Something is happening. The Heteropocalypse text is blooming. On April 2nd, 2014 the translation of Heteropocalypse was roughly completed, and subjected to a first reading, this was somewhat remarkable in itself, but what happened next, and continues to happen is miraculous…
The history of this strange text is fraught with conflict. It was discovered on an early January night by a crew of homeless scumfuck assholes. We use the term affectionately, as we were among the discoverers. One minute we’re hanging out, shivering, the next we’re huddled around this little book. It was unassuming, a small leather-bound volume, almost pocket-sized. This is not some cliche Evil Dead Necronomicon ancient tome, but it was still immediately remarkable. Sopping wet, yet intact, with pages that won’t tear or burn, the book is full of strange mesmerizing symbols. We were suddenly very curious, to say the least. Anyway, the rest of that story you can read here.
After a few years we become full-fledged philology pirates, we got our lives on track because the text demanded it. Okay, maybe if we’d gotten our lives a little MORE on track it wouldn’t have taken… what is it, nine years to decode the thing. Nine years and nine months. During that time a schism developed. The text was an exciting discovery. The fact that we had it and not some posh “experts” in academia felt remarkable and like an opportunity we could not waste. Eventually, as the translation continued and we got a clearer idea of what it is we have here, two different secondary motivations evolved, which would eventually divide the gang.
Half of us saw a goal mine, and the other half saw a higher purpose. It was six cultists v seven capitalists, and I was on the capitalist side. Still, we worked together, we had to. There was a sort of Solomon the Wise moment that went poorly and our baby ended up torn in half and had to be nurtured separately. Driven to prove who was the better parent, we bitterly raced to finish our half, thus proving who deserved to make the baby whole again.
Divided and mired in resentment, we stayed in touch. Competition doesn’t hold up long if you don’t check in on your opponent. There were also, of course, attempted robberies. Someone lost an eye. Dark times. I’d rather not go into it. The translation race was neck and neck up until the very end. For the last year or so the squabbling and turf wars have subsided while we all focused on getting the text together. We weren’t racing each other anymore so much as racing against time. The coming notoriety of being the only fuckheads twisted enough to try and peddle this smut drove us into an anxious frenzy. Every day without their sacred text being complete and out in the world was excruciating for our cultist counterparts.
The day we finished, both at the same time of course, some of the more mature members of both factions had been working together behind the rest of our backs to arrange a first reading. The smut peddlers swallowed our pride and went to their turf. They made us wear robes. From the start, it felt like the good old days, thirteen crusty drop outs breaking into Saint Louie’s on a Wednesday night. We brought gin and ham sandwiches from the 7 Eleven dumpster, they brought green satin and candles. They said the gowns came from a Lithuanian choir’s upcoming palm Sunday mass. We took hammers to the stained glass, busting up the life story of some saintly king to gain entry, and the cultists creeped in from underneath the floor somehow.
Anyway, we consented to the robes, and sat in a circle, to read. The text talks about thirteen stories, and arranges them in a very specific, but apparently jumbled and seemingly random order. There were thirteen of us, which the cultists insisted was significant, but we wrote it off as an ironic coincidence. We read the stories aloud, in unison. Well, a divided unison. The six literary entrepreneurs read the tops of the pages in unison, and the zealots read the bottoms. Don’t ask how the book got torn that way.
Anyhow, it was a fairly glorious night, but initially unremarkable, almost anti-climactic. Hearing the other side of the story we all grew strangely fond of each other again. We laughed and cried together, got turned on and grossed out together, sweated in the muggy night and prayed that no authorities would show up to haul us to jail for trespassing together. Without words, one of the copies of each half traded hands to the other side, and we parted ways, each possessing what we believed was the full book, the complete story.
I don’t know what the cultists did, but we celebrated, making giddy plans to submit the text to every christian publisher in the country, as well as some folks who might actually consider putting this thing out. We dreamt up publicity stunts, and joked about getting on Oprah’s list. It was a wonderful night, until we went to sleep.
Each and every one of us had terrible nightmares that night, waking with no specific memories of the dreams, just a powerful looming sense of terror. Then the tremors started, the seizures, the glossolalia. The thirteen of us are each carrying a piece of something much bigger than the original text in our heads. Sometimes it comes to us in bursts, visions and blurted sounds spilling from our flapping tongues. Other times, we realize that we’ve been muttering it for who knows how long. Always it is in a language utterly unfamiliar, which must be the spoken match to the unknown glyphs in the book.
We have raided the local Best Buy, Office Depot and Wal-Mart for portable recording devices with removable anti-shoplifting security magnets. Now we each carry one, hoping that when the text next attacks us, we’ll be able to hit our record buttons before we hit the floor. We have no idea how the sounds that come out of our mouths map onto the alphabet we’ve decoded from the paper, but we aim to find out.
Between near fatal car accidents and breakdowns in the cereal aisle of Piggly Wiggly, it has been a rough fucking month. But, the words are starting to come together, we just have no idea what they mean. Splicing audio files and trusting our intuition, we’re assembling something, and listening to it obsessively. There is a massive undertaking ahead. If it took nine years to translate a little book into 84 pages of filth, I don’t want to think about what it’ll take to turn this stuff out. We hope to publish it piecemeal, like an old serial novel. The important thing is, this shared experience has closed the schism. The cultists have come to terms with the fact that this endeavor cannot succeed without some financial input, and we have converted. It’s sorta hard to not believe in a religion whose sacred text is spontaneously exploding out of your own brain.
