Black-Market Manna

An occult metafiction in 5 parts (1)

Jul 12, 2024

This novella appeared originally in Angry Old Man Magazine, Volume 2 in 2018. It has undergone a few updates and visuals. No further angel meat was consumed in the process. Enjoy!

And now whereas my father did lade you with a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke: my father hath chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.

1 Kings, 12:11

The Interlocking Nightmares of Flowerbomb and Bonestorm

“He had the unfortunate malady of being allergic to poetry.”

Vespasian believed that Flowerbomb and Bonestorm were lovers—Flowerbomb being the passive one. Marie contended they were best friends from very early on. I, Vasmatzidis, thought that they were brothers—mainly because their methods of doing some of life’s most pedestrian things seemed unorthodox enough to must have been the product of a sibling situation abnormal from the start: that of being twins.

Away from each other, Flowerbomb and Bonestorm made little to no sense on their own. Together, they formed a unified whole so thorough it was convulsive, tied together at long last by strands of sickening logic. It came from what they read and how they read it. We called it exegetical teamwork.

It’s one thing to read a German occultist's diary; it’s quite another to read only every other page, initially scratching your head and heaving with anxiety on why things are so hard to figure out, only to later mesh your half-formed ideas together with those of your counterpart to form a clockwork not so easily attainable by one mind alone.

We’ll never know what exactly happened in that Berlin park during the years of the Great War. Marie and I visited it last autumn and found a few things alluded to in their writings: the concrete paths that wound through the bright green expanse, chopping it up in geometrically pleasing parcels: the cherub-choked water fountains, the rock gardens, the white bench on which they sat while reading their last book together. It was an eldritch Dealey Plaza, an unsettling serenity airdropped by biplanes in the middle of the capital to provide refuge for a couple of bumbling fools too obsessed with arcana to be interested in their country’s struggle. They overdosed on that Biblical no-no called wisdom, and got served the eviction notice.

Neither of us had ever been to Germany. Marie was of some Prussian extraction, though she spoke German only because she taught it to herself. She proved a flawless tour guide through the park.

I sat down on the left side of the bench, dragging her down with me by her lambskin overcoat. Actually, she and I would have to switch sides to create any verisimilitude. Reading my mind, she shot up and spun around me. I scooted over to allow her room. She looked at me with a smile and asked, “Are you going to wither away?”

Fools that we were, we hadn’t brought a book with us to the park, so our mimesis came to an end. Marie stood up and surveyed the park. A wind sent her loose black hair east. Autumn in Berlin was beautiful, gray sky and all. The leafless trees in the park were alive in their deadness, clawing at the heavens in retribution for having been so stripped. Without saying a word, Marie went and lost herself in the labyrinth of walkways. I remained sitting on the bench, smoking.

It was Bonestorm who had wandered along the paths after having read his way into a soulcrushing jam. Or so Flowerbomb says. Lover, twin, buddy—Flowerbomb wrote about his counterpart in a highly disjointed style. They may have written the same way they read. Each one of them read every other page, so that they could later put their halves together to watch coherence take shape. Bonestorm, at that time, was long too gone out of his gourd to have been able to contribute to his own drawn-out eulogy.

Flowerbomb, as if anticipating criticism of his counterpart’s physical weakness, claimed in his testimony that Bonestorm was mentally fit to weather any intellectual tempest, though he had been cursed since childhood to have the unfortunate malady of being allergic to poetry. Bonestorm therefore had to be very cautious when dealing with literature. Rimbaud, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Emily Dickinson were off-limits.

“Finally, someone who could handle the Beats,” Marie muttered.

When it came to prose, however, he could join Flowerbomb in the readings, though a dust mask and surgical gloves were in order, and would be used until there was evidence that the work had no traces of being a prose poem.

Which was why he and Flowerbomb started out with Pavlov, Euclid, Pauling, Galton, Darwin, and Archimedes, all of whom trafficked in the poetry of mechanics. And that was precisely why Vespasian, Marie, and I took forever in finding out why a perusal of tracts put out by some hermetic megalomaniac led to Bonestorm’s downfall.

(Los Amantes [1963], oil on Masonite, by Remedios Varo)

Flowerbomb wrote:

At first, he and I went to the park for weeks on end. He liked it there. So did I. We liked the breezes that came through, and the chirping birds. It was rare that another human being would come upon the spot where we sat. Few souls would even come or go down the winding paths. So we knew we found our spot. Each time before we cracked open a book, I kissed him on the cheek. I read the left pages and he the right. As we wound down the paths on our way home, we discussed what each of us read and put everything together to much delight.

(a lacuna of what probably amounts to an entire page)

The poetry of florid language pales in comparison to that of machines and notions. Prosody doesn’t hold a candle to physics. While poets muse about dewdrops and rosy-fingered dawns, decorating them through metaphor and exaggerating them with properties they don’t even possess, we concern ourselves with the Round Table of Nelvage and proprioception. Nightmares, we have learned, are just incomplete dreams or snippets thereof, which accounts for their disagreeable aspect. Our nightmares joined together became fantasies. A light shone forth upon our revelations as soon as they were pieced together.

The Round Table of Nelvage

Afraid that I would lose Marie for good, I stood up from the bench and wound down the concrete paths in search of her. I found her sitting down at a similar bench, her black-haired head buried in her pale hands. She heard my footfalls and glanced up at me with a perfunctory smile.

She demanded that we return to the hotel. She wanted to re-read a few passages of Flowerbomb’s account.

In her room, she made me sit down on the loveseat. I did so, and she took the place next to me, cracking open Flowerbomb’s book. We were close enough to each other where, once open, the book would bloom over both of our laps. It was a musty old piece, likely a first (because only) edition by some subsidiary or vanity press. Its binding was at the point of disintegration, clearly from overuse.

The text was slightly faded and was of those tricky typefaces that seem every ten pages or so to shrink and grow to the eye that burns past the text. It was my kind of book—obscure and looking to become very wholesome. Like Etruscan porn. I began reading from the top of the right page, which sat over my lap. Sure enough, Marie had begun at the left. Such a way of reading books struck me as not just unnecessary, but entirely ineffective. Even if it were merely to deliberately deprive themselves of information so that their parlor game could be enacted later, the method was anti-logical, if not stupid. I quit reading Bonestormlike to vent this opinion. Marie shushed me. My eyes then followed down the orthographical trail her own had just blazed.

If not mistaken, the scene viewed from the very park bench where I had found Marie sitting only an hour earlier was being described in detail. It was the site of some heinous event, unknown to us because of Bonestorm’s missing half of the memoir. Marie flipped a few pages backwards. “Here,” she said, mashing the pages open with her palms, “here is where Bonestorm’s half begins to go missing.” At about the halfway point in the book, lacunae appear on every page, marked by parentheses. There’s no telling what had been written by whom up to that point. The account flows like an ordinary coming-of-age story of two kids from early twentieth-century Berlin. Then Bonestorm’s allergic reaction to poetry is mentioned. Soon after, the account jumps from first-person plural to first-person singular, though the disjointed flow suggests that Bonestorm was meant to have added his own half.

I called Vespasian back in Massachusetts. He was not at home, so I left a message. Antiquarian bookseller that he was, he knew every other one across the United States. I told him to get his hands on a companion book to The Interlocking Nightmares of Flowerbomb and Bonestorm, should one exist. I had a hunch that it did.

Marie doubted that the two names, translated to the German, would register. She was worried as I about the authenticity of the account. The only thing that kept us from deeming it a work of fiction was the sincerity of the authors’ tone; the allusions to a few historical events, however minor, and the use of real locales, meant nothing.

The next collegiate semester was a whole month away. We had time to mess around with decrepit geometers and biogeneticists. Marie read in German and I in English. Vespasian joined our reading party within the week. He had very little experience in hermeneutics, so we left to him the task of tying together the First Book of Enoch, evoked often by our nerdy Berliners, to the strange but entirely earnest accounts of Queen Elizabeth’s court astrologer, a mister John Dee.

The one social act that Flowerbomb and Bonestorm had allowed themselves was the frequenting of the so-called Black Velvet Cabaret. The kids likely got soused while watching and listening to the burlesque acts and paying visits to in-house frauen. I checked the place out and found that it had in fact existed at one point. It closed down in 1918, probably as a result of Versailles. The location underwent various incarnations. It was now a nail salon.

At the Black Velvet Cabaret, there was a number that they could not safely stick around to watch. It was a slow, though not to say any less bawdy, number called “Your Skrying Eyes.” The two of them had a little snit one night—Bonestorm saying it was time to leave, Flowerbomb safely entranced by the poetic song. It was because of that number, however, that they had got deep into Enochian. Flowerbomb would stay behind at a table, pounding back beers and listening to “Your Skrying Eyes”, while Bonestorm donned earplugs and plodded up the stairs, whoreward.

[Check back in a few days for Part Two.]

Thank you for reading Third-Eye LASIK. If you like what you just read, why not check out my brand-new novel? It’s an LA noir mystery with an alcoholic private detective, vegan crime bosses, guys who cut cocaine with borax, and AI Charles Manson.