against the sides of the tunnel as the stomping and deconstruction sounds continued.
He had read about these in the past, he realized. Made from clay, given life with semen and blood, they were golems, mythical creatures that carried out the will of their hateful masters. These semen golems were possessed by a cretinous but systematic urge to destroy, kicking houses into dust and flinging the half-eaten bodies of their victims in blood-spattering arcs across the sun. As Nigel watched, police cars zoomed into position around the local Circle K and gunfire erupted toward one of the golems. It watched as if entranced as the bullets hit it, then vanished.
“They got it!” said Tang.
Then the creature manifested, like the air and earth coming together to form it, behind the police. Its fist crushed one car, then it swept a smoky granite hand across the rest, leaving only red streaks on the concrete and fire.
“How can we get out of town?” said Nigel.
“Won’t work,” said Tang. “They can just teleport their spermy asses wherever you go.” Indeed as he spoke, one of the semen golems appeared on the horizon, then vanished and appeared again further in the distance, iterating even further away the next time.
“They’ll destroy the world,” said Nigel gloomily.
“We have to fight them,” said Tang.
“We’ll die,” said Nigel. He began to pray, mumbling far-off memories of liturgies and snippets of Biblical text, but the words felt intangible in his dry mouth.
“We’re dead anyway,” said Tang.
“And that is the beginning of wisdom,” said a heavy voice, and they looked up to see Ori. He carried a cauldron by its handle and a bag of other mysterious items.
“Right, so how do you beat this thing?” asked Tang. “God ain’t gonna help us here.”
“He never does,” said Ori. “God is one part of the sphere of the heavens, Satan is the other. Where God represents the intellect thinking about the world, Satan is its pure mechanism, cause and effect. God can tell you what to think about these demons, but only finding their cause and reversing it can save us. You must turn to Satan.”
“How can that help us?” asked Tang.
“They have won,” said Ori. “They are bigger, stronger, and meaner than we are. But now that they have won, they have to try to impose their order upon us. We will subvert that order and use it against them, much as the Jews used Christ against the Romans.”
At that moment Shoii slid into the tunnel. “Guys I saved the weed,” he said. “I thought you would be here.”
They spent a night in the tunnel, Ori silent, but Tang and Nigel shivering in huddled bundles against the wall. Shoii kept rolling blunts and passing them around the small chamber, the fire providing the briefest heat in a world that had grown cold in a way that even the Texas summer could not disperse. They winced as sounds came from the outside, sounds of things being torn apart and turned upside down, the symphony of the destruction of their world.
Finally after a long darkness of shivering, light dawned upon Matacristo. The three adventurers stretched legs, yawned, and furtively peered outside the tunnel. In the dawn light, none of the semen golems could be seen, so they walked out into the ruins of a familiar world. It turned out to also be a changed world.
As they mounted the bank of grass next to the road, they heard a mewling sound from the school library. Turning, Nigel shrieked. On the roof was a human crouched like a gargoyle, munching on what looked like a severed leg. Next to it a child screamed, and the fist came down and crashed it. The eyes were wild but the person otherwise looked “normal.”
Tang called out. “Roberto, what are you doing?”
“They have pushed me too far,” he said finally. “Everything is hopeless, everyone must die, and I am king of the world.” With that, he took another meaty bite from the calf. Nigel vomited. The group moved on into town.
They passed a church, its stained glass windows stained with blood, semen, and feces. The cross on the roof had been draped in LGBT and Communist flags, and behind the altar a swastika and Star of David in spray paint shared space on the marble walls. A vast pool of blood surrounded the altar, which had on it a pile of still smoldering human bones and sage. There were Reagan-Bush 1984 buttons, used condoms, Indian arrowheads, smashed iPhones, and suppositories scattered over the once-bright cloth, now spattered with blood and something dark that smelled terrible.
A faint whine called to them. On the floor in a circle of salt the priest crouched, his rectum splintered outward like a carnation by a giant stone phallus, his intestines dripping down below him. As he frothed and murmured, chime spouted out one severed end and splattered thickly on the floor. They opened the vestry, only to find a dozen citizens busy sodomizing young children, the semen and blood running down their faces to no effect; their eyes had been removed and their hands severed. The church office featured loose pigs raping teenage girls, then consuming them. As they tore into the intestines, more feces spurted across the stained glass. Above it all the cross remained, happily proclaiming the reign of a god who had clearly abandoned this world.
“Absolute lexical chaos,” said Ori. “The signs of a mind unraveling. Or rather, a collective mind finding that it was an illusion. God is feeling, Satan is cause-effect.”
They walked stunned into the graveyard. Every grave had been dug up and the tombstones thrown down, and nuns in bondage gear were nailed to large crucifixes inserted in the ground between graves. In one, a priest sodomizing a young child was in turn sodomized by a goat while a zombie Jew burned behind him like a citronella candle, the sweet scent of burning decomposed flesh wafting through the air. Books in a pile had been reduced to gibberish by the careful use of small penmarks that rendered each letter indecipherable and words incoherent. At the edge of the yard, they found the true perpetual poor of the town dead; they had been gorged on caviar and wine until their bodies had given out, and now flies circled the mass grave. In one grave seemed to be piled all the coins in the town, soaking in what looked like a mixture of motor oil and blood.
At some point, their breath caught in their throats, they fled. Only Ori seemed unaffected, as if he was watching a movie he had seen before.
They passed a pond full of limbs, a pile of severed breasts as high as a house, and a giant sculpture of Cardi B made of human feces. Smoke still hung in the air, the barbeque-like scent of burnt wood and a pork-like meat. They had to step over large pools of intestines frequently, and sometimes found eyes or penises shredded against the concrete which marks human civilization.
Finally Nigel stood before his own home. The front door was open and strange lights played on the walls. He looked down and saw his hand shaking. He sighed, then stepped forward. The other two did as well, and this dropped warmth into his heart like whisky in Sunkist Orange, something they used to mix up from the vending machine at school and whisky from Shoii’s uncle who was “the most raging alcoholic I have ever seen” according to the local police chief, Rudy Cruz. The walk up the path may have been the longest in his life.
Inside the house, a scent of bacon filled the air. Nigel’s father was on the sofa watching static on their old rabbit-ear-antenna television. Crosses, pensises, stars of David, swastikas, life runes, “Live Laugh Love” and dollar signs were written on every wall in blood. A pot on the stove bubbled with a mysterious jalapeño scented broth; as Nigel stirred it, his mother’s bleached face floated to the surface, then sank below.
“The nganga,” said Nigel’s father. “It has come alive with a life-force unlike anything our padrino has ever felt. We are cursed by demons.”
Or just cursed by interfering with a world you do not understand, small human, thought Nigel.
Ori turned to him. “If your (cough) life-substance animated it, we can undo the spell, but only by going to the cause. It will require a ritual and culling.”
I wonder if Bif is still around? thought Nigel.
Twenty minutes later they crouched around the nganga which was now decorated in the torn flags of the participants in the last two world wars. “To undo lexical chaos and semiotic confusion, we must go below the level of symbol to pure Will,” said Ori. “In Luciferianism, Will is the sum total of the universe; it is either organized or disorganized. Those of disorganized Will become occupied by demonic visitors which are not conscious, simply being composed of appetites. You inserted a life-force, although wasted via Onanism, into the place of death, and you have connected the worlds. We cannot simply sever the link because we need to lure them back, so we must give them a sacrifice.”
Bif struggled in the corner, duct-taped and cable-stripped. He cried out in sheer frustration at the futility of his future prospects.
Far into the night went the ritual, sigils of moving bodies cast on the walls by candlelight, blood dripping onto the altar and rolling into the nganga, prayers to the dark lords cast in Syriac echoing through the courtyard.
“Hail to the guardians of the structure of Earth and Heavens, the ancient ones who reign forever, come forth again! Hear our prayer to the emptiness, a-Muluc, ancient god of evil and continuous future time. Accept our sacrifice on this summer night and bestow upon us the power of the seven gates! Praise the Magister Sathanas and his eternal works, deny the triune deity of Abraham, desecrate the heavens and burn all of the human stain from this world!”
Somewhere before dawn Bif, now a spatchcocked torso writhing as his organs dropped into the purifying sage-saturated fire below, perished, his eyes rolling grey-white into his skull. Blood rained down the walls and fire encroached from the horizons.
However when dawn came, they found themselves back in the drainage tunnel. “How did we get here?” said Tang.
Ori was smoking a massive blunt composed of three daisy-chained Optimo wrappers. “Cause is emptiness because its effect has not happened, so it has no meaning, where religion attempts to capture meaning but by encoding it as finite rules and observations, interrupts cause-effect and therefore in its attempt to do good, births evil anew. The spirits that afflicted this town did not come from afar; they were always here, buried in the hearts of those who tried so hard to signal good.”
Five years later a visitor stopped by the town on his way to a far distant location. He checked in to the local La Quinta, then squinted at the sun dropping below the ridge far toward the horizon. From what he had seen, this was a nice orderly town, but a little weird. For starters, there were very few people, as if most of the weak and aimless had been culled. For another, at the town center, a cauldron of blood boiled, consuming the Bibles thrown in by passerby with a hissing sound and faint wispy smoke.
