Showing posts with label nick mamatas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nick mamatas. Show all posts

Monday, March 15, 2021

Revise and Resubmit, fiction by Nick Mamatas

1. You find HTML difficult to learn, and you don’t trust those various blog platforms. There are still the old ways—the weapons of the X-ACTO knife and mimeograph. The truth must get out. 

Here is the truth as you recall it. The subways used to be clean. When a man felt the call of nature, he could use the restroom right on the platform. It would be clean, well appointed with liquid hand soap—clear, not pink!—and TP rolls cut to industrial standard. It wasn’t even the blacks who ruined the public bathrooms with their lack of care for the commons, their desperation to sell copper pipes and chrome taps for drug money, it was the homosexuals. They just had to suck one another, bugger one another, all hours of the day and night. Evacuation is a revolting enough activity under the best circumstances, but the mouth meeting the penis, the penis meeting the anus, the anus meeting the mouth, the anus meeting the penis, like filthy Tinkertoys…

Now even the white man has to hold it, or piss himself, or somehow find a quiet moment behind a concrete pillar on the subway platform, just like any savage.  No shopkeeper or restaurateur is kind enough to do a well-dressed, perfectly groomed, white man the favor of letting him use the facilities without a purchase. Your grandmother worked in a coffee shop when you were young. She’d let people use the restroom; she’d offer a first free cup of coffee after midnight to the late custom. Her Jew boss would have surely complained had he wasn’t already abed with his obese wife likely clammy from Lord knows what exertions, but what the Jew didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. She wanted to be alone at night with men sitting at her counter. It made her feel safe to be surrounded by white men.


2. You aren’t the man you used to be, and not only because the Jew took your job and drained your bank account of the precious funds your father and mother left you when they passed. You’ve lost a step. Your peripheral vision is collapsing into a dark tunnel. The pamphlet is ready, but you dare not hand it out on the streets. For every interested person you make contact with, there might a Jew or black who can somehow “pass”, despite the years you spend studying the science of racial realism. Plus, those black-masked terrorists with their homemade weapons and swarming numbers are just a text away. Jobless children supported by the miracle of compound interest, with nothing better to do with their lives than assault others for their opinions in the hope of “going viral”, whatever that is.

They’re already a disease.

You dare not publicly solicit, so instead you once again use the old methods. Wheatpaste and a bucket, late at night, when the traffic lights give orders to streets empty of traffic, when the diners are closed, when you can piss down a flight to steps to the subway station without audience or embarrassment.  Wheatpasting is really an endeavor designed for two, but you are at the moment of a movement of one. You have comrades, but they’re all far off in other cities, and you communicate entirely via a circle of round-robin correspondence, and then in code. The Jew owns the internet, but more than a few of your comrades work for the Postal Service. They revealed long ago the trick to free letters—just put the address you’re mailing to as the return address, and your own address as the destination. Leave off the stamp. The letter will be “returned to sender” every time. If the government insists blindly on treating everyone as equal, take advantage of the blind spots.

It’s a long night, but the streets seem longer, and it’s a challenge to hold the folder containing your leaflets by pinching it between your left arm and ribs, the bucket handle hanging from your elbow, as you brush the paste onto a lamppost with your right. Then you must gently put the brush back in the bucket in such a way as it doesn’t fall into the mush, slide a leaflet out of the folder without ripping the paper or dropping the folder, and plaster it up without getting your hands sticky, or glue under your finger nails. A block’s worth of available pasting space takes twenty minutes. Your arm cramps as the folder grows thinner and you have to keep your muscles tensed. For the white race you’re doing this, for your white children and for the two of your grandchildren who are white. Little Cicero, well…

It’s nearly three o’clock in the morning when you arrive home. Do people even call this hour three o’clock in the morning anymore? Three AM seems to be the fashion. Everyone is like a machine these days.


3. Waiting is the hardest part. Possible contacts are often the last to call the number on the leaflet. It’s not even pranks, vulgar children, and threats that fill your answering machine. It’s journalists, the maggots. Always wanting a quote, offering a coffee, even wondering if they could visit “headquarters”—you can tell from their tone that they already know that White Political Allegiance is headquartered out of your three-room railroad apartment. Wouldn’t it be a laugh, to show the man who wishes to lead the Master Race sitting in his boxer shorts on a stained old reclining chair positioned right before his television set? Then come the hysterics screaming “Nazi!”, which just showed that they only skimmed the leaflet—you’re a race realist libertarian. Monkeys don’t have markets! Then the punks with their threats and challenges, which they wouldn’t dare make if this godforsaken chocolate city allowed for concealed carry.

It takes weeks for your co-thinkers to reach out. You’ve learned not to grow upset when your handiwork is ruined, when the contact information at the bottom of your leaflets are scraped away. It’s these men, and twice even women, who do it. They need to meet you, but these exemplars of the West and the Race aren’t quite so courageous as they should be.

Truth be told, even those who reach out to you rarely do much more than accept the reading list you proffer them over coffee. It’s your fault, truly. The logo, the rhetoric, it all hints at a large worldwide movement to reclaim the world, to cleanse it. There are perhaps forty of you, and you are one of three men in this city. Who wouldn’t be disappointed to find that the future of white children and families depends on a handful of old men who have been crushed under the weight of Marxist oppression and horrific black violence?

You’ve grown used to disappointment.


4. You vote in every election, from President down to county coroner and school board, though with the school you often find yourself just spoiling a ballot. Nothing but a list of names such as Martinez, Washington, Ho, McDonald… You haven't met a white Washington or McDonald in this city in a very long time. Voting is like flossing—mandatory but it never seems to help with bleeding gums.

Then one day there is a candidate seemingly worth voting for, and not just for county committee of the Republican Party, or local sheriff. You’re not as enthusiastic as the race-denier right, not a sucker for his glad-handing and simple slogans, but the man is a wedge. He says what Presidential candidates must not say, and he does it without apology. And what he says shifts the Overton window. People are talking about whiteness again, and without hissing the end of the word as though the very notion were a curse. 

But what did it mean for you, old soldier in the race war? Your PO Box was filled with crudely drawn cartoons of pink-haired girls and sad frogs, and these were gifts from the people…children? simpletons?...purportedly on your side? More journalists to ignore, but a few public gatherings to attend. One young fellow who had the backing of family money and the genetic advantages of perfect Aryan physiognomy greeted you warmly at an event, and turned to talk into the smartphone of a comrade to introduce you to the internet. Your early writings inspired him, he said. He misquoted you, but only slightly.  Your actual famous phrase, the one that has become a meme, is There is no one else who will fight for us. We must fight together, for the future of the worldwide white race. He put it, “If we’re to have a future, we must, the worldwide white race, fight together.” No wonder he stammered twice. And you just had to stand there, unsure whether to offer an avuncular smile or a stoic and determined frown.

Ultimately, you grimaced.


5. You wonder now, why bother? We’re much alike, you and I. We’ve both been fighting for our causes, diametrically opposed as they are, for decades, in the old way. Steady leafleting, pamphlets, the creation and cultivation of small yet flexible affinity groups. Always an arm’s length from violence and street battles, though always armed and ready if “it goes down” as the kids these days say it. Yes, that probably is a borrowed phrase from African-American vernacular. I can see that grimace again, despite the sack over your head.

How right am I? I give myself a solid A-. Perhaps I’ve made a few assumptions, trafficked in cliché a tiny bit. Perhaps you once had a wife who supports your politics, or a common-law husband who doesn’t. You wouldn’t be the first fascist to be caught up in the ironies of masculinities, social progress, and the law. Champion the Aryan physique, declare the woman inferior and undomesticated, you’ll find that some of your comrades have joined the movement for access to lonely men.

Not a twitch, despite the ties binding you to your chair being fairly loose. Stoic or just uninterested in my theories? It hardly matters. What matters is this. You don’t count, not any more than I count. Nobody reads my pamphlets either, my presentations on post-state post-kyriachy futures at various anarchist gatherings and socialist fora are as poorly attended as your funhouse mirror versions of the same, and like you I was never much of a brawler. I have over one hundred students per semester, and almost none of them ever do the assigned reading, much less comprehend it. I’m as poor a revolutionary as you are a race warrior.

What I am good at is demographic divination. My masters degrees in sociology and English are good for something beyond teaching rhetoric and composition at the community college. I spotted you. You’re hardly the only older white man to skulk around on the periphery of the meetings we hold on campus—even an adjunct can reserve a room in the evenings—to ask questions at the end of a panel that mean nothing more than “But why not consider that which you have already rejected—that which I believe?”

You referred to globalism, not corporate globalization.

You claimed that since race is a social construction, it is “scientifically ignorant” to treat people of color differently, and instead suggested “that each group seek its own way.”

You discussed the importance of focusing on “the nation’s working class and small producers” instead of appealing to the international proletariat.

That’s the funny thing about you fash. You can’t simply pretend to have utterly mainstream politics. You have to signal to your fellow travelers, even as you try to infiltrate the far left; centrist politics; the garden-variety right-wing of the petit bourgeois, the banker, and the God-deluded. You fascist creeps, always attempting the fascist creep.

No, we on the left don’t do any such thing. We don’t want to associate with you, we don’t want to penetrate your spaces, enter your parties. You need to be crushed like insects. Not after we gain power, not after capitalism is overthrown. Anywhere and everywhere.

6. Fascism is ultimately capitalism, and especially capitalist morality, metastasized. If you could speak, if I hadn’t stripped you of your briefs, coated them in Krazy Glue, and shoved the mass into your mouth, and tied you to your own recliner, you’d try an appeal to horseshoe theory. You know, how Communism, most often Stalinism, is indistinguishable from fascism? How left anarchism smells like right-libertarianism? The political spectrum bending into a horseshoe, both extremes arcing toward a black hole of violence, oppression, and genocide.

But but…this is torture! Wouldn’t that make you as bad as I am?

You’re nodding, but that isn’t quite right. You’re old and clever. You’d say as bad as I supposedly am? You’re not a violent man, I can tell that much from the conspicuous lack of scars. Your limp is that of a sedentary office worker whose only socially necessary expenditure of labor is the sequestration of carbon, not that of a former street fighter. You’ve never harmed a hair on anyone’s head. Why do this to you and not to one of the badasses who have put my comrades in the hospital?

Embedded in that argument is an axiomatic masculinist demand. Untie me and I’ll show you, you bitch! Neither of us are any good at fighting; we’d just throw haymakers, roll around the floor for a bit, I’d try to scratch your eyes and crush your testicles; you’d try to mount me and punch and grapple in a manner similar to sexual assault in the hope of triggering me. We’d both be exhausted after two minutes. I might have a heart attack. You would have a heart attack. You hide behind phalanxes of boneheads and star-spangled meth-addled bikers. On my side of the line, I’m a medic. I do my bit. I have my ways. 

Also, you’re in no condition to fight. You may not recall precisely what happened, but I’ll tell you: I saw you on the street weeks ago, putting up your leaflets, and recognized you from your skulking about at the edges of one of my events. I tore a number of your leaflets down. When you didn’t rush out to replace them the next night, or the night after that, I dug one of them out of the trash. Then I waited a couple of weeks and had an older, white, comrade, call you to arrange a meeting. He no-showed, but I was there.

Well-dressed women of color are invisible to you. That which you cannot conceive you cannot perceive. Whores, maids, mammies, or leeches. That’s all you ever see of us.

It was easy to follow you home. I didn’t even have to wear a hat and sunglasses. That was two weeks ago.

You live in a dump, and you’re an old white racist. You have a couple of unofficial deadbolts on your door, but I had your leaflet and your building superintendent is a nice man from Puerto Rico whom you mistakenly call Juan—that was the name of his brother, the former super. Both were once part of Los Macheteros; lucky break for me, but I would have found a way in regardless. Tonight Yeriel and I worked together to take the front door off the hinges so I could gain entry, then we put the door back up behind me.

Why? Because something has to be done about you, and I have the capability. I don’t hold to bourgeois morality. You and yours may fancy yourselves übermenschen, but in the end you’re just men who came in second in the game of Monopoly Capitalism and seek to start over with more property cards. We seek to overturn the board.

When you walked in, wheatpaste bucket in hand, was the first time I ever successfully used my Taser.

It’s recharging now. According to the instruction manual, it’ll be hours before I can use it again. That’s okay. We have all night.


Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including Bullettime and The Second Shooter. His short fiction has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and several volumes of Akashic's city noir series.