The heater in his car didn’t work. He rolled the window down and forgot. A roaming WiFi algorithm recorded the word cocksucker and flagged him as homophobic, posting the deed in digital replay to crowds of thousands. He’d face a full shaming, doxing, and banishment, which didn’t matter, because he banished himself. Re-posters gained many followers with condemnation speeches. Whoever spray-painted his house, any regard was appreciable. He forked spiders cooked in spinach. Spirantal chimes sounded off somewhere in the room’s growing mold.

There was a public panel where every faction held forth. An academic protest, those words being synonymous. It would descend into a screaming match. Probably because he was driving there to shoot all of them. Boxes of ammunition weighted his pockets, but everyone would have to stand in line while he reloaded. His former glory, unacknowledged, proved little to those who speedran past it with modified clipping. He’d been pinched off the screen by a bigger boss. The few with his point of view were jailed. He had no idea why they allowed him freedom. Being invisible was somehow worse.

Some self-proclaimed coven asserted that they had resurrected Foucault, shipping his zombie overseas. You were banished as pro-life for expressing doubt about the reanimated corpse. Plug believed them, not out of self-benefice. Thot whores, amorphous millennial soy-blob men on a leash for the PR of an apology, trend trannies, BLM, every contemporary hustle, sat behind their label. He’d read the popular works, favoring the plainest diarist with poems the length of his erect clit. The bald part of Foucault’s head was a verdigrisy molt of protrusions. Encephalous rinds glowed when he thought.

“All the way from France, we had a boy, my son everyone (applause), suck his dick through the dirt of his grave and up he sprang, not as preferably instituted as a Frankfurt fellow, but I give you Foucault…he’s a big boy…he’s a big boy.” She was showing the crowd her son’s child-penis. Foucault turned and flicked it so it swung like a pendulum.

“My value judgements, having been placed elsewhere, willy-nilly, in a zone—call it a bog, if language applies, a bubble clogged between universes, where another million me lie in repose, stroking different-sized genitals—free of our own making, and perhaps including the unconscious sayso of some neurological remnant skipping around the rot—which is a liminal feature of this dimension, factored in somehow, perhaps randomly, or not—what this fictive, suck-friction rising from the grave has entailed, in order to, if anything, antagonize feasibility with a cumshot—not to reference religion. Boys now prefer my touch to that of their priest.” He spoke, uninterrupted, while vomiting a pea-green bile. “The thought through which these physics were changed came manifest according to the incompetence of whichever illimitable sentience presides over its dictation. I stayed swollen into the afterlife, bigger coffin necessary to accommodate my loin. Death’s dopaminergic excess conducted the wand, a dick growing inside my dick, offering evidence against orgasm.”

Foucault reached the end of his vomit, stroking an identical, smaller Foucault head presented by his mouth. It wagged through more elucidation, laughing about the venereal notions of the franchise being referenced, and hocked a wad of AIDs into the crowd—a request for reverence. The people were impressed, clamoring for free DNA. “You’ll find me in my hollow, smirking at the sense data, doing all my boys’ homework. Which categorical empiricism are you subscribing us to? The one with the most footnotes? I am not denying biology by flaunting the supernatural extension of a body this far past its due date. I am merely reinterpreting human matter and leaving the discussion open. I will meet you in the subjectivity of atoms. Somewhere deeper still, dare we assert. Excuse me, insert. Mutual associations on logic, every system at once, sounding off inside my anus. Sucking Zen smegma in the theoretical air. You are only to come if your partner has an STD, avoidance of which is prejudice in action. I authored the vacuum of space and kicked us a couple dimensions ahead. You’re welcome. If the electricity shooting through our neurons ascends after death like a firefly traveling outside time and between universes, don’t you think its glow might attract a hungry reptile or two? I wrote the biography of asylums. I assisted-suicided the grim reaper. My last PhD was underground, clapping for embalming fluid. I am the shadow the planet can’t step out of, the decay of thought. I burn back my cuticles if they dare offend me. Every conclusion has been brought into an ossified fracture. The question mark rendered as rigor mortis…”

Plug couldn’t hear the rest over the gun he was firing. He clipped three heads sitting in the front row and tagged Foucault in the throat. The little Foucault head popped out and bit the hole shut, both muffling a guffaw, a lisping pfft. “Hold still,” Plug yelled, reloading. A couple people sauntered off. He shot six more, right away, feeling better. Everyone was white, anyhow, so it’d be difficult to link him up with Hitler, but they would. He approached the stage. One of the Foucaults growled: “Fuck you for your help!” He fired at the thing’s lap ‘til his finger ached and woke up strapped to a table.

“Observe the insect on fire. Meat stripped to one carcinogen. Shall we trim off the resting layers of fat or turn them black screaming the word cum into a fucked apart incision? I’ve inserted bits of sponge between bone and muscle to inspissate over time before the augmentation oxidizes and kills him, or renders him a cripple. He’ll feel the intrusion every waking hour, to the point where thinking will be quite impossible, not that he ever excelled at it. Imagine chewing wire mesh with your joints. Chart how far this fibrous rind will travel after implantation, living matter as façade, how something sessile can be guided, a beacon skin shedding dynamically. He’ll contribute by participating, round for round, a hired faux dissident, brainwashed along whatever trajectory he encounters, incapable of ignoring any controversy we fabricate. Occupy him with the idea that both sides should be reformed from whoever sold them out. Maybe he could deal with how things seem not to matter by working through life while people laugh at him, since no one will take it upon themselves to forge the little castle of a family his genes need, huffing baby hair to feel better about the struggle. Blame’s always on you, customer, except tough love has become jaded to the point where only a mass shooting can explore its final conclusion. Hatred is spatial, allowing someone proximity doesn’t end hatred, but it gives them less targets. Station him in a city. He left a manifesto no one will bother to make sense of. Publish it somewhere, same as being deleted.”

The sky hung low, like a poked-open genital. He gored through this conflux, fluids trailing back from each of the creature’s wounds. A dressage whip hung from one nostril. Swallowing wadded mane, brain like shish kebob, they steered aground, steaming against the horizon, lumped together as if awaiting a tumbrel, one or the other expelling paddy. Ribs spoked wide on the undercarriage. Organs shone below, kicked toward insignia. Daylight parted, jangling wetly away. Muzzle stripped bare, flies carpeting, the stink brought coyotes. He saw himself reflected in black cavities of skull. The dogs retreated a yard at a time as he advanced. Insect music trapped in his hat. They trafficked in and out of the baby’s screaming mouth. He held it up, letting the swaddling unravel, and spat between its legs. The hole there began to grow. Flies exited. Only rows of teeth were discernable now.

This is an excerpt from Sean Kilpatrick’s new novel, Henchmen: A Novel on the Millennial Dilemma.