Joey Cloudy online

Isaiah Jones versus the Sea (A 21st Century Odyssey)

Chapter 9 pt 2 ‘War Pigs’

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” -Albert Einstein.

“Almost all human behavior and activity is not essentially any different from animal behavior. The most advanced technologies and craftsmanship bring us, at best, up to the super-chimpanzee level. Actually, the gap between, say, Plato or Nietzsche and the average human is greater than the gap between that chimpanzee and the average human.”

-University of Texas at Austin philosophy professor Louis Mackey

‘What’s Free’

“In the land of the free,

where the blacks enslaved.

Three fifths of a man,

I believes the phrase.”

-Jay-Z

…Naomi smiled. The last 4 days since Isaiah had pulled her bloody unconscious body from the dinghy adrift off the coast of the Bimini Isles had been good sailing after the storm 3 days ago. She could feel her gunshot wound in her left side healing. As they sailed the 44 ft sloop west towards Cuba.

“Thanks for explaining all of this electromagnetic stuff,” Naomi said with a demur smile. With a brain like yours, talking to me must be like showing a dog a card trick.”

“Yeah, he grinned, but I like dogs.” They both burst out laughing again.

“Oww, she grimaced between guffaws, it still hurts when I laugh.”

“It looks like it’s time to change the dressing on that bullet wound of yours again and feed you more of Starbucks antibiotics, he said with that goofy kid smile.”

“You really going to war with Dead Eye Polly?” she asked.

“Nope, this is what they call “gunboat diplomacy” in the history books. A demonstration of overwhelming power before we parlay. That way, nobody else has to die. Think of ‘Fat Man’ and ‘Little Boy’ as the apex of this stratagem. You have a plan. I am your plan B.” She laughed again.

“Stop making me laugh, Mjiho, it hurts. But that was a good one.”

“Ok,” he said, “seriously, take your meds and I’ll grab the first aid kit. Starbuck, the helm is yours.” The big white Dogo Argentina sat at attention, hearing her name, then barked once as if she were acknowledging the order. “Good girl, Isaiah cooed, good dogo.”

“Isaiah, what would you have done if I died?” she asked as he cleaned and disinfected the wound and changed the bandages.

“Put your naked body back in the boat and cut you loose.” He answered flatly without a moment’s hesitation. She wasn’t shocked by the answer, but at the speed at which he replied, as if he had already anticipated the question long ago. He was wary of the police, yet he insisted on going with her to meet Dead Eye Polly, a gangster, a psychopath, and a murderer. Isaiah reminded her of her CO (commanding officer) at Fort Benning Ranger Training Camp in Georgia. 3 years later, she would be selected for Delta Force. There was a cold, detached ruthlessness to his well calculated efficiency. Isaiah looked into her eyes as he spoke.

“Surely, you must understand that it’s nothing personal, but there is no scenario where I do not end up detained or in prison after bringing in the corpse of a dead white woman with a bullet hole in her gut. Statistically, there is a seventy-three percent probability that I will be implicated, imprisoned, and possibly executed for your death. Those are the facts; blacks and whites commit crimes at the same rates, but blacks get arrested four times as much as their white counterparts and convicted seventy-three percent of the time whenever they enter a court of law. We get more time for lesser crimes; I can show you the state departments data, the FBI 1996 or 2006 reports on the infiltration of ghost skins in law enforcement if you like this is all from publicly available vetted reputable sources, everything from the Tuskegee experiments to COINTELPRO, MK-Ultra, the CIAs the colonialist/capitalist/racist iceberg it’s all diagramed there, all respected experts in multiple fields accrued over decades devoid of politic or spin to spare white frailty read the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) 2016 reports as well as the department of justice’s own studies.

I have no witnesses to my whereabouts on the night of the shooting since I was at sea. The police are as predictable as the tides; they will claim that I was with you and Milo on the burned, sunken catamaran when you were shot, and the passenger and Milo were killed. That wraps up the case in a nice, tight, familiar little ball they love to fetch. The black guy did it. Even if they don’t convict me of the crime, I’ll be stuck in limbo, rotting in a cell while the halfwits attempt what they jokingly refer to as conducting an investigation for weeks, possibly months, before I can leave. All that just for being a good Samaritan while black. And regardless of whether or not the morons convict me or clear me of any wrongdoing, I end up on the radar of your homicidal employer. So, no matter how things play out with the blue lives matter cunts, I still have to deal with your Señor Polly.

I considered my options; first was setting your corpse ablaze, but a Viking funeral, while removing any evidence connecting me to the body, would have attracted unwanted attention. I then considered deflating your dingy and using it to wrap around your body and let the outboard act as an anchor, but then I saw that “death before dishonor” tattoo above your left bicep over the grinning skull and well my parents are vets too and if something happened to my folks I would like to have the option of choosing how to dispose of the remains. To desecrate the corps of a veteran is un-American. It is the sort of thing I would kill someone for doing. So, ditching your very lovely corpse by putting it back in your skiff near a port would be the only logical thing to do.”

Listening to him talk, she could only smile as she looked out at the 40-foot cat in tow. Only 16 and he snuck off in the dead of night to steal it all alone in her skiff. The kid had guts. The plan was coming together, with the stolen catamaran in tow, it would take an extra day to reach Cuba, but that was ok. At least now she wasn’t coming back empty handed. Caesar’s death was another matter. Nothing she could say or do would ease the news of the death of Dead Eye Polly’s only son.

While Isaiah tended to her wound, she looked out at the ship in tow again and shook her head, still unable to believe the kid had done it, perfectly, exactly as she had instructed him. He waited until the couple left, then swam over, and rather than cut the rope, the clever bastard untied the line attached to the anchor chain, then sailed away in the night. They will be arguing about what knot they used to tie it to the chain until the divorce papers are signed, the sneaky fucker. That was a stroke of evil genius. She thought a smile spread across her face.

“Look, kid, you might hate pirates, but you got all the markings of a first-rate freelancer. Fearless, ruthless, and no offence, but you’re probably a well disguised psychopath, a sociopath is also possible with your childhood’s history of trauma, along with the autism. I’m not a shrink, but nearly everyone I ever met in the Army Rangers and Delta Force operators exhibited all the signs of being some iteration of antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). No judgment, just an observation she said with a grin. “We can smell our own.”

Isaiah sighed, “According to wiki;

[“Non-autistic people tend to assess concepts before details, also known as top-down thinking. Autistic people take the opposite approach with bottom-up thinking and use details to build concepts. It may take longer to filter out sensory details with this approach, but you’re less likely to miss important information.”]

“I practice not talking like a robot and feigning interest in the inane concerns of others in order to blend in.” “I rarely spoke to anyone except my twin sister until I was five. She did all the talking for the both of us growing up and beat the crap outta any kid that picked on me for being weird. She was my skjaldmær, my shield-maiden; now she is a spectral ache, a phantom limb of my severed soul. I still have to translate everything from Emily into English in my head first in order to communicate with the outside world,” he said with a sadness-tinged smile as he continued dressing her wound, applying fresh gauze and bandages as he spoke. My notes are all written in Emily’s indecipherable to anyone but me and her ghost.”

“Emily is your dead sister and a language? Naomi asked. “So, Twin Speak is your first language.”

“Yes,” he said with a smile. Along with Sicilian, Italian, Greek, and Arabic. All the languages I absorbed in utero. We absorbed all of the different languages spoken by our parents’ friends and their children growing up in Sicily for the first 6 years. Off duty, our parents never associated with anyone on base, so we grew up with the languages we learned living in Sicily. My mom and dad both speak Spanish, Italian, and Sicilian. Momma speaks Greek, and my Dad speaks Arabic.

“So, you speak 5 other languages besides English? Naomi asked. That is unusual for an American.”

No, I now speak a total of 37, thirty-seven different languages, thanks in part to Duolingo.

You’re kidding me, right?

Nope, Duolingo offers courses in:

Wait a minute, the total is 41. I have to count both of Tolkien’s Elvish dialects, Quenya and Sindarin, since Klingon and High Valyrian are on the list, and I nearly left out Aramaic, and we all speak conversational Tagalog.

“41! Naomi exclaimed incredulously, “You speak 41 different languages?! How is that even possible?”

Language is music to me. I learn a new language the way you learn a new song. Just because you’re in a jazz band doesn’t mean you can’t play rock or funk or country, or classical music. Part of being on the neurodivergent spectrum for me means my thinking process is closer to the latest iterations of AI machine deep learning than human. In the next two years, according to my timetables, I will be able to build the AI I need to construct the fusion reactor I designed when I was 9. I’m only one generation of hardware away from being able to build a PC that can run the software I designed to operate the damned thing. “Those first reactors will go online in Accura Bay, Ghana, where I will have dual citizenship.”

Naomi was stunned. “And you have been planning to do all of this since you were 6?” “No, I was 7 when it started to come together in my mind. My schedule was thrown off by the death of my sister. I stayed home instead of attending college out of state in order to be near my mother. She had the hardest time after Emily died. That’s when she started using opiates, and the in and out of rehab thing began. By the time I was 12, she was doing better, so I finished puttering around, finished high school, and went to university, where she taught, mainly to be near my family while I finished school. I don’t care if it’s cliche, I am a momma’s boy.”

“While it is in my nature to be kind, I am not nice; my interactions with people tend to be transactional, my communications are curt, civil, direct, and to the point. Being at sea away from too many people makes it easier for me to think clearly. The sea is a pure soul; it has no politics, religion, race, gender, or sexual preference. The sea has no feelings to confuse, no ego to bruise. The sea rewards the unfortunate and the stupid with the same prize, death. The sea is my skjaldmær, the sea is my sister, the sea is my shield maiden. I don’t get sensory overload out here, away from everyone; it’s the only place where life and death make sense.”

“I’m just glad you’re one of the good guys, Jefe. Tomorrow, when we reach Havana, if it goes sideways with Dead Eye Polly, she said solemnly, you understand we’re both dead. let’s just be sure we take that albino bastard with us to the grave.” He looked up into the middle-aged Cuban woman’s brown eyes, his green eyes saw that there was no fear, only resignation and a touch of aging sorrows, the soft lines in the corners of her eyes from her smiles.

“I swear it. If it comes to that, he will drink to us in Valhalla.” She looked at him and laughed.

“You’re such a fucking nerd. Naomi grinned; I just love it.”

“His guns are big, Isaiah said stoically, but mine’s bigger, longer, thicker, and uncut,” he said as her eyes followed his to where the Mass Driver lay on the charts table a few feet away. “Literally.”

“Ow. Damnit, Izzy, stop making me laugh. Does this electromagnetic gun of yours have a name?”

“The technical designation that appears on my research papers and patents is;

‘Magnetically Optimized Launch Oscillating Coil Hypersonic-drive projectile platform’ or MOLOCH pp.44mm magnum [.44mm caseless 16-gram ceramic magnum], he replied with a shrug. But the boomer professors in the engineering department at SMU christened her War Pig.”

“Your nerdiness knows no bounds, does it. Alexa, play ‘War Pigs’.”

“Playing ‘War Pigs’ by Black Sabbath,” the robotic voice called out in her synthesized, mellifluous voice. They both collapsed into each other’s arms, laughing as the opening chords to the metal anthem blasted out of the ship’s speakers. As the music reverberated within the cabin’s walls, they raucously screamed their war song out into the night across the darkened Caribbean Sea.

“Generals gathered in their masses!

Just like witches at black masses!

Evil minds that plot destruction!

Sorcerer of death’s construction!”

-Black Sabbath

“Yeah, she had a plan. But one thing Isaiah Leonardo Jones was certain of was that he had a better one. And by the time this was all over, God was gonna’ need a slide rule to figure all the angles.”

[Footnote to ‘Isaiah Jones versus the Sea (A 21st Century Odessey)’ chapter 9.3 War Pigs:

It is important for the reader to understand the mind and the lexicon of his humor and reasoning when he names his Mass Accelerator MOLOCH. In this, the age of Google people will read the first paragraph of a Wikipedia post and move on without ever encountering the mad genius of Allen Ginsburg’s epic poem Howl. It is our protagonist as well as my own favorite poem. Of particular importance to the narrative is Part II of Mister Ginsburg’s masterpiece. The author wants the reader to read it and then reread it and substitute the word America for Moloch. Now, please take your time and savor the ecclesiastic ecstasy of Allen Genberg’s magnum opus. Enjoy this holy moment.

-jdc

“Howl II

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!”

-Allen Ginsburg]

[Foot notes on Emily Elisabeth Jones: the reader first learns about Isaiahs late sister in chapter three in this 10-year-old AP news article: Aeon picked up the 10-year-old Newspaper and reread the Associated Press article; Labor Day 2010 Tragic Loss Strikes Maiden Voyage of SS ‘Horizon Disparu’: 28 people Perished in Maritime Catastrophe Porto di Catania, Italy – Labor Day weekend marked the maiden voyage of the SS ‘Horizon Disparu,’ a 100-foot cruiser by ‘Atlantique Voiles,’ a distinguished French shipbuilding company with a four-century legacy. However, this much-anticipated journey from Sicily to Carthage turned into an unforeseen tragedy, claiming numerous lives. Of the twenty passengers and nine crew members on board, only Lieutenant Helen Jones of the US Navy stationed at NAS Sigonella and her 5-year-old son, Isaiah, emerged as survivors. The vessel departed from Porto di Catania under favorable conditions but encountered a fierce storm shortly after 11:00 PM (37°37’37.2″N 11°20’48.2″E), approximately fifty miles off the Sicilian coast. Tragically, as passengers slept below deck, the keel bolts detached, causing an abrupt capsizing that thwarted all attempts to deploy life rafts despite the captain’s SOS distress signal. Amidst the chaos, Lieutenant Helen Jones, displaying remarkable courage and maternal instinct, sought to secure her 5-year-old twins, Emily and Isaiah, using shirts to bind them amidst the flooding cabins. As the vessel sank, however, the fabric securing Emily tore away, separating her from her mother in the chaotic darkness. In the aftermath, Lieutenant Helen Jones and her son, Isaiah, emerged as the only survivors amidst the desolation of the capsized vessel. For seven arduous hours, battling winds up to 50 knots and towering 20-foot waves, they clung to hope in the unforgiving Mediterranean until search and rescue helicopters located and rescued them at sunrise. This catastrophic maritime incident has spurred a thorough investigation into the circumstances leading to the SS ‘Horizon Disparu’s’ demise. As the world grieves, heartfelt condolences pour in, offering solace to all the families and loved ones affected by this tragic loss in the sinking of the SS ‘Horizon Disparu.’ The Associated Press diligently follows developments in this Labor Day weekend calamity, awaiting answers and closure while the memory of 5-year-old Emily Ruth Jones, lost at sea with 27 other passengers and crew, remains an indelible mark on this unforeseen maritime catastrophe.”]

[Note 2 Twins and death]

-About the author

JD Cloudy’s poetry has disappeared in the literary journals: Fatfizz, Mad Swirl, Texas Beat Anthology, Danse Macabre, Du Jour, and Death List Five. He has won no literary awards, entered no slam competitions, and never completed college. He lives to write in Dallas, TX.