Posted by nigel1 on June 12, 2002 at 09:16:55:
It was clear that Lentil's thirteenth year was a critical one. Even he sensed that, and the significance of that number thirteen was not lost on him. Little did he know, that the rest of nature responded, that the aether vibrated in the space around him, sending out a subliminal biological alert, to the healthy organisms around him. Chiggers, wasps, bees, ants, spiders, mosquitoes, plagued him unnaturally, receiving a course vector from Bio-Control. His pubescent peers isolated themselves from him, froze him out of their social lives. They began to make his school life a living hell. Sleek young animals, secure in their genetic ordinariness, sporting the perfectly smooth and very light and thin neocortex, the diminished frontal lobes, which were all marks of nature's favor to her fittest young animals, transformed Jean's Lentil into what could only be described as a boy with a cauliflower head, so badly and so frequently was he beaten. The beatings rendered Lentil's world fuzzy. A kind of distorted vision and a distorted perception became chronic. If only he could do things with his mind! He would rain a quarry of rocks upon his enemies. He prayed to dark gods, hidden powers, old enemies of mankind, to grant him the ability to wreak harm in the outer world, just as the outer world worked its harm upon him. Lentil little knew that a dermoid cyst grew in his very brain! A mass of displaced teeth and hair and musculature forming an almost recognizable homunculus had slept for years in the deep brain tissues beneath his left temporal lobe. But it was awakening.
He'd locked the bathroom door behind him. Arthulia smashed at it with her fists, screaming at him. Memories assaulted Arthulia, of a childhood she had not known she had-- it was a little confusing but no less depressing. It seemed that in a ghetto she learned to fear locked bathroom doors. Confronting this door, with Lentil behind it, she still fully expected to find an abortion in progess, a murder, a drug overdose, body parts stuffed in the toilet. Something was increasingly wrong with Lentil, wrong with her life as well. That difficult life honed an extra sense that made her aware of evil, wherever it grew. An inner voice told her contradictory things: SOMETHING'S GOT CONTROL OF YOUR MIND, ARTHULIA-- GET OUT OF THIS HOUSE! and DON'T GO THROUGH THAT DOOR! LOOK NOT THERE! It was her odious duty to catch Lentil in the midst of unspeakable acts, crimes against nature. Jean was a rutting zombie, all unaware, and so much the better for her. Arthulia smashed at the door with her shoulder and actually managed to break it open. Horror of horrors, there was Lentil with his pants around his knees and both filthy mitts wrapped around a purple pulsing boner that would have given pause to Babe Ruth. You could hit a homer with that, for sure, but how'd you swing something that quivered so much? Lentil's eyes were crossed and he seemed so tranced out as not to be aware of Arthulia's presence. He was muttering, intensely and feverishly: ...yeah got her between her tits shot that other one in the gut shoulda seen her jiggling boobs butt going down into dirt dead dead dead... She could only think SNAKE! SNAKE! and attack with her broom. It was suddenly like being in the jungle or in the veldt, fighting off a deadly Black Mambo, a snake that stood on its tail, six feet tall, hiding behind a tree until somebody walked too close and BAM right in the face with a mouthfull of fangs. But the whacking with the broom handle only brought a smile to Lentil's face, and if anything the erection got huger and meaner.
In the next few weeks, with this embarrassing incident behind them, Arthulia joined Lentil with his bone collection. Was it only empty space he stared into? She felt the presence of invisible gods, some more evil than any imagining. She began to place hex charms in every room. She adopted a diet of field peas and bacon grease. She found a source for cornwhiskey and smoked dope.
Actually, we might easily imagine that there was nothing whatsoever occult about Lentil. He gazed into space. So what? Isaac Newton gazed into space, and he was thinking. Maybe Lentil was thinking too. Maybe he was thinking he didn't have long to live. Mabye he was thinking that he wouldn't live long enough to do any really serious thinking or accomplish very much because he was always getting the snot knocked out of him. His cauliflower head bloomed all over with bruises and running sores. He had a lot of headaches. He had a ringing in his ears almost all of the time. Sometimes his ears got clogged with clotted blood. He'd bet (maybe) that he'd someday accumulate so much brain damage, he wouldn't be able to think anymore and maybe he'd better do his thinking while he could. Maybe he conducted "idealized experiments" in his head. It's possible. Who can say? Lentil's teachers realized he was a really bright boy, without realizing how bright he really was, which would have surprised them. He could not perform up to his potential since he was frequently punchdrunk. Everyone knew to some extent that Lentil suffered. But they were, everyone of them, graduates of the Douglas A. (Arthur) McArthur American Freedom Foundation Academy, and couldn't help but feel that anyone THAT smart was probably going to be subversive, dangerous, untrustworthy, and most likely some sort of liberal faggot. He was a weakling, too. And that was not a bad thing (in this interpretation of events) because weaklings had their place and lots of boys punier than Lentil survived by paying protection money and giving blow-jobs on demand. That was life, and the fitness of the scheme could not be doubted, since it all came from God. What pissed everyone off (if they were in fact pissed off and not something else we can scarcely imagine) was that Lentil held himself aloof, practised a kind of exclusiveness that suggested the hated, dreaded, Christ-killing Jew. It was like he didn't want to be contaminated by ordinary life, and as though he scorned the verities of Honor Duty Patriotism. Or maybe they just didn't mean shit to him. Too quiet, too thoughtful, too aloof-- unnatural! And in such a light, those beatings were a gift from God. They would shave off a bit of that excess brain function, toughen his hide and maybe snap him out of it, whatever it was. Like the marines said, be a man or die. His gym coach was an ex-marine, and found it difficult to keep his hands off Lentil. He would have loved to smack the snot out of that kid. He was so slender and graceful, Lentil could be mistaken for a girl, almost, a young girl, a thirteen year old girl. That slender butt in the showers, for instance, brought up memories of bayonet practice. In Korea the coach had bayoneted a gook he'd caught with his pants down, taking a crap. He surprised the enemy, who must have been isolated by his company's sudden advance, and the gook got up, hands raised, gibbering some shit or other, and presented a nice target. But instead of putting a round in his gut, he walked up to the surrendering enemy soldier and stuck him in the belly with his bayonet. Sometimes the ex-marine jacked off, thinking of that, but lately he'd substituted Lentil's body, and sometimes Lentil's body faded into a girl's body, and whenever he saw Lentil in the showers after that he felt like taking Lentil's slender arms and twisting them until the kid screamed. Shit, he'd grab a hold of the kid's cock and pull it out by the roots. If men would only look like men, he thought, and act like men, there would be no temptation and no unnatural behavior. You could only fight it, with fists if need be. Lentil's bruises gave him heart. The kids were OK. The guys, after they showered, liked to gather around his desk and shoot the shit with him, standing there naked with their dicks dangling at the height of his desktop and he felt perfectly OK! Because they were young MEN! He knew they were OK! They looked OK and they acted like men by God! He was OK! The country wasn't going down the toilet yet, not in these parts. But that Lentil kid might have to die.
Maybe it was like that. It could be that Lentil, surrounded as he was by contempt, by round and jiggling boobs butts bellys rank fishy overheated cunts, by tight rippling mesomorphs who had all apparently been born prelobotomized, (or were the lobotomys performed when they took the foreskins?) withdrew into his brain because he knew he had to die, or that eventually they'd fuck him up so much his brain wouldn't be available as a refuge anymore.
On the other hand, Lentil might not actually have deserved anyone's pity or sympathy. He looked human but maybe he wasn't. He had that dermoid cyst in his brain. He might not have had 46 chromosomes. Maybe the cyst/homunculus had begun to do his thinking for him! And what right had anyone to deny a perfect nature the right to cleanse itself by any means?