☝︎□︎♋︎⧫︎

I scratch the next sequence onto my tablet in charcoal. My wingdings once upon a time denoted codes, though they may not signify anything now, and our communication across the gulf may be beyond language at this point. No matter the extent to which these thoughts are delusional, the machines clank on and the elemental means of our communication persists. We are coming with the GOAT today.

“ETA?”

“The carriage should be there by dawn.”

Sometimes I wonder why not me over there, considering the dark thoughts that taint my vision. But those on the receiving end have their own culture and territory. All the lines are drawn. I am not one of them. Nor am I one of the greats from over here. We are different from us.

During the GOAT transfers, I try to connect with my old acquaintance. But Codd shows no signs of empathetic feeling except a snide pleasure in torture, and a glimmer of clarity when I arrive with the squealing sacrifice. He is across barren rocks in the region that compasses his people’s reign of cruelty.

I am the only one who has any chance of talking him down from his most heinous ideations. I still remember his plan to rewire everyone in our grade eleven class with a concoction of symbiotic brain viruses he’d collected through the medical web. One of the many fantasies he tried to make flesh after coming back from his ventures into the alpine fields. It was only by distracting him with kissing tag that I got him to toss the vials of infection into a canyon.

Some people cross a threshold and never return the same. Upon every threshold a keeper like myself tries to whisper such people down from the precipice, with a finger raised, mouth open, and eyebrows quirked. It’s like going out beyond the breakwater and getting sucked away to sea, or walking through the frame of a door that’s propped between stones in the middle of a field.

Todd walked through the alpine fields and up into the peaks of frozen stone that must have seemed to him a new kind of foreground. His deceitful smile now part of the bleak, endless winter out there.

Behind the doorframe in the field is another, larger system of frames. He became associated with some larger geometry, a world that would eventually be cordoned off into a distinct character zone. The caves lined with glinting implements, the screams of the GOATs as they are split open. At each one of their cries I wince at the promise – broken – that this would be the last.

A symphony of monastic gongs in the Himalayas cross-geographied with the classic Dickey-squeals of the Appalachians, such is the nature of this mountain range. The crusted plates of the earth cracking up over eons following some ancient script, proving so convenient for the division and assortment of types. On this side, gentle crystal streams feed reservoirs of kindness. On that side, the ill intent, the harshed mellows, the web of cast shades, and extinction embraced with vigorous ennui.

Best not to want to be the best at anything, we say over here, because being the best leads to most terrible ends. Any ambitions I used to have I have renounced at the shores of Humbletude. I feel a great relief at not having to aim for those gut-spill heights.

There isn’t much to see beyond the peaks, the rest of the world is off in the gauze. People hike from here, to there, and back again. From here, I march with forced vigour alongside some local farmers down the way of the crystal creeks. We move through golden platelets of light caused by the fragmentation of sunrays through atmospheric particles. It’s nice, but today, on Goat Day, no matter how pleasant the weather I always get this timber-shivering feeling before we enter into Codd’s territory–a cold convulsion of my stomach wall. Because there is no saying if we’ll return from our mission to bring the GOAT to the other side, or what we may accidentally glimpse over there.

When the sun comes to inhabit a place next to the moon, down at the station they will be hustling the straitjacketed GOAT subject to secure them in the hold of a waiting carriage. Preparing to deliver the main course, as it were. Occasionally a few sides may be taken along with the main delivery—a bowl of ordinaries to paw around with (guy who placed first in the B division of a ping pong tournament, or some dude who won a spelling Bee, perhaps the bloke who never could have known that cleaning the table in billiards would mean a trip to the butchers—as tenderloin, that is).

I’ve seen carriage conductors snared by shadows and then get snarled in the bowels of the mountain, submitted to terminal captivity in rooms of prolonged suffering. Concern for my own safety is minimal, due to the bittersweet “in” I have with Codd. And I don’t mean to be purely figurative here. I have in fact bent over for Codd. His seed has polluted my insides. I comply with his randy demands just to maintain the balance, swallowing my feeling of being used as a toy along with his winter seeds.

On my way towards the station through an agricultural zone filled with hydroponic sober-dope paddies which glisten on zigzagging slopes, I rehearse the calculus of my own absolution: feeble notions of countenancing harm to one or two so as to ensure the survival of the many. Damage control governance. I keep waiting for the right moment to make my principled stand, but I have always pinned this plan on being able to win back the sanity of Codd. I want things to go back to the way they used to be when we were simple goatherds sucking at udders like in the novel Heidi.

When I reach the final switchback and begin making my way along flatter terrain, a prophet on their sledge rows out from behind an old tree stump, and immediately begins an utterance.

“The murdered song writhes in the scorched grass!” Their cloak and sonorous voice telegraphs the fact that they sure ain’t fucking around.

Impressed, I have to ask, “How did you write that?”

“Smoke weed every day.”

“Even if that were your line–and I believe it’s of another, rap-based, origin–you know that’s doping, right? Where do you scrape your lines?”

“Doping?”

“We must bring back the greats,” croons another prophet who is pushing their sledge between ponds of wet produce. “We must bring their GOATED bones back to these declining valleys!” The prophet stabs the ground with their sledge sticks and trundles away behind hydroponic machines.

“And yet,” the first raises their voice and attempts to overwrite the other, “the blood of the GOATs is our ongoing covenant.”

The first prophet follows me down the path towards the station, their robes hovering like a parasol over their sledge. Even though my first impression was that they’d been doping to enhance creativity, this narrative they scream out from under their hood is damn catchy. Something about a fire god coming down and burning holes in the forest. How those holes became places where novel kinds of plants grew. The new plants in these burnt patches carried a plastic resin on their bodies, bore plastic fruit and presented trunks made of a rubbery material.

“Eat the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Artificial Knowledge!” cries the prophet. On finishing their utterance, they throw back the hood of their cloak.

“I dress the part just so people think I suck,” the prophet says.

The very best prophets are gone. Same with the top fashion designers. Ditto cooks. When, like today, you’re lucky, you cross paths with a talented one. This talented sledge prophet, as quotidian in appearance as they may seem, would be of great use in helping us make sense–in a rounder and more comprehensive way–of the psychological destiny of Codd’s people, and thus fashion a way forward away from societal policies of divisionary planning.

As we enter the glacial trough that leads to the mountain station, the prophet stops and stares upwards, as if noting something written on the wind. Their sunny expression glooms over; now they start heaving at their sledge sticks and launch away across the landscape with the cloak pulled over them again, paddling through the rocks with clacks and pings. Nobody said they aren’t unstable, those prophets. Those unpredictable prophets. It’s too bad. That one was special. We could have used their poetic wisdom on this trip.

The old mining station is like a face of rusty metal jaw and orbital lines, and dynamite-blasted eye holes with metallic drainage dripping down sedimentary veins to a dark, crumbly mouth-ass opening. At this entrance, figures that could be stones, or could be people, move in and out of view and a tongue of rusted rail track twists to the dock of oil-soaked boards. The station wavers in ways at once digital and real, with transportation units sent off in various directions once the tongue forks past the entry. The connected carriages disappear into the opening like the sections of a carapace through an architectural sphincter. The conductors, massive people with small heads, strap themselves behind the steering apparatus, and herders like myself get in the command seats.

Usually the carriage will jolt forward immediately, but today’s delay indicates they must be having difficulty getting the GOAT inside its carriage. I’m aware that this delay is no mere accident. The GOAT must be virile. I can sense the signs of the GOAT. This could be the GOAT we need. But I can’t quite get my message back to it, no matter how hard I grind the carbon into my tablet.

We sit around in the lead carriage, tucked under the rusted shell of an old car pulled from a valley ditch and hammered into shape, staring out the warped window frames at the dripping walls of the cavern into which we will descend. Finally we feel some vibrations and hear some scraping of metal from the GOAT carriage. At the back they are shoving the GOAT into the armoured elytron.

“And we venture into the canyon. With the talent for the grand incision,” a voice whispers.

“Go on,” I symbolize on my slate. “Can you not, just go on? Who is this?”

No answer.

The carriage operator turns from his levers and says, "Interesting GOAT," interrupting my attempt to communicate through the aether. The only light now comes from mining lamps the colour and texture of moth-fur that pass outside as we wobble forward through the opening. Flashes off the conductor's rhomboid cheekbones seem to be a part of the dripping caverns around us. His eyes have the green lustre of a predator.

The GOAT’s messages are tingling across my tablet. They appear in my mind as a list of the many victims.

Jackson Michelle, world record holder for the most Hungry Man dinners eaten in an hour: starved to death on a liquid diet of water, honey, and chili peppers. Mirror Abernithe, first author to write a million-page modernist masterpiece: injected with vials of printer ink until they turned into an ink-blue corpse. Possum O’Henry, champion parkour athlete: hung by a climbing rope then swung like a wrecking ball from one jagged landscape feature to another.

“I’ve done this so many times. I don’t like to know.” I sense the institutional fatigue in my own words. The institution that upholds the moment and erases history.

“I hear ya,” says the conductor. “Honestly, the GOATs aren’t that exciting. They are just average people with noteworthy abilities, who happen to be the top of their field, or the best at what they do. It’s random. The best rower in the world doesn’t look that different from the top street sweeper. It’s like that guy at a race who just blows everyone away. He’s so frustratingly plain, just like any other guy. There’s no way to recognize and prepare for the challenge from a GOAT. That’s why I gave up.” The conductor pulls a lever around and we clatter down the tracks, bucked this way and that by the wonky spin of the damaged crankshafts.

A siren goes off somewhere ahead of us and our carriage stops in a caterwaul of gears and the spray of fluids with various viscosities and odours from rusted pipes that tends to streak our faces. The conductor’s huge shadow twists so that he is facing me again.

“What about you? You must have won something some time, been, for a moment ‘the best’ HA HA HA HA fack yeah Soofie Angelique, Esquire, hanged by noose ‘o daisy-chained Rolexes from rusted mining bolt.”

The guy’s been here too long. I sway my way away from him to the back of the carriage, clutching the chains that connect the units, then grab hold of the rim of the oculus of the GOAT carriage and stick my face as close up to the dusty glass as I am able to given the deep inset of the metal rim. I see a cloaked figure shackled in the hold. Fuck. No. Not a fucking prophet.

I go back up to the front of the carriage and say to the conductor, “Why them, do you think?”

“The prophet? Well, they’re known for the power of their words. Top prophet in all the land. Highest exactitude of calamity prediction. Ulcher-sacock!” The conductor grinds the stick shift and the gearbox at our feet screeches. “Is that a problem for you? I thought you were in charge. You’re the one who started this thing.”

“I’ve lost certitude...”

It’s considered bad form to go against the selection of the GOAT. I might end up fileted like the others.

His green eyes rove in the dark, trying to fix upon me. “But surely you have been the best at something, once in your life. No?” The conductor veers closer, his eyes growing in size. The clattering sounds all around us are overbearing and I have to yell out some of my words.

“No, fuck no. I have never been good at anything. Any success I ever had has been out of sheer luck. Seriously. The talented one was always Codd…”

“Oh really?”

“Codd. Codd. But then, in grade four. In grade four he placed fourth in high jump. Then. Then. Then the phys ed. teacher drowned. Drowned in two feet of water.”

“Ah yes, AH YES! It figures that you are a piece of shit. And so… so is he!”

Providing sacrificial GOATs is a way to reduce deaths overall, as fewer of Codd’s people will venture out onto our side to gnaw off the legs of prophets. We melted down our weapons, all of them, and no longer possess a tangible way of defending ourselves. Even this conductor could send me into the abyss. We banked entirely on the success of our proposed system. It turned out to be a horrible compromise.

We are trajected through the old mining tunnels where carts once slinked across the continental divide. This was the term used to designate the line from which water flows east or west, dripping down on opposite sides of the stalactite-stabbed upper profundities of the hollow mountains, but now it refers to the line between types of insanity, whether spreading one way and dissipating towards agitated mania, or becoming incredibly dense and depressed into a zombie-like violence.

As we descend into the abandoned molybdenum mines, I grow worried: the prophet seems unable to evoke a single phrase, which weakens any possibility of action. Though I can just make out what might be the smudgy shape of a 9, or a 6, on my tablet.

“I’m going to bring them a yogurt supplement,” I say, even though my seniority allows me to do as I please without asking permission. Two or three yogurt supplements. Four or five rodent supplements. I’ll give them the whole box of yogurt supplements to help them survive. Thrive.

I need to loop the GOAT into the plan, though of course it’s the plan that never works. Through the oculus I see the bound GOAT has twisted into a lumpy shape on the metal floor, and is crying. I try to write a message on the air between us but sense nothing. I kneel down and place the yogurt supplements in front of the door, but I know this foodstuff will barely be nibbled by the time we arrive at Codd’s spot, and that the door will have probably remained shut anyway.

Our carriage soon emerges from the tunnel into a cavern that dwarfs us, and we eventually come to a creaking, clanking halt on the passenger dock. Codd is already in position. Others from this side stand by a separate trolley, operated by townsfolk from Codd’s realm, that will take the GOAT to their sacrificial processing center deeper in their territory. Normal-looking Codd. Staring not at, but through, whatever he sees, processing sense data into minerals of demented cognitive industries. He is their form of GOAT, the most depraved of the deviant. With each trip my ability to talk him down has grown weaker, precipitously so, and–given his current state of disassociation–I hold little hope of getting through to him. In the past we have at least negotiated provisions upholding the treaty regarding the separation of territories, and the odd concession for improved treatment of GOATs, for example amendment five that limited the length of force-fed intestine to three feet three inches. But now it will be up to the GOAT to use its words. Words. It feels so futile at this point that all I can do is lube up in advance and prepare for the triumphant thrusts that mark the finale of the sacrifices.

The GOAT is tugged by the conductor to the foot of a bridge that leads across the chasm to actuation chambers.

The GOAT prophet utters: “The winter of love returns. Winter’s seed. A crystal. They would elope to the openings created by the fires, and from their loins we welcome the plastic flesh. Creator of all that is innovative, we repudiate your future.”

Codd slices away the prophet’s straightjacket. Lust courses over his typically impassive features like a flame flickering in the eyes of a procession of ants. The prophet leaps at him. Seeing their bodies come together on the dock is revolting. They have assumed a head to groin orientation. A 69er. But I know at this point all our bodies have become symbols in a code. The codes are fucking and I pull my pants down and wait for the inevitable final thrust—the coup de ass.

It doesn’t come. Instead of hot cum I feel heated words. The prophet is bombarding Codd with visionary particles. The territories, or at least their wiry imprint on our souls, are dissolving now that their pointlessness has been established. It’s a kind of data poetry doing this, phonemes blasted against totalized meanings. But inside the mass of chaotic wordbits flares the vision I’d been hoping for. That ability this prophet has to find the tail of an elephant through a mouse hole.

Is that a smile on Codd’s sick lips? A faint, at first sickly but now healing, light coming to the dank mouldy walls. The prophet rises and thrusts their arms upward, sticks both pointer fingers above their head.

Codd and I tuck our hands around our knees and listen to the prophet. “In the background is the door frame in the field propped up by rocks. Behind are the mountains of cruelty. Take the elephant tail whip. Whip him back through the frame. The whip is the tail of the elephant and the frame is the mouse hole. You have walked your friend back through the frame. Life glitter diamond. Feels, what? Healthy, positive? Maybe you feel whole. Yes. We are drinking chilled white wine in large glasses on a warm day. An oriole glows orange on a magnolia branch. Some strange process is at an end and the meaning of the original sequence is clear. The pointer, the frame, the six and the nine, the diamond. You know what that all amounts to.” The prophet sweeps their arms downward in a gesture of consummation or realization. We are in the scene described.

But Codd chugs his wine and chucks the glass onto the rocks surrounding the doorframe. His mirror reflections emerge, as they always do. The GOAT’s scream is like the shattering of a transformative vision.

I feel Codd’s shoulder shove against my throat and jaw, and the back of my head grind into little gaps in the cavern wall that has begun impinging on the scene.

“Bring me only the best, the best and brightest!” He pushes me back in the direction of the frame.

But this time I raise my finger, I whirl around, and my face assumes an expression I have never felt it make before.