LAURA LAURENT
"There is nothing love cannot face; there is no limit to its faith, its hope, and its endurance."
Around this time in Shippingport, near the Half-Moon Industrial Park; there were a series of coyote attacks. Many of them were clustered around Black Knob, about ten miles south of the nuclear power plant where John DeVaux oversaw the replacement and disposal of the reactor's plutonium cores. John loved his job, he had to operate the machine that replaced the cores remotely...the radiation was so strong that a ten-minute exposure put John at risk for Rhabdomyosarcoma, a form of nuclear leprosy. John liked working with the cores not because of his six-figure salary and the stellar health insurance, but because...there was something mythological about working in the underground. The plutonium cores—when unsheathed—gave off an ephemeral blue hue. The light only lasted a minute or so, but it never ceased to satisfy John DeVaux. He was a divorcee and unaware of how his sexuality—stagnant—bursted into the other fields of his life, rejecting forced obsoletion. Operating the crane, the gentleness with which he handled each tube with his machine's steely fingers…it required his utmost concentration. A single tube could leave him drenched in sweat from the effort depending on the day; two tubes would leave him totally incapacitated, but three tubes were of the utmost ease...the effort required seemed to have its own intelligence...of course John didn’t imagine it this way himself. For John, the Blue pestered him and brought to mind bones and graveyards. An etched, “Here Lies,” perpetuated into a limited eternity. John thought, The smokestack is the industrial equation, a quadratic aftermath. A tombstone is the logarithmic hitting an inscrutable plateau. Vague dates, speculating the date of his own death drifted through his thoughts, March 4th, 2067…September 16th, 2074. He operated his crane from the control pit to replace a single plutonium core, carefully maneuvering the painted yellow steel arm to gently cusp the core with perfect stainless-steel fingers. John thought, Lowering a coffin into the ground is no different than core injection, no different at all, and John imagined bagpipes as he punched in the injection command from his pit. Core injection is the ceiling of a DMT-style supernova into spiritual extinction. A smokestack starts under the clouds and ebbs its way down to the facility, twisting and spiraling until it sublimates subterranean slag. When I’m six feet under…no, tombstones are no good, no good at all, epitaphs are a savage device…no, a tombstone is no different than a smokestack, no different at all, all this transformation…the stony mist covering an underworld where dirty dwarves pound away on the hammer and anvil. Yes, working here is without exception the graveyard shift, even the daylight rotation. A tombstone’s no good, John thought, one rotten inscription after another, or a shitty picture. So, John believed that working within a nuclear facility was without exception a graveyard shift. The inner mechanics of a nuclear facility could be a modern underworld, he thought, even the daylight rotation.
Laura DeVaux was born into the desert, and to the desert she would perpetually return. The desert is not a geographical space, it’s an emotional topography. The desert is a lonely place where Laura learned how to survive, to protect herself from the heat. The desert is harsh, conducive to decay and atomization. This is why Laura was so interested in authoritarianism, it presented her with an alternative to the roasting irrevocable isolation that was always on the threshold of her heart that had been dogging her since childhood. Desperately Laura wanted to stave off this suffocation, there was never enough air to breathe. Laura thought the People's Paradise could only possibly have fresh air because in this utopia every detail was accounted for. So she became a Stalinist to the annoyance of most of her friends and family, not because of Stalin himself, generally the people of West Virginia felt neutrally about Stalin, even positively, but some had a reserved hatred for him of course. They could care less what he did, they mostly didn't like him though. Piece of shit commie, if you asked someone about Stalin in the American Legion. To the people of Hancock County the Red Army may as well have been the Mongol Horde...but they could hardly consider themselves to care...it was the way Laura approached the subject matter that was so abrasive. She had an aggressive enthusiasm. If you were not with Laura, there was a target on your back. In fact, whether you were with her or not there may or may not be a target clinging to your back. Laura correctly considered all conversation to be target practice, The enemy of my enemy is my friend, she'd say...so what difference does it make whether there are targets on your back or your front? Laura always spoke of targets, whenever she did anything right, Bullseye, she'd say, or Ringer, or sometimes, when she was wrong especially, Hole in one. It annoyed Laura’s father, John, to no end⎯this talk of targets, of centering. What the hell is she talking about, Bullseyes and Ringers and shit, get a life, he'd think. That was the voice of John's utter failure speaking. Failure to ever hit the dead center mark, he for one could never say 'Bullseye' but could only say 'Maybe next time.' It reminded John, of the shadow (another target) that he would never get a release from...a shadow too closely bound up in the very idea of success⎯bullseyes⎯that hadn’t found its proper articulation yet, even as a forty-eight-year-old man.
Laura's recent turn to Stalinism annoyed him deeply. He was a closet McCarthyite, a card-carrying Republican that had a disdain for, in his opinion, unhinged leftist political programs. John couldn't quite be considered a Reaganite though, he remembered having to eat the government's Reagan-cheese growing up, it tasted like ass and it made him chubby. However, like a good father, John sensed the impending rift between himself and his beloved only child. Laura was his miracle baby, an accidental pregnancy, and as such, he considered her sacred⎯no matter what she believed. John DeVaux was not content to let political leanings, stances, beliefs, etc. eclipse personal relationships; a calm entrance into middle age had at least taught him a few things. People are always more complex than the systems of belief that they are stuffed inside of...hearts burst unless trained otherwise. John thought, If only people could raise their eyes and see the masterpiece that is perpetually perfected, just by living. He thought, People are an avalanche of complexity, no center, no bullseye, everyone is a constellation...but Laura was too young to understand these truths. Its natural to be consumed by belief when you are still in your early twenties.
Laura became obsessed with the distortion of Joseph Stalin’s image in the eyes of the West. In their shared kitchen, Laura started: It was an all-out smear campaign; Stalin did not starve the Ukrainians, that was asinine, a devastating famine is a devastating famine no matter how you slice it, what’s to be done? Laura said, He couldn’t help that. It’s good that the kulaks were liquidated for the People, and then: Stalin said a lot of good things, you know, as many good if not more than bad, to the people around her who were at this point barely enduring her presence. Laura realized that she was speaking into thin air, brick walls, to a cricket curtain...her family was, generally speaking, brain-dead, but brain-dead was not sufficient for her dad. Netflix razed his last neural refuges, she thought. He had pluto-brain...but she could hardly care who or what she was speaking to. Frankly, it didn’t matter when you were a believer. Laura continued, Without kulak liquidation, there would have been no agricultural base to support the People and feed the magnificent Red Army that succeeded in liberating most of the world. A necessary sacrifice, she said, because to Laura the People were all that mattered, in an odd distortion of John DeVaux’s belief, Laura felt that the Soviets were totally right to supplant the icons of the Russian Orthodoxy with images of the people. In her opinion, Why shouldn’t we devote ourselves to each other and the perfection of a world that we all share? It seemed to Laura that perfect community complexes of concrete straight lines were a lot more real than Heaven with magnificent curvy pearly gates. She thought, Heaven was some alien antithesis of the People...their hardiness and struggle. Laura at least knew that in the desert, Heaven was unintelligible, Where is Heaven in the Half-Moon? Where are the Angels? It's hard to conceptualize a West Virginian Heaven when most of her state was a wasted chilly Inferno. Laura said, Have you ever seen an industrial park? John DeVaux grunted and spat into the kitchen sink, holding his tongue. He said, I work in one numbskull, and thought, Socialist utopias were always missing a critical ingredient...he didn't know exactly what, but there was certainly something uncouth about it. John wanted to bring his daughter along for a ride...to explore the mountains, hike around, frolic or something, because Laura was growing into an academic, a half child half Faust that needed a reminder to get out into the mountains. The two of them got inside of the pickup truck and got on the quickest route to Racoon Creek State Park. They took sixth street for a mile or two past Zerbe’s diner and then to second street toward Eastwood that connected to thirty south.
The coyote attacks appeared disconnected at first, or that’s how it appeared to Laura—people get lost, and if you’re lucky, you make it back, if not…you’re swallowed. Industrial Appalachia itself is a stinking parasitic body seeking to fracture systems of resistance and survival by starving them...there simply is not enough grace to go around, the mercy of the desert is limited, and the grace itself is not exactly benevolent. The first victim was someone that Laura knew in high school, Natalie. Natalie was a vague high school thread but one that was always loosely bound and transparent, yet it was certainly possible that they could have established something. Regardless, the seed of a true friendship never passed between them. In her head, Laura liked to classify Natalie as a naive and facetious horse girl with big beautiful blond curls that was an enemy of the revolution because she looked like a perfect Aryan. Laura thought, You could never trust a blonde-haired horse girl, but Laura desperately wanted to be Natalie's friend at one time. Natalie had infectious joy, and a simple heart...a much simpler heart than Laura's, and a simple heart is hard to find. Laura's heart was a double-knotted Gordian entanglement that she picked at ruthlessly. Laura attributed it to the books she read, she thought, I could be happy, like Natalie and be brain-dead, or I could read and suffer. Dialectics, Laura thought.
The police found Natalie’s body without a face, missing many of the tendons in the arms and legs, loosely clutching a locket that had a picture of her and her mother about fifty yards from her car, a white ford focus, parked near the visitors’ lot for Black Knob, coated with some soot from the garbage burning factory near Racoon Creek State Park. The vultures hadn’t quite gotten to the body yet, and the police were able to identify Natalie's body by running the soot covered plates and collecting tissue samples.
John decided to take his daughter to the mountain Black Knob, known locally as Mad Mountain. It was considered to be the poltergeistical nerve center of Hookstown, Pennsylvania, about 15 miles Northeast of Weirton, West Virginia. Hookstown was hardly more than a pit stop outside of Racoon Creek State Park, the Knob, and Shippingport. At Black Knob there was an abandoned mining tunnel beginning at the bottom, working its way to the very top...winding all over its interior with no particular intelligence, only the crawl towards energy. The digging took place in 2015 at the tail end of a natural gas boom, when a rogue energy company, Bluestone-Mechel Mining, found itself hemorrhaging money (and mines) after sustaining substantial losses from plummeting energy prices. It was rumored locally that Black Knob had an unusual quantity of...deposits...but no one was quite sure what those were. Locals just tried to stay away from the Knob because of the fumes that came out of the natural vents, but the disaster there attracted many regional activists. Exposure to Black Knob's fumes were pinpointed to induce schizoaffective disorder that usually only resulted in mild cyclothymia. It was a suffocating place, spiritually erosive was the term that Bluestone-Mechel Mining used in their report of overwhelming worker suicides after two months of digging caused them to put a pause on their mining. Now, Black Knob was left with its artificial arteries.
It was still morning when they arrived in Hookstown, so the DeVauxs ate breakfast at Jack's diner, where they got the exact same meal: two eggs over easy, hash browns, sausage, coffee, orange juice, and wheat toast that John scarfed down. He was overcome by a supernaturally insatiable hunger, another perversion, another channel through which his sexuality exploded, because the scarcity of the desert always made him hungry. In fact, he had always felt this way, or had at least felt this way since his divorce—the reality he was born into that his past was now dispersed behind: the bareness, depravity, overgrowth, heat, humidity, rugged nature, the waste. They electrified his desire because as John was coming to realize about himself…he was a sadomasochistic eco-sexual whose symptom was a hunger quake of a primarily sexual form he could consciously sublimate to a gastrological plane for the sake of Laura. The desert had no such effect on Laura, in fact it slowed her down, displaced her to slow motion consciousness because Laura enjoyed leaving no stone unturned⎯psychically and physically.
So, while Laura deliberately made the case for the liquidation of the kulaks into the agricultural collective, John DeVaux began to sweat because he ran out of food to stuff down his desire with. His vulcanite libido stewed and pressurized and needed a new channel to explode into. All the talk of the kulaks truly annoyed him to no end; truly a nuisance when he was being terrorized by the spectre of his sex. John thought, How the hell can I give the kulaks a second thought right now when the desert is here and there is an empty plate in front of me? It was as if Laura knew this all along but took her time, purposely, to make John hang on to every word⎯that regardless he never heard⎯as an attempt to elongate his strain through her own language.
Laura wanted John to platform over every phrase. She thought, A sentence is in itself a structure, its own language, a rearrangement. Sentence structure is the People's logic...whether it's understood or not. A sentence is an island, or an iceberg. Functionally, they are the same...there won't be any left. Alternatively, Laura thought, a sentence is a UFO abduction, a conspiracy. Laura said to John, This business in Ukraine...it's the first successful assault on the West in decades. The first disintegration of decadent hegemony...They say it’s about territory but it's about bread and pipelines...the New World Order. Or, more precisely, the territory of the pipeline...the territory of the pipeline is the logic of the fourth world war...it's a madness, energy starvation...the miotic split between currency and oil is analogous to a flooding generating new spheres of interlinked madness...in the same way the logic of the ego is a hologram of the anthropic center, money is a hologram of oil that has slipped out of sequence, gone rogue...perhaps it’s an engineered resynchronization. The pipeline needs a new cartography...it’s all linear of course, oil is nothing more than a straight line toward naked meaning. That's God's dirty little secret. This is, of course, Laura emphasized, directly tied into kulak liquidation...collectivization makes it so that the blood of the people⎯oil, wheat, raw materials⎯flows into its most efficient channels, and linear systems are dependent on the efficiency of flow. The modern-day Genghis Khan is the proverbial Big Oil Chairman...and Russian oil, the People's Oil, sells. The only art left, Laura said, was the art of the deal.
That’s when John DeVaux realized he was psychosomatically a Ukrainian because he had the territory of his robust barrel-chested body wrenched from his control in this desert. It was primal sex camouflaged as voracious appetite. John's animality was being collectivized into an internal pool of memories, monsters, and symptoms that no longer aligned themselves with his so-called self-knowledge. As John got older, that self-knowledge slipped away like snakes wriggling out of old skins leaving a husk or two on the dirt floor as a clue but not the thing in itself. It was a ripping from daily reality into the world of ravenous hunger and other strange symptoms that he kept stumbling over.
At the diner, Laura finally stopped talking about the war to the relief of her father, who was not listening in the first place. Laura could take the hint but that never stopped her. She was working out some obscure problem that was hard to care about in the desert, but paradoxically, it was the fundamental problem. John was about to burst when a fantasy flashed through his mind of him stuffing a slice of wheat toast into Laura’s mouth to get her to shut up but Laura did not stop because of her father, but rather because she was listening to their server talk to a customer a couple of tables over: “Did you hear about Alejandro at the base of Black Knob? On a hike and twisted his ankle from what I heard, got stranded, coyotes and vultures…that’s the fourth one this year close to that god-forsaken Knob, before him was Michelle, she was a friend of mine, Alejandro was just a familiar face, but Michelle? the police brought me in to identify her body because she didn’t really have anyone, she did work here at one point, but the truth is that the body was so mangled that I couldn’t be completely sure it was her, she was missing her face, but I saw she was wearing the bracelet she always wore that her grandma got her, one of those QVC specials that they claim came from the holy land or was blessed by the basin that Mary washed her feet in or whatever...the divine helmet or foot-water bracelet...it probably came from some factory but what mattered was that it was a sincere gift from her grandma, that’s what made it holy to Michelle; when her Grandma died Michelle told me she gave the bracelet a little kiss every morning as an offering up to the spirit of her grandmother, requesting a blessing, a kiss for some grace…only Michelle would have thought of that but apparently it didn’t work out too well for her. I went to the police after Michelle died, to see if they were doing anything about these wretched coyotes and see if there was anything else to it. Of course they gave me some bullshit answer; What’s that cocksucker’s name? with the mustache and the patchy neckbeard? Dresses like 2010 never ended...Officer Spaunge?”
“Yeah, it must be that asshole,” her interlocutor said
“Yeah Spaunge told me, ‘How do you arrest animals?’ and I looked at him like really? no shit you can’t arrest a coyote, we hunt coyotes, we have guns and hunting licenses, this is how we’ve always protected ourselves. So I tried to be polite and asked Spaunge if he had called the dog warden or anything...I noticed that he had this picture on the wall with his ugly face and his ugly wife and kids⎯uglier than him and his wife⎯but they were a smiling happy family smiling plastic smiles in the photo but when I started asking him about the warden and the coyotes and if there was any possibility that my lovely Michelle would be avenged...the wife and kids started weeping, moaning, lamenting and Spaunge’s face tunneled into a snout and the ears were getting droopy and triangular. I rubbed my eyes and thankfully that plastic family with the plastic smiles snapped back into their proper places and Spaunge told me that the game warden was on the other side of the county dealing with a rabies outbreak.”
Someone from across the room called on the waitress, asking for another cup of coffee and Diana lightly smacked the table and left her interlocutor, but before she left she leaned in and whispered something unintelligible into his ear.
Laura was becoming anxious about Black Knob, the danger of the enterprise was setting in. Yet Laura was skittish about her image, she wanted to maintain the toughness that she perceived that others perceived about her that was in all likelihood a misperception, why Black Knob? why now? Laura nibbled on a piece of her toast and worked on the articulation of her question while John DeVaux got another plate of sausage and toast with a cup of coffee tacked alongside it. Laura asked, "How did you find out about this place? Black Knob?"
John DeVaux stuffed a piece of sausage in his mouth and started to talk through the sausage, the notes of his voice distorted by the seasoned ground meat. John said, "I heard some guys at work talk about it...they said it was pretty creepy, they couldn't stay too long, gave them the eebie-geebies. I remembered that you like haunted places and ghost stories so I thought you’d think it was fun; I thought it could be some good father-daughter time, there hasn’t been that in a while, don't you think? You know, we’ve each just been so wrapped up in our lives…you in your—studies—and I’ve been logging a lot of overtime."
John DeVaux paid the bill at Zerbe’s diner, leaving a standard 20% tip, and he and Laura got into the rusty family Ford Ranger to set off towards Black Knob. It was quite a hike, so they decided they would break it up into a camping trip. Consequently, they then decided they would need some extra provisions to get them through the expedition. At the 7/11, John bought five bags of trail mix, a two liter of mountain dew, and a small container of camp stove fuel; Laura bought two packages of pop-tarts, one liter of Coca-Cola, a Twinkie, chocolate, marshmallows, and crackers for s’mores. With their provisions, they set off for the overnight parking lot at the foot of Black Knob and hiked until John DeVaux found a suitable campsite. The trails at the base of the mountain were punctuated by ready-made campsites stationed every fifty yards or so. The only thing that made a ready-made campsite ready-made was that there were fire pits constructed out of nearby stones and other stones were arranged into pseudo-chairs around the stone fire pit. It was easy to identify the campsites because of such an unusual concentration of stones on what was a generally a stoneless mountain, usually more so a dusty scraggly mountain that was round and toothless but with deep and robust ravines where the water gushed down when it so chose to rain, the rain very much chose Black Knob as if it were a meteorological lightning rod, a nucleus of meteorological phenomena, or it was just a mountain.
Mountains never heal. The concentration of stones was uncanny because it was the product of the park service’s manufactured trail apparatus to attract tourists to this God forsaken desert. The stones were removed from the tunnels that wove in and out of the mountain and that were explicitly off-limits to the everyday hiker on the grounds of preservation. The mountain needed to recover, to heal. This rule was instated after the Park Service removed some of the stones left exposed from all the mining. In all likelihood, the Racoon Creek Park Staff didn’t want hikers to be aware of how they had also hollowed out the mountain to some degree...a continuation of its gutting...or how one of the tunnels collapsed, killing six¾three women, two men, and one child¾of some of the activists that visited the site periodically. They never found the bodies because how or why would the Park Service tunnel through a tunneled mountain to find something that was gone anyways? It was a regrettable mistake on their part. Yet, in the opinion of the Park, egregious mistakes needed swept under the rug.
The outrage from this accident was multi-faceted and overwhelming for the Park Service to deal with, which explains their non-reaction. They thought they would outflank the outcry by non-response and non-movement, taking what they perceived as a Zen approach to an anti-Zen situation. The families and a representative from the southwestern Pennsylvania Environmental Council barraged the office of the Park Service relentlessly. The Representative mostly wanted to communicate to the Park that they would prefer the tunnels to be off limits from now on. The Environmental Council could care less about the accident itself. The objective was to make a martyr out of a mountain, to make it a sacred space that only—with the EC's signage—the ecologically initiated could enter. The goal of course, is to have everyone become an initiate into the Ecological Order...paying homage to Mad Mountain can be, of course, a form of active citizen engagement. The EC's Utopia, as the Representative explained, was to create a better-informed world, to make an ecologically themed informational slip-space. Signage is a virtual reality and information is the future, the Representative said. There's hardly ecological mutilation to the nth degree like we see here...there are so many regulations nowadays...the EPA goes this way and that depending on who's in office...regulations bound up in regulations...but our goal, the Representative said, is to push the new terraforming. Most simply put, the Representative said, We want to sublimate disaster into activism, turn the disaster into a brand, the more support we have...The representative paused and, remembered his line: We want to turn an atrocity into a glimmer of hope. The Representative warned that without them, the Head Ranger would be buried in accusations. Bluestone-Michel Mining flopped a couple years back, they'd been accused of mutilating the sacred mountain, scraping it out, scooping out the pulp like it was a jack-o-lantern. The Head Ranger rolled his eyes and said, they just needed to get some fucking rocks, and the Mining Company unsuccessfully sought out oil and gas...no one went to Black Knob anyways, it could've hardly mattered until they came...so it was really nothing to knot your panties about. The Head Ranger said, Who gives a shit about Mountains, aren't Mountains mute, aren’t stones meant to be pulverized, destined to be dust? Mountains serve and Mountains obey because dirt can’t cry and more importantly mud and rocks can’t protest, right? The Representative smiled.
He explained: those tunnels inside of the mountain are now an underworld, the tunnels are a skeleton, the support system, an infrastructure for the afterlife of the Mining Industry. Now that a tunnel has collapsed, a crucial artery has been severed in the cardiovascular network of our new mythology. The EC wants to show the way to the post-Industrial Elysian fields. How could the people understand such an atrocity without us? Left as it is it's relegated to a purgatory disrupting our manufactured mythological pulse through which our people choose to articulate themselves...through their work. Without these tunnels it is harder for us to make a collective identity. The underworld will push back—because Mountains do speak my friend, stones are vessels, stones are transmitters from another time, stones are compasses, stones conduct, they don’t speak per se, but brushing your hand over a stone you discover it whispers something unintelligible because the narrative is relayed over the surface, elongating backwards through a timescale that to either one of us would be unfathomable. It’s not eternity, but an eternity of its own, maybe a stone wouldn’t understand how brief our lives are. Who’s to say that the Gods have to be like you and me? The stones are probably closer to God than either one of us because a stone truly knows discipline, a stone knows how to listen, a stone knows how to accept its fate; stones have no illusions.
Laura and John woke up in their basecamp at the foot of Black Knob. Quickly, they packed up their gear and began the ascent of the mountain while the first sunbeams were annihilating the silhouettes that insulated shifting dreams. It was sparse with relentless rising light with no critters spotted on the path and given the difficulty—rated red diamond—the two were breathless. They hardly had the spare energy to afford to conversation. However, after about an hour, the two stopped for lunch, where they greedily devoured a medley of Twinkie’s, trail mix, Mountain-Dew, and Coca-Cola. The mountain was bare, traumatized from its leveling by Bluestone-Michel Mining. There was nothing on the path to the top of the Knob, just the wind.
Laura and John decided to work their way down into the tunnels from the top of the Knob. At the summit, John and Laura saw the signs posted by the Park service that prevented entry into the tunnels, but to Laura’s delight, John readily ignored the signs, who were they speaking to? the wind? meaningless gestures in his opinion. If it is there it was meant to be explored, that was the spirit of the Enlightenment that occasionally flared up in John’s breast—but John was wrong, he didn’t know anything about the tunnels, these signs were specifically designed to warn and ward off the weary traveler that these were treacherous tunnels, with no direction and discernible end, because the signs said, clearly, that if you are lost in these tunnels, you are essentially fucked. The entrance had no lights, so John passed Laura her head-lamp and with his on as well, and they entered the tunnel. It was like spelunking; the tunnel was braced in by stone. So it seemed like they were entering the body of a large mountain-worm, constructed and supported by wood with steps leading deeper into the twisting intestinal pattern that was carved into this place.
The tunnels were a troublesome matter. They had no observable direction or orientation; no markers, no signs (there were signs, again, there are always signs, but John and Laura were dumb to them, how could they not be?), so they were left to roam this enormous animal body that was now their adventure. After an hour in the tunnels Laura and John were totally disoriented, a little light-headed, unable to discern any path, but they were moving.
John and Laura preferred not to venture into those interior regions, a personal hell. Floodwaters, imprisoned images, and instincts that one could consider both angel and demon, two-faced undifferentiated emotional conglomerates that stew in the recessed backwaters of all minds...it’s simply not possible for there not to be a backwater where trauma makes its nest and exerts its gravitational influence on memories and personality, everyone has that…swamp…but the truth is it’s a matter of putting the waders on and getting the hell in there to figure out what’s what, but for John and Laura both it remained a point on their interior map that skirted on the threshold of presence and non-presence. It’s a space where wicked schemes connived to give the tectonic personality a proper thrashing; a total humiliation that at its core, had encrypted transcendence into their psychic lexicons. These wild, intractable gods are like a bad romance…relentless punishment for attention's sake. More often than not, we want the torture to stop, the ravaging suppressed, yet…it’s an invitation to a bolted door of personality where light beams trickle out…but Laura and John preferred safety and security. They simply wanted it to stop.
It was a despicable lie they told themselves that smothered the electric seed of evolution. John and Laura both told themselves a delusional variant of thinking that they had control over their fates, it takes a much deeper understanding and patience to master wild horses; the accolades, possessions…things—they never get one very far in spiritual matters because what counts here is sincerity; elaborate forms can never disguise falseness, greed—there are no false appearances before God. Black Knob demands turmoil and submission, it demands combat. It required one to be a hero, and neither John nor Laura knew that they could be heroes; actually, John once did, but life had beat him to the status of some awful maggot crawling around and resigned to masturbate in the subterranean nuclear facility. Just yesterday or the day before John touched himself to the removal of uranium cores. It wasn't the first time, the memory glowed and extinguished itself as if it were one of those cores itself, obeying its own laws that were unintelligible. Chemically, it could be worked out of course, but that was the low-hanging fruit of the greater question: Why? In chemistry the why was displaced to a numerical plane, a transcendent movement far away but for John what mattered was the emotional content, surely the God that designed all these rules and regulations must have felt something.
Why else could he feel anything? He refused to get existential, the God of the Old Testament at least felt anger and jealousy, but physics and chemistry only offered atomic answers that further atomized his own heart. The scientific leveling of meaning had scrambled his moral compass leaving him in an inner desert where he was struggling to find his place post-divorce; science offered no shelter or consolation to people like John, it only offered anything to those that were born husks or shells or hermit crabs. Nevertheless John was fully aware that he was an active participant in this leveling of meaning, he thought himself to be something like Kierkegaard’s knight of infinite resignation, resigning himself to hopelessness and hope through the abysmal scientific chaparral that could somehow short circuit his destiny and see the miraculous heart of meaning. But maybe there was nothing, maybe as a knight of infinite resignation he would rust away into red Martian spores blowing through frigid infernos. However, until that day came, John DeVaux would keep digging, it’s not like life would be better if he stopped, he reasoned, besides there was no choice, he couldn't stop. He bet most scientists hope to stumble upon that brute emotional content of the world. It was part of what bound their community together; it was also a deep-seated fear...it would spell annihilation.
Laura’s heart was simply dormant, a possibility, but her margin for error was growing ever slimmer, because she felt the world was fucked, meaning she had a remarkably laissez-faire attitude about legitimate community action that was the shadow of her idealist socialist utopia that every day, Laura regrettably realized, was becoming less and less possible. While walking the tunnels a more tender memory settled on her heart. While she was working on her studies, her boyfriend Mateo came over and they were lying in bed. Laura was talking about the Gulag but clearly Mateo wasn’t listening. Mateo was only feeling, feeling the possibility of Laura’s body. Laura thought of her own body as a Gulag in a sense, not quite the actual space, but as an institution, she liked to weaponize her body like a Gulag. She was conventionally beautiful, and she used her beauty to make prisoners. From the start she knew she would never give her body over to Mateo. He was a jailbird, she thought, as his fingers steadily crawled over her belly and made a bold move to unbutton her pants. She shooed his hand away and turned over, away from him, and laughed a little. Another dull soul that thought they could challenge Laura DeVaux’s Gulag; Mateo knew nothing about Gulags and was most likely better off for it. He was certainly more popular at South High School, so he contented himself to putting his hand on the back of Laura’s thigh and Laura didn’t mind that: hope lends prisoners endurance.
Laura thought that at its heart, the Gulag was ideally an underground prison for enemies of the people, the Gulag is its own tier of hell where the wretched souls that stand in the way of the Utopia are sent...and Laura had sent Mateo tumbling down into the stinking Pennsylvanian Gulag of her own fabrication. She wanted people to talk to and listen to her deep down...she couldn’t bear loneliness and as such was no self-propelling wheel. Mateo was unaware of all of this, and could care less about Infernos or Gulags; he felt the pangs of embarrassment and sexual frustration and finally a sort of resignation that he would soon overcome because there were plenty of fish in the sea, like his dad said—Women are like shoes, just try them until one fits—but for Laura this was an incredibly serious matter because Mateo joined the others in the Gulag of Laura’s heart. What she was aiming for, what she had to create a Gulag for, what all of her soul wanted was: a pure connection, consecrated by idealism. She wanted shared virtues, shared beliefs; Laura, more than anything, wanted a comrade who could later become her lover, not the other way around.
Laura and John sat down to rest when their headlamps went out.
With their headlamps dead, John and Laura grew afraid of what was to come, the tunnels were total black, so they held hands to form a chain, and began again to make their downwards. Their eyes did not adjust, because really, there was nothing to adjust to, it was an untenable situation where John led the way, one hand feeling along the stones, the other in Laura’s hand as they attempted to navigate. Although neither Laura and John were aware of it, the fumes from Mad Mountain started to go to their heads. As they wandered deeper into Black Knob, Laura fell to her knees and had a vision, slipping further away (deep inside the mountain):
Tonight, I’m at the dirty glass table at my friend's flat, with two separate but overflowing ashtrays in front of me. I'm annoyed, resentful of my friends because they were blubbering jokes to each other, being boisterous, singing songs, sloppily, and arguing those same arguments I’ve heard for years, numbing arguments about the Left, how haven’t they figured it out? For my health and safety, I’ve retreated into myself. There is a chill hovering over my skin and seething anger that’s making me throb and throb and throb and I asked myself, where is everyone? Where are my allies? I am alone, up North. Where is everyone tonight? Tonight, I am a beggar, an empty-handed bitter beggar with tidal anger. I walked into my room and screamed into the plush pillow, a small relief. I’ve melted down in my own anger, melting down is not a good feeling. One has to keep their wits about them. It’s not a good feeling, to feel totally alone, but I know something. I know that if I keep following this path I will suffer, excessively. Tonight, I understood something about the world: the enemy is everywhere. Most importantly, I am my enemy. I am my own enemy because I've forgotten how to love. This anger, this refusal for connection has finally made my heart black. I’m vibrating, tonight. I’m atomized, tonight. Past the basement apartment, on down the hill, past the Church, past the clouds...my anger, congealing. Anger spinning, magnetizing, radiating, anger like hot plutonium, right when the atoms split off, ejected, refused, escaping; I had to pinch the bridge of my nose and one of my friends said, Laura, C’mon, drink up, what are you doing tomorrow? Got a nipple on that thing? I want this song played when I die, and I want everyone to sing it, send me out like a viking to Neutral Milk Hotel, with everyone shouting...but I didn’t hear her, really hear her...because I was churning, churning hard, so I grabbed the liquor, a steaming molten core inside of me. No one knows what I'm going through, no one understands, no one is suffering like this...loneliness, but I’ve lived through it before. I am living through it, tonight.