Soft Sci-Fi Wednesday -- Nork Goes to Church

Nork left HOPE© early the next day. His vacation was one day away and he was antsy. There was a careful mix of anger and awe in him as he drove away from work and watched the early afternoon hurl flames toward the city behind him. He saw the buildings catch almost all at once, watery and invincible though they seemed in the cloud light before noon. They conducted the sun like hot cathodes. All their glass made them appear molten, and in league with some thoughtless urge for destruction. They gave him words without mercy as he drove, channeling into him a thousand different tongues. He let himself believe in the moment of genius, as if it were another rare moment of "being in relation to the world". But he knew he would never remember the sentences that temporarily lit his brain. They would fade like embers in the hours to come, and become something old and uninteresting.

An emptiness embraced the city and its towers, deepening their outline. The surrounding vacuum of wilderness was an empty foundation, a flat baseline signal for the city’s jagged pulse that spiked out of the blown static of the Midwest swale. 

Noise. 

Noise was the ubiquitous feature of the city. Noise and a deeply pitched note oscillating inside of it. The sound hovered over the streets, humming like a half-angel charged with toppling every wall, and splintering each pane of icy glass. The note vibrated in Nork’s skull. Was it music? It was at least in its most basic form a consistent system of movement with no discernible melody, and so what it spoke it did not speak plainly. It may as well have been silent like boulders wedged between mountains, or the depth of ice at Earth’s poles. He felt it like low strings in his finger bones, and his mind brought images of meteors whistling through clouds, and wind stripping trees. Mammoths collapsing. The sound was old and prior to man, like groans from a weird fish fighting back to a deep place to be left alone.

 

The sound and his thoughts confirmed every glimpse he ever had into what he usually described as an invincible "brightness" inside him, showing him that "End" he sourly wanted. 

"End." The word was like flint over his gunpowder spine. He would never lose that response. A goose bump for each notion of total obliteration, bringing his life back, bringing everything back into focus.

As he eliminated distance between him and the city melting behind him under showers of light, memory harpooned him from both sides. Every beam of it carried volumes of information; salient details from being raised in the south boroughs. Uninhibited moments of honesty, mundane and painful, arranged in clean glass looking jars. They seemed capable now of leading him on some eroded but confident path from his own blazing peculiarity to the universal place he desperately sought. For a split second, he was convinced some grand new thing was heading his way. Some sweeping conclusion born from within this isolated moment showed him that all life looked expressible, and felt miles away from the private beach of tongue-tied significance he'd been hiding on for so long.

 *** 

For reasons unknown to him, Nork veered off the highway and drove to a chapel that was located near his old train route to work. His eyes were always drawn to it like all large tomb-like things that capture the darker verges of the imagination. It was probably because the building was so old. It was still old 100 years ago, when the city was much farther away, and the distance from the heart of the sprawl still afforded a buffer zone that kept the city invisible except for its glow.

The church’s structure was hulking and monolithic, as if carved out of a single stone. To Nork it represented obsolescence, but also a craving for old things. A marveling at how they persist in spite of the breaking down of everything around them. How did that resistance happen except by some spectacular power? He thought about the brain when he saw the place. To him, the church looked like the first crude mound of reptilian neurons. A monument to man’s first limbic clusters, still firing with first desires, visions of spirits, demons, and dreams of immortality. The god organ. Still our foundation. Nork wanted it to be alive inside him somewhere, buried as it may be beneath a bloated and domineering cortex.

The church was seated on a rise that provided a view of the open space before the city started toward the northern horizon. He climbed the rock steps and wandered around the side of the building where an unkempt grotto overgrew and kept the place looking its age. There were graves there. The oldest cemetery stones had been buried in earth and now resembled ancient burial mounds. The grass on the mounds was new, and Nork figured the soil had been deposited recently during the last major dustbowl that rearranged the Midwest countryside. These were post-world graves, he thought, drowning in a landscape of change. But some of the newer stones were still visible. Nork was glad people were still buried in the ground and commemorated with stone. He believed with certainty that the practice of proper burials would be one of the last things to leave from the human being. When that is gone that will be the sign, he guessed, that it was all over.

He returned to the entrance and walked through two huge red oak doors. Real wood, Nork noticed as he pushed them with both palms. Nork found a seat in the back of the sanctuary near an ancient fiberglass pipe organ with yellow stained keys that looked like fossilized teeth. The sound it croaked was prehistoric and beautiful, like a long extinct animal come to life to lament eons of lost time. The pews were surprisingly packed. Nork wondered where everyone came from. Where was this barren countryside hiding all these people? The service began with a liturgy that was typical of the new generation of omni-denominational theology. Like all things human in the post-world, everything was borrowed and blended until satisfactorily unrecognizable. Nork heard from someone that communion was often taken at these churches by soaking a rag or sponge in a bowl of vinegar wine and passing it around for congregants to suckle from.

The service continued with musical litanies and group prayers. When it came time for communion, the ushers approached the altar and fetched long poles from behind the pulpit. They affixed vinegar rags to the ends of the poles and swept them up and down the aisles of the sanctuary in front of the congregation’s trembling lips. People leaned forward, eagerly slurping the sour liquid into their mouths. Some of it dribbled down their necks, beaded up in their beards. Some of the more impassioned elderly women darkened their blouses with the fluid they could not hold behind their slack jaws. Nork just watched. During this moment of ‘feeding,’ the minister guided his audience through meditative visions of the suffering of Christ. Each syllable moved the crowd. People shivered and moaned as if something neglected inside them was finally allowed to eat. Nork became afraid of the world that was created here. It was a stage of ritual he had never seen, and was too terrified to admit that he envied. He watched the people more intensely than anything else in his entire life, as if looking hard enough would let him access their ecstasy. To feel the scorching of such uninhibited belief. By the end of the rite, Nork felt he had witnessed something truly extraordinary. Something world-changing. This church, this theater of emotion was a place people could still go to touch the face of god. Through art, through storytelling people were carried to heights of abandon, egos liquefied into the great ocean of supernatural terror. Nork had grown to believe these sensations had all but died off the face of the earth. Only rumors of these “passion churches” remained in the dead ironic city. And here it was: man’s unrestrained exaltation alive and thriving.

After the service, he walked out of the chapel, away from the chatter and sounds of catharsis. The night seemed so close to him he could feel it breathe. The sky was a low ceiling he could almost press with his hand and turn his palm black with soot. It seemed like he knew what he was going to do long before the decision entered his mind. That’s the way it was for Nork during many of his drug cravings. He still had 3 pills left, wrapped in aluminum foil inside his glove box. It was to be a legendary dose. “Why not?” he asked each pill as they burrowed into his stomach where they would stage for an unprecedented assault on his mind.

***

Nork had trouble identifying the precise moment he came to. The instant was smashed somewhere between the diminished snapshots of his slow re-sharpening awareness. His eyes shook away a blur, and he heard bells. He was leaning against the steel of a canal. The air was burnt and sea rotten. Smell, he noted, was the first grip on reality to return after a hard night of the fickle drug Shade. The parapet he reclined against was covered in aquatic crust. The colors of his surroundings were oceanic and severe, like the world was bleeding blue through a cracked calcium shell.

Fisherman bound a boat beneath his dangling feet. They walked imperfectly between docks, their experience a heavy shadow that followed them, sometimes getting in their way. Nork wondered whether they handled each night's catch like the last slivers of earth, escorting white wedges ashore like the divvied corpse of Christ that they found floating at sea. One of them smelled his hands. 

"There are still fisherman?" Nork asked the ripe wind in his nose, deferring to its expertise. His senses did all of his thinking, and so it was that a person without Shade over their eyes that morning would have seen no one at all on the docks. Not one fisherman.