#josef k.

[possible-streetwear]

Von Thronstahl

[fourorfivemovements]

Films Watched in 2024: 42. Le Procés/The Trial (1962) - Dir. Orson Welles

[begin-with-the-beginning]

Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested.

Jemand mußte Josef K. verleumdet haben, denn ohne daß er etwas Böses getan hätte, wurde er eines Morgens verhaftet.

[kunst-kultur]

Deniz Yücel im Gespräch mit Josef K.- eine Festrede widerständlicher Erbauung. Mehr über die Festspiele: https://www.bad-hersfelder-festspiele.de/ @Besser_Deniz @HersfelderFests @osthessennewsde

KUNO-Blog: https://www.kunoweb.de/blog-ethik-ästhetik/

[tokillabeastie]

this guy writes great stuff

[please-wakeup]

Exit

I know this road better than I know myself. I know each of Interstate 85’s 250 odd miles; I know that it takes me an average of 3 hours and 26 minutes to drive west, from Charlotte to Atlanta, and an average of 3 hours and 29 minutes to make the same trip going eastward. I know the price of gas at a dozen stands, and the closing hours of each fast food shack and greasy diner. I know the curves of each low hill and I know each stand of pine and oak trees. I know the stretching dark of the long winter nights and the wet heat of the summer breeze. I know these things well because they are the totality of my existence now.

I know the names of each exit, westward and east. Batesville, Poplar Springs, Spartanburg. They tick through my head as I pass, but the Silver Creek Road exit is never among them. In three years of this endless loop, it has never appeared again. If I ever begin to doubt that it will, then I have nothing left.

The Silver Creek Road exit doesn’t exist on any map, or at least, it no longer does. It may have once, but like the road itself, it has been razed from the earth and from all memory and record. At the beginning, I spent long anxious days poring over old surveying maps and neighborhood planning documents, searching in vain for any sign of the road, or the exit I know I had taken. When there was nothing left in the libraries and city halls to comb through, no meek county official left to interrogate, wide-eyed and frothing, then I began the drive.

I’ve been through two cars, and have burned through my savings and now survive off a stack of rapidly vanishing credit cards. I have no address to receive bills, and no intention of paying, and have been filling my trunk with small plastic gallon jugs of gas, while the cards are still accepted. When this filthy and battered Oldsmobile gives up the ghost at last, I suppose I will have to learn to hitchhike.

I first took the Silver Creek Road exit three summers ago, on that last night that I was with Bobbie. I have in my head just a few frozen frames of that ride left, her black curls bouncing like springs in the evening breeze, her gapped toothed and freckled smile, and the slow summer crossing into night.

We’d made that drive together a dozen times, between our apartment in Atlanta and her brother in Charlotte. There was nothing remarkable that night. We simply ran low on gas and took the first exit we came across. I remember vividly passing beneath the green and sparkling white letters of the exit sign, and onto the sharp curve of the road.

The street turned perpendicular from the light and noise of the highway into inky darkness of the pine trees. Nothing remarkable to separate it from a hundred other country roads, but as the lights of the car penetrated the darkness, a vague and trembling unease passed through me. The tall rustling pines seemed black even under the blue white of the headlamps, and the road began to rapidly degrade, becoming pocked and uneven just a few dozen yards in.

All the roar and glare from the highway seemed swallowed up behind us, and there were no lights ahead of us for as far as we could see. My insides felt tight and knotted, and I turned to Bobbie. She had her skinny legs tucked to her chest and looked at me, quizzically, one eyebrow raised, with a small crooked smile. Her small bravery seemed to dissipate the chill that had been steadily rising in me.

I looked forward to the road, I felt a sudden sharp pressure on my chest. Stretching out in front of the wan light of the headlamps, the road ended. There was a small field of shattered asphalt slabs, and then the forest swallowed up every trace under a blanket of rotting pine needles. Something twinkled brightly between the trees, and I strained to pick it out of the darkness. It was the smooth chrome of a bumper, attached to a pitted and rusting car, completely enclosed by the towering pines.

A wave of panic and disorientation crawled down my scalp and my knuckles went white on the wheel. Bobbie placed her hand on my shoulder and gently squeezed once.

“Cal,” she said, firm and evenly, “we need to turn around now, honey.”

There was a tremulous quality to the last word, as the surreal darkness seemed to further constrict around us. I heard her take a little gasp of air. I began to turn the wheel when I realized how narrow the road had become. It had been two lanes when we started, I was sure of this, but the forest seemed to be pressing against both sides of the car, far to narrow to turn around. Blood pounded in my temples, and I threw the car into reverse. The boughs of the trees scraped against both sides, soft whispering scratches from the needles and the soft thuds of thicker branches.

Bobbie held her hand on my knee, calming and reassuring even as panic threatened to overwhelm me. I could see the highway moments later, a thin cloud of hazy illumination over the rise behind us, and the forest seemed to part like curtain. Bobbie released her held breath and giggled softly, and I felt a wave of elation wash over me. I turned to her to share relieved smiles, and I locked with her dark eyes when the siren sounded, once and sharp in the silence, and bright blue and red strobes flashed through window.

The police cruiser was parked in the center of the road, crouched low and silent like a predator. The familiar red and blue flicker bathed the street in weird crooked shadows. As I turned off the engine, there was the slam of a car door and I could hear the heavy thud of boots on the road, pacing towards us.

The comforting normalcy of the sight of a police officer began to drain away as he approached in the dark. He carried no flashlight, and I saw his gloved hands hanging straight at his sides in the side mirror as he walked towards me. He was dressed in thick winter wear, with his high collar turned up, and his hat pulled low. He approached the window, and as he leaned straight from the waist to fix his black and beady eyes on mine, I realized just how thin and tall he was.

“License and Registration.” His voice was muffled and thick with a strange and choked drawl, almost unintelligible, and his lips seemed to move in manner counter to the shape of his words. The summer night air around him seemed to grow even warmer. There were no sounds, no wind in the pines, no chirp of insects.

I was mesmerized by the strangeness of what seemed, for all the world, to be an absurd imitation of a man. For the second time in as many minutes, I wondered fleetingly if I was dreaming. I could see now that he had no badge, and was simply dressed in unremarkable black clothes.

The overwhelming fog of dread and panic seemed to condense all at once around me, and singular animal command to flee, at once, drove my hands forward towards the keys.

He was quicker. One black gloved fist slammed into my temple, and a shower of stars exploded over my left eye, and the world tipped sideways.

I remember him dragging me from the car, the shocking heat in his grasp seeming almost to burn. I remember hearing Bobbie’s screams and seeing in dizzy glimpses her brief flight, before being swept into those inhumanly long and slender arms. One glove came off in the struggle and I saw the pale white hand, like an immense knobby spider, each leg tipped with a black and curved talon. The world swam around me, wild and burning, and I struggled to move my limbs.

Bobbie was limp in his arms as he approached me again, and I struggled weakly to my feet. Our eyes met in the red and blue strobe; he looked nothing like a man now, his once pale mockery of humanity was stretching and distending away into some unthinkable shape. He did a very human thing then, and smiled, lips peeling back to reveal rows of thin white needles.

I was running before I knew it, bolting dizzy and weaving down the road. I was vaulting across the shoulder of the highway when my rational mind clawed it’s way to the surface. Coward! it screeched at me. My legs shuddered to stop, and sudden painful guilt flooded my lungs like fluid and stole my breath. Bobbie’s face loomed in my vision and I felt a profound and clear shame pressing down on me.

That’s when the car struck me, sliding on locked and screeching tires. I was tossed into the concrete median, striking the back of my skull. I woke up three days later, wrapped in plaster and flooded with morphine.

Gaffney, Blacksburg, Kings Mountain. The exits pass by, each one decreasing the chance of seeing Silver Creek Road exit on this go around. It was impossible to accept in those first few days of maddening research that Silver Creek Road had simply vanished, and so I made the drive myself, carefully reading each sign. When it failed to manifest itself, I made the drive again, this time at night. And then again.

Sometimes there’s a zen-like quality to the repetition, the familiar patterns of predictability and order. The immutable order of the land, the locked procession of towns and trees is comforting as it continues to grind my hope away like a millstone. Most days, I can believe and accept that Bobbie is gone. There is always that shadow of doubt, that crystalline thread of hope, but it feels hollow in my hands now.

There is one thing I must believe: if it appeared to us once, it will to me again. And if I can find it, that pale horror in a man’s skin, I will kill it. If the bullets fail, I need only a few moments to ignite the trunk’s cargo, and to lure murdering thing to the me.

I swear to the stars, I will never stop looking.

[please-wakeup]

Quiet

I never saw the ocean till I was nineteen, and if I ever see it again it will be too goddamn soon. I was a child, coming out of the train, fresh from Amarillo, into San Diego and all her glory. The sight of it, all that water and the blind crushing power of the surf, filled me with dread. I’d seen water before, lakes, plenty big, but that was nothing like this. I don’t think I can describe what it was like that first time, and further more, I’m not sure I care to.

You can imagine the state I was in when a few weeks later they gave me a rifle and put me on a boat. When I stopped vomiting up everything that I ate, I decided that I might not kill myself after all. Not being able to see the land, and that ceaseless chaotic, rocking of the waves; I remember thinking that the war had to be a step up from this. Kids can be so fucking stupid.

I had such a giddy sense of glee when I saw the island, and it’s solid banks. They transferred us to a smaller boat in the middle of the night, just our undersized company with our rucksacks and rifles and not a word. We just took a ride right into it, just because they asked us to. The lieutenants herded us into our platoons on the decks and briefed us: the island had been lost. That was exactly how he put it. Somehow in the grand plan for the Pacific, this one tiny speck of earth, only recently discovered and unmapped, had gotten lost in the shuffle; a singularly perfect clerical error was all it took. It was extremely unlikely, he stressed, that the Japanese had gotten a hold of it, being so far east and south of their current borders, but a recent fly over reported what looked like an airfield in the central plateau.

We hit the beach in the middle of the night. I’d heard talk of landings before, and I’m not ashamed to tell, I was scared shitless. I don’t know quite what I expected, but it wasn’t we got, that thick, heavy silence. Behind the lapping of the waves and the wind in the trees, there was… nothing, no birds, no insects. Just deathly stillness.

Another hundred yards deeper into the eerie tranquility of the jungle, we stopped in a small clearing for the officers to reconvene, and it was obvious even they were spooked. I wasn’t a bright kid, but I knew enough to know that something was very wrong. It was like the whole island was dead. I remember I could only smell the sea, despite the red blossoms dangling from the trees.

It wasn’t an airfield, on top of the plateau. I can’t tell you what it was, because I’ve never seen anything like it, and I don’t think anyone ever will. If I tell you it was like the Aztec pyramids, but turned upside down, so that it sank like giant steps into the earth, you’d get the basic idea of it, but that somehow fails to capture the profound unearthliness of the structure.

There was no sign of individual pieces in the masonry, it appeared to have been carved out of a single immense block of black rock into a sharp and geometric shape. It was slick and perfectly smooth like obsidian, but it had no shine to it. It swallowed up even the moonlight, so that it was impossible to see how deep it went, or even focus your eyes on any one part of it, like it was one giant blind spot.

Our platoon drew the honor of investigating the lower levels, so we descended the stairs as the rest of the company surrounded the plateau. We took the stairs slowly and carefully after the first man to touch one of the right angle edges slit his hands down the bone.

At odd intervals down the steps, there were several small stone rooms; simple, empty, hollow cubes of stone with one opening, facing the pit in the center. There was no door that we could see, and with the opening being four feet of the ground, you’d have to put your hands on that black razor sharp edge to climb in into it.

We circled the descending floors, shining our lights into each of the small structures; They contained the same featureless black walls and nothing else. No dust, no leaves and other detritus from the jungle, the whole monument was immaculate, as if the place was just built; but that couldn’t be right. The whole structure felt incalculably old to me somehow, despite having no way to articulate the particular reasons.

Down near the bottom you could see that it simply sloped away into a darkness that swallowed the flashlights. We tossed first a button and then a shell casing down into the pit, and waited in the unearthly silence, but no sounds returned. No one spoke, we simply turned away from the yawning abyss and continued our sweep of the bottom rung and the last of the small structures.

The body in the back corner was almost invisible at first in the thick shadows, but the long spill of drying blood reflected the light of our flashlights, and it led right too him. He was coiled tight, arms around his thighs, and his face tucked into his knees. You could see badly he was cut, his clothes opened in ragged bloody tatters to reveal the pale skin and bone beneath it. He may have been dressed in a Japanese uniform, but it had been reduced to ribbons; I only had few seconds to look at him before we heard the first shots.

It echoed like the buzzing of faraway insects in the still jungle, swallowed almost instantly by the blanket of quiet. By the time we reached the top, the rest of the company had vanished. There were shell casings on the ground, and the hot smell of gunpowder in the air, but they were gone. The trees were deathly quiet around, there was not a trace of the nearly fifty other men that had come ashore with us. I could taste bile rising in my throat as panic threatened to cripple me; I felt crushed between the yawning pit and razor edges on one side and the dead jungle and the pounding ocean on the other. The silence rang in my ears and I struggled to still myself.

They were just inside the jungle, waiting for us. They came out from between the trees with all sound of a moth, simply sliding into our view.

I can try to tell you what I saw, the same as I did to the army doc on the hospital ship when I first woke up, and again half dozen other various officers over the following months, and you’ll have the same reaction they did; that I was a dumb country rube suffering from heatstroke and exposure and trauma. That I was crazy.

You know me. You know I’m not crazy. And I remember every second of that night with crystal clarity.

The thing, the first one that caught my eye, was wearing the skin of a Jap soldier, all mottled with the belly distended from rot. The head drooped, useless and obscene on the shoulders, tongue swollen and eyes cloudy. I could see where it was coming apart at the ill-defined joints, with ragged holes in the drying flesh. At the bottom of each of these raw pits was blackness, deeper than the stones of the buildings; a darkness that seemed to churn and froth like an angry cloud.

The thing moved suddenly, the head snapping and rolling backwards as it dashed towards us. I had my rifle clasped tightly in my hands, but it simply didn’t occur to me to fire. All I could do was gape silently at the macabre sight bearing down on us, and think absurdly of my mother’s marionettes.

A gun went off beside me, and I turned to see a dozen more of the horrors darting silently in on us. Among them were a few more rotting and swollen forms, but the majority wore the same uniforms as us, and were pale, fresh, and soaked in blood. More bullets zipped through the air, and I saw the grisly things hit again and again, but they never slowed. I caught a glimpse of the First Sergeant's vacant glassy eyes as his head dangled limp from his shoulders; I saw the great ragged wound in his back and the shuddering darkness that inhabited his corpse when he leapt just past me without a sound, landing like a graceful predator onto the soldier beside me. The others around me began to drop in a silent dance of kinetic energy and blurred motion

I was on the track team in high school, and it could have got me to college. I didn’t need an invitation. I just ran. I ran blind through jungle, caroming of tree trunks; I ran until I saw the ocean, and it struck a new ringing note of terror in me. I don’t remember actually deciding to swim, but when I turned back to the tree line, I saw one of the white and bloody things emerge, running on all fours, the hands splayed wide and the back contorted and cracked in an impossible angle.

To this day, the mere thought of the ocean still brings on a cold sweat, but that night I let it embrace me, let the tide drag me out to sea, if only to bring momentary relief from the impossible monolith and terrors on the island. The days I spent drifting off shore and blistering in the sun were a welcome release from the silent island.

I never saw the war. They sent me home as soon as I recovered. It was comforting in a way, when I thought no one believed me. It allowed me to believe that it never happened, that it was a product of my mind. But as I got older, I’ve found that it is pointless to lie to anyone, especially yourself. I know what I saw.

Someone else believed me too. I’ve seen maps of where they tested the hydrogen bombs in the South Pacific.

[please-wakeup]

How This Ends

There were parties that night, but I elected to spend it alone, drinking and snorting the last of my priceless heroin on a wooded bluff overlooking the sea, capturing what quiet I could on my own terms and determined to meet the last day sober.

I woke, caked in vomit and pain as the sun arose, and trickled down to the beach, relishing the cool salt breeze on my chapped face. As I plunged my face into the water, I heard a tinny wail of joy, and turned in mute disbelief. A child raced down the beach, trailed by her mother. As public opinion had slid into open hatred of those who knowingly reproduced, births had become unheard of.

I swam in a wash of emotions: raw fury at manifest selfishness, an aching nameless joy, a thousand other twinges of head and heart. In the last decade, when it was clear that nothing could divert the comet’s path, the final gasps of propaganda’s engine had repeated this final message: Don’t Make It Worse.

I rose, fists balled, but my shout of indignant protest died on my lips. The earth trembled, a passing shock wave under foot. The impact was hours ago, in the steppes of Asia; the wall of fire and pressure had made it’s solemn journey around the world to us.

The girl was swept into her mother’s arms. They looked serenely at me, twin eyes of sea green. For a moment, I bordered epiphany. Guilt washed in behind the tide of anger. Then it was gone, and I was empty at last.

“I love you,” whispered the mother, holding the child close.

I sighed, and the air grew dim and thick with the onrush of steam. My vision clouded, and I turned to the sea, one final time.