I, Zorn: Part Two (The Flogger's Art)

I'm going to finish it quick now. Finish talking about myself in fast, disdainful strokes. Dismissive strokes. I'll dip my quill in a superheated stew of pitted prunes, sun-baked herring, coagulated hogblood and brain fluid drawn from the skull of a schizoid, octogenarian Southern Baptist . Then I'll blitz it out in a rush of hypnopompic automatism.

I don't want to dwell on myself like I said. This here is just a preamble, a way to frame the stories I'm about to present. I've chosen three weirdos to begin with. Three visionary revenants weaving bizarre, transmontaine narratives. The narratives will unfold in rotational collage, one following the other in uroboric succession, whatever the hell that means.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Best to get this over with first, sans ado. I ought to talk about my name here at the outset. People call me Zorn or Zorn Altheus but that's not all there is to it. It's never that simple, not at this end of the alimentary canal where the sun never shines, where crud dries in concentric rings and critters die soundless and asphyxiate.

My name, in its resplendent entirety, is Zorn Altheus Blue Vajra Cacodaemon Dancing Bear. My old lady used to be a sci fi enthusiast back on the rez, in happier times when she ran youthful and sunblessed under the Dakota sky. She read every bit of sci fi schlock she could get her hands on. One of her dog-eared, moth-eaten paperbacks featured an intergalactic superhero named Zorn Altheus.

Zorn saved the Proteron galaxy from utter destruction and killed Rruothkarr, scion of the insect people of Minraud and sith lord of the Ariguan Confederacy. Zorn died in the end, not from injuries sustained in battle but from chronic constipation caused by frequent trips across poorly maintained Einstein Rosen Bridges, also known as Wormholes. Zorn learned too late that a clogged wormhole will kill you faster than all the laser scimitars of an alien enemy.

My old lady adored Zorn Altheus, so she named me after him. Dancing Bear happens to be my Lakota family name, the one my old man gave me before crossing the mystic bourne in a flaming nimbus of blood and murder. The names Blue Vajra and Cacodaemon came to me during a sweat lodge vision quest supervised by Theodore Running Wolf.

I changed shape during that vision quest. I morphed into an eagle with golden wings and eyes of fire. I flew over the Black Hills in the shadow of Crazy Horse and rose in a tremendous soaring arc to the crest of the Himalayas where I communed with a troglodyte Yeti who I later learned was the immortal Hindu monkey god Hanuman.

It was Hanuman who blessed me with the name Blue Vajra. Later, as I coasted on chill wind-currents over an expanse of fulgent ice, a hooded manitou appeared on the horizon, pointed with a gnarled finger and said: Cacodaemon. Thus I emerged from the erotogoric abysm of my vision quest with a new name: Zorn Altheus Blue Vajra Cacodaemon Dancing Bear.

The new name came with a new purpose, the nomadic death-telos that Theodore Running Wolf had divined with his Orbis Tertius back at the rez. I wandered in deference to my new purpose, flogging and flaying the ogres who crossed my path. I covered much of the continental United States over a six year period with brief forays into Canada.

I lost track of the number of men I shredded and killed. Later, some of my abductors insisted I had murdered well over two hundred men between the ages of thirty and fifty. I take strong exception to the word 'murder'. I didn't murder those men. The Lord's Prayer says: deliver us from evil. That's what I did. I delivered those men and their victims from evil.

The men I flogged to extinction in sprays of consubstantiate gore were ogres, irredeemable tormentors of women and children. The men I shredded were nameless then and are nameless now. I didn't know who they were but I recognized them in a manner of speaking. I saw with perfect clarity that they were monsters who secretly yearned for the fate that awaited them.

I identified them via mantic apperception, the mindsight I had acquired under Running Wolf's guidance. I located them, isolated them and disintegrated them. Then I excised their scrota, stored them in mason jars of formaldehyde and moved on. Once every month I scooped those nuts out of their sacks, inserted colored light bulbs and created luminous scrotal pastiches on outhouse walls. I am an artist as I said.

I stuck to back roads and small towns, moving patient and unhurried. I never worked to stay alive. People helped me wherever I went, gladly vouchsafing to me that which I sought. They didn't help me because they chose to. They helped because I bent their will to my own with a glance or a word. It's easy to bend people to your purpose. You have to know how, is all. You have to stun their pineal glands with gestures and words directed with fierce intent, in a dense beam of pranic energy.

Your pineal gland is located between your eyebrows, in case you didn't know. I can stun your pineal gland with a gesture, a sound, a word or all three in conjunction. The specific combination changes with each person. One time I stunned a scrofulous prison warden by slapping my left tit, tweaking my right nipple and putting out a high-pitched squawk. Overkill, as it turned out. The man dropped like a sack of wet cement, his eyeballs capsizing white.

In my seventh year of wandering I joined a travelling carnival run by a goitred and flatulent Australian who once ran a brothel on the Thai Cambodian border. I figured the carnival would provide cover for my activities which indeed it did. Even serial-flogging paladins like myself need protection sometimes.

My knife-throwing skills were put to good use at the carnival, skills I'd picked up on the rez. I also learned to juggle a variety of disparate and dangerous objects: burning torches, active chainsaws, coils of livewire, bowling balls, milking stools and huge genetically modified rodents that bit my hands and delivered squeaking apostrophes of furious protest as I juggled their steroid pumped bodies.

I continued meanwhile to troll for ogres, locating them as before and shearing the flesh off their bones as they screamed soundless, their torment accruing about their bodies in phosphorescent aurora. While at the carnival I married a three hundred pound woman with a silver mohawk on her misshapen skull, a green patch on her missing eye and a flowing red beard on her absent chin.

Why I chose her in particular is not clear to me now, in retrospect. I could've had any man, woman or hermaphrodite I wanted, given my stellar good looks, my cyclopean nether appendage and my tangible aura of pathic self-assurance. It's possible that I married Bertha in a paroxysm of penitence for my crimes. In belated spasms of bogus guilt and Sartrean bad faith. Even natural born serial killers get the pangs on occasion.

The marriage did, nevertheless, offer certain deviant rewards. Our emperor waterbed quickly became the mise en scene for feral, bone-crushing, pudendal fusions that lit up the carnival in weird fulgor as squeals and grunts rent the night. Bertha wasn't so much a person as a plenum, a boiling adipose swamp of subterranean lusts, bestial ruts, cannibal debauches, howling saturnales and blood-drenched orgies of corybantic delirium beneath the glans of a purple moon.

Chances are, I'd still be a travelling carny Indian if Bertha had survived. But she didn't survive. She died of an aneurysm in front of a cheering crowd on a chill winter night in Arkansas. Her sudden and unceremonious passing affected me in ways I couldn't have imagined. The calescent intensity of my grief softened my heart, reshaped my spirit, turned the compass needle of my quiddity.

I left the carnival a week after her demise, intent on resuming my life of solitary wandering and serial assassination. The frequency of my crimes had waned during my marriage to Bertha. And for a while the killings had ceased altogether. The barbarous delights of the flogger's art had yielded to the incendiary catharses of copulation. Eros reigned in place of an extrovert Thanatos and Lordy's Love Whip lay unused at last, its rawhide strands curled limp and forlorn, its gleaming drail hooks piled mute.

But now I took up the knout once more, eager to make up for lost time. I wished to embark on an unparalleled flogging spree, to flay my way across the country in deranged afflatus. But it was not to be. Somehow I couldn't summon the nerve. Something had changed. Prolonged communion with Big Bertha had leached and gutted me, blunted my resolve. My flogger's fortitude had ebbed to the point of extinction. I thought of killing myself but I didn't. I wandered adrift, going where my feet took me.

I started to feel it a month into my aimless walkabout. Feel like I was being watched. At first I figured maybe I had a stalker but no. The feeling persisted even when I was completely alone, miles from human habitation. I can't render with certainty what happened to me next. I remember most of it well but I can't vouch for its authenticity. It's possible that I lapsed into some form of delusional psychosis that lasted a long time. It's also possible that my abductors permanently distorted my recollection of capture and internment. I'll let my readers decide.

I entered the state of New Mexico sometime in the spring of nineteen hundred and seventy two. I'd left the carnival in Aintree, Georgia and hitchhiked west, along the southern route. I hit New Mexico on a Friday as I recall, an hour before nightfall. I followed the highway for a while looking to thumb a ride. But trucks and cars weren't stopping so I left the highway and headed north, into the badlands.

I'm not sure why I left the highway. It was an obscure impulse, a sudden yearning for solitude, for abnegation. It occurred to me much later that it wasn't so much an impulse as a command. I'd been led, driven by external volition. The landscape changed colors as I walked, distant mesas going from burnt sienna to tahitian bronze to blood red under a cyanic blue sky yielding to darkness.

Soon it was completely dark, the mesas bulked in silhouette under a bright smatter of stars. I remember stumbling at some point, stumbling and falling from fatigue and hunger. There was light when I came to. A circle of brilliant white light beaming down from above. I couldn't discern the light source but the creatures standing in the circle were clear enough. I say 'creatures' because some of them were human and some were not.

Five of the eight creatures were aliens of the kind you see in movies. They were short, pale and slender with large domed heads, black panoptic eyes, vestigial noses, slit mouths and absent ears. The remaining three were human. Not just human. They were famous and supposedly dead. The first was Elvis Presley in full stage regalia. The second was James Dean in black leather. The third was martial arts legend Bruce Lee in a blue kung fu suit. Just the people I wanted to see.

Concluded in Part Three.