𝐻𝓊𝓂𝒶𝓃 𝑅𝑒𝓈𝑜𝓊𝓇𝒸𝑒𝓈? 𝑀𝑜𝓇𝑒 𝐿𝒾𝓀𝑒 𝐻𝑒𝓁𝓁, 𝑅𝒾𝑔𝒽𝓉?

Bureaucratic oversight in The Key of Solomon [7/24]

Last week I sat in the hotseat for a routine root canal. The dentist lectured on the dangers of a diet filled to the brim with sweets. To accommodate the condescension, his mouth opened wide, enough to swallow the fluorescent lights slung low on the office ceiling. By squinting, I could see the black ink of fresh tattoos aligned along his ruddy upper gums. The message was clear: “9/10 oral surgeons recommend purchasing a copy of Red Lamb’s debut novel, The Charlatan.” I tried to formulate a question about that lone holdout, but my unformed words escaped my lips as a gasping moan. He approached with a long piece of floss, a party favor to bring home. Printed on both sides were the text and footnotes below.

My tongue bleeds reading the latest submitted missive, a crisp iron taste flooding my mouth, saliva turning to rust against my will. This mystery penman has discovered a secret realm of institutional cruelty that makes my biological system revolt. His story operates like surgery performed sans anesthesia, each sentence cutting deeper into tissue that should be numb by now but isn't and will never be.

The photocopier births documents that shriek when touched. Insurance forms printed on human skin, medical questionnaires that pulse with arterial rhythm. The machine operates on schedules determined by lunar cycles I stopped tracking years ago, decades ago, yesterday afternoon when time folded itself into origami shapes too complex for linear comprehension.

On the third date—that’s two this fiscal quarter!—he runs his mouth ‘til jaw becomes law, a calcified bone hinge¹ codified by the State for the explicit purpose of spreading the news about their latest pick-up-sticks racket: purchasing bulk orders of pawned marriage certificates, launching discrete campaigns to discredit the institution of holy matrimony, watching unions of love both young and old crumble from controlled demolition, then flipping the legal paperwork post-divorce after prices skyrocket.²

She risks an interjection to tell him that this master-bedroom-busting plan makes little to no economic sense. He responds, in the same manner as one does to all critics: arranging a free ride, for her, to the Re-Education Township Alliance for Remedial Damnation³ just outside the limits of town, away from the jurisdiction that guarantees her rights of speech, assembly, and bodily autonomy. In that R.E.T.A.R.D. camp,⁴ she is bound to a stone slab inscribed with ancient runes—Viking, Mongolian, etc.—and modern sigils—Bluetooth, WiFi, etc.—and forced to watch an unending stream of horrific war crimes captioned by even worse graphic design,⁵ all while a pair of superintelligent garden gnomes tickle her pits and kneecaps with the feathers of rare, exotic birds.⁶

He observes her methodical torture through a small window in his computer screen, tabbing back and forth between that and a virtual group call attended by his fellow Kings of Hell,⁷ boldly masturbating under the desk until it’s his turn to speak, a period prophesized yet never arriving—Monday morning meetings, am I right 🙄

Blood pools under my fingernails after writing these annotations, crimson staining crescents where I've been digging into palms without realizing. The sinister laugher of these conference calls echo through ventilation systems that carry voices from meetings never scheduled yet somehow attended nightly.

My office chair burns against my spine like carved tourmaline conducting electrical current through pathways that connect this building to facilities existing beyond normal geographical boundaries. The door locks changed themselves again. I test the handle seventeen times each afternoon, compulsive behavior triggered by reading about transportation protocols to camps where human rights evaporate into thin winter air like the hot steam of breath.

The gnomes appear in peripheral vision during late afternoon hours, shadows moving independently of their casting objects. Domestic decoration transforming into surveillance apparatus through algorithms that study nervous system responses I provide without conscious consent. The feather sensations across my cheekbones intensify during reading sessions, phantom tickling that creates psychological breakdown more complete than physical violence.

Precise documentation of institutional torture requires personal experience in place of imagination. Motivational posters about exceeding agony quotas. Employee portals accessed daily without questioning why the login credentials never expire. These diabolical prose one-shots arrive from the same mind and voice, identical obsessions disguised as varied authorship. HE LIVES.

Wanda

1. My own mandible is totally rigid, bone hardening into bureaucratic instrument while fingers burn against keys that conduct medieval frequencies. The courtroom smells like wet quartz and fear-sweat. Scribes dead for centuries dictate testimony I record about women who count when they should remain silent. The defendant has my face. Her crimes happened in 1347. And tomorrow, during the plague tribunals. Dinner conversation for male throats, gift-wrapped. Legislative chambers honoring speech as magical act. Oath-swearing ceremonies, spoken words carry binding force, transforming into legal reality. Biological anarchy-tyranny. One conversation at a time. Time collapses when examining institutional power. What happened within Black Death boardrooms?

2. The futures market applied to human affection. I taste smoke, parchment roasting, Amsterdam tulip merchants surround me, explaining bulk purchasing strategies for love contracts. The auction house. The year is 1637. The year is 1942. The year is now, eternally now. I bid on certificates from couples who consummate without ever meeting. The auctioneer's gavel echoes from explosive force. Wars I never lived through but filmed as embedded journalist. Infrastructural violence, architects who learned anatomy from DARPA technical documents. Controlled demolition, residue coating my lungs. Implosion as the only perfect relationship termination. Emotional labor commodified by way of investment logic identical to war bonds. Profit extracted from human suffering. Time in the bull market beats timing the bear market. Divorce paperwork appreciates like vintage wine.

3. Salem fires warm my back as I watch her speak heresy through simple addition and/or subtraction applied to masculine financial fantasy. The persecution reflex. Automatic activation embedded in institutional DNA since 1486. Female mathematics becomes divination requiring immediate relocation to the space between netherworlds. Beyond time itself. Conference rooms where I took shorthand minutes since the Inquisition began. Yesterday. Questioning male authority triggered intimidation protocols designed to maintain willful ignorance through fear. Witch trials, kangaroo courts. Women dare add and subtract; men prefer multiplication and division. Arithmetic ceases to exist. Deliberate miscalculation. Debtor’s inferno.

4. Offensive acronym hiding behind cheap gag. Vomit mixed with chalk dust from classrooms spanning multiple prison-planets simultaneously. I fill out intake forms for camps that processed my grandmother, will process my daughter, and are processing me right now through inter-dimensional paperwork shredding boundaries broken through administrative procedures. Geographical displacement removes subjects from first-world protection by moving them outside reality itself. No legal jurisdiction. The camp exists in pockets opened through properly filed torture applications processed by departments that exist only when needed. Judicial vacuum, spontaneous evaporation, replaced by convenient efficiency standards perfected during Japanese internment of 1942. Refined through CIA black site operations conducted in international waters. These decades blur together, oil paint ambience.

5. Symphonic conductors, ancient curses and modern electrical signals carved into my retinas while pattern recognition pulses through rock that remembers every body it ever supported, the rock keeping the body keeping the score. Comic Sans on the brain. I taped this genocide footage for audiences who mistake all-encompassing murder for PowerPoint training materials. Democratization of atrocity through amateurs wielding professional presentation software. Ethnic cleansing reduced to slideshow format with bullet points and pie charts. I remember sitting through similar fireside chats in conference rooms existing outside spacetime, with middle management explaining extermination quotas.

6. Skin-crawling procedures that Spanish inquisitors perfected in 1587, documented in Theatrum Crudelitatum. Machine learning maketh torture customer service industry with quality control standards. Supply chains I managed, manage, will manage for specialized suffering equipment: inventory systems for graduated torment, departments that maintain procurement networks for specific types of pain. Cataloguing species according to neural response patterns produced when applied under controlled conditions calibrated for pleasure-pain infliction. Prolonged stimulation without release. I am inside of the aviary.

7. Quarterly torture reviews: Baal presents PowerPoint slides about pain metric improvements while Paimon's dog barks in background and Beleth has connection issues making his voice sound like digital static mixed with turbo jet engines. Purson forgets to unmute during soul harvesting updates while Marax types in chat because his microphone broke during last week's screaming competition. Ipos calls from his “car”—a neon pagoda on stone wheels with thirty-inch rims pulled by slaves covered in boils—audio cutting out as he explains despair distribution efficiency standards. Aim has technical difficulties with screen sharing when displaying depravity analytics, cursing in ancient Aramaic while his computer freezes. Naberius multitasks, checking email during Glasya-Labolas's presentation about psychological terror optimization. Buer provides medical consultation via webcam from clinical setting, the sterile office of the black angel of death, offering advice about maximizing suffering without premature expiration. Gusion's video pixelates during recruitment metric reports among middle management executives. Sitri handles customer relations, discussing complaint resolution for abuse victims filing service quality grievances through employee portals. Leraje manages apprenticeship programs, training junior demons through virtual reality simulations. Eligos coordinates intelligence briefings on surveillance data from smart home invasion. Zepar specializes in targeted psychological manipulation, sharing his KPI wins. Botis focuses on supply chain management for specialized torment equipment across dimensional territories. Bathin handles transportation logistics between earthly locations and infernal processing facilities. Sallos manages public relations, maintaining Hell's brand image through influencer partnerships, using algorithms coded during decades that bleed together like watercolors in acid rain. The meeting continues across sectors and centuries: each demon multitasking through spreadsheet presentations while discussing optimization strategies for industrial-scale suffering production through VPN-enabled corporate communication platforms where cruelty operates according to business review standards that span eternity. Even the break-room coffee is cold!