In the quiet moments of his desperation, Barwis felt it grabbing at him. He felt it rising from the depths of the dusty and dark corners of his mind, sirenically and lustily tempting him. Fear. For all the armor of his projection, even Barwis was not immune. In myth and legend, there is a perception that valor exists in a vacuum, that the greatest of men, those self-realized demigods of achievement, are unwitting participants in a world gone soft. Society construes fear as the grandest of weaknesses. Fear breeds self doubt and self doubt breeds failure. This thought sat above Barwis like guillotiner’s blade and he trembled.
Barwis, before this unreasonable juncture of time and place, had felt fear only once. It had been on the night that he had taken his wife on their first date. He remembered parking his Firebird outside her parent’s house and listening to the silence that had been formerly displaced by the grumbling of his two Ram Air 400s. As he walked to the door, he remembered feeling as if he was on the cusp of something wonderful and terrifying, a gentle pause before a monumental leap.
His instinct, although a larval rendering of an emotional salt plain, had proven astute. Barwis knew he loved her the moment he saw her standing in the door stoop, her iridescent dress shimmering in the twilight. Those glorious deltoids, that pert rack. That meticulously crimped hair. He could remember speculating on her firm abductors, wondering if he would ever be given the grace of an audience. She looked so stunning, so absolutely marvelous that he had at first been paralyzed by a tentative omnipresence. He felt like a child, in awe of her.
And here, for only the second time of his life, Barwis stood afraid. Above him was a mechanical monster of perfunctory and automatic programming, a mechanical and programmed lust for arid destruction. It dwarfed him.
Barwis was not the breed of man who spent his time speculating on great unknowns. His operative philosophy was simple and wolf-like: Eat. Sleep. Fuck. Fight. Do everything that you do with pride and fury. But of one thing, Barwis was sure: fear was a trial. Conquest required momentum and momentum required ferociousness.
And so, as he stood beneath the bellowing creation, Barwis became cemented in something akin to resolve. He knew who had borne this vile being and he knew there would be a day of great recompense, be it in this life or the next. Barwis knew this because he felt this. In the pre-modernity of his philosophical paradigm, feeling made everything real.
Barwis had never before been faced with such a monumental task. He stood in the shadow of a mechanical beast, a tyrannosaurus rex that stood four stories high. He had chased this beast from continent to continent. It had taken him three years and seven months of diligent pursuit. For much of that time, the creature had eluded him gracefully. The Death Rex has trespassed across the globe like Satan or the chupacabra, leaving in its wake half-imagined tales of fleeting destruction. Whispers and half-truths, always. But, Barwis had never relented the belief that such a terrible thing was real. Of course, Barwis knew it was real. He knew it was real because he had seen in, once. It had been in his early days. He knew how this vulgarity had been spawned. He knew the injustice and the pain of its being.
Barwis had been a young man, then. It was 1989 and it was the middle of winter. Barwis, unexpectedly, had come across an acute case of wonderlust. He felt trapped, as if his path had been one of simple agoraphobia. Pre-determined sediment layered upon pre-determined sediment. It was all so confining. He was seventeen and needed out. He was a young man and like all young men, he had a proclivity towards making rash and quixotic decisions. And so, he did what young men do and he headed west.
Barwis remembered the crisp feeling of the Philadelphia night as he slipped out of his window and into the street. It was quiet and dark and the street lamp across the street spun soft cones of light onto the pavement. He took it all in; although his decision to leave was only temporary, he knew that life was unpredictable and enormous and that such a glance, in this world of infinite potentiality, might be his last.
He bought a Greyhound ticket to Seattle. He imagined America as a big, peculiar place. He wanted, desperately, to see what there was to see. Transit by Greyhound, in and of itself, is an awe-inspiring thing. His first night on the bus, he had been the gleeful recipient of rough handjob administered by a woman named Terry. She told him that she had two children and she smelled like cigarettes and experience. She had launched her proposition to Barwis with no expectation of anything in return. She had grabbed him, remarking that he was, in fact, not far removed from boyhood. He went from soft to hard to rock hard. She seemed excited by this and her exuberance became enrolled on Barwis. The story ended with him exploding gleefully onto the seatback in front of him. The algorithmic sensation of youth dissolved, conquered, beheaded was palpable and meaningful, if only to Barwis. Outside of Gary, Indiana, Terry disappeared into the night, tenderly wishing him goodbye. He never saw her again, but, she often snuck into edges his mind, her brambly hands knowledgably stirring his manhood to attention.
The travels of young Barwis were what travels of this sort always are: interesting abstracts of pause and digestion, short-lived in every sense except that of personal cognizance. He saw the bare, rolling hills of Iowa in the winter. He saw the desolate nothingness of western Nebraska and the long flatlands of Eastern Wyoming. As he moved westward, he marveled at the expansive nature of the sky. The horizon, always, seemed to be so far off, so distant. It had a style and grace all its own. He was told, through the rigors of contemporary ontology, that the world was round. He believed such a thing, of course. But it didn’t feel like it was true, not here. In the West, the world was like an enormous sheet of paper dappled with longrasses and trees and windswept snow and mountains, and all of it was topped off with an icy blue pane of atmosphere and wonder.
The Greyhound bus system was designed for cost efficiency. If you treat people marginally better than cattle, their transport becomes financially and schematically reasonable. As with all things, the cost/benefit continuum exists. Barwis had ridden through the meat of the country, mostly uninhibited the pragmatic and faulty reality of diesel engines. But, probability came crashing down in Gillette, Wyoming. While stopped on evening, the driver noticed the sticky sweet smell of coolant on the pavement. He also noticed several calicos slinking around, their feeble minds urging them to taste the afterlife. The verdict was simple but austere: the lower radiator hose had burst and repairs would extend through the night and into the next day.
Barwis, in his youthfulness, was of limited resources. Children – and that is what he was – often do not recognize the merit of contingency planning, do not understand that just because things should go as planned does mean that they will go as planned. The probability that things will go right is always outweighed by the probability that things will go wrong. But this is a lesson that is consummated only through the ardors of time. Barwis, our seventeen year old hero, could ill afford a night in a motel and resigned himself to the uncomfortable dirtiness of the station’s tile floor.
Here, though, was where he met the Rat Man. In this life, it is not unusual to meet people who impress upon the mind’s eye a caricature of those godless beasts that populate farmlands and savannahs and oceans. A tall man sometimes looks like a giraffe, a portly and squat-faced woman sometimes looks like a hedgehog, a robustly fat man sometimes looks like a collision of Irish-American heritage, a total lack of self-control, and a sperm whale. This man looked like a rat.
Barwis had excused himself to the restroom. Whereupon, he pushed out a fetus-like creation, an impossibly large and organic bowel movement. He had lit up the room with the bright notes of relief and was washing his hands when the Rat Man pushed his way into the bathroom. He sniffed the air, his snout perking upwards, and looked at Barwis. “Atta boy,” the Rat Man had said.
Barwis, unsure of how to respond to such accolades, said nothing. He scrubbed his hands with an increased vigor. He had little interest in any sort of discourse with this man. But, silence and separation were things that were not to be. The Rat Man was also pushy man and he burrowed forwarded. My name is Mark, he said before extending his hand to Barwis. They shook. The Rat Man’s grip was strong and sweaty and flaccid.
“You on that broke down bus?” the Rat Man inquired. Sheepishly, Barwis replied that, yes, he was. The room was still haunted by the phantasm of digestion, but the Rat Man seemed not to notice. Or, if he did notice, he seemed not to care. Perhaps, thought Barwis, he is a man used to great squalor. The Rat Man proposed that Barwis spend the night at his house. It wasn’t far, he said. He had an extra bed and plenty of food. Plenty of food, he reinforced. A growing boy like you, you need to eat. It would be a good decision for Barwis to make, the Rat Man said. And, then, the Rat Man pulled a long, slender, and ivory-handled knife from beneath his shirt. The Rat Man was quiet, but his implications were erect and apparent.
Under such conditions, Barwis had little choice but to accept. The Rat Man had a feral glint in his eyes. And Barwis, in his brash Philadelphian way, was not afraid. He was intrigued and anxious. He could overpower this man, he knew that. He was a child in throes of, perhaps, becoming a man and this challenge, as laid forth by the Rat Man, seemed to be a trial, a microcosm of Barwis’s flight into the yawning unknown.
And so, Mike Barwis looked the Rat Man in the eyes and said, “let’s go, friend.”
From the city, they drove into the country. The wilderness spread out like the topographic jewel that it was. To the west, the Big Horns poked through the earth’s crust, silently standing as memorials to geography and history. To the east, the Black Hills. This was neither God’s country nor man’s country; instead, it merely existed. It existed the way that all things do, ripe with the validity of face value. And they – the Rat Man and youthful Barwis - sat in the Pig Man’s recently purchased F150 and said nothing. They cut through the night and the cab smelled of newness.
They drove for twenty minutes and then they stopped. The Rat Man maneuvered the truck up a long drive and turned it off. “Follow me,” he said. They entered a house that looked like a house from the outside but on the inside was anything but a house. It was a den of iniquity, a place where sin ran rampant and unfettered. Everywhere, everything seemed so wrong. Barwis was taken aback. On the couch sat three men, smoking opium and viewing pornography of the wildest sort. On the screen, a man and a woman, both in the nude, were ceaselessly torturing a clumsily depicted unicorn. It was braying into the air, a hopeless and horrific sound and they plunged household devices deep into its most sacred cavity. In the kitchen, there sat three women of dubious proportions. Two of them sat shirtless, injecting heroin into each other’s arms. Their defeated eyes sat sunken in their heads, their breasts sagging with wear and depression and cellulose weight. They said nothing, as there was nothing to say.
A great sadness settled upon Barwis. Who were these people, how had their minds become so twisted, so non-ergonomic? How had they become this, this mess of insubstantiality? The bottom always exists. It had to exist. But to see such a thing, such a perverse display. To experience it. The air felt heavy, as if saddled and vested by a great weight. The conscience is a thing of remarkable flexibility. It is a theoretical tendon, an enterprise borne of the human condition. But even it has limits. It has lines and borders that, if crossed, will chew upon. Barwis, although still a youth, knew this. He knew this because all people of reasonable fabric know this. There is good in all, except for some.
The Rat Man strove through this mess, unabated by its moral aridity. He led Barwis down a set of wooden stairs and into a dark basement, scantily lit by harsh the glow of industrial lighting. The basement, in its whole, belied its first impression. It was a workshop and it spread out before Barwis as a giant warehouse. At the far end, Barwis saw an enormous garage door and he wondered why such remarkable industry was cloaked and hidden from the road. And then, he saw it.
Before him, Barwis saw evil. He saw what he had hoped, indirectly, to never see. He saw the machine of pain and suffering and the cruelest of intentions and it tore through him. He backed away and he stared into the Rat Man’s yellow eyes, searching for even the slightest glimmer of humanity. He searched and stared, hoping against hope that warmth would emerge. But, there was nothing. Only cruelty and hatred.
The machine was a massive thing, an assembly of metal and steel and hydraulics that distinctly struck Barwis as genius. The Rat Man spoke:
“This, my friend, this is the Death Rex. I have built it with my hands; it is me. Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world of equity. I have engineered this creation of aluminum alloy and titanium and I will unleash it upon the world. I show you this because I sense something in you. I feel that you and I are the same. I believe this, friend. Fate and chance and the dark lord have led our paths to this glorious juncture. I believed this the moment I saw you in the bus station and I believe it now. We are one, you and I. We are the same and together, we can have it all. You and I. We can have it all, friend. Everything. It can be ours, but first, first we must take it. This is a world of great cruelty. This is a world of pain and together, together we can craft a regime of immeasurable anger. We can be lords. We can rise above all of this and we can rule over the crosscuts of field and forest, of desert and ocean, of mountain and valley. We can become gods, you and I. We can be everything and nothing. Heaven can exist now and it can be ours. We can rule without respite, we can rule with vengeance and with malice. We can become the new order. Everything can be ours.”
The Rat Man then licked his lips, brooding over a great thirst.
Barwis, desperate in his repulsion, grabbed the Rat Man by his throat. Colors blurred into shades of grey and his sinews quaked. He felt apart from himself, from everything. Ethereality became him and he screamed, his voice rising in tremulous fury: “we are not the same. We are not the same. I am not like you. I will never be like you.” He reached for the Rat Man’s knife and he curled his fingers around its elegant, ivory handle. He thought of murder and of death and the line of demarcation that separates this side and the next. He wondered if he could do what needed to be done and realized, in his youth, that he could not.
And, so, he ran. He fled into the wild and became melted into its static. He wandered through a great fog from which he never thought he would emerge. He ran through the fields and the snow and the soft light of the stars above rained downed upon him. When he awoke, he was standing in the precipice of dawn. He found his way back to the bus stop and returned to Philadelphia, his great adventure having ended in Hindenburgian disaster. Time marched forward. Routine persevered and weeks bled into months and then into years.
In the time between then and now, however, the Rat Man had risen from his dark obscurity. The Rat Man’s career had assumed a bosomed trajectory and he had been propelled to a marginal but significant throne. He had become a minor actor in a minor play. For his part, Barwis, too, had become a man of some stature. He had observed the Rat Man from afar, wishing all along he had killed him that night. He lamented over this fact and it punctured him. And, softly, he had heard whispers of that terrible beast. He had heard of devastation. The cries of the impoverished kept him awake. He imagined mothers without daughters, fathers without sons. He thought of orphans and widows and smoking, craters that braided their way into the center of earth.
The Death Rex had wandered the globe amidst this cloud of rumor and cataclysm and hushed chaos. This fact troubled Barwis deeply. In the margins of life, all men must come to a moral plateau. In this life, man must abhor the dark and celebrate the light. In this life, man must wrench his hands upon the axe of goodness and smite those beasts of carrion that seek dissolution. Barwis knew this. In recognizing such, he felt compelled to action, to right the wrongs of his youth. In this life, all men must hate the wretched and they must do so with every fiber of their being. They must have a vested interest in a good and just society that is ruled by compassion and communion. They must yearn for the destruction of the wicked.
And so, Barwis had hunted the Death Rex across the globe. He had trudged through snow and sleet and rain and sunburn for years on end. He missed his family, he missed his life. He missed the smell of eggs on the griddle or the blissful taste of his post-workout chocolate milk. He could not, however, discontinue his efforts. He could not, in good conscience, do so. There had been close encounters and near-misses. He had tracked the robotic demon from the farthest reaches of South America through the druglands of Central America. They had risen through Mexico and into the scrub of the Sonora desert. Barwis had followed the beast as it crossed the Pacific Ocean and into the muggy forever of Southeast Asia. He had stalked the creature through jungle and across desert. Together, man and machine had passed like a fever through India and disappeared into the Middle East. Barwis had always been just behind the Death Rex, close enough to taste the caustic heartbreak of destruction but never close enough to prevent it. He had seen things of horrible congress, things of great evil. The Death Rex, though, was merely a symptom. Designed to be without axiology or empathy or emotion, it was a product of its creator. It was its creator; calculated and cold and incapable of real achievement. The creation must always bear the sins of its creator. Always. Together, they sought only destruction. Barwis knew this and knew that he must assure the destruction of the Rat Man. The Death Rex was a product a more pervasive and viscous carnality, an unabated and abstruse sickness. But in the present, Barwis was cognizant of the fact that he must end the threat in its immediacy. In the causal nature of dominos and life, pragmatics too often intervened with the circumnavigation of raw ideology. But, and Barwis knew this, there would be time for retribution; there always was.
So, in the rural and rain softened jungles of Zimbabwe, Barwis finally cornered the titanic beast. Framed against the man-made divinity of Lake Karimba, machine and man stood together, 1,300 kilometers from the Indian Ocean. Under the creature’s enormous shadow, Barwis was afraid in a precise way, a way he had previously been unaccustomed to. The monster was enormous, spiking twenty feet into the air. It made the sounds that enormous machinery make and its destruction was an intimidating thing. Dark smoke and the smell of exhaust perfumed the air. Barwis was terrified and felt so small, so alone.
In his fear, however, he found resolve. Intrepidity was not inherent to the human animal. Accusable, perhaps. But, achievable? Only by few, a select few. There is such a thing as the human spirit and there is such a thing as greatness. In this pop-humanistic disaster, mediocrity is commonplace. It is pervasive. The ghosts of our forefathers rue our climate and our world, seeking their former selves in world besieged by technology and innovation. Barwis knew this and he became agitated with undertaking. He must stand steadfast; if not him, who? His voice rose to a roar and he addressed the Death Rex:
“Into this world, you were born. You did not create yourself; this I understand. A frightful selfishness has hurried you onto your mission, and your heart has been crafted to be impenetrable to love and sympathy. You are a wretch through a fault that is not your own. But hear me, monster: you shall soon die and you will no longer terrorize. Your spirit will sleep on in peace and in nothingness, or if it thinks, it will surely not think thus. I promise you this, monster. I promise you to hunt your creator. I promise to banish him to the fires of the thereafter. I will smite the Rat Man with fist and hand and heart. Your repentance is superfluous and unreachable, this I understand. You have suffered and I have suffered and tonight, you will suffer no more. But I will live on and I will suffer for the both of us. Hear this, monster.”
The Death Rex, untouched by Barwis’s address, shot a voluptuous tongue of fire into the air. The impact was momentous and traumatic and Barwis slipped into darkness. Under the weight of it, he dreamed like had never before dreamed. He saw things of great imagery and of great substance. He dreamed of his wife and their first date. He dreamed of his son and unmitigated love. He dreamed of his wolves and of their luxurious pelts. He dreamed of Philadelphia, of the house he grew up in. He dreamed of peace and of evil and of all the things between. He dreamed of everything and he dreamed of nothing. He saw his life in a retrospective and he dreamed that he died. He dreamed of a buzzing and expansive nothingness. In this room, this limitless space, he saw a rainbow and a unicorn, a beautiful and magnificent creature with a flowing mane. He dreamed that this was not the end, that this couldn’t be the end. He dreamed of wind-whipped whitecaps and of falling a great distance.
He awoke.
Around him, there was fire and smoke and the heat of the midday sun. Barwis was confused and embroiled in disclarity. He tasted bitter iron taste of his own blood. Above him, the clouds marched through the sky in muted columns, distinctive contrails of moisture perched on the jetstream. He stared through the heavens. The Death Rex had disappeared into the jungle and everything, literally everything, was quiet. The lull was prodigious.
In the primality of it all, Barwis’s determination hardened. His destruction was complete, but it was not lasting. Like all things, it was temporary. Good would prevail, he would prevail. He knew this and he declared, to the jungle: “I will find you, Death Rex, I will find you and I will kill you. I will dismember you. Your annihilation will be my reason for existing. All of me, every ounce of skin and bone and blood and hair, will rue your existence and will do so until the day you are no more. And then, Dantonio, I will come for you. I will haunt you until time and meaning cease. I will bury you in the fertile loam of history. I will swallow you.”
With that, the story changed. Everything changed. Friends, it begins here. And it will end, with or without you.
