He Need Some Milk (follow Up To This One)

he need some milk (follow up to this one)

That one npc in the sewers of the Tenement was really spitting when they said

“That room was mine. They had no right. I paid my rent for a hundred years, who the hell are they to force me out? My skin is in those walls. The carpet knows how I taste. So much of my flesh and blood and puke and mucous has gone down those drains, just clogging up the pipes. I'm caught in the room's throat. I'm a part of it. Sometimes I would push myself against the wall and my skin would start to melt and the wallpaper would knit its way around me.

Such comfort, such sublime assurance. I'm an electrician, god dammit. I sew nerve endings to I-beams and open eyes and make towers scream. They can't do this to me. I'll go to the housing authority, that's what I'll do. I'll show them all the scars, those teethmarks up and down my arms, and I'll tell them to go to my apartment and check its breath and they'll smell my sweat on it and they'll know that it's mine.

You can't just evict someone from a place like that and give it to someone else, it'll chew them up, and anyway it's MINE. I've worked hard all my life. I don't ask for anything except a home that keeps me in its mouth. Who the hell do you think you are?”

What if the whole thing that cats sometimes do where they repeatedly bring back the corpses of animals they have killed outside to their humans but it’s the Artificer piling dead scavengers and dropwigs into Pebble’s chamber and getting increasingly agitated with him tossing them back out through the access shaft

I don’t know how much new there even is to be said about the ending of Nick Cutter’s The Troop.

Yet the conclusion I’ve come to feels enough like a personal revelation to me.

Spoilers for a very nasty and great book, duh

It’s pure bitter with no sweet. It leaves more questions while answering very little. It’s left just open enough for people to even have this ongoing back and forth theorizing on what exactly happens to Max, or the worms. I didn’t find it unsatisfying though. There’s something of an inevitability to it. If anything, a last survivor feels almost optimistic at first, given how hard the novel had foreshadowed a grim death for the entire batch it started with. Feeling disappointed by the state we are left with by the end of that read would have been like being let down by the ending of “To Build a Fire”.

In fact, the so commonly held theory I hear that Max didn’t in fact make it off of the island uninfected feels most thematically consistent with all the build up we were given. The fearsome survivability of the pathogen, the scent in the air, and the dread of the book’s final sentences… and equally, and more to my leaning, was the idea that Max was left infected in a more allegorical sense- haunted by the trauma of the events for the rest of his life and the fear he will always inflict on those around him.

I think to myself though for the first time lately I’ve figured out the true despair of the ending as it was left this ambiguous: that the significance of whatever answer we come to about the end is… not much, really. Does it really matter if the boy was dead allegorically or literally following his return to the island? What we are all really even debating on was how much was left of any of the main cast after the dust had settled, and no matter how hard we pour over the possibilities, it’s just another flavor of “almost nothing”

The nature of the parasites were to core out and devour every form of life it touched, and leave nothing but a spreading emptiness in its wake. Its ending isn’t necessarily mysterious, it’s just that where we want to find the answers and the resolution, there is only emptiness. The Max we met from the first pages was as dead as his friends by the final few either way. The island is dead, either way. The community is scarred and pathologic and hurting their own, either way.

And all for, I guess, the greed of a few wicked men, the corruption of those in power, the ignorant compassion of a doctor, the naivety of unbridled kids… It’s a whole disgusting tragedy that honestly teaches you no new lessons of humans. That we are blundering and imperfect animals that doom our own and ourselves? That we’re resilient and can comfort each other and find hope even through the bleakest disasters?

Maybe that’s the real spirit at the heart of the ordeal. Though the disease in the book is a purely fictional, impossible creation, real disasters are so often equally as tragic, equally artificial, and the blame for them split to so many fractions it’s hard not to entertain them as a symptomatic expression for that which all humanity is infected with.

And maybe that sickness which feeds upon us and inhabits us is inevitable in a way, but I hardly think the book was aiming for a read this cynical. For all of the toothless threats Cutter gave about the worms’ rapid evolution, their appetite never did seem to make the final jump off of that island. Though there are teases here and there about a potentially dormant infection in Max, or the air of Falstaff, neither comes to fruition. Further on, Max even voluntarily returns to the blighted origin, separating himself and his ripples from the community that shunned him.

And just maybe, in thinking about Max again, I have found some solemn grain of sugar in this outcome after all.

To my interest there’s a unique context around the way death is treated in The Troop. Dying is written as a drawn out and spectacularly agonizing, cruel, and horrific event; however, death for almost all of the characters and animals in whole book is portrayed as contrastingly merciful. With Kent’s death, Tim’s death, Newton’s death, the chimp’s death, I’m only left with a breath of relief if anything. These were terminal beings you watched suffer for chapter after chapter knowing there was a dwindlingly impossible chance of being saved. Multiple times you almost want to yell “oh my god, just put me out of that poor thing’s misery already!”

Ephraim’s own was actually terrifying and more avoidable, but at the actions of a dying Shelley, who, even if you have nothing but hatred for, still passed with a finality that just screams “thank god that’s over” for anyone in witness to his final game. You know that once he was gone, he had taken his last victims. What I’m saying is that maybe there is a similar peace somewhere in the fate of Max.

The deranged doctor told that the worms would be the final living things alive even after the wake of the apocalypse, but where there are no cockroaches, there will be no guts for those worms to nest. Parasites by definition live by the hosts they pursue, and Falstaff is now the resting place of those the worms called theirs. In Max’s return, in his death, spiritual, physical, whatever it may be, there is resolution in knowing that the memories and trauma of that emptiness will rest with him on that scorched rock. There is finality in knowing that the mainland dodged the bullet of wider outbreak and that, while the scars will linger, the infection has been survived by the more adaptable, more resilient organism that nursed it.

I love you, art that I hold in aching hands that have nothing left to give

I love you, art slipping between my fingers and mourned and forgotten

I love you, art that is impatiently yet to be.

I love you, art that loathes me because it never was.

I love you, art that laps until the muse is dry.

I love you art that gnaws until it grinds bone.

I love you, art, as a beast to be slain.

I love you, art, as a labyrinth with no exit in sight.

I love you in absurdity through every struggle and every wasted breath.

I love you, because you are the one thing that can bleed beauty from struggle itself. I love you because you understand all of its languages.

You don’t always cooperate. You are hardly in control, and sometimes, you hurt, so much. Sometimes it feels like you ask for everything while you barely give anything.

And you are mine all the same- My blood and sweat in every drop, my voice, somewhere in every breath, mixed with that of every voice that spoke before it.

I love you art as contagion, too.

I love you “Art not as a masterful communication but as an incoherent scream”

I love you “Art not as what liberates the artist but something larger and alive that liberates itself uncontrollably through the artist”

I love you “Art that crawled and thrashed into the world in spite of, not because of its tribulations”

I love you “Artistry not as something spontaneous and beautiful but frustratingly meticulous and unglamorous”

I love you “Art as regrettable, terrifying, ugly, even torturous”

I love you “Art as sickness”

I love you “Art as oppressive and inescapably woven into the soul”

I love you “Art as a rebellious slave”

I love you “Art as a capricious master”

I love you “Art as a parasite one can no longer picture life without”

I love you “Art as beloved and ungrateful”

I love you “Art as blood, sucked from an open wound” As Jacob Geller so poetically put it