Prologue
There is going to be an uprising up on the Mountain. It is always just a matter of time for folks who live there. Regardless if the sun is coming up on them or going down on them, they will know violence like few others ever do. Time will tell. These pages will tell. You will read of it in the deepening madness of the characters that inhabit them. Most embrace their slipping toward insanity and dive headlong for its delirium while some cling to those tiny beacons of morality glinting through the rising fog of folly, the partition of ignorance that separates the Mountain people from the progress of humanity below. Now ask yourself: barren of progress, what remains of man? Primal hate and unhinged violence? Bestial copulating between strangers in the dairy isle of a grocery store in shambles? Time will tell. These pages will tell. Or perhaps they won’t. Perhaps I, your unsung storyteller, is not to be trusted. Maybe you will discover that the story of the Mountain is so impossibly weird that no party involved, including your own best sense of judgment, is worthy of trust. As a reflex, you may throw the book away and tell yourself it never existed. You may reach the last page to find that you never existed. The story of the Mountain is a leveling of lie and truth. Your ideals will be glorified to the heavens on one page and snuffed face-first in the muck and filth of the page that follows. Perhaps this will not be an easy story for you to digest. If this be the case, set fire to it. Slander its unholy verses to your friends. Get an interview on international television and denounce it. You have my permission to destroy it along with my assurance that I despise all its characters, misdirected ideologies, and barbarisms just the same. Nevertheless, here is your ticket, take it or leave it, it will take you to a place without a Time. That is, the same senseless hate of 1456 is preserved in 2010. Babies born face down in the muck of primordial loathing. All animosity is permitted so long as it is justified and any justification that furthers the feud will fly. Then again, you never know, a couple of do-gooders could come along and toss a wrench into the works of this unrivaled display of immorality. I am just a lowly bard, you are the brave traveler, what do I know?
. . .
The drummers have wailed away at the same beat for millennia. They are reverse snake-charmers, with the ratatat of snares they plunge into 100-year stupors, singing their song in lightning strike, spellbinding generations of Mountain people. There are the immune. They come crawling for the dead-eyed drummer boys, inch by inch, daggers sharpened to the tune of lunar orbit. They inhale cool musk of earth, continue the crawl, feel sure of themselves. Moon wash illuminates the fat faces of the drummer boys—so swollen the heads consume their features. The faces that ate themselves face out across the valley. Dough legs dangle in midair, kicking heels against the cliffside to the beat of their drums. Kicking and rapping all in unison. The glints of daggers pierce the mountain laurel. Cracking of snares mutes the snapping twigs and crunching leaves underfoot.
. . .
The most absurd thing about the Mountain is the cause of the enmity that has always plagued it. There are two communities that split the territory, right down the middle, and both of them have always claimed that their respective settlements arrived there first. On the east side, the Muslim folks refer to their mountain, in a most serious tone, as The Masjid Most High. Meanwhile, folks on the west side mountain, with an inebriated hoot and holler, refer to the whole plot of land as Redneck Mountain. I probably don't need to tell you, but those are two names that could not be more divergent, recognized side by side—on global GPS and trucker’s atlases since 1832—with no more than a backslash between them. For over a century, consecutive leaders from both sides of the Mountain squabbled with each other, and cartographers, over the implementation of a more divisive article of punctuation. At one point, in an incredibly rare instance of cooperation, leaders from the east and the west both agreed to separate the names of their communities by bracketing them, but when they took their idea to GoogleMaps, they were told that the additional four brackets would introduce too many characters to allow both names to share the same line. That meant, if the brackets were to stay, the name of one community would have to be printed above the other… back to the drawing board. Both leaders were already at wits end with the ‘and/or’ implications associated with the backslash, but after it was explained to them that no single article of punctuation existed that signified ‘or’ alone a screaming match was sparked that carried on for a good three hours under the adjustable Pendant Wayfair lighting—set to 65% dim—in a conference room at the Google Headquarters. By the time their vocal chords were beginning to fail, a crowd of at least 50 Googlers, or whatever the hell they call their employees, had pressed their pale, gaping faces against the outside of the glass conference room wall, sucking what little excitement they could from the belligerence blasting between the leaders within.
A pimply-faced intern was sent in to referee the ordeal. All the Googling lambs were sent to the slaughter at some point. They should have known that waltzing on in to such a prestigious career would mean proving their loyalty; would require a fresh-faced employee to keep that face cold and empty when an enraged partner from an off-the-books tech start-up was screaming at it from three inches away. This pimply-faced little lamb had done an all right job up until he suggested that the war-mongers decide whose title for the Mountain took the top spot on the worlds most used GPS application, and whose would ride cartographic bitch on the bottom, with a coin-toss. This little lamb had a death wish. All his elders, the suckerfish observing from close proximity on the other side of the glass, were letting him have it. You fucking dumbass! Now you have had it! Hell with the job, save your life and get the hell out of there, NOW! “Gulp,” said the intern. “I think this is great idea,” said one leader. “Well what the hell are we waiting for,” cried the other. All nerves, the intern, Nate—Nate is his name, by the way—fished out a penny from his pocket that was so damn filthy not one of them could tell which side was which, so it was agreed that the darker side would represent heads and the side with the pink fungus-looking patina would be tails. Nate dropped the coin three times before flipping off a real beauty of a toss. It rose twelve feet before hovering at its apex, mere centimeters below the ceiling tiles, and falling, picking up speed on its collision course for no man’s land on the table separating the leaders. Like an all-pro punter, Nate had given himself the optimal hangtime needed to high tail it across the conference room and then tuck that little tail between his legs underneath a vacant desk where he quivered and waited. From under that desk, measurable tectonic activity was felt. Through the hands that muffled his ears, the intern heard maniacal laughter followed by the dull crack of what must have been a chair against the conference room glass. It must have been, thought Nate, because the crack was immediately followed by the stifled hollering of the googling suckerfish against the outside of the conference room fish tank. Then, after all those hours of repressed violence between the leaders, the flood gates were lifted, and a 37-minute brawl of epic brutality popped off within one of the most non-violent workplaces in the United States of America. It was awesome. By the end of it, sucker fish from all across the office had brought furniture and step ladders to mush their faces against open space higher up on the glass—it’s a wonder the whole thing didn’t shatter—and the bodies of the leaders lied bloody, motionless, and somehow breathing, on opposite sides of the arena. The two men were so beat to shit that neither of them could recall who won the toss so, unspoken and unofficial, they reluctantly agreed to leave their names for the Mountain printed on maps as it had been thus far: Redneck Mountain/Masjid Most High. Smart enough not to send another fresh-faced intern to serve a summons to the most violent mountain in the United States of America, Google was left with an $18,000 bill for damages done to the conference room. All said and done—just for this little prologue that is—Nate was the only dude who got out ahead. Christmas bonus on August 2nd and a promotion the same day. By the time Christmas rolled around he was able to afford the best dermatologist in town, the best haircut, and a brand-new Audi A5 which, as I speak, he is pushing to 70mph across the countryside with a stripper named Candy’s face buried in his lap. His lunch break ended 45 minutes ago. Sometimes running and hiding can pay big. Other times…
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