The Convulsion Factory (20 page)

And then where would I be, losing not two kids, but hundreds?

Mariana knew my heart, I think, knew it as only one can who has lost her own children after already losing a husband. All three of hers — a daughter and two sons, none older than fourteen — had been killed last year in the massacre that had left the eleven dead in the street. I didn’t ask if they were delinquents or had only been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Surprisingly, I didn’t even wonder until much later. Not that it mattered.

We grieved for ourselves, mourned for each other, long after the afternoon sun had gone to evening moon, long after Pedro would have packed up his camera and bid another day farewell. We held each other against the night, and soon she took me to her bed and we loved each other in the sad passion of tears, loved each other as only two who intimately share some mutual anguish can love. I knew the powerful rapture of her body, and it exhausted mine. I groped for her soul, and it left mine feeling less abandoned.

We slept some, but late in the night she awoke with a start, trembling, and when I tried to hold her, Mariana gently pushed my hands aside. Her beauty became ethereal by moonlight, a silvery flood that came through the open door to her balcony. Her hair was now unbound, a lush tangle across the pillow, deeply black with silver threads that glimmered under the moon.

“No touching,” she said, “not now. Please?”

“Do you want me to leave?”

“No, no,” and she shook her head. “You came to understand.”

I smiled, a moment’s self-derision in realizing how little time we’d actually spent talking about Miguel and the others. The smile faded when I realized that she sounded as if I now might be learning something new.

“I do not understand what gets into me some nights,” she said. “But I let it in anyway.”

From beneath the balcony came small sounds of scramble, of feet and hands bracing on wrought iron and pulling themselves up, up. Higher. Closer. Doña Mariana showed no fear, so I, naked and defenseless though I was, promised myself I’d feel none either.

Finally, she looked toward the balcony, where small shadows were beginning to fall. Kids. Just kids. Four of them, with bright feral eyes, climbing over the railing, clambering onto the balcony and hesitantly entering the bedroom. Even in the night I could see they needed baths.

“I dream them to me in the night, sometimes,” she said. “I wake, and here they are. Is it not a miracle? I choose to believe it is. I choose to let it work through me.”

Doña Mariana left my side, left the bed, and went to them. She displayed not the slightest shame in appearing to them naked, her body tall and proud and magnificent in the moonlight. Before them, she lowered to the floor, lying on her side with her heavy breasts exposed in subtle invitation. In permission.

The children knelt, crowding in with eager faces, and as I watched, no longer any part of this, they suckled. For a long time they suckled, taking turns, snapping irritably when one monopolized a thick brown nipple for too long.

When the first of them bounded away, leaping from the balcony in a blur of child-skin and fledgling fur, it became clear to me.

I thought of Argentina of the late 1970s, when the army was in charge and routinely rounded up innocents who were never seen again. The generals often took orphaned children, to raise them as their own, trying to poison their hearts and minds at tender ages. But the grandmothers and other women fought back the only way they could, a few at first, but more every day: marching with signs in Buenos Aires’ Plaza de Mayo, across from the seat of government, demanding the return of their missing loved ones. The Mothers of the Disappeared, they were called, and they won. They were the first true resisters, who took back their country.

A mother’s grief can be such a potent form of magic.

I sat on the bed of Doña Mariana, and thought of the
policía
, and tried not to believe the rumors I’d heard of pelts hung wet and dripping from alley walls, a new blow struck in the coming struggle. I tried to believe that the chorus of howls I heard late last night sounded something other than mournful.

Don’t let it happen,
I prayed, again the resurrection of an act I couldn’t believe in any more.
Don’t let it happen.

But I tried to have faith, faith that these children would not allow it, that they would fight until they need fight no more to keep themselves from becoming the worst of all possible things:

The last of a dying breed.

There is no such thing as repugnance. Everything is a simple matter of context, and how much you’re willing to accept. How far you’re willing to go for your own aesthetic of beauty is only a factor of commitment, and the only one that matters.

Kevin and Anthony and I arrived in Chicago two days before the first show of the new tour — Josef would follow — to settle in and make sure there were no problems with the stage design, and give our road crew plenty of time with the initial set-up. The theater management was cooperative. Smaller venues usually are. A 5000-seater, it was probably the top end as far as what we could ever expect to sell out. We would never fill anything much larger. This is the price of shunning the commercial, and cultivating your disciples from among the underground. It’s their fervor that sustains you when you start to think no one else is listening, and no one ever will.

“Has he checked in yet today?” It was the first thing Kevin asked me when he came knocking after we got back to the hotel that night. For some reason it was my room that got designated as the communal area. I think I understood: Kevin and Anthony lived like pigs but wouldn’t generally inflict it on me. Concessions to the alleged fairer sex after all? They would deny it to their graves.

“There was a message,” I told him. “He said he’ll be coming in tomorrow night for sure.”

“Call him later?”

I avoided that one and moved about the room. Here and there lay fetishistic objects I seemed unable to leave behind whenever we toured, my favorite being a shrunken head impaled on a long, crude nail of the type used in Roman crucifixions. I had cut the stitching across the head’s lips and pried open the tiny mouth. Dark and wrinkled as a prune, blind and wizened, it seemed to sing.

“Wonder if he’s still in much pain,” said Kevin. “At least he’s bound to get some good scars out of it.”

He shucked his leather cyclist’s jacket and lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling. Sweat glistened, jewel-like, in the cropped black stubble of his hair. We’d been lovers once, in terms of the act itself, if not the emotion. It’s always easier to detach when you go at it like machines. You just disengage.

This was before Josef, after whom nothing could ever be the same. Some of us seem naturally to addict ourselves to obsessive types. It reduces the world to a certain attractive simplicity.

“I wonder what he sounds like now,” was all I could say.

On the bed, Kevin started to say something, found it wasn’t there after all. He shrugged and was the first to look away, and I then knew: Something had finally pierced his shells of leather and grime and dogged survivalist ethic, and left him cowed.

It meant I was stronger … and that was information in which I could revel.

MANIFESTO: In the late twentieth century, the territorial war has become an anachronistic holdover, on the wane as an effective tool of control. The battleground for control in post-industrial society is informational. Information has become the new international currency, the new holy grail. Covert wars in private as well as public sectors are fought over information, with murders, assassinations, and saturation propaganda all viable means to desired ends.

This we understood. Know thy enemy.

And of information, on ourselves, we have plenty…

*

From
B-Side Magazine
, February/March issue, 3 years ago:

“Your confusion’s understandable,” says Josef Jaeger.

That’s a relief.

“Not a whole lot of people pick up on the significance of our name. It used to bother me, but now I just take it for granted.”

So says the vocalist/lyricist/psychodramatist behind hardcore industrial quartet The Giger Sanction, whose first two releases have solidly established them as worthy contemporaries of such bands as Skinny Puppy, Ministry, and Nine Inch Nails, while also bringing to mind middle-period Swans.

Now, about that unusual moniker?

Explains Jaeger, and one gets the feeling he’s run through this a few times: “Most obviously, it’s a reference to Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger, and that entire biomechanical world his paintings depict. He did the original creature and some of the set designs for the movie
Alien
, but that’s just a tiny fraction of his work. Is it flesh, is it metal? His work’s always creeped me out in the best way possible. But our name’s also a play on words from the title of the Trevanian novel
The Eiger Sanction
. I read that when I was in junior high, and it had a big impact on me. The main character was a professional assassin named Jonathan Hemlock. He was so ruthless when he had to be, he could just completely dehumanize others. I think what I was responding to, what I found the scariest, was that when you read it, you
root
for him.”

Apparently more than a few people wonder what connection this has to the dense, eardrum-rupturing sound of The Giger Sanction and its apocalyptic lyrical content, not to mention the frequently gruesome stage spectacles. Not to worry. One gets the feeling Jaeger has often explained this too.

“Modern society is breeding sociopaths at a rate higher than it’s ever been. We definitely believe that. And dehumanization is everywhere you look. Sure, you have obvious examples — mass murder, the military/industrial complex — but it’s in the ads for your breakfast cereal too. Those commercials don’t care that you’re a human being, they take for granted that you’re some kind of meat machine and then try to push the right buttons. People are getting torn in two inside, because they’re expected to function in a world where everything’s progressively more mechanized, but they’re still human beings. We don’t try to make sense of all that, we just look at it really hard.”

“At its heart, what our music is,” says Jaeger’s bandmate and paramour Jasmine Snow, “is a wake-up scream. Wake up and smell the corrosion.”

Which makes them prophets of gloom, doom, and apocalypse?

“Definitely. Hell yes,” says Anthony Newman, but with a wicked grin that suggests he gets a thrill out of the world just as it is. “I mean, when you look like us, and there’s still lots of streets
we’re
afraid to walk, you know there’s a big problem.”

The Giger Sanction must surely win some minor award for their physical transformation between debut and sophomore releases. The liner photo in their first album,
Virtual Neurality
, doesn’t do much to distinguish them from any of several anonymous techno bands, decked out in colorful rave-wear. One look at the photo in their new CD,
Acetylene Torch Songs
— not to mention the band in the flesh — suggests that in a year’s time, they’ve undergone an evil metamorphosis.

Leather cycle and bomber jackets abound, on top of commando pants, unwashed T-shirts, and combat and Doc Marten boots. Jaeger sports a head of crusty white-boy dreadlocks. Jasmine Snow, the Sanction’s primary keyboardist, has sidewalled her own scalp, the remainder braided into sharp-looking, whiplike rat-tails. Both guitarist Kevin Lanier and Anthony Newman, who handles electronics and percussion when the Sanction isn’t propelled by a drum machine hammering hard enough to shift continental plates, bare menacing skulls shaved within a millimeter of skin. This crew looks as if they stepped out of the post-holocaust wasteland of a Mad Max film, and frequently come across as grim as if all they have to look forward to are lives spent sweating over the foundry in a steel mill.

“Oh, that,” says Jaeger, uncomfortable with the comparison to a Mel Gibson character. “It wasn’t really anything calculated.”

“If anything,” Lanier adds, “we’re more comfortable now in whatever we project. We quit caring. That makes everything so much easier.”

Says Jasmine Snow: “It just seemed a mutant outgrowth of the direction our music started taking.”

One listen to their two releases supplies all the evidence needed to back that up.
Virtual Neurality
is sonically the smoother album, heavily reliant on synthesizers, sequencers, and a few samples of caustic unnatural sounds. All of which are present on
Acetylene Torch Songs
, but this time deeper in the mix, combined with the frenzy of Lanier’s grinding guitar and Newman’s sledgehammer drumming. It all blends into a devastating wall of beautifully ugly noise. Live on stage, it’s as dense as a wrecking ball slamming you in the chest.

This time around Jaeger promises a visual presentation worthy of the music. “Our first tour, we opened for Ministry. Which was great, but when you’re the opener, you’re limited as to what you can do. This time we’re headlining in clubs and small theaters, so we figure, why not make it memorable, in a visceral, propagandized way. I wear a headset, so I’m not chained to a mike stand, and I spend the first two-thirds of the show wandering around the stage, doing an autopsy on myself. The special effects makeup’s pretty intense. I tear out the pieces that we perceive modern society to be minimizing in importance — say, my heart, for instance — and I put them on various altars. Then for the final third, I go gathering different pieces from the junkyard onstage and putting them in me, as replacements for everything that’s missing. Gears, wiring, tools of control. Like, one of them is this oil-dripping videotape.” He pauses, looking a bit sheepish. “Well, we kind of stole that one from the movie
Videodrome
, but it works so well with the overall concept, we like to think Cronenberg wouldn’t mind.”