Watson, Ian - SSC Read Online Free PDF

he will incorporate us
all, as conscious living beings, into the matrix of his own insanity?
                 It
is a fact of history that he arrived in 1985 ragged, jibbering and
lunatic—tortured beyond endurance by being deprived of us.
                 Yet
he demanded, jubilantly, in 1997, confirmation of his safe arrival;
jubilantly, and we lied to him and said YES! YES! And he must have believed us.
(Was he already going mad from deprivation?)
                 If
a laboratory building can rotate into the probability of that same building
adjacent to itself: if time is probabilistic (which we can never prove or
disprove concretely with any measuring rod, for we can never see what has not been, all the alternative
possibilities, though they might have been), we have to wish what we know to be
the truth, not to have been the truth. We can only have . faith that there will be another probabilistic miracle, beyond the promised
inversion of laboratories that he speaks of, and that he will indeed arrive
back in 1985 calm, well-kept, radiantly sane, his mind composed. And what is
this but an entree into madness for rational beings such as us? We must
perpetrate an act of madness; we must believe the world to be other than what
it was—so that we can receive among us a Sane, Blessed, Loving God in 2055. A
fine preparation for the coming of a mad God! For if we drive ourselves mad,
believing passionately what was not true, will we not infect him with our
madness, so that he is/has to be/will be/and always was mad too?
                 Credo quia impossibilis; we have to believe
because it is impossible. The alternative is hideous.
                 Soon. He will be coming. Soon. A few days, a few dozen hours. We all feel it. We are
overwhelmed with bliss.
                 Then
we must put him in a chamber, and lose Him, and drive Him mad with loss, in the
sure and certain hope of a sane and loving resurrection thirty years hence—so
that He does not harrow Hell, and carry it back to Earth with Him.

           THY BLOOD LIKE MILK
     
     
                 This tale is for the sun god, Tezcatlipoca,
with my curses, and for you Marina—whom I never knew enough to love—with
apologies and blessings, somewhat tardy . . .
     
                 Have
you ever screamed at your nurse to go away—to leave you in peace—and hated her,
as bitterly as you’ve ever hated anybody? And begged her, as you never begged
anyone in your proud life before?
                 Ten
of us lay in the ward in the plastic webbing imprisoning us, yet only three of
us really counted, Shanahan, Grocholski, and me, for we were the only
presidents. Yet a big haul for them, indeed, three
presidents! How cleverly the hospital distinguished between us and the
ordinary runners: the extra dose of nerve sensitizer in the syringe, the
absence of any opiates. We hung on the raw edge of pain, gritting our teeth as
the taps were spun and at times—when our bloodstreams burned like second
nervous systems on fire in our bodies, and it seemed like we were being roasted
on a gridiron, from our insides outwards—at such times we let go and screamed.
Whereas when the runners were being drained they moaned but did not need to
scream. Mixed in with their quarter-pint soup of drugs (anti-shock,
anti-coagulant, vitamins, iron) they received the opiates that let them still
catch the idea of pain, but be somewhat glassed off from it—while we three were
locked up in bright tin boxes with the howl of a thumbnail on slate a thousand
times amplified. The nerve sensitizer wasn’t merely sadistic, but meant to aid
the nurse monitoring the effects of the milking on our bodies; the opiates
were supposed to block off the worst of the sensations arising. I might say
that according to the compensation laws we should have all had opiates. But
that’s how they ran a punishment ward. Idiot thinking. Shanahan,