Join My Cult - Original Falcon Press

ack now… I always think for a moment, amidst a flash of memories—
was that me? and that sensation too? and the reaction? My head and
heart swimming with the recollections, I’m thinking about sitting in a
restaurant, someone beside me, gun fire, confusion, explosions.
Back and back in the valley, I think how I had come a long way and
thought “learning, really learning,” and yet underneath that, too, I feel
an uncertainty, like the difference between how I’m walking and how I
feel, and I ask “am I, really?” The voice, deep and insane, rolling on and
on, “learning and learning, you are really pushing on and soon, so soon
your genius will explode out, your genius will explode out it’s only a
matter of taking something you really believe and something you want to
believe and switching them learning really learning” I have nothing left
to say, my skin is sun burnt and raw, there is no cause worth fighting for,
the desert sand washed over me, I am drowning, suffocating, burning,
and now I am back where I began:
Learning really learning the insane voice continues on steadily,
slowly, with the terrible ferocity and gravity of a freight train. Still, I feel
a certain fondness for this train, even for the engineer. The insanity is in
his eyes, the kind of plastic, neon-glowing Prozac grin I imagine Arnold
Schwarzenegger would have, standing there so straight-backed, his
immense teeth shining in fluorescent lights. “Learning, really learning,”
he would say in a deep Baritone, and I can hear trees creaking when his
arms and legs move, giant sinews stretching under leather-tanned skin.
He would lean down over me and—his hands are so much larger than
mine, I feel like a child, and still he’s saying “learning, really learning,”
and the smile just keeps growing, the picture growing brighter,
“learning, really learning,” he says, I’m four years old and he’s towering
over me, and now his grin is a grimace, his handshake a convulsion.
I can hear Beethoven screaming his last in the 9th Symphony and there’s
the same kind of overload, you just have to put your hands to your ears,
look life in the eyes one last time, and scream: enough!…
There’s that thrumming sound still, growing deeper, flashing lights in
the forest with every pulse, every pulse sending a shiver down my spine.
My chest is on fire. With every breath I know I’m falling deeper into
sleep, and it is with this knowledge that I cross the threshold, enter the
tunnel, and the last remnant of consciousness drops away like the final,
fleeting image of a dream upon awakening.
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