CHANCE ISLAND
I
From the rocks beneath the lighthouse on Cathedral Point, you can see the wooded shores of Chance Island. When the sun sets, the burning light always sets the points of the trees on fire and, for an hour at sunset, the island looks radiant and alive. This is the hour when men forget the stories about Chance Island and their hands drift on the wheels of their engines. This is the hour when boats are pulled towards the west. You can read the warning on the nautical charts of Hammerstone Sound: steer clear of Chance Island at dusk. The chart has been used by fisherman, merchantmen, and boaters for over a hundred years and, other than changes made to the recorded depths along the shipping lane, the map hasn’t changed.
II
What are the stories of Chance Island? I can tell that you want to know. You can hear them over the creak of the rigging at the Fisherman’s Terminal. You can put your elbows on the worn planks of the bar at the Pelican and get any number of versions from the regulars whose asses have permanently molded the stools. You can buy a man a short glass of whiskey at the Alibi after midnight during the week and he will tell you a lie he knows about Chance Island.
But you don’t want to know the how of the wooded island, do you? You want to know the why. I won’t tell you the why. I will tell you the why not because I am a liar and I always tell the truth.
III
A generation ago, there were two fishermen who ignored convention and tradition. They used modern materials in their nets and sophisticated electronics to track the schools of fish. They fished before dawn and always sold their catch to the same fish monger. There are stories as to why. The one that was most likely true is that the older of the two brothers had once asked the fish monger if he could marry the monger’s only daughter. The fish seller had said no, telling the young fisherman that she wanted more for her daughter than a life of fish oil and fish scales. Fine, the fisherman said, if I bring you a lifetime’s worth of fish before I am thirty, will you let me drape your daughter in furs and silks and take her away from the salt air?
IV
The younger of the two fishermen understood his brother’s aspirations though he didn’t share the sibling desire to leave the stretch of the Hammerstone. Their father had raised them on the water and it provided for their lives. The younger brother wasn’t simple, but he understood the purity of a simple life. He wanted to be able to smell the fresh water of the Sound on the morning of his death. Besides, while his brother was fair-haired and strong and had large hands with delicate fingers, he walked with a limp and a scar twisted the corner of his left eye. He never forgot that chance could have been crueler and the wave beneath the boat could have been stronger. He could have lost the eye or his brother or both.
Chance is like that, you know. You don’t wonder at what might have happened, you simply hold out your hand and whether it be a hook or silver that lands in your palm, you close your fingers tight and hang on.
Which, not surprisingly, will bring us back to the Island.
V
His brother carried the last bucket of fish that he would ever carry up to the fish monger’s shop and placed it on the scale. The needle tipped past the top of the scale and he stripped off his gloves and his boots and his heavy waders. He stripped off his colorless sweater, removed his knit cap, and laid his fishing knife down on the counter. He piled the rest of his clothing in a neat stack next to the knife and stood before the fish monger and said, “I am done. I have left the sea.”
The younger brother sat on the back of the boat and watched the fish monger embrace her naked son-in-law. A week later when it finally sank in that his brother wasn’t coming back, he sold the boat that had been their father’s and went to work as a guide on a charter fishing boat.
VI
Fishing for sport wasn’t the same. He couldn’t find sympathy for the soft fingered clients who squealed when they pricked their thumbs with the large barbed hooks. His stories of the water lacked hyperbolic drama and the requisite sea monster. He didn’t know anything about stocks and bonds or the shifting price of gold and commodities. He looked at the dense row of trees on Chance Island and didn’t see virgin lumber that could lay in beautifully straight rows across the floor of a mansion. He didn’t wonder about the quail or ducks or other game birds nesting in the thick brush near the water’s edge. He didn’t count the number of points on the large buck that came out of the wood and stood on the shore of the tiny inlet at nightfall.
One day, close to a year after his brother had left the sea, a client looked to the west as the sun was firing the top of the trees. “How much would it cost to land me on the island?”
The charter captain laughed and didn’t turn his head. “More than you have.”
“I have a lot,” came the response. “Name a number.”
The captain did. And it was a ridiculous number.
“Done,” said the client, staring at the fire dripping down through the verdant trees.
VII
The problem was that the charter captain wasn’t so foolish as to actually set foot on the island. On the following morning as the fog swept across the bay, he stopped his boat well away from the rocks around Chance Island and pointed at the small dingy tied to the back of his boat. “This is as close as I get,” he said. “You’ll have to row the rest of the way. It’s too dangerous for larger craft.”
The client was carrying too many things and he stood there in the bow of the vessel, staring at the captain, blinking. He looked at the young fisherman. “I’ll pay you what I’m paying him to row me ashore. And back.”
The young fisherman had woken from a bad dream that morning, a dream where he died on the water, cold and alone, and he had been thinking about his brother and his new wife. They were in Paris. When the client surprised him with the offer, he had been staring out at the fog, wondering what it was like to live in Paris, out of sight of the sea.
The young fisherman looked at the small dingy with its old and cracked oars. “Sure,” he shrugged.
VIII
The client waited until the young fisherman had drawn the dingy up on the shore before disembarking from the boat. The wooden vessel rocked precariously as the client stepped across the bow, leaping clumsily ashore. His hiking boots left gouges in the sand that looked like teeth marks. “Two hours,” the client said, stripping the weather proofing from his long rifle. He spotted hoof prints and walked into the forest, his eyes following the tracks.
The young fisherman nodded at his retreating figure and sat down on a nearby rock to wait.
It took the fog a half hour to turn black and for the water to grow white and choppy in the tiny bay. In another thirty minutes, rain started to wash away both sets of prints in the sand. The young fisherman pulled the dingy farther up on the shore, throwing a loop of rope around a large rock. In another thirty minutes, he had to retreat to the tree line in order to stay dry. He crouched down on the mossy side of one of the tall pine trees. His tiny radio that kept him in touch with the fishing boat was filled with nothing but static, so he turned it off and put it in his pocket.
Thirty minutes later, he knew the client wasn’t coming back.
IX
The trees protected him from the rain and, after a few minutes of walking inland, he could no longer hear the sound of the surf pounding the rock-strewn shore. The upper branches of the trees bent and creaked overhead. Rain droplets threaded their way through the thick cover and became a glittering mist in the half-light. One of the legends of Chance Island is that the spirits of dead settlers still roamed the interior of the island, which wasn’t true because no one had ever settled Chance Island. The apparitions that were supposed to haunt the dark trees were probably hallucinations brought about by the presence of marsh gases. But, as the young fisherman discovered as he explored inward, the ground was too hard for both the formation and the expression of such psychedelic fumes.
The floating skulls were most likely conjured by the imagination of frightened explorers, the play of light against the leaves and shadows creating bulbous floating shapes that the imagination turned into baleful drifting female heads, their eyes lit with the captive light of the climbing sun, the black hair streaming behind them as they moved nothing more than the shivering leaves of the maple and poplar.
X
One does not come upon two paths in the wood. In the dark wildernesses, feverishly colored and populated by the mind, there is never a fork in the road. There is only a single path that leads you farther in. The dark woods are not a maze, but a snare.
The storm was fading, the movement of the trees less pronounced now. His clothes were soaked, but when he wiped the water from his face, it didn’t immediately grow damp again. He shook the excess moisture from his fingers.
The young fisherman heard a distant echo as if from thunder or a gun. He stopped, the tree limbs thrashing and groaning overhead, listening for another sound.
On his left, the tree women floated, darting and hiding behind the thick trunks of the poplars. Their eyes were the color of ripe limes and their mouths were filled with jagged teeth like triple rows of sixteen penny nails.
The young man looked behind him and couldn’t see the path.
XI
Eventually he found was a gold-colored tree with a black crow sitting in its branches. The bird’s eyes were streaming with fire and his talons were long and white like fingers of a dead man. The bark of the tree was hammered gold and it filled the surrounding forest with a yellow glow.
The only sign that anyone else had been there was a single dark spot on the trunk of the tree.
The young fisherman approached the tree and peered at the hole. He could smell the acrid scent of gunpowder and the metallic scent of the tree’s sap as it oozed from the wound. The bark was thin and splintered about the tear, crinkling outward like foil.
With the tip of his knife, he gingerly tapped at the hole and heard the metal sound of his blade striking metal. He pushed his knife carefully into the hole, feeling around the flattened bullet in the trunk of the tree. He worked it carefully, trying not to tear any more of the delicate gold foil that covered the tree. The wood underneath was smooth and dark red like young cherry.
The leaves overhead rustled as he found the base of the bullet and popped the projectile out of the tree trunk. It landed in his hand and he flinched, jerking his palm away. The metal cylinder was still hot.
He didn’t drop the bullet.
XII
“That won’t bring him back,” she said, flowing up from the heart of the golden tree, her limbs pulling and stretching into the branches of the tree. Her hair was fine copper and her lips were the color of the wood beneath the filigree bark. Her skin was the color of winter leaves.
“I know,” he said, putting the bullet into his pocket. “It seemed out of place.”
“The whole world is out of place,” she said, a shadow flickering across her teeth.
“Can you help me find the other man?” he asked.
“Is he your blood? Your friend?”
The young fisherman shook his head.
“Then why do you care what happened to him?”
“For the same reason I took the bullet out of the tree,” he said.
She laughed, and as she laughed, she grew taller and darker, her hair twisting and braiding into a thick black dome like the cap of a deadly mushroom. Her skin darkened and sprouted thorns and jagged flowers.
Around him, he could hear the tree women laughing too, their tittering voices like the drying screams of field mice as they were carried into the night sky by hunting owls.
XIII
The golden woman was gone; in her place was a dark majesty who cast a black shadow across the golden tree. The light was fading quickly, the reflections in the foil going out like the quiet death of cold coals. The young fisherman swallowed, trying not to let fear show in his voice. “What is to happen to me?” he asked.
“The same thing that happens to everyone who comes to the island,” she said, her voice now as terrible as it was sweet moments earlier. “Your blood is fed to the trees, your soft tissues are given to my ladies, and the hard bones that I cannot crack easily I break apart on rocks.”
“What about my brain?” he asked.
“Given to the gulls.”
“My liver?”
“Fed to the ferrets.”
“My intestines?”
“Used to build snares for other slow moving men.”
“My heart?”
Copper light flashed at the base of her neck as she turned her head away.
XIV
“You can’t eat my heart, can you?” he said.
She whirled on him, flowing down the tree like an enormous serpent, her thorns and jagged leaves rippling like the teeth of an eager saw. “I can and will,” she hissed. “I always save the tender little hearts.” She was growing larger, her black head spreading and opening like the hood of a cobra. “When they are so rich with fear. So tasty.”
The young fisherman thought of his dream again, the dream that had crawled down the length of his spine during the night and nested in the pit of his belly, throwing its black tail over the arch of his pelvis. He thought of dying, and he thought of the weather in Paris.
What did the rain taste like in Paris?
He looked up at the face of the forest queen and saw the copper light that still glowed beneath her plated skin. He lifted his chin, showing her his throat and chest.
She giggled, a wet bubbling sound, and bent her head towards his chest, her long fingers tapping at his breastbone, looking to find the space between his ribs.
He brought his face towards hers, and quickly gave her a kiss. As the young fisherman touched his lips to the hard cheek of the forest queen, he heard her voice whispering in his ear. “When you kiss her, you kiss me.” He closed his eyes and kissed her again.
XV
In Paris, on a morning close to a year after he left the sea, the older brother was woken by the tap-tap of rain against his window. He slipped carefully out of bed so as to not disturb his wife and her round belly and quietly opened the window. The rain came in, and he let it caress his hand. It tasted salty, and his heart ached suddenly for the sea. Behind him, his wife sighed gently, and he went to close the window. But before he latched it, he paused. “I’m happy for you, little brother,” he whispered.
XVI
There is no fork in the trail on Chance Island. There is only one way to the grove of the forest queen. There is the path by day and there is the path by night. There are two queens on Chance Island, and they walk the same path, but never together.
At night the dark queen rages through the woods, shaking the trees and throwing stones in the sea. She rages and howls because she is alone. And, in the morning when the young fisherman wakes and kisses her, she softens and sheds the hard shell she covers herself with during the night. He smiles and pulls out the snarls in her copper hair and brushes the curled thorns and shriveled leaves from her skin.
And he never dies, the young fisherman, because nothing—not even Death—dares approach his bed while she stands guard. And she never dies either because every day she is born again by his kiss.
THE NIHIL NATION MANIFESTO
[A Love Letter by Crash Nietzsche]
Love is a word. Death is a word. Hate is a word. God is a word. We build civilizations, erect towers and dig canals, with words. We slaughter entire cultures with words. The first word—the last word—was and will be: “No.” A cry, a whimper, a plea for help. No. This is how we began communication; this is how we will end it.
In fear. In disbelief.
No.
Listen.
There is nothing to say that hasn’t been said; there is nothing to write that hasn’t been written. Permutations. Combinations. Tiny symbols scratched on the wall. Brush strokes across the blank canvas. Everything is possible with the right combination. Everything will be revealed if you know the proper code. It’s all there, hidden in the letters. Fiat lux. This is the beginning. Amen. This is the end. So it be said, so it be written, so it be.
No.
Listen.
There is disease in the inkwell; there is venom in the water. Our tracts are written in blood; there is poison on our pages. We write to love, we write to kill. We write. We transcribe. We read. We speak. We sing. We pontificate.
Is anyone listening?
You cannot hear.
The corporate poison has been poured in your ears; their foul vapors have fogged and confused your brain. Their acids have burned your receptors and incinerated your sensitivity to the endless varieties of sound. Your molten flesh has cooled into scar tissue, blocking all but the basest of sounds—the grunts and squeals of reality soap stars. We clap our hands and caper like idiot children to the tin song of their simplistic jingles. Their rhythms of excess are our glazed fantasies. Our brains are endlessly raped by their dull cocks. Their febrile thrusts through our ear holes are the only contact we know and we take it deep—we take it hard—because we believe their touch is the finger of God.
Their rituals are the whitewash of mediocrity. Their gifts are your own livers and spleens and guts, handed back to you on a tarnished silver platter. Eat up, children, clean your plates. We work hard to give you shelter, to give you food, to give you everything. Gulp it all down. You cannot hope to survive without these home-cooked meals. Eat to live. Live to eat. It isn’t cannibalism when you eat your own flesh. Self-mutilation is self-modification; trans-humanization is the fading novelty of release, the Houdini trick by which we’ll escape the hook and the chain.
No.
Listen.
If you cannot fear, you cannot hear.
If you cannot lie, you cannot fly.
If you cannot bleed, you cannot heed.
If you cannot try, you cannot die.
Freedom is madness, madness is the freedom. Smash the chains of conformity. Shrug off the weight of complacency. Madness is the skeleton key that unlocks all doors. The madman is cast as the revolutionary, his psychosis is the vision of an evolved future. His ears are open, unblocked and untempered by the controlling paralytics.
Listen.
You do not sleep, you do not dream—what you are told is all that you do. To sleep, to dream: these are the stolen delights of insanity, of irregularity. You breathe what they tell you to breathe, you blink in the tiny darkness between commercials, your pulse is fed and directed by their pop jingles. You speak in unfinished thoughts, your tongue trapped by slogans and brand trademarks. Your life is ending one three-minute pre-programmed pop song at a time.
Your first and last mad thought was which of your mother’s tits to suck from first. (And you can’t even remember the taste of warm flesh in your mouth now.) Your New Mother is 130 channels with On-Demand and Pay-Per-View—ah, so many choices, so many ways to kill yourself. The digital clarity of her voice is a spike in your cerebellum, a VR finger pressed hard against your neural OFF switch.
Language has been taken from you, meaning and symbol co-opted by corporate brands. What you read is what you consume: this is the tongue you know. The single-use license fee for every syllable is but another drop of your blood, another scrap of your flesh. There is nothing in your soul but a debit account running backward.
Listen.
The word of God is not a word at all. It is a sound. It is the sound that requires no language, which came before language and which will ring out after language is gone.
Music does not require language. Music does not require your mouth. It does not need your hands or your feet. It does not need your eyes or your skin. It only needs your ears. Listen—my lost, desperate, fucked up children—listen and hear the sound of your salvation.
Throw your radios from your rooftops, put a hammer through the flat screen of your obscene televisions, smash the links of your compact disc chains. Melt your vinyl. Destroy it all, you poor monkeys, burn it all and learn to listen.
You cannot climb into the sky. You have dug your own pits, squatting in your own shit and piss, digging and digging and digging. There is no Heaven below.
The Nihil Nation is noise. It is the glory of the Tower of Babel. The pillar is complete and the lightning that comes down upon those who have built the tower cleaves their tongues. The one becomes many. Celebrate, my children, celebrate because no one can understand a fucking word you are saying!
Open your mouths, my monkeys, show me your tongues. Show me that you are ready for the Lightning of Heaven. Show me that you are eager for the Baptism of Rock and Roll.
Listen.
The harmonic convergence begins at home. We are all instruments. We have been marked with the gospel of pain, inscribed with the sermon of despair.
On the inside of our skins is the tattoo of divine instruction; on the inside we all carry the Word of God.
Whisper the word. Whisper it now.
Listen.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Nihil Nation Manifesto fills the interior of the booklet that accompanies the debut CD release of Crash Nietzsche and the Nihilators. An enigmatic revolutionary, Crash Nietzsche denied every attempt at an interview, referring all press requests to the manifesto and to his sermons delivered from the stage. The Nihilators played their last show on August 21st, 2—. During the encore, Crash was shot by both the drummer and the guitar player of the band. Neither was aware of the other’s intention, though in a later statement issued through his lawyer, the drummer claimed that he was the one who had killed Crash. He had, after all, used a sawed off shotgun. A number of sources claim to have seen numerous notebooks in Crash’s possession, filled with the singer’s unpublished material. No notebooks were ever recovered; all that remains is the manifesto from the liner notes.