The Song My Enemies Sing

By James Reich

Set against a haunting Martian landscape, THE SONG MY ENEMIES SING is a surreal, disquieting science fiction vision of murder, revolution, manipulation and mystery. Ray Spector’s search for meaning leads him to a teenage Black Panther named Eli Jones, the missionary Philipé Olmos, sometime television star Richard Parish, and Ingrid Auer, who dreams of becoming a terrorist. Under the shimmering Grid drawn by the swarm satellites encircling the planet, with fading memories of an apocalyptic California, the Australian outback, and the jungles of Mexico, their obsessions form strange patterns, dangerous relationships, and alliances across time and species. Science fiction legend Barry N. Malzberg, the first recipient of the John W. Campbell Award, describes James Reich’s fifth novel “as a history of science fiction form, origin and development, and merciless in its refusal to pander to the easier implications of its material.” In the lineage of Ray Bradbury’s THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES, William Burroughs’ Nova trilogy, J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick, these distant episodes will possess you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Aug 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9781312159020

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The Song My Enemies Sing

Copyright © 2018 by James Reich

ISBN 978-1-312-15902-0

First Anti-Oedipal Ebook Edition, December 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher. Published in the United States by Anti-Oedipus Press, an imprint of Raw Dog Screaming Press.

Cover Design © 2018 by Matthew Revert

Interior Layout by D. Harlan Wilson

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OTHER BOOKS BY JAMES REICH

The Moth for the Star

The Song My Enemies Sing

Soft Invasions

Bombshell

I, Judas

PRAISE FOR THE WORK OF JAMES REICH

In his exceptionally well-written novel, Soft Invasions, at times lyrical, elegiac, and even mystical, James Reich asks some profound questions about time and identity. This fast-paced book is a meditation on history and human relationships which will keep you thinking and reading to the last page. —Michael Moorcock

Defiant, toothsome, and flaming with color, the voice of James Reich is one of the most exciting to emerge in recent years; he is both something new and something wholly real. If is possible for a true underground writer to exist anymore, he is that author. —Stephen E. Andrews, author of 100 Must-Read Science Fiction Novels

"In Mistah Kurtz!, James Reich turns back the clock to give (Conrad’s) eloquence fresh room, bringing to new life one of the great characters of literature by channeling Kurtz’s insistent voice directly onto every inch of these fantastic pages." —Matt Bell, author of In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods

Reich is a formidable writer. —Malcolm Mc Neill, author of Observed While Falling: Bill Burroughs, Ah Pook, and Me

Somewhere between the macho-hipster fantasies of Quentin Tarantino and the banshee-activist theatrics of Pussy Riot dwells Bombshell’s Varyushka Cash . . . Now that’s entertainment. —New York Times Book Review

"Bombshell is great stuff, and James Reich writes like a demon. He invokes figures as wonderfully diverse as Valerie Solanas and Nancy Reagan’s astrologer as icons in a supremely bizarre, darkly humorous universe. Varyushka Cash is a heroine for the ages." —Mary Dearborn, author of Hemingway: A Biography

"I, Judas will have you clenched in a fetal position for a century, relieved only by the occasional orgasms of its mellifluous prose. You have to be strong to read this book: it rains fireballs." —Andrei Codrescu

Like Cormac McCarthy wandering a William Burroughs wasteland while blasting a riot grrrl mixtape on a scavenged Walkman! —S.A. Crary, director of Kill Your Idols

"Soft Invasions comes off like a psychoanalytic noir in the vein of Hitchcock’s Spellbound but it reads like Raymond Chandler with a greater maturity, vocabulary, and ear for semantic nuance. The sentences themselves are something to relish. They assert and turn, a one-two punch, baiting and switching the reader between each period. Even the most utilitarian sentence has a subtle beauty." —Jordan A. Rothacker, for The Believer

For Number 65.

CONTENTS

The Camera Monkeys

The Grid

Transference

The Sabotage of Saturn

Shadows of Maralinga

Zap

The Children of Ham

I Am the Song My Enemies Sing

Wheat Field with Crows

Me and Say Dog

The Man Who Felt like a Satellite

In the Capsule

Nail-Maker

The Salt Addicts of Dis

Zipaquirá

Nineteen Fifty-Six

Glaxo Babies

The War at Dulce

Althaus

Then Cruelty Knits a Snare

And Spreads His Baits with Care

Drive-In

Looba and Titus

In the Beech Forest

The Rainbow Serpent

CHAPTER 1

The Camera Monkeys

The camera monkeys were dead. In a shallow lagoon of red grease beside the Ventura freeway, Ray Spector knelt before the broken form of a chimpanzee. Obscenely like a child, it floated face-down there, hanging in cherry aspic, a thin silver steam issuing from the wet body, sweating out of its wounds into the cool California morning. One of its hands was close to his, and the instinct to take it, to fall into a palmistry of grief was overwhelming. Insects of sorrow hatched in his throat, and worked through him like scarabs in sand. Ray Spector had miscalculated.

He, in his desperation, was responsible for this death and all the others. The wreckage of the freeway spooled about him, videotape fluttering with automobile memories, and a bubblegum of flesh hung and dripped from the twisted guardrails. He had fashioned this extinction from his ego, and now there was nothing more to do but toil and grizzle into its blackness. He should not have left Oakland after the fire, should not have come south. Now, the evidence of his mistake spanned that scorched zone of Los Angeles, the landscape studded with primitive corpses, groves burning, pylons mangled like bloody tin foil. In the moment, it did not console him that he might have the footage to disprove in Parish those doubts that undermined their relationship. For he felt an evil in himself, flowing along the scar beneath his bleached hair, a guilty thing that had limped from an ancient ghetto, dredged up from the trenches of sleep.

Leaning over the dead chimpanzee, a towering remorse held him in its black leather fist and shook him with rage, its vertiginous grip threatening to toss him aside against a gory concrete abutment, or into one of the ravines of broken asphalt where the fighting had been, to dash him from a height. He imagined a warm ghost rising out of the dark hair on the creature’s scalp and groping weakly at the electrical hum that, though the night was done, still riddled the air like the dying shiver of an opium eater’s gong, the oily echoes of some distant machinery, the stun-gun music of a slaughterhouse crackling its miserable storm. Then, the ghost would slip into another space, soft as a rainforest, capsuled in silence. The Moon was still visible in the blue sky over the palms and peeling billboards, and the death scent of the chimpanzee slid across it, an eclipsing cloud of those funks and faints that blaze from the skin when murder is certain, thick as lilies, sweetly excremental as food stuck under a bad tooth.

He studied the poor creature floating there, bewildered as a baby that had wandered into the promising headlights of evening traffic or dropped uncomprehending into the shimmer of its own reflection on a swimming pool—yes, perhaps as innocent as all that, he thought—yet mutilated as though the pool sparkled with piranhas and the white fog of drowning. And it was with the tenderness of lifting a slumbering child that he slid his hands under the vivid surface of the lagoon and turned the chimp over. The camera and its rubber straps were glossed with a congealing trickle of blood, but remained fixed in place over its face. A shred of gray masking tape along the camera retained a smear of his handwriting in black: No. 65. Leaning closer, he listened intently, filtering out the distant drone and echoes of metal—the camera was still recording, and the viscid motor dripped in the drive. At dislocated angles, shards of femur, rib, pelvis and mandible projected through the chimp’s coarse, swollen pelt, as though a crude effort had been made to remove the bones. Pale coins of vertebrae spilled behind it from a smoldering vent at the spinal base; there they were suspended in the sticky surface of oil and animal fluids swilling around his knees, a heavy spirit tumescent with pain. Ray smoothed the hair close to the animal’s empty eyes and loosened the goggles he had fashioned for it. He began to weep, shuddering, paying a tithe of his nausea to the moment, and, as he disentangled the camera from the mash that had been the chimp’s skull, his fingers slipped and shook. Smearing his tears away, he adjusted the wet straps and pulled the camera harness over his own face now to record the rest of his reconnaissance and his return to Sunset Boulevard. The animal’s blood was warm on his skin, collapsing the distance between them, perilous, tempting.

Ray forced himself to stand and began to identify with the camera. There was nothing left of the Pasadena suburbs, only a vast swell of trash and mutilation reminiscent of the puckered retch of an earthquake. The baritone throb of doodlebugs rippled the smoke, and flames thrashed over the Scientology center. Skeletons of cracked concrete, girders and rebar rose like coral toward the muted light of dawn. Some had been overpasses, some buildings, and some had been pylons, but now together they resembled nothing more than the scorched wires, solder bulbs and transistors of a hyper-sized circuit board. He walked back toward the city on the remains of the freeway, the disengaged, aimless gait of a man who expects a bullet between his shoulder blades. The camera caught images of smoldering mandrills crucified on burning telegraph poles, some with melting cameras dripping metal and rubber down from the indigo divisions of their faces on black superstructures that he could not identify. The decapitated head of an Uakari monkey stared from a stack of flaming televisions as though from a shrine in a pop music video, livid red skin blistering in hot buboes about its death grimace. Ray climbed the shifting face of garbage and retrieved the blood-splashed recording camera from the shriveling scarlet skull. He would need its evidence, also. He needed every vile and tragic frame. He had thought that the animals from the primatology institute would be agile, fast and strong enough to film the Wheels by night and return to the city barricades. He had prepared food for them, for when they got back. How pathetic it seemed, now. He had stayed awake all night, but none returned, not even the gorilla that lay dead on the concave hood of a wrecked car, the dark cables of its muscles unraveled like old magnetic tape over the peeling fenders. The enormous black head was scalped above the supra-orbital ridge and the gorilla’s recording device had been obliterated by the impact. One rubber strap dangled from its right ear. Sorrow fused Ray Spector with the wreckage that surrounded him. He felt himself disappearing into it, spineless and translucent. The trash flowed and poured through him. But, he had the footage.

At 4:30 that afternoon of October 8, 1979, Ray Spector kept his appointment with his psychiatrist, Doctor Parish, and reclined upon a mid-century modern couch of silver-gray leather. Compacted horsehair and metal springs coiled beneath him like a trap, and he felt himself hanging over its jaws, willing himself to flicker gently above the upholstery, not to enter the scene completely. He had not removed his herringbone sports coat before lying down. In his chair, the bald psychiatrist nodded his head sympathetically, tapping his pursed lips with a biro, as though they had already been speaking for some time. They had not. On the wall behind Parish’s back a painting depicted a golden wheat field swarmed over with blunt black crows. A plasticky aspidistra plant gathered dust in the corner. The floor between them was carpeted with red tiles, and the psychiatrist seemed to be wearing a white plastic lab coat, even when he was not. He was dressed in slacks the color of nicotine stains, a creamy shirt with a paisley tie knotted loosely over an open button. Parish dressed more casually when he was not on television.

Ray Spector fingered the small videocassette inside his pocket. Doctor Parish placed a glass of sparkling water on the plastic table beside his gray leather chair before seating himself. The effervescence of the water merged with the gray of the chair, so that when Ray looked at Parish through the angle of the water glass, the psychiatrist seemed to speak to him from a glittering cockpit of the future. He struggled to control his resentment at the superior position that the shrink occupied, the pale bulb of his head surrounded by slow glycerin stars, the eyes that never fixed upon him directly, only from a tilt, studying him across the dry blades of the psychiatrist’s high cheekbones. The head bulged. Parish’s spine held his skull in the way that an exhausted man holds a glass during a party, just before it spills. There was arrogance in him, also, a cold patrician thing, a voice of seersucker and sails.

Richard Parish felt Ray Spector’s brain reaching out for his. It was absurd, of course, to imagine it coming for him like ink through the papery crispness of the air conditioning, a menacing Rorschach hanging in the space between them. Momentarily, Parish thought of The Blob, bulging out of the cramped doors of the cinema. Yet, even Freud had believed quietly in telepathic communication, had he not? A little goo of madness crawled across the carpet between them. His patient, this disheveled science fiction writer, with his kitchen sink bleached hair, his eyes rimmed red with blepharitis, had been a better foil in better days, a good guest, good ratings, even. Now, Parish thought, Spector was pawing feebly at the jellied envelope of tragedy, a slippery bubble of unreason that insulated him. If Parish thought of him as a Romantic, it was with chilly derision, and no little disappointment.

You say, Parish opened laconically, lighting a cigarette, that the Wheels, these machines, are very close to a final assault upon the city? His voice was flat now, neither endorsing, nor skeptical. Yet, he had honed a technique of flashing his crystal blue eyes, almost as a matador lifts his cape. The gesture, an affectation, was an invitation to ever more dangerous exposure. The eyes said, Come on . . .

Well, I’ve got—I have to review the new footage. Ray Spector experienced a flush of irritation, sensing himself pricked by something, as Parish turned his head slightly, disinterestedly, toward the tall smoked windows. The black high-rise building that contained Parish’s office swayed gently in the wind blasting over the trash from the distant suburbs. Ray felt it suddenly as unstable as a narrow gantry about to fall away from a rocket that bloomed with flame. The psychiatrist’s cigarette fell into the bowl of his ashtray.

Parish shifted his posture, uncrossing and crossing his legs again, before his head lolled back into its angle of hauteur. Go on, he said. Parish touched his lips again, as if in thought. Last week you were quite convinced that Armageddon was imminent. Parish invited him on with that blue pulse of his eyes.

I am. Ray fingered the zipper scar that ran from the base of his skull to the front of his disrupted hairline. Parish had lanced him, lightly, patronizingly. Of course, I am, Ray insisted. He thought of the machines, of the footage that must be on the tape—rolling mag wheels of hectachrome, three hundred feet high, crushing everything beneath them, needle guns hissing from the gyroscopes on their hubs. He saw the massacre of the camera monkeys and the great apes, shrieking and howling, blood spooling from them, spattering the freeway, a scarlet mist of meat that the giant Wheels rolled through, gleaming like saw blades, the hornet whine of their guns, drawing closer every night—

What if I told you, Parish said, watching Ray Spector’s panic rising and trembling like a fine layer of skin lifted by a scalpel, and retracing his words to add salt, "what if I told you that people that I speak to, my secretary, for example, the Hassid cab driver I met this morning, others, appear to be unconcerned about such an event, and that existence beyond this office remains quite quotidian, quite boring? It was unusual for him to leave his chair during a session, yet he stood, moving slowly to the window, staring out over the rippling city. In all candor, Ray, outside this office, Los Angeles is still as slick and beautiful as ever." He turned, permitting his shoulders to rest against the