“No touching,” she said, “not now. Please?”
“Do you want me to leave?”
“No, no,” and she shook her head. “You came to understand.”
I smiled, a moment’s self-derision in realizing how little time we’d actually spent talking about Miguel and the others. The smile faded when I realized that she sounded as if I now might be learning something new.
“I do not understand what gets into me some nights,” she said. “But I let it in anyway.”
From beneath the balcony came small sounds of scramble, of feet and hands bracing on wrought iron and pulling themselves up, up. Higher. Closer. Doña Mariana showed no fear, so I, naked and defenseless though I was, promised myself I’d feel none either.
Finally, she looked toward the balcony, where small shadows were beginning to fall. Kids. Just kids. Four of them, with bright feral eyes, climbing over the railing, clambering onto the balcony and hesitantly entering the bedroom. Even in the night I could see they needed baths.
“I dream them to me in the night, sometimes,” she said. “I wake, and here they are. Is it not a miracle? I choose to believe it is. I choose to let it work through me.”
Doña Mariana left my side, left the bed, and went to them. She displayed not the slightest shame in appearing to them naked, her body tall and proud and magnificent in the moonlight. Before them, she lowered to the floor, lying on her side with her heavy breasts exposed in subtle invitation. In permission.
The children knelt, crowding in with eager faces, and as I watched, no longer any part of this, they suckled. For a long time they suckled, taking turns, snapping irritably when one monopolized a thick brown nipple for too long.
When the first of them bounded away, leaping from the balcony in a blur of child-skin and fledgling fur, it became clear to me.
I thought of Argentina of the late 1970s, when the army was in charge and routinely rounded up innocents who were never seen again. The generals often took orphaned children, to raise them as their own, trying to poison their hearts and minds at tender ages. But the grandmothers and other women fought back the only way they could, a few at first, but more every day: marching with signs in Buenos Aires’ Plaza de Mayo, across from the seat of government, demanding the return of their missing loved ones. The Mothers of the Disappeared, they were called, and they won. They were the first true resisters, who took back their country.
A mother’s grief can be such a potent form of magic.
I sat on the bed of Doña Mariana, and thought of the policía, and tried not to believe the rumors I’d heard of pelts hung wet and dripping from alley walls, a new blow struck in the coming struggle. I tried to believe that the chorus of howls I heard late last night sounded something other than mournful.
Don’t let it happen, I prayed, again the resurrection of an act I couldn’t believe in any more. Don’t let it happen.
But I tried to have faith, faith that these children would not allow it, that they would fight until they need fight no more to keep themselves from becoming the worst of all possible things:
The last of a dying breed.
The Meat In The Machine
There is no such thing as repugnance. Everything is a simple matter of context, and how much you’re willing to accept. How far you’re willing to go for your own aesthetic of beauty is only a factor of commitment, and the only one that matters.
Kevin and Anthony and I arrived in Chicago two days before the first show of the new tour — Josef would follow — to settle in and make sure there were no problems with the stage design, and give our road crew plenty of time with the initial set-up. The theater management was cooperative. Smaller venues usually are. A 5000-seater, it was probably the top end as far as what we could ever expect to sell out. We would never fill anything much larger. This is the price of shunning the commercial, and cultivating your disciples from among the underground. It’s their fervor that sustains you when you start to think no one else is listening, and no one ever will.
“Has he checked in yet today?” It was the first thing Kevin asked me when he came knocking after we got back to the hotel that night. For some reason it was my room that got designated as the communal area. I think I understood: Kevin and Anthony lived like pigs but wouldn’t generally inflict it on me. Concessions to the alleged fairer sex after all? They would deny it to their graves.
“There was a message,” I told him. “He said he’ll be coming in tomorrow night for sure.”
“Call him later?”
I avoided that one and moved about the room. Here and there lay fetishistic objects I seemed unable to leave behind whenever we toured, my favorite being a shrunken head impaled on a long, crude nail of the type used in Roman crucifixions. I had cut the stitching across the head’s lips and pried open the tiny mouth. Dark and wrinkled as a prune, blind and wizened, it seemed to sing.
“Wonder if he’s still in much pain,” said Kevin. “At least he’s bound to get some good scars out of it.”
He shucked his leather cyclist’s jacket and lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling. Sweat glistened, jewel-like, in the cropped black stubble of his hair. We’d been lovers once, in terms of the act itself, if not the emotion. It’s always easier to detach when you go at it like machines. You just disengage.
This was before Josef, after whom nothing could ever be the same. Some of us seem naturally to addict ourselves to obsessive types. It reduces the world to a certain attractive simplicity.
“I wonder what he sounds like now,” was all I could say.
On the bed, Kevin started to say something, found it wasn’t there after all. He shrugged and was the first to look away, and I then knew: Something had finally pierced his shells of leather and grime and dogged survivalist ethic, and left him cowed.
It meant I was stronger … and that was information in which I could revel.
MANIFESTO: In the late twentieth century, the territorial war has become an anachronistic holdover, on the wane as an effective tool of control. The battleground for control in post-industrial society is informational. Information has become the new international currency, the new holy grail. Covert wars in private as well as public sectors are fought over information, with murders, assassinations, and saturation propaganda all viable means to desired ends.
This we understood. Know thy enemy.
And of information, on ourselves, we have plenty…
*
From B-Side Magazine, February/March issue, 3 years ago:
“Your confusion’s understandable,” says Josef Jaeger.
That’s a relief.
“Not a whole lot of people pick up on the significance of our name. It used to bother me, but now I just take it for granted.”
So says the vocalist/lyricist/psychodramatist behind hardcore industrial quartet The Giger Sanction, whose first two releases have solidly established them as worthy contemporaries of such bands as Skinny Puppy, Ministry, and Nine Inch Nails, while also bringing to mind middle-period Swans.
Now, about that unusual moniker?
Explains Jaeger, and one gets the feeling he’s run through this a few times: “Most obviously, it’s a reference to Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger, and that entire biomechanical world his paintings depict. He did the original creature and some of the set designs for the movie Alien, but that’s just a tiny fraction of his work. Is it flesh, is it metal? His work’s always creeped me out in the best way possible. But our name’s also a play on words from the title of the Trevanian novel The Eiger Sanction. I read that when I was in junior high, and it had a big impact on me. The main character was a professional assassin named Jonathan Hemlock. He was so ruthless when he had to be, he could just completely dehumanize others. I think what I was responding to, what I found the scariest, was that when you read it, you root for him.”