Symphony of the Iron Underbelly, Movement No. III– Mountain Climb
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[The Now]
The Human Body is remarkable in its resilience. Blind. Its determination to continue. To live. The miracle of sentience – that quirk of evolution, a beautiful accident or divine essence imbued into us all from beyond some imagined veil – is irrelevant. Upstairs for thinking, downstairs for surviving. Superfluous. Life is fundamentally a relentless effort to continue to exist and only in-between the moments where that is threatened, do we wile away the time thinking great thoughts or making terrible mistakes. Sometimes wonderful tapestries weaving both. The best stories are tragedies.
It is the intervals which vary between those threats. Months, maybe years for the comfortable. Minutes for those walking riskier paths. Time to die.
My conscious mind – me – sees all this, analyses and evaluates it, even as I drop down to my knees. The chair falls too, dragged down by an accidental spasm as my prosthetic misinterprets the misfiring neural impulses flickering in alarm all across my being; crushing the varnished oak between hard plastic fingertips. It begins as pain: whole-body, arcing. We are not ready. Explosive muscle fibres twitch uncontrollably, unsure what they are being asked to do and why. Limbs jerk, and only the composite porcelain over my face stops it being ground into the hard floorboards. No.
That passes, although I do not know how quickly. Time is subjective when it comes to agony, and people, flawed as they are, become notoriously poor at accurately judging its flow when in discomfort.
This is beyond discomfort, and I am so very flawed. Enough.
Numbness replaces everything and a refreshing paralysis takes all feeling. The hand given to me at birth and taken from me a little after jerks, grasping at air and ghosts. Catching shooting stars. Nothing else makes an effort to stir, beyond my chest as it makes hard work of taking staccato gasps. Breathe. I cannot move my head, and so I am left looking over and up at an ornate fireplace dominating the room.
There is a painting of a mountain above it inside a gold-gilt frame, only now beginning to flake where too many rapid heating and cooling cycles above the hearth has flexed the careful leafing past its elastic limit. The artist tells a story of transition, in broad brush strokes thick enough to see the individual bristles permanently indented. Verdant green circles the mountain base – vibrant and full of life. Crowded, competing; vying for the same resources and perhaps, made worse for it. Low-hanging fruit. They are indistinct, just a mass of something with no definition or uniqueness. No challenge.
The air grows thinner and life wilts in the ascent; surrendering to pointed glacial rock and wind-whipped trees stripped of anything but sharp needles to fend off the occasional challenger. Now there is detail, clarity of form. Competition. An emerging tier above the average. At the summit, there stands nothing but the mountaintop, triumphant. Unassailable. Mighty. A snow-capped resting place; a freezing mausoleum for all those that have scaled its heights for the privilege of dying – failed and alone. Pristine and bathed in focus. A Champion.
This is how my conscious mind chooses to spend what might be its final chance to think anything. Meanwhile, my autonomic being is busy giving the former a second chance. Fight. The urge to breathe is magnified ten-fold, lungs straining with the direction – the order – to fill. Adrenaline surges, burning up my blood and replacing it with a distilled rocket fuel. All of this is in service to my heart.
Worn out, stressed beyond maximal tolerance. Fight.
My heart. It belongs to me, but it is not mine. The ridged knot of scar tissue drawing a pink rope from sternum to navel was the door cut in to welcome it. Install it. Make ready the design. A replacement for the god-given one that, like my hand, was taken from me too soon. Improved.
It twists and wails behind aching ribs, swollen and sore. Beating with a weak, turgid effort Fight! It wants to give up – I can feel the fatigue, undercutting numbness and pain. Fight! After all, it has worked tirelessly for two people now. How many more? For how much longer? Until it is done. It was never designed for such hardship, to be pressed into some involuntary servitude in a second life. Suffering is so very good for the soul. Breaking the pact from cradle to grave implicitly signed by every one of us. Voided by blood and fire.
These are questions for the self-aware, and the animal I am now has no time to consider them, so rocket fuel arrives and ignites a cardiac combustion chamber. My heart bucks and judders and flexes every fragile artery with the violence visited on it. For a few moments numbness retreats and the pain resumes; agonising. Whole-body and all-soul.
This cannot last. A temporary reprieve between the threat of death now and in a few minutes’ time. Only the interval has varied.
She is at my side, but I cannot hear her words clearly. Her panicked face passes in front of my view of the mountain, obscuring the base and leaving only the untarnished, magnificent desolation of its peak and summit. The point below which all crane their necks up and wonder and the point above which only one can stand, regarding their lessers with the contempt deserved. Briefly, I wonder if this is what my Resplendent Hurricane sees from her unassailable vantage point.
She fidgets with a black leather case and in her panic, her sweat-slicked fingers slip against the brass catch. Eventually it opens and she pulls the hypodermic needle free, shearing away the plastic safety sleeve and plunging it through a foil top.
The adrenaline reaches the apex of its burn and for a few moments, I have a little freedom to think and to feel. Fight!
“Cassieopia …” I rasp and she stops, hands trembling. The point of the needle wanders in a wide circle in front of my eyes. She leans towards me.
Focus. “Take … It off …”
No. At first she does not understand and I do not have the strength to say it again. It takes precious more moments to compute and, blessedly, realisation dawns. Then she hesitates as if this is some sort of test. Stop this.
“Promise …” I manage. Enough. “Promise on your faith.”
Finally, she understands and accepts and reaches behind my head. There is a moment of more pain, more pressure as she twists the ratchet in the wrong direction and then … Relief. StOp– The straps fall away and now only sweat is left holding the composite mask to my face. Gently, Cassieopia prises the porcelain free and for the first time in so very long, someone sees me. And smiles.
There is a connection now, a bond of sorts. Not simply tools to wield, but the people operating them. Inevitable, given the great design all three of us – my Resplendent Hurricane included – have set in motion. For Cassieopia’s part, she is virtuous, and in that duty collects all sin to her. Amber’s, mine. A wider world sinking into depravity faster than it can invent new ways to debase itself. She is a moral heatsink which draws out the ethical poison of our decision-making, leaving us free to act and not think of the consequences. Dividends that were already making an instrument of lethality that bit more exceptional …
The mountain and the flower girl named after the stars begin to dull. I blink away the colour from her face, and then all the discrete detail of the summit – thick snow and hard rock – blurs together. Something sharp cuts into my neck, but I think it is too late.
I think about my heart as it falters, slows. So tired. After all, it has worked tirelessly for two people now. How many more? For how much longer?
I think I know the answer. Not for very much longer at all.
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[The Rapture]
We are all defined by our connections with others, and the exchanges we make in-between. The ties that bind. These external delineations are subtle – after all, it is obvious where the sensory input of one person ends and another begins. We are all individuals, complete and independent regardless of how reliant we might be on others. The sum of the parts. You cannot live inside someone else’s skin, and you cannot scald yourself over a thousand miles’ distance away because your sister did so. You can still feel it.
And yet, the closeness we enjoy with such significant others leaves us open to a different kind of damage. Poison delivered by relationship, injected directly into the soul and finding the mark as surely as hypodermic through flesh into a vein. Wounding-by-proxy. Betrayal.
Our own, internal, neural networks are mappable. Quantifiable. Magnetically imaged and coloured for ease of interpretation. Lie still and please try not to move. Swarmed around by learned men and women who poke and prod and try to elicit specific reactions or suppress contraindications. Help me Doctor. Our wider networks, however, are barely qualifiable. Familial, friendship, acquaintanceship-based. Multiple tiers, stacked hierarchically and yet somehow also oddly coexisting: where flesh-and-blood are strangers to one another, and those no more related than any single pair of people are closer than perhaps even siblings.
Curious then, to think about how these wider social and societal networks that we are not directly connected to – that have no Latinised nerve cluster assigned filling the pages of some laborious medical textbook – influence us. Help us. Affect us. Support us. Can be weaponised against us.
How can we use this offensively?
There is nothing revolutionary about eliminating enemies through targeted destruction of those closest to them. That is simply strategy. Cold logic. Colonel John. A Warden described a series of five rings, a beautiful euphemism for “targets”, which could be used to achieve victory of which only the outermost circle represented anything approaching traditional warfare. Death. Only there do we find the thrust of a bayonet, riding up as it cuts through flak armour and deflects against the sternum; the kick and whip-crack of a rifle muzzle as the trigger is squeezed hard. Watch the life drain from their eyes.
Focus on the other four rings instead. Eliminate the will of your foe to fight and you do not have to meet his armoured columns across the plains or spin in the hellfire thermals of air-to-air combat. They will still fight. He will fold before ever meeting you in battle. In war, such things are tolerated – at least for a while. However we are not at war and despite the bravado, brinkmanship and balls already on display across the wider SCW roster, the Blast From The Past tournament is not being contested under Geneva Conventions.
So we must be a little more surreptitious. Measured. Killing is absurd. Agreed. Besides, you cannot learn any lessons if you are dead, and the great design underway to deliver the Rapture is fundamentally one of lessons to be learned. And applied. And suffered.
So, we cannot simply eliminate connections – people – wholesale. Even if we could do such a thing, vengeance is an incredible motivator and an inexhaustible supply of fuel by which the wronged can extract truly powerful retribution. Revenge. But they are too important to ignore completely as a legitimate opportunity. Take the special bond that Miss Kat Jones shares with my very own Resplendent Hurricane, Amber Ryan. She is so very lost.
Before this tournament, such things would have been of no importance to me. They are so important. My beloved Miss Ryan has already set the sky on fire as she soars sunward, and there is no reason to look back at the rapidly shrinking Terra Firma. Except to miss home. Still … Sisters of the Heart and Violence, to use Miss Jones’ own words. How useful that information could yet prove to be. What a delicious happenstance. What a tragedy.
Who forms the most critical nodes of your wider network, Kat? Who are you when we strip away all those interdependencies between you and those most important to your self worth and value. Your friends. What do we find when the mosaic is decompiled and the first piece, the truest measure of self – internal image, just a little girl from Cincinnati – is left as the only element in play? The truth. I think we find you are nothing but a shallow composite; an output created by the sum of inputs provided by everyone else. But how to test this hypothesis? How to model the means to break you?
The experiment is already underway. Scientifically grotesque. Your beloved Angel, Miss Ryan, becomes more distorted with each passing week … At least, from your ignorant reference point rolling in the mud with the rest of the unworthy and unsighted, blinking up at the sun with squinting eyes. Looking for a little hope. Instead, in actuality, she rises resplendent and mighty and disregards the earthly concerns of people like you. Her friends. Your sisterhood is broken, over. Rendered obsolete and unfit for a new design and an accompanying age in SCW.
Has she called you? Did she wish you luck? Did you call her?
So have very many others. This user’s message box is full. I am sorry.
How does it feel to know your most intimate interdependencies, the fundamental bearers of the network that defines you, cannot muster the interest or energy to do anything but disconnect? There are so many more worse things than death. Such apathy is a very special kind of misery. Agony. Amber has advanced beyond the petty considerations of your otherwise meaningless friendship. Lost. You talk of shared struggles as if they have built some unconquerable wall of solid stone, but it is made of nothing more than rock shale.
Building sand castles on the beach like a child aping the vast industries of man; silver tubing, heat exchangers, condensate towers and flares burning brightly against the star-studded sky. Poisoning it and everyone. We do not hear you and we certainly do not see you above the glory of our works. I hear you.
Do not misunderstand me. She is lying. You will not be struck down by her – nothing as vulgar as mere violence. For even the absence of an input leads to pain. We become conditioned to expect them – perhaps not so different from the machines we make to do our work in production lines all across this modern world – and in their absence, we flail and worry. Is it our fault? Was it something explicit, like a cross word, or implied in body language? Something we failed to say, or do? A misinterpretation? Such a very special kind of misery. Was it my fault?
I am sure the increasingly desperate calls you left her, red MESSAGE WAITING light pulsing forlornly, say more in pseudo-response than any reply – that you will never get – could do.
The heart of a person is not in their chest, after all – it is in their friends. Agreed. A distributed cardiac system built on emotions over haemoglobin, feeling replacing plasma. Ignorant of a circulatory system stretching across all the planet and her oceans, independent even of the mighty interval of time; of mortality itself. The heart of the world. To break your heart, Kat, all I have to do is turn them from you. Not against you, merely away. Without ever laying a finger on you, I will slip the blade between your ribs and push up. And what are you without heart?
A little girl from Cincinnati, Ohio. Nothing but history. The past hung over a fireplace in a gilt-gold frame, acting as a reminder – a Blast From The Past – while the present endures and the future prepares to write itself. Better to die now than live in it. You are nothing more than a spectator. A moon in circle of the world of Mark Cross, where titanic battle will be wrought in a Paradise.
Do you feel the asymmetry? The Imposter Syndrome? You do not belong in this equation or conversation. You are an aberration, a random integer spoiling the set sequence. Stand aside. Stand and fight.
I have not taken your sister from you, or turned her against you. She has. I have simply given her the tools to think, and with that newfound insight see that you were never a sister to her at all. A burden to be released, in pursuit of so much more wonderful things.
Accept your role in all of this – nothing. To no-one.
You are unworthy of consideration for inclusion in our grand design, but you will still be uplifted. Better to be left alone. I would not leave you behind in the dark. The footnote you provide in Paradise, Nevada will serve for those more worthy to follow in magnificent destruction.
Welcome to the Rapture.
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[The Now]
I can feel her gaze dipping below mine with every turn of my head towards her, trying to avoid line of sight, only to rise back up and threaten to bore through my skull until the cycle repeats itself again. Wallflower.
“Yes?” I ask.
Cassieopia demurs, muttering something non-committal until it becomes obvious the lighthouse of my vision has stopped its rotation and rests solely on her. The spotlight burns through, after a while. Speak.
“Why still wear it?” She says, eventually. “Now that I know–”
“You do not know me,” I interrupt and the edge in my voice makes her recoil, like a physical cut to the skin of an outstretched hand. Savour it. I wait, letting the psychosomatic pain linger for a while, underlining the point. “You have seen a part of me.”
“In time,” I continue, and she does look back up where before she might have stayed staring at the floorboards, “You might know me. If everything we are working towards comes true.”
Nodding – she does not really understand, not yet – Cassieopia reaches down for a leather binder. The cover is embossed with flowers, intricately stamped and blooming. Childish.
“Your tag-team partner …” She begins. Her words trail off, and I realise she has interpreted the change in my body language, obvious given the stakes. To be expected to rely on a stranger, particularly one who is not part of the grand design, so to speak, so completely to achieve an aim is an unsettling prospect for anyone. Unacceptable. Impressive adaptation. A clear evolution in Miss Mares but not a new skill. She was already a reader of people, to some extent.
With some effort I manage to sit up in the chair, a hand pressed hard against the scar running down my chest to settle pooling fluid underneath my inflamed skin, I nod. Endure it. “Please continue.”
“Bill “Bulldog” Barnhart – the reigning Roulette Champion.”
Looking up from her so-called notes, Cassieopia suddenly closes her folder, apparently finished before she had even begun. The silence stretches on until the context has worked itself out inside her mind and she offers nothing but a shrug. “There wasn’t really a whole lot to go on. He does most of his talking directly to scheduled opponents, isn’t really one for taking off the mask …”
“If you’ll pardon the pun,” She added with something suspiciously approximating a smirk. Take it from her face. This new confidence intrigues me, but now is not the time.
“You have nothing else?”
Cassieopia purses her lips for a moment. “I can tell you he doesn’t like keyless entry security systems and …”
She frowns, trying to pluck some further insight from the ether; not quite important enough to make it onto a summary page one sentence long. “He once roasted a scammer live on-air pretending to be Microsoft Tech Support.”
He is feeling without filter, then. Useful. Impulse arrives almost concurrently with thought, and reaction is far too slow to offer any resistance. A walking example of Newton’s First Law – Inertia in action. In some ways, this is welcome: why must everyone carry a multifaceted story spun around threads of tragedy and hope? Complexity breeds contempt. Deep, existential questions that torture the inner-self and find meaning in everything where there is nothing. Perhaps occasionally, life and those living it are no more complicated than a man shouting angrily into a speakerphone at a Sales Representative from Vivent Home Security.
“The Bulldog is about to experience his own personal Oh Shit moment. Do you know what that is?”
Her head jerks, surprise written across her face, confusion.
“In the words of my unsolicited Tag-Team Partner himself, an Oh Shit moment is that singular point at which you finally receive something you have coveted and lusted for and desired … Only to find it is so much more than you thought. So much more. Something you do not think you can handle. A sinking feeling, a gut-twisting sensation, that you cannot cope with what has come into your possession …” He cannot.
Levering myself up from the chair, I turn away. “I am Mister Barnhart’s Oh Shit Moment. Fortunately for the Principal of his so-called “School of Hard Knocks” – what does that mean, exactly? – I am content to act as a visiting lecturer. He does not need to cope with me; just survive sufficiently long to make Paradise, Nevada exactly that in more than name.”
Cassieopia’s frown deepens until the lines across her forehead cut shallow grooves in the skin. “You already did your research on him. So why ask me?”
I do not answer, making my way with some effort towards the double-set doors leading out from the sitting room. Consider him. Thoughts remain on Bill Barnhart. As Roulette Champion, his ability to stand resolute against endless challengers has been repeatedly demonstrated, speaking volumes for his resilience. Sacrificial protection. To carry a target of any kind is to know the agony of a million superficial wounds, each one adding to the corporate suffering until the back breaks under the accumulated load of years and enemies. Spoken like a Painted Hurricane …
He is robust. He will need to be.
“How do you know I won’t tell anyone what I saw?”
The subject change is breakneck, forcing me to stop and look back at her. Very good. Instead of replying, I simply cock my head to the side. Cassie laughs – the first time she has felt comfortable enough to do so. “I don’t know why I asked.”
Faith is a key component of her virtue. A necessary evil. It will be sorely tested in the coming times, with all manner of secrets and shames which she alone must carry. Ultimately, the design we work tirelessly to realise will take it from her and everything else interconnected and interdependent. Poison her. There is no way to separate the belief system from the personality, and so no means to split it from the person. No way to save her from the fate she entered into willingly, if ignorantly. Deliver her to it.
I would not save her if I could. Agreed. Sacrifice is a key requirement although, perhaps in this case and ultimately, suffering will not be particularly good for Cassieopia’s soul. It will still be enjoyable …
There is no alternative. Faith is a key component of her virtue. Without it she is nothing. And now, without it, I am nothing.
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[The Rapture]
The grandeur and invincibility of a mountain is not solely defined by its absolute physical imposition. Size brings power, but how that power is translated ultimately determines true greatness. Strength. Everest stands almost as a cliché above every competitor in stratospheric reach, where the air itself struggles to maintain molecular cohesion and the slopes are littered with the brightly-coloured windbreaker-corpses of the weak and unprepared. It is a formidable challenge which can – and does – kill those unworthy of it and it has generated an entire mythos bright in the mind’s eye of the thrillseeker and the adventurer. It has become a standard. A metric for adversity and victory.
And yet look a little deeper, and judging the scale of the task by physical imposition alone spins a false narrative.
The people littering her slopes are unlucky, under-equipped or unsuited to the attempt. Her summit, once conquered by great heroes of men, has become the reserve of naïve little girls from Cincinnati, Ohio. Well-worn paths winding up and through the permafrost altitudes are littered with holiday detritus and Human waste. Shit. It is an illusion of grandeur and invincibility – nothing more than a toilet standing nine thousand metres high. A meaningless metric. Fool’s championship gold. A false goddess.
Absolute physical imposition misleads us. Leaves us obsessing over how high instead of how tough. Instead, we should look at the likelihood of success. How probable is it that a prospective challenger will succeed in scaling the summit? Taking it from the previous incumbent and becoming the standard. Champion.
Instead, perhaps we should look to a more worthy contender in our metaphorical comparison; The Siren of the Himalayas – K2. Four times more likely to take the lives of its challengers, it is a widowmaker; a summit many attempt and few reach for the pyrrhic prize of a tortured, hypoxic breath or three before scrambling back to save themselves. A Mountaineer's Mountain. Death.
The metric we choose to apply determines the scale of the task, the grandeur of the potential victory and the invincibility of that summit. How likely are we to survive, to win?
Thoughts naturally turn, then, to what metric to apply to the equivalent and literal peak of the Blast From The Past tournament, Mark Cross. With two victories to his name already, it is much less metaphor and much more reality to say he is the summit against which a dozen teams will dash themselves against black glacial rock and biting winds. Titanic, unyielding. Brave. He looks down, not up at those scrambling across the face of the tournament; desperately trying to find purchase on taut, swinging lines of multicoloured rope. The tournament hopes of some will die by their own mistakes and omissions, he will kill the rest.
It is not a question of establishing if you have the credentials or ability to win, Mark. You have, you do. You did – Twice. The question is to establish whether the resultant grandeur of your reputation, the invincibility of your achievement, is set against the correct metric. Are you mighty because you are the graveyard of the best sent against you? Are you the Mountaineer's Mountain? Deserving. Or are the tales of your physical imposition based on families’ weeping for the death of badly-prepared students on a gap-year adventure gone tragically wrong to Everest?
When the Bulldog and myself come to scale your heights in Paradise, Nevada, will we pass your other challengers dying alone in caves, huddled in thermal blankets surrounded by their own shit and spent oxygen bottles? Alone. Or will our tournament lives end cold and exposed, on the jagged rocks of a lonely widowmaker attempted by few and scaled by you alone?
George Bell, a member of the legendary American Expedition of 1953 to K2 once remarked, “It is a Savage Mountain that tries to kill you.”
Are you the savage mountain, Mark? Will we die scaling something truly unbeatable, or are your glories and plaudits based on the meaningless struggles of little children, fools, and competitors named Kat Jones?
Mark, you are a champion of this climb beyond compare. Untouchable. The summit to be scaled. It is now time to test, empirically, whether your mountain – whether you – deserve that reputation. I am so very much looking forward to finding out. I think you will enjoy teaching me.
Away from the man, the metaphor and his mountain, I wonder, however – how have all your Florida summers prepared you for a return to winter? Fairweather. Your exploits speak for themselves, and yet it is difficult to think that giant inflatable pink flamingos make effective training partners. Except, perhaps, in being more resilient and robust than your tournament partner, Miss Jones.
I do not think she is ready for this, and I am very sorry for what will happen as a consequence. Save her.
A great design is in the offing within SCW. A Rapture, something you have not seen from your swimming pool in Orlando made from flowergirls and hurricanes and it is so very close to completion. While you have been impressing the hired help with your NFL-vintage catching skills, a vast clockwork machine of distorted angels and stars, turning on its celestial bearings, ticks inexorably towards zero. Grotesque.
You have spent too long on top of career mountains and pink flamingos in the Sunshine State, making exclusive visits to metaphorical Ski Resorts at neighbouring peaks to toast and hear sycophantic choirs sing your praises. Down at basecamp amongst the brightly-coloured tents, deep in the shit, however, everything has changed. Corrupted. You would not recognise SCW now if you saw it from behind your Ray Ban Wayfarers …
… But I promise you will see it at the end of your great tumble from height. When the broken bones heal and the purple bruises turn rainstorm grey, your convalescence boosted by all the White Claw you can drink, I think you will love what I have done with the place. You might be Champion of The Climb, but you remain a Blast From The Past in every conceptual, metaphorical and literal sense; the painting of a mountain in that flaking, gold-gilt frame. You are that enduring present, but it is now time for you to stay where you belong – within easy commuting distance of Disney Resorts.
The future is preparing to write itself, and you are not welcome in it. Unless, of course, you would like to stay and help me in my Rapture. I think you would make such a wonderful addition to my machine. Resist.
