An Interview with John the Apocalyptic Schizophrenic

John: I’ve been hearing them again, in my head, at night, every night.  The voices. The Satanic voices.  Dr. Domitian gave me pills and the voices went away, and I could sleep.  The voices were keeping me awake, but the pills let me sleep.

Interviewer: Why did you stop taking the pills?

John: The pills made the demons keep quiet but all the while I was taking the pills the angels stopped visiting me, and I was lonely without them. See…I don’t believe in hypnotism, but this hypnotist’s crystal allows me to see people.  When look through this crystal I can see you; I can really see you.  The You that you can’t even see.  I can see You.  I can see if you’re a good person or not.  I can see if you’re a bad person pretending or if you’re just bad at pretending.

The elders are calling to me.  Greybeards and white hair.  I want to think that I can trust them. I want to believe that they have some sort of long acquired wisdom, knowledge of secret things, old hidden things forgotten by the rest of the world.  But I don’t trust them.  I think that they’re lying to me about something.  It’s the elders who take away the medication.  They took the pills when I stopped taking them.  But now they’re demanding an explanation.  “Why have you stopped taking the pills?”  I told them the same thing that I’m telling you:  the archangels came and talked to me and I missed them while I was taking the pills.  I’m lonely without them, so damn lonely. 

I travel alone.  I ride the bus alone, except for the angels.  Dr. Domitian tells me that they’re an illusion.  He says that the angels that visit me are just illusions.  Like time.  Time is an illusion.  Everything’s an illusion.  I’m not sure that we’re really here, living on this planet, trying to be good.  What is good?  All I have are these illusions of goodness that lack context and matrix.  All I have are these questions and counter-questions. Is it lawful?  Is it awful?  I’m a hostage to fears-but not my fears. I’m a hostage to someone else’s fears, to everyone else’s fears.  I’m afraid of everything and everyone.

When the end of the world began it began in silence, unobserved, without fanfare.  It didn’t begin in the halls of power in Washington D.C. or in smoke filled rooms at the Pentagon.  The end of all things did not begin in the secret corridors of the Kremlin.  Neither was it beneath the vaulted, painted ceilings of the Vatican, nor was it in the narrow streets of Jerusalem.  The End of the World began in-of all places-Des Moines, Iowa.

***

The dragon woke slowly; four thousand years of sleep weighed heavily upon him but now he was awake again.  His thick, hemocyanic blood pumped through his veins and arteries.  He opened his eyes and began swimming for the surface.  His tail, as long as some trees are tall, swept back and forth, propelling him toward the light above.  Great humpbacked whales, for millennia the benevolent rulers of the abyss, saw his ascent and trembled.  Their cetaceous songs became long, deep keening wails of terror. 

The human inhabitants of the planet-living on less than a quarter of the globe, smug and self-satisfied, did not understand the change in the song.  Neither would they have acknowledged them even if they had understood.  The flattered themselves into believing that they ruled and subdued the earth, that they filled it with teeming good things.  But the Beast from the Sea would teach them.

Dr. Domitian stood at the edge of the water, laughing.  Be careful-this is open to dangerous misreading.  Even as they read the letter they are under his sword, but they do not repent.  They still have not learned; the process must, MUST, continue. The pogroms in Poland, the Inquisition in Spain, the massing armies in Manchuria-these are the things that consume and drive him.  He does them with power, with power and great relish.

The enemy, that ancient serpent, the Beast from the Sea, emerges from the deep, planting his clawed feet upon the dry sand. Rivulets of water stream down his armored scales.  He snorts, blowing a cloud of water vapor into the air before roaring-a death roar, full of evil and malice. He combines the pessimism of Schopenhauer with the despair of de Sade; he is evil and unredeemable.  He is the world leader pretend.

“I am everything!”

Preparing ammunition for wild-eyed men, science fiction spies of modern politics, cynical, cryptic, cyanide visionaries.  Alas…Alas!  The end and black smoke billowing over Jerusalem.  Roman legions unfurled across three continents with their tanks, and helicopters, and jet fighters.  From the fog shrouded moors of Scotland to the sunny slopes of Spain.  From the blood drenched sands of North Africa to the spice and incensed streets of the Orient.

“I am Everything!” Dr. Domitian is ready to find fault with God.  His internal organs are exposed like an anatomical model: tar clogged lungs folded over a blackened heart, shriveled liver grey and oozing.  His bowels are swollen and bloated with fetid gas.  Power surges through his fists, streaks of blurred light. Blue sparks into the dark.

John: “I bind and command you, in the name of the holy arch-angels, to stand and to depart, to leave this terrestrial sphere.  Leave here and return to your spiritual realm to receive what is your due.” 

Interviewer: Have you ever been a patient of Dr. Tarrec?  Dr. P. L. Tarrec?

John: No.  I don’t think so.

Interviewer: Do you know Dr. Tarrec?  Have you ever met him?

John: …

Interviewer:  It says here that you’re a schizo-fantasist, an Alchemysticist.  Can you explain what that means?

John: I drew a summoner’s circle on the floor with wax and salt.  I lit candles.  Inverted crosses hung on the walls.  Dr. Domitian says that I was staging a crime scene with disparate elements drawn from numerous traditions.  Egyptian, Greek, popular Satanism … in a buffet styled amalgamation.  But I don’t remember doing this.  I thought it was a dream, a vision of … I’m sorry. What was the question?

 Interviewer: Is something bothering you, John?  Would you like to stop for a while?

John: There are arguments in the apartment next to mine. All night long, I can hear them fighting.  Screaming.   And outside there are police sirens.  But they don’t stop here.  Someone crashed into a telephone pole.  Sparks showered the street.  News helicopters hover over us.  A warehouse is on fire, but they’re still fighting next door.

Interviewer: John?

John: I’m not talking about decent, ordinary people, here.  I’m not decent.  I’m not ordinary.  I told you, already: I’m the devil.  I deserve this.  Like Daemon and the Omen, I can’t be trusted.  I can’t be helped.  It wasn’t enough.  It will never be enough.