7/3-7/12 - The Gate Is Straight, Deep, and Wide - pt. 2

Ghosts, son? You're asking me if SPYGOD actually believes in ghosts?

Well of course I !@#$ing believe in ghosts, son. What kind of a dumb!@#$ question is that? Don't you remember when I was running with Chinmoku? They don't call him the only living master of Hungry Ghost Path of Kung Fu for nothing.

(The others failed, and became -- you guessed it -- ghosts.)

Now, yes, we can be objective about this. It's true that, sitting at that fire, I'm not really in my right !@#$ing mind. I'm fighting a black hole of depression, suicidal urges, and god knows what other long-repressed mental problems. I'm crying like I won an Oscar, thinking I could just die right about then and no one would give a !@#$, and !@#$sing myself just after I realized I really needed to go water the beer garden.

That and the radioactive !@#$ I'm drinking could probably kill a !@#$ing atom-powered cyborg tyrannosaurus rex if you shoved it down the wrong !@#$ hole.

So, yes, given that by the time those yellow-hatted mystics show up, I'm so !@#$ing drunk that I've lost all sense of time, distance, proportion, and dignity, it's just possible that I imagine everything that comes next. But I don't believe that, son.

Not for a !@#$ing minute.

How does it go? Well, talking with the dead ain't like Charles !@#$ing Dickens, son. You don't get a herald, you don't get told how the ride's going to go, and you sure don't get away !@#$ing clean. Sometimes you don't even !@#$ing get away at all.

There's reasons that Shamen are both revered and feared for what they do, son. Any sensible person would run away from a job like that, but some people just have to be the ones to peek behind the veil and see what's there.

And you know what curiosity got that poor, dead cat.

So when they inform me that there's people who want to talk to me, and I realize what they !@#$ing mean, I realize that I am in for a world of !@#$. Of course, I'm so !@#$ing drunk I can't even stand, much less crawl away, so they got me where they want me, these yellow-hatted, grinning freaks.

And so do the dead.

I see that one of the Shamans isn't there, anymore, and Second is there instead, smiling at me with that special, little smile of his. The kind that always said that he knew, deep down, what a goofy, drunk !@#$-up I could be, but that he admired me, anyway, and wouldn't have wanted to work for anyone else.

And there's a second when I just chalk it up to the !@#$ I've been pounding, and wishful thinking, and regrets? But then he starts !@#$ing talking, and I know it's him. 

I'm sorry to report I kind of !@#$ed up, sir, he says: I did my best while you were gone, but they had us beaten at every turn. Dragon played us all against each other, they snuck in a bunch of GORGON troopers, and... well, they had it well in hand, sir. I can only apologize.

"You shouldn't have to apologize," I tell him (well, blubber out, really): "I was your C.O, (REDACTED). I should have been the one giving the good orders, not you. And if I hadn't made those dumb !@#$ing mistakes... if I hadn't gone South instead of to DC... if I hadn't..."

If you had, you'd be dead, too, sir, he tells me: They had us cold, sir. Dead !@#$ing bang to rights. They had a plan for everything, including you.


"Well, it should have !@#$ing been me, not you," I blubber: "It should have been me..." 

No sir, he says: It was always supposed to be me. You said it, yourself. Soldiers are there to die. The fact that you get another day is a blessing, and I had a lot of them. All of them good... well, most of them. 

I have no regrets, sir. I had a good run, and I died fighting. I went down hard and I tried to take as many of them down with me as I could. !@#$, I even pulled the wool over the Dragon's eyes for a little bit, and that's not something you can say all that often.

"That's... that's good..." I say, not knowing what else to say. If I wasn't so !@#$ing drunk I'd have actually given him a real complement for that one. 

Well, I learned form the best. And that's why you need to get back on your feet, sir. I did my best to save as many strategic talents from what was coming as I could, and they're going to need a leader. 

And that's you, sir. And you know that.

Of course, I can't say anything to that but to make excuses, wallow in self-pity, and continue blubbing. I can't even !@#$ing look at him, son. He's looking at me like a proud parent, and all I want to do is crawl under a rock and die.

So it's a while before I look up, and when I do he's gone, and the Shaman he was inhabiting is looking at me with a nasty, red-toothed grin.

I never thought I'd see the day when SPYGOD got all maudlin and self-pitying, says another one of them. I turn and look, and it's Joe Samuels, who was the Owl, up until just recently. And seeing him there, dead, kicks me even harder.

"What... what the !@#$ happened?"

Well, I'm dead, he says, matter of fact as always: GORGON hit the Owl's Nest hard. They teleported in in droves and shot us to pieces. Your man, Second, tried to warn us, but we missed the message until it was too late. I had to atomize the Owls Nest in the end, just to deny it to the enemy. 

"Oh gods... I'm sorry..."

He smiles: I took them all out with me, (REDACTED). You should have seen it. I showed them what it meant to try and take us on our own turf. 

And next time they tangle with my family, they'll be in real trouble.

"What about Martha? Thomas? Kaitlyn?"

Martha's fine, and she's with your friends, getting a resistance together. Thomas was hurt very badly, but he'll be alright. We're seeing to that. 

And Kaitlyn... he smiles: She's going to be the best Owl that ever was, my friend, but she'll need your help do to it, just like you helped Martha and Thomas. Can I count on you?

Of course, this leads to me trying to blub some more, but he's not having it: Oh, stop it, (REDACTED). We don't have time for tears. Too many people have died, and too many people are going to die, for you to sit around a fire crying your magic eye out. 

"Easy for you to say... you're dead. You don't have to face this failure-"

I didn't say it, my friend, he says, smiling and pointing at me: You said it. You said it to me. And if you think really hard, you might just remember when, and why. 

And I never told you this, because I was so embarrassed, later? But thank you for that. 

So, this is me returning the favor. Tears later, soldier. Action now. You fall apart you're no use to anyone.


"I'm already broken..." I try to say, but it comes across as a tangle of words. By the time I get my tongue unglued, Joe's gone, and in his place is that tall, black Colonel that'd been hounding my !@#$ since the assassination. Colonel Richter.

And he's not looking so !@#$ing good, either. His bald head's a misshapen mess, and one of his yellowed eyes has bugged out of its socket. It almost looks like someone smashed his brains in.

Well well, he says, smiling: Here we finally are. You know how long I've been looking for your sorry !@#$?

"I know... I'm sorry..."

Oh, don't you dare !@#$ing apologize, SPYGOD. Don't you !@#$ing dare! You don't have the right! !@#$, you don't even have the right to speak to me right now, you sloppy !@#$hole.

Now, for some !@#$ dumb reason, this takes me aback. Everyone else so far's been trying to shove complements up my !@#$, in spite of my getting them killed. But he's actually !@#$ing angry.

And, for some reason, that actually brings me up from the slippery, dark hole I've drunk myself down, just a little bit.

"What the !@#$ are you talking about?" I ask, rearing up a bit: "I didn't kill you-"

Oh, but you did, he says, sitting straight up and leaning towards me: That crazy-!@#$ vendetta of yours? Well, while you were !@#$ing liberating Cuba, you sent us off in ten directions at once, trying to catch your !@#$. You had the COMPANY so !@#$ busy chasing its tail that GORGON was able to walk in and !@#$ us without us even noticing. 

If you'd just done the right thing and given yourself up, we could have been united. We could have stopped them. All those people would still be alive. 

I'd still be alive-

"!@#$ you, Richter." I spit at him: "I didn't !@#$ up the COMPANY. You did."

What... he says, the anger bleeding away as confusion sets in: What the !@#$ do you mean?

"Why... why do you think they put you onto me?" I ask him, still too groggy to talk too fast: "What were you doing... before the President was assassinated?"

He tries to open his mouth, and then he closes it.

I... I don't remember...

"No. Of course you don't. Not your last birthday. Not your first kiss. And why do you suppose that is?"

I knew... I used to know...

"Yeah, when you were !@#$ing breathing. But now you aren't, anymore, and when you died all those memories just went away, didn't they?"

I... what are you-

"Because you weren't doing anything, Richter. They activated you. And then, when they didn't need you anymore..."

I point to my head, right about where his has been clearly bashed in, and then roughly pat it a few times.

He opens and closes his mouth a few more times. Then he screws his eyes shut and screams so loud my eardrums almost blow out of my !@#$ing head.

And then he's gone, leaving a hoarse shaman who's trying to hog the kumis bottle he and his two friends are passing back and forth.

How long did you know about him? asks a mellifluous voice I know all too well.

"About as long as... well, about as long as I suspected about you," I say, turning to look to my left. The Dragon is sitting there, smiling that slight, inscrutable smile of his.

And he doesn't even need a shaman to talk to me.

(SPYGOD is listening to Soul Kitchen (The Doors) and drinking... well, yeah. Don't ask.)

7/3-7/12 - The Gate is Straight, Deep, and Wide - pt. 1

Well, son. As skull!@#$ings go, that was just about the best one I've ever had.

No, son, a skull!@#$ing is probably not what you think it is, for which I can be eternally !@#$ing grateful. There are no new holes in my noggin, no !@#$ on my brains, and no whiplash, either.

Skull!@#$ing is just a simple little ritual that America's armed forces came up with to better deal with the severe stress that comes from less-than-satisfactory contact with the enemy. Put simply, it's the mother of all alcohol binges, to be performed by a soldier when that person has endured something so !@#$ terrible, horrible, and !@#$ing demoralizing that the only reason he hasn't blown his brains out, committed suicide by enemy combatant, or  tossed his bars into a fire and gone AWOL is because he still !@#$ing wants to believe.

And hopefully, by the time it's over, that soldier will not only have drunk himself sober, but rekindled his belief, to the point where he can crawl upright, clean himself up, and get back to work.

A long !@#$ing time ago, back when things went seriously south in Korea, no less than General MacArthur, himself, introduced me to this ritual. After my time as a POW I'd fallen down to the raging, ragged edge of the !@#$ing abyss, and wanted to throw myself into it. So he had a few of his boys drive my gelatinous, miserable !@#$ to one of the best makkoli houses in Pusan, and something like five or six large and pungent bowls of warm rice wine later, I was a new man.

Makkoli is the best !@#$ to get hammered with. It's sneaky. You don't realize how much trouble you're in until you try to stand up, and then you realize why they gave you scallion pancakes along with the booze. Me, I made it through a whole bowl and a half before I had to take a slash, and then I was !@#$ing stumbling into the head, breaking !@#$ as I went -- mostly by accident.

(That building still stands in Pusan. They have a three bowl limit for wayguk, now. I'm the reason for that.)

But, unfortunately, I did not have any makkoli, here with me today. All I had was that nasty, tooth-rotting, radioactive kumis that Altan Aduu ferments, himself. So I took every single bottle they had, and then took it out into the deserts north of Choibalsan, bottles clinking in the bag as I dragged it out far enough for them to not see the fire I was going to build.

And, in true skull!@#$ing fashion, I drank about three bottles of that !@#$ on the way to that place, so I was already good and hammered before I even arrived.

(This is also a part of the skull!@#$ing ritual: start before you get there, so that you'll be on a !@#$ing roll when you arrive.)

But man, son, I really was !@#$ing hammered. I didn't realize that I'd made a fire until I was actually sitting in front of it, opening up another bottle of that radioactive !@#$ and gulping it down like it was water. I didn't realize that day had turned into night until I saw that I'd gone through about half of what I'd brought out with me to drink.

And when I howled in despair that I might not have enough to last until morning, I looked at my watch twice to see how much I had to pace myself, and it was two whole hours between checks, even though it seemed like it had only been a minute!

Time does strange things when you're angry, sad, dehydrated, and massively drunk, son. Especially out in the deserts. Things happen out on the peripheries of civilization, sometimes, and it's like it's all reality can do to just keep itself on this side of unglued.

It's like that old question about the tree falling in the forest -- if no one's there to see it, is there a sound? Well, if no one's around to say "hey, that's !@#$ed up," are there laws of physics?

If not, that goes a long way in explaining how yours truly, who can see way too much for his own !@#$ good, did not see the Shaman walk up to my fire and plop his !@#$ down.

One minute, there's just me and a fire. I take a drink, and the next time I look up, there's this grizzled, red-toothed fellow with spaced-out eyes and a yellow hat. He's grinning at me with those red, stained teeth and chuckling, and in the amount of time it takes me to threaten to kill him for messing with my skull!@#$ing, there's two more of them.

Yes, shamans. Mongolia's still got a !@#$ing lot of them around, even in this day and age. Most of them are pretty decent guys, even if I'm not convinced about their power levels. But someone's got to be the one to talk for the dead, and over here that's them.

So they're !@#$ing jabbering and talking and laughing, and passing a bottle of kumis I don't remember offering them, and I'm telling them to go the !@#$ away and just let me get hammered in peace. But when I say "peace" I think "piece," and then I think "pieces." And then I realize I really am nothing more than a man-shaped pile of glass shards, and the crying jag part of the skull!@#$ing sets in.

This is also perfectly !@#$ing normal. Before you can put yourself back together you have to completely fall apart. That's what the booze is for. It takes away all your inhibitions and shackles, and tears your structures down to the ground.

It makes you forget you're supposed to be some butch, disciplined soldier, and lets you let go and cry your eyes out like your momma just died all over again.

And while I'm crying, the Shamen are jabbering at me, and whatever kind of Mongolian they're talking I can hardly get every other !@#$ing word. But eventually I realize they're asking me if I want to talk to anyone.

Who the !@#$ would I want to talk to? Who the !@#$ would want to talk to me, right now? I'm a nasty stain on the floor. I'm a dog turd in a punchbowl. I'm lower than worm !@#$.


But oh, they have people who want to talk to me. And, one by one, they bring forward the dead to speak. 

All my ghosts, come 'round to haunt me at last. 

(SPYGOD is listening to Break On Through to the Other Side (The Doors) and having something really !@#$ nasty)