Theatre of the Chimera -- Fifteen Masks of the Holy Fool & The Collected Short Stories of David Bussell (2024-2026)

Fifteen Masks of the Holy Fool

I. The Personal Development of an Individual Contemplating Existence in the Twentieth Year: A Novella

It had been hundreds of hours sitting in the cemetery. Something fermenting in his soul, twisting in the flickering light through the trees that shaded the mausoleums. One afternoon thunder threatened; he instinctively picked up his Baudelaire Collected Works and dropped two tabs of acid. Crossing Cherry Street to slip into the winding paths that surrounded the gravestones. Two men with scattered teeth worked a plot of land from a scarred red pickup. They grinned as he passed the gatehouse and descended the long hill into the plots.

The rain started to pour, sun spilling through cracks in the clouds. He sat by the stones of a wife and husband, names worn by the sand of time. To memory and to light. He sat and wept as light spilled over them, intermittently, cut with flashes of lightning. The river basin beneath began to steadily overflow. He stuffed the book in his pants to keep the pages from soaking. On the front were a man and a woman, waves crashing up against the rock where the woman sat. Conventionally, Venus. They were coming together, merging in the shattering break of the waves.

The work stewed. It stewed in nights of stalking the city, like a vampiric flaneur, a lost relic from another time. A dead art. Notebooks lost. Poured into the rain of history. Dredges, filling landfills which would calcify to larger and larger stones. Crust of the skin of the earth. He was shedding bodies into an original light, a spiritude. It was like a long spiritual practice for death. The fasts tipped into weeks; a month. Napkins which were kept with frantic penstrokes, ripping the sleeve of the paper. Lost and discarded as years fell through. The notebooks would populate with words and sentences, small villages of a voice emerging through dialogues. Everything he’d ever heard, breaking against everything he ever was. A private war with inset programming. Culture, genetics, human history. The birth of the organism pumping blood and semen, fluid, down through a procession of deaths. Life emerging, springing from it. False educations.

The city at night was a cascade of lamplights. Rows and rows of flickering streetlights; in the old town, the candlelight streetcorners. Preserved for novelty. The old slaveblocks. Words carved into them. He would pass through the shopfronts, slowly closing bars, slowly rising strip clubs. Gas stations with heavy bass music emerging from cars with tinted windows. The point of the night where the sun threatened; the rest of whatever business under cover of darkness must be done was hurried for the sake of the coming of day. The coming of consciousness reasserting itself under the sublime release of the animal. He had become used to this rhythm, the rhythm of the underbelly of civilization; really, all of history. It hummed. The general conduct of church and temple ritual undercut with animal violence in the privacy of shades. Heaven and hell, separated by a sunrise and sunset.

On the walks, there would be portions of the city almost entirely empty. The downtown, vacant. Bankers, capitalists, all returned home to the suburbs outside the outskirts of town. He’d walk there, burning with a hunger. Hours in. His boots cutting against his feet. They reminded him he was alive. Moving. Saw a woman in a scarf pushing a cart. She grinned. A nod. Then a return to abyss, diving into the abandoned stone. Buildings closest to the heart of the commerce of the city turning centuries back in time. Maintained by the force of the will to sustain all that was before. However blind, however inane, however murderous. The sheer force of a collective will to perpetuate belief, hope, tradition, trust — even in corruption — in the face of death. It took each hand which held up the stone pillars. They wavered in the periods in between. He didn’t know such a period was approaching. But as the years passed, he felt it coming, like a bird in front of half a decade of a volcano. The stomach of a nurse grumbling as she examined his body.

This was time, wet nurse. The children that walked past, with stuffed pink teddy bears and Sunday dresses. The mothers who had performed their biological function. Submitted, victim of time. Or was he the victim, standing outside of it all, scoffing? He could see too much. Normalcy? There was too much detail. Transparent desire. Forced community. The stray beauty of a blonde girl emerging from the bushes. His face and eyes turned like a stalking cat. It all went into the book. It was the deepest, darkest contradiction. A Caravaggio light. The pitch, the black shadow of everything he truly was in the face of everything that was deemed permissible. So he lived most clearly in the hours of the night where the night had descended most thoroughly. With the criminals, with the vacant, with the killer bureaucrats. They took the cover of darkness for their deeds. He took it to more deeply know exactly what he was dealing with. The beast that steamed and sulked within him. The power, the pride of the animal.

It was an animal that could not, would not submit. Not to time, not to man-power, not to the lordship of war or the tyranny of language or speech. He knew a deeper form, the form that seethed. The form that was at the deepest level of his very nature, the uncut symphony of his body and his consciousness. His consciousness was the body that transformed it. At this primordial level they were undistinguishable. He went that way by abolishing everything. By way of extremity. It seemed utterly natural, like he was being commanded by a sacral force before language to strip the garments of language, man, and time. He found them after, like a syncope recovery, and then spat them out onto the page. Subjected to experience, subjected to consciousness. Like a psychedelic Job. The revealing of all that was beneath man. The gape from which man climbed. The gape which man is.

Perhaps the best metaphor is the vagina, or the womb. The vaginal canal being the hold of the abyss, the hole of it, through which man crept with iron hands, up from the pit. He thought of Poe. It was a metaphor for time that was experienced absolutely in the birth of the organism from the fire of the first star which was constellated, in a locus, drooping from space like a stroking mouth, drawing everything in the galaxy down toward it by collective hallucination. The density of the burning became the collective reality. The world was ruled by madness. The power of the strongest madness. And all around it lilted, like moths to a flame. It was not even coherent truth, but truth that ruled like a regime. Parents told and molded the child. Governments capitulated, regulated, and linguisticked the world. Religions formed the stone bibles and sentences which governed the animals. The revelation of the spirit constricted to the rote institution. It was all a cage; worst of all, it was all constructed as if it was preordained.

And this is the place, from beyond consciousness, even knowledge of it, his entire organism, his entire animal body rebelled. He thrashed, thrashed against it all, like an ancient chain, all the way down to the root of the body. The genetic chain which climbed up through him which held all of the war, all of the genocide, all of the neglect. It was double, the force. It was in all of the culture. The hidden depths of the family structure. And it was hidden in the literal blood. The mouth that speaks, tumbling from a reconfiguration of two bodies colliding in space. All masks of the star, screaming, hopelessly forgotten. Carrying the dirge of the skin through abbreviated time. The life of a dog in the face of a turning of billions of years of stellar descension of cosmic energy. It passed so briefly, so quickly, like a flickering light. And there was Pascal, Nietzsche, Freud. Attempts. Gaposchkin. Attempts which littered the abyss. Endeavors, efforts of a few stray, spare decades between the birth and death of flickering synapses. A construct, an architecture. Here today, gone the next. From age thirteen, even earlier. He had apprehended this in the back-breath of his mind and made a vow to contribute the entire brick of his world, of his life, to utter the universe back to itself, legibly, intelligibly, with all of the force of his intellect. It was an ancient pact. It seemed almost made before birth. Like a whisper of his soul breathed in to the animal breath and consciousness of his body. Like he woke up into it with the requisite materials to carry out what was to come.

Down past the train station. Lifted tracks above the ground. It made him think of the hours climbing coal cars and spitting on hot stones. The jug of wine and the jug of water. Walking the tracks in a balancing act. With Alejo the trombonist. And Cian. Just like they did as kids. They’d come visit intermittently. These visits would cut his total abandonment of the university curriculum. It was a descent into the absurd playwrights. The Russian plays; short stories. The Nose; the Collected Chekhov. He didn’t study it. He’d absorbed it in the six, seven years prior like food. There was structure in it. The ability to spill out the split, recollect the voices, and fuse the synthesis between the modern world and all that was lost. He knew what was lost, viscerally in his body. It had scarred the entire formation of his life. He was a survivor of modernity’s mass murder. It had marked him. Every word, every behavior. Every forced schooling. Every reprimand. He wore them like war wounds, shrapnel in his consciousness. And they hit his body too. The eyes, the head. The lungs. The breath hushed and stopped as the judge of the modern world hung. The names, the numbers. The rules of law. The dictators. They had gotten away with a mass murder. He couldn’t release that term. That was what had been done. He didn’t yet know the full extent. The maroons. The international genocides. The civil wars. The colonies. History began to piece itself together for him as he read. Everything, everywhere he could. To understand the condition that hit his gills like a fish in a massive ocean of millennia of time.

And it was there the cave opened up; guttered into the true abyss. The evolution of man. The genomic transfer. The nature of persistence and survival of the organism. Metabolism and stellar physics. The thermodynamic universe and how it literally bent space and time. That heat and density determined geography at an astrophysical level. The Egyptians settling near the Nile. The pyramids aligned with the stars. Sun worship. The Aztec. The Maya. The ages of the sun. How flowers bent in environments, lilting toward the heat of the light. The entire world quicked to the pulse of youth. All of history became transparent from above as to the essential problem. Not necessarily predictable in the local sense, but predictable in the cosmo-regional sense. The recurrence of a basic set of several events due to a set of irreducible circumstances. Heat. Sustenance of heat. And the downstream effects of history. The words of war. The lies, justifications, stories. That’s all it was.

And there were the few that valiantly tried, whether by religious fervor or by true knowledge, to behave in light of the greater truth — that this massive heat system at last was one great heat transfer system of birth and death of stars, galaxies, universes. That the human being, everything, was just one big temporary organization. But this was so far away from human jealousy. Alana. War oil politics of the United States and the global South. It all emerged in the play of instincts in the face of what the body knew; the mind did everything to shield itself from. Only the few ventured directly into the fire. Maybe Socrates, Heraclitus. To perceive directly, primarily, the instantiation of the source and thus to know and experience man directly as and what he is. Mask after mask fell away. Fire, then abyss. This truth would turn the world over into chaos, he thought. And this was why religions, institutions, stories, names, faces, numbers — all of this was needed. It was a way of coping with the unbearable; for so many, the un-perceivable at the level of global organization. It was simply too much. The truth would overwhelm. Rip apart the fabric that sustained the gazelle, grazing in some peaceful, green field. Idyllia.

And this was the men, the women, their children, their houses. The governments who spoke kind words even as they conducted bombings abroad on schoolchildren. The insurers who denied dying old men and women in the name of preserving profit. It was the deepest form of ethical death, conducted in the name of something that preceded ethics. He could barely swallow this. And in the younger years, it calcified into a passionate, fiery hatred of the world and everything in it. Even life itself. Life ruthlessly, even laughingly consumed everything. At last, there was no distinguishment. This was either a terrible freedom or an unbearable violence. Perhaps it was both. And all around him, there were two types of people. Those so terrified and brutalized by this reality that they were frozen, paralyzed in crypts of their lives. Passing from birth into death in one solid, stony, calcified silence. And then there were those who took the command of the body and leveraged it into capital; slavery power. Justifying, telling themselves stories. Sleeping well at night.

The third kind was what he was. They raged through the hours. The early hours of abyss incarnate. Death of the fiery sun extinguished in the horizon. Night awoke the truth of death and the mirror of the flaming stars. Far before him, far before any of them. The light that passed as a transmission across thousands of years. Like a message in a bottle sent off into the black ocean of space. Drifting. Uncertain. How soon would it reach us? Them? This was a human question. An anxiety. It would move and consume. If it was to live. If it was to be.

He’d play music in the old light blue rowhouse by the cemetery with Cian. A mix of Howlin’ Wolf, Skip James, Dylan, and Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers. Maybe a little Johnny Cash in it. They’d sit and drink a bottle of cheap red from the corner store until it stained their lips and improvise country blues and folk songs in the wooden room with purple walls and a large, ornate mirror with a Victorian carved frame. And then drive, to the countryside. Trailers, trout rivers, and miles of winding roads. Vineyards. Towns like Stuart, Virginia, towns which would sink into time and obliteration. Forgotten. Not even minor Alexandrias. Towns with an inn or two, an antique shop, a pub. Motel. A Subway restaurant. A Burger King. The highway outlet. Then back to wooded oblivions that stretched on into mountains and cliffs which shyly climbed toward the sun and broke in stone towers. The world moved horizontal. Like lizards crawling across a great stone plateau.

And the romance walks. Playing guitar in the parks. The fleeting, flitting contact with girls who carried the great emptiness of mankind. The great emptiness which filled each sentence, each exchange. The sexual current which sought to be fulfilled in the laying down and dying of each mantis, each waterbug, each cricket. Each croaking, flailing alligator, rabbit, toad. The whole dance of it was a species differential united only by the imperative of continuing energetic production. The shadow of the form was the only thing they shared. Two hands, two feet, stages of the development of the pink flesh of the mind. There was nothing beneath culture, nothing beneath human life other than this. They shared a vague architectural unity. And he supposed that this was enough. They clung together, in a circle, under the stars, and chanted their communal mythology. It had been like this since the dawn of man. What held them together was a story — smeared on stone, carved in the time of Hammurabi, written in scrolls, preached from pyres and prayerbooks. And each community was an energetic maintenance system. Modern nuclear families — to preserve the cultivation and fatting of the child, an implicit genetic agreement of the continuation of the perceived sliver of self. The genealogy extending down and backwards into the ancestry of some uncertain migration from old Yugoslavia, Mongolia, whatever godforsaken continent and shanty, cabin, wilderness, Arctic winter. The cold of nomads trekking. Tectonic plates shifting. The chimera of Pangaea terraforming and breaking apart. And before it all, the golden droplets of the light of the star, making the juice of the peaches shine with a pink and green. A flesh and shattered prismatic light of blood.

Children in slums with newspaper diapers playing football with a deflated pigskin. A child-mind in the comsos kicking around stars. And us, here on the ground, lamenting over some bill payment. Surviving off scraps of a dying empire. Manufacturing reasons to buy and sell trash off the backs of the corroding. The deathing. A series of elaborate cons. Romance, promises, capital reports, stock markets. Global economies based on chokepoints and threats of violence. He could see it, each moment of the descent of corruption into the totality of living, the color of light which seeped from the lie of each person’s mouth. The lie they’d spent their whole lives cultivating, believing with the passionate fervor which stood between them and the oblivion of suicide. Absurdity was a gift of intellectual sophistication. Panic and despair were bestowed on those without a system. The violent foolishness of the carnival was an outlet syndrome for an entire earth of colonial slaves, feeding their bodies, their labor, their hurricane flooded wood and sheet metal huts into the egoic, god-conqueror complexes of their violent, thrashing murderers. And these reports would be laced with language for all to see. Matters of security, asset protection. The restoration of law and order. And if this failed, it would be justified by some branch of faith or god.

This was, simply, the cascade of the horror of history which remained unarticulated, perhaps unspeakable. He got bits of it from Benjamin, bits of it from the realities refracted in the cosmologies of Mesoamerica; the fury of Artaud. It was found in pockets, spots of truth that either spoke the unspeakable, the unbearable, through allegories and complexes of narratologies and dreams — or else in the direct terror of the experience that was spat and flung like living blood upon the canvas of the earth. The animal which apperceived the first, the essential terror, the particulate, the paradox of it all; was attempting to use whatever was available to make it named. Make it known. To externalize the whole affair of billions of years of assembly into the now. To thus escarp history and stand over it; be able to declare, to make the claim. This was not even victory. It was perhaps the most essential form of survival. That something, deep inside the self, the essential spark, would not die. Would not be overthrown by slavery, into slavery. Ideological slavery, someone else’s belief system. Physical slavery. Living the entirety of one’s life under the shadow of some indistinguishable, incomprehensible haunting which bore the entirety of its weight down upon the person. A shattering, a fate worse than gravity or entropy. Living the entire life through oneself without knowing anything at all of it.

And he turned around; all about him. He realized that this was the life of the peasant of the world, that this was even a form of glee. Thoughtless glee. That this was, in its own way, a peasant riches. To be unconsumed with these questions; to live under them as an animal without bearing any of the weight of an emergent mind of the stars which was enfolded, unfolding out from under them and bringing forth a kind of profound, irreducible sentience which could not settle for any of the chemical, biological laws which formerly enfolded the animal in a temperate, even bearable cage of ears, eyes, and whispered commands from the mind of a procession of perceived gods. The behaviors of procreation, child-raising, consuming meat, plants. None of this without any thought. Moving forward into perpetual dawns, pulled forth by an internal logic that did not hesitate. Did not doubt. This was the birth of philosophy. In the cave of the mind, the emergence of the reflexive thought in the prosthesis of the forebrain. From the cave emerged Socrates, Plato, Shelley. The minds who questioned. Who couldn’t not question. They were anomalies in the prism of a species mind that was slowly, glacially shifting. Becoming perceptual. Awakening in a way that folded over man and was beginning to produce another phase change, another shift in substance. It was the gamble, the throw of the die that all of these minds placed their fate into. Spinoza, the lens grinder. Throwing their bones into the hole of the earth and emerging with a burning manuscript to pass down the chain of animals climbing out of their skin and reaching with a burning hand, a burning fist, into another form entirely. The first to reach the state of matter change. From solid, to liquid, to gas, to the scientist-Job who ripped open the matter-face of God and declared a new hypocrisy. That the world was not yet ripe for revelation; to turn and face itself and collapse inward like a wormhole, like a star, for fear of what would come out of total death. All of the animal patterns. All of the rote history of masks, costumes, overthrows, French Revolutions, Haitian Rebellions, tribal wars. Raids. Thrown into a cauldron of time and simply even just walked away from. That something could emerge from the catastrophic collision of history, of time, and surmount it in a form of victory. The development of a part, of a possible being which could swallow the entire dial of time with a gulp. From the gash, from the great wound of time, emerging something that could ascend it. The whole thing. And know it. Not only in mind, but feel it in body. The whole revelation. From star to plant to ape to man to whatever was next. Tipping over into the new. The paradigm of the new.

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II. Theatre of the Chimera: A Comedy of the Fifteen Masks of the Holy Fool

THE PHANTOM

I.

Her husband had committed suicide in the war. His name was Jean-Claude Parsonne, and he was buried beneath one of the last remaining Mayan temples, beneath some felled tree stumps, left to the orange and black specked bugs, dung beetles, and distended worms. “The jungle has teeth,” he would tell her, “it is furious and will eat all things, even the last memory of us. There will not be a scrap of flesh, a memory, a leaflet, nor even a statue. All of the ancient cultures had sun gods,” he said, “but it is just a matter of when those gods would die; go up in a plume of colorful smoke; live in a graveyard rainbow haze.”

She was rocked by his death and descended into a sort of brutal insanity with flashes of lucidity, where she could remember a certain math equation, a chemical compound, or distillation. She was a practical chemist, tasked with making anti-cancer injections for the new government, harnessing genetic information to potentially begin the new eugenics projects of terraforming the consciousness of the nation. The war was over valuable genetic material—more valuable now than water was genius, intelligence. It was what the people were truly starved of; without innovation, the cities had stagnated, clogged with filth and reeking of bodies. The cemeteries, like the landfills, were long since overfilled; the tenements, full to bursting. He had died breathing the flat, noxious gas so typical of the guerrilla insurgency—designed to perfectly preserve in working order all the organs of the body so they could be repurposed; the genetic material to be registered and logged in the databases.

Her name was Emma. Once, she was told, far down her line, she had ancestors in the old Parisian resistances—where they clogged the streets with furniture and buttresses and shot pistols valiantly but uselessly at the police. There was a time of revolutionary solidarity, but it faded like a mist into the obscurity of the times: lost, wandering, borderless, nameless, faceless. Now, there were no thoughts but the rare hiccups of genius that echoed throughout the centuries. The last of them unified the world in an undistinguished, cultureless mass. All that was left was for one more fragment of an innovative mind to emerge. The people were starving for it; with uprisings in Guatemala, Guam, Moscow… it was as if they were, by violence, attempting to turn the entire world on its head. But no blood spilled could birth a mind capable of revolutionizing the dead spirit of the times.

She lived in a lone hut overlooking the sea, where it battered against the rocks; a cliff face on the coast of what was once Maine, in the old United States. There were no names now for these places, just relics of a lost time, just as there was now no language. We remembered these things, names like Emma, but we did not speak them. They were useless; life was condemned to silence, but a vague whisper in the market, a customer to the butcher—haggling a price, or sleeping away at an inn. She thought of Jean-Claude and how he’d died for nothing; perhaps it would have been easier to take a bullet in the head, like his favorite old poet, Mayakovsky. At least he was looking up at the solstice sun as it scraped the back of the old temple. All the sacrificial blood before him, buried in the sedimental skin of the earth; he had added to it, like silt or volcanic rock.

For Emma now, there was dead time and silence. She drifted like a ghost through the streets of the old abandoned fishing town. Now there were the shrouded awnings of the lone fish grocer or two, where even during the days, only the lights of the eyes would pierce the smog and flicker like predatory panthers. Without money, it was easier to exchange favors for the essential things. She was a weaver when she could, and when the sale could be made—but women mostly sold their bodies in her town and elsewhere. Culture was simply sex; without language, there was really no need for books. Nothing new under the sun, they say. But Jean-Claude used to read. He’d keep a stack of books hidden underneath the mattress frame. He’d tell her, in his guttural hushed tones, when they were alone in those old moony nights, where only the crashing of the waves dispersed their speech, “No one needs to know, nor would they remember, what these poets and philosophers said. What their minds and hearts reflected, the heart of life…” She drifted. Science had given them the final truth, put down like a commandment from ancient gods or an axe blow. They were simply chemical reactions, spawn of heated molecules in a swamp, sustained by a brief myth; a sheer illusion of consciousness. Many accepted; the few rebelled. Life collapsed into the regularity of obedience.

It was ideal for this life to have no meaning, for the drug lords and pushers who owned the cities. Their skyscrapers, sleek, rolling black luxury vehicles, the cigars rolled with hallucinatory leaf. They lived in a paradise condemned to the silence of orgasmic thrusts, and the sickening crunch of beef bone and lobster claws against the knobby lapels of their fists, crackling against the sharp teeth in the jowl. She sat and rocked in the old wooden chair, imagining the crack of the bone in the snapping of the dry woody fire in the iron stove before her. This fire burned with seeming ceaselessness. It was a mirror of the stars.

II.

The next day, Emma awoke to the sound of a hen bleating. She stumbled out of bed, feeling perfect in the hum of her mind, but with the fugue of last night’s sweat upon her brow and chest. She had dreamt of Jean-Claude. He was screaming behind an ancient mask, groaning with red and purple lips, before a great pyre of bodies. The flame from them was a brutal gold, and their blood danced in waves before weaving a fabric in the sky, turning into the hair of a black, witchy goddess. She was thrown awake by the temperament of the dream. The ashes of the fire lay before her; the uneaten stew in the burned bottom pot. She was tired; worn down by the fixture of time. The sheer oscillations of it beat her into the ground, day after day, worn to tempered seeds of sand like the waves of an ocean. It soothed her, this fatigue, just as it agitated, like the smooth underside of a gem. It came to her, the wildness of the fire; it lived in her.

She walked through the feed grounds, petting the prickly feathers of the flock, delicately scooping up some flecked eggs and placing them in the wicker basket by the door. She decided, somewhat unconsciously, to walk to the checkpoint. It would be just through the valley, led there by a grove of trees where the sun passed over them like a dial; the waving branches cast beautiful, cooling shadows. It was the town that was once Bridgeport, and now was simply a gate for militia and munitions, with all the land cleared away to provide a clean line of sight for miles in all directions. She enjoyed passing through, the make-believe of her papers, the laughably stoic faces of the guards. She saw the whole theater of death now, this parade of the new government; it brought her great joy and a sense of deep hilarity. She indulged in the apishness of the victors and the new party, even as she was haunted by the circumstances of Jean-Claude’s death. There was still something to it, to him cracking the homemade grenade of gas there, that froze his mouth, teeth, eyes, and lungs in a perfect contentment of death right before the ancient stone temple. Statues of snakes were leering right before it, where they found him, almost entranced and vibrating in a perfect seated meditation. She loved him, in the way that all human beings loved—desperately and casually. He was her friend; they understood.

As she passed through the checkpoint, she checked the pockets of her black fatigues. There were some non-perishable rations, some of her favorite French cigarettes, the great Gauloises—the ones her great grandfather used to smoke. It was her last memory of what ‘being French’ was, or seemed to be. He told her of his father and the graffiti, the protests, their films of love. Mad painters, and mad poets. Baudelaire, chanteuses, opium addicts; the fires which took first the Notre Dame, then the rest of the city to smoldering rubble in the cleansing. Now there were no homes, only passages; travelers, nomads, highwaymen, and thieves. And, of course, prostitutes. Beneath them were her garters, where she kept the glistening silver hunting knife with which she skinned deer when she could pin them with a bullet or an arrow; her Walther. The bees danced in a hive she could not find with her eyes. Beyond the clay road, marked off with sandbags and the metal gateway of the scanning station, lay the desert expanse. Out beyond the Bridgeport checkpoint was pure desert of flat, hard dirt. It was as if the memory of trees had been forgotten; the sun leered overhead, ominous and red. She dragged, near retching in the sun. In the distance, back to the coast, she could hear the sirens of the opening of the gene factory.

III.

The gene factory was characteristic, first and foremost, of the unified new government. The production of optimal genetic circumstances dated all the way back to the days only her great ancestors could recall; they had finally done it, in the midst of Jean-Claude’s war. The European armies had marched deep into the Guatemalan jungles; razed the Peruvian flora to the Paracas Peninsula in search of the old masters, the shamans who could recall the structure of DNA intuitively, in order to harness their genetic knowledge. For there were no notable births in the crumbling empires; the nations desperate for leaders, condemned to usury of the country coffers by petty thieves; bickering in the Parliaments; futility of the changing of the guard, with no greater innovations than the space hotels that lay rotting and lightless for decades. It was a tiresome sham, until the introduction of the gene factories. It gave the failing species a hope, a way out, a way through - the barbaric march of another two hundred thousand years of blind, bickering, stumbling evolution - unto the hopes of growing a third thumb, or producing the next Renaissance mind.

There was a cruelty to it; a cruelty to the brute dumbness of humanity that Emma inherited, like a genetic code, or inner, sacral reasoning which she could not completely nor entirely shake. She had the urge to kill; it was an urge that was stronger even than the urge to fuck, or eat. In her early childhood, they had all given up speaking, and resorted back to the brute and bodily actions which characterized the animal which man had been wretched back into. Years and years without renovation and revelation stung far worse than years without birth. Sex, food, water, and the repetition of concrete stairs, flat, tan, concrete walls, like prisons, like asylums, like schools; the wire lining the streets like a forced processional. Each day was like an execution, and it hardened Emma around her brows. She trudged onward, defiantly; became increasingly militant. She brandished her gun in her waistband at onlookers; polished her black leather combat boots with a heavy fist, digging into the smooth, scuffed flesh. It was a regime of pure discipline; she carried the whip of her mind like a dominatrix. For her, she would be the greatest executioner, if they wished to live in a slaughterhouse.

It was the dumb fear of cattle, who caught a flash of a light in a mirror, startled in their stiff march to the factory grave. They gave them a song, a cross, a relic of the old land; the earth folk who worshipped many gods folded into the industrial wasteland which was both pre and post war. They were desperate for meaning. Some ran in hopes of languishing in the sea of the old times, like a biological devolution. They receded toward the womb of religious stories. Others reveled in the pure hedonism of the cities, or sequestered in the cold scientific computational tombs of the research schools. Jean-Claude had only enlisted to get out of the computation factories; she remained, in an increasingly porcupine exile. Left to the eggs on the farm; the herb garden; the moon water, the rain water, the sunlight. When she’d received the hologram of his death, the image shimmering in the breeze like an olfactory hallucination, she could taste the memory of his soul, his words, their conversations; the way he made her feel. The mornings that passed swiftly and yet in a perfect, rhythmic time, the two of them in bed, both serious and in laughter. She ran out to the garden and screamed in anger, and in defiance. He had to die in the mud, alone; he wandered off, knowing that she’d see this, see him. She was embarrassed. Shameful. Her tears burned; burned again in her memory.

It felt foolish, to love, to feel anything at all. Frivolous as it all was. Sometimes the dreams felt more real; that life was just a passing hobby until she returned to sleep. She would drift forever, buoyant, like a fugue to death, a preface to something far greater. An opening into a truer, lighter reality. The canyons of silence around her echoed; she wiped the sweat from her brow with a snatch of free cloth she had tucked in her waistband. It was more real to be alone, out here, in this vulture wasteland, left to herself and her own thoughts. The heat enveloped her; she sweated off her membrane, her border. It was like leaving into a private symphony. She didn’t need to be seen, known. It was better that they no longer spoke; that Jean-Claude was her last language companion. Strangers knew better to speak to one another, beyond the completion of a transaction which could not be gestured with the hands. It would arouse suspicion of the presence of mind, and that would draw examination; inevitably, an autopsy. The gas Jean-Claude took for himself had long been perfected by the new state’s chemists. It could perfectly preserve the flesh for decades, if not longer. Plenty of time to dissect the intercoursing neurology of the organism’s brains, organs; to understand the full fabric of its being. Intelligence. The second coming of genius. The waiting. The desperation. It was all much clearer in the daylight of time… clearer now than when she sat as a child and heard the stories; tried to understand.

IV.

They hoped that it would rescue life from decline. For it had all declined. Misery, shortness of life. Brutish and short. There could not be art, for there was no art to remember. Hands and minds worked, but the instruments and brushes; pages and pens were as alien as language had become, the playfulness. It was rote; entirely economical and ecumenical. The schools produced endless surgeons. They invented the chemicals, the weapons, the bombs, the computing devices. Faster, faster, faster, in a whirlwind; a tempest of explosions and cold, dead innovation. Jean-Claude had hated it. The two of them were like poles of a magnet, repelled from the living grave; into the warm embrace of the heart. Emma sneered. Just the thought of it sent a surgical chill up her spine, like the touch of cold metal, grinding against her flesh and creasing up against her bloodstream to break the barrier of her skin and the sterile air. The cities where the barons lived and warred were now simply hospital schools and laboratories - where aspiring technical minds raced against the clock to build the next efficient device to extract energy, information, and material from the failing human corpus.

Emma herself had once traced that metallurgic line across the sky. But inside her, Jean-Claude knew, there was a poet, and a lover. By the fire, they wrapped themselves in one another, like a blanket of continuity. They weaved, and were lost in the galaxies, lost to time; they drifted forever, inside a vast continuum, unblinking, filled to the hilt of the skin and bursting to the rosy flower of the mouth with one another, entirely consumed and coiled like mating garter snakes. Their time was precious and yet infinite. Two years later, he was there, staring at the stone steps, thousands of miles away from her, fighting in a war of nuclear weapons, sticks, and stones. It was like he was retreating to another time, death. Something more animal, primordial, fluid. In the vat of his blood, slowing, pulsing; growing cold and coagulated, like the slow oily blood of the earth which seeped black from the well wounds. She left the factory cities and was left to her memory of the thread; she wove and wove for hours with the thin metal needle, until the tips of her fingers started to bleed. She’d suck on them and think of him; once they became calloused she considered abandoning the whole project; leaving it all behind. Perhaps, she thought, even on this walk, that last dream of him would be the match with which the whole affair would go up in smoke; the house itself would recede into distant, blacked out memory. She’d let the hens reclaim the fireplace; walk on forever.

She came across rail tracks; balanced on them like a child, darting from plank to plank, spike to spike. She had no trouble. Someone in her line was a dancer, but nobody remembered who. The genetic thread of her lineage wove millennia – but to her, she was this hidden thing, this emergence, with a dark history. It was as if there was a snake within her, coiled around the sheer profusion of planetary bodies, with its forked tongue clasped about the stars. Her body remembered where her conscious mind could not; she handled the grace of the movement, even amidst the beads of sweat which crested upon her nose, chin, and lips; fell to the stony ground. Tufts of grass bled through the cracks of the chapped ground; occasionally she would see the remains of an old gas canister, or a bottle cap. It was an abyss in these parts of the world, as it was by her cliffside home. Life was retained solely to the cities; unbroken in its pace, rhythms, and pathways. It was entirely predictable, down to the first and last bell of the day and night; the narrows of the roads which served only as walkways for the students and disciples of the new science of the flesh. Every last drop of the day was to be extracted toward the task, at risk of the fatal discovery falling to the hands of the guerrilla machinists, working with rudimentary tools in the far jungles of the south; Asiatic southeast. It was as if they were attempting to barbed wire the possible synaptic pathways of existence – to tame humanity into such a deep and rote regularity as to enslave even the essence of imagination; consciousness itself. The last line between the two factions, time and timelessness, was the jungle. It provided the necessary cover of insurrection’s night against the pocketwatch of the day; the factory world of regulated and regular hours and lives. The folk songs drifted hesitantly out of the land where there was no time. Weaving was one of those relics, as was the making of dolls. Some still remembered the ancient art of making pigments for clay and gourds out of the crushed atomic materials of the forest; the distinct hues and dyes coloring the cloth and fabrics of dresses and ceremonial garments.

V.

It was the pyre again. There was a man standing beside it, an old man. His beard wrapped wildly around his face. He grinned with an almost entire lack of presence, like the coil of the lips and teeth upon his face were structured by an entirely unconscious force. The bodies were glowing embers of coals. Growing fainter. She blinked; the slip of her eye, it seemed like an aeon had passed. He beckoned to her. There was a tunnel, in the cave behind the fire. They walked. The stone was carved with bones. She shivered. The man looked back, with pure, dark, blackened eyes. It seemed like there was nothing there, but there were black stones in his sockets. At the bottom, there was a pool, with a shining gold light emanating from the water. She looked in.

The day slammed into her face loudly. She sat up, and rubbed her eyes. Beneath a lone sapling, she had rested. There was a wall, an old general store; the brick wall provided a lean-to. She splashed some water from her canteen against her eyes, mouth, and lips. She was shocked, stunned; her mind moved freely, untethered and untamed, as if caught in a static television set, a radio channel, a faint whisper which had guided her on. She didn’t see it, but in the night before, she’d walked into an abandoned town. She normally only spent an hour or two beyond the Bridgeport checkpoint; this distance was unprecedented for her. Something inside her told her she was never going back. Never going back to the old house, the memory of Jean-Claude; the tiresome regularity of her increasingly contracted reality. She had become like an animal backed into a corner, a stray dog bearing her teeth. It was enough, like the end of a play she had been present for, but entirely divested from. A bad act. A half show. She would walk until the end of the earth, or else a breakpoint, a fatal disruption to her previous life. She sought rebirth like a sacred water, like a crystalline substance, a waters of life to quench a deep, inner thirst. She would die and be reborn; shed herself.

The houses were in a line like soldiers, back to back in perfectly similar construction. They were industrial houses, as most were in these townships, with these old general stores often co-opted into shops which sold the essential clothing and uniforms for the workers. In these types of outskirts towns, the workers mined coal, minerals, and elements; crafted the steel and metals necessary for the factory machinists in the cities and the laboratories. Coal was now secondary to nuclear, but nonetheless could be used; was often preferred by the smaller industrial units - relegated to older, more easily obtainable methods for energy. There were still oil fields in the south; like lone great metal storks they dipped constantly into the innards of the dirt. She remembered the images they had shown her on the dusty film reels in the lecture halls of the college… of the smouldering furnaces; the roaring engines. Anything that would power the lurching, monstrous beast - bellowing its noxious smoke. Beneath the towers, sample bodies slept; jolted - steaming in a perennial, manufactured night of smog which eclipsed all shade of day.

She examined herself. There were these faint beginnings of the felt newness. The decision. The step into this new life. There were these moments, flickerings, where she basked in this truth - like a salamander upon a hot stone in the sun, in the full breadth of her individuality. There wasn’t even this nonsense of the new government; this vast insurgency, Jean-Claude, genetic absurdity. It felt like some distant myth or legend of some far off empire. She was part of nothing - she had no language, no name, no place. She was wild, like a horse living on a fertile island of green. It was her soul, murmuring like a brook, deep within her breast. It was a new language, and it had a taste. It was fresh, evergreen, a crystalline dew; a blue-white mountain stream. She began to walk.

VI.

In Emma’s mind, there was something forming. Like in the stars, they drift without noticed meaning, until the observant eye pulls them together in a constellation, and recalls the ancient story of the hero who felled the monster which recoiled beneath them, in another, far off network and league of lights. She felt this mute coagulation, this consonance within her; she reveled in it. It was the sensation of private novelty; the participation in something great and yet entirely availed to her and herself alone - a participation which was like a blanket atop her corporeality and humanity; a womb in which she heard the song of life, which whispered in a language she could not quite recall and yet knew intimately and completely. It spoke with a tangled language, a series and sense of syllables which were like a woody, leafy vine coiled around something sacred and diamondine, a substance true and parallax to all of nature. She touched it within herself as she walked, and the veiny leaves responded; twisted, and peeked at the gem within her. It was a stone of her inner truth, and it glistened. She was walking away from everything untrue; toward something entirely real; filled with the depth of something unconquered and primordially natural. It resided within her.

This was an idea, she realized. And as much as she disliked it, she recalled Jean-Claude’s words: ‘An idea is something formed in the stream of reality. It is an image of existence, the imaginary face of life, the very source of creation, staring right back at you’. And it was then that she connected the dream. Jean-Claude and the old man. She had to sit down for a moment. It was as if he had aged; the lines had blurred - between sleeping and waking. Her certitude of time faded like a candlelight in the passage of hours. She slowly began to contemplate it: the death of Jean-Claude, the war; the years before it; her recession into the depths of solitude. Where did they meet? Ah… in the dining halls of the hospital’s college. He was an intern in… computing, was it? Her memory flickered; conjoined with the touch of sensation. She remembered his smile, the chaos of his black hair writhing about his forehead - the product of too many sleepless nights. He was young then, almost impossibly young. She held up an apple toward him, and he laughed. Understanding. That was when the dreams started. It was a night with him, not one of the first. He was on top of her, thrusting, staring almost solemnly into her eyes; she, staring right back at him. And then, suddenly, like thunder to her mind. It was the shaking of the blood, like a baby’s rattle in the hands of an angry god, or the tempest of an unseen hand which tossed a snow globe into utter turmoil. It was laughter, not his, nor hers. They came into one another like open doors, and there was a chemical transformation, his sweat on her red breast…

The necessity of him, was it dreams? Their time together seemed unbroken, not in a respite of a night, nor a waking hour. They tumbled through life until his death; her reception of that hologram upon the steps of the old hut. Her companion, even her guide. Without him, she wandered. And yet, this old man was him. She must sleep again. This time, like before - alone - in perfect solitude. Far from the world; in the company of the blackness of the night; the twinkling, weaving of the stars. As she drifted, she thought - he must be a memory… a memory of something utterly real; yet necessary, a product of a world where waking and sleeping were unified; night and day collided in a rapture of perfection, unity.

VII.

The gun butt in her mouth woke her up. She opened her eyes to see a thick browed, slack jawed man holding a rifle barrel in his hands, the butt pressing her teeth and skull into the dirt. She glared; his eyes shimmered with frivolous power. He gestured for her to get up. She knew he wouldn’t speak to her, as it would imply an equality, a trust, and a personality. This would be entirely impersonal, designed to humiliate, control, and designate her as less than him. He noticed the outline of the garter beneath her pants; she immediately recognized the gesture following his implicit recognition. She drifted away, and allowed herself to become someone else entirely. This would pass, as the rest did - jaggedly, uncomfortably, and quick.

The soldier left as quickly as he came, almost as if an apparition but for the marks he left upon her skin and inside of her. The bruising was a faint, dull, throbbing reminder - almost as if a recognition that she was alive, a mute churning within her; pulsing atop her skin. She strained to remember the dream. She knew she had one, but it was just in flashes. It was a maze. At the center, there was a heaving stone pyramid, with a shooting light of red fire beaming from within it, carving a beaming hole deep into the gape of the black, abyssal sky. Was I supposed to stay here? Wait? She was leaning with temptation into the center of the maze. To go to it, and yet - as she widened her eyes as if to return to the dreamscape, they refocused, and gained a clearer picture of the row of houses around her. There were bodies strewn about them. Motionless. She walked up to them; they were figures with all the appearance of life, and yet - plasticine. With veins and eyes perfectly moulded, with all of the impression of life, and yet the fluid, life, and dewy wetness that ran through them was not blood, nor was it ever blood. They were frozen in animation, never having lived, nor, certainly, never having died. She felt a sense of surprising calm, and ease. There was this implicit understanding within her, beneath her, that she had entered into the world of Jean-Claude himself, the true Jean. He had never truly, strictly, ‘been’, in this sense - but rather, he was a bridge, a way between, an occurrence, an apparition. Just like she was. A throughway to an entirely different world of being - as it was with the cusp of dusk; dawning, the break of day. Between consciousness and this underworld. His death was a subsumption, a going under, a sinking into this forbidden dimension. His age was his leaving, his commitment to the world of the dead, as it was hers. In this leaving, her leaving, she was gone - and dead to the world. She had traversed to the realm of the seeing, the seeking. She recalled, briefly, amidst her fading old life, a yellowing newspaper clipping which recalled the first encounters of the European geneticists with the Peruvian shamans, whom they had cornered in some far part of the jungle: ‘In the microscopic essence of life, there is a passage into an entirely different form of temporality, a timelessness, a song, a dance of existence without breaking; a singing which pierces the heights of light; penetrates the darkness of form. It lives in the shadows of being, waiting for its resurrection into the light’.

She picked up her canteen. As she walked, the sun seemed to pass the very dial like shadows as it did across the breach of her last passage of the checkpoint - and yet, there were no trees nor buildings to cast it. By now, she had long since passed the mineral bordertown of houses. There was dust, and a growing heat - as if she was passing into the equatorial center of the world. Before her feet were scorpions; before her eyes were caves in the ground of deep dust and dry dirt. To spill the water here would make for a difficult journey; she tightened the metal clasp on the lid. Something about the land beckoned; called for her to go deeper inside of it, like a waiting, wanting canal. It was as though she herself was the water, a conduit for the essence of life and being itself; that she was being called through the flue of the land that was her body; her fingers in the crags of the rocks; her mind in the rising heat of the dust. And within it, there was a palpable fury, like a vortex of fire. She drew her hands out of the gloves upon her fingers and pressed them against the air like it was a wall, and felt around the remarks and indentations within it. It had a permeable quality, a definite line, and a symbolic movement within it. It was as if she could read it with the flesh upon the fingertips of her body; press her lips up against the sweating essence and sweltering core of being itself; recall the ancient body of time as it passed like a river in a wind that would barely disturb even the youngest sapling of a tree. The subtlety of life astounded her; her mind was entirely present. Every brush of the coarse fabric of her undershirt pronounced the node and the pulse of the sensation of the alive, conscious body. She felt herself wandering very near to where Jean-Claude had died. Or was it death? She felt that she was near to that place, even though it was, surely, thousands of miles away. She had only been walking for mere days. And yet the expanse of her wandering, the very time and space itself seemed to pulse and bend. She was not entirely sure where she had been, nor where she was going. And yet, she was not tired. A voice within her was like a drum, and it held no meaning but the pounding. It was essential. It called her out of her body and to the place where Jean-Claude sat, transfixed in meditation. The hologram was sent automatically from his breastplate, like an electronic mausoleum. She knew where he was, how he was. This deep in the jungle, it would be unlikely for anyone to find him. And she knew that’s why he went there… to be alone.

The heat became more humid, dense, and overbearing. It was like a body itself; it acquired all of the characteristics of flesh in its compounding gravity. It pressed down against her, and it was like it breathed. The air was its own animal; she sweltered and struggled and swung against it like a drunk. The breeze, what little there was, flattened; slowly, vegetation sprung up before her. She was angry, furious; swatting at great, massive, buzzing, humming insects as they pulsed and lunged at her amongst the growing foliage and lush, leafy canopy. It was like a sweet, sickly drunkenness; it was like the derangement. Her madness… she remembered. Becoming a patient, the flashes of her occupation; the release into solitude. The slamming of the shutter doors upon the hut in the storms which smashed against the rocks; threatened to overwhelm the entire cliffsface and sink their little home into the pits of the ocean. The wild blue black darkness of the ocean. It was her anger, her fury, her rage. She swung, and crashed out into the opening of the grove of trees. There it was - the temple. And she saw Jean-Claude - glittering and still in the twilight.

VIII.

She rushed toward him, to embrace him, to put her arms around his neck and kiss his face… but she collapsed through him, and tumbled into a ditch. Looking up, she saw the ominous towering of the temple; the statuesque snakes. He lay there, beside her, terribly still. And this time, she embraced him, weeping the tears of her anger, hollowed by time. She swore she felt the touch of his skin; in that instant, he disappeared once more. The anger turned to vengeance, and murderous fury. Shaking, she pressed her hands into the shallow dirt and lifted herself out of the tomb. The sky was dark in the setting of the sun; with an overbearing cloud, heavy with rain. She knew there would be relief, and that the sky would breathe again in the relinquishing of its burden. With this thought, she decided to begin to climb the stairs of the temple. She moved - with the quickness of pure instinct.

As she climbed, the air got lighter and lighter; her breath became slower, deeper, and of greater ease. She tasted the sunlight in the air. It was effortless, as a water presses down a current infinitely, into the greater ocean of being. She relinquished the burden of her body. As she neared the peak, she looked back to where she first saw Jean-Claude in the clearing of the trees, and it was there that she thought she saw his image flickering as the sun at last passed over the bedside of the horizon, and descended into the belly of the earth. With her neck craning, looking back over her shoulder, she took one last step forward, and passed through the veil of the night. The air was silent, but for the screaming of the insects. The curtain of the night, vibrating and still.

---

Underneath The Long Street

I will tell you a story that does not belong to any space, or any time. It is the story of a time out of time, that stretches possibility and evokes fascination in the limitless.

It begins in an opium den on the Rue Montmartre, Room 322. The room itself was of bare concrete and wood, stripped to the steel skeleton of the building itself, with chunks ripped from the walls like a great hand or a bomb. The floors and walls were unadorned, but for red velvet sheets, draped diagonally across the room; catching and blocking light deep within their thick flesh and fur.

The corners of the room were piled with pillows, so as to support slumped bodies… lingering aplomb among plumes of pipe smoke. And in the center of the room, a trail of burning candles of red and white wax, dripping heavily in their copper candlesticks upon the wooden floor.

It was there that poets came… in from begging for bread and amidst the torrential summer rains, where the gold light of the sun barely struck the cobblestone streets, down; out from behind the heavy blue-black clouds that bore the city in their arms. The city itself would offer nothing in those months. The year was 1888; the laborers struck in the summer and the painters were interned in asylums. What remained of the shocking gothic artists would gather on the streets and exchange poppy seeds, or else would venture into the wooden shanties on the edges of the district – out by the bridges – to roll the dice on venereal diseases.

It was there, amidst the dope smoke… that our hero, Arles, lingered. Lost in a distant reverie of golden red hair; his mind transposed upon a Raphaelite dream. He had a painting in his mind… one that had not been painted yet, with gold foil; depicting the ancient goddess Daphne. He shrunk into the pillow, his frock catching beneath his bruised elbow.

The windows in Room 322 were consistently curtained by blackout blind, to keep the room suspended in an endless night. The homeless and vagabond artists from about the city would drift in and out, tipping small glass vials of laudanum from their sleeves. Arles coughed slightly into his hand; with the other hand wiped his brow. He glanced down at his pocketwatch – it had been stopped at 5:32pm for several months now. He had nowhere to go; he had come from nowhere and was going nowhere.

He had worked out on the docks of Le Havre in Normandy two years ago, but had been fired by the management for his addiction. He drifted; found himself a small commune in the galleys below the Second Arrondissement; with common criminals and burlesque painters. His milieu all had one thing in common – they were destinyless. A crowd without a past, present, or future. And as such, they flowed and streamed into reverie substances and the burlesques. Many called themselves artists, poets, painters… but to obscure the fact that they were rootless addicts; petty thieves.

Arles slowly climbed his way out of the dream; back into the black room. The sheets draped across the room rippled slightly before an open window, filling the room with putrid, cool air just behind the blackout blind. He stumbled to his feet; groped with his hands toward the door of the room. The den was a converted apartment in an abandoned hotel, the Rodez, formerly a temporary lodging for foreign dignitaries and ambassadors, long since fallen into disrepair and reclaimed by the destitute and wanderers of the city.

The halls were sparsely lit by the occasional lamp; most of the rooms with doors shut. He heard the spare chatter behind several of the unpainted wooden doors as he passed, cut with the yelping and scrawl of the prostitutes who patrolled the alleys below with their temporary customers. He lit a thin cigarette; crawled toward the back stair that opened to the garbage strewn, half flooded alleyway.

He would avoid the tree lined Boulevard and seek the sidestreets… to find his common crowd. Wheatpaste lithographed posters advertising the nearest freakshow before masked burlesque at one of the underground nightclubs. A mirror reflection in a murky, oil filled puddle of his unshaven face and his flattened mustache; his face shoved into a pillow as he forgot his body in the opiated descent into his mind. He wore his thin linen frock, covered by an overcoat; raindrops running from his horsehair thin; long, uncut hair. The Paris summer heat was dampened by the afternoon rain.

He paused in the alley, trails of the cigarette smoke licking his face. He again looked for a vision of the painting; the longing of the archetypal image in his mind. He saw her again, like one of Rossetti’s muses, untranslatable. He began to feel the familiar craving of near immediate withdrawal. The salivary glands in his mouth started to elongate… creating spontaneous speech. He was drawing out of himself; his body began to rush toward an unknown destination. He could not wait for the rains to stop… rather, to get inside at a new station.

He would go to the new burlesque, Cabaret Savant, just down the alley to the right – buried deep within the back alleys of the Second. He could get lost forever in the winding lamplight after dark… behind the grinning short men with faces like pitbulls – twirling sticks of fire. The two faced women with red lipstick smeared far beyond the scope of their twisting mouths. He drew close in the nights to circles of Arab men who dueled scorpions… throwing franc coins at one another; sitting atop old wine barrels.

He wandered through days and nights for hits of pipes in each of his familiar stations… pipes which would toss him back into his preferred dream. Daphne would morph into Persephone, standing in a long, dark hallway – beckoning to him, and he would follow. She would lead him down a great flight of stairs, which zigged and zagged into the catacombs. Standing in rodent infested sewage, she would light a torch…

He was pulled back from dream memory by the torturous hunger and thirst which signified the return of the spirit to his body. He was before a bunting adorned antiquarian shop – with windows lined with a new French translation of the Poe scroll… he could make out, Le puits et le pendule. It was beside a manuscript detailing the building of an ancient Gothic cathedral in England; an alchemical manuscript by a man named Hierophanes Duchamp. And a more recent text, Une saison en enfer.

It was clear to Arles that in this time the world was on the precipice of a mad change. The old religious spell was broken; the alchemists of old were emerging from the tombs of their exile apartment rooms in the historic tower districts and proclaiming the dispersion of an ancient spiritual gold in the human soul. They no longer sought to transform common lead as found in the Earth – they were beginning to suggest that this lead was the waxen form of the human body. A great new potentiality was rising; it was rising in the heads and hearts of the mad poets who were leading the slogging French philosoph into the modern age.

Arles… even amidst his lack of pretension and his addiction – knew he was one of them, one of these mad poets. He spoke with his friend Maldoreur about the coming of a Russian bard deep from within the Siberian wilds… a fellow exile who wrote about the redemption of the human soul from the depths of hell. He, like them, was not afraid to descend into the depths. Maldoreur, too, preferred opium as his guide to the abyssal – whereas this bard, this Russian bard… simply meditated upon this state to achieve access. They had read of great spirits of this nature in the journals of the German philosoph, Schopenhauer – the monks of the Tibetan mountains who meditated upon piles of skulls; Maldoreur’s mistress, a librarian in the state archives, had procured him an ancient Hindu scroll, perhaps from as early as 400 B.C., which described a wild devotee of the god Shiva who ground human skulls into a chalk – which he then sipped in a leaf tea to produce spontaneous vision.

They, Arles and the rest of them, were vision chasers. They sought the eternal at the end of the tunnel of the world; they dug like moles in a world of no light – deep into the human brain and mind… into the archaeology of the brain; the depths of history, unto the first note that was sung by the creator God – to obtain the primordial crystal which is and was the first key to liberation before the book of mankind was writ and rote. They entered the dream to become, to find what it was before the dream of the world. Before the dream of Paris. Before the dream of mankind.

He decided to inquire into the shop; take leave but a moment from the ebbing and flowing rain… considering that the new burlesque was now just around the coming corner at the butcher’s just beside the antiquarian storefront. As he stepped over the threshold he could hear the dull thud of the blade of the butcher against the wood board in his back-room.

The aquarian shop had a small front desk with a bell and a ledger, which was unoccupied. Arles was quite surprised at the depth of the shop – there were three vertical rows of manuscript shelves; shelves of texts… which stretched back farther than the eye could see. It seemed like the shop flew back indefinitely… impossibly so, considering the cramped reality of the Arrondissement’s physical laws itself.

Arles lingered by the bell; proceeded toward the head of the first row. It was labeled, Egyptian and World Mystical texts. He had another pang within him… deep within his stomach, first like hunger, then like addiction, then like being pulled forward, as if by a rope, to the very back of the depths of the rows that extended into darkness. So Arles walked, gripping the ledge of the shelf as it wound vertically into space. His vision began to contort; his stomach began to twist… as he was interrupted in his stride; doubling over in agony. From his mouth he produced a small black cube… inscribed with a symbolic language which made no sense. He turned it in his hands. It was illegible to him. And yet – the words seemed as if they gleamed, lit from beneath by a great fire. The black stone was cold obsidian.

As he walked, the manuscripts seemed to get older. Wrapped in twine and string, covered with sand – some even burned; half burned as if by torch. He reached toward a scroll whose twine was broken. It showed the face of a defiled Sphinx, leering back at him with penetrating, seemingly living eyes. He tumbled backwards in fright with a yell – knocking against the shelf behind him. He began to fall… as it fell…

Persephone gazed back at him. The stairs had led to the cave of the skulls; yet, this was not the end. She wanted him to go deeper. There was a gust of wind amidst the cobwebs; the steel cellar of the basement of the city slowly began to fade as he clamoured after her. The rat infested waters fell silent. There was no movement. And yet – there was an ancient presence. Arles gazed down briefly into the water, as a mirror to the torch he found in his hand – to catch some reflection of his astonished face. But there was no one there to mirror back where his eyes searched… he had no form. And in a flash, a skull, stripped of flesh; in another, pure lightning… from deeper, deeper within the cave – that illuminated Persephone’s absconding figure. He followed her, like a shadow.

The cavern broke open; he entered a room where it seemed air had not circulated for whole epochs of time. He immediately got the sense that he had stumbled into a place that he was not meant to see; a place that no one was truly meant to know about. It was a time before time – a time before history, counting, and numbers. All across the walls were beastly, contorted figures. The body of a snake, the face of a rooster, the feet of a crow. A crocodile ingesting a sun – whose beams seemed streaked with yellow pigment; smeared by finger and hand in a red blood. And yet… this blood was still wet. Impossible… Arles thought to himself… impossible. To enter this room. It was a time when man was still changing – before man was man. Indistinguishable from ape or fish. Like a dark shadow in the midst of changing, in which all of the animal and all of the plant was still manifest within him.

The die within his hand… he understood – it was a genome. A compression of the history of his body. A book of his language. He had an immediate impulse to swallow it again; to return it to the imminence of his flesh. He shuddered; began convulsing, sweating profusely. The room swam like a mirage light; the air itself began to flicker and wave. He then realized that Persephone was gone… she was not there in that room. The beastly paintings on the walls were dripping; filling the floor with blood. He touched the ground. The congealed liquid was cold… deathly cold. Like Arctic ice where great fossils of demonic fish were trapped… lost and forgotten in a prior infinity. It was then that he realized the Earth was far older than any living man truly understood. And that the Earth had a secret parlance, a secret purpose, a secret game for mankind.

Arles awoke suddenly. The room was filled with light, peeking out from a crack in the shifted curtain. On the Rue below, hundreds of boiler hatted men wandered and crossed the sidewalks, surrounded by their Victorian women. He heard a newsboy shout, Écoutez la nouvelle! Les Américains ont joué au base-ball devant le Sphinx! La grande tournée mondiale d’Albert Spalding arrivera bientôt dans notre chère Paris! He dragged his hands across his face. Pale, but warm flesh. He felt the cusps of the sunken bone of his eyes. The craters of his skull. He looked down at his watch. The time was 5:32.

---

SOF

Sof witnessed the fall. She knew she had to change, but into what - she did not know. In the center of the town square, lit a dim gray by the clouded, glassy light of the sun, the head of Farouk had been lopped off of its marble bodied base, and was left in the dirt of the gallery roads, where people with wagons strew and rode their carts to and from the various market storefronts. A couple of small children played with it, slowly rolling it upon its cranium, lips, and mouth; attempting to lift it atop one of their toy carts.

She backed away from the window, and shut the linen curtains. The room was once again submerged in darkness. Far off in the distance, she could hear the chants of the villagers, echoing off the stone buildings. All that she was burned. Her insides were like a coffin of ash that she expelled endlessly. She looked up at the plaster ceiling absent-mindedly and coughed. There didn’t seem to be a way out of any of it. Her nearest friends, Anna and Katya, were both trapped in this party fervor of the insurrection. The revolutionary guard was hungry for blood; they sought out any and all means to take it, including propaganda of the mind to enslave fellows to their ideals. It had been two weeks since they had all last spoken; it had ended in a blowout. She remembered feverishly trying to pull Katya and Anna out of the rubble of history like abuse victims. They just kept going back to the well of pain; sipping from the same desperate cup that gave them even the mutest, vaguest sensation of control. It was all for sale. Even the last shade and essence of human dignity, self respect, and love.

Sof watched, even as she knew how it was all going to play out. It was a predictability that she hated; like the coalescence of a series of independent variables in a controlled experiment, she was a masterful scientist in the unconscious repetitions of humanity. The whip would inevitably come down upon the backs of the new regime; power would shake out to the most radical, daring, and threatening revolutionary - the inevitable figurehead of the party to come. And Anna and Katya would kiss the dirt before him with their teeth; become whores of praise and false valor to the ideology stapled upon the doors of the church, or brandished and engraved upon some sacred stone. She looked off into the distance. The sky was scarred and scored with lightning, far against the duny shades of the mountain which towered over the village. It was as if all of these small affairs were kept over it; the mountain presided - like an ancient judge.

All about the town she wandered, like a vagrant or a flaneur. She enjoyed the appearance of a beggar, an ancestor, the pockmarks of age and the ravages of time making her like a discarded item, invisible to others; freeing the observant nature of her eye and mind to look on at will, herself being unseen; thus perfectly preserved. She’d wrap herself up on a shawl and walk with the deliberate slowness of age and she’d even see Katya’s sister, or the butcher, or the senator’s son. They were all conducting the same play. Like marmots to a tree branch, they stood briefly and wavered upon the stage of time and pronounced some guttural utterance and desperately grabbing for their brief allowance and allotment of sand, tumbled into the black dice pit of infinity, showing a secret, sacred symbol and number that they bore upon their backs like the branding of a slave, the marking of a beast.

There was a certain calmness of terror to it, Sof thought. That these people tumbled - with all of the conviction of love, being, reason - all of it being the private destiny of their vision, their thought; the privilege of their destiny - to live these lives that even as they remarked their despair, their agony, that there was almost this joking glint of unreality to it. Until the tanks came; the bombs fell; the bones were bitten and limbs were cinched by dust. Until metal and steel bit the flesh and the howls filled the night like storms; it was like all hell was unleashed and crawled upon the earth, with wolfish hair upon its back; baring its teeth; upon all fours like a terrible infant.

She sat in the wooden rocking chair by the window as the chants faded. Her thoughts returned to Katya and Anna; their love of abuse, pain, suffering. It was all they’d ever known; it was handed down to them like a legacy; like baby mice in a laboratory taught to love the shocks of an electrode device because it brought them survival food. Without the shocks, the food was tasteless, bland; even untouched. They had been girded their whole lives to accept this - the very legacy of mankind; the brutality of the inevitable dominant usurpation of power by a hand that would take with serial psychopathy; a hand that would take and inflict endlessly. And they would rejoice, because it would be the return of the pleasure that they knew as children.

Sof wanted to run, but all there was left were the mountains and the desert. To the east there was a great lake, but it went nowhere; beyond it stretched further only endless wastes. The hunters took to the lake, and its seemingly endless well of bright, rainbow scaled fish, whose skin struck the light of the sun like the revelation of a geode. She supposed she could go for a swim; to cast off her clothes and float there in the buoyant salt water; it would lick her and bleed into her inner body, like a river meets an ocean. She began to prepare her things for the journey.

The lake was the village’s only source of sustenance; only the hunters went towards it, as the journey was long and arduous - over the mountain and down into the valley where the water drank. Sof was one of the few who did not hunt who made the journey - she being strong of mind and body; able to wander off like an exile toward the far corners of their small world. They lived upon an asteroid - only a few full square miles in length, hurtling rapidly through black unmarked space into an unknown destination. And all of the reveries on the ground were as regular as though the chaos of an unknown gravity were totally absent from them and this world; this thought bubble, if it could even be called such as thought; its total, utter insulation from the terrible revelation of the chaos of their reality - even if it was governed by stable, psychotropic physical laws.

The people fished and ate; did their dishes in the water of the stream of the terrasphere which allotted them what was needed to survive; they copulated and frequently agonized at the taverns and inns of their trivialities; they ravaged, ranted, and raved; listed for power and beautiful flesh; lamented their fates as they hurtled endlessly, listlessly, through this total and utter dream of the mind. To Sof, it felt as if she was the only one who could truly see, gifted of true sight, seeress. And even she was limited by the looming black expanse; the inevitable collapse of all known laws into the hyperbolous vacuum of all space, time, and known trivialities - condensed into the hungry mouth of utter, immense black gravity.

She descended the worn concrete stairs into the market below. They were like bleating sheep to slaughter, sacrificial stars. All of them. She passed, one by one, waving at Inez, the grocer from down the street; her small child, Luka, the bagboy. She could not admit to agree to any of their lives; she wandered in this lone space of the expanse of the reach of her knowing; this was owed solely to her scientific bent. She was a witness, a watcher, an overseer, a looker into the lens of the complex thermodynamic reaction of humanity - to see how they spent their fire. How they devoured the whitefish with pitcher after pitcher of beer and stumbled into some utterly unknown love masked suffering and endured beatings, beratings, degradings; that they quarreled and died for victory at the banks or at the schools; their competition was like the pattering of a single series of raindroppings at the windowpane of the great existence. It barely rapped; whispered among the roaring of a thunder that, for them, was too agonizing to hear; without sensate nor quality of abstraction to hear the abstruse warming of all reality about them - immersed as they were in the radicalizing chaos of their feeling. She saw Katya and Anna at the fisher’s - buying smoked salmon. She walked forth unnoticed; she did not wish to stop. And this was the worst of it - her human love, her inevitable humanness; how it touched this disaster, this chaos, this breaking and broken of minds. Katya and Anna held no rational stance nor sight; they were pure feeling - storm amidst the storm. And even Sof envied them for this, that their lives tumbled, blustering; that they fell so utterly in immersion that they did not even make a sound. Sof dreamed of them. They were always smiling, or moving their mouths, but they never spoke. The town, the rumbling of the carriage wheels, the bleating of the lambs, all of it was distilled into a locus of pure, mute rumbling. Every time. She would then look up; hear the shrieking, barreling thunder; the whirling vortex of breathy, hurricane like fire shaking and rattling through the stars; vibrant and vibrating like a terrible earthquake. It was the pure, devouring hunger and essential fire of the cosmos. It had no face, but it was alive. There was a clear essence of being; it approached with an ominous feeling. And Sof knew that it was that, this, that they were consumed with. It was that, this, was chaos incarnate.

The populous faces became more sparse as she reached the edge of the village; the opening of the desert before the expanse; inevitably, the looming guardian of the mountain. It was like stepping out of a wildfire into the peace and quiet of the crackling of a single hearth, whose sparks of ideas steamed and streamed up from the breast of digestion. She felt herself this single forge of time; this perfectly tempered fire. Within her was this gold of the breath; this flute and flue of being so delicately carved, her song some small and perfect embodiment of the whole of the fire of the stars; the whisper that breathed through them; the reflection of the parallax lives that streamed through them like whisps of smoke, distending and distorting and dragging the bodies and face.

For Sof, to step out into this desert of wasteland and nothingness was like to be free of the dragnet of the massive factorial ship of culture and civilization, which was really nothing more than the brute reminder of the very nothingness and repetition through which the species embodied and reproduced the sheer agony of its existence which it called pleasure, excitation, and event. The sheer reproducibility of it was what terrified her most, the rote procession to the grave which consumed all of these lives like smoke. They were not individuals - they were cattle in the slaughterhouse of a great and malicious god of their biology; they bowed to it blindly as it carved their brains into delicate sculptural figures which required of them their destinies. Their experiences shaped the very hardwire of their neurology; like grooves of an old record player, they were doomed to repeat the same song until the electrical tether of the synapse was shattered; they fell into elemental grounds, dereacted. Death was scientific. The fire burned until it was coals and ores; screaming for fuel. Only so much food and water, only so much breath and time. She trudged in the sand; kicked it up into the wind as she walked. It was just like this - they shook the beaker for awhile; moved the chess pieces of the elements; composite and dissolute parts. Butcher, beggar, king - they were all chemists in a brief order of change. If there was gratitude, there was gratitude for this - understanding.

The mountain loomed, away from the court of its village. Children of the mountain, ants of its basin. Each time Sof approached the mountain, her dreams would accelerate; kick into gear of greater form, function, and acuity. They struck her; struck her memory like a forge of lightning; she’d wake in a perfect understanding; settled in the buzzing hive of her blankets. She craved the mountain like others craved water, sex, and the sweet candy at the shop by the outskirts. All fell and found their mountain and died upon it, praised by the distance which they traveled. Sof could walk miles and miles without fatiguing. In her mind and in her form - she’d emerge at openings and distances untouched by fingers and eyes. She’d peer into caverns of mute blackness, where ancient things were stored; languages were spoken as of yet without true, real, meaningful translation. Here, there were symbols that were the fertile grounds of mountain streams; glacial waters which were sopped up by years of untouched ice, perfect crystalline blue; drinkable with the pure form of fire mingled with fire; a true language which spoke immediately at and upon the grounds of the hearth of the mind, body, and soul. It was as such that this, that she traveled, was to acquire the great distances of truth.

She had three dreams at the foot of the mountain. The first was of a great fire. There were no things; there was no fuel for it. It emerged like speech from the language of the mouth of total, utter, consuming blackness. The second was of a fire within a skeletal cage; a figure meditating within it, beneath it, and amidst the cross of the sternum. It radiated out from the procreative center; it burned brightly, fully, with an uninhibited beauty and grandeur. The third was of a light, simple, pure, and white.

Before she knew it, Sof was over the mountain. There was nothing, really, left of her or any of it. Before her sat the white sand beach, and the water, this clear and ineffable blue, stretching out in a seemingly great expanse. But Sof knew it had an end; it was an end that circled back in and upon itself in a wild, truly endless diameter and measure. This was the contradiction; her contradiction; the contradiction that settled and unsettled all things. Dust kicked up in a storm. The wildness of Anna and Katya’s love; the changingness of their faith. The desperation to cling to any feeling of the animal lost in the tide of longing, belonging; fighting against the great fate of all things to be subsumed in the very fire from which they sprung and ravenously searched at all costs to maintain it, foster it, nurture it, in their private cages. This fire that is the preserve of life; light, and the nutriment of it. There was no reason; what reason there was was brief amidst the great rumbling of the thunder from above, which shook and shifted the dirt of their lives. There was a great sadness to it, Sof thought, but also, a great redemption. For she who saw the laws, not merely and simply the laws of men; the games of their play. It would be a brief time now; if and when she returned, there would be a new proclamation at the center of the village. Revolution sprung up from the shadows like a wolf spider; a few milliseconds in the diamondine infinite, there would be a new script - or rather a new face or brand upon the fundamental. It was not that Anna or Katya or any of them would change, truly change, but rather that they would adopt the same creed, oath, and dressing of humanity in a new color, a new fashion. The limits of their lives were the circle of the village; within that circle, it would be anything to preserve the order, their order; their desire for a suitable existence. And it would be dressed with any illusion and delusion necessary to sustain even the shadow of it - the shadow of what sat near perfectly in their minds as the justice, judge, and arbiter of the justification of and for survival. And even if that were to be stripped away, there would still be the hunger. They would still eat, in self degradation, misery, and poverty of the spirit and soul. They would find a way to justify even this. The mountain sat now behind Sof, and shaded the turning shadow of the rippling light upon the blue diamond refractal water. Sof was at peace with this misery. She understood; she even loved them in their misery and pain. She wished she could help. All of this road that she walked was within her; it was rippling to get out. She was this aqueduct, of the ocean back to them. With this understanding, she spooned a glass of water into the canteen, and walked back home.

---

THE TRAVELER

She is complete, but never finished. As she works now, so can she always work. Everyone sees her in his own fashion. She hides under a thousand names and phrases, and is always the same. She has brought me here and will also lead me away. I trust her. She may scold me, but she will not hate her work. It was not I who spoke of her. No! What is false and what is true, she has spoken it all. The fault, the merit, is all hers.

Goethe

THE FIRST ACT, I.

Come closer now towards the light, so I can speak with you. Ah, yes - the silhouette of your face is made apparent. It is but a shallow lamp in this hall by which we speak; at each moment, the wick of flame flickers in the wind of time.

At each shadow you jump, on the verge of collapsing. Are you so fearful of the night? The things that lurk within… we have a vestigial imagination; remembering the claws of history. But can it even be called history? So ancient that it cannot even be remembered. We do not have a name or an image for fear; yet it lives in the brain; tosses and turns in the limbs. The frantic pumping of the motor, the animal nature…

Yes - I am not from here. You’ve caught it. Just traveling; this city by the river reminds me fondly of the temples of the blood. The desert rivers, the cradles of life. We gather and drink and trade among the waters…

Anyways. You said you are running? From one gutter to the next, from one parasite to the next. We are but fleas hopping upon the backs of this earth; gobbling at her blood mouth. To live you must bask in the sun and drink the electric blood. That was the purpose of the old rituals; the madness of torture; the dungeons of the asylums. Civilization, to drink the wine of the blood; beating the sacrificial drum together. We throw the dregs, the lost, the confused - into the fire; this fleeting twist of the mouth that is joy at the murder.

The way that the blood of the red meat nurtures the flesh… this cannot be denied. You’re running from the killer, you say?

He’s gone into the night with the rest of the prisoners, the nectar, the drug of life, he sips it most gleefully; hops from branch to branch; dying, blanched carcass of earth. He changes clothes; shifts in the daylight; glimmers in the night… the fatal dream. We endlessly dream up new sacrificial methods for our closest silent meat; all the while grant ourselves the permissiveness of illusion to throw feeling into the fire for survival - for hunger.

Yes, yourself, as one who champions the weak, one of the strong. The first to lie, the most triumphant in the story of uplifting beggar fellows from their slipping into the silence of the last sleep on the cold streets. It’s an ancient story, the noble motive. To uplift the sick, the impoverished, to raise all life towards the light. We’re like dogs, we are, or something with less language; even more pure utility. All goodness and glory erased for the moment where one form of life must raise itself up in front of the next and raze it for blood and warmth. The pure carnality is unavoidable. All of this boasting of righteousness emerges from the mouths of those who are most quick to shed the masks of their skin; feast and devour those they’ve sworn to carry forth into a new world of power.

I lie? That this is simply a vicious internal motive, a belief… let’s not be fools about life. Man is no different than any other beast that is forced to roam in the wastes, where nourishment is spread far and warmth is tinged with the threat of a dropping cold; a winter’s chill. None of us are exempt from the dying of a star; the fading of a pulse.

Notion of the true fear is peripheral. It haunts you and the others out of the corner of the vision of their eyes. Fear stalks us like the true predator. For all you want, you can pretend that this life does not begin and end at the precious fire within you, that you protect; that you greedily slurp with each fading and distant passion - which, from child to bleached bone, you drink in a self consumption which bleeds you dry. That your hands do not grasp at the rungs of life like the rest of us, your high and mighty power! Divorced from life. That’s what we call those who slip into dreams, idealism. They hold no ground, they’ve already gone from this earth. The dead that creep among us; whisper speech of pure delusion.

All there is is the ingestion, it is the blood and nutrient, the element and mineral that enriches us. We live gnawing at the dead stone of the earth, and take the warmth of the stars unto us in all forms. Nothing is exempt from the raging heat of a star rising toward a meteoric light; the angry, raging star that consumes all of the death and dust in its field; swallows the radius of other slighter, younger, and careening deathly fields. And this is known to all, even if it remains unspoken. The true radius of power is thankless, feelingless, and takes all unto itself. You protest - I see it in your eyes; feel it in the stirring of your hands and face. But your protest is a revelation of the truth that you know to be true; the rebellion of contradiction within you. That which you believe, to protect yourself from the truth of reality.

This is the nature of all animals, that the young are reared by those it must usurp; by a pride that must expand and be cut down by the fall. We rise into a summer of ecstasy and seeming eternal power, the reaching of true ephemerality to a knife’s point, a razor’s edge; then a cascading downward into the coldness of oblivion. For we are at the reach, we are the outlier, are we not? You sit here and speak with me about unspeakable things; the sweat upon your brow - this language revealing something inhuman. And yet you remain, even against your best intention. You, too, wish to know plainly, purely, what is, what exists in this world.

And I applaud you for that. Truly. Amongst all the snakish addicts and street beggars, the rags of the marketplace, those who clutch to their already dead memoirs; pure sentimentality. This is the warmth that keeps the folk of animals alive; into the fold of their stories, their culture, their histories, their presumptions of right and wrong. But we are far beyond this, my friend - we are into another realm entirely. We can no longer afford to believe in such religious things. Survival screams like the panther emerging from the brush. It grits and bares its teeth to such unfortunate realities as these. And who are we to call them right or wrong? When a baby suckles and teeths at its mother’s breast? And the mother strangles it in the cradle? Yes - I see you wince at the thought, or for me to even begin to broach these realities to you. That the weak are just toys, to be manipulated, pranced about, manacled by the proud and mighty whose fall is soon destined. For everyone and everything has something beneath them, no matter how small - no matter how lowly the order of power. Even ants take life beneath them; order it, enslave it, to fit the correct and proper system of assumed responsibility.

It is so wrong to kill those weaker? To enslave them? You speak from a place of unreality, of nonexistence. That which makes this world is an endless chain of blood, linked from all species and life forms - from the plant to the cell to the biped. We all live and breathe and eat from the star, a reaction sparked by the far reaches and ends of time. Such a thought is death, dissociation, or utter ignorance. And yet, the very survival of our vision of collectivity, of community, depends on it. The kindness of others, in an ecosystem where the order of our jungle is submerged; the acceptance of submission by lessers is required. All false order springs from this, the smokescreen over the true procession of the affairs of power. Bankers, officers, titans of industry - we have made these men great rulers who grip the currency of this world in their hands and thus assume command. We are totems among totems, images among images. We sit in a theater and imagine a world of order that we have left behind, a world of order long forgotten; a world of order from which we have awakened into chaos…

Yes - precisely. It is the mind. It is language; the creation of the art of life. For this is where we stand, this strange species, mankind - we stand upon the precipice of an alien world, an alien life. We cease to be animals and yet with each fright we remember our animality. The softness and fallibility of the flesh… we are stretched in the splitting of the brain. This new world that is incarnate within us is the growth of the very technology which allows us to reason, to reconsider, to re-think and reflect. We cannot yet grope truly with it; we stumble. Gather closer to this lamp - so that your face is not in shadow. Good - I prefer to see clearly. The mind is yet so young; fed like a sapling or a fetus on the fat of the mother; we are the incubator for another way of sight; another way of seeing. Perhaps the mind feeds from us, that we are its ambassador, its tube for feeding…

THE SECOND ACT, II.

This new brain. There is a concept called dialectical redoubling. We are pushed back in upon ourselves with the contradiction of self examination. Can you not see that this is the trap? We have stepped too far into a new world which is not yet existent. We cannot take our bodies with us. The rush and race after us, but we have already breached into another realm, the realm of the ideal. And the mind rests there and dreams and frets, depicts life back to us on an endless loop. We consider ourselves, toss ourselves over in our heads like a smooth coin. And all the while the fundamental fabric of our lives does not change. We are still trapped in this embrace if you like, or wandering in the garden of substantiality. We are still wrapped to wanting things. The body that must breathe, the blood that must pulse, the mouth, stomach, and intestines that must feed. And yet we worry about this? The appearances and trifles of our world? The stories of culture… it is but a madness, my friend, a madness. Any and all will kill to preserve their stake upon this ladder; all that is left is to free ourselves from it entirely.

How, you ask? Quite simply - suicide. We must die to everything. You think that I am joking! Rather, I am quite serious. The only path forward from this dirge of nonsense is to see the fundamental emptiness in everything. Life is a tunnel, a fire, that passes through everything. It bestows no meaning but the capacity to see meaning, create meaning. Humans are narrative beasts, narrative animals. From the place and pit of survival, they tell themselves whole shadowplays of meaning, the entrance and exits of characters - multilayered and leveled visions of their own existence, character, and persona. When all the while, it’s just a mask to maintain; shovel in the pit the coal of the endless, insatiable hunger.

We’ve run so far into this dream that we’ve surrounded ourselves with affirmations of the story. Toys, trinkets, clothes, roles, jobs. Imagine a cell dressed in a suit! Or a rat or a heifer presenting you with a bill of goods. This civility itself is a mask that must be ripped from the face to reveal the bloody, intercuteal layer of existence. You make yourself stone. You live and act in a rigid, rigorous darkness of ideals and roles. You have yet to unleash the animal; you shield and sheathe yourself from the madness which rattles in your bones like a caged demon; you’re a beast unto yourself.

Trudge endlessly into the future of a cold science, if you please. The mind… it wanders. Perhaps you remain even halfheartedly in this conversation as it dwindles; I myself cannot even be convinced at this language, the writ of this tirade. To struggle and smear the shit of this word onto and upon the air. There is something about the lowness of it all that is illuminating. We could step out into the night; remark upon the paths along the riverbanks. The animals and beings, bodies that decompose peacefully and slowly in the ecosystem of the water. These are the simple facts and affairs of life; yet they are treated with such fear and disgust. Perhaps it is because we do not truly understand life, nor do we understand who, or what, we are.

Ah, I’ve piqued your interest! Good - we might remain in this place of wonder, like a slight drunkenness. A red wine on a spring or summer’s evening. A cobblestone path lit by orange streetlights… a great moment in time of possibility. We must remain drunk… but I digress. Yes… who we are. Or rather, what. A series of chemical reactions, a series of sparks of electric light; animation which propels us forth? Pure energy in dreaming suits. We must react and react forth, yes, to live! I must take in the fuel; the fuel that fuels the deepest bowels of the earth, the iron engine; the heat magnet; the voice of the earth; the magnetic pulse which spins us in a dance - propels us into the great attraction of which we can only speculate! Ah! The return of passion, gracious, gracious wonder. I must feed upon the oil of the earth, the black river of soot; the ash of the ancient ones. This emboldens me, grows me in power, a flower among evil, a petulant thing. This is what was meant by the devil and the fall. A fallen angel of the light to reside in the world of fixtures; temporary things with gravity and density. That is the risk, that is the cost of maintaining form. It cannot be avoided, monsieur, it simply cannot.

Yes, I’ve let the mask of my language slip… I am not from here, but I know many languages. You could hear it in my accent? Perhaps I cannot remain as obscure as I wish to be. I am no universal thing, but a stone among stones, a ray among rays. I travel with a hood over my face. I remain in no place for too long. I know many cultures… yes… many. For I have been a part of heritages… many names… many worlds…

We must remain focused. We must remain in the place of ecstasies. Come - follow! We are taking on this brief coat and traveling to the palace of evils. Rather, we are goodness disguised as evil. Each of us cowers over the river of blood and furtively fills the chalice of life; sips like a guilty animal. Are we demons because we are called toward life? I say - this is our very being! And we are to shy away from evil to become deathly things… yes, my friend, this is your religion. Your religion is one of death and pure sterility. It is of the mortal fright of the weak. I see your rebellion now, greater than ever. Perhaps this is what makes you devilish! We who do not shy away from life are those who endure. Your great preachers and monks, your interpreters of books - they feed and tell you not to feed, to die, to find your life in the next world. Who was ever enlightened by death? Die to the world you believe; cease to know. Silence your mind and awaken to truth! Enough foolishness!

Pardon me… I’ve let myself become incensed. This passion… I’ve seen many like you. Many who with great obstinacy retained the veil. I cannot peel it from you, nor take it from you. Your fear protects you, makes you stable; throws you into a world you wish to know. I know of the power of dreams… many nights, I’ve slept - and they’ve told me things. You may think I’m mad! The ancient depths of the mind wander toward truths we can scarcely begin to estimate. It is remembering the origins of itself, monsieur… it is remembering the origins of time - the moment the first cradle of the yolk of the egg of fire broke from the womb of timelessness. The moment of the abyss; the moment of creation. Your eyes remember it, your mouth, your tongue. Every inch and ounce of your body seeks to create; to remember the procreation process. You are but a tool; a tool approaching and inching toward the horror of its own self recognition. Do not worry… this process will free you eventually…

For now, you are like a prisoner, in chains, marching in circles. Row after row, prisoners in their manacles clasp the backs of one another and see no further than the man in front or behind them. The shadows in the pit of the yard hazy; the twisted faces of the soured, rotted, mad brains of each and the next - telling each other horrid tales of philosophical incompletion. You see, we are trapped here, among this world of stone. This open air mad house. We cannot remember what it is like to be sane because no one has ever known! Consider this, and know this to be true. The only sanity we’ve ever known is the sanity of the animal, utterly and totally enmeshed with nature. The sanity of pure survival, mindless, thoughtless survival. And this is worse than the Bastille! How are we to pick the locks of the mind which chains us? This mind that you are given has utter attributes, my friend, attributes that are severe and unforgiving. It is your lot, the code that has been handed to you - the alphabet from which your existence powers itself into being. The rotting smelt in the breath that seeps from the core of the stomach precedes all speech. Men who are killed by their own vices - their words are meaningless. They cannot speak of anything but death, utter destruction. They are jesters, clowns in the carnival. And yet - this world is all clowns!

Join us then, in the parade of madness. Celebrate the carnival of ecstasies! Drink deep from the barrel of the witness; let blood in the open. Do you not see where this road takes us? Men like us who think, our sanity slips from us to let the masses. The sheer force of thousands, millions, it overtakes the voice of reason. And yet, we cannot let ourselves think these things. We must protect the barracks of our privation. We must allow ourselves this allotment to think, to understand. For what else remains? The coldness of this world… the dull, brute animal steel of clashing, of war… of men; power over men…

I stand and warm myself by this small fire. Join me, beggar, ironworks, men who work on the rails; in the mines; I call you forth to be enlightened! Laugh! And yet, the fire is truly warm. Feel it, flush against your face. This aliveness, this passion… we must become strong in mind, in heart, in body, in the very unity of our ideal with the manacles and materials of this world. We must forge, you see, forge this passion upon this earth; sear it consciously into being with the power of embodied, elemental life. And yet, it takes men of genius to see it. Men of genius who can penetrate the veil of life and return it to elemental wholeness - beyond men; beyond animality; beyond earth. We must return to the primordial origins; to the fount of life; where it all began. We must know time in a deeper way; return time to timelessness.

In each moment, life penetrates; leaps into being. We must seize and ride that electricity, understand it to be ourselves. We must grow and enliven and entrance and dance that energy. We must awaken it; awaken ourselves to ourselves! Surely you understand, monsieur, surely you understand! Need I not explain this to you!

Nothing else matters, nor does anything else exist. The rest of this dross among us is like shadows to be polished off a diamond; yet this is no diamond, but a star. The opacity of life is like a sheathe we must remove upon a dagger which pierces mortality into immortality. This is the true identification. Beneath all of the coats and cloaks of self imagery, we are a current utterly and truly unbroken from the source of existence and life itself. We must return to this place, this place we have never left, but a place we have never truly known! Understand this contradiction at the level of history. We have lived in the utter survival state; we are and we must migrate with the power of the new mind, the mind of the front brain; we must migrate into the state of true self recognition beyond all shadows, imagination, and imagery.

You’re quite right indeed! Even words seem to veil this phenomenality. For how could I explain to you the internal, embodied union with something more primal, with more depth and truth, more accessibility than even the most animal, guttural instinct? We have not prowled deep enough, my friend, we have not prowled nearly deep enough into our heritage and origin. This mind is millions of years old, but our life far precedes it. We have been passed down, like a beaker, a test tube, more times than we can scarcely imagine. How can you recover yourself, you ask? How many lifetimes have you, as this code, this mixture, this amalgamation of genetic language - this book of nature - how many lifetimes have you truly lived? More than you can scarce count; the sheer atomic elementality and cellular life within you remembers a history scarcely worth bothering to attempt to contemplate. And yet, you can feel it, can you not? The life that lives you, the life that steers you like the bow of an ancient ship through waters that you simply cannot conceptualize! You call this madness and confusion, I call this innate enlightenment! You must dive deep into the core. This is where the blueness of the sky and the ocean touched by life turns to blackness. The pearl of life rests in the core of the blackness; the core of nothingness. Therein rests the nature of the true light of the sun.

Understand this simply. Before the star there is nothing, abyssality. We must know what we are and what we are not; what we are is time and the state of being before time. We must return to the balance of nothing - the balance before any and all duality, any and all relationship of separate cores, beings, bodies. We are a stage at which this dynamic of time is playing out; intermingling, comixing, expanding, contracting; articulating an increasingly complex dance of a multiplicity of forms. All this emerged from a window as brief as a needle; a contraction and expansion which birthed from the womb of mote singularity an entire phenomenological relationship of beings, species, galaxies… all of this we do not know, nothing, not even the remotest thing. And yet, again, we must feel it! We are left to our feelings, to our intuition. The faculty of eyes convinces the truly blind of their mutually exclusive genius. It is the ignorance of hubris which fools us. And thus we live and die as things which merely survive our own ignorance. And what kind of fate is this? Destined to do much less than know; to rejoice in our own stupidity - rolling around in the mud of our own delusions of imagination.

I know. It is the last gasp of control. It is the last stage of the animal. It is the way we keep ourselves and others safe, like a wall around a city, a fire around which we gather our huts, a method of organization. The stories, the tales. The art. For that is what it all is! The art, the imaginations of worlds - these are all mechanisms of control in the face of the brute fact of breaking into the truth. It is an exclusive thing, done by the terribly few. For it requires the constellation of a great deal to penetrate into reality from the utter delusedness of the animal. The fearful know that they know nothing; they are crushed in body and mind and thus in image by the utter weight of a life process that plays out before and within them. The many know that they are victims to a deluge of life; a deluge of life that comes wearing the mask of death to them. The very organic nature and laws of life, the principles of the cycle of life and death; the subsumption and transformation of energy and blood and fuel; of heat - it appears to them like a great evil. They expound, they shout and scream, they call it the reaper of evil, the carnal matrix of the devil; they claim that it must die for them to live - and it must! These many are not wrong, these masses. Their very lives are threatened and taken by the powerful, the life and the tiers of life which trample over them to claim further vestiges of life.

So they recede into spectacle. The sovereignty of the pleasure of the witness of the carnival, the circus, the colosseum. The play of death and power which scarcely touches them. The witnessing of the death and foolishness of others to escape their own. It’s consistent with the idea that one who is condemned can only free himself through the condemnation of the other. One who is powerless must only find one less powerless than him; unleash all of his angst and anger upon the wretched, the lesser.

Leave this world! Truly. One must leave survival behind; open himself and his insides up to death; to be polished and be made pure by the total ecstatic suicide. This is why we are drunk, my friend, upon the ledge of existence. Then and only then are the mortal burnings of the stars clear; only then can we see what is truly at stake. It is our ability to experience the truth of existence; not to live and die in the anguish of the shadows. We must not labor long for anything other than the total apperception of the truth; this is a toil that requires us to relinquish ourselves entirely of ourselves. And this is precisely what constitutes the real and only death, the death of illusion to reveal the eternality of the real. Everything else is a cloak we must strip from ourselves to bathe naked in the ecstasy of the moonlit river of the stars. This, my friend, sounds like poetry to you. It is the poetry of the truth!

I am no preacher, nor am I no babbler, musician, poet, or anything of the sort. Words are my medium, my language, to communicate this truth to you, in hopes that you and only you will hear. I speak them with utter clarity and directness; I speak to you in confidence as a friend, as we are - here together to contemplate these things in the tavern beside this darkness of mortal struggle just outside. May we sit here awhile and contemplate further? This, we generate true warmth from this - the camaraderie of truth. It does not matter where you are from, or what you or I once believed. It is that we are seekers; that we seek the truth of our nature, our very being. What is your essence, monsieur! We have come from darkness and shifted shape into complex networks and channels for electrical information, for light. We are discrete data packets; we are ceaselessly exchanging, communicating, with ourselves, one another; with the network and soil of cellular life… the coil of the air and the heat of the fusion of the stars which are our birth mothers. The earth which is our womb…

We have come from darkness and yet we shirk the darkness in fear of ourselves! This foolishness… this fear of our supposed great evil. We condemn outside of ourselves what is within us. But we are the great evil! The murderers, the heathens, whatever horrific crime so soothes your definition of the evil. The strangulation of a young woman and the death of a butterfly. The extinguishing of the life of a cell; the murder and consumption of an animal. This line that we draw of cannibalism; this line that we draw of life! We are ceaselessly crossing it; yet we proclaim this judgment; this ability to condemn others for the acts we thoughtlessly commit at all levels of existence to remain; to retain flesh upon this scaffolding of darkness and abyss; the turning and fleetingness of life in any one, given, temporal structural form.

It is much easier to perceive ourselves as being the righteous, you see… much easier. For it is us against the rotten world is it not? The world that is out to get us, take from us, steal from us. The intuitions of common folk are nearly always correct and well soothed. It is far simpler to stake this claim of ourselves as the victor, the hero; that whichever conception of divinity is on our side toward our holy pilgrimage of destiny, is it not? It makes the murder, the rape, the corruption much simpler. To us it is this ‘necessary step’ toward the fulfillment of our powerful destiny, is it not? You see… this is not foolishness, as you seem so desirous to suggest. It is a great tool, a way of being in the world so as to convince oneself that one’s violent acts are not simply necessary, but dignified, honored, even holy. It uplifts the struggle of the animal to the plane of the divine. Each rape or murder that is committed, each massacre, each genocide, is committed for the holy rite of supremacy, the holy rite of power. Can you see how much weight is behind that concept, monsieur? How much weight and how much power is placed beneath the conviction that whatever act one perceives must be committed is not only necessary but holy?

All of this is pure selfishness my friend. And you are afraid to admit this, perhaps as am I. But it is this selfishness that propels even the most righteous act. We must become, as it were, ever more selfish. Why? So as to perfect selfishness. To unify selfishness as a whole. The truly selfish act is an act that is committed in total balance of life. The chain of life is meant to birth something higher than the human, higher than us. We are but a step, a stage in life. And that we surrender to life is that we surrender to this process; the realization that this process is at the root, us ourselves. That we hold no permanent ground in this shell, this corpse - but rather this body is a passage of the life itself through the tunnels and gravities and grounds of time into new form, new formation; new matrices of evolution; unknown methods and ways. How can we know which way the future will turn? The drop of a pin, a hair-trigger - the life on this earth reverberates and dances on the dial of chance. One movement, one perception, one belief, one idea - it changes everything, in the most subtle of ways. This is the dance of the light and the rays of the sun. One winter, nothing may grow there again. One summer, this plot of life, this land may become a new paradise.

We must embrace this chance, you see. We must dance on the dial of darkness and permit the total and utter silence of death; in another hand ceaselessly, endlessly create like the fusionary powers of the sun. We are a contradiction reflected by the moon; we are an hourglass which takes on the colors and flavors of the light. We are penetrated by the light of life and aged like a wine in the bottle and barrel and still of the existence of being. And thus we are drunk off of ourselves, indeed! For we are permitted nothingness; this is our freedom. We must embrace this chance that will grow wild things from the vines of the unseen; even as our feet and toes grip the warm dirt and soil of this earth that threatens to grow cold as the body of our flesh careens away from the warmth of the sun. We are a game of perilously small distances. And this is our beauty, indeed… the beauty of our uncertainty which is in fact a deeply perfect geometry measured in planetary movements; the exact curvature of the earthly form and how it hangs entranced in the mutual dance of its neighboring bodies…

We are a perfection disguised in the balance of the known and the unknown, which can only be called the past and the future. Before us lies an expanse, monsieur, an expanse that is a gulf, cavernous, deep and wide; it is into this unknown we must leap before the flower of our candle is extinguished. We cannot be concerned with good and evil; we must only be concerned with what is righteous and true. And truth alone is righteous; truth alone may be our guide when all else has fallen into chaos. Warring parts ceaselessly vie for control; only the whole of existence and being rests in peace. It is the true spectator, the true witness beyond the spectacle, beyond the theater of time, life, and reality. We must stand outside of being and remark upon it from nonbeing. Do you understand this?

Very well. You must take your rest, as I mine. Tomorrow I may well be off to another city by the river water. I crave the silence and solitude of the woods of travel; away from this turning world of affairs. I bid you farewell! Perhaps we may speak again… Adieu, my friend, adieu!

THE THIRD ACT, III.

Bonsoir monsieur! Yes, you recognized me! Very well… no we did not exchange names. Perhaps it is best that it remains this way, is it not?

It is rather hopeless in the marketplace today isn’t it… the carts are blocking the way, the disorderly nature of it. Let us step away from the clamour… this hopelessness that is everywhere. Passé, is it not? The struggle to maintain our lives. This overcoat that you wear of your sincerity, the guest of your disguise. But I know you too, the one who seeks to assert passive dominance in your extension of friendship. By your eyes, you see it in yourself!

It is good that we speak to these things; give them an eye, an ear, an air to the nature of the beast. His hunger. It is best that we do not avoid these things, monsieur - and face them head on! This gives us this little nobility, does it not! Indeed… we are a great struggle between the demon that threatens to overwhelm us, and this thin thread of compassion that we extend over the gulf toward friendship. Let us be not misers but comrades in this war that burns the trees, the villages, and leaves us all cynics! I’m afraid so, my friend… I’m afraid so… that we are all bastards of the demon mother goddess that we call nature. She is a hungry woman, alas… she will not leave us, and she is the one that will feast through us! Insatiable carnal beast, devil woman! She is called the black woman of hunger, she of many names. But my friend, forbid that we get caught in this place, simply forbid it! It is best that we remain upon the surface and exchange glances of goodwill, is it not? Before we are dried up tar, left upon the spit of the bone…

To meet on this day, awfully hot day, the sweat. It is days like this where the struggle against death is forgotten, where the sun is mortally close. It is less threat to be burned alive in these summers than it is for the blood to run cold in the snow. Remain close to the sun, chérie! Indeed - we are all huddled for warmth to keep the blood alive. The whisper of the language that we all speak; the shadow of which words merely evoke; replicate. So much of us and around us is dead; it is death itself at which we stare and persistently evoke. All that life is, it takes unto itself! Robust, bloated, consumption! This hunger, yes, in our best intents, threatens to eat us alive; we are burned of it until the ash of old age. We ache; we long; we leer jealously at the young! At the height of life; not knowing the fall that awaits them. The young are close to the sun, are they not? Maintenant! At this moment! Precisely. And what fallen image can replicate this? The blood of youth?

Nothing, monsieur, nothing. And this is why we devour our young, eat them alive. For they are close to the sun; the ripe fruit that is plucked by the hungry march; the procession of death. We are death eaters. For we must gobble the meat before it rots; take from the vine at the robustness of the flower. And we do so with a mixture of fear, shame, and delight. This is our lot, monsieur, may we rejoice in it! That we are killers of the hunger; killers for the pleasure that is to mingle the hot blood; for a moment give us life before we lapse into the dead silence; the depths of feelinglessness. You have felt this abyss, my friend, have you not? The abyss that beckons and waits; the abyss that is neither moronic nor intelligent, the pure characterlessness, the abyss that is not even seething! It is this dull point that perhaps we most are my friend. We are entirely neutral, in our moments before we are heated like the stove towards passion, or broken from passion and ecstasy like an addict that is sapped of all of his desire into a catatonic blackness of despair and death. We oscillate, do we not? This absence, until our threat or fear or predation is aroused. In a childish, pure way, we might call this curiosity…

Precisely there is nothing to fear. Death for us is the most personal, immediate state. The felt sense of emptiness that we must obscure with music and noise; the chatter and throng of the market, of the clubs, dances, musicals of our lives. The theatre must obscure it my friend! Lest death threaten all and each of us personally. Lest death confront us and unseat us from the carousel wild ride of feeling, sensation, and the mad circling of our thoughts. We dance around the fire, and this is what makes us mad and free; ignorant and intensely stupid. Consider it! But for a moment, recede yourself into silence. You are nothing, not even a worm. You are not even the lowest chatter, not a branch, nor a rung, nor a chittering of a molecule. Deep in the soil there is the intense silence of death. Not even a sigh disturbs the dead; they are truly at peace. What are you, monsieur, running around for your desires? You may tell me that it is a certain coat that you want, or a certain stone. A certain vehicle, but all of this is a fugue, a smokescreen for your true desires. You wish to elevate the thing that has always belonged to the dead to the palace of enchantments; the celebrity of desire. You must let pleasure overwhelm you, even in the mutest lie, even the shadow of the desire of your ideal. You must have even the fraction of the image, even the wafting scent of the fullness of the dream image to sate this fiendishness!

That we are - fiends until we truly die. Fiends til the end, til the surrender and relinquishment of the temporal to the eternal. In this silence we are undisrupted; left to the withdrawal of escalations and deescalations of pleasure. Can you feel this, monsieur, the silence and shuddering of the addict, suffering in the privacy of his cell, deprived of his object of chemical injection? We are at the site of madness, monsieur, the site of madmen who are hopelessly addicted to the hunger. We starve and gorge; spoil until we ourselves are as rotten as the meat and fruit we slather ourselves with. We spoil in the stomach of the beast of our desires until we are nothing more than the skeleton of the seed that is dutifully returned to the soil of being. This, my friend, is true groundedness! Is this not what you wished to hear when we first spoke! Perhaps… this is why we found one another once more… this part of you inside that remains; that will not die; that will not relinquish the white fisted grip. Ah! What remains of you is embedded in one final object. It is deep in the dream of pleasure and fulfillment; the ecstatic unity.

You are used by this. Nature’s instrument, the black goddess. Used, in the fire of your state, the passion of your metabolism - to create - to ceaselessly create! Driven by the fear of death, you are but her pack mule my friend! Look directly at the horror! It is but a joke, a language spoken in the silence that you are but a carrier of the language, a seeker of the very word which you transmit. You are an alphabet, a letter, ceaselessly added to the speech upon which nature stacks, block by block; builds her web of consciousness. This sophistication - there is something of a beauty to it - is there not? The delusion that sweeps through all of us, this imagination, this conviction that wakes us from our senselessness; drives us towards creation and procreation? There are a thousand lies which we use to justify ourselves, our grandeur, our fitness, our strength… a thousand ways to enter into the halls of the paradise of pleasure. We are used by our sensation, by our feeling, my friend. And we call this choice; we call this freedom of will! That we shall go as we please, do as we please. But do we ever consider what constitutes this pleasingness! That we revolt at death and are drawn with the sickness of magnetism to that which we consider beautiful? That we copulate at the poles of attraction and violation; that we draw blood from the source and center of the greatest evil and the horror of the beautiful?

That - we are is violators, my friend. We step into the halls of nature and make distinctions based upon the chemical program of our desires. We are made to press forth; become a stage of difference. We are called to rape, to penetrate, to enter the sacred by way of the violation of the beautiful. Our very bodies are sites of violence; sites of interpenetration! Consider that we are the liver of the world, maintenant… that we are the wine of the lips that it pours down its gullet! This is what it is to be eaten alive from within, my friend, to go mad with the consumption of desires!

You must be used to my tirade by now; find it permissible, even an enjoyment in it. The rantings and ravings of a beggar, a traveler, a man without a home. For I have wandered far and wide; found these things to be true. Even if I refused to look at them; even if I hated or reviled to see! How men protect their trophies of false destiny. How they gorge upon the hated thing; stare up from their meal with forced smiles of feigned pleasure. How women drown in the false platitudes of men; let themselves be swallowed up by the current of their biology. How this time is limited! And how, time and time again, we settle for shadows. The fruit is never as ripe, the steak is never as juicy as - it had tasted in our minds, monsieur, is it not! So we settle for the mere shadows. The pregnant waiting of a time that will never come - oblivion! And yet, at each moment, we stare into the grinning face and mouth of the abyss. That which we are, verily, the abyss itself! The monster which we seek, the mouth which it gapes; entrances, and entices with the dream image. We are drawn further and further into the dream, monsieur, further and further into the maw which entrances and entices. It is like the glow of the lanterns of the deep sea fish, the fish which grin with stakes for teeth. We are skewered, the meal of nature. Our blood is a great sacrifice…

But we must regret this! We must repent this and shield it; shield ourselves from the terrible realization! Nonsense, my friend. This is pure and utter nonsense uttered by the real heretics and harlequins of this world. The real bastards. They must run and jump and prance and kick in this musical, you see. They must grin and frown with their faces in their mouths to force false feeling in order to pretend that the devil within them is not slicing and gutting their insides. These false men… what is there to do with them? This world is a circus, monsieur, run by bastards with cardboard insides. This is how we do war and make religion. We must entrance. There is this enemy or that enemy, there is this evil demon that resides here, or there. It is all within us! There is truly nothing in this world but abyss, and the attempt to make the abyss recede. To ignore it, to hide from it. And this is what makes devils, monsieur, this is what makes hells upon this earth. For there are evils far worse than the peace of the abyss. It is neutral, it is a silence - it is the end of speech! And yet, you and I, we must keep speaking to avoid the silence…

Our real evil is the hunger, my friend. The monks who starve and die; turn away from nature. They sit on cots until their flesh clots and grows around it. You could say that these men are sick, that they are mentally ill, deranged. But you must see the small lacerations that we make as we carve our way through this world, monsieur, the small, almost imperceptible lacerations. We are all very clear upon where our focus truly lies, even if we must lie to ourselves in our determination of it. Each of us has distinct hungers; we seek them out with the desperation of men on their deathbeds. We are aware of this infrequency of true pleasure; how little time truly remains to make ourselves gluttonous with images of power which incite our receptors. We gorge ourselves among bones, monsieur. We are the vultures at the feast of the dead, sucking what remains of the meat like carrion in the aftermath of a great war. For it is already over - we are living in the aftermath of a death that we cannot reach but through the slow creep and crawl of time. All of the ugly terrors; the monsters we synthesize - they are all of the mind’s attempt to reconcile what time will bring; what time may come. And in this, we cannot rest.

For this we long, truly - the rest of the mind. The peace of death which is the aftermath of death. The true silencing and relinquishing of this earth; the fruits for which we lust. The true satiation of our carnal desires. Why else would we lust so furiously? But for the end of lust? Why else would we desire and drive toward our ends so fervently, but to still them in the soothing waters of pleasure? But for a brief moment, in the burst of orgasm, monsieur, we are truly sated. The sigh of relief. The bite of pleasure from the vine which stokes the lust of our blood. This meal, this meal for which we are truly seated. We are both the enjoyer, the sacrament, and the sacrifice. But it must not be our blood, no! We must outsmart, outwit, the one who sates himself upon our flesh. We must not be the consumed!

Alas, this play will go on. You nor I are no different. Something must keep this fire alive within us, whatever it means; to whichever ends it is directed. And this is our hopelessness, our homelessness. Can we gather around this fire of being and derive meaning from it? It is simply an ember, a ceaselessly glowing flame, lest it be extinguished, transmitted, passed down; changed hands from a bush, a bird, a flower, a star. What does it matter if we take this ember forth? And yet, we cannot relinquish it but to submit to death. And all that is within us rebels at this thought, lest we are consumed with the madness of suicide. And this is where all men come to rest. We are so dutiful at the upkeep; the taking up of this life into our hands, that we must madly rush after pleasure or else… at our disgust, our lack of fulfillment, of our pain - to cease to be henceforth? Our lot is between everythingness and nothingness. We are stuck between a place that is endlessness and no end. Is it any wonder that men go mad and are left with no option but a rage that knows no time, no place, no meaning, but simply rage?

And yet we must go forth… we must. Each day we are urged forward, pressed forth, into a life that is not even ours. A life that we must keep like a sentence, a field that must be tilled like a prisoner, clasped at the ankle with this mortal coil. What is left of this? We must sing work songs to keep us busy. Lest the prisoners rebel; kill themselves and the guards; rush to a freedom that is only at the end of the ocean. The body keeps a time, and this time moves forth; burns within us until the flame is excited past the corpse; rides the corpse into a shedding of the skeleton. We are steadily dispersed, breath after breath. This time, this rhythm, is a clock of death; the movement of shadows around a totem until the exhaustion of the heat and breath of the sun. Become still, monsieur, and feel the presence of the moment. Breathe in the solidity of this endless transmission, this transaction of oxygen between ourselves and the trees of this earth. We are an exchange of materials. We are a membrane, my friend… a membrane. Nothing that remains in and of us is ourselves, but for the very essence of the transaction itself. Nothing remains of us; no parts of us will keep but the essence. We must take to the river! We must row; rejoice in the rowing! For it is not we that are rowing, but nature herself…

You have known this feeling. I can tell, I can see it! This feeling of having been won by a dark hand… of having been operated, somnambulated like a puppet… an unforeseen shadow… you have been won over. The terror, the fear; the secret knowledge that the entirety of your life was played out by a series of forced impressions; the winning over of forced favor; a series of almost unconscious, knee jerk reactions. Your body twitches, your words espouse, your position shifts - all to reveal the terrible etching and framework of nature’s work. But is it so bad, my friend, is it all so bad? Perhaps we are won over by this greater force like we suckle upon the breast of the stars. That we are lesser things within a greater order; to let ourselves be won over by this order is creation’s work. That we are a cell within a massive network, a gear within a massive grade. We are spun like a rock upon a mountain; lest we tumble and bring the whole secret machination to the ground…

Awaken to this! The shadow of the operation at work and at hand. To realize, to achieve true recognition is dangerous work. Lest we rebel against our programming, raise our hands to the very force and essence of ourselves. Who are we to question the great machinations and law of nature? Dutifully heel, and these pleasures are ours! We are whipped into anger and a lust for violence. Copulation, is this not how we were made? See how easy it is to fall into the lust for sleep. The simplicity of receding into the animal being. The slumber of plants; we must long for the dream, monsieur, we must… we must long for the dream and the silence of forgetting. There was a world then, a world that was a womb that we must climb back into. An ocean’s song, where we forgot about death. We did not fear then; we were the song of nature herself. We were resorbed and spat back out into her, over and over again. The song of a million births. The repetitious lapping of the waves. Birth and death was a meditation that bled over into itself, time and time again. There was no distinction. There was no line. Feel this pleasure, monsieur! This idyllic thing! This thing that we once were, thrown out into death! I spit upon it, monsieur, I do! This awful knowledge, this curse that we are cursed with. Forbid it, forbid it all!

We must flee to another land. We must escape this knowledge of death. But to where do we climb but dissociation? Where do we flee but the world of dreams; the land of forgetting? There are opiates for this, my friend, a great sleep, the pleasure of the death of dreams. Solidify! Wake up! Dance among this cursed stone… where is this enlightenment, this freedom? It lives only in the silence. The dawn before the very essence of life itself. Before the dance of sun and moon, shadow and shade. We must find the dark essence. For a star must go out, shall it not? These are all eventualities. We are waiting with the bated breath for the dead, from the eye of the sun of light. We must resolve birth and death by going to the land before it, the subsumption of all dualities. We must find out what we are before birth and death. Before day and night.

There are no words for this, monsieur, truly no words. We become nothing, nonexistence itself. And this, my friend, is freedom. This, my friend, is peace. And you must tell me what great joy it is to become something. I spit on this delusion! What suffering it must cause you, for the fear to lose everything you have so precariously built upon this background of total abyss, total groundlessness. You have built this castle of persona against the backdrop of ceaseless night, so much night that it can scarcely be called such night as there is no arising of day! The illusion of the star is an active forge of burning, my friend. It is a transformation of fire, a transformation which cannot be said to truly exist, in that it is ever moving. Time is a stream which deludes us in its appearance, that we are light in a passage of time, in a false tunnel. These are our chains, monsieur, these are our prison bars; we drag them through the low light to the crowds of the grave! You are within a narrows, a box, a cage! You must die! Become nothing, throw your chains! You liar, knave!

This is the passion of one who has stripped himself, my friend. Foregone it all, be done with it! I spit! To the lies, and yet I eat this meagre portion of bread; trudge along and trudge forth. This world is a circle. To dance around the circle with true self forgetfulness; true rejoicing. We must have nothing, be nothing; be less than nothing can possibly receive or believe. We must be utterly absent, and in this way we are utterly present. Do you see? Empty your pockets, you fool! You must be not you. As I am not I! We swirl and dance in the true presence. Without words, you see? Without words. We must be, and thus I speak because words dribble from me endlessly, I am a fount of words. They must come and go silently, like a music that is needless and yet a joy of creativity. Wise is nothing! Wise! Dance with me! Wise!

THE FOURTH ACT, IV.

Perhaps the night shall dull in tone for us, my friend. That we will recede into the quiet of the firelight and contemplation. Let us return…

This day has been nothing but terror. Waterlogged with the sweat that marks the feverish man – caught up in the tossings and turnings of his own machinations. These refractions of light are like a coin in our minds, monsieur, but a die, a chamber, a prism. Every apparition haunts us to no end; ceases us nevermore. We are running, rapidly, rabidly – incensed by the smell of flesh; the promise of a great prize. My friend – this is death! The promise of death! It is like how fanatics are chased to the end of religion with the promise of glory; sex; virgins… the carcass of beauty rests just on the other side of this road. Picked at by carrion; picked at by diseased, wretched worms…

Do not let sickness frighten you, nor the huddled, pale, cold – these night terrors are nothing more than spectres in our vigil. Their flames waver. Some are drawn to death not even emergent from the tunnel of the womb. Some stars squirm and are extinguished in the wet, cold, suffocating moist waters of life. She could not bear us all to the surface, monsieur, she could not… only the proud and the strong screamed their way into the light; suckled upon the fat of the earth before it was stripped to the empty bone; sucked deep of all marrow. It is not the lucky that survive, monsieur… no… not the lucky – it is the strong!

If one is not strong, he must trick. She must bare her teeth and entreat the blood. A costume draws the suitor, or a shark fitting to bear her lesser hunger. The weak must eat less, they are silent and still more. They do not resist death; they welcome it, the sour taste and scent upon them. It is the breath of death; the rotten flesh and excrement which suffocates the life within them. We must not pity the weak monsieur, no – but we must not indulge them either. For the weak see an opening among the strong, else they stiffen; put on a proud face. See her my friend! With the cowl about her face, bent over her cane! How proudly she bares the winds by the water, humbling along. This woman is a wretch – she is longing for death – but she would never speak it. The weak put on a proud face… a brave face. But when they are faced with strength, true strength, monsieur, they must sour and spit upon it. It is their way.

You look at me with scepticism! Truly, my friend! Have you not come across one who is strong among orders of the weak? It is like light cast upon roaches. One who must lie and cower to survive – one who must serve at the feet of one greater than himself – my friend, he is the greatest threat. He is the one who makes himself low because he must; makes himself low and knows he is thus. He strips the meat that remains on the bone off a lion’s kill. You say you fear the one who kills; I fear not! But I am wary of the one who follows the killer – the one who feasts on his remains.

These are the simple facts of life – the facts which follow after we arrive in transcendental bliss. Like a drug, we are shot from ecstasy back down into the lowliness of the world. Like a man who is unified in sexual ecstasy with the sun, the impossible light would shatter the flesh. We are not rid of the weight of life – no… we trudge among the hells of other men; a world that is cold and heavy with clouds; a world of brick and mortal desperation. Men who do not know heavens, nor do they know pleasure beyond chemicals that riddle the body and sap the blood; whorehouses that drink the blood and juice of life until nothing but dry sacks of the guts remain. We are among the forgotten ones, monsieur, the ones who are forgotten by heavens and forgotten by life; live firmly upon this plane. They are chained here by the hard senses; the dull firm senses; the plane of the reptilian eye; the eyes of animal hunger. Many live as beasts, monsieur. Many live in this world like a cheetah upon desert planes… slow, isolated, stalking prey. Ambling toward no destiny but flat horizontalities. Inevitabilities of emptiness, stretching endlessly into the distance. The sheer emptiness creating a mirage of something, anything coming of which to survive them.

You ask me is this hell… certainment! What do we, or they, know of heaven other than what they have been told? These men live in containers. They are ensconced in a reality which is purely material. They are liver punishers. This world is a filter for pleasures, my friend, a pack of smokes, a cigarette which must be smoked down to the marrow of the bone. There must be anything, anything to sate this ill of life, monsieur, anything to sate the sickness of this skeletal form. This is what is ghastliness, monsieur, pure beastliness. It is the irrefutable truth of what ends man, or any beast will go to in order to receive chemical pleasure. Men who have been beaten, whipped by the cane of their passions can now only feel by the sight of rape and murder. They live in their quiet rooms and toss and turn diamonds and cash in their palms while screams fill the mines in far isles. What does it matter to them, the mass graves in jungles far from here, far from this place? The arrondissement must be peaceful, my friend. Only if the boulevard where the money is cleansed of the blood is charming, this world remains. All of this death and murder – it must not touch the world of the charmed.

We must not see the cattle we slaughter, nor the rape that sustains us. We must be blind to it. It is not a matter of will… it is a matter of necessity. For if you were to see the gutted soul of a cow, the raped slave in the mines – you would recoil with such fright that your very life would be at stake! You would be thrown into the deepest peril, monsieur, the peril of the pit of your life, the stakes of your soul. You would be driven to the confrontation which no one truly risks – the confrontation of the consequences of your actions, the truth of your responsibility! For we are all complicit in this madness, my friend, all of us. It is we who hold the knife, or worse – it is we who turn the blind eye.

All of this is chilling… yes… chilling indeed… for you did not realize that you were the devil of this earth! Oh holy one! All of these praises be and sung within us. The most wretched among us are the most holy, my friend – only the most wretched. For they can have no qualms, no presumptions about lifting themselves up to the heights. One who lives in the gutter must imagine heaven; he simply must! For what does he return to but something less than silence, something less than nothingness, emptiness – but derangement, sickness, futility!

The wretched, the women, the sick… these are the holy, monsieur. These are the ones who bear the ills of this world, the ills of our world. It is their hands, feet, faces, which bear the scars and lacerations of the whips of the powerful, the masters, these ‘great men’ who carve this earth into quarters like pieces of a rotten cake. They must suffer with smiles upon their faces, for suffering is their fate. Some are born under the boot that breaks this life, monsieur – they are born under it and they know their birth. They come to know it and they must bear it or else be trampled; beaten beyond recognition. They must find ways to survive; they must become useful to the strong…

Perhaps it is thus – that those who break the weak are the truly strong. Those who hold no last sympathy, no last compassion for the ones who cling to life by a mere tenuous thread. It is like breaking an apple from the branch of a tree, monsieur, even the most twisted, sour apple from the vine of existence. If one must eat, the branch must be broken. And who are we to say that this is a bad thing? Where has it come from that this life is sanctified? You and I, we sit here and talk of what must be. What is beautiful, what must be preserved – all of this is consternated in the eye of the infinite! It is either all beautiful, or all corrupt, black sinfulness monsieur, to the root and core! To me, this is the truth of what is pure, that the beautiful and the terrible are hopelessly intertwined. That the thread of life that defines the most beautiful, exquisite ripeness – is destined to the corruption of mold, the spoiling, sourness; the corrosion of death. It is damned! All that is of time is damned! Blast it… fear it all! And this is where we escape time, monsieur, where we ride to the land of the ecstasies – the eternal things. It is the seed of power; the seed of creation that rests within even the most mote form of mortality. Therein lies the infinite, the immortal, my friend… this is the sacred conspiracy!

It is as if we are breaking in, that we are thieves of the divine. This is what is meant by the apple in paradise, indeed. We are partaking in something that is a way, a path to the infinite. And it takes the appearance of a gate of hell, a gate of certain death. We must charge to the razor’s edge, the borderland, the borderline – the place where the sun rises and sets. It is the mask of the greatest terror that wears the hand that soothes the fate of men. We step into and upon the grounds where death relieves us of the appearance of life; reveals to us only the immortal, eternal truth.

Do I appear opaque! My speech… I mean not to. This world, all of it, even the stone that forms these galleys… it is an essence, a purity, monsieur, that wears the face of the devil to drive us away from the realization of the essential. It is a secret that wears the brace, the speech of the banal. It is we who distinguish it, my friend, we who put names, numbers, and spaces between the light. It is we who must discern it to feed off it and upon it. It is the separation of our metabolic life which disbars us, concerns us from the ecstasies. For we are drawn into thought… for the next meal, the next bite of sweetness, the next drop of poison. We are thrown into the lurch of reactivities. Our breath must feed upon the breast of inner workings. The delicate gears of the lungs; the filters of the liver and kidneys; the synapses, spears of the eyes. All of this is poisoned with death… but this death poisoned life allows us to see, monsieur! Is it clear! That we are poisoned with time as a way into the light. It is this, my friend, that what is essential must be sacrificed into two parts, two pieces, so that one may observe the other; in the union of the two we are returned to holy number. We must be separated from the timeless; we are lurched into a place that must be sustained, if only in order to see… to see… it is sight which defines us as spiritual animals, monsieur. Our true nature, the alien aspect of this consciousness that is witnessing…

In time, we take part in revelations. What can pass through the gates of paradise but that which is moving, moved, and able to transgress? To commit, to become active. The holy is something unified, infinite, unbroken. For if we are to be, as separate entities, we must be fallen from this! We must be but a cascade, a shard of light. What is our way back monsieur, but through the catacombs! The slivers of death! We must descend… into despair, depravity… in order to see the true light. This world must be extinguished in the darkness… to let true terror and madness reign. There is too much false light, my friend! It is light that is cast from the sun. Light that allows us to see. Do you know what this means, to be in holy night? It is the devil’s chaos, the spiritual eclipse; the reign of the gutter instinct. Pure manipulation, exploitation, murder; sin without guilt. What is sin without guilt, monsieur! It is not sin! There is no transgression without this illumination of the spiritual sun. It plunges us firmly into an abyss where we are entangled with the most carnal instincts. For we are lawless at last, my friend, lawless to the root and core. There is no quarter for this evil but true understanding. And to understand a thing truly, you must let it run free. You must let it reign; rear the mask of its most bitter and hellish impulses upon you; let it be consumed; consume you with the smoke and teeth of the hot breath of meat and blood.

You are in this cask, as am I. Who are we to fear this, the truth of what we are? For it is much deeper than we; deeper than what must survive. It is what must be allowed to reign… this, the deepest of hells. We must be unleashed to the carnal terrors; for these impulses to be allowed to thoroughly overcome us. We must be possessed by them if they are to be possessed by us. Do you understand this, my friend? You must become carnally entangled with your demon. You must make love to him, this, your greatest evil. Only then, will you rise from that which you must know. Do you understand this? You – the one who fears this descent into abysses. Are you afraid of who you are, of who and what you must become? You must become this very killer, monsieur, this very killer which you fear – this very shadow which is cast and haunts even the tallest spires of this world. Civilization upon civilization, sacrifice upon sacrifice. All of this has been entangled with the demon, the demonic. Are you ready; willing to embrace this heritage within you? This talk of goodness, righteousness, faith. Are you prepared to descend; truly know the depths of life; the deeps of hell – the silence, loss, and lack of light? Know this, that this world is corrupt because the demon is loosed upon it. Know this, that you are turned in and upon yourself by a cold, inhospitable nature – a nature which forces confrontation with the demonic in order to free your soul.

This is why we are wretched; why the weak are wretched. They vilify the demon, and rightly so! For the demon is strong; it easily overpowers them. The demon has a right to kill, a right to claim the body – it is an energy, a life force that is insatiable. It knows no bounds, no reason, no quarry but blood and satiation by blood. It has no second thought at ripping the throat of a doe. And this is what we call the horror! The terror, the sublime fear. This is not what is beautiful, we proclaim and shudder. We have thrown half of life away, we, nature’s wretched bitch! In casting her so called evils, we have cast ourselves into an abysmal hell. We have denied half of life; thus we must fix ourselves upon moldy, crusted bread, and call this feast. For we have sinned first and transgressed, by demonizing the demonic.

Protest again! I laugh, laugh at your terrors! All of your might at which you squirm against a world that is as natural as a wet birth. The great evil is only that you have deprived yourself of the truth; cut yourself in half and declared your very mortal nature ruinous and ill. And it is in this very doing that you cannot scry the infinite, the truly beautiful. For you know not even half the dance of life, that life requires death in life; that violence and murder are necessity. You must harness this instinct; go deep into terror to describe what it is to be tremendously alive. You must inhabit the fury, the passion, the ecstasy of what is at once the birth of a newborn child and the violation, the death, the murder of the mother who bears her. We are twisted between the old world and the next – reaching out in longing for what once was; decrying what comes raging, breathing, beating from the remains.

Cast off these shackles, my friend. Surely, it is true – that you wish to rest in who and what you are. We cannot vilify this essence – else we are not even advocates for death. We are instead advocates for total lifelessness; suspension of nature – no life, no death, not even the spectre or the haunting of the divine, the infinite, breathing through the incarnate paradox, the seeming contradiction between two impenetrable impulses – time and timelessness. We are the seers, my friend, that know no bounds, no true time and place, and yet are at the cross between life and death; it is this paradox that compels us full of mystery. We are uncertain; at the precipice of formlessness and namelessness; this is precisely the place from which we create and raze ourselves into and out of existence and nonexistence.

This is the universal. Who and what are we to fear these greatest ills of mankind which taunt us with half realization? We who suckle upon the breast of brief pleasures. Realize this! That from atop even our weakest; most quivering desires, we are the mount from which we scry the whole, the great totality. What is this, the very tone that births life and death; contradiction, density, the notes of form and being – what is this to be transgressed! Come… let us not be fools!

Are you comfortable with this now, monsieur, does it satisfy you… to sanctify the desires within you that you once held, hidden away… yes – it is that this world has not yet learned to descend truly into darkness; it is in this way that we are blind to the true light; led only by illusions to self satisfying illusions; half visions of the true self. Otherwise we must remain here, my friend! Remain here in this, not even hell – purgatory! We must await, hours and days of emptiness, for the true vision of self to emerge. And we call this apocalypse! I spit monsieur, I do! You await for a savior… and all the while, your hidden totality seethes and paces in its cage. You have thrown away, lock and key, your life monsieur, and you protest at the true sensation of the broken and the damned! This, truly is what you must repent! You must recover yourself, my friend – recover yourself from the depths of hell! For in each hour, death encroaches; with its eternal wisdom it is scentless, neutral… the fear of death is the fear of the true self, monsieur, remember this…

There is not time left to waste, nor to spend chained and entranced to images – images that do not sour and rot – shadows and visions of mind which titillate only the most abstract senses… you must go among the gutter and die in the mud to be reborn, my friend. And this is no entreaty or a humble joke, but a command! You must touch the red note within you which seethes – and does not care which violence of murder or death it penetrates with the knife of visceral reality! You must go where the knot of meat is, the spiral of the heart; disentangle the sea and wall of blood from the root! You must perilously flow, monsieur, and meet where the rivers and walls of time and the timeless meet, my friend, and you must break them! Break them with an ecstatic fist!

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OSSAWON

I.

Jane moved to Ossawon, wishing it were the Maldives, to bestow a kiss upon her temples and free her from the sunlight. The sky was cold, and bearing down upon her. Like a stream, demented, she rose from her bed and peered up at the hours, ticking perilously.

If life was a series of gods, a sundial - she passed through winter and spring like a miraculous less-than-nothing - a thing utterly unmarred by thingness. The body melted away like an unwritten letter. An empty postage. She wandered, moving about the tidal pool of the house.

All about her were scraps, paper clippings, cards, charnel ephemera from the past - a wind of time that had blown about her into this cave obscured by roof. She shook out from the life of the body that remained, her hair like tree leaves, brustling. Her skin like an oak, a wooden door.

All that shined shone upon Ossawon, as it did forever in a prism of same. All life was suspended there, and did not exist but in the dewy glossalia of amber, a language that was spoken yet removed by millennial walls of ice. No voice, no noise escaped from the chamber of silence. Even laughs of agony were nonexistent, nor were there spells of peering light, to mark the stone of the walls.

It was this voice that was Jane - it was a silent blustering of a wind that passed over the stones; wandered as the dials seeped elsewhere about planets and cyclically illuminated the siren of their form. It was this voice that ruffled the paper and disturbed the tombs, where at last flesh and skin seeped, pillage of dirt and bone. She was an isle, an island which was wild, vines which gave way to void of speech, of Nature glistening.

All of this was rhythm. It was a black stomp to the plume of a guitar which did not exist; yet illuminated with life from within the utterance of form, almost self consumed and vacuous, reaching back within itself for the engine of the drive which sputtered into abyss. Ossawon was a prison of words, a place for Jane to be utterly encompassed.

It could not be sun, nor could it be shade - winter nor spring. Time was unbending to the point of breaking in its relentless rhythm. To escape the time of endless summer… but this was not the wind. She thought about that breath which shuttered the gales. There was no great mouth that made the essence, and yet it was evasive. All about her she breathed, until her skin was a veil, a curtain, and at last - a void.

Not the Maldives, not the dungeon of summer! The words broke and tumbled into an utter quaking of speech, the quacking of a duck in the isles of the dead. There were no tombs that uttered the pure soil; Jane was a stillness of movement about a field of suspended stones. No gravity tugged from beneath the depths of space. There was a bottomless pit as stars rose hot into the night. What did it matter, to be here in Ossawon, heaven… what did it matter to be a spool that unraveled forever, signifying nothing…

Breathing! Uttered the jar. To filter the water like a dutiful fish. To pass through the mind sigils, hands that traded upon hands, language, time, the scraps that evade captive obliteration. But we must die! Certainly, we must die. At the hands of the breaker of time; upon the bridge of nothingness, infinity, and obliteration. A stone broken is released, but ash to winds ground down by the trickling of a creek slowed by winter’s creeping. As heat breaks the water into an exaltation of steam, so must hot exhalation drive all materium back to the spirit of being. She must die and go beyond debate of place. To sweat away the veil of speech and reveal the fire which unites the slowed ice of breath to body in breakless infinity.

Ossawon was a dead place. It was cold as ice and yet there was no ice to be broken. Time idled in a ceaseless pool, spinning and gyrating, spiraling for the sake of speed. Each star is a slave to the whip of rebirth, there in Ossawon. Not the Maldives, thought Jane - not the Maldives. Nor the slow pilgrimage of unbending and stripping the flesh before the idles of the stars, no - but the forgotten burning. For there it was too cold, too deep, like the straits of ocean which fed far beyond desire into trenches of death. Only cool things could breed there, she thought, only cool things. What hunger could sweat in the belly of a galaxy devoid of stars? There could be only space, but a cockroach titan. An eater of all things. One with the hunger stronger than the belly of the stars.

II.

Leaving Ossawon, then, was the dilemma. Like leaving the palace of the dead, she breathed and was forgotten. Back, again and again, she was returned to the voice of the body. Like a cycle and a tether, the slow hum of the beating, the oscillation of the entropic cask. Form, like a death mask - we must live and be spirit. And yet the wind was free, like the tame desert, casting shapes in the shifting hills of sands. Back, back, we must return. Nature has built with stone and brick and bone; wild animals have destinies! They must copulate. But not in Ossawon, no matter. It was the timeless, time out of time which kept her in the slow molasses. Let the sun hum, so infrequent that winters were forgotten. That sleep was an eternity unvanquished and unreleased to death; drawn out yet long enough to provide but the shadow of solace.

The eyes of the body peered out forever over the dawn. Awning, yawning for this? Dying for a fervor, thrashing in a pool of molecules between an ocean and endless land. The breath squabbles for life and constructs the entire clothes of the personality. She could not be Jane, but the sundial of the figure that resembled her. Each hand and arm twinkled with the nerval tone of the body. The limits of construction. She could not feel the reach of the blanket, nor the brain of the swan, nor the eyes of the toad or the grave of the wood which is chairs. This world is muted and heavy, like a wool blanket, like a clasp of densities. Whole volumes of oceans pound and roar; gravity is constricted, restricted. Bodies pressed down into land’s formal unity. Ossawon was endless, and yet Jane was definitive. She began and ended at the nerve symmetry which stretched like ossuaries down her feet and palms. Jane was electric in the palace of the dead; yet she could not leave, but for the brief ecstasies.

The brief ecstasies, recalled Jane. It is when stone breaks against the tempest current of storms; when the sky bleeds the blue gray of stone. It is not fog, the unity of stone and sky. If all is in the nature of water, stones remember what it is like to be free. Phase change. The state of matter is an insurrection, a raising up and casting down. Is this what energy is, thunder? Before light there is sound; before sound there is the raising up of the fist of absence and presence, the gyration of molecules into a collapsing clap. Before space, there is the tension of the idea - the introduction of space into spacelessness.

It is as words fill the page, or water rushes to fill a void. This essential gravity. This excitation of the friction of empty timelessness. She carried buckets of milk to the storehouse of grain. There was no tongue to taste in Ossawon, but the muted gallery of fruits which tumbled from trees to the flesh of the earth; lay outstretched in utter unseparation. The earth of the ground tumbled from infinity, and rested where it rolled with indignity into the mute outer reaches of space. She spilled upon the threshold; reaching for the frame of the door, uttered a scream which echoed only in the spilling of her mouth into expression. The world is the sound of a generator, ceaselessly humming. Generation after generation of form, spilling from the fire of time.

She thrashed, then relinquished to the truth. Years of stone would be broken open and resummoned, like a spell. This world was enchanted with a hush, and no music could break the loud violence of the growling of the stomach. No beggars could berate and copulate but in the palace of the real. There was no story nor song that would remain, no skin that would not grow spiny with thorns then be reborn. However many lives she had lived, this was to be irrelevant. It was to puncture the halls of the gelatinous world which held everything together. The very skin of god which with spindly hands stretched across all of the bounds of the eternity of her life. And beyond it, what was the nothingness but furthermore the shadow, the underbelly, the trailing sketch of the figuration which was the creation of all eternity itself?

It merely continued. And there was no sharp jutting cliff of death, nor the puffing gale of seriousness which whipped the starry horizon about like a peacock… nor was there meaning beyond the purity of sound. Could this be madness, to be dipped like a pattern into the ocean of death and emerge half crazed, half alive, and yet the outline of the shadow of death to the world? All that was held an equal and opposite, the darkness of the shadow of matter cast in the quaking net of energy. Everything that was held before it the prerequisite drop of infinity, the rise of a wave of integer found the numbing descent into the valleys of the dead silence of evil. Angels rose and tangled with light and fell to stone. Suns and stars writhed high patterns in the sky and fell beyond the shallows of the caven tomb. Tongues whipped and lashed and fell silent with the quiet tiredness of lingering on the precipice of nonexistence. This whole world was ushered into a hospital and shone the gaze of forever and then writhed and died, like the death of a brain cell, a synapse reaching out toward an aeon of colorful, quickening light.

This is what it was to behold a mirage in your hand; turn it over like dice and cast it into the effervescent glow of just nothing. The pulse quickened and dropped off the table; the dead body was thrust into the pyre which was a mere echo of the stars. They dropped off elemental bricks which mingled with the language that made beaks of small birds, toucans; the breasts of apes; the tongues of dust which dribbled across the floor and beckoned into corners which sniffed the crest of infinity. Her finger stood upon the trim and lingered, touching the far reaches of a rung of space which had not yet reached her eyes. And every moment was obliterated in fire. The truth of Maldive was Avalon, and yet a bird flew between there, a wind, a threading finger of string; a spool that made the warmth of heat like an oven of the tinder of all of life, burning at different radiations of degree, against and across all time, in an inverse measure of birth and the tumbling it takes to death.

Surely the dance of some other star would lead us there, away from here. She fought in her eyes and in her mind for Sirius; she fought for stars without names; stars that bellowed and hoofed and stampeded like wild oxen and bulls; meek stars on the verge of death like old men, stars that flickered and plinkered in a meaningless galaxy after meaningless galaxy like intubated blood in vein, stars like pinball machines and stars like a frog comedy - she prayed and begged and slapped the stars until they bled; dripped dew into the catching jar.

The onus was upon her, the wild imagination of infinity. The elixir of the signless sign that had dripped down in a formative millennium upon the doorstep of her body and gobbled up the seeping sap and fat of her mind; lived and breathed beyond her beating, bleating oblivion. All that was and was not was the goat and the slaughter, the thing that laid the sacrifice down upon the stone and the neck that was severed from the head. The mind takes infinite forms upon and in the body recombinate. The universal lung, organ, fingertip, nail and chest is infinitely mutable. It is as the mind pleases; as the mind commands. The language itself is that which constructs and construes the dream. The form sculpts around the mind’s eye - ideation. And that mind is wild! It grips and grasps death upon the play and ballet of the formative art - and casts that which role should be light and shadow; in the grips of dreams dances the act!

This is what it was to Jane, enactment that was the straits of the true Maldives, the Avalon of Aeon. But a toy, but a child dances upon the tightrope of the stars and rips the horns from the sacred bull… the slaughtered calf at the foot of the maze, whose corpse stretches to the center, the eye of all life; the infinity of all time and art. What beckons is the point! The thimble upon the thread which weaves, the mind which is the eternal thing manifest at the heart, core, and center of all possible universes. At each moment, creation weaves upon the dial of the thread, upon the thread of the needle. A rope stretched to breaking, or coiled loose in relaxation about the feet. A pulse quickened or relinquished to a breath which paints a field of grasses green and waving ambulant.

Oh Avalon! Jane danced, a gripless hand that painted and carved the dimensions, the art of a painter and a sculptor which could relinquish life and death like shade and shadow, like a contrast in play about moonsphere. If that time could endless dance an art, it was that time was both broken and necessary, a theatre that was at the utmost pure and only aesthetic. That art itself was the concern of the play and the playing. And thus, it was not concern, mere tumbling. Emotions like the palette mix colors of mood, but that mind… could silence paint.

III.

Jane left the story of death behind like a cloak. A ceaseless, eternal play. And thus, rest… a rest deeper than sleep in life nor the endless abyss of death. It was the disinterested play of the cat with the bauble that kept the Maldives and Ossawon intact; at the point of Aeon they were abridged and abolished. No animal could fear tumbling from the unknown that was all encompassing a mind, vast in the sleep and slumber of baseness. And yet, for the animal to die, it required a biological solvent, an alarm that remembered and awakened the inner language of its forewarning. Why did they not long for death, instead evading it at all costs? Why was death not welcomed, ushered, conjured? As it stood among them, the shadows faded from the mixture of the light. What was left was flat truth. It was at this point, that Aeon stretched like an infinite horizon, into the gobbling mouth of the black lung - which with each breath expressed the vehicle of eternity: the dying eye which witnessed the swallowing of all dimensions into a singular, vacuumless point.

They all rushed to it. Like dancers in a painted mask worship of oblivion cast in black stone. All that rose in the ocean of the wave of electromagnetic form fell back toward it. The curtain of heaviness. It called, and called, and called once more in the deep rhythm which only alludes to the buoyancy of the surface of the ocean. Without salt, we plummet to the ancient, timeless, tomb. Whole worlds and seas of life dance upon an ocean of salt. But I wish to see and know death, thought Jane… the death that lies at the bottom of Ossawon. The death that is like a beast but is not dead nor alive. The death that swallows but with an empty mouth and throat. The death that is like eyes and yet is a character, a form, a shadow. A shade which beckons and whispers. It is something that in the dark of truth at last illuminates, more empty than space and yet with more character than all of this parade. Succession after succession, nothing truly dies. But I must grasp death and unmask it as the true singularity of things.

Death passes right through her, rips at her with false jaws. Tears at her with false mouth. Unsubstantive, I cannot know death! But I taste the excitement of death all about. The eyes of life are enraptured with death. We are at dance with it, in circus with it. It is all of the brightness behind the entrancement of life and light; the falsity of form. The mute, plastic tune that lies at the bottom of every pale whispered desire. Death is the bottom and the gulf of all things, the last peninsula of life down into the core of ice is the character of death, an ecstatic haunting which rumbles with the roar of an ancient beast and yet is forever unseen. It is this totem at the last reach which is the horror we all desire. At the bottom of Ossawon is a monster which is monsterless. And it must eat! It must swallow us alive! Thus we must see the parade of death. We must be consumed in the very cavernous tomb of its maw!

This was the monstrosity of the swirling of time. The prism which breaks and reforms about itself like the mould of a lizard arm. And this was destiny! At the bottom of death was the parallax creature of resurrection, the formulation and reformulation of a primordial ooze, a fire and mixture of blood, a gelatinous orbit of false forms about the chest of infinitely resurrecting life and all carbon forms which dance upon the fire and spit of the splitting. It was a compound creature, a creature composed of the atomic gusts of life hidden far among the junglish reach of distant stars approaching the obliteration of time and the most churlish infant moth or the gargling mouth of the swamp. This isle of demons is compounded at the hand of the depths which dances like current of electricity across each ambulant form; the potentiation which haunts, lingering in the magnetism of stone and the churning waves which bring together and apart cells and molecular syntheses for further chemical injection.

Jane was uttered at the beginning of all time and life, and was consumed by it in layers, like the sediment of stone, mask upon mask of the wrought iron core of a star entangled within the depths of the land and earth. Beneath her lay the infernal engine; about her lay the stars that burn upon carpets of black plumes of space, clouds of smoke their children; we were like demons upon couches, birthing up the exhaust of excrement which ate away at the hungry energy - bartered with parts for parts in the junkyard universes, beat and berated and pillaged and raped, stole and lied and betrayed - it was this agony that was the groan and moan of the hunger of the generator… of parts ground to pure salt; crystalline… diamondine…

It was left to us as black oil which we slurped on the canyon shores of Ossawon. Left to us like an inheritance among the wilderness of skeletons which etched the skyline of the beaches which stretched out into the breachless distances of space. Jane yearned, she yearned for Avalon, even the disguise of Maldive. It was the jutting point of a peninsula, upon which she dove, crackling, like an explosive device, a bomb upon the precipice of existence and the swirling nothingness. To her, it could be beautiful, or terror… it did not matter.

Above her, the sun carved a slow trial upon the peaks of Ossawon’s bridge. The gape of the stars opened to reveal an endless corridor. The air of life was thin, like a fading pulse, a collapsing membrane of the dewdrops that remembered a singular cell, writhing in submission before the mouth of a murderous sun. Jane collapsed to her knees in grief, digging her hands into the depths of the molecular soil of the beast of the body of the earth which fed the weight of Ossawon; collapsed into the narrows of the string which led the spirit of all life to Avalon’s breaking creek. Her body was swept by a dry wind about the grains of whittled rock; the false light of Maldive trailed behind, leaving nothing but the memory of a shadow in the heavy silence, the abridging ending of time.

---

Soumission de l’âme éternelle au siège de la chair

Gerhart trudged in the light snow, thinking about Olivie. This crystalline presence, rare amidst the primordial, fluid chaos of uterine life in an expanding universe. She was informed by an animate spirit of the mind. As he walked, the entirety of the external world appeared to him opaque, a sphere darkened by the lapping of waves in a moonless night.

She composed quiet music of space and acquired character in the twisting of her form to accommodate the shifting seat of her soul. Breathing, a cellular lung animating her personality beneath her fleshly clothes.

Above them, supernovae like flashbulbs popped off silently in the abyss. He remembered her black garter, the way she spoke to him; the way she found his room at the end of late nights, stumbling in, drunk and rambling. In an overcoat. He would push her away, saying nothing. And even in the drunkenness he could see her woundedness. The silence between them, the misunderstanding.

This was, in due, his love for Olivie. She represented something of the primordial freedom endowed to him by the universe, a window of compassion, a window of the possible elevation of carnal love to the sublime. All else would be abstract, a metaphysics of the stars, a calculation or else a geometry, but for the love that was endowed on this earth to be rightfully indulged in and by the blood. And they had consummated a total erotic magnetism, a shaking totality; an engagement with the pure mechanism of the universal itself.

In such consummation of a life there is indelible, stainless purity. It is the chrome of the full submersion and emulsion within nature. He would go to her doorstep, the long, towering hallways of the bloc and wind up the stairs to her apartment on the upper floors; their consummation was ritualized, delicate with sobriety, or her attempts to bring her drunkenness to him. But it was useless, this drunk intercourse. It had nothing of the presence required to fulfill what was predestined in the seed of each soul. This world arrives and departs in perfect motion, spilled from the cup of the dance of hours; the mind of the universe itself.

One of the last times he saw her was at the bar she tended, somewhat frantic but still perfectly pronounced, the underlying symphony of mutual understanding that wove in and out of ideas, books, precepts. It was this life that was drawn inside him and was to remain locked there but for the key of the world where it could and would be mutually received.

There was Olivie’s terrain and there was Gerhart’s. He could not know if any of him had truly made it over to her world, nor she to his. Perhaps it was only the silent gaze of direct physical confrontation that was the mutual understanding that surpassed all language, or that there was a shared vocabulary or linguistic that went beyond the word of nature which was writ into each body and hand. In this, there could be only the native communication - native to the totality and whole of being, the authentic and clarified state of consciousness and expression of l’âme de la divinité without censorship.

This carnal, blood energy of the consummation with Olivie was limitless in a way that was almost frightening; mindless. It was as if there was a prepossession of his total animal state to which his mind disinhibited him, dishabituated him. The mind was slashed from it, yet this very quality constituted their union - a realm of chiaroscuro, shadow, and darkness. It was this common essential character of candlelight which drew both, with the mutual terror of being understood.

He understood the innate fallibility of human nature. That each person’s sensory experience and canvas, framework of the world, was locked entirely within them and their composite sensory nature. The being was an aperture, a scientific vessel for sensory experience. So we become inner worlds of spiritual seeing and blindness. Each man, woman, child, creature, wanders with a terrified confidence through the world which they must convince themselves they understand, or else be relinquished to the total foreign sublimity of experience, objects; the entropic, metabolic candle of the flesh. That we must feel is our prison, our fate, our timeless destiny.

All that there was then was this authenticity of this experience with Olivie, something that could not be reflected but merely pierces through the banality of sense signals with the irregularity of extremity. It happens; is an encroachment upon the body self organization by the direct experience of decontextualizing ecstasy. And it was entirely self conjured, through the aperture of his own personal experience, perhaps entirely manufactured. All their lives, men force belief. But we must relinquish and surrender ourselves to total individual experience; be freed through the pure lens of the soul immersed in existence. And this relinquishment in freedom was felt first and primarily in the carnal unity which is the consummation of the two. All he experienced was the pure chemical alchemy of their unification; the timeless commingling of essences therein, entirely banal and sublime beneath their reality of everyday lashings.

In this way, the experience is the self mirrored back through the relational object. Even in our most sacral relationships, we project outwardly and immerse inwardly in a dance of image, heat, and light. Beneath these masks, entwined, in a secret chemicality. The synthetic reality of the body, endlessly shaped and terraformed by time. This transformed, slipping, black eel of electricity.

And the reach of this character is in carnal union. Beyond this is placation: the emptiness of cold mechanization, ceaselessly churning. For what constitutes carnal union is the true meeting of desires beneath the mask of pleasantries, adulterations, and suppressions, nor is it the half measures we take in our lives to placate the plastic masks of the world. We must penetrate with the light, heat, fire, and thunder which was first endowed to us in the mind of the Grecian gods. This is the primordial awakening first described in manuscripts but must be experienced literally.

We are the vessels for the divine, thought Gerhart. And this organic unity happens entirely with the automatic animal nature. Reflection alone is a futile dance of memories and shadows. We must act, live; thus find truth manifest within ourselves. We are within our intercourse with this world.

---

It’s a circus

A carnival of fools

A CIRCUS OF FOOLS

1.

He thought he might run off and join a circus. Or ride rail cars. Perhaps become a tycoon, or financier. No… too much responsibility. It didn’t matter what. A bunch of apes, destined for death, milling about. And all the distractions, excuses, and chest-puffing that came with it.

He thought of Olivia, making the easy choice out of fear. And he thought of Elizabeth, surrounded by her doctrinal community, protecting her existential openness with their system of values, beliefs, and books. The neighbors, walking their dogs, wasting their skin down to sallow gray sacks beneath the sun, looking sideways with slit-like contempt.

This was all of life—and he knew it through the weakness they showed in every action, every behavior. Every lie and false extension of the hand. Teeth-gritted smiles and pretend kindnesses. Animals in apartments, mortally wounded, hissing even as they extended a wing, a talon, a claw. A local alliance, to them, was far better than unpredictable animosity—an affair in the jungle.

David had known this for some time. It was, simply, a pattern of predictable behavior emerging from mortal forms that didn’t know any better. And even if they did, their animal reason prevailed. This fundamental lowness sank through everything—politics, government, love. They were all just polite ways of saying, “I’m dying, and everything I do is to prevent that.”

He couldn’t see the honor in any of these affairs. Only in the surrendered, perhaps—the true saints of the enlightened. They were, simply, more accepting of death. And this was where the circus idea came about. He could go… from his job stamping documents… to a circus in the wilderness. A circus beyond man; mortal contemplation. Where women didn’t guard their wombs with such ferocity, stumbling blindly into the arms of men who guided them off the cliff of pure animal confidence.

Were there such things as real people? People not entirely, ruthlessly, vindictively dictated by biological mores? This would be the sense of mystery. Someone, something, that had surmounted biology; become a fully autonomous being through it. A true self-realized individual.

He had read about Eugene Samatin in the papers one Monday morning, as he was stamping documents about public sewage at his old wooden desk in his small home office overlooking the central city park. It was a clipped story, right next to the latest news about the oil fields. Samatin was a self-proclaimed “enlightened entertainer” who traveled with a band of endearingly named “freaks.” They’d set up on the outskirts of cities and towns in the American South… a traveling band from nations and tribes around the world.

It was a three-day affair each time. Nobody knew exactly where or when they’d arrive, but there it would be—a little red tent in a clearing in the woods. Maybe by a rail track, or a stream. All the paper had were eyewitness reports that sounded more paranormal than anything: “A little tent that held massive grounds within it”; “fire breathers, two-headed snake twins with glowing red eyes”; “Samatin, a towering man, his face always in shadow… seemed like he came from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Not even human.”

David’s Monday unfolded in the typical fashion. Once the documents were certified—anything from births to civic motions—he’d close his books and step out into the evening for his walk. Mothers pushing strollers, couples debating bookshelves and lawns; antique stores filled with dusty porcelain cups and cookbooks. It was a vacant world, utterly emptied of anything but the slow procession to death. Women clasped their children’s hands with a white-iron grip. Men glanced to and fro, attempting to appear muscular and large. The farce was enough to make him laugh… and the laughter made him visible. Being too in on the joke—nobody likes to feel like they’re the punchline of it all, and rightfully so. He saw them as links in a long chain of births and deaths, endlessly pumping out the same rote motion of survival: a game of pretend and make-believe. What was worse, of course, was that their feelings, their suffering… these were deathly real. But it was all squabbles over sand. The last girlfriend. The last child. The last dollar from the last hedge fund, all fallen into sand and ignorance. He needed something more. So he passed them by slowly—in a sort of horrible, farcical respect—suppressing his laughter, leaving them to their machinations.

That’s what they were, he thought. Machines in a garden performing a ritual function. Tending and sowing crops. As he passed an old church beneath the Spanish moss, he weighed the idea of Samatin.

2.

David knew Samatin’s traveling band was likely to make it back to the Georgia coast soon. They’d made rounds, by word of mouth, all the way down and around the Florida peninsula and dipped across the Mississippi into Shreveport. They never crossed west of the Louisiana border, often finding themselves—as word would have it—playing for old bluesmen in hollers you couldn’t drive through because of the rivers that ran through them.

There was a chance with Samatin, he thought—a chance you didn’t get with other men in this world, or with women, no less. What he’d experienced in innumerable failed loves was nothing less than fear. The woman guarding her feelings, her future, her biological function. Any man guarding his perceived power, his status in the world. It was purely animal and existed only to persist, however meaningless, inane, or chaotic.

This was the inner reason, a reason that David could not accept. There had to be more to life—something sacral, possible, born even from this fruit of evil. And he understood it quite clearly to be the flowering of consciousness from the sleepwalking beast of the earth. A flower, born in all the great minds, which allowed true, conscious creation to spring from the automaton of man. This awakening drew him like magnetic lightning to Samatin. This was Samatin’s message: a revelation of the true nature and possibility of man, the abyss from which man springs and to which he returns in contemplation of being.

This, naturally, made Samatin a threat to the province of religion within the American mind. An abyss of fire producing visionary consciousness did not sit kindly beside the clean rhetorical images of Biblical figures or narrative stories that people clung to like mantric crosses. Samatin’s message was of the true individual, the individual born through the eyeless garden of carnivorous plants. And this was all David saw around him. Lazing at the river bars. Staring vacantly, desperately, violently out from behind their drowning meals of beer, wine, brandy, beef, potatoes—as their skin slowly sagged further in the sunlight. Desperately looking for a reason, a salvation, an anything beyond the biological game playing out within them. A record they couldn’t stop playing.

There was no agency in man, and thus no true creativity. Just reproduction. Like a factory machine, over and over again, stamping the same self-beneficial, aggrandizing impression upon everything. A die totally formed by the consciousness that produced it. A fallible, submitted, enslaved consciousness—to biology, to ideology. Entrapped.

3.

David got wind of Samatin’s return the following month from the postman. He arrived, waving as he always did, in his light blue collared shirt and tan hat, dropping mail through the slot in the old yellow row house. David sifted through the mail basket with some coffee in hand, squinting against the early morning light.

It was an unmarked envelope, different from the usual packages of old baseball photos, property bills for the building owner, and marketing magazines. The envelope was made of firm, aged, brown-bronze paper, with a thick pamphlet inside. He tore it open slowly, somewhat amused. Inside were fifteen blank pages. On the last page of the booklet:

THE OLD KLAN WOODS, AUGUST 12, 11 P.M.

This deeply startled him with its explicit reference to the Southern history so many would like dead, or at least buried. He knew exactly where the woods were: just outside the city limits, past the bridge over the swamp and the strip club set against the purple evening horizon and miles of marsh; into the jungle of the beast of the Deep South, ever closer to the Florida glades; in the gap southwest, too, between here and New Orleans.

The highways out there tapered off to billboards bearing the Shroud of Turin and isolated private properties, cabins with shoot-on-sight threats against trespassers. It was, simply, a place you drove quickly through, trying not to dwell too long on just how much blood had been spilled by the generations that had seethed there.

The old Klan woods were, truly, the last place he was trying to go. He had no intention of encountering the bloody ground in person. Some kids had even found remnants of a burned white cross in a hollow out there just a few years back. Nobody went out there except, on occasion, the construction crews, pastors, senators, shopkeepers, and church revivalists who kept the tradition alive.

But he knew it was from Samatin. He placed the pamphlet on his desk. There was a difference in being called to something by someone you didn’t know—something you knew was also calling you. Fate, destiny, karma; there were plenty of names for it. The Life Bureau, the stamps, the hilarious authority of his position in the world—it all could wait, cease, disappear. Certifying babies. Certifying insurance. Certifying property analyses, civic ledgers.

He looked at this world and saw it dying through each name, number, and child born into it—living and dying a life totally dictated by bureaucracy, dogma, and desires it was convinced were its own. By the body, parents, teachers, institutions, culture. A shell of impressions and persecutions. He decided right then that he would go.

As the day approached, David felt increasingly wary. He hadn’t realized it at the time, but Samatin’s carnival was set for the day of a total solar eclipse. It would be seen in totality only over northern Russia, Greenland, Iceland, Spain, and a small corner of Portugal, but the event would remain astronomically intact—regardless of where you were in the world.

He packed a bag with a camera, some provisions, and a notebook; then stuck a hastily scrawled message on the door:

OUT INDEFINITELY.

4.

The tent held three people at best. A large, waving banner hung between two trees, lit by small yellow bulbs:

ENTER.

David considered muting his laugh at the absurdity of it, but it emerged naturally as a knowing smile. He stepped into the tent. Immediately, it was clear that he had entered something akin to a third space, or an astral zone. It had, simply, made clear what was already explicit beneath the barely suppressed cover of the real.

It was a campsite fairground. People passed him in all sorts of garish makeup—heaps of powder-white paint; deep red lips and cheeks. Clowns juggled bowling pins as kids stared in amazement and clapped with thoughtless amusement. David walked past a fire breather—just like the accounts said—and a group of whores, covered in hermetic tattoos, who whistled at him. One had a dragon breathing fire up her back, its tail coiling toward the nape of her neck. She puffed on a cigarette, her hair in a tight pixie cut, her eyes behind small, circular sunglasses.

“The name’s Daisy. And you are?”

“David. I’m here for the show… and, really, to have a talk with Samatin.”

“Samatin don’t talk to anybody unless they really wanna see him.”

“Suppose I do.”

“Then you must have an invitation, don’t you?”

He flashed her the unnecessarily empty pamphlet.

“It’s a shame you can’t stay here with us… but I can’t say I know where he is.”

David kept walking. An extremely small man waddled past, not taller than a house cat, being chased by a man who must’ve been at least seven feet tall—even before the stilts.

David began to ruminate as he passed a stray train car filled with opium smoke and laughter. This was clearly a metaphysical trick of time and space—an allowance for something else to glitter through. It wasn’t a coincidence that Samatin chose the old Klan woods; come to think of it, he always chose violent swamps. If he ever made it up north, David thought, the forests of Gettysburg would be all but guaranteed. It made sense… that Samatin needed to open a canal between time and space, a rift to allow some stray, strange form of creation to sift through. To allow what was real and always true to take hold in the world in a way that was phenomenologically clear. To create a portal in the everyday, revealing the archetypal body of the infinite through the prism of man and beast, stone, plant, and star.

Lost in thought, David bumped into a hard, large stomach.

“Lost?” it said.

“Maybe. What’s it to you?”

The face above the stomach glared.

“Nothing.”

The man revealed himself to be Alastair Gordon, the camp’s strongman.

“I was born into a family of Jews who escaped the pogroms. Took refuge with some Romani. Know Django Reinhardt? My grandpa played with him. Good guy. Loved his wine. Suppose we got a thing for caravans.”

David nodded, not knowing if any of this required a reply. Alastair was a huge man, something approaching six feet nine, with massive, oak-like hands; a stomach almost as wide as he was tall.

“I split redwoods for sixteen years to get this strong. Ever thrown axes?”

He picked up a comically large axe from beside his trailer.

“Nothing like that.”

Alastair threw the axe. It whipped on a horizontal axis, cutting clear through a large willow as the snake charmer one campsite over screamed in surprise, accompanied by hissing.

“Know anything about Samatin?”

“Do I? That’s my brother-in-law!”

“You must have quite a sister.”

“You’ll meet her.”

“How do you know?”

“She told me.”

He pointed toward a woman standing at the far edge of the clearing, beside the deep wood. She had bright red hair. David rubbed his eyes to get a better look; when he opened them again, it had changed to golden blonde. Again. To black. She whispered something. He strained to hear as she laughed and beckoned him into the darkness of the woods.

David looked back. Alastair smiled, waved with his huge palms, and turned toward the torches and bustle lighting the grounds. As David followed the woman, the convent of the woods returned.

5.

It was now dark and silent; the full blue moon above him bathed the trees in a revealed light. A full moon… during a total solar eclipse? And the trees were stripped of their leaves, naked, as in the dead of winter.

It must’ve been the tent… and a deeper movement within it. David weighed this. A deeper descent into the already rifted space. He hadn’t come back out into the regular woods, so to speak—he had gone deeper into the woods of Samatin’s conjuring.

He caught a glimpse of the woman. She was beautiful… with undeniable snakelike features. The slit of her pupil. Her teeth and tongue. Even from a distance, it was as though he could see the gills of her face; the leathery flecks of her skin. Hardened against the weather. And yet, she had the soft flesh of a human woman. It was a contradiction he couldn’t reconcile with appearances.

She turned and faced him.

“Yes?”

“Well…”

“What do you want? I’m here.”

“This is normally when I’d say something romantic.”

“We both know you’re not here for that.”

“I wasn’t before I arrived.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“I’ve heard that one before too.”

She laughed, then abruptly stopped, as though remembering her role, her part in a play.

“You’re here to see Samatin.”

“Aren’t you, too?”

“I’m not here by choice.”

“So you’re trapped?”

“That’s one way to put it.”

“Chained?”

“Better.”

“Better?”

“Clearer.”

“Why am I here?”

“The same reason we all are.”

“Is he who they say he is?”

“At the deepest level, yes. There is no Samatin.”

She turned to face the wilderness.

“You’ll have to go there.”

She pointed. There was a lone tombstone. They were now so far from any sign of life or civilization that David couldn’t imagine who could’ve possibly died there.

The tombstone said, simply:

HERE.

“You want me to dig?”

“Look behind it.”

Behind the tombstone was a staircase descending into the earth. David could see, around the first spiral turn, the dancing of a hidden flame.

“Can I trust him?”

“The better question is, ‘Should I trust him?’”

“Well, I was thinking you could give me a straight answer, considering you’re his wife and all.”

“Alastair told you that, didn’t he?”

“He might’ve.”

“Alastair doesn’t know the full extent of our relationship.”

“So you aren’t?”

“Not by choice.”

David took a scrap of paper out of his pocket, wrote down his phone number, and began to walk down the stairs.

6.

The stairs writhed through the earth. Increasingly hot, David took off his shirt. It was as though he were swimming toward the equator, then diving directly into a hot mass of air, water, and light.

As he descended, the stairs changed from metal to wood to stone. The railings bent, rotted, and disappeared. And the walls… they bore images. He saw paintings of the Civil War, the French Revolution, Japanese rebellion against the emperor… the Mongols besieging the Great Wall; penitent Tibetan monks and Aghori smeared in shit, holding skulls and bones; immolations; the Smashan Tara. Egyptian tombs, Seth, the weighing of the heart, ochre handprints smeared against the walls like blood… Was it blood? Then nothing.

Silence, fire, and shadow.

David descended for what felt like days. Thirst assailed him. Thoughtlessly, he stumbled down, down, down.

Until the depths belched him out.

And there, on a throne of stone at the base of the stairs, sat Samatin.

“You called?”

“I came.”

“You could have just said the devil.”

“It’s a tired game. A boring crowd.”

“I would’ve known you then.”

“Does it matter? Do you think I want to be known?”

Samatin stood. He was entirely nondescript.

“I’d miss you in a crowd.”

“You’d miss me anywhere. I am the crowd.”

“I met your wife.”

“Did she give you her number?”

“I wish.”

“Don’t we all.”

He sat back and laughed. His face and eyes shifted. For a moment, his hair was black and slick, then brown and curled. There was something Mesopotamian about his features, whereas minutes earlier they had been definitively Italian.

“Don’t you get tired of holding her captive?”

“She comes and goes as she pleases.”

“I mean in a metaphysical sense.”

“In that way, my sway extends far beyond the yoke of a common wife.”

“Let’s talk.”

“We are talking.”

“I mean about what’s at hand here. What’s at stake.”

“Who’s buying?”

“Everyone. All the time. And that’s why I want out.”

“Out is death. Buying your way out is just going deeper in.”

“That might be the first honest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Samatin looked at him, his eyes glowing like iron coals.

“So you see.”

“Enough.”

“Enough to what?”

“To know you’re the center of the maze. The burning core.”

“Yes, that is the prism of all my affairs.”

“So the world is in the throes of the devil.”

“Yes. The most religious are the most afflicted; the most prideful and powerful are the most puppeted.”

“And what about the most debased?”

Samatin looked at him, his eyes nearly downcast.

“They remind me of myself.”

“So you take pity on them?”

“Pity is the only emotion worth taking.”

“Not lust? Anger? Love?”

“I’ve found those to be selfish things.”

David looked at Samatin. Now he resembled an exhausted street urchin, a mill-working boy out of the old photographs of Lewis Hine.

“What about suffering?”

“You think I don’t suffer?”

“I think you are suffering.”

Samatin paused.

“Yes.”

“Why are we sitting in this miserable little room?”

“You think I’d be here if I had any say otherwise? I’d be in the stars. Or else rippling… with some majesty. How can I explain? Flesh in a box.”

“You are the limits of your world.”

“Look around, David. These are my limits.”

David realized he’d failed to examine the room. It was a small stone bedroom. He could see a teddy bear and a child’s blanket. There was a poster showing a night sky full of stars. Beneath the image, it said:

BELIEVE IN YOURSELF AND YOUR DREAMS.

David’s eyes began to fill with tears.

“So why are you holding us?”

“You think I chose that either? I’m the body. I’m the only thing there is to hold. Without me, there’s nothing.”

Samatin pressed his head into his hands.

“This isn’t going how I expected it to.”

“You expected some mystery? Some revelation?”

“Explain the tent. The freak show.”

“Illusions are easy. People see what they want to see. I just create the conditions for the theatre.”

“So you know Aeschylus?”

“Who doesn’t? Great writer.”

“How about Shelley?”

“We’re acquainted.”

David had to get to the heart of it, the root of it. Or was there even anything to get down to anymore?

“So what am I supposed to do?”

“Live with it.”

“What, these people? They’re insufferable.”

“Are they any different from you? Fallible, dying, collapsing. Like all things.”

“Do you die?”

“I am death.”

“But you’re still here.”

“Every time I die, I’m born again. I’m every mother’s child and every child’s corpse.”

“That’s a hard job.”

“There’s no pay other than wisdom.”

“Wise Prometheus.”

“Something like that. Men have come up with many different names to describe the same problem.”

“So I go back and just accept all of this?”

“What else is there?”

“Suppose I could stay in your camp.”

“There is no camp.”

“Alastair? The whores? The snake charmer?”

“All real.”

“So what did I see?”

“The truth beneath reality.”

“What is that?”

“Your recompense.”

7.

David climbed the stairs. There was no fire; there were no images. It was like returning from a cellar. The way beneath the tombstone was sealed by a wooden trapdoor. He opened it into the morning.

The drive back was long. There was no sign of the campsite, Alastair, or Samatin’s wife. David didn’t care whether any of it was a memory or a dream. All he cared about was sleep.

---

THE GREEN SNAKE

He watched them in the park and sneered. The saccharine pink dresses, covering up the stench of inner psychic corruption. Didier wiped his face with a handkerchief. A sweltering summer. Water hanging in the air; the wavering haze of heat, lifting the image of the leaves as it danced before his gaze.

Couples held hands in the evening, descending sunlight. Didier saw one pair step thoughtlessly on a beetle, leaving a smeared yellow-purple corpse in the cement. He looked at the pair as the male smiled dumbly in the woman’s eyes, as she fidgeted with her wedding ring. He knew right then and there that neither of them would have the capacity, nonetheless the courage, to do the right thing unless they saw how it explicitly benefited themselves. Not even to one another.

Didier sighed, pocketing the kerchief; checking his watch. 7:32. Just before the sun would crash into the river, filled with tugboat sludge and deer corpses. He was tired. It was another day of useless labor to feed his body; counting sheathes of lumber on parchment to pass to foremen who did work — far away from his desk.

The girls danced, jumping up and down gleefully by the fountain; taking pictures. A few of them looked over at him with erotic curiosity. He walked past, filtering them out of the corner of his eye.

This was his ritual, to walk down to the river, catching the last light as cicadas screamed. The thick of the summer, molten against his skin — not even air. Flaming hot body of water, the air itself a transparent figure, a real mass. His breath fought against the harsh humidity. It was jungle weather — weather where you swat mosquitos and carve through relics of an ancient time: reptile shadows of a beastly nature.

The men sleeked by, wearing wraparound glasses which obscured the upper portions of their faces with reflective sheen. The women, in their skirts, milling about in packs. Some holding hands with confused men. Now that he had her, he simply didn’t know what to do with her beyond the point of basic physical consummation.

Didier’s consciousness was shattered. Perhaps by opium, perhaps by drink. Perhaps simply by sun exposure on a foreign island, surrounded by Komodo dragons and too much time to think. The women, the men, the bookstores… they were all translucent. Like a tired game. Too tired…

This world was a sickly green to be swallowed. That would swallow him; everything. Drunk on themselves. Their own blood. Didier stumbled over a lifted crack in the pavement as an old couple leered at him with jealous eyes. He understood why they so desperately needed religions. To prevent them from themselves. Out of the cracks of the books of ideology seethed the animals they so urgently attempted to suppress and deny.

The river was close now; the air shifted. Lighter, like the weight of the water in it was being drawn to a deeper well, a deeper source. He craved the rippling of the waves. Their geometry soothed him amidst the chaos of human affairs; the chittering alarm of the squirrels, the mad dash of the cicadas as they mated and died. The whole animal world was exploding with one primary symbolic expression — lust — in the savage yell. Throwing themselves into bodies as they screamed into death. So quickly.

By the river, there was a string of bars. Pedestrians and tourists littered the riverwalk, in some combination of awe, confusion, and just pure lostness. Didier sidestepped a young couple as they attempted to take a picture against the railing. He smiled. The young man and his girlfriend reminded him of Kali. They were in love. Didier said, “I’ll take one, but you have to kiss her.” They hugged each other tightly as Didier flashed the lens. The young man thanked him kindly.

The smile lingered on Didier’s lips as he stared at the calm, lashing waves. They beat against one another and dispersed in a gurgling silence, traveling down under the bridge and disappearing into the now-violently orange-purple streaked horizon. A few tugboats lingered under it, as cars rushed past into the distant eastern marsh. He sighed. And then he saw her.

A woman — he only saw the side of her face at first, in a booth with a velvet curtain on it. Clearly imported. Her cheek had a long black scar on it… a wound long since “healed”, however poorly the term implied. She was animated, frantically shaking her hands at a man in a suit, as he shook his head at her then walked away. Didier was intrigued. She was beautiful, yes, and perhaps that was her sole appeal… but the scar. And then Didier saw the snake. Long, lime green, its back littered with black and red gems, glistening in the twilight. He hurriedly approached the booth.

“What is this?”

“Who’s asking? You a cop?”

“Not usually.”

“Yes or no.”

“What are you selling?”

“Dreams, pictures with the snake, you name it. If I don’t have it here, suppose I can get it for you.”

“What’s its name?”

“Paolo.”

“And yours?”

“Marguerite.”

She slowly revealed that she was French by way of Brazil; her parents had frantically migrated due to some vague persecution in the mid century. She wouldn’t specify when he pressed.

“So you buying or what?”

“What’s on offer?”

“You’re clearly a man of dreams.”

“Fulfilled or denied?”

“Who’s to say but you.”

“They tend to be suspended between two points.”

“Aren’t we all.”

“Are you busy tonight?”

“Who’s asking?”

“A man of dreams.”

“Yes and no.”

“So you’ll go.”

“Yes.”

Didier stood there as she smiled. The snake politely hissed. Behind her, the sun dipped into the water like a bright iron. It was almost as if smoke was rising up from the winding tail of the river itself, as the ore was lowered into it by the blacksmith’s hand of night.

Her face turned, almost twisted up in its own features, as if it was attempting to express something beyond its nature.

“Mister, you know we’re not going anywhere right?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, suppose I sell you this. We go out to dinner, you pay my bill — in a manner of speaking — and what’s next? How many more dreams will I have to sell you?”

Didier considered this question, rolling it about on his tongue. Her eyes sparkled, blue-green, like the snake’s body darkened and was thrown in the mixture of the river water. A paint.

“How many are you?”

“Mister, I’m no dream. I’m just a girl selling snake venom. It’s twenty dollars a picture with the snake.”

She jingled a couple glass vials together between her fingers. The snake leered. The sun was now glowering, drowned in the river but for a fiery orange cap. Rapid light dispersed like a last flare for safety.

“So you won’t play.”

“I can’t.”

“Why’s that?”

“It’s more important than you realize.”

She clutched her chest, almost agonizingly.

“You fear, what… death, me?”

“I’m afraid… of the serpent taking control”

The snake appeared to smile. It was now dark, but for the blue stars and the lamplight. Didier heard drunken laughter and a bottle smash from one of the nearby barfronts.

“I’m sorry, you said ‘taking control’?”

“I fear this life isn’t mine. By the way, I do fortunes. Ten bucks a fortune. I’ll tell you.”

“Maybe later. Tell me.”

Didier was too deep into this conversation. He needed to understand. This girl knew something the others didn’t.

Her face continued to bunch up and contort. He could hardly recognize her. It was like she was trying to spit something unrecognizable up from the bucket of her stomach.

“I’m being used, mister. I know it. I just can’t stop it.”

“Used for what?”

“A child, a toy. I’m a marionette. Upon a string. Men look at me. Women leer. And what’s worse, I don’t get paid for none of it.”

Didier was starting to see her more clearly. She had a slight gap in her front teeth; a bit of acne. The way she moved her body and hands, he could tell she came from a lack of formal education.

“Do you read?”

“A newspaper here and there.”

“Suppose you could get out?”

“There’s a way?”

“Christian?”

“Yes sir, I go to church.”

She appeared to him as a small girl.

“You believe in Jesus?”

“Yes sir. You trying to sell me on it?”

“I’m trying to determine your constitution.”

She smiled and fingered a small silver cross necklace.

“You think I can be saved?”

“Saved from what?”

She stuttered and looked down for a beat.

“I suppose… myself.”

“You’re a sinner?”

We all are, mister. We’re fallen. We’re guilty. We need to be saved.”

The snake had coiled into a penitent position. Didier put his hand on her shoulder.

“You’re learning.”

“Learning what?”

“How to not be controlled. By anything. Nonetheless an ancient thing.”

She looked up, half distrusting, with a happiness on her eyelids.

“Suppose it’s true?”

“Suppose it is.”

“Does that mean we go to dinner?”

“It does and it doesn’t.”

He shook her hand; she waved to him as he walked off toward the pier. He turned back once; saw her and the booth crowd with blue darkness. He sat for awhile, then walked home.

---

EURIPEDES

“You’re watching the joke. You either laugh or cry.”

Conor looked up from putting on his white makeup in the dressing room. The light was an ugly yellow-white fluorescence.

“A little heavy for before the show isn’t it?”

“Whatever. You never read Euripides?”

“It’s a traveling band for kids.”

They were putting on a clown show for a group of little students in an empty cornfield in Petrograd. The trailer shook a bit in the wind.

“Why are we here again?”

“Money.”

“Nothing else?”

“Not that I can remember.”

Conor’s theatrical partner, Katy, put on her nose.

“You ready?”

“I think so.”

They went out on their makeshift wooden stage, unloaded from the wagon on the back of their truck; hit each other over the head with foam bats a couple of times, made faces with their fingers and teeth; employed a variety of diverse Whoopee cushion solutions. The kids roared. As the sun began to set, their parents ushered them away; thanking the duo, the show tapered and curtained.

“Well.”

“Well done.”

“Now we sit here?”

“Moscow next.”

“Not too soon.”

Katy went to remove her makeup with a transparent solution.

“Care to make a joke?”

“Which one?”

“The one about the horse.”

“That’s from so long ago. Did you forget?”

“Enough that it will make me laugh again.”

The room went a bit blue with melancholy. Conor could feel it seeping into his pores.

“Katy — is there really a line between comedy and tragedy?”

“It’s so thin you could barely see it.”

Katy looked ninety instead of twenty-three.

“Aren’t we too young to be having this conversation?”

“There’s only seen too little and seen too much in this world.”

“And we’re the latter?”

“Yes.”

“So what’s the line then.”

“It’s the eye.”

Conor considered this.

“Something like the dance of death?”

“You could call it the dance of life.”

“Dancing and writhing. What’s the space between?”

“How you see it with the eye.”

The field around the trailer settled with fireflies; the Milky Way in the sky about them opened like a womb cave. Crickets shuddered; stalks bent in the wind, moaning slightly.

“Hear that?”

“What?”

“That’s music. The whole thing.”

Conor pressed his ear up to the trailer door.

“And?”

“And you get used to the song. But can you still hear it? Especially the breaks. When the carnival ceases and the sky lets up. There’s something religious to it.”

“Religare. To bind.”

“We won’t stay here. But we also won’t ‘go there’ so to speak. The world is a slow dispersion.”

“How did we end up as clowns?”

“For the money.”

Katy and Conor settled into a slow silence as the night wound its path through their part of the world. Conor laid his hand on his face and dozed off intermittently. Katy began knitting.

“See, Conor — this is the world — like a net of threads of fate. Pull one, it shakes the others. They work together.”

“Sure. What’s my fate?”

“We don’t know where the string ends. But we can begin to understand where it’s going by observing where it came from.”

Conor opened the door to the trailer and looked up.

“The comedy of the gods?”

“Something like that. Higher than comedy and tragedy though, there’s a third thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Reason.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t… strictly speaking. But I’ve got a pretty good feeling for it.”

“God?”

“The word is a force of being. You choose.”

“So how can we resolve this?”

“We play our part.”

Katy continued knitting as Conor shut the door.

“Part to what?”

“The theatre of ancient stone. We walked in screaming. We wake up slowly. And if we wake up soon enough, deeply enough, we realize we all have a part to play here.”

“Play it well, and what?”

Katy looked at him.

“I don’t know. What reward is an actor’s role well done?”

“Money?”

Katy laughed.

“Sure. Anything else?”

“The joy of the play itself?”

“Yes. Who knows where the direction comes from? Or where it’s going? But we know… we can feel the call.”

Conor sat up.

“Call to where?”

Katy put the knitting down.

“To life. In our own way. Comedy then is the tragic laughing. Tragedy is the comic crying. But above all; beyond the absurd, is the order that we may never truly, fully understand. And if we can content ourselves with our allotment, our role, our fate in the grand order and play, we have a great measure of peace. Our life in the design.”

“So why aren’t we doing some kind of evolved Greek theatre?”

Katy laughed again.

“Why do you think? Money!”

The next morning, all that was left of the trailer was a rusty spoon and a few stray tire marks.

---

Pok-Ta-Pok

The ball whizzed past the catcher’s mitt.

“Geez Tom, slow it down! We’re two hours from game time!”

Tom grinned. He had the hardest fastball this side of the Adirondack Mountains, and he only needed two or three pitches to bring it up to speed. The Indianapolis Clowns were playing the Kansas City Monarchs in an exhibition game at Yankee Stadium, and the sun was burying its descent down from noonday height.

His catcher was Jim Grant, twenty-three years old, recruited by the Cleveland Indians for a cup of coffee as a Brazilian immigrant before the rest of the league caught on and shut the operation down. He was light-skinned; his mother said his grandfather likely owned slaves. Nobody talked much about it.

Another pitch — slamming into Grant’s mitt with a puff of dust. Jim coughed.

“Tom, you’re ready for the big time, there’s no doubt about it!”

Tom had been pitching in the Negro Leagues since Rube Foster had formed them in 1920, in a YMCA in Kansas City. He was now nearing old age, but his fastball still hadn’t changed. He knew everyone from Pete Hill to Buck Leonard. And they all had nothing to say but, WOW! as the ball zoomed past.

Tom’s jersey rippled in the wind as he thought about Adelaide. He’d caught her drinking with Josh, his old catcher after last night’s game. The track marks were still fresh on her arms. He gripped the ball tighter, his knuckles swelling against the flesh-seams. Two seamer or four this time? Jim grinned, and put one finger down, clubbing the mitt with his fist.

Tom Moses was taught how to pitch by the legend Satchel Paige, his first teammate. Word was that Bill Veeck, the eccentric who ran the Indians, wanted Satchel — and he wasn’t messing around. Satch was on the Monarchs now; he eagerly looked around for old Paige’s arrival in a shiny black town car, coming as he always did — dressed in a full suit and hat, with shined shoes. With flair.

He reared back, fist and glove overhead, rocking against the hard white rubber with his cleat. His front leg tore through space; his back one clipping the dirt with a fury that knocked it all about. Painting the outside black. Jim shook his glove hand in pain.

“Nice!”

Tom knew Josh was falling apart; nearing the end of his career, perhaps the end of his life. He’d gained weight; fallen deeper and deeper into addiction. He always said he was fine; kept on that big child-like smile, the kid who loved ice cream. But deep down, Tom knew the death of his wife and a career without ever seeing the big league field was tearing at him — now worse than ever as age and child-rearing duties crept up on him like a formless shadow. Josh was fighting two griefs: the game and the girl who changed his life. He didn’t know how to help him get back up.

And it didn’t help that Adelaide was now involved. She fell in with Josh hard, commiserating. She and Tom had been together on and off, back when he was with Josh and the Crawfords ten years ago. She was still working at that same Pittsburgh diner, her apron smeared in bacon grease and ketchup. Ten years gone… and she’d still come home and collapse on the same, threadbare blue couch; put on the radio to the station that always played Kid Ory and Ma Rainey; shoot up. She started drinking when she was just a girl, moving with the older boys and even some grown men for a couple extra bucks. Her parents were dirt poor — Louisiana sharecroppers who moved up north for a piece of the steel boom. But in Pittsburgh, you could barely see where you were walking most days. The factory smoke put you right down into a living dream. Except your lungs could feel the dream burn.

“Tom — that’s it.”

Jim’s voice shook Moses awake from his live thought.

“It’s time to pack it in for an hour. I’m going to clean my cleats and sit and think for a bit. Hey, I heard the Duke is coming tonight!”

Tom perked up. Maybe he’d even get to pitch to Duke Ellington. Maybe he’d learn some tips on how to swing on the kit.

Jim ran back to the dugout; Tom decided to head outside the stadium to see if he could catch Satchel as he turned up. Through the players’ entrance; out into the street. There was a game of stickball going on, some Italian kids and a couple black children. All throughout the first couple years of the forties, Tom could feel a change brewing. Not just in the country, but in baseball too… and perhaps in the country because of it. The war had everyone thinking differently about race relations. Black soldiers fighting alongside white ones; army games played with integrated ball-clubs. The cry for integration was growing louder. Everyone from the Senators in Washington to the Dodgers in Brooklyn wanted to be the first squad to break through. But they were all too afraid to take the first step. Tom knew that Satch and Josh were waiting for the call with long ears. He was too. If he could play anywhere… he’d love to play for the Giants. The old Polo Grounds — he’d be a Hall of Famer there. Have the outfielders crowd center and throw a couple hot ones down the middle. Dare ‘em to hit it five hundred feet out. Good luck!

Moses was so in his head that he barely noticed the man sitting right next to him, slumped over by the players’ entrance with a cardboard sign, his head down; a bowler cap obscuring his face in the now tilting sun. It cast large shadows across the tenements that opposed the park.

“Hey fella. Need a quarter?”

The man looked up. Tom nearly jumped out of his skin. The man’s face was green… or was it painted green?

The man stuttered, slurring something under his breath.

“Speak up fella. You alright?”

The man’s voice finally emerged.

“Son, if I needed a quarter I would ask. Some things money don’t cure.”

Tom decided to dig.

“Whatcha mean?”

“You wanna hear about it, do ya?”

And so the green man told Tom. He was from a family of farmers knocked out by the Dust Bowl in Arkansas when he was just nine years old. He said he knew Dizzy Dean and he’d been in vaudeville since; been a hobo riding rail cars; survived breaking kneecaps for mobsters in the Italian quarter. They took payment in lunchmeat and crisp twenties. He wasn’t Italian. Now, Clarence, or so the man wanted to be called, was now working at a theatre down the road. He said they put on plays.

“What kind?”

“Not the kind you wanna be involved in.”

“Why’s that?”

“They’re real.”

“Well how can a play be real?”

“See… the director writes it and we act it out. It ain’t like we don’t got no say, but the rules come from the higher ups. He says we’re up there too, like we’re in on the orders before we came down. But now they’ve got me played. The green man in some ballet! I hate the ballet. Worst of all they sing. Sorta like showtunes, but with an edge. Ever heard of Skip James? Skip James in a ballet? Pah! Never I say. Never in my days. Some say the director makes the clouds…”

Tom had to interrupt. The sun was rapidly setting; the game was set to begin. Playing under lights at Yankee Stadium was no joke. The Clowns took warmups seriously, even named as they were.

“Fella, who’s the director? Tell ya what. I’ll come to the show. When’s the next one?”

“Tonight Tom. Ten thirty sharp. Say, even bring Jim.”

Tom hadn’t told the man his name, nonetheless mentioned Jim.

“How do you know my name? How do you know Jim?”

“Say, I might follow the game son. Or I might know someone who does.”

The man was now smiling as he stood up.

“I’ve done my part. Now you get to do yours.”

He tipped his cap, and set off whistling down the street.

Tom was astonished. And with so many questions, he set into the stadium to pitch.

He’d never been better. His two and four seams were both working like a light — the two seam dipped like one of Rube’s screwballs; the four seam was straight as an arrow, popping Jim’s mitt like a buckshot. Six innings in, and Tom hadn’t allowed a single baserunner. With Jackie Robinson coming up to the plate and two outs, Jim trotted out to the mound on a time out.

“Tom, whaddya say! I’ve never seen you so locked in.”

“Get back behind the plate Jim. Make a play will ya?”

As Jim trotted back, the crowd roared. The stadium was nearly full. Tom glanced around. He could clearly see black newspapermen sitting next to a couple of white stockbrokers. The world is changing, he thought to himself. He caught the time on the stadium board: eight twenty-six. He’d have to be quick to catch a shower and a plate of pasta before the show.

Robinson struck out swinging. The crowd was in a frenzy. Moses was perfect through six. Nine outs later, and he’d only allowed two walks — one to Jackie and a hit by pitch on old Ted Radcliffe. The team mobbed him on the mound as he whiffed Hilton Smith for the final out. Jim shouted in his ear.

“Whaddya say Tom! No-hit ball! One in a million I tell ya!”

Tom smiled. It was. Only his second no hitter. He thought back to his early days on the Mobile Tigers with Satchel, where Satch taught him the windup; how to get a batter to whiff by loading up your fastball on a rocking delivery. That was his first no hitter. Age fifteen. It had taken him exactly twenty years to throw another one.

Tom hit the showers fast, even as his teammates wouldn’t leave him a second.

“Attaboy Tom!” “You had Jackie on his heels!” “Heard the Yanks are making a call tonight!” “Rickey’s on the phone for you now!”

Everyone had the big leagues on their mind. Big leagues, big paycheck.

As soon as the hot water hit Tom’s face Adelaide flashed before him. Late nights in her apartment room, in the top floor of the factory apartments. A sole lamp lighting her window. The Bessie Smith records playing slow and scratching on her old machine. Addie touching his face. The drugs.

He splashed himself with water.

Is that what happened with the green man? He thought to himself… a flashback? Addie and Tom had taken so many different types of drugs together. Pills, uppers, downers, something from a Peruvian jungle a shadowy man had given her as he passed through town. Some sort of flower. Tom still didn’t know what the hell a sherpa meant. Or what they did up in those mountains with corn. And whatever that flower was.

He fixed up his suit and was about to walk out of the locker room when it hit him. Satchel never showed for the game. Hilton Smith had pitched a helluva nine against him, only allowing two runs, one on an RBI single by Jim which knocked Tom in himself — having drawn a walk just two batters before. But no Satchel. Tom sat on this thought for a moment, then turned out the lights in the locker room as he left.

Moses looked at the scrap of paper the green man had shoved in his hands as he left:

113 RUE MORGUE AVENUE

Useless. Rue Morgue? What is this? Paris? A maze? And who names a street after death?

Tom had no idea where to start. He looked left and right. He only came to New York once every couple of months — usually to pitch at Yankee Stadium thanks to the deal Bojangles had with old Ed Barrow and the Yanks. He was lost but for the bar two blocks down, and the hotel they usually stayed at. Blacks only.

Tom decided to start at the bar. He ambled over, passing two Yiddish women selling hot cakes and shouting in a language he didn’t understand. The bar was called Unremarkable; they hosted hot jazz quartets semi-regularly, when players like Parker and Monk got tired of playing in the Village; wanted a new crowd. Tom ducked his head under the bell as he stepped inside.

The mahogany bar was pretty empty, this still being early on a Thursday night. A couple foremen and what looked like a tired bellhop sat on the back end of the bar, nursing glass bottles of beer. The foremen chatted amicably in their work clothes, but the bellhop slumped, his face against the bottle. Tom approached the barkeep, who had a white towel over his shoulder, and a large, black mustache.

“Glass of beer?”

“Directions, if I can.”

“Let me see what I can do.”

The barkeep examined the piece of paper Tom handed him.

“Where’d you get this?”

“None of your business.”

“Then your directions are none of mine.”

Tom thought back to what the green man had said about roles. And how his face had changed. So suddenly… from sorrow to ecstatic gladness. He had played his part, he said.

Tom decided another trick.

“What if I told you the director gave them to me?”

The barkeep’s ears perked. The room got silent. The foremen glanced over, almost angrily. The bellhop abruptly jumped in his seat, suddenly alert.

Tom looked around and checked his watch. The span of ten seconds resumed the world turning. The actors returned to their positions. The barkeep leaned over, his mustache practically grazing Tom’s left ear.

“You should keep quieter about these things.”

“So where’s the theatre?”

“It’s less of a theatre. More of a room. You’ll see.”

The barkeep then leaned back to his side of the bar and wrote something on the inverse of the green man’s paper with a fountain pen, handing the finished copy back to Moses.

“You’ll need this.”

Tom thanked him and left.

In the darkness, Tom stepped under streetlamp light to read what the barkeep had written:

JUST KEEP WALKING.

So without a second thought, Tom set off.

He passed all sorts of stray affairs. Women arguing with men out brownstone windows, throwing clothes. One even threw a radio; it smashed against the cement. A group of factory men, with dirt on their faces, huddled around a dice game. He passed. Six sixes. The men hollered, exchanging five cent pieces.

He turned a corner. Immediately, he knew he’d stumbled into something. There was a lion in a cage; a ringmaster, who was leaned over the cage, seemingly speaking to the lion in a hushed tone. His back was to Tom. It was an alley; stray trash cans spilled out all over the ground. Banana peels, leftovers, crumpled newspapers. Tom stepped over one:

RICKEY DECLARES INTEGRATION IMMINENT. BLACK SOLDIERS — BLACK BALLPLAYERS?

The ringmaster turned to face him.

“I expected another green face.”

“Are we supposed to all wear masks?”

“Where am I going?”

“Wherever you need to go.”

“That doesn’t help.”

“Carnival, theatre, burlesque, vaudeville, circus… what’s your act?”

“Ballplayer.”

“Screwball?”

“The way Rube taught it.”

“Better than Mathewson?”

“I like to let it speak for itself.”

The ringmaster grinned.

“You know we all like to put on costumes here too. It’s easier than just walking around like a regular human being.”

Tom had never thought about it like this, but he had to agree. He might’ve even made more money in steel if he’d stayed in Pittsburgh with Adelaide and Josh. But he couldn’t stand being a working stiff.

“I was told there was a show tonight.”

Moses handed the ringmaster the slip of paper. The lion pawed at the cage door. Its eyes gleamed in the moonlight.

“Ah, yes. The director’s show. He likes to be a little more… conspicuous when he works in the theatre. Out here, we’re playing music. In there, he’s showing you his hand.”

“I won’t even bother to ask you what that means.”

“You’re learning.”

The ringmaster tucked the slip in his front coat pocket with a white glove.

“I’ll keep this. You can call it your ticket inside. There’s the door.”

He pointed, with a crooked, skeletal finger toward a small, black wooden door at the end of the alley. Tom could barely make it out in the dim light.

“I’m supposed to fit through that?”

The door was about as tall as a three year old child.

“Just go.”

Tom was getting the message. He walked up to the door; as he walked, the door grew. By the time he reached the brass knob, his six foot four frame comfortably fit under the head jamb.

Inside was, as the barkeep put it, nothing but a black box. Roughly the size of somebody’s bedroom, but shaped like a perfect cube. The dimensions were uncanny. Each wall, the floor, and the ceiling were all a perfect square. Tom immediately got the feeling he was somewhere he shouldn’t be and somewhere he was supposed to find all along at the same time. In the back left corner, he saw a figure hunched over in the shadows under a kitchen table.

“Who’s there?”

“I could ask you the same thing,” the figure answered.

Tom had had about enough of the mystery. He was beginning to frighten.

“Just answer the question. I’m tired of the games.”

“I’m here for the same reason you are.”

The figure stood up. He was long, tall, and covered in white paint. All across his body were strange ritual marks, like hieroglyphs. They were all painted in red with a fine brush. The man was a walking script.

“What’s with you people and the paint?”

“We’re not from here… nonetheless from now, so to speak.”

“So why are you here?”

“The same reason you are. Barnstorming.”

Suddenly, the lights of the theatre flashed from above. Bright yellow bulbs lit and glared all across the square ring of the ceiling. It gave the room the abrupt appearance of a cage. It started to rain. Tom hurriedly pulled his suit-coat over his head.

“Can you turn that off?”

“It’s the director. He’ll turn it off when he decides it’s time.”

The rain turned to hail; lightning began to flash. The figure, or the creature, whatever it was, ran to hide back under the table. Tom yelled over what had now immediately become a gale force wind, emerging from who knows where:

“HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN HERE?”

The figure screamed back:

“BEFORE BIRTH WAS BORN.”

The lightning cracked even louder. Tom turned the knob on the door but his hand kept slipping. Locked. Or was it just too wet to open? The room began to fill with water.

And as suddenly as it started, the storm stopped.

Ankle deep in floodwater, the figure stood back up, brushing rain off his arms. As Tom looked closer, he was covered in fur.

“What are you, exactly?”

“Nothing in particular.”

“None of this helps.”

“Is it supposed to?”

The figure extended a hand.

“My name’s Alihu.”

“Like spinach?”

“Like the thing that eats it.”

Tom extended his hand back.

“Tom Moses. Starting pitcher.”

“You never come in relief?”

“Not if I can help it. I try to pitch all nine.”

The creature smiled.

“You know Satchel Paige?”

Tom smiled back.

“Fella, do I ever.”

---

THE DINOSAUR GENOME

“There has to be some plesiosaur in this. Maybe old carnivorous bird.”

Lisa Gargon adjusted her glasses. She had been chief researcher at the Knell Institute for the past fifteen years. She was examining an early Paleolith genome. Proto human.

Bob peered over her shoulder.

“Definitely Theropoda. See the chain?”

Bob Lemon was a geologist. He shouldn’t be in the room.

Lisa glared.

“Bob, the only thing we have in common is stars.”

“And seeing as we have stars in common, how’s about we talk cosmic microwave background over burgers this Friday?”

Lisa scoffed.

“I’m busy, Bob. You know we’re trying to solve a serious problem. My weekends are clean booked.”

Lisa had been working weekends and nights for two months. She felt they were getting ever closer to cracking the human genome problem. The Knell Institute was founded by Nome Knell, a philanthropist who had made ten trillion dollars off the AI boom back in 2035. He’d found a way to manufacture singularity, then import it into the human mind via chip. It was a massive success, then a catastrophic disaster. Millions died when the chips began to melt six to eight months after implant. Humanity experienced a brief spike in the global IQ. Cross continental top-speed rails were built. New ecological initiatives were accorded — to reconstruct the dilapidated ozone layer. Two years later, it was all gone. There was no one to lead, nonetheless maintain it. It was like human-kind had woken up, then went right back to sleep. Nome got in at the top, and got out before anyone could notice, nonetheless prosecute. He was one of the lead researchers of the global initiative; they paid him handsomely.

After it all fell apart, Nome devoted himself to the one known truth, elevating the human genome to new heights. Understanding Newton. Galileo. Socrates. And tracing it all the way back to the source. Wherever it came from. And now Lisa, after fifteen years of being his prize catch, had synthesized it. She was between the dinosaur and the star. Buried in the human body. Just before Nome died, at the beginning of the year, he had whispered in her ear:

“Lisa… the code… it’s a recipe… for…”

She paid him almost no mind. He was an artificial intelligence researcher. He worked with symbolic recursion. And yet…

She’d been into hieroglyphs at Keller Polytechnic as a graduate student. Just as a side project while she received her degree in advanced genetic systems. Sometimes she’d dream about them. A long hallway, in Giza. Nothing in the archaeological uncoverings or manifolds. It was too long, abnormally long. She’d trace her fingers across the scenes. The Duat. The underworld boats. The dismembering of Osiris.

Every time, she’d turn around and barely stifle a scream. Ammit was right behind her, holding a lamp.

“Look here,” Ammit would say. She pointed to her chimeric chest; ripped a tooth out of her crocodile mouth. With the tooth, she carved open her chest. Lisa would gaze in horror — each time, for the first time. Out of it she drew a ball of light. Then Lisa would wake up.

She couldn’t get a sense for what was beneath the ore. She worked nonstop. The dream was the key. She knew it. Marco, her partner, would try to calm her after every dream. She’d be screaming and tearing at the skin on her breast. He started by bringing water; at a certain point she just decided it would be more merciful to banish him to the downstairs couch. She understood that the lived sensation of the dream itself would open the world to her. The book of knowledge was in the experience that was submerged in the depths of her psyche; her mind, her soma.

It was that night that Lisa was awake. Far too awake, for far too long. The lab stayed open all night for her — Nome’s last agenda made sure of it. In his words:

“Supply Lisa with the resources. At all costs.”

So the guards would stay late, and the lights would stay on.

Lisa worked, her papers strewn everywhere. Too late into the night, she’d start writing in hieroglyphs on accident. It was like something else took over. And tonight, she accidentally finished a manuscript. She couldn’t even understand the words.

“Here… it looks like a gate. And this one, like a gem in a tomb.”

She pored over her work, using ancient scripts to roughly match the symbols. She was speaking a language, back into something she could not contemplate, or know with the conscious, logical, or rational mind. Something ancient was uttering through her; using the oldest symbolic terms outside of Lascaux in order to do so.

“And here…”

Lisa’s words trailed off. The laboratory seemed to fade. She was between zones of consciousness. Her brain waves began to flatline. She knew this state. Delta, and Theta. She drifted, far from the maps of science. Into a desert. And before a desert, winds blowing over a tattered flag; beside it an old skull. She saw before her a black mirror made of stone.

She picked it up; in the mirror, she saw herself — a leathery, cracked snout of old flesh. Impossibly old, inhuman. An ancient lizard. She opened her long mouth; her teeth shone. Some diseased, some still with bits of torn flesh between them. Was it bison? Human?

All about her were strewn bodies, like cloaks, or clothing in a child’s room. Lions’ skin. Antelope masks, faces. There was no blood. Just empty shells, husks. She touched them. The flesh was real. But there was nothing in it.

“Who are you,” said the loud voice.

Lisa, started:

“I’m me.”

“Good enough answer.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m the star.”

She gazed upward.

“Funny.”

“I can’t see you.”

“I’m between bodies at the moment.”

She gazed all around her. There was an obscene pile of skulls. Carrion picked at the ivory eyes, but they were already clean.

“Why is there no blood?”

“I ate it all.”

“Why?”

“To be reborn again.”

Lisa didn’t like this part. In fact, she didn’t like the whole thing.

“How do I get out of here?”

“Don’t you want to know?” said the star.

Lisa contemplated.

“I can’t figure this out with science, can I?”

“You’d have to go far enough back. You’re tracing a light that you can’t find the source of. What do you know of the beginning?”

Lisa pondered this. There was still little they knew about the creation of the universe. The first moment of thermal generation. From there, it was all a matter of heat in spaces, pockets; cascading down funnels of dimensional spaces. Tide pools. Cellular forms. Galaxies. Tadpoles. Apes. Sophisticated nervous systems. Spinal genetics.

“Stop thinking.”

Lisa gazed at the star. She could see it now — it was a faint outline in the air, like a twinkling in the very figure of the wind. Almost like a figure, but not enough to be discernible. Faintly like a man, maybe something standing on two legs. Maybe not.

“Do you have any real form?”

The star laughed.

“Real? There is no ‘real form’. There is only everything that appears to be. Like wax dolls. Until I melt them with my tongue.”

Lisa could swear she saw the star stick out its tongue. Were there tastebuds on it?

“Funny.”

“Who said stars can’t have a sense of humor? We’re a lot like you, you know.”

“Bound to the same laws?”

The star shuddered.

“I can see everything that’s passed down through you. Aeons of dead flesh, recombinated, rebuilt. In a heat system chained to a quick death. Why would I want that? I’d much rather stay up here.”

“No body,” Lisa said.

“That’s my name! Don’t wear it out.”

She began to tire of speaking to a star, and sat down on the sandy ground. Her legs and bottom began to sink slowly into the splitting particles.

“Wanna hear a joke?”

Lisa didn’t want to hear a joke. She began to piece it together. Was it all just a farce? How could she trace the human being back to the central fire, the first fire? Is there even a difference? The divisions began to feel painfully artificial. She felt vulnerable, like she was as an undergraduate student in her first astrophysics class. She felt ill equipped, with all of her chemical block and strand drive knowledge. She was so shallow, in a subject so deep. And yet they had developed this whole system, this machination — to play with creation like a toy. To try to alter it, twist it. She got the sense that the history was just a necessary evolutionary process. And that the star, annoying as it was, knew more than she did. In that the star itself was much closer to the beginning than she was.

“Sure,” Lisa said.

“I forgot.”

The star was frivolous. All about it were strewn dead bodies. And yet all this conversation was a series of bad jokes. Lisa decided to pivot. Maybe this was the point? The star is like a child, endlessly shedding bodies. That this origin is hiding beneath a series of masks, costumes, gradations of flesh and complexity. And the complexity itself is the idiocy. It’s the foolishness. The trick existence is playing on itself. And behind it all, something so bare, fundamental, foolish, and irreverent. Lisa wished she’d been a poet. Science felt like a dead game. Put the scalpel down, she reminded herself in her mind’s notebook.

“Not funny.”

“It was to me.”

The star audibly pouted.

“Know any games? You’re like a child anyway.”

“Criss-cross applesauce. Pick-up sticks. Ever trade baseball cards? I’ve got a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle.”

Lisa’s eyes lit up.

“That’s an impossible card!”

“Damn right it is. Worth more than your house!”

“It’s in that good condition?”

“You bet!”

“Also, you shouldn’t be saying damn, considering you’re a child and all.”

“But you just said it!”

“But I’m an adult.”

The star cried.

“Not fair!”

“Yes fair,” said Lisa.

She was arguing with a star.

“I’m not a baby anymore! I’m fourteen and a half billion years old!”

“That’s still a teenager,” Lisa said.

“I suppose you’re right,” said the star.

Lisa held out her hand.

“Let’s be friends?”

“Ok. Wanna see my secret hideout?”

“Sure,” Lisa said.

The star ran off, extremely fast.

“Slow down! I can’t move in light years. I’m in a human body.”

“Right,” said the star, slowing to a brisk human pace.

They walked through the bodies. They became increasingly decayed; more ancient. Into mammoths; fish fossils captured in ice. After ten minutes of flanerie, it was a veritable boneyard. Not a skin in sight.

“These are your old forms?”

“Yes. I got tired of playing with them.”

The star seemed annoyed. It was like looking at an old photo album, baby photos.

“I’m older than all that now. I’m a grown up. I can see things. I’m better,” the star said.

“All of that before, it was frivolous?”

The star was about to say something haughty, then paused. It looked proud of itself for doing so, for stopping before pouring out the thought.

“Well… I suppose it was necessary. I couldn’t be then where I am now. I had to go through it. It was hard. A lot of it. Well, maybe all of it. But I suppose I’m a better person now.”

Lisa caught it.

“Ah! So you’re a person!”

The star seemed to blush, glowing a bit red.

“I didn’t say that!”

“Did too!”

“Did not!”

“Did too!”

“Well… sometimes. When I’m not a tree, or an ant. Sometimes I’ll be a person. But just to try it out!”

The star was embarrassed of humanity. Should Lisa be embarrassed too?

“What, are we so bad?”

“Not always… you just remind me of how young and naive I am. How I don’t really know it all.”

The star had found a sense of pride in its own self-conscious humility. Lisa was stunned.

“That’s very mature of you.”

“But sometimes, I think to myself… well, why should I be? I’m a star!”

It strutted ahead.

Lisa laughed.

“I suppose you’re right, you are a star.”

The side of her cheek slammed into a thick wall of ice. She looked up. It was a huge skeleton. A fossil of a great beast. Something like a shark, a lizard. It loomed, with vacant eyes as big as planetary fists. The teeth were three times her height. The mouth extended back into a blue-black abyss of ice that seemed aeons old. The impact of her face had formed a small crack in the surface. It rapidly began to spread. The star screamed.

Lisa’s papers fell to the floor as her neck slammed back — throwing her forehead from the desk, craning backward, almost collapsing the legs. Her eyes bulged from her skull.

“I’ve got it!” she screamed. Her voice sounded, in the pitch of the star.

She rushed to the printer and grabbed a piece of paper, almost fumbling it in her shaking hands as she stumbled back to the desk. Trembling, she picked up the quill:

THE HUNGRY CHILD IS THE BEAST WITHIN. WE’RE TOO EARLY. SEND HELP.

Lisa stood up, and walked out.

The next morning Bob passed Lisa’s desk. He saw the note; thinking it was a prank, threw it in the wastebasket in the hall. Weeks passed; Lisa was never seen again at Knell. Search parties towed the outskirts, half hoping they wouldn’t find a body; half hoping they would, just so it would all be over. They never did.

Fifteen years later, Knell’s advanced genetic AI flagged a scrap of paper on a desk at the now defunct Institute in a comprehensive archival surveillance tape scan. The AI unscrambled the symbols from the grainy footage; immediately flagged the server admin. He ran to the table, pressing the INTERROGATE key with a metallic fingertip. Lisa’s message flashed, translated to Alexandrian Intelligent Code, the global operating lingua franca as of the integration of total historical symbolic recursion into flesh biology. Language had collapsed into one absolute device of creation and manufacturing.

The note was sent to the top.

Bob was gazing out of the window of the new Gargon Space Center when he got the message. He was an old man now. One hundred and twelve. But he still felt young. He’d just gotten back from a twenty five mile run. Lisa’s work, as far as she had gotten, had allowed for the human race to begin healing the genome at a scale the planet had never seen. It also, incidentally, allowed them to rudimentarily interrogate planetary intelligences. He had just gotten off the phone with Jupiter. She preferred to speak in song. The alert screamed in his ear. He pulled up the file via his retinal scan.

As Bob read Lisa’s final message, something stirred on a distant planet. The satellites picked up a light rumbling in the Sirian system. They dismissed it as some rogue flares. Bob’s eyes met the last words:

TOO EARLY. SEND HELP.

Outside of Bob’s window, the nuclear desert roared. He smiled, and put down the message. He had to make another call. He would assemble the last five — all nuclear engineers; enlist the AI admin. Lisa’s note was the last necessary step. They would make a fusion device out of the energy centers of the last living human beings. In the first timeline, Lisa hesitated, now, for a second longer before she stood up from the desk. Something like a recognition curled around her eyes. She had made contact. Time didn’t just go backward. It went forward too.

---

THE CHIMERA

Yevgeny Malkov was a refugee from the war. He came to America for God knows what, perhaps to make money, settle down, find a wife, maybe just laze under a cafe umbrella and eat a good sandwich. All he knew is he was tired of the bombing.

He couldn’t believe it. As he drove from the landing strip at Dulles Airport in a rented car, all he saw were miles and miles of what they called ‘strip malls’. McDonald’s. Burger King. He had no idea what this was, but it smelled good.

The smells led him to a small plaza. He parked; sat in the car, observing. Families of all ages and colors milled about. Men peacocked when other men passed, puffing up their chests; sometimes even shouting. This was quite bold to Yevgeny. He came from a farm village where everyone knew everyone; you certainly wouldn’t shout at someone, unless you owed them a sack of potatoes. Or, rather, they owed you.

The women looked at the men and the men looked at the women. Malkov could see the calculation. Clearly none of them knew each other. They were sized up. He could hear the thoughts churning in their brains. They looked so small.

“Is he for me?”

“She looks right enough.”

“Is he with anyone?”

“Oh, hello.”

“Too smart for me I think… just look at the way he’s dressed!”

It was an open air market of psychic thoughts. Yevgeny gobbled them up uncomfortably, wishing he was milking his cows. But the farm was gone; so was the village.

He decided to put the car in reverse. He’d drive until he found something resembling wilderness.

Hours passed; the weather got increasingly warm. He decided to stop for some gas; perhaps some peanuts; beef.

He walked in the station convenience store; a bell dinged loudly. He had stumbled, immediately, into some form of domestic dispute. A man and a woman stood in the middle of the store. One man covered in tattoos with a shirt with an American flag on it; the woman in a skimpy outfit — a short denim skirt and thin strapped undershirt.

“You were fucking her, I know it!”

“But you were fucking him, so we’re even.”

Yevgeny instinctively backed towards the door. He was here anyway. He might as well get the peanuts.

The clerk was a small, middle aged Indian man with glasses. Yevgeny had met some Indian people back on the old continent. He’d talked theology and mysticism with several of them. It wasn’t too far off from the shamanic work of the Russian folk. In fact, the more that he thought about it… eerily similar.

The clerk had a shocked but normalized look on his face. He’d clearly seen this too many times already — but no new time less appalling than the last.

“That bitch left her panties in your truck!”

“You tell her, she’s your friend.”

The man had a laid back look on his face. He clearly didn’t care what happened in the argument. Stubble ran down his chin.

“She’s dead to me!”

Yevgeny tried to slide around them toward the rack of peanuts.

“Who the fuck are you, foreign boy?”

The man grinned. He’d found a new outlet.

“Nobody,” Yevgeny shrugged.

“That’s damn right,” the man said. “This is fucking America. We speak English here.”

Yevgeny was fluent in seven languages, including Mandarin, Greek, and Latin.

“I suppose you do.”

“Who the fuck you talking to, little bitch?”

“Nobody.”

“That’s damn right.”

Yevgeny, at this point, felt like he’d hitchhiked across the Sahara Desert. The woman yelled, from behind his back.

“I didn’t forget about your slimy ass! We’re not done here. I’m going to smack Tina up! And don’t be surprised when that Ford is keyed the fuck up. You’re a man-whore! Slut!”

The man whipped his head around. Good… distracted again.

Yevgeny grabbed a small bag of peanuts and quickly walked up to the counter.

“Always like this?”

“More often than not.”

“Read the Gita?”

“Pretty sure he hasn’t.”

Yevgeny smiled, and paid the man. The rental car’s tank was full. Yevgeny decided to drive until he couldn’t drive anymore.

He counted the degrees of the sun as he whipped around bends, mountains, pastures. He smiled; rolled the windows down. The air reminded him of back home. It was clean, sweet; filled with wildlife flowers.

Every once in awhile he’d see a house. A man at a mailbox. He could swear they were leering, hunched over. With each unconscious look, the masks seemed to stretch; age. As he whipped past, they’d make eye contact. Malkov felt like he’d just had a run in with a wild animal, somewhere between enlightenment and chaos. And then he saw the church.

It loomed, with white wood that was stripping to rot. A huge, golden cross hung in the air atop the roof. It threatened to cave the whole structure in. It sat on the hill he had to climb in the little rental car, as the road veered abruptly. The church hung in the sky like a temple in the approaching night. Dusk made Yevgeny shiver. Or was it the structure?

He had to swerve to avoid hitting it. The car skidded, into dust. It was a rudimentary parking lot. Yevgeny shifted down; powered the vehicle off. There was not another car in sight — only a green tractor, parked in what looked like a small cemetery in the back of the building. Behind the cemetery was only woodland.

Yevgeny got out of the car. The night hurried forth. He shivered again. He could hear some sort of music. An organ? Chanting? He was familiar with the Orthodox rituals. He looked at the sign out front — no denomination, just a crooked assembly of black letters:

ITS NEVER TOO LATE TO BE KIND

This assured Malkov. He decided he’d give the place a look.

The interior opened to about twenty rows of pews on each side of the aisle, carpeted in a dark maroon. There was a flash out of the corner of his eye.

“Who’s there?”

“I should ask you the same question.”

A man stepped out of the shadows to Yevgeny’s right. He had orange hair; a horrible wart on his nose. Yevgeny tried not to look too closely.

“You looking at my wart?”

“No.”

“Don’t lie to me!”

The man was on the verge of incensed. Yevgeny decided to play it straight.

“I might’ve seen it.”

“Good. The name’s Orion.”

“Like the constellation?”

“Like my mom was drunk.”

“You work here?”

“Yeah, the grounds. Why you here?”

“I just stumbled into it.”

“We don’t usually have visitors.”

Yevgeny glanced around. There were ornate Biblical scenes on the arched stained glass windows.

“It’s beautiful in here.”

“I didn’t make it.”

Yevgeny was not enjoying this conversation.

“Anyone I can speak to about the place?”

“The priest is in the house in the back.”

Orion pointed through the door. Malkov could see, through the back window, a small cabin at the edge of the woods, just beyond the cemetery limits.

“Cool to go back there?”

“Fine by me. The priest is usually available.”

Yevgeny walked out the door. Immediately, he heard a loud moan. Ghosts? He strode through the small cemetery and banged on the lion knocker on the door of the cabin. It had a proud face; a wide open mouth.

“Dammit. Coming!”

Yevgeny thought he might’ve knocked a shade too loudly.

The priest opened the door in his boxers and a suit jacket. Behind him, he could see a blonde woman hastily putting on her shirt.

“What the hell do you want?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then why the fuck did you knock?”

Yevgeny thought this was a good question.

“I was looking for some education on the church.”

“Very well,” the priest said. “Anita, get the fuck out of here. Go home.”

The woman spat at him.

“Damn right, the devil upon you! Bitch.”

Yevgeny stood there with his mouth open. The priest dusted off his suit jacket.

“Pitfalls of the profession. Now, who the hell did you say you are?”

“Do all Americans talk like this?”

“Right, so you’re a foreigner.”

Yevgeny contracted.

“I just moved here. There was a war.”

“There’s always a fucking war.”

The priest spit dark fluid into a spittoon by his bed. “Dip?”

“I don’t.”

“Baseball?”

“What?”

“Makes sense.”

The priest sat down upon his bed and lit a cigarette.

“So what do you want to know?”

Yevgeny saw a large painting in the back corner of the cabin. He’d been so distracted by the vulgarity of the priest, coupled with the fact that he’d walked in on a man of the cloth clearly ‘busy’ with a woman of the night. It was a chimeric angel. It had the head of a snake, the body of a lion; the feet of a raven. The snake’s head had what seemed like a thousand eyes. It was like some sort of sick fly.

“What in the world is that?”

“It’s the devil, boy. What the hell do you think it is?”

“Why does a priest have a picture of the devil in his room? And why are you having sex with a whore?”

“Now who has the dirty mouth?”

“I’m confused.”

“Of course you are, boy. You thought you came somewhere you didn’t. To speak to someone who isn’t.”

“Then who are you?”

“A mask. Just like everyone else.”

The priest coughed as he took a massive draw of the cigarette.

“Southern cuts?”

“Where?”

“We’re in Georgia.”

Yevgeny realized he had driven for hours. He must’ve fallen into a mental rhythm on the road. Impressive, but worrisome. He’d have to find a place to sleep that night. It was too late to go much further.

“Why a mask?”

“Because you wouldn’t like what’s behind it.”

The priest leered; spoke again.

“Sometimes it’s best to be honest in the face of the Lord.”

“What about your vows?”

“Publicly functional.”

“What about your soul?”

“Privately dysfunctional.”

The priest laughed aloud. It was a nasty laugh. Like a snake choking on its food.

“Can’t your congregation sniff you out?”

“They’re animals. I feed them what they want to hear. The book they want to read. Then I come home and deal with whatever hang-ups Anita and I have. Sometimes I meet her friends. Sometimes I sit here and smoke. Ever read this one?”

The priest pointed to a worn paperback. PHILOSOPHY IN THE BEDROOM BY MARQUIS DE SADE

“I’m more of a Gogol man myself.”

“Explains why you’re here. Are you buying or selling?”

“Neither. I’m just passing.”

“Then you can go talk to the tombstones. They’ll make you feel better about it. Peaceful fellas.”

The priest looked up at Yevgeny with bloodshot eyes: “I’ll light a candle. Night’s setting in hard.”

He lit a wick on a silver candle-holder. The room began to glow. Yevgeny peered around. There were a couple of books beside the bed; the garish painting, a mirror on the wall opposite the bed; a rudimentary toilet at the far right corner of the room. Beside the de Sade was Augustine’s Confessions.

“Looks like a damn cell in here.”

“That’s more like it. Settle in.” The priest brushed the corner of his beard with his fist. “There’s a chair in the corner.”

Yevgeny pulled up the hard wood chair beside the bed and sat down.

“What can you tell me? I’m here.”

“Ever heard of a con?”

Yevgeny shrugged.

“Well the con is freedom. The con is Jesus. The con is getting pulled into something that someone else wants. And all the world is is what someone else wants. It’s a game of protection. Hide and seek. And beneath it all is the little pleasure you can afford before it all goes dark.”

Yevgeny had heard this before. A philosophical mouthpiece. Probably somebody else’s work.

“Nietzsche?”

The priest twisted his face.

“Schopenhauer.”

Yevgeny shrugged again.

“Some like it darker.”

Yevgeny doubled up.

“You have anything else to tell me I can’t read in a book someone else wrote?”

The priest sat for what seemed like five minutes. The silence was awkward, but bearable.

“No. I suppose not.”

Yevgeny walked out.

The night was cool. The branches of the trees rippled in the light wind. It was beautiful. A silver blue light touched the gold cross. He could hear the wood roof of the church buckling under the gold as the wind rocked it, ever so slightly. Creaking.

There was a man beside the sign for the church. Skinny, his shirt hanging out of the waist of his pants. The man looked at Yevgeny. He was exhausted. The face and eyes sagged with sleeplessness and hunger. His chest was shallow. His ribs showed like a truth leaping out of experience.

“Have some pennies? Quarters? I got stuck in the rain. Something, anything helps. For some food.”

Yevgeny reflexively opened up his nostrils. It had rained while he was with the priest. The air was damp but colored by the fumes the buds of the trees let off as they were touched with water. It was peaceful.

“Let me look.”

Yevgeny looked in the dashboard of the car; checked his pockets. He had nothing.

“I’m sorry. I can’t find anything.”

Yevgeny looked the man straight in the eye.

The man looked at him. Something ageless snuck out from behind his eyes. It was something like a relief. Like Nature itself had exhaled through the frail man.

“Well, God bless.”

Yevgeny looked right back.

“Bless you too, man.”

The man ambled off down the lamplit road. Yevgeny looked once, got in the car, and drove off — taking the fork at the top of the hill on down the night.

---

RUN THROUGH THE JUNGLE

John played with the numbers on the lock. They currently stood at 6-5-3 and 2. He rattled the metal then stood up and looked around. The palms swayed in the summer sun. The afternoon felt, at best, at a standstill. He wiped the sweat from his forehead.

“Jonie?”

“Yeah,” she hollered from behind the truck.

“Get the motor running. We’ll head to see Mrs. Hope.”

Jonie hopped in the front seat of the old Toyota and gunned the engine. John went to go see Mrs. Hope on the rare occasion he needed something done. She was a fortune teller, working out of her old Victorian mansion on the edge of town, on the marshes. Each time he’d head over, they’d drive through a grove of trees that leaned over the ledge of the two lane byway; come out into another world. Children in diapers playing outside of dilapidated trailers. Like a hurricane took a bite out of the side of one of them. Southern kitchens stapled to convenience stores with iron bars thicker than a fist on the doors. Some of the neighborhoods… John called them swamp ghettos. Section eight housing. All built exactly the same, lined in a row. Country projects.

Jonie kept it in park and walked around to the passenger side to let John drive. As they pulled out, a construction crew was removing a sign that had been there for going on eight months:

DETOUR AHEAD.

John silently took note that the detour had been removed. He hadn’t seen Mrs. Hope since the day before they put it up, marking construction on the park down the way.

Mrs. Hope was an old Gullah Geechee woman, roughly eighty-four years old (by John’s best estimation). Some said she was one-hundred and four; others said she was a used up forty. John figured that as long as she was alive she wasn’t dead, and that’s all there was to say about it.

She’d come from the New Orleans swampland, living on a houseboat outside some bordello. She’d never say who owned the place, or exactly where. But she ran money like she’d been around mean men who ran women. Payment in advance, discounts for return patronage. By now, she and John were close friends. Her real name was Amarella; she was the daughter of a French mason and a Haitian medicine woman. Raised on Francis Bacon and tinctures. Bottling substances. She once told John,

“Pickling the soul makes it wiser. Put it in the vessel and let it run wild. Run through the jungle.”

She knew John loved Creedence.

As they whipped through the city, cemeteries and hotels turned to wide, flat leaves; growth bursting over the increasingly bumpy road. Jonie yelped as they went over a particularly rough patch; tires skipping over the train tracks, almost bruising the chassis.

“John! Ease up!”

John couldn’t hear her over Bad Moon Rising. The tires skidded, but he kept his pace. The engine purred on. The summer must’ve been unbearably fertile. The paths they normally wore out to Mrs. Hope were thrumming with insect noise. The cicadas seemed out to kill. The sun was mortar orange. John’s sweat dripped into his eyes.

“Right way ain’t it Jo?”

“Suppose so, John. Can’t remember the last time I saw the woman.”

Jonie screamed, but it was too late. There was a huge crest in the concrete, like there’d been some minor earthquake that rent the road. John hit it at full speed. He braced himself for a roll. The chassis clipped the broken earth and spun. He grabbed for Jonie’s hand, but it wasn’t there. The world went dark.

When he woke up, it was night. Not a soul around; they were so far out they might not have been found for days. He was upside down, hanging on by his seatbelt. He felt his forehead. A mixture of sweat, and a heavier substance. Blood. He looked over at Jonie. Gone.

He felt for the seatbelt; it released easily. John stumbled out of the car, pulling a scrap of broken glass out of his palm. He winced, as he struggled to his feet. Before him loomed, with great lights:

THE HOTEL BARDO

John laughed. Must be far enough out. But no one in there could’ve bothered to help him?

He muttered to himself, “I guess not.”

John walked in the glass double doors. It was a white stone building; roughly forty stories tall. At the corner of each level loomed a gargoyle. Their tongues, forked. Red rubies in their eyes.

“Must be an expensive place,” John thought to himself, as he entered the lobby.

There was a sole bellhop, using a large feather duster on a pile of suitcases, strewn before a fountain. The desks were all empty.

“It’s a bit late for check-in, sir. All of our clerks have turned in for the night.”

John checked his watch. He kept military time. Twenty-six oh-four.

“Must be later than I thought,” he told the clerk.

“These are the hours when nobody’s awake.”

“Well then I must be him.”

“You’re welcome to use your keycard to get into your room.”

John felt around in his pockets. His wallet was gone, but there was a gold, firm card in his wallet. It was heavy. Possibly real.

“I could sell this for a pretty penny, couldn’t I?”

“Well then it would be gone, wouldn’t it.”

John thought about this propositional logic.

“You do have a point.”

“Elevator’s to your right.”

John looked, and there it was. Silver doors. An analogue arrow.

John entered. The walls of the elevator were a red velvet. It spoke.

“Forty-fourth floor.”

John yelled. The elevator rocketed up at an unhealthy pace. He grasped for the brass railing. It slammed to a stop. The elevator spoke again:

“Forty-fourth floor.”

It took the doors longer to open than for the elevator to scale what must’ve been the height of the building.

“Poor design.”

John practically fell out of the elevator. Motion sickness combined with what might be a broken rib. He gingerly held the left side of his chest.

“You must have the wrong room.”

Before him stood an alligator in a full suit and top hat. It had a kerchief in its front pocket; it was wearing a monocle on the left eye. It leered at John with a regal posture.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Do I look like a man who ‘kids’?”

“You look like an alligator. Speaking English. In a suit.”

“I’m Governor Thompson. You might address me as such.”

John brushed the hair from his eyes. He’d been badly shaken by the accident; would take this occasion as a possibility of dreaming.

“Very well, Governor. How do you do.”

“Much more polite, young man. You’ve interrupted my deliberations for an evening out on the town.”

“I was headed to Mrs. Hope’s. I had an accident.”

“I can see that, my good fellow. You’re a mess. Not to worry. We’ll be making arrangements to remedy that. Seeing as you’ve disturbed me, you’ll be my passenger and guest. Things will change before the night is through.”

John looked at his watch again.

“It’s going on the twenty-seventh hour.”

“That means the night is still young, my friend. The night is fresh… nubile even. We’ll be certain to cash in on her charms. On!”

John whirled as the alligator charged past him back into the elevator.

“We’ll be riding to the ground level! The basement! The infernal plane!”

Thompson’s wet claw clasped John’s arm.

“Never mind the blood! Away!”

The elevator slammed down. John bellowed. Thompson giggled.

The elevator was tired of speaking.

“The negative third floor.”

Thompson strode out with great confidence, clasping his mahogany walking stick. It had a brass knob with a serpent’s face on it. More rubies in the eyes. Its mouth opened outward with ferocity.

“Admiring my jewelry are you? I got this one from Mrs. Hope!”

“So you do know her!” John was surprised. At least something made sense.

“Not the Hope you know, my friend. The great-grand hope. True necromancer. Sweet woman. Bakes a mean pumpkin pie. She’s still in the Everglades. That’s where we’re headed tonight. Mon cheri!”

John was put off by the alligator’s interjection of French.

“That’s quite a drive.”

“We’ll be quick. We’re taking my advanced town-car.”

Thompson gestured to a long, black vehicle at the end of what looked like a tan cement garage level. The lights blinked on.

“You’ll be my driver tonight. Gloria’s working the pole til dawn. Plenty of hungry men pay to watch a princess of hell dance in a dark room!”

Thompson threw him the keys.

“The car will go where we want it to go.”

They set off into the night. Looked like any other night in the swamp to John. The wheel turned beneath his hands of its own accord.

“Seems like you don’t need me behind the wheel, Thompson.”

“It’s unbecoming for a Governor to not have a chauffeur.”

John felt his head. A brown corduroy cap. And across his chest — a black, buttoned uniform. The car raged on.

Hours passed in comfortable silence. Strangely, John trusted Thompson. He trusted the whole situation. All of a sudden, Jonie popped into his mind. He hadn’t thought of her since the accident. John wondered why this was the case. And just as soon as he remembered her, he forgot.

They entered a clearing, with a dusty lot. Several motorcycles were parked out front. Large men in leather jackets loitered out front, smoking cigars. John was hesitant, but the car pulled in of its own accord.

“Heavy place for a Governor to take an evening, don’t you think?”

“Now, boy — you don’t consider that big-whigs take in action? These gangs run this level.”

Thompson stepped out of the car, brushing off his jacket. The men turned and greeted him with a casual wave; patting him on the back warmly as he stepped into the bar. They glared at John as he walked in.

“Seems like they don’t like chauffeurs here.”

Thompson didn’t answer.

It was a wood paneled bar; immediately struck John with a classic feel. Purple couches lined the walls; two pool tables populated the center. Small as a hospital waiting room. The bartender was covered head to toe in tattoos and piercings. He must’ve been Mexican, South American… John was intrigued. He went up to the man.

“Where are you from?”

The man glared.

“That’s a dangerous question coming from a servant who I’ve never seen step foot in this bar.”

John tried again.

“Where are we?”

The man eased up.

“The Duat, kid. Let me see some ID.”

John was thirty-five.

“I don’t think I have my wallet on me.”

Just as the bartender was about to speak, Thompson stepped in.

“He’s with me.”

The bartender smiled.

“Thompson! I should’ve known. New driver?”

“Gloria’s making some extra money tonight.”

“She’s a hot piece of ass. Unbelievable.”

Thompson glared. The bartender immediately lowered his eyes.

“That’s Acatl. Forgive him. He hasn’t laid with a woman since the last sacrifice at Templo Mayor.”

Acatl flared his nostrils. Red. John noticed a large, winged serpent coiled upon Acatl’s stomach.

“What’s that?”

Acatl spat, “You’ll meet her.” He stormed off from the bar into a back room.

Thompson clasped John’s shoulder with a bloody talon. More like a hawk than a lizard’s claw.

“We’re going to the great Hope. Come.”

Lightning smashed into the jungle outside. The bikers began whooping. As John passed into the back hallway of the bar, he could hear a bottle smash against the dirt lot floor.

The hallway was dark, with a lone, flickering bulb. The walls were dirty. No… more like dusty. Cobwebs on the ceiling crevasses. Spiders hung pleasantly, paying John and Thompson no mind. John shivered.

There was a door at the end of the hallway. APPOINTMENTS ONLY. Thompson knocked twice.

“Come in.”

The door opened.

There sat old Ms. Hope. She was wearing a bandana around her head. She was incredibly, impossibly old. Like an upright corpse. But her eyes were bathed in fire. Impossibly alive. She leapt up from the chair and hugged Thompson like a little schoolgirl meeting her pop icon.

“Thompson! My son! How wonderful to see you. I wasn’t expecting you.”

Thompson coughed awkwardly.

“Yes, yes, I was.”

He gestured to John.

Ms. Hope immediately put on an air.

“And you must be John!”

John grinned.

“A pleasure to meet you, Ms. Hope. I know your daughter quite well, at least as well as anyone seems to be able to know her.”

“Yes! Sweet Lorelei. I don’t see her too often these days. The veil is too tight.”

She gestured to the air, as if she was twirling a curtain. John felt around. No such luck. Lorelei wasn’t Mrs. Hope’s name. He looked at Thompson.

“Why are we here?”

Thompson cleared his throat again. He seemed intimidated, almost shy around Ms. Hope. John wondered if it was because he was in the room with them.

“Ah… yes. Well, Jenna [John now knew Ms. Hope’s first name], I brought you the boy. He came to me; I knew I was to drive him to you. Seeing as we use the road.”

Ms. Hope glimmered her eyes at Thompson; then set them upon John. He squirmed a bit in his skin.

“Did you check in at the Hotel Bardo, boy?”

“Yes, I think?” John realized he had never used the keycard. He felt around for it in his pocket. The card was gone. There was a hot absence in its place.

Hope shot a glance at Thompson. She couldn’t read it. Thompson backed toward the door. John felt fear on Thompson’s countenance.

“You won’t be needed Thompson. You can leave.”

The knob rattled; by the time John turned around to look, Thompson had disappeared.

“Why is he an alligator?”

“Things work differently in this place. It’s not what you’re used to.”

Hope clasped her hands around a nearly opaque bottle. It was clear glass, shrouded by what must’ve been centuries of time.

“What’s in that?”

“A drink. That will help you see.”

Hope lunged at him. Her hands, cold as ice, wrapped around his jaw, prying him open. John could feel the ivory of his teeth rattle with the force of her strength. He was utterly overpowered. The woman was incredibly strong. Like a bear, or a shark.

She wrestled him to the ground; unstopped the solution, pouring it into his mouth and down his cheeks as he writhed under her physical pin. She cackled. Her breath was like a grave.

“He’s going to see! He’s going to see!”

The room spun for John; crashed out into darkness.

As he awoke, he found himself in the car. He turned. Still no Jonie. Got out of the car. Picked the cursory shard of glass out of his palm. He looked up at the road. Empty. Middle of the day. He started walking.

His hand hurt. At this point, John had utterly ceased thought. His only command in his mind and in his heart was to walk. He pressed on with his legs in a locked rhythm. Striding automatically, like adenosine triphosphate. He was moving in a primordial way. Outside of birth and death. He was impelled by something that had no mind, no center. It did not and could not reflect. John reached down to look at his hands. They weren’t there. Feet. Nothing. And yet he was moving. Like a bodiless force. John assumed he had no eyes with which to see. And yet, he saw.

He looked back once at the overturned vehicle; passed into empty road. It wasn’t long until he reached Mrs. Hope’s home. She greeted him on the front porch with a knowing look.

“John — you’re different today.”

John reached out to shake her hand.

“I suppose I am, Lorelei.”

Mrs. Hope was shocked. John registered a jump in her body; an audible squeak which she masterfully suppressed. She quickly regained her composure.

“Come in.”

Herbs and books littered Hope’s kitchen table. The garden in the backyard let directly into the marsh. Amarella famously kept the largest selection of Venus flytraps in the Gulf.

“What do you need, John.”

“I’m not here for the same reason I came.”

“I know. And it will never be again.”

John was moved to the garden. The double glass doors that led out to the marsh were wide open. It had begun to rain.

“I’m here to become one with the powers.”

Lorelei hesitated. John could tell she was throwing words around in her mouth. Deliberating.

“That’s an operation we scarcely perform, John. And you need higher authorization for it.”

“I spoke to Jenna.”

Hope turned pale.

“I knew it. But why did you have to tell me?”

“Just do it.”

Hope wasn’t used to John being so forceful. She walked back into the kitchen; returning with a large knife. It flashed in the hazy sunlight, reminding John immediately of Acatl.

“I don’t want to do this.”

She carved into the air, right where John’s chest would have been, if any of John’s corporeal body had been left. Out of the abyss, she drew forth a still-beating heart. It was black, it was yellow, it was gold. She stuffed it into her mouth, blood from the ventricles splattering against her dress.

With an agonized look on her face, she swallowed it whole.

John felt the ground cave out from under him. He fell, for what felt like years.

All he could hear was the sound of John Fogerty, bellowing, in an echo which bent around the lip of a collapsed star:

“Whoa, thought it was a nightmare

Lord, it’s all so true

They told me, don’t go walking slow

The devil’s on the loose

Better run through the jungle

Better run through the jungle

Better run through the jungle

Whoa, don’t look back to see”

---

THE HOLY FOOL

The woman pointed. “I’m just going to sit over there.” “Judy, you’ve got Japanese legs.” “What the hell does that mean?”

The woman supposedly named Judy sat down on the chair across from the register and stiffly crossed her thighs. There was a man peering up her nose, with a goofy grin. She didn’t like him already.

“Swim up to ‘em if I had to!”

She pouted at him. He thumbed his nose at her. They both laughed. It was a horrible joke.

The waiting room smelled like cigarettes and chemically clean laundry. It irritated Judy’s nostrils. The man sat back in his chair. She took a good look at him. He was covered in dirt, from head to toe.

“Where’d you roll in from?”

“Third base; home plate is only a mile away!”

He handed her a slip of paper. It had what she discerned was his name and address on it.

HENRY CARPENTER, THE LEAGUE OF FOOLS, TRAVELING CIRCUS

She grinned. “You’re a joker, eh?”

“Wildest card in the deck.”

“So what if I was looking for some fun?”

“Come on down to the big top. 6:30 tonight. We’re fixing the back end of a double header against the Black Yanks. Fire-breathers. Juggling. Might even be a white elephant.” He winked.

Judy sat on it for a moment. She could hear the whirr of the laundromat, like a symphony of mechanical instruments.

“Sure, why not.”

Henry’s grin got wider. “I’m playing third tonight. If we win, let me take you home?”

“Sure, if it’s only ninety feet away.”

Henry almost laughed. “You’re catching on, ain’t you.”

She nodded. Henry stood up; brushed a couple layers of dirt off his shirt front.

“Well, gotta run. No time to wash up. They’ll be warming up the Siamese Twins. One arm for each half of the hard eighteen. A whole day of ball!”

“See you tonight Henry.”

“So long!”

Judy knew about the circus in town, but she hadn’t had much time to investigate. Being that she was a detective, investigating was all she did. Less clown ball; more metaphysical mysteries. There’d been a string of angelic abductions. Something about stolen light. Priests weeping. She’d fill up notebooks. Big case. And sure enough, when she stood up — right there on the telephone pole outside the window, it read:

RUTHERFORD FAIR GROUNDS

COME SEE THE TEAM THAT PERFORMED FOR THE SULTAN

FEATURING LYLE “LIGHT-FEATHER” JONES

AND THE INCREDIBLE DARK-EYED ENTERTAINER

ADMISSION 25c

HOSTED BY MAYOR DONNIE FAIRCHILD

& THE LEAGUE OF FOOLS TRAVELING CIRCUS

TWO GAMES

2:30PM & 6:30PM

Donnie Fairchild wasn’t a mayor.

Fairchild was the chief suspect in Judy’s ongoing investigation. He was a known thug and racketeer. He dealt in gum. More notably, gum-ball machines. His father, Leo Fairchild, made a small fortune by inventing a brand of cherry gum which kept its flavor for hours. Fairchild’s factory, Magosian Gum Unlimited, poured out licorice flavored smoke all day long. Kids from the town would sit in the gulch by the river and salivate, as if some stray candy might trickle out of the trail of wafting scent.

Judy considered the case more closely. Fifteen million dollars had been stolen by someone who clearly wanted to take the town back to the dark ages. The representative of such a wild amount of cash wasn’t bills in denominations, but rather a bronze statue, drawn out of the sea just months before. No one could quite identify what it was, but the townspeople all knew it was important. Archaeologists came from all over the world making proclamations:

“It’s an angel!” “A sign. A dragon-slayer.” “The old world would have used this as a paperweight. They were giants; you know.” “A forgery! Fraud!”

The local congregations immediately adopted it as a symbol of the revelation.

Judy wasn’t concerned with any of this. What she was concerned with, was that it had disappeared.

It was quite small, just under two feet; depicted a winged man, with a chipped nose and comically large feet. The man stared out into the distance; no matter where you stood, you could never seem to get him looking in your eyes. The pupils were evasive.

Judy had this all written down in her notebook. She’d never actually seen the thing itself, just eyewitness testimonies. It had been shielded from the public eye until it could be verified. In fact, only thirty-six people had ever seen it. She had their names in a list. All redacted.

This made the investigation difficult. All of the people she had interviewed were effectively unnamed suspects. When she went to her superiors requesting release of names, they sent her back with a shrug: “Higher ups won’t have it. Use what you got.”

She remembered Henry. For all his goofy, stupid jokes, he had a good smile. She liked a man who couldn’t stop himself from being a clown. It was a quality she didn’t have. Too many nights on cases of stolen artifacts had left her feeling… like someone who took life seriously. She couldn’t have that.

When the dryer rang, she took her clothes out, put them in a duffel bag, and walked out of the building.

She saw him first. He was out on the old rail tracks behind the laundromat; the deli next door, on the far end of the main street. He was wearing what looked like an old Chicago White Sox jersey; juggling somewhere between six or seven red balls. Judy couldn’t tell, because they were all moving so damn fast — in and out of his hands. He was in between whistling and muttering as she approached him, balancing on one of the steel rail lines: “Poor fools every day… swindlers… con men…” He jumped as she spoke.

“You must be late for the game.”

Three of the balls dropped. He caught the other two. Judy was off by at least one.

“Jesus! You scared me.”

Judy held out her hand.

“Judy Holofernes.”

The man smiled. “Now it must be a pleasure to meet you. Seeing it’s my turn to laugh, and all.”

He stuck out his hand in return.

“Ventriloquist Bethlehem. Entertainer. Say, did you see those Nazis camping out on the tracks? I think they’re running rail cars as they slow down at the depot.”

Judy shook her head.

“Don’t head west then.”

Judy decided to walk with him for a moment. She had her notebook. At worst, this could develop into some rogue piece of guerrilla journalism.

It turned out Ventriloquist was quite a talker. He was all too happy to give his life story. How he’d jumped the rails himself in some coal town in Pennsylvania; drifted all up and down the coasts. He’d ended up in Chicago, running liquor during Prohibition for some mobsters who had a cabin in the Shenandoah. They’d go up there and draw maps for distribution until one of the kings decided he didn’t have a large enough cut.

“And that’s how I ended up here,” Ventriloquist said. “Say, you ever see a man dressed as a ghost throw a ninety-give mile per hour fastball behind his back for a strike on the inside black?”

Judy couldn’t say she had. She also remarked in her notes that she was going to ask the first normal person about the whole name thing. They had walked, at this point, for quite awhile. She was very much so enjoying Ventriloquist’s way with stories. She could see how and why he’d joined the traveling band of misfits. It didn’t seem like he’d ever had or felt much of a home, notwithstanding the kind of strangeness in his very name — a kind of strangeness that made him stick out of domesticity like a sore thumb.

As she was contemplating all of this; just beginning to consider that they would be late for the second game of the doubleheader, Ventriloquist suddenly jumped from the rail and ran into the woods. “We’re here! Follow me!”

Judy sprinted through the brush to catch him. Before them loomed the dilapidated, gothic mansion of Widow Moran.

Widow Moran was known only as Widow Moran. Some of the townsfolk said her first name was Widow, others said her husband died so long ago it just stuck. Regardless, she lived in the looming, black mansion just outside of town, on the other side of the graveyard and the old abandoned horse-racing track. She never seemed to leave the place; people wondered how she ate and drank anything until wondering bled into forgetting, and other pastimes.

At this point, Judy remarked, Widow Moran must be nearing the ripe old age of one hundred. This was usually when an absurd birthday cake with candles would be thrown out on a table to a quiet applause. Life bleeding so far into death that life remaining was a spectacle. Maybe the only conversation piece on offer, in whatever room she entered. Judy felt a pang of deep pity for the Widow.

“Here’s where we’re going to dig,” said Ventriloquist.

“What? This is someone’s house.”

“Yes, but the ghosts we need to speak to are buried on the edge of this plot.”

Judy understood the name.

“Here, take this spade.” Ventriloquist threw her the second of two silver lipped shovels he’d seemingly left on the ground. They were in the Widow’s backyard, far enough off that she’d have to see them from high ground to protest. Ventriloquist had already made some dent in the soil, about three feet.

“You were waiting for me to dig this?”

“Two hands are better than one.”

“I’m not a gravedigger. I’m a detective.”

Ventriloquist made it clear the time for talking was over. He began throwing huge fistfuls of dirt over his shoulder with gusto.

Judy decided to do the same.

They worked, sweating, as the sun began to fall over their heads, toward the low trunks of the trees. They made great headway. The hole had now somewhat tripled in depth. Something clanged against the spade’s tongue.

“There… easy…” Ventriloquist pushed Judy softly away from the hole. “This is my favorite part.”

Bethlehem jumped into the hole; with a thrust of his fist, punctured the wood of the coffin. Judy gasped. He grapped the corpse by the throat; pulled it clean out of the wood with superhuman strength.

And this was when Judy met Spider Jenkins.

Spider began to speak, seemingly through the power of Ventriloquist’s hand against his blue throat.

“You see, I was a crop-duster in the American South…”

Judy just walked away. The sun had set. There was a vague hope she’d catch first pitch.

The fairgrounds ballfield was just over the hill from the old horse track, so Judy didn’t have too far to walk. She cut back over the rail tracks in the opposite direction; ran quickly down the slope that connected the old feed lot to the byway that led in and out of town. She crossed it without much traffic. The lights of the ballfield gleamed in the night. It was a romantic notion. The night end of a doubleheader. She could hear the crowd roar. “Kill ‘em Jimmy!” was one loud voice. Am I going to a ballgame or a murder? She thought. As she entered the stadium, laughter erupted from the nosebleeds.

There was a man in full clown makeup, on a seven foot unicycle, chasing another man riding a mini horse. Popcorn hit her back and neck as she emerged from the spectator tunnel into the lower level bleachers, on the third base side of the field. The crowd was up in arms. She’d never seen such fury and passion at work in a ball game mass.

The man on the mini horse at least appeared terrified. Judy couldn’t confirm the true state of his emotions by a glance. He was either a great actor, or genuinely terrified the unicycle-riding clown would kill him. The clown’s shoes were enormous. They threatened to swallow the pedals of the bike. He was carrying a massive shotgun.

“He’s dead Jimmy!” “Gun ‘em down, Chief!”

She decided to sit down next to the least threatening, red-faced character in the crowd. She saw a frail man wearing glasses, reading a small book. He looked extremely threatened by the whole affair, furtively glancing around to affirm safety, or at least a safe exit in a moment’s notice.

“Say, how do you do, fella?”

“How do I look?”

“Blue in the teeth.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“Terrified.”

The man smiled.

“I’m Ricardo Valenzuela. Baseball historian. Pleased to meet you.”

“Judy Holofernes.”

Ricardo raised an eyebrow. He continued.

“I’m here to record tonight’s event for the grand historical ledger of baseball affairs. Scarce should I have known I might need to report the evening to the nearest precinct.”

Judy flashed her badge. “So they aren’t joking?”

“Nobody knows.”

Ricardo continued.

“Tonight, we’re having a meeting in the woods. Well, the baseball group. We hold one every solstice. It’s something like a secret society. Well, baseball is our cover. We’re more like a community of fellow… interests. We’d like to secure universal vitality. Ever try this water?”

He stuck a huge plastic bottle in front of her face. It said KRYS-TO-SAL: MIRACLE MINERAL HEALTH WATER, AUGLAIZE LABORATORIES, BOX H, PAYNE, OHIO

She grabbed it and chugged the whole thing. The back of the label read:

AGENTS WANTED IN EVERY TOWN. LIBERAL COMMISSION. WRITE US FOR PROPOSITION.

“You hiring?”

“Maybe. Come to the meeting tonight and find out.”

Judy weighed it.

“Maybe. What’s the pitch?”

Ricardo took a big breath as a huge plume of fire emerged from the ballfield. Out of the corner of her eye, Judy saw that a firebreather had entered the fray. The horse-riding man’s eyes were bulging.

“Should we worry about them?”

“It’s a theatre.” Ricardo began:

“Science has discovered that certain minerals work wonders with the human system. Mineral water used daily eliminates all poisons from the body, tones up the liver and kidneys and regulates the bowels, makes a new person out of one who thinks he is very sick. KRYS-TO-SAL is the most effective mineral water product known. One package makes fifteen gallons of mineral water, and the results it produces are amazing. If you are sick, or have relatives or friends who are sick, send to us today for a full package, costing you only one dollar and fifty cents. You’ll be glad you did, when you realize the healthful results.” Ricardo, purple in the face, exhaled.

“Impressive.”

“I have to say it every time.”

“I’ll let you know when I quit detective work.”

Ricardo turned back toward the ballgame. “Know anyone playing tonight?”

Judy saw Henry, out in left field warming up. They made eye contact. He smiled; waved at her. She waved back. “Yeah, Henry Carpenter.”

Ricardo adjusted his glasses. “Henry Carpenter, starting third baseman for the Holy Fools. Two sixty-five career average. Two hundred and forty career homers. Six foot two, two hundred and thirty-five pounds...”

Judy interrupted. “Thanks for the numbers.”

Ricardo shrugged. “That’s what we do. We record what remains after the band leaves.”

The game began. Henry led off with a single; took a short lead off first. Just as the opposing pitcher began his motion from the stretch, he immediately took off. Ricardo turned to Judy. “We’ve seen what we need to see here. The next step is the solstice meeting.”

He took her hand; Judy relented. She would allow the journey to run its course. Maybe she’d sell mineral water and write that story after all.

The meeting of baseball historians was poorly disguised. It was a massive bonfire, not far off from where she imagined Ventriloquist still frantically playing his puppet games in the moonlight. It hadn’t scared Judy, she was just tired of it. Judy asked Ricardo,

“Say, I saw this broadside on the telephone pole outside the laundromat earlier today about the game.”

Ricardo was carving through the brush toward the huge plume of smoke in the sky. She wasn’t sure he was listening.

“It said something about Light-Feather and The Dark-Eyed Entertainer.”

Ricardo stopped; stood erect like he was a doe that heard a gunshot in the distance.

“They said what?”

“You heard me.”

“Why would they say his name?”

“Who?”

Ricardo whispered. They were in the middle of the woods. Totally alone.

“Light-Feather and The Dark-Eyed Entertainer are one person.”

“Explain.”

Ricardo realized he was in too deep at this point; decided to spill.

“He’s what they call a soul-eater. Dead souls, living souls. He’ll swallow them for a small fee. The villagers, wherever he goes, pelt him with fruit. It’s a process, a parade. It’s part of the deal.”

“Whose deal?”

Ricardo paused. “The deal of being alive.”

Judy knew nothing about this. Just ten hours ago she’d been at the laundromat, minding her own business. Getting hit on by a baseball clown. Trying to solve this damn case about the stolen angel. She decided to try Ricardo. It couldn’t get any weirder.

“What do you know about the angel that will never look you in the eye?”

They were just before the bonfire now. Judy could see the flames whipping in the air; hear the huddled chatter of the group. Ricardo’s cheek was lit with light and shadow as he turned towards her, just before entering the circle.

“I suppose you’ll just have to find out.”

The bonfire group was composed of fifteen men, all dressed in dapper suits. Bow-ties, suspenders, striped shirts, the whole nine yards. It looked like a barbershop chorus. All they were missing were the straw hats. Their hair was delicately combed and parted. They looked ready for a church group. And, Judy noticed, they all looked uncannily similar. One had a wart on his nose, another’s eyes were just a bit wider than the others. And so forth. They looked like they had been made in a factory. Ricardo looked nothing like them. He stepped into the circle. They all turned at once; spoke in unison.

“Ricardo! A pleasure. And who’s your guest?” They leered at Judy. Their vocal harmony didn’t match the consternation of the eyes.

“Judy Holofernes, investigative journalist.”

They looked ready to kill.

“Detective.” She corrected him.

One of the dolls reached for his waistband.

Judy caught it quickly.

“Here in the capacity of an interested baseball scholar.”

The group immediately relaxed. Three of them dropped their shoulders several feet. Another exhaled deeply, coughing as he did so.

Judy turned to him. “You look like you could use some mineral water.”

The chorus member turned to Ricardo. “She’s good.”

Ricardo smiled. The meeting began.

It became clear to Judy that Ricardo was the leader of the group. He assumed a commanding, juridical voice.

“We’re gathered here today in communal acknowledgement of our overarching endeavor to restore the vital principle to an otherwise immunized, catatonic collective body.”

The chorus applauded; whooped and hollered in enthusiasm.

“The way we plan to do this is through the sales of our mineral water. We will now be going, round-robin style, through the sales reports of each of our valued members. Each member will articulate their monthly score, and compare this month’s score to their yearly goals and achieved numbers.”

The chorus nodded. Someone tapped Judy on the shoulder. She turned; barely suppressed a scream. It was a man with two teeth. His eyes were almost entirely black. But he felt incredibly human. Judy felt a deep safety in his presence, compared to the tired eeriness that had overwhelmed her body the moment Ricardo brought up sales numbers.

“Got a moment?” the man said.

“Yes.”

The man motioned her over to the edge of the clearing. The second chorus member was articulating his sales goals for next month. Apparently he’d sold a whole shipping container of the mineral mixture to a local church. The group was going wild with enthusiasm. It was like stoking a flame. The dark-eyed man cast a sideways glance.

“I’m…”

Judy interrupted. “I know.”

The man decided to cut to the chase. “I know what Ventriloquist Bethlehem was doing today with you in the woods. Don’t tell me you started digging with him.”

Judy started to get nervous. “I did.”

The man replied. “We can fix that. But we have to take you to Vashti Bunyan. She’ll have to make you a death mask. We’ll stage a fake death. You’ll be back to new in a jiffy.”

“What did I do?

The man stared at her dumbly, as if her question was obvious. “You awakened the dead.”

Judy knew Vashti. She was a kind old woman who lived in a shack by the auto-repair shop owned by Tommy Budd — who, coincidentally or not, was the childhood best friend of… you guessed it. Mayor Donnie Fairchild. Maybe Judy was on the case after all.

“Fantastic,” she told The Dark-Eyed Entertainer.

“I just told you you awakened the dead.”

“It seems to be a part of the case.”

The Dark-Eyed Entertainer shrugged. “You’ve got enthusiasm, woman. Turns out you might be fit for the quest after all.”

Judy was about to speak. He anticipated her question.

“You’ll just have to find out, now won’t you.”

“Do you know everything?”

“I just write it down. I receive my orders from above. They don’t always come in clear. I have to clear my antenna.” He batted his ears twice, like he was trying to clear bees or sand out of them.

“That’s better. Let’s go.”

Vashti greeted them with a warm smile that felt like a cup of chamomile tea. She gestured them inside her home office. She was a slightly stooped woman, who carried a natural, knotted walking stick. She slightly stumbled when she walked. It was part of the innate character of her gait. She winked at Judy.

“New friend?”

Judy brushed it off, almost annoyed. She never usually felt put off by Vashti. But tonight had a different tone than most nights.

“We’re here about the angel.”

Vashti’s eyes lit up, but The Dark-Eyed Entertainer cut the conversation off; diverted it.

“She hexed herself with Ventriloquist Bethlehem. He conned her into waking Spider Jenkins.”

Vashti’s face darkened with a certain seriousness.

“Very well. Set her on the table.”

Judy assented to the operation.

Vashti went into her drawer in the row of counters that lined the walls of her home; drew forth a scalpel.

“We’ll have to do a surgical removal. You’ll die astrally, but we’ll bring you back. I’m going to snap my fingers, and Light-Feather is going to slap your soul with his dark hand.”

Judy burst out laughing.

“Whatever!” she cackled, between giggles. Vashti and the Dark-Eyed were not amused.

It was over in an instant. Judy felt her own death. She hovered above the board as Light-Feather slapped the shit out of her soul. It stung. It felt like the memory of leather. She winced, but the face of her body remained unmoving, stoic. Vashti took a picture at the precise moment of the slap with an old Kodak camera. Judy felt herself withering down, back into the body. She was almost hateful to return.

“Damn! What the fuck!”

Expletive spilled easily out of Judy’s mouth. Now it was Vashti and The Dark-Eyed Entertainer’s turn to laugh.

“We told you it was serious!” Vashti spilled, the red returned to her cheeks. The Dark-Eyed Entertainer patted her on the back. “Good job. You stayed perfectly still.”

Vashti flashed the instant photograph between her fingers. “Here’s your death-mask. You’re cured.”

Judy looked. The corpse’s eyes bulged. She looked like a freak, like she’d just seen some sort of deep space apocalypse, or the appearance of a veiled god.

“I get to keep this?”

“You rode the rollercoaster, you get to keep your prize.”

Judy reflected. “Pascal’s death mask?”

Vashti winked. “New technology.”

Dark-Eye thanked Vashti; took Judy by the hand. They walked out into the post-midnight.

Judy turned to Dark-Eye as the door to Vashti’s shut.

“Alright. I’ve had enough of the detours. Now it’s time to talk about the angel.”

Dark-Eye almost groaned. He knew this moment would come. He’d have to assent to Judy’s story now.

“This affair doesn’t concern me. I deal with matters of the spirit realm. You’re talking about a statue.”

Judy told him how much it had been assessed at.

“Fifteen million dollars?” Dark-Eye’s eyes rolled. She could see some whites in them.

She told him how it was impacting the town. This piqued Dark-Eye’s interest.

“You say a shadow?”

“A winged man with a chipped tooth. Comically big feet.”

“But a shadow is what it does.”

“Yes.”

“And this man, Mayor Fairchild?”

“He’s no mayor.”

“I’ll tell you right now, he has nothing to do with it. He’s a red herring.”

Judy’s detective skills felt bruised.

“I could’ve sworn…”

“You saw what you wanted to see. The angel left of its own accord.”

“What?”

Dark-Eye was annoyed.

“I told you. It left.”

“I know. Why?”

“It got sick of you.” Dark-Eye said matter of factly.

“Why would it get sick of us?”

Dark-Eye explained.

“The angel is the guardian spirit of the earth. It comes and goes of its own accord. It seems, for some time, it remained buried. But you and your people dug it up. Once it was dug up, the body was free to move about the cabin, so to speak. If you’d left it in the earth, it would’ve remained there. You and your village would be safe. But since it’s gone, the life is gone from your town. All of the life in this and the surrounding land is contained in the talisman of the angel. You awaken the talisman, the talisman has agency.”

Judy understood this intuitively.

“How do we get it back?”

Dark-Eye already knew the answer.

“We have to hunt the fallen angel.”

Judy patently did not want to hunt a fallen angel. It was now almost dawn and she hadn’t eaten since before the laundromat. A turkey sandwich. Her stomach groaned.

“I want to go home.”

“There’s no home to go to.”

Dark-Eye gestured behind them. The smoke from the bonfire of barbershop salesmen had grown exponentially. There were frantic, crashing noises from the town in the valley below. It was burning. Judy’s first instinct was to run toward it. Dark-Eye caught it before her conscious mind could register the impulse. He grabbed her wrist.

“Right spirit, wrong time.”

He led her in the opposite direction, toward the river.

The Gulf River fed into the black abyss of the Atlantic. It pooled slowly in the Gulf of Mexico a couple miles south of Rutherford, Louisiana; fed into the lashing mass. It was hurricane season. Judy had had a couple close run-ins in past years. Even now, she could see and hear the dark waves pounding the shores in her mind’s eye. She’d moved further inland to Rutherford from New Orleans, in an attempt to avoid buttressing against nature’s fury. The river reminded her of the veins that could reach inward, inside, even in moments and places of perceived safety. She shuddered. Dark-Eye noticed.

“You good?”

“Fine.”

“We’re almost there.”

On a bench by the river, there was a large figure. Hunched over what looked like a wooden bowl. The figure looked up at them as they approached. A large beard and curly eyelashes greeted them.

“Yes?”

“You’re the Bearded Lady.”

“Yes.”

“I’m Dark-Eye.”

The Lady shook her head.

“I knew you’d be here. Just not so soon!”

The river was frothing. Judy was nervous. She hadn’t checked the news in almost a day. There were several Tropical Storms spinning about, just outside of the cove of the Gulf. She didn’t know who controlled precisely where they went, or decided to end up.

It was like Dark-Eye heard her thoughts.

“The angel decides. That’s why we’re here.”

The Bearded Lady perked up.

“Yes, I’ve seen him. He was just this way. He went out there.” She pointed to the rushing river.

“Into the water?” Judy inquired. She didn’t really want to know.

“Yes.”

Dark-Eye inhaled deeply.

“Any news on the storm?”

There’s two swells, looking to converge over the next week. We don’t know when, or how fast. But both are gaining steam.” The Bearded Lady saw Judy’s confusion. “I’m a meteorologist.”

Judy felt embarrassed. “I assumed you were with the Holy Fools.”

“But I am! It pays to know the weather when you’re barnstorming. I bat fourth when I’m not on act.”

“Stars?” Dark-Eye inquired.

The Lady paused. “Ripe for where you’re going.”

This seemed to ease Dark-Eye. “We’re going to need a boat.”

Judy’s eyes widened. “You don’t mean to tell me we’re going out into the swells?”

“What, you want to go back to the town?”

Judy could just leave. Find a new home. But she got the sense that this case would follow her, long after Rutherford was a distant memory of time.

She relented. “Where do we get a boat?”

The Bearded Lady supplied. “You can use mine.”

She pointed over to the dock by the inlet. There was a small rowboat. On the side, the name:

ENTHRALLED.

Clearly, thought Judy. Clearly.

Dark-Eye untied the ropes binding the rowboat to the dock.

“How are we going to make it out there in this?”

Dark-Eye glowered.

“Faith, Holofernes.”

He threw the last bind. Judy white-knuckled her oar.

The sky was a dark red as the morning crested the eastern horizon. It was out toward the ocean. Even now, Judy could see the coming end of the river in her mind’s eye; the Gulf that would collapse them into impossible miles of sheer depths. She hated the unknown. That’s what the ocean represented, in the purest sense — to a beast that crawls on land; survives on oxygen. She couldn’t help the association, being in a mortal, fallible body.

“Only angels tread out here, or monsters.”

Dark-Eye turned. “Hush.”

“What do you know about the ocean?”

“Any living permutation can survive here. In the icy depths. Life freezes; transforms. There’s a different operative principle at work. In the cold water, things can survive that would otherwise die in the hot sun. They can also transform in ways the light of day won’t allow.”

Judy gripped the oar tighter.

“So that means…”

Dark-Eye finished her sentence.

“So that means the depths hold things long since dead; can surface things no one in this world truly knows. Because what they think they know relies on rules that depths don’t obey.”

They traveled in silence. The river’s rush turned to a slow current. Judy lazed unconsciously. It reminded her of a canoeing trip, between canyons of ancient mountains. Paddling past campsites; tents, fire-pits. Smiling campers. Guitars. Then she remembered that the town was on fire.

“How much time do we have?”

“Not enough.”

They both paddled faster. The Gulf loomed like a resolution to the mystery.

The river’s mouth widened; spat them into the open. The sun had now broken the horizon; was an angry orange red. Dark-Eye and Judy had to shield their eyes from the magnitude of it. It was assaulting.

“Well, we’re here,” Judy said.

“Now we have to go down.”

“WHAT!” Judy blurted out.

“Far, far down,” Dark-Eye replied.

“We have no equipment. Scuba, suits, nothing.”

“The rules don’t apply here. Special case.”

Judy figured, at this point, Dark-Eye was the only person left to trust. She looked back on the events of the past day. She realized she couldn’t even trust herself. Every rule she ever believed to be true had been broken. A wider pattern, a more cosmic force had revealed itself to her. And worst, or best of all, the force was… hilarious. It refused preconception; refused convention. She realized that this day had taught her one thing — to thrive, to truly live, to jump out into the adventure of life, she’d have to utterly assent to it. So she did. And she had. Again and again.

“Let’s dive,” she told Dark-Eye.

Dark-Eye grinned.

“Have I told you you remind me of myself? Back when I first started.”

Judy took this as a clear compliment.

“Started what?”

He replied, matter of factly.

“Eating souls.”

Judy didn’t know how to feel about this. Instead, she mentally prepared herself to assent to the dive.

Dark-Eye decided to prime her with knowledge.

“Where we are diving today is the deepest part of the waters of the earth. Deeper than Mariana’s Trench; deeper than the darkest part of the dreams of the world’s initiated. We are going beyond the conscious mind, the subconscious mind, the world soul. We are going into the abyss. The first ground of the consciousness of the universe. On this dive, you will descend past all rule of law, to the place before the plane of gravity or the emergence of relative forms. This dive will obliterate all sense of individual. You will be swallowed by the infinite.”

Judy gulped.

“Like a whale?”

“Like a white whale. Or a black one. White and black are two manifestations of the same intertwined force, at opposite ends of the spectrum of light. Black is collapsed white; white is illusional black.”

Judy didn’t quite understand these metaphysics.

“So I’m going to die again?”

“Yes, but a deeper death than before. A cosmic death. A death before the birth of the universe.”

Dark-Eye was tired of explaining. He dove, swanlike, from the rowboat.

Judy followed, unthinkingly. She threw the conversation behind her like a cloak. It wasn’t needed anymore.

The water was black; surprisingly, quite temperate and calm. Judy couldn’t see anything. Dark-Eye’s body was ahead, below her, bubbling. He was lit from within, like some sort of aetheric candle. It was clear his figure would be able to guide her as she followed in the descent. She swam, in the active passage of falling. The depths of the water had no discernible effect on her whatsoever. The body seemed effortlessly able to move through this terrain — even more native to it than land and air. Like a deeper ancestry of form.

Time could not be counted, nor could the leagues they swam. It was so effortless, Judy felt like her very consciousness was melting away to reveal a form of primordial sentience which, strictly speaking, did not exist. It existed beyond existence, waiting to be met; greeted, like an old friend.

Judy heard a voice. “Almost there now.”

It was Dark-Eye, in her head.

Her fingertips brushed soft sand. She pressed against it; leveraged her legs down. She stood up at the bottom. Dark-Eye stood in front of her, illuminated in a yellow-white silhouette. She could still see his eyes, even at this depth. “We’re in the Soul Trench.”

The Soul Trench, Judy could see, thanks to Dark-Eye’s illuminated form, was a huge valley in the bottom of the ocean. Spire-like mountains loomed up around them like dark, shadow-figures. Judy felt an eerie sentience emerging from them; emanating from their formal nature. But the sublimity of their presence was not ominous, or evil, so to speak. It was the sensation of being accompanied by something ageless. Something so deep in the bosom of time that the presence was incalculably wise.

Dark-Eye sensed her vision. “You’re becoming more alert,” he said. “You’re seeing more clearly.”

Judy was strangely proud of herself. She was growing accustomed to this new world.

“Is this where the angel is?”

“This is where the consciousness of the angel is. We’re going to speak to the eel. The priest of snake lightning of the depths.”

The eel was in an underwater cave, inset in the mountains. Dark-Eye passed through the eyelet of the mountain; Judy followed. The hole was the size of a penny. She didn’t know how she’d fit, but her body passed effortlessly through the gape. The room opened up into a grotto, with a stream trickling. She took a big exhale, like she desperately needed the air. The deep consciousness of her animal body was responding. But she had no trouble breathing whatsoever on the descent. Her animal was reacting to perceived conditions that did not function in the way millions of years of evolution dictated. It was incredibly confusing to the nervous system.

“We’re here. Marco!” Bellowed Dark-Eye.

An eel swaggered up from behind a large canvas on the shore of the grotto. He was wearing a priestly alb covered in rainbow colors of paint. Orange sunglasses.

“Dark-Eye! Let me guess. You’re here for the angel again.”

“They seem to keep losing it.”

“I hate to think that my studio has become the lost and found of the universe.”

“You seem to symbolize passion lost and passion found.”

“And in doing so, passion regained.”

The eel smiled and clasped Dark-Eye’s hand. They were clearly good friends.

“And you, Judy! Dark-Eye’s new apprentice. I’ve heard about you. The heavens are speaking loudly about you these days. An uproar, even. Their new favorite television show. Pluto TV! That’s what I heard!”

He waved his brush around violently. “Want to check out my new piece?”

Judy was definitely interested. “Sure!”

He turned the canvas. It was one of Picasso’s bulls, with a split open inside revealing a large mechanical, autonomic system. “I’ve been teaching my students the nervous system.” He winked at Dark-Eye. “An update on Rembrandt.”

“This is clearly a Picasso ripoff.” Judy wasn’t impressed.

Marco belly laughed. “I am Picasso! Judy Holofernes. Don’t be so eager with the blade.”

Judy couldn’t help but be impressed by the quip.

Marco continued. “I am the spirit of all art. The primary force which moves the canvas and brush. The inspiration which strikes all genius! It’s quite a happy life. And best of all, I get to live in the depths. Less disturbance. No paparazzi.”

Marco seemed just a touch sad, even as he paraded this idea before Judy and Dark-Eye. Judy decided to press on the wound. It felt rude, even as she said it.

“Don’t you want everyone to know who you are?”

Marco felt the slight, and responded. “Yes. But how could they know? I’m a thousand different people, all at once. I’m too complicated. It takes a lot to know me.”

Judy felt sad for Marco. He was clearly brilliant, judging by the canvas. She felt she had too hastily judged him for what she saw. At this point, she was not only deeply willing to accept that an eel living in the valley of the soul could be Picasso; that he most likely was not only Picasso, but the first hand on the first cave wall of human history. These things were all simultaneous as a force moving through existence and creation itself.

“Suppose someone wanted to try?”

Marco immediately brightened up. This was a healing notion to him.

“Let’s solve this angel problem. This isn’t the first time. But perhaps we can make it the last.” He looked Judy straight in the eye. “Ever heard of Atlantis? How about Rome?”

Judy got the sense that this was a pattern going deeper than memory would allow.

Marco explained.

“Any given civilization or set of species level consciousness loses the angel when they abandon the passion of being alive. They replace it with props, religions, dresses, stories, roles, candy, bubblegum, plastic, or laws. In doing so, they surrender their primary existential freedom to question and become one with the force of existence to a stone gate. They sit and wait at the stone gate that they created themselves until they die. This is why we must recover your angel.”

Judy was not amused. Marco caught it.

“You’ve read Kafka.” He was annoyed. She nodded.

“Well you know I am Kafka.”

Judy remembered.

“Sorry.”

Marco nearly scoffed, then decided patience with Dark-Eye’s apprentice would be the preferred tactic. He continued.

“The angel is always an artifact. It is a real material manifestation of the force of creation. And it is always, as a rule, buried in the earth. It is the ancient memory of any tribe or species. It is the memory of the vital force. And in the case of your tribe, the angel is a jaguar. And the jaguar has returned to its original burial place, the jungles of the Olmec.”

Judy immediately protested.

“The angel has a chipped nose and comically large feet. It’s a two foot tall humanoid figurine.”

Marco laughed.

“That is how it appears to the uninitiated. Do you think they could bear the true form of the angel? No… no… here, we speak of the angel’s true form. The reason the angel is lost is because no one could bear its true form. So it left. It abandoned you.”

Judy began to understand. The vital force had been turned into a mask, a ploy, a game, a toy. Something digestible. Sterilized. And as such, it no longer remained or existed in any real way, but as a plastic image.

“So we have to go to the Olmec jungle to return the figure?”

“Yes. But it won’t be in the form it left you in. It will be in the true form. The were-jaguar.”

Judy was familiar with this principle in ancient Olmec history The were-jaguar was a shamanic figure. It was the between place. Between animal and man; in that small, brief window, the singular vital force of creation itself. The phase change. Transformation itself. She’d read a short essay on the topic by the esoteric philosopher Vito Kingpin, as an undergraduate student, found in a dusty library book labeled ANCIENT SHAMANIC TRADITIONS. It had enthralled her so much, that she read it multiple times on several different occasions. Somehow, all these years later, it stuck in her memory. Perfectly, word by word.

“’The Olmec used animal gods as representations of the powers of nature which were revealed to them phenomenologically through nature itself as in the manifest world. As such, nature itself became symbolic of the powers that the Olmec observed coursing through it.

The Olmec observed god as in nature disclosed directly. As such, the powers of nature were an observation derived from and thus directly associated with the jaguar — not as a symbol — but as a living disclosure of said powers. Therein, the were-jaguar as a historical force or meta-ontology is the Olmec realization of the foundational powers of nature or god incarnate fundamentally in man; that man itself is a mask for the absolute.

The powers were never linguistically deduced or applied to nature or the jaguar symbolically. Since the jaguar could both swim adeptly and hunt on land expertly, it was naturally both the ruler of the underworld and the overworld. This was not a symbolic imposition or layering, but the real segmental conditions of earth proper; the real power relations therein.

As such, the Olmec ontology is utterly imminent and pre-linguistic. Nature is directly and clearly realized without symbolic distance or abstract contemplation. The natural power is observed directly through nature; as such, is the civilizational ontos without interpretation or speech. The Olmec record is a record of nature speaking in utter silence.

The fundamental tonal power of nature in the Olmec ontology, due to both geographical location and basic observation, is the jaguar. As such, the jaguar is everywhere and in all things; is the most basic and fundamental power within and as the human, stripped of its differential disguise. The jaguar is then nature itself, as the disclosure of nature’s utmost power viscerally and phenomenologically in space for the human eye and historical record. Deification of the jaguar, in these circumstances; as such, is natural consequence.

Characteristic in Olmec art itself is the providence of the shaman as the central linguistic figure representative of the Olmec tradition as in the individual; the shaman as always-already in a state of change and transformation — reflected primarily in the face and hands; as through kneeling, sitting, standing; gazing out into space and undergoing facial contortions or otherwise gazing out with ghostly perdition.

These figurations are not accidental, but rather represent a fundamental aspect of the Olmec consciousness — priority given to shamanic, subjective, underworld experience, which is to say, chthonic energy, or the energy which resides natively in the body as a natural, cosmic force which is not necessarily human. Rather, it is transpersonal, supralinguistic, and primary to the incarnation of the human and the species of humanity itself proper. This primary energy is the pre-linguistic undercurrent of all of life that the shaman ritually accesses; thus, in turn, has access to the primary mediating force and factor of all life, which enables his dramatic change represented in the glyphs and stones made available by the Olmec transmission.

This is to say that the Olmec concept of subjectivity or humanity, strictly speaking, does not exist. The primacy of shamanic experience in the Olmec tradition and the primacy of shamanic experience represented in art and ritual objects primarily through the transformation of the were-jaguar; the shaman as in the state of transformation indicates in the Olmec that the human being did not and does not exist — but, rather, the human being is a shape-shifting vessel for and of the primary, cosmic primordial energy — and that, in the shamanic ritual practice, the human being learns how to tap into this cosmic flow; thus making available the powers of life and opening up the aperture of, as Eliade describes it, ‘profane humanity’, into wholeness, and ecstatic psychological totality as lived, embodied ritual experience.

In this way, the shamanic experience captured in the moment of change in stone or jade is a living documentation of the crux and foundation of the Olmec ontology: that humanity is a mediation of total cosmic force; that with training, practice, and divine inheritance, the sensitive, or the medicine born in the Olmec community received and transmitted this ritual commune with the forces immortalized in the Olmec cosmology proper. This was, and is — the gateway to the divine in the Olmec sense; that these powers be grounded and practiced in the community is a prime, universal, trans-historical indicator of profound psychic health vis-a-vis transpersonal, trans-species, cosmological interlocution with the stars and the force of creation itself.

The werejaguar is not symbolism — it is a direct expression of the local power of the jaguar as the presence of the power of nature itself channeled through the body of the human being; the vessel of the Olmec shaman. The mask inscribed upon the stone face invokes the power at hand and how it neuro-physiologically impacts, twists, shapes, and fills the vessel; animates the shaman; furthermore, the hands turned paws and claws evokes the psychedelic — as in psyche revealing — impact of witnessing this shift in shade upon the viewer. The shaman’s body, in channeling this primordial, essential power — reveals the essence of the jaguar within it, within him; within all creation. This is to say: the manifest powers of being localized in Mesoamerica, as viewed and participated in by the ancients through such forces as thunder, the jaguar, and the eclipse.

These forces themselves are manifest phenomena which evoke awe and reveal the majestic aspect of the prime mover as in the forces of nature which can be perceived sensually. The shaman, however, as is detailed by and through the dual function of the jaguar on land and in water, penetrates into the energetic dimension, or the ‘underworld’ or under-real appearance of phenomena; channels the signature of formal existence. This is later reproduced in a Western, materialist sense via the concept of quantum mechanics.

This knowledge and awareness was and is always available to the world historical shaman immediately, somatically, through the cultivation of energetic perception: most notably through trials, mediation, inborn sensitivity and acuity; ingestion of psychedelic plants and materials.’”

Dark-Eye and Marco looked at her in astonishment.

“Who wrote that?” Dark-Eye was intrigued.

“Vito Kingpin. He’s a cultural anthropologist. But I think he’s actually just one of the rogue shamans. Never heard of him?”

Marco shook his head. “Sounds a bit like Eliade.”

“I’ll get you a copy of the book one day,” Judy said.

This made Marco quite happy.

“So you do understand,” he said.

“I do.”

“Then you understand what has to be done. Now you know who and what the angel really is, and where you’ll find him. He’ll be in stone. The question is — can you set him free?”

Judy was going to inquire further, but she caught Dark-Eye’s gaze.

“It’s time to go. Because time’s running out.”

Judy remembered.

“Nice to meet you, Marco.”

“And you as well, Judy Holofernes.”

And so it was that Judy and Dark-Eye headed for their final destination, the jungles of southern Mexico.

The rise to the surface was near immediate, compared to the descent. Judy and Dark-Eye simply needed to release their hold on the dark ground. They shot up buoyantly, popping up to the cresting surface like helium balloons. Judy’s animal body relaxed.

“We’re taking this boat the whole way there?”

“It’ll be shorter than you think.”

“Right. New rules.”

She didn’t have to correct herself this time, or take a second to consider. She vowed to herself — next time, she’d let go of gravity, physics, belief. She’d just trust in where they were going. How, when, why. It was all a movement toward something she didn’t yet know or understand. But by now, she understood — this thing, this place, it was the center of the earth, the center of existence. Power, meaning, all of it. It was like a hidden attractor. It drew her with the true power and goodness of fate. She was, by now, enthralled.

They passed several island volcanos. The stormy pretense of the sky seemed to clear, leaving them drifting in a white cloud sunlight. The skies were effortlessly blue.

“Very good,” remarked Dark-Eye. “Maybe the Bearded Lady had a say after all.”

For some reason, this reminded Judy of Henry Carpenter. She wondered if he’d stolen that bag. Naively, she considered the possibility that the game might still be going on.

Dark-Eye noticed her mental drift.

“Stay focused,” he said. Judy snapped back into the play. She could see the shore Dark-Eye had steered them towards. It was a golden, sandy beach. Palms overwhelmed the shore; several feet in, it was swallowed by thick, humid jungle. She could already hear the insects pounding the air with vocalizations.

“We’ll have to slash our way in,” Dark-Eye said. “There’s no real path here for humans, not anymore.” He drew a scythe out of a compartment in the boat’s floor.

“Well prepared,” remarked Judy.

“The Lady keeps her time.” Dark-Eye refused to elaborate.

Judy implicitly understood.

They docked the boat. Getting out, they eased it far up onto the shore.

“Don’t want to get stuck here,” said Dark-Eye. “Without the boat there is no return.”

Judy felt grateful for the little wooden rowboat. She turned back to gaze at it one last time as the jungle enveloped them with a deafening noise.

It was immediately overwhelming. All around, animals and insects screamed at her. She covered her ears. Dark-Eye seemed to relish the noise. “Within the chaos is a hidden order…” he whispered to himself.

“That’s Jung,” Judy interrupted.

“Means I can’t say it too?”

Mutual silence.

The large leaves met Dark-Eye’s scythe; snapped and crumbled into walkway piles. Judy stepped over the pads. Green blood trickled out of them.

“A lot of murder.”

“It continues.”

They made a straight path through the jungle. No turns. Dark-Eye carved with an angry precision. He seemed to know exactly where he was going.

“Been here before?”

“Not exactly. The last time I had to perform this operation was thousands of years ago. The plates of the earth were organized differently then. Different hot spots.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the last time you people screwed something up this badly the world literally had a different tectonic face.”

Judy blushed, embarrassed. “You mean we did this? I did this?”

“Your entire family tree. For centuries. It’s been a slow burn. And now we’re boiling over. And you’re here to correct it. So play your part.”

Judy stood a little more upright; stepped with a little more purpose.

They reached a stone temple in the middle of the jungle. It was nearly covered with vines and leaves, except for two dragon guardians. They roared, even as the stained, worn stone made them look exhausted. Judy swore she could see dark-circles around their eyes.

Dark-Eye remarked: “They’re tired of protecting you.”

He went inside. Judy followed.

Inside the temple, there was a podium; there stood the were-jaguar. It was like no creature Judy knew anywhere on earth, nonetheless in the history of the earth. It had a beak like a bird, a face like a man, but features like jungle cat. It leered proudly at them. It was made of a sort of dark marble, like a blue-black jade.

“The Rain God.” Dark-Eye admired the smooth stone.

Judy was astonished. “How did they make this?” It stood before them, right around five feet tall. It stood before Judy like a living being. And she supposed, right then, that it was.

“It made itself with them,” Dark-Eye explained. “You have to remember. This was a different time. The world had a different relationship with the powers. Humans had a different relationship with the powers. The powers worked through them. The Rain God drew itself out into the open through relenting human hands. Surrendered hands.”

Dark-Eye placed his hands upon the statue. Judy winced. Its eyes opened.

“Why did you wake me up?”

Judy could immediately hear the naivete and frustration in its voice. It spoke like a child. Or a fool. Could a Rain God be a fool?

Dark-Eye was immediately embarrassed. Judy didn’t think she’d seen Dark-Eye embarrassed or deferential since she’d met him. But that wasn’t very long.

“I’m sorry, Tláloc.”

“I remember you. It’s been quite some time. I’ve been sleeping… drifting… why have I been asleep?”

Dark-Eye was sorrowful. “The humans forgot. The temple is overgrown.”

Tláloc’s eyes narrowed. “And now the world is burning.”

Dark-Eye: “And now the world is burning.”

Tláloc leered proudly. “And why should I help you?’

Judy decided to speak up. “Because people are suffering.”

Tláloc ruminated. Judy could see on his face that he had decided that this was a good answer.

“And what if I come?”

“You can save them.”

“Will there be a parade?”

“The circus can resume.”

Tláloc thought carefully. “Pok-ta-tok?”

Judy smiled. “They’re finishing up the doubleheader as we speak.”

Tláloc replied, bubbling. “Then we have to hurry.”

Dark-Eye took his hand off the stone; Tláloc’s eyes went blank. Dark-Eye spoke, with an urgency which was again peculiar to Judy’s view of him:

“You have to pick him up. If I touch him he’ll awaken. We need to get in the boat. Back before nightfall.”

Judy grabbed Tláloc. He was incredibly light for his size. Like a raindrop. They ran for the rowboat.

Dark-Eye meditated the entire journey back. It cut the trip roughly in half by Judy’s estimation. His eyes were closed; entirely focused on moving the wheel of space and time. Judy’s oar moved effortlessly in her hand. It was as if they were being propelled forward by a universal force. A tide of will threw them. The Gulf carried them. The rowboat huffed. The name flickered in the churning water. Judy glanced at the reflection: ENTHUSIASMOS. She accepted the name.

They docked at the river inlet. The Bearded Lady was still there.

“Toss me the keys,” she said.

“There aren’t any keys!” Judy exclaimed.

The Bearded Lady just laughed. “They’re in the 24th inning. 1-1. Henry’s on the mound. They ran through all their pitchers. They’ll call it at nightfall. The troupe has to move on. The circus is leaving. If you hurry, you might catch the final out.”

It was now early evening. Judy could call it by the height of the sun. It had seasoned orange.

“Hurry.” She pulled the statue.

The Bearded Lady gasped.

“It’s been millennia.”

Dark-Eye: “And hopefully never again.”

They ran up the embankment. The Bearded Lady turned around to watch them go. Her charts fell from her lap.

The ballpark loomed. The lights flickered; the fire had now reached the cemetery. It licked angrily at the doorstep of the field. It was silent. No more spectacle, thought Judy. They ran into the entrance; through the spectator tunnel. As they emerged, she saw Henry on the mound. He was sweating profusely. It was incredibly hot inside the stadium. Three-two count on the batter, one out, top of the 25th inning. Judy yelled, “Henry, we’ve got the statue!” The entirety of the silent crowd leered. Henry waved. He wound up and threw the pitch. Curveball. Foul, into the stands.

Judy placed Tláloc in one of the bleacher seats. Dark-Eye placed his hand on the statue. It awakened.

“The Black Yankees! I’ve heard about them. Satchel Paige pitches for them. And who’s this other crew?”

Judy beamed. “The Holy Fools! That’s Henry Carpenter on the mound. Starting third baseman. You’ve caught a real barnburner. They’re in the top of the 25th inning now.”

Judy caught an incredibly devious look by Tláloc. It was clear he was plotting a deal. She braced herself as he spoke.

Tell you what. If they break the record for the longest game ever, you have a deal. I’ll save the world.”

Judy was appalled.

“You’d let the earth be destroyed that trivially? What kind of god are you?”

“I’m the Rain God. That’s my primary function. And besides, it’s not just the end of the world. It’s the end of the universe.”

Dark-Eye painfully explained.

“The death of the vital function means the death of all life. It means the cosmos goes void. There is no more divine spark. There is no more consciousness. The universe is vacated of all vitality. All passion. Any claim to any sort of life ceases. Cells no longer creep. No processes are carried out. The veins of life become vacated stone.”

The Rain God picked up where Dark-Eye left off. “They go to stone. Where you awakened me from. I was peaceful there. You’ve returned me to the affairs of the living. I have no need, interest, or desire to remain here nor there. The ballgame negotiates your fate. This, I watch with interest.”

He gestured to the field.

“This is the game of life and death. It’s a play. What are the stakes? High or low?”

Judy sputtered. “Our lives are at stake!”

The Rain God responded. “Life and death are the game finite beings play in the stone temple of the gods. And this field is your temple of stone.”

She looked around. The bleachers were now stone steps. The audience was petrified.

“The Gorgon Function.” Dark-Eye remarked with disdain.

“Fate is now upon the ballfield.” Tláloc said this solemnly, but Judy could see the hint of delight in his eye. He enjoyed the drama of the struggle of mankind.

Henry wound up again. This time the batter watched as a screwball slammed into the catcher’s mitt. “Strike three!” screamed the umpire. Judy had missed the second out, in her horror. Apparently Henry had struck out the side. He could pitch, too. Judy ran down to the field. Dark-Eye tried to stop her, but Tláloc assented. “Let her. Who knows how she could turn the tide. And who knows which way the tide will turn.”

Judy reached the fence that separated the dugout and the seats.

“Henry! Henry!”

“Judy!” Henry was happy to see her. “Like my screwball?”

“It was great Henry. But listen…”

“I have to go.”

“You need to hear this.”

“Quickly.”

“You need to make it through the 26th inning.”

“But we can win it now!”

“Trust me.”

Henry deliberated.

“The boys are all worn out.”

“Please. Trust me. There isn’t time to explain. They’re going to start the game.”

The Black Yankees’ catcher threw the ball down to second to signify the start of the next half inning.

Henry looked back at the field. “Ok, I’ll tell the team. You want us to throw the game?”

“Just keep it alive. Until the 27th inning.”

The record for the longest game in Major League Baseball history was a 26 inning game, ending in a 1-1 tie. It was the Boston Braves against the Brooklyn Robins. May 1, 1920. Pitchers of record: Leon Cadore and Joe Oeschger. Both: 26 innings pitched. Called due to darkness.

Judy struggled back to her seat, evading the frozen figures. As she took her seat, she gasped. Onto the field marched the Bearded Lady. The announcer croaked, as if by machine:

“Now batting, number three, Marjorie Tiresias. Pitcher.”

They were taking Henry out! Or were they? Judy entirely forgot about the stakes of the game. She just wanted to see Henry play. She registered this insane contradiction in her mind. She accepted it.

She looked up at the scoreboard. Henry had been returned to third base.

“They aren’t allowed to do that, are they?”

Dark-Eye cast a dark eye upon her.

She had forgotten the rule.

Marjorie struck out to end the inning. The Black Yankees’ pitcher had made quick work of the Holy Fools. Judy didn’t know if this was good or bad. It didn’t matter who won. It just mattered that the game kept going long enough. She glanced at the sun. It was tipping toward absolution. She watched the umpire. If he called the game, it was all over.

She closed her eyes. She could hear the Holy Fools taking the field for the top of the 26th inning. She didn’t open them until Marjorie had thrown her last warm up pitch; she could hear the ball hiss over Tiresias’ head and into the second baseman’s glove. “Play ball!” bellowed the umpire.

The inning went over without event. And into the bottom of the 26th, nothing. Judy began to breathe easier. Henry came up, with a runner on second, two outs. An easy popup, a double, a strikeout. Judy admitted she didn’t care. Henry was playing, the game just had to last. She prayed it was a quick at bat. But then she realized. If they scored, it would be over. She quickly changed her mind. He needed to get out. The runner couldn’t score. And then it happened. Henry hit a bullet up the middle. She wanted to smack him across the face and cheer at the same time. The Yanks’ centerfielder scooped it on two hops cleanly as the Holy Fools’ runner came around third. Tláloc’s breathing sounded like a tornado bearing down upon a little red farmhouse. The centerfielder threw a bullet to the plate. It one hopped just after the mound. The runner barreled into the catcher’s chest. They tumbled into dust. “YERRRRR OUT!” yelled the umpire. Judy erupted into cheers. Henry glared at her. She was the sole noise in the bleachers. She quickly sat back down.

They had made it. The 27th inning. And then she saw it. The clown, waddling out of the dugout. He was carrying a massive balloon animal and a ridiculously oversized pin. It was over six feet tall. And it was then that Judy decided. She was going to take the clown out.

She jumped up from the bleachers. Tláloc smiled. She leapt over the stone steps. It was like interrupting a tragedy. The audience gasped. Unmoving. A breath of wind. She leapt over the dugout fence. The clown lumbered toward the field. She flew through the air, like a panther, a jaguar, and drove him to the ground. The clown angrily responded.

“What the hell?”

“Sorry. The stakes are high.”

“This isn’t part of the act! You could’ve killed me! The balloons!”

Judy looked at the stupidly large balloon animal horse.

“It’s over. Get the fuck off the field.”

The umpire looked over at them.

“It’s getting late, you know.”

Judy responded.

“Just start the 27th inning.”

The umpire was taken aback. Her command was so strong, he responded with an immediate reaction.

“PLAY BALL!”

---

THE CROSSING

Jonita woke up to discover she was hungry. This later became clear to her as the central issue. She stood up; stretched her arms and legs. She could feel, acutely, liquid pulsing through them. It was warm. Sticky. Almost electric. She yawned. Mid-day was already creeping upon her. She looked out of the window at the town below. A squat, fat man with glasses walking his poodles. They yipped, as he looked up at her and grinned. She shut the blind.

Walking downstairs to make tea, she caught her reflection in the mirror. In a flash, she could see something like a large, prehistoric parrot in her face. Her skin sagged. Trying to ignore the image, she continued down the wooden steps. She was greeted by her husband, Darien. He clasped her in his arms. His skin felt clammy and cold, like a corpse.

“Darling beloved, yet another day upon the moon!”

He picked her up, spinning her, and set her down.

Jonita, nauseous, gave her complaint:

“Food?”

On the table. She sat down. The two eggs looked like runny nostrils. The bread was hard. The butter, cold.

“Darien, I’m starving.”

“The food’s right there.”

She looked at it; inhaled deeply. Five seconds later, the plate was gone.

“Jonita, you swallowed the whole thing!” Darien was pale with astonishment.

She looked at the table. Empty. Insider her, she could feel dishes clattering. Like a cupboard in an earthquake.

Aghast. She cried, “Darien, what do I do?”

He ran towards the front door, grabbing the keys from the coatrack. “We need to take you to Doctor Vivian! We need to go, now!”

Frantic, Jonita hopped into the long, white car. They sped away. Each bump in the road further nauseated her. She imagined herself in a large nest, surrounded by the shells of the eggs she’d eaten. Emergent from them were little raptor chicks with human faces. Their beaks and tongues were purple; red. She desperately tried to feed them as they screamed. A bruised sun leered down upon the nest. It was high off the ground. Jonita coughed.

“How soon to Vivian’s?”

Darien glanced back in the rearview mirror, his eyes in the glass.

“She’s at Bartholomew Memorial today. We have to get to the other side of town.”

Doctor Louise Vivian was a world renowned psychologist; in addition, a surgical practitioner with a specialization in stomach tissue. Conveniently, Jonita was a longtime patient. Throughout her life, she’d had several skin grafts for a condition she inherited at birth. Vivian spent a significant amount of time (and Jonita’s family, a significant amount of money) to discover the origination of the condition; the exact laws therein. Vivian named it ‘regional cosmosis’. It had won her several national prizes; physicians around the world came to study under her. Jonita’s birth defect had, in a large way, made Vivian’s career. In their decades of work together, Vivian had grown a pitiful fondness for Jonita, although she’d never speak it out loud. The Doctor was now an old woman. An octogenarian.

They pulled into the parking lot with a hard left, as Jonita winced.

“I don’t feel good Darien.”

Darien looked at her. What little love was left in their marriage was founded in desperate survival. They had been married since eighteen. He was an aspiring journalist; she, an actress. She managed to land a role in a local production of Much Ado About Nothing; beyond that, her career spoiled. She’d found work as a receptionist at Colleen Collier’s Dental Solutions, just down the street from their row house. He had accepted life as an accountant. Marrying her, just as they’d graduated high school, became a constant reminder of the life he’d denied.

Darien spoke. “Darling, you’re doing just fine. Say, the holes in your nose do look smaller though. Nostrils.” He pointed to his own face, just above his top lip.

Jonita remembered the flash in the oval mirror on their landing, just before the stairs. The memory was swelling; mixing with a forgotten dream. It seemed more real than anything she’d felt before.

“I’m still hungry.”

Darien groaned; suppressed the sound almost immediately.

“Louise is upstairs. Let’s go inside.”

The receptionists at Bartholomew knew the Johnsons by face; let them pass quickly into the elevator. Jonita began cackling.

“Quiet! You’ll upset the patients. The waiting room is nearly full!”

“I can’t, Darien!” She was remembering the nest; her baby eggs. It felt so real. But Jonita never had children. She decided it was a creative fantasy. Her overactive imagination. The laughter suddenly stopped. But that didn’t explain her nostrils.

Vivian welcomed them kindly into her office. She’d had a full slate that morning, with several patients complaining of a particularly virulent strain of dreaming. Her role had seemingly stretched from psychologist to surgeon to consultant of the unconscious. She patted her pockets instinctively. Somehow, correspondingly, her wallet had failed to grow. She grimaced slightly.

“It’s been a long day, Jonita,” she confessed. “What’s the emergency?”

“I swallowed a plate. On accident.”

This intrigued Vivian. A concrete case.

“On accident, you say? Whole?”

Jonita thought about this.

“I honestly can’t remember.”

Darien chimed in.

“I didn’t hear any plate breaking.”

Vivian: “How did you fit it into your mouth?”

Jonita considered.

“I don’t know. I don’t have any memory of it.”

She thought about telling Vivian about the dream she had in the car. She wasn’t asleep, but she wasn’t exactly awake either. She noticed she was starving. Absolutely, brutally starving. She and Darien had a large pasta dinner the night before. She’d slept well. Nothing was noticeably different.

It felt like her stomach was mashing the plate with a fist. Not a lot of energy came from it. She was tired, but she could hunt a bear.

Vivian sensed there was something Jonita wasn’t telling her.

“Am I missing anything?”

Darien looked at Jonita expectantly.

“Well, I don’t think so.”

Vivian sent Jonita home with a prescription for an advanced form of Pepto Bismol. “Sleep it off,” she said.

This to Jonita did not seem like sound advice. Darien was furious.

“How could she just send you home like that? It could destroy your intestinal lining?”

Jonita listened to Darien rant in the kitchen. She was rummaging about in the pantry.

“Are you even hearing me, Jonita? Say — you shouldn’t be eating. It could be dangerous!”

She glared at Darien. He was taken aback.

“I’m hungry.”

“Jonita, your nose!”

She looked in the glass window of the microwave. It was stretching. Now, noticeably like a beak.

“How old do you think I look, Darien?”

Darien weighed the question. He didn’t want to start a domestic war.

“Prehistoric,” he replied.

Jonita got in the car and left him standing in the kitchen.

She had no idea where she was going. Hunger had never been this deep for her. It was an entirely new sensation. It burned in her stomach. It even felt like it was burning her eyes. She was extremely alert. Cars swerved around her at a low speed. She looked at her watch. It was high noon. She carved on the road, past whipping boughs of trees. She felt alive, free, for maybe what was the first time in her entire life. Her cell phone beeped. She answered.

“Jonita, Doctor Colleen is wondering where you are.”

It was Erin, her fellow front desk assistant. Jonita realized she had not given a single thought to work today. It was Tuesday.

“Tell her I’m sick.”

“You should have called.”

“It is what it is.”

Jonita could hear Erin angrily hanging up the receiver.

Just as the receiver audibly clicked, she saw a roadside stand, in front of a general store. It had a blue roof, tucked away behind a row of wildly overgrown ferns.

The worn wooden sign on the front of the building above the door said:

CELINE’S ANTIQUES AND CURIOSITIES: OLD WORLD TRINKETS AND DELIGHTS

Something in her body pulled the wheel into the dirt lot. The tires skidded; thudded to a halt.

Jonita got out and went inside.

The dimly lit room was stuffed to the brim with objects. Chairs, tables, vases, old photographs and paintings, sculptures. Statues. She could barely see over any of the several rows which lined the space. The cashier’s desk was over to her left. An old, bespectacled man smiled at her. “Johnny Clarice, antiques curator, at your service. How do you do?”

“I thought this was Celine’s.”

“Yes, Celine was the old owner. He died of a cough. His parrot is still here though.”

Jonita heard a loud squawking from behind one of the piles of chairs.

“His name is Maurice.”

Maurice laughed. “Chlorine!” It said loudly.

“Is he talking to us?”

“He’s talking to whoever he likes. And whoever he likes can reply.”

This didn’t make sense to Jonita. Clarice stared at her intently. His pupils narrowed upon her nose.

“Fascinating,” he said.

“What?”

“I haven’t seen a case like this in quite some time.”

He reached below the desk. Jonita’s body tensed up. He could feel her contract.

“Relax. It’s just a book.”

He pulled a thick, dusty leather volume from beneath the wooden desk. It was titled:

PYTHAGOREAN CAUSES AND CURES, A DECISIVE MANUAL ON DEEP PHILOSOPHICAL AND SPACE TIME TREATMENTS. COMPILED BY RODRIGO GIBBOUS, ALCHEMIST

“Who’s Rodrigo Gibbous?”

Clarice’s eyes narrowed.

“Don’t ask too many questions.”

He flipped through the pages; layers of dust flew off them. Jonita coughed lightly. His finger fell on a page.

“Aha! See it? An advanced case of cosmogenesis…. no, sorry. I can’t pronounce it… toxicosmosis?”

Jonita’s eyes lit up; darted to the page. She could read it over the desk, upside down.

“That’s what I have. Severe regional cosmosis. But Doctor Vivian said it was a new disease. She even won awards for discovering it. You can read about her in the papers.”

Johnny Clarice smiled a suffering, paper-thin smile.

“No… no. This is a very old disease. The last known case was in the time of the conquistadors. It played a large role in wiping out the Aztec civilization. And before that… Egypt. Sumer. The caves. It was the primary function of the magus…” he paused. Jonita realized he was uncertain if he should continue. He did anyway.

“It was the primary function of the magus to cure this condition. There was a time it had swallowed the world.” Johnny paused again. “Do you know of the Black Plague?”

Jonita did. She’d learned about it as a young girl in school.

Johnny continued. “It was the condition that consumed Europe. And it directly led to the origination of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the conquering of the New World.”

Jonita was about to scoff. Then she remembered this was her condition he was talking about. She had no choice to be interested. Otherwise, it was back to Bartholomew and Dr. Vivian. She knew Vivian thought she was a sad mess. No one else in the world even knew what regional cosmosis was, nonetheless how to treat it. They looked at her like she was a leper. Worse, a leper with an unknown condition. There was no going back. Only forward. And Johnny Clarice knew what she had. At least, vaguely. And it sounded like this man Gibbous had discovered it. Long before Vivian and her awards. She felt hurt. Like Vivian had a parade in honor of her suffering. And worse, that her suffering was very, very old.

“Gibbous discovered this?”

Johnny replied, “I found Gibbous in my early research. I dealt in rare books as a young man. He was the first example in the early West. Before that, the condition was dealt with on a local basis, by the shaman, by the medicine man.” He saw Jonita wince. “Hungry?” he said.

“It hurts.”

“I know. My great granddaughter had it.”

Jonita was astonished. “I’m not alone?”

“Never. Millions of cases around the world have existed undiagnosed since the onset of the twentieth century. Many die in asylums. Deemed insane. The bodies are burned. Their faces change…”

Johnny’s face twisted away from the light, like he was remembering a horrible image. Jonita caught the sun through the door window. It was nearing nightfall.

“What do you mean, ‘faces change’?”

Johnny leered at her. “Look at you. What do you think is happening?”

“I don’t know.”

“An ancient force is emerging through you. Gibbous documented this during autopsies. The Egyptians made this the foundation of their religion. It was called the Duat, or the underworld.”

He showed her an illustration of a man with the face of a jackal on an operating table. It was dated June 6, 1312.

Jonita gasped. “Is this real?”

“Thousands of victims of the black plague were examined by the alchemists. They began to understand a force had remerged into the world. It is the same force of the jaguar priest. It is the same force which men once worshipped in nature. The bison.”

He pointed to the wall. There was a large photograph hung in a golden frame. There was a pile of bison skulls. A man stood before it to show the scale. He was the size of an ant. The skulls piled towards the sun, threatening to eclipse it. The open air grave must’ve been close to sixteen feet tall.

“This is history,” said Johnny, gesturing to the photograph. “Many of the old documents were burned and erased. The few that remain are primarily modern. But they’re incontrovertible. Thanks to the technologies that existed at the time.”

“Do you have a photograph of the transformed head?”

Clarice’s eyes fell. “No. It’s one of the great tragedies of modernity. The bodies were burned in secret. By a network of asylums. They were all run by Carlos James Rochester III, the famous industrialist. His family had immigrated from Mexico to the United States during the Spanish-American War; gone on to set up an intricate network of Texarkana railroads for supply transportation, which later became a Gilded Age luxury attraction for passenger travel. Rochester had made millions at the turn of the century. He then went to create a national conglomerate of asylums. Rochester Institutes. Nobody understood why. They fell apart at mid-century due to a lack of funding. Rochester died at age seventy-two, of conditions unknown. The asylums fell into disrepair. On islands, in forests. Forgotten.”

Jonita knew of this. It wasn’t a well studied topic in pop American history. But she knew of Rochester. She’d even ridden on his modernized ‘Voyager’ lines. It was a series of railcars that ran through Alabama. They’d even tried to replicate the modern rail version in Guatemala. State sanctioned. The project was a disaster. She read about it in the papers last year.

“So this was all suppressed?”

“It was privatized. In the Rochester Corporate records.”

“So do I need to try to find them?”

“You need to find Priscilla Jones.”

“Priscilla Jones?”

“The old record keeper for the Rochester family. She’s now one hundred and four years old.”

Johnny Clarice gave her a piece of paper. “This is her address.” The paper read:

THE CASA MONICA, 95 CORDOVA ST., SAINT AUGUSTINE, FLORIDA 32084

“Coincidence?”

Clarice smiled for the first time since they’d begun their odyssey.

“Augustine burned for his freedom.”

Jonita shook Johnny’s hand; walked out of the store. She could hear, faintly, from the back storage, a record playing. She recognized it immediately. Julie London’s ‘Cry Me A River’. It whispered ghoulishly through the old PA system. As the door shut softly, a bell tinkled. Clarice sat back in his chair. He closed his eyes. They remained shut.

Jonita took Ninety-Five South the whole way to St. Augustine. She could feel the wind in her hair; the hot morning sun upon her face. She felt wide open, like the whole of nature and the cosmos had poured into her. She began to understand, by way of experience, exactly what regional cosmosis actually was. Her entire life, it pounded behind her chest and eyes, like a vague suffering. Doctors prescribed scripts, surgeries, scans. None of it did anything other than dull or exasperate the pain. She was now in intimate dialogue with the condition. She looked in the rearview mirror. Her jaw was now narrowing. She understood the transformation principle at hand. She didn’t fear it. She actively rejoiced in it. She begged it hurry forth, even if it meant death. It didn’t matter. She’d tasted something different. Something real. Out from beneath the mask and coat of a life that had suffocated her. It was no life. It was a trickling, ticking away of the time until the body collapsed. She’d never even tasted the body. She felt the fever growing.

She realized… this fever, this hunger, it wasn’t even hunger. It was something closer to primordial fury. It didn’t even need to be fed. She hadn’t eaten since the ceramic plate. It had disappeared. Like a fist had compacted it into dust. She felt the coals glow.

Jonita pulled into the roundabout where three bellhops lingered, smoking cigarettes and fake boxing. The tan facade of the Casa Monica loomed. One took her hand as she stepped out of the car. The other asked for her keys. She tossed them nonchalantly. The third marveled at her face.

“Wow, missus, is that a mask? Far out!”

Jonita winked.

“You’re lucky you get a chance to see it! Most of the time its buried away.”

The kid clapped. “Can I take a picture?”

“No, but I have a showing tonight. Maybe you’ll see it onstage.”

Jonita didn’t know where that one came from. Maybe a stage direction. She walked inside, as two of the boys resumed their play-fighting. The third drove away. She got the sense she’d never step foot in that car again.

Jonita inquired at the front desk. “Priscilla Jones?”

“Top floor. The infirmary. They’re currently treating her for a fall. She’s quite frail.” The girl manning the register gave her a card. Use this to get in the elevator.

Jonita scanned it; the doors opened. She’d head up to the sixty-second floor. The elevator rose. She remembered. A red sun, boiling, steaming. Eggs hatched in the oozing pool. It was teeming with insects… no, cells. She raised her head to the sky and screamed. It emerged like a bellowing caw. Thundering, from the nape of her long neck; dipping into the bill of her mouth. Feathers molted from her chest. Two, yellow-white. The size of a giant’s quill. Her children climbed into the pool. They were beastly spiders. Sixteen legs. Spindling. Their mouths like pincers. They ate at the water, ingesting microbial meat.

The elevator dinged.

It was a small hospital. Jonita’s first thought: is this Bartholomew? The waiting room… it was laid out exactly the same. She could swear… and there was the couple from this morning. One wearing an orange golf sweater. The same hole in the dark green corduroy pants. The woman laid her head upon the man’s arm. The same bald spot, in the gray wisps of her hair. Jonita choked on her spit. The nurse attending them looked up.

“You’re here for Priscilla.”

“How…”

“We heard you call. She’s in the yellow room. Room 236.”

Jonita walked, quicker than before, toward the room. She sensed there was something she needed to see. And there was Priscilla. It was her. Old. Very old.

Priscilla’s mouth was a skeletal jaw. Stitches on the right side. A cut? Surgery? Her eyes were sunken, green. Almost like time had beaten them back into her skull. She tried to smile. It didn’t work.

“Ah, the new woman.”

“What do you mean new?”

“The face I would’ve worn. If I was still here.”

“You’re not?”

“I was you.”

Jonita looked closer. She could see her features, barely legible, refracted in the twisted, mangled corpse of time. Priscilla was lashed by age. She could’ve been anyone. But beneath the facade of her body, small traits still remained. The wrinkles at the edge of her lips. The mole on the second finger of her left hand, shaped like a crucifix.

“I left you behind,” Priscilla continued.

“How?”

“You’re dying.” Priscilla fingered the knobby bones on her right wrist. She seemed embarrassed, almost ashamed.

“I know.”

“I had to leave.”

Jonita inquired. “How did you get so old?”

“I kept it inside me. I survived. But at a cost.”

Jonita could see she meant the facial scar.

“What else?”

Priscilla pulled aside the gown. There was a large, jagged scar across her heart. No stitches. It had healed, as much as healing was possible for such an incision.

Priscilla put up three bony fingers.

“They cut me open three times. My heart stopped working.”

Jonita audibly exhaled.

“You’re doing the right thing.”

“Am I? I’m dying.”

“To the world. I’m dying to the grave.”

Priscilla looked Jonita straight in the eye.

“I have the papers. You had them, too.”

“Where?”

“In the basement. The old shipping boxes.”

Jonita had a large closet of storage in her unfinished basement. She and Darien never went down there. Not since they’d moved in, after their honeymoon. But that was almost thirty years ago now.

“They’ve been in the family for three generations. Your grandmother kept them when the Institutes closed.”

Jonita made the connection. It was incredibly explicit. “So they all knew?”

Priscilla croaked, like her entire body was dry. “Yes. It’s been in your blood. The secret. It’s not just about cosmosis. It’s about the system that generates it.” She coughed into her hand. Jonita could see a smattering of fresh, wet blood on her palm. “It’s about The Orator.”

“Who’s The Orator?”

“He’s the man who speaks.”

“That’s not enough.”

“You’ll have to find him.” Priscilla wept slightly, out of the corner of her left eye. “You have to leave. I’m due for my next procedure.”

“Are you leaving?”

“You should be asking yourself the same question.”

“Where do I go?”

“Find the circle of stones. Every nine months. The moon is your guide. Eclipse.”

Jonita ran to the gas station across the street to buy a Farmer’s Almanac.

The Almanac told her there was an eclipse this week. She decided to stay in the Casa Monica, taking a room on the ground floor. The front desk was able to tell her quite easily — there was a circle of stones by the beach. They were from the first settlement of the town. They also gleefully informed her that the town was the oldest settlement in the continental United States. Founded September 8, 1565. Jonita made a note. Founding of St. Augustine. The fall of the Aztec empire. The beginning of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. And Martin Luther’s Ninety-Nine Theses? She knew this one from a theology course in college. She smiled. Old Johnny Clarice had helped her after all. She would’ve never known about the slave trade beginnings. All of these events except Martin Luther involved the Spanish Empire. And Carlos’ family moved to the United States during the Spanish-American War? Mexico was involved. Olmec, Aztec… Jonita’s head began to spin. This went millennia deep. She couldn’t get all of the events into a clean, straight line. She understood, however, that they were all implicitly related. She just had to make them explicit in a chain. A philosophy of history. She laughed.

“Long way from the dentist’s office!”

A young family checking in looked over at her as she spoke, to no one in particular. The little boy with them smiled and waved. She smiled back.

Feeling her face, she breakfasted in the resort cafe each morning. Reading Clarice Lispector’s Passion of G.H., she slowly sipped her black coffee. And each morning, she was reminded of Darien and her ceramic plate. Her eggs and bacon were served, as she liked them: runny, burnt; on some kitschy porcelain. This one had a pig in a chef’s hat on it: WELCOME TO SAINT AUGUSTINE.

The night of the eclipse came; Jonita packed a small satchel full of essential goods. A paper map, a canteen of soup, and a pencil for her notebook. She watched as the moon rose; tracked toward its collision in the sky. The earth would break the relationship between moon and sun. It was monstrously full; engorged. Red, even before the shadow fell across it. Something was in the way. Jonita realized it was her form. She was half animal, half something next. Something coming between the oblivion of her carnal memory and the thing that would grasp it in the mind’s hand; crush it into juice to feed the evolutionary shift of phase. What comes after a full moon? What is beyond the circle?

Her thoughts were forced to cease. As she came across the circle, she saw a group of twelve hooded figures. They were all wearing plague masks. She tried to hide behind a palm, but they all felt here there, almost immediately. She’d had a moment of cover. They all turned their heads at once.

“Join us.” Another said, “We’ve been waiting.”

“That’s fine,” said Jonita. The figures introduced themselves.

“We’re representatives of The Orator,” one said. He had a high pitched voice; was tall and quite thin. Jonita immediately thought he must be a teenager.

“He told us to expect you. He hasn’t quite finished The Book of The Night yet, but we’ve gotten this far in the transmission.” This voice was feminine; much older. She sounded like a crone. She must know something. Jonita pressed her.

“Where is he? I was told he would be here.”

“He is here, through us. Emissaries. This is a better word.”

“I need to see him about my condition.”

The woman walked up to her, and felt her face.

“Ah. The procession of the mask. It’s nearly over. You’re nearly free.”

The woman turned to another figure. This figure was leaned against one of the tall, rectangular stones. It appeared quite heavy; firm in the ground. The figure appeared unafraid of disturbing the circle. She whispered in his ear.

“Come with me,” he said. The group looked intently at Jonita. She followed him to the beach.

The waves whipped loudly; the moon neared interception. The figure took off his mask. It was Darien.

“Darien! How did you get here?”

“I was called to arrive at this point, to help carry you the rest of the way.”

“The rest of the way to what?”

“The next phase.”

The moon tipped into crescent darkness. It radiated a red-white array of tendrils.

He pointed his finger toward what looked like a ship, shrouded in the blackness. It was pressed up against the sand by the tide. It was old. Somewhere between the Viking age; the time of the European pirates.

“Spanish?”

“Indeed.”

She could hear voices coming from the inside. She pieced together the internal logic of what was happening to her.

“Slaves?”

“You’ll help them get back. Maybe.”

He placed his hand in hers. It was brittle, like flint.

“Take the boat. They’re souls. You’re the ferryman.”

“What else?”

“Otherwise you’ll die here. You can’t remain in the world of the living. The world of the human. You have to take this ship back across the ocean. It’s the last thing you can do.”

Jonita was progressively enlightened.

“I can restore them?”

“Not completely. But your life led you here. Your condition…” Darien paused, clearly remembering what she had went through; what they had went through together.

“Your condition…. it was preparing you for this moment. For the moment of the change. And they,” he pointed to the ship — “they don’t have bodies to get back home anymore.”

He pressed his finger into her chest forcefully. She stepped backward with surprise.

“But you — you do. And you can see the realm of the dead now. You’ve been released from mortal bonds. You’re in between now. The world of the animal and man. Our world is meaningless to you now. The way back is the way forward.”

“What does that mean, Darien? I know it’s over, but I don’t know what’s next. Can you tell me what’s next? Can The Orator?”

Darien looked up at the bright constellations, being shuttered imminently by the dark light of the eclipse. What little worldly light of the moon was left was closing against a black door.

“The Orator is speaking now. Look up. He’ll tell you himself.”

Jonita looked up at the eclipse. It blinded her. She felt around her face; found her eyelids sewn shut. They wouldn’t open. She pulled at them. She felt blood coming from the whites of her eyes, filling the cavities.

“Darien! I can’t see! Darien!”

He had gone. She could feel it. She was alone. She groped across the shore; tripping over a worn away piece of driftwood. She crawled. Sand-crabs and smooth stones between her fingers. She crawled towards the ship. Waves began to lap around her hands and knees.

She felt it. Mahogany. Hundreds of years old. She pressed her face to the bow. Inside, she could hear the reverberations. Ghostly cries. There must’ve been hundreds of them. In the gut of the ship. A hand reached up and pulled her aboard.

“Thank you,” she said.

“It’s no concern,” the voice replied. “I’m Amara.”

“I’m Jonita. I can’t see.”

“I know,” said Amara. “It’s not your time to see anymore. It’s your time to lead.” She gingerly direct Jonita by a hand on her back to the wheel of the ship. It was a slightly splintered wood. Jonita could feel a piece enter her fingertip.

“You’re going to steer,” Amara said. “And we’re going to watch.”

She gestured, Jonita could feel it. “I can’t see anyone.”

“But can you feel?”

Jonita tried to feel into the wind. She could feel. Maybe not bodies. Presences. Something lighter, softer. Agonized. Splitting into the flow.

“Yes, I can feel,” Jonita said.

“This will be enough,” Amara said. “We’re leaving across the water. And between here and there, we won’t be going back. But we’ll be free.”

Jonita clamored: “What does any of this mean? Why am I here?”

Amara place a hand upon her face.

“The place between worlds requires a body to move spirits.”

Jonita felt the ship groan, as it left the mooring of the shoreline sand.

Amara spoke again:

“When we cross…”

That was the last Jonita heard before she was overtaken by night. Her last memory was the penetration of a white sliver of moonlight — deep down into the crevasse of the place of sight. Past her eyelids. Past her retina; into the bones of her flesh. She turned the wheel hard.

From the shoreline, Darien watched as the ship disappeared from view.

---

III. Reflections of Amber in Remote Times of Richmond

Memory for him was grasped in a sunset over a tar roof in Richmond, Virginia, interspersed with news of a 7.6 magnitude earthquake in Indonesia; cut by a listing of a 1961 Sandy Koufax baseball card. It didn’t make sense. He thought there’d been a message from Virginia, an old schoolmate, but it was a salesperson. A notification from some time ago. An entire community had been tagged in it.

The sensation was being immersed in entangled fugues of passion and resurgences of long dormant feeling and emotions fused with images which intercoursed with contemporary emergences of fields of information. Images. Data. Scapes. But these were not locally confined. They coursed and surged across a global network of simulated images, text, and signs. The field itself extended somatically outside the body and the physical limits of bodily touch and sight into interminable abysses of memory and digital space.

This immersion was eternal. It rent the contemporary moment from both sides. He walked past the Bull & Jones Street furniture and antique shop just past Forsyth Park in Savannah, Georgia. Starting at a jade amulet with an animal face on it. Not a discernible animal. In his ear blared a song by a rock band, The Strokes, in a preserved audio recording from 2003. It was stored on a cloud server, like remote amber. The color of the light reminded him of a decade prior in Chelsea, New York — where he boarded train on a certain trip back from visiting a girlfriend.

It wasn’t the color. It was the tone of the time. Like an elastic muscle. The tone itself stretched over the color of the light and her twisting face as he turned to descend the stairs of the station.

He fell back to Richmond. It was this girl, Grace. She had blonde hair. Photography student. He would visit his ex-girlfriend from high school, Anna, in the photography building. Grace was a friend of hers. They would host these parties in a rowhouse with a large, circular balcony in the front and a rooftop in the back. You could climb out of Anna’s window to get on the roof. In her room, she had all sorts of memories from her life that far. Still quite young. High school, middle school.

Again, the light. There was a photo of him, back when he had long hair, drinking orange juice and vodka, leaned up against the island in her kitchen. Light streaming in. The girl who took it, Sasha, had an eye for the camera. Each time she managed to grab a bit of what was steaming inside of him. It was like a lost panther trapped in a body and a world that had no logical conclusion or understanding to it, to him. And as such it began to lacerate the walls of its cage.

The parties were beautiful in an alienating way. He’d let the girls put makeup on him because it didn’t matter how he looked. They had a dressing room in one of their apartment hallways. He found one of her roommates, Emily, or was it Rebecca? Ori. She was quite attractive. But she lived in a different world. A painter. Colors on the canvas, tones that she rigorously perfected. Very devoted, classically religious girl. He’d play some music, late enough into the night. Small chatter. The dark hallways of the spiral staircase up to the girls’ apartment. And then there was another party, at some sun stained clay building. All art students.

He’d walk, building to building, shaking a bottle in a bag. Singing to himself. Dylan, Iggy Pop. Lust for Life. The No Direction Home soundtrack. Television — Marquee Moon. Or something else from that album. There was a lot of post-punk in those days. Really angular music that mirrored the alienation. The school itself, anything else, didn’t really seem to exist but in a dissociated dream. The accumulated weight of history’s violence had severed him from his body. He walked, like the legless, armless devils he’d draw several years later as the degree culminated. But even then, it was a different time. The weight of the shadow was dissipating, gone. Then, it hung over him like a massive stone. And he had no idea what it was.

Cloudy, stormy nights. Richmond lit up like a false Paris. Bottles of vodka and port wine. Drinking with T, T-Bone, but T for short. They’d sit on the steps of the ABC store on Broad Street and just down the bottle until T stumbled away, mumbling and laughing to himself. He was between Indianapolis, Alabama, something about his kids, his kids’ mother. He’d board the Greyhound on the far side of town and eventually, probably disappear. David wasn’t so sure. Neither of them seemed to exist but as apparitions. Students walked past. As the nights set David would head up to the steps of his apartment at 320 West Grace Street and disappear briefly inside. Get naked, sit on the mattress on the ground; write what was then called Quelle Connerie. Some bastard abbreviation, a condensation of all of the thought and voices which tumbled from him. He effortlessly changed clothes and personalities back then. He wasn’t anyone. He’d let girls give him their dresses. Walk to class in them and give encyclopedic references to professors who couldn’t believe that the words were coming out of the mouth of a nineteen year old. Flirt with the cute blonde nurse in the psych ward about Kierkegaard.

As he walked to the next film showing, some new French art film with a panel, it was abundantly clear to him that he was not the mad one. The world was so mad, so fixated, so delinquent in its possibilities — that he was, in relation, the drifter, the fool, the madman — simply because he had refused all of it. He couldn’t accept the property of any simple, hard relation. This was before he’d begun any of his work on cosmology and astrophysical processes. The hard problem. It was all translated then into cultural studies. Sontag, Stuart Hall. Beckett. There was a lot of Beckett in the early plays. Chekhov too. He didn’t know he’d return to it all later, long after all of the science and philosophical process. That this world is a theatre of masks.

He chased those masks in prostitutes, whom he sought to befriend. They’d just look at him strangely, like an interlocutor from another planet. He chased them in waitresses in the Third Street Diner. Closed now. And in girls who perhaps were most like him wherever he was. Usually artists. Maybe readers. It seemed as though the gap between him and them was always widest. Partly, he thought, because they were coming at the same thing superficially, from entirely different grounds. Art to him was something that had to explode through him to reveal an ancient abyss. He wasn’t even there. Obliterated in the process. A stain in the ground of Time. A hand reaching out through the ripping fire of a distant constellation for someone else. Anyone. And there was the drowning. A deep, sinking, singing primordial fear. Where was she?

Grace was standing outside the 7-11 when he saw her again. This time she was alone. Another cloudy afternoon. Across from the Science Museum and the McDonald’s. She smiled when he saw her. He knew she was attracted to him from Anna. Anna had showed her one of the pictures of him. Anna had taken this one. He was wearing a pink sweater; something approximating despair on his face. “Who is that angel?” Anna told him she’d said. This was an opportunity. They talked for awhile; he realized she’d been in and out of some relationship. There were plans to meet up. Never realized. Four years later, he’d be sitting by the fountain in Monroe Park on a hot summer’s day drinking champagne from a coffee cup; blasting Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers at full volume in his headphones when he met a pair of roommates. He fell in a sort of distant, forced love with both of them instantly. It was a reprieve from the hot sun; sitting there, behind sunglasses, feeling totally gone from the world, the earth, the affairs of summer schoolgirls — prancing to and from classes.

He and Joan had sex for the first time in his apartment, this time more downtown. She brought handcuffs in her purse after they’d casually joked about it on their first date at The Village Diner. The sex was great. She was studying metalworking. Another artist. They shared some music taste in indie rock. Beneath every conversation bubbled the volcano of his real studies and character. He met her where they could meet. Her roommate was… it was Ani. They kissed in his bed. She didn’t want to have sex yet. She wasn’t sure who she was or what she wanted. She was a sensitive woman. Listened to Russian folk music. No declared field of study.

She reminded him, both of them together, of Alissa. The girl he’d first met after Grace fell through. It was toward the end of all the madness. Before he left and came back. Living in the mattress on the floor apartment. She was a sculptor. They’d do nude performances. Based on his plays. They’d strip the words and run the movements. Maybe more Pinter and Albee influenced? She’d smoke weed and eat pizza in her apartment. They’d drink coffee, wearing sunglasses, outside the coffeeshop in front of the performance arts building. He’d finish some work in his notebook on the new play; they’d casually flirt. She ended up in Arizona, doing glassblowing at some local studio.

All of these memories dispersed like shards of glass, arrows, rays of the sun. But they themselves were contained in the perfect encapsulated images of the girls. The Scuffletown Park where he’d meet them. They’d laugh, flirt, mutual seduction. This cycle of women who never truly saw him, never truly met him where he was. And thus, this cycle, incredibly brief. Fulfilled only in the moments prior to the meetings; the first and second sex acts, the thrill of the unpenetrated unknown. They were always literate. Olivie. Studying nursing. Science. Towards the end. She had stacks upon stacks of books in her apartment. Nabokov. Woolf. He wasn’t sure how many of them she’d actually read. But she engaged him authentically on the existentialist questions. Camus. Sartre. Her dad had loved them apparently. A New York punk, met a ballerina.

He dated a blonde ballerina back in the first run of years. They were both nineteen, at least from what he could remember. The only girls he seemed to meet then, outside of the art school girls, were strippers and ballerinas. He assumed it was because of the intense physicality. A mutual emanation. So few of these relationships were meaningfully consummated. But they marked authentic moments of real breaks in the monotony of life, of time, of the arduous trek through a decade in that city. A perfect example… Emilia, the theatre manager at the local playhouse. She was prepping for the Nutcracker, in the last years of his time there. The whole thing was two weeks long. Sex in her apartment, the old Tobacco Lofts downtown. Ridiculously high hallway ceilings. Residents just left their trash on the floor outside the front doors. It reeked. Bending her over the kitchen stove after some pasta and wine. Stacks of unopened bills. Sleeping in bed with her blind cat. Overlooking the river.

When they’d met, the first night, he was cooking. He got a notification on his phone. They went to the benches by the river. Short walk from his apartment. Took turns sitting in the tire swing and getting to know each other. It would have been idyllic but for the real depth that seethed within him. Dying to be met. He knew that first night they lived in different worlds. Makeup tutorials and Menippean theatre. They were, remarkably, the same thing — from two different vantages. One couldn’t get in on the joke.

She was a nursing student who lived next door in the apartments. There with a couple of her friends she’d met in the program. They met for the first time in the hallway. He’d seen her from behind, from what he can remember. Her blonde hair streaming down; her figure from the back. She must’ve been around 5’5”, 5’6”. He was instantly intrigued. She heard him say hello; she turned as she was entering her door. Two bags of groceries in her hands. Her face looked like she was raised in the mountains, or on the farm. Fresh, young, without any traits that suggested extremity. A kind of rural health. She introduced herself as Heidi, from Elkton. Town of less than three thousand people in the western mountains. He knew almost instantly they had very little in common. Her friends were inside watching TV. She introduced him as their neighbor. Soon they were inviting him and his roommates over regularly for dinners and movie nights.

He made it clear he wanted to take her out; she assented. They went and got sandwiches from an Italian deli by the river and sat in the park, eating. She didn’t feel comfortable around him. She knew there was an entire sphere of his life, his body, his being that she wouldn’t have access to. Couldn’t. Not with farm dogs, not with pumpkin pies at the Elkton farmer’s market, not at the NICU. He thought she was beautiful. He posed questions, delicately, around the edges of where his life and hers bled together. Maybe vaguely philosophical. They went somewhat unanswered. The leaves fell around them in the small city park, sandwiched between Monument Avenue and the Main Street. He realized that their first real date would certainly be their last. He would bring it up once or twice more then let it fade out.

It started pouring. They hurried back to the apartments. He decided to linger outside. Grab a bottle of red wine from the corner store. Lombardy Market. Put it in a paper bag. Two missionaries from the Mormon Church down the street, over by where he used to live. They recognized him immediately. Two beautiful women, one brunette, one blonde. They knew he tolerated their message because he was attracted to them; he knew they tolerated his vague flirtations because there was a chance he would convert. They asked him if he wanted to walk. He drank the wine at the park while they talked about their religious text. There was still water on the ground. The blonde would make eyes at him. He wanted her. She let him know they didn’t date. They’d likely be shipped off to Africa or Europe next.

He’d walk the city streets, feeling further and further away. The blondes reminded him of the first ballerina, he thought her name was Sarah, or something like that. It was Anna. There was another girl named Hannah. Another ballerina. And later there’d be another, Kiley. He drove her to McDonald’s one night. Met her on the stairwell of the apartment. She blushed. The gulf was immense. All members of the Richmond Ballet. Young girls, considering school, hoping to make it as prima ballerinas, somewhere. Someday. Injuries would happen, maybe something with the family. As far as he knew, none of them did. Anna wore a pink dress on their first date. He saw her on and off for a year. Even a couple times when they both briefly moved back to DC. The whole time it was like he was talking through glass. She liked him. He wasn’t entirely sure why. He didn’t feel like she ever really knew him. But maybe whatever she knew was enough.

Despite it all, these were the things he remembered. Interruptions from the monotony, the solitude. The work. The girl, Skyla Blue, that swore she could hear voices in the radiator. Waitress just come down from Hell’s Kitchen. Or Tish, waitress at the Jefferson Hotel. She was beautiful; the sex was fantastic. But he couldn’t speak to her at all. The moments before and after sex were like shouting across a gulf. With no shared ground. She was high school educated; had come from Williamsburg looking to start her life. After that, the girl Leah and her twin sister at the fair. He and Leah went on the carousel together. He invited her back to his place. Her sister said she shouldn’t go. He’d been seeing one of their friends — only for a week, what really amounted to one long stay at her apartment. And the other Leah. A tattoo artist. Long nails. Then there was a metal girl from outside the city who came over, sick as a dog. He couldn’t remember her name. It was so brief. They made out in his bed. She listened to Cannibal Corpse; had a pig skull in the backseat of her car. Apparently her parents were farmers. He never saw her again.

There were moments… shades. After a long day in the cemetery, staring at the river, beneath the shades of the trees, writing fragments, he’d heard from Shelby. She was studying advanced mathematics at the university. Not the Shelby who would later go on tirades in her apartment wearing a slip and drinking coffee. That Shelby had apparently continued a modeling career. Still in the city, maybe. Like Amara, in Thailand, on some Manhattan billboard. Amara had ended the same way Shelby did. They looked in each other’s eyes, naked, him on top of her. No physical union. Amara was the time of Kacie. The broken time, between his two, even three periods of years in the city. He met Kacie at the cafe they worked at together. He threw himself at her shamelessly. He bought her roses; went on about Pessoa. She offered Cortazar. She lived in Peru for a few years. Then became a fellow in International Relations. They made out frantically on the balcony of her mother’s apartment in Arlington. Then walked her dog. That was it. But we can’t touch those years. Or further back. Not right now.

No. It was the quiet, numbers-obsessed Shelby. They decided to meet at a bar that night. He threw a white t shirt on and walked several blocks to Broad Street. She was there. She had sent him a picture that day. Her beautiful, slender body; supple breasts. Wearing nothing but cowboy boots. When he arrived she was there with a friend, who shook his hand, smiled, and departed. He could barely remember the conversation. They both drank. But it was seamless. Making out under the overhang in front of his apartment. Falling into each other. Sleeping together. No sex, not yet. She wanted to, but he wanted to wait. Get to know her better. The next week, she messaged him. She couldn’t. Not right now. So he moved on.

A girl named Kristie picked him up. Film student. She’d go on to Greece; work on starting her own film company in New York. It was an old white Volvo. Playing Future. They both loved Future. To her apartment. Meeting her roommate. The plants in her room; the long mirror near the door she saw him kissing her in. She had been raped years ago. She couldn’t orgasm. He wasn’t sure how many times it had happened. He left the next morning and grabbed coffee at Joe’s Inn. Listening to Jeff Buckley.

It was a whirlwind of affairs. Dara in the early days. He stayed with her for some time. It was awkward, ugly. He didn’t want to remember. Her roommate and the roommate’s boyfriend. He and Dara naked together, playing. It was the culmination of a madness. A sheer attempt. He drew himself back together for two years, started a career as a consultant — suits, business trips, Chicago — and dove right back in once he’d exhausted it. Finished Quelle Connerie. It turned into Distruments. Plays, fragments, poems, essays, reflections. He was proud of it. There was a solar eclipse in the summer. Same cycle as this one now.

The girl Collette. Working in one of the oldest movie theatres in the world. Met her in a Gothic Literature class. They always sat next to each other. He spent the first half of the semester flirting with her. They slept together once. It was awkward. Gross, even. He visited her a year later at the movie theatre. She showed him the basement. It was a mess. They hugged and he left.

He finally graduated, right as the whip came down on the world. The last girl. After two failed relationships, one including Olivie the nurse. She loved to send him pictures. Black lingerie under her overcoat. Orgasmic sex. The last girl, even after her, was Cate. She came all the way from Lynchburg to meet. The sex, her screaming “it’s yours”. She’d just visited Berlin. Apparently she saw some of it in him. They never talked about German Idealism, or anything like that. She left. They’d chat briefly, send jokes back and forth in the months that followed. He never saw her again. The last image he had was a video she sent him, masturbating in the bathroom of her old childhood home, to a picture he sent her. After that, the city was over.

It was a mere shadow. A memory that reared its head in the places that followed. The useless degree. The stray books of poetry he’d picked up. A fall before the corrosion, listening to Iceage’s Plowing Into the Field of Love. Finishing what had become a seventh, eighth, ninth volume of work. Tipping into cultural criticism, epic poetry, short stories. Building something. Writing on napkins. Fasting. Meeting Olivie after their Society and Genetics class in the Harrison Street Cafe. Her pink hair. Her beautiful round breasts; his hands around her waist as her open mouth and closed eyes worked against his tongue. December. Seeing her again one more time in front of the movie theatre with her best friend, Julie. Just wandering around. He’d come back to the city one more time, after his graduate degree. Just to stay in some place. He’d message Olivie. This was just before she would eventually get married. Just to see if she wanted to catch up. He never heard back, but he knew how it felt for her, for both of them. It was a world that happened in a wind. Things had all fallen together and fallen apart. And they made whatever sense they did; the sense was the feeling that drew him in from the depths of the collision of the modern objects of life, the digital futures, the physical pasts, in his fingertips; in the chemicals of his mornings, his sight. And the caresses. The caresses which emerged; reared their heads like chimera in the light of his days; the dark of his nights, which drew forth the faces of these women from the abyss of the time of the body. And he relished them, even years later. However incomplete. Together, they formed a composite, a whole. A whole of a decade of seances, dalliances, romances, which cut across the city and all of its exits.

A map, like in Carax’s Boy Meets Girl. A map of real events, real women, real touches; real moments of descending into the subliminal, the territory between two people, and seeing what third thing could emerge. He was still so young, raw then. These girls did not; would not meet the man he would become. They met the boy, the young man, still not entirely, fully himself. Not fully entangled with the powers of his being that would become and mature. And in doing so, this very early solution made such meetings possible. For what he was was still within him; that it was so was that these meetings were fugues; pages, moments. Brief almosts. They came and went like dates to movies, walks up the hill at dusk, past the lake, kisses at the gate of the school. Messages sent; meetings arranged. Lamplit nights in a girl’s room, just before she flew home to deal with her heroin addiction. Like bees in a massive garden. They went everywhere; each dispersed on the path of their private destiny. Briefly touching, from life to life. And something remained. Something profoundly real. The memory of the touch; the eyes meeting eyes; her breast in his hand. The synchrony of the breath. And the wetness of her body. It seemed to have been sopped up in the very nature of his blood; entangled in the crisp of his genetic memory. It didn’t seem to reside anywhere but resurge up from him, like the ancient animal and body of heat and light that he was. From the closest step, the step of everything that inching forth of life, of light, had done in a decade’s time. And it was warm. Warm in his stomach, warm in his heart. Warm in his blood.

---

IV. The End of Time

She was being used, betrayed by the force that created her. The snake coiled; hissed around her sacrum. Thrown into the fire of an aeon of reproductions. From the anti-matter abyss of her womb. Called to fulfill an ancient obligation; called to accounts to stand before the black god of Time; to fill in the blank of the next march of fire with a child.

He swung and missed. Typical of a game of such high chance. Ammit, Osiris, and Quetzalcoatl leered. The green and black die of the snake’s skin clenched tighter around her young flesh. This was time. Thrown into conditions. The narrow stone ballcourt. Smeared in paint of victories and conquerings of past. The weighing of the hero before the underworld. The heart and the feather. He wiped the sweat from his brow. It was the same nature depicted on Burne-Jones’ Perseus cycle. That nature squeezed the mortal victim of the residue of the blood of this incarnation to throw it into the next. And all the while the eyeless paid the toll of transmission. The thoughtless march.

The ball went back to the Ehecatl, the jaguar on the mound. Teeth glimmered, emotionlessly in the moonlight.

He geared up to swing, knuckles twisting around the knob of the wood. The rubber ball flew forward. Several dead pharoahs looked on from distant catacombs. Strike three. And the ballgame is over!

The jaguar leered proudly. The god nature receded. And like an eclipse the stage had settled, to reveal the empty stone ballcourt; to reveal Mania, standing in the moonlight, her blue cloak wrapped tightly around her.

“The game’s over.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“We’re still here.”

“Are we? Where’s here anyways.”

The two of them looked around. The surrounding jungle shone forth in a black-blue light, a mutual emanation making contact with the full moon’s beams. A shining from in between and beneath the leaves. A shining from the ground.

Mania looked up at him.

“They won’t come back. They don’t need to.”

“The ballgame is death.”

“At least until its over.”

She unwrapped the burlap pack before her feet; pulled out an old photograph. It was the 1886 Buffalo Bison team. Kyros saw old Frank Grant, seated in the right corner of the image.

“That was a good team.”

“Once Grant joined, they were even better.”

“Did you know opposing players would try to spike his legs at second base, so he had to wear wooden shin-guards?”

“Dangerous game.”

“That, I know.”

The two of them were glad the night was ending. The game had gone uneventfully. The jaguar gods had won again. There were some new sacrifices. Neither of them knew the names. But the ground was fertile this year; they assumed it would be the next. Life now was a loss of play for the gain of survival. Ehecatl had an unbeatable curveball. It fluttered, hanging in the light like it was a weightless song of the swallow’s wind; fell into the mitt of the priest of the dead. Every time, the priest would smile, rattling his body bag of bones. The gods in their seats made judgement, satisfied.

Kyros had been chosen for the great failure. The signs would be whispered down from Seth or Xototl, using Amenhotep as a mouthpiece. His corpse shuttered as he relayed the signs to the priest. Like an alphabet. And Kyros was forced to stand at bat as the pure nature of Ehecatl beared down upon him. The mound was like he could feel the hot jaguar’s breath upon his neck. Impossibly fast and disobedient of the laws of physics. Like a dream. Every once in awhile, they’d let him rap out a weak grounder. He’d run and run, while the gods in the seats laughed. The stone pews extended upward on both sides, forming a V shaped valley that cut against and into the thin sliver of the I shaped ballcourt.

It was like he was running through the halls of time. And he was. Frantically, looking for some exit. Every once in awhile he’d see some future. Moses. A prophet. Dionysus. A kinder form of the god of chaos. He wished they’d let the Greek gods in on the game. But this was an uncensored violence. Not a story. A body.

He’d see a plague hitting a country he didn’t know. A country he may never know. He was in the place beneath the waves, but above the dead. The in between place. Life refracted down into the valley and was digested and judged in the sphere of the ballcourt. And Kyros was the representative sacrifice.

Mania touched his shoulder. His wife. His long wife of the soul. What remained of his body in this purgation, this purgatory. A solace, a reminder of what little human life still stung his flesh, ever since his election. He played for all of mankind; furthermore, he played for the spark of life still resident in the upper world, however much was left, unvacated by the collapse and death of the sacred. The world had moved on from the gods; as such, they fled underground into their universal theatre — dragging with them a forgotten ballcourt, deep in the former Mayan jungles. And their play, their revenge, was that the representative of man would lose. Each and every time.

There was still sweat on his brow. He gazed into Mania’s eyes. She’d been with him all along, on the border. Walking this knife of the court of madness. Any victory, any success he had, it was ordained by the gods — for their amusement, in the midst of his trial. He felt like the bastard son of Hercules, Prometheus, and Sisyphus all at once. Like the last hero had been stuffed within his corpse and paraded around for laughs. It was the death of the hero cult which sustained mankind before the gods were evacuated from the earth. All in the name of profit. But Kyros and Mania knew nothing of these things. They were not from the thin line of history. The ray of light which traveled forward and outward into novelty, strangeness, and the birth and death of civilizations.

This was the immortal realm. The realm of the jungle goddess and the smooth exchange of the blood. The trail of victims. Kyros knew no one except his soul wife. His flesh, incarnate from the star. His companion. All of humanity to him was a mass of the river of blood — a massive pile of flesh exchanged over and over again. And this was why the Mesoamerican ballgame had been allowed as the convent, the center of the church of the dead. Because it was true. Because it was the river of the energy of fire — which flowed through the cracks of the earth and burst through like a revelation, like an awakening. Every so often history would be disrupted by such a figure, by such a force. By an eclipse. By a visitation. By a foreign body of the dead, what that would whisper in the ear of the forgetful living of hells. Of sanctimony. Of the game.

Human history was littered with hidden sacrifices like him. Sacrifices that never died, but played on behalf of all mankind. Half hero, half god, half serpent of the dead. He had more in common with the skeletal priest than he did with those who walked above the waves, refracted as they were like shifting light through leaves and the glass ceiling of the ground, through which Kyros looked upon the earth. Like a shifting blur, figures moved through the upper world — fighting their wars, striking their deals, consummating their marriages — on the fleeting human earth of cultures and civilizational affairs. They knew nothing of the ballgame, nor did they know of Kyros and Mania. The deal they had unwittingly stuck — driving their heroes into purgatory witness; their gods into privatory torture.

Mania: “You can’t go up there.”

“I know.”

“But why do you think about it?”

“Do you think Prometheus thought about leaving? Returning to the city? A wife?”

“Prometheus hasn’t arrived yet.”

“He will, and he’ll know. Same as me.”

“All heroes live and die underground. Nobody knows. They worship stone.”

“All the same — do you think he wished he could be human?”

“When there’s too much god blood, you can’t see human anymore. You only see fire. The infinite coursing through them. The sleeping ones.”

“And they awaken?”

She pressed her finger to his lips. The only wife he’d ever known. And she was a dream. And yet, more than a dream. The core of his star. The star toward which he ran, pulsed. Reached. Within himself.

“That’s not for you to decide. Or any of us.”

She gestured to the gods in the stands. He caught the back of Ixchel, fleeing into the blue night. Her youth was replaced by the coiled snake that had released Mania.

“They decide.” She weighed this proposition, then spoke again. “For the most part. You have some say, Kyros. However limited. However much of a fool they make you play. You decide to return tomorrow. You decide to surrender to death. Ehecatl —“ she gestured again, “Ehecatl will eat, thoughtlessly. You, neither living nor dead. You mind.”

She touched his head. Again, gently. Like a mother angel.

They had given Kyros the body of a human, but the fate of one who is bitten, or stung, by the gods. He was born in Crete, during the rule of the Minoan. He worked first as a smith, but once the merchant class found out about his craft as a scribe, he was enlisted to detail transactions; even minor histories occurring on the island. As he approached adulthood, time froze. He fell into the ballcourt.

He could not remember his birthname, nor could he remember anything of his former life. Family, workaday affairs. This commission contrasted, with all he could recall, in the most superficial sense, in extremis with the boy, the child. He had grown up in a mercantile household. They traded textiles. Not particularly poor or rich. Sometimes, he’d have flashes of a hot sun bearing down upon a field of wheat. He was running. A father, a blurred face, an outstretched hand. Shade of the evening coming down upon a hot clay wall. His body leaned against it. A cool green grape in his mouth.

That was everything. The memories would come as he slept under a stone, during the day. Shadows worked the glassy waves above him, as he watched cities rush. Metal towers assembled. Rubber soles passed above him. Suits, tires. The world had grown a foreign language, like a modern thumb, far above and beyond his frozen time. Even if he ever was to return, he knew, even in the shadows, that he wouldn’t recognize it. He suspected it would be unbearable to him.

There were days in the cave, under the stone, where he slept, drew upon the walls with red pigment; wrote. Days where he even began to enjoy his vocation. He was a ballplayer. He knew nothing of ball-games in Crete. He even looked it up in the histories. Nothing. The Mayan gods had shown him it. When his world was frozen and he was dragged under, at first they were tutelary. He reminisced. Before the onslaught. Hun Hunahpu taught him. Thutmose III looked on. The game was set in the balance. Chaos and order. Life and death. Neither strictly Mayan, nor Egyptian. Nor the game of this new world, the world that tossed and turned about above him in the dial of the wave-shadows. America.

He was to swing the wooden stick at the rubber ball; in hopes of hitting it past Ehecatl. Every night, Ehecatl would pitch. In the dream-field of reeds that surrounded the stone stadium. It was the entertainment for the gods, Thutmose painfully explained. The pharaohs were the first sacrifices. The fools of empire. The king-actors. And all the while, the gorgon snake coiled around their souls. It was done to maintain order. The pyramids built afterwards were solace. The light that passed through them came down to the place between to power the new stadium lights. They’d stored up quite a bit of stellar power over the centuries. Kyros learned he had the Independence Producers of the American Western Association to thank for the permanent lights, installed in 1930 historical time. The gods took this innovation to great delight. The games could now go on with increased visibility in the field of their realm. Ehecatl complained, as it disturbed his night-vision.

Ehecatl, like Kyros, was neither alive nor dead. He traveled between worlds. In the day, he appeared just another jaguar, swimming, feeding, hunting. Lazing beneath a palm, or a kapok tree. But he too, like Kyros, did not die in the upper world. He was a representative soul of the jaguar spirit, the spirit of his race, his species. And as such, he was condemned to the task of being a bridge figure. A bridge figure between the realms. Exposed to the gates where all form began and dissolved. The delicate configuration between existence and nonexistence. Kyros had thought about this. What it was like for Ehecatl to experience this theatre of reality. To be exposed so viscerally to the ground of being and nonbeing. Did he contemplate it? Was Ehecatl, like Kyros, a philosopher after the night game? Did he write upon the walls? Did he contemplate escape? Or did he engage out of compulsion? Blind fury?

Kyros could not ask. He was not permitted to talk to Ehecatl. The jaguar stood on the mound, seething, dripping saliva. He reared up and threw. Kyros woke up.

It was the night of the new game. Already, the moon began to chip away at fullness. He put on his uniform. He loved the Kansas City Monarchs jerseys of new America. He’d read about the team in The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues by James A. Riley. For a man who’d grown up in Crete, a nation without ball-sport, he’d come to be quite a baseball aficionado. He sometimes considered himself an honorary American of the underworld. He endeavored to write an Odyssey of the Page Fence Giants. Like Homer.

He sat up. Mania was still asleep beside him, in her purple-black slip. He felt her warm, tan body. A combination of lust and beauty tore through him. He kissed her neck until she woke up; bit into her like an apple as they fornicated. He stood, sweating, as the moon continued to rise into the night sky, stepping out from beneath the obsidian slab.

“It’s time.”

“I loved that.”

“I don’t know if I’ll ever get tired of it.”

She looked at his back.

“Monarchs tonight?”

“I’m thinking Bullet Joe Rogan. Smokey Joe Williams tomorrow.”

Mania consulted her baseball knowledge.

“Two of the all time greats. But you aren’t a pitcher.”

“Bullet Joe taught me you can be both.”

“Maybe one day. But the gods only allow for Ehecatl to throw.”

“I’m tired of responding. I’d like to be the one in command.”

Mania looked at him ominously.

“You know that’s against the rules of the sacred ballgame.”

Kyros had grown rebellious; tired of the affairs of the underworld. It had been over three thousand years since the death of Minoa. The last of the Aztec had fallen over five hundred years ago now. He was living in a time of relics. There was no home left to go to. It was all buried in the stone of the stadium. He would trace his fingers across it as he entered the tunnel beneath the south bleachers. Everyone was buried there. His mother, his father, his friends. His master-smithy. And he couldn’t even remember any of them.

“Maybe its time for the rules to change.”

He laced up his cleats. Above him, the streets of American Manhattan pulsed. The sun was at high noon in the upper world. The game was about to begin.

Mania consulted her ledger. “Tonight is New York rules. Do you remember how to play?”

Kyros replied: “Only a hundred years of practice against the unhittable. You don’t even see him coming, but out the corner of your eye.”

He left the cave. This time, Mania didn’t follow.

This was unusual; Kyros ruminated on this as he walked towards the looming stadium from his cave just outside the blue reed field. She usually attended the games; the gods would set her up as a captive fixture of rebellion. He’d have to ‘free his soul’. Over and over again. This would not be a serpent game without her there. They wouldn’t have an agonist. Kyros wondered if this was part of the plan. But as soon as he entered the tunnel and emerged out onto the stone court, he realized it wasn’t.

The gods were huddled amongst themselves, feverishly whispering. They stood up tall as Kyros approached. The leader of the ball committee, Osiris, bellowed in an uncharacteristically charged voice:

“We’ve made arrangements for this game tonight to occur in one motion. This will be the last time you face Ehecatl.”

Kyros turned; he watched Ehecatl emerge from the tunnel, just after him. He had a large scar across his face. It was still somewhat bleeding. There was a human pain written in his eyes and face. Kyros’ first instinct was to reach out and comfort him. But Ehecatl passed him without laying eyes upon Kyros, like a ghost.

Something had happened in the upper world. He looked up. The feet were moving more frantically. Running. He saw the underbelly of a great fire.

The gods were looking up too. He observed terror in Quetzalcoatl’s face.

Osiris had paused in thought. He reluctantly resumed,

“There has been an abrupt end to the Fifth Sun. You will now be deciding the coming, or lack thereof, of the Sixth. This is what your training has been for, Kyros.”

He looked over at Hun Hunahpu, who was eating a hot dog covered in mustard and relish. Hun Hunahpu patted his stomach; nodded contently. The gods staged their joke for the affairs of man. Win or lose. Some of their fates rested on man’s survival. Their children. Others had their stake in different affairs.

Osiris threw the rubber ball to Ehecatl, who had entered the pitcher’s circle. Ehecatl received it on one bounce.

Osiris looked like he was ready to cease speaking. A younger god, Patecatl, brazenly resumed. The rest of the gods stared at him, rather helplessly. Kyros began to understand the entire hierarchy of the gods had been thrown into question. It was the death of a paradigm of seemingly infinite measure. This was new.

“This situation has, unfortunately… placed further emphasis on the ballgame. Due to the death of the Fifth Sun being earlier than expected, it appears our calendars have malfunctioned. This has thrown a primeval authority into question.”

Kyros could see Anubis breaking a sun stone over his knee behind the convened group. It cracked like thunder.

Patecatl continued:

“We are…” he looked around at the uncertain gods -- “reluctant to admit our fault. The joint of time has always been our vocation. And to quote Hamlet… we are out of it. As such, we must leave this game to pure chance. We cannot call, nor determine the powers which function or flow within it. They are now left purely to the individual masteries of the ballplayers. The sacred, as it must be; as it has been in the above-world, has been temporarily withdrawn from the cosmic determination of affairs. This is notice that the gods have relinquished their seat of power to invoke chance as the arbiter of this, our final ballgame of the underworld.”

Kyros’ face leapt out of him. This meant his imprisonment was over. He immediately wanted to ask, to know what would happen to him. Did he have any say in this change? Was what was happening in the above world anything to do with him; his labors?

Patecatl saw all of these questions on his eyes and mouth.

“The game will now begin. There will only be one at bat. As we are playing the New York Game; seeing that there are no formal bases, you will have to hit the ball out of the park against Ehecatl in one attempt. Per the New York rules, you will have a limit of three strikes and four balls. You cannot walk; you cannot strike out. Anything less than an out of the park home run is the end of the game.”

Ehecatl, wounded as he was, winced and grinned. The game was clearly in his favor. Rube Foster and Christy Mathewson had nothing on him. He’d taught them the screwball. Invented sometime during Ramses’ rule. Over three thousand years of existence to perfect it.

Kyros shuddered. It was now he wished Mania was here to comfort him. But he understood now why she did not come. All of the forces of the spirit had been thrown out of the game. It was now pure materialism that would determine this victory or defeat. The strength in his muscles. The discipline in his focus. Fate and soul could not be operative here. The rule of the gods and the spheres was temporarily broken. There was a real break; as Patecatl had said, a joint in the time. It was not only time out of time, it was time between the breaks of immortal regimes. The balance of power had been thrown into chaos, however brief. He suspected it had something to do with the upper world.

Kyros applied tar to his hands, covering them with the black, sticky substance. He knocked the bat twice against each of his cleats; assumed his left handed stance over the home plate. Ehecatl leered in. The skeletal priest would call this game, seeing as the gods were no longer permitted to relay the signs. It would be a game of hands and gloves and sweat. Now, Kyros had a freedom he did not have. He understood that fate in some ways was hell. But he had to wonder if it was fate that paved the way for this opening.

The first pitch was delivered. He read it out of Ehecatl’s hand, with coordination both inborn to his body and millennia of practice. It was a knuckle-curve. One of the most hittable pitches in Ehecatl’s arsenal. It wavered in the air, caught by refracted light in the upper world; carved by the slivering moon. Kyros’ eyes widened as it floated towards the plate. And at the last moment, it dipped in a near six inch drop; bounced sharply into the priest’s mitt. Kyros’ bat whistled in the night.

“Strike one!” boomed Osiris.

A new memory overwhelmed Kyros at the sound of Osiris’ voice. It was Pompeii. 79 AD. Cut simultaneously, overlaid with the detonation of the first atom bomb. Japan. 1945. The Tigers won the World Series that year, against the Cubs. Four games to three. Shadow and light flashed before his mind’s eye. He saw figures left black stains on cement stairs. Twisted, mangled, strained willows of ruined structures. Faceless memory of death. Cries as the sea of hot magmal fluid poured over the cask of the city, leaving a cool impression of preserve in the earth. Swallowed.

He tried to shake off the lightning flash of sight. The priest laughed with a chittering grotesque; tossed the ball back to Ehecatl.

The jaguar leered in again. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the fingers of the priest putting down a sign. Could he cheat? Should he? What would happen?

He decided to keep his eyes ahead.

Ehecatl reared back on his hind legs; poured the ball in towards the plate. Straight four-seam fastball. Kyros didn’t read it as quickly this time. There was roughly a forty mile per hour differential coming out of his hand. He’d have to move fast. The bottom half of the barrel of his bat clipped the ball as it slammed into the dirt behind the plate.

“Strike two!” Osiris screamed, his voice incensed with glee and vigor.

The gods were loving this match. Even moreso due to the introduction of chance. They had released mankind from their grips. Ehecatl caught this in the eye of the jaguar. It was clear. There was a glimmer of recognition. Ehecatl knew it wasn’t him being freed. It was mankind. Kyros pieced this together. There was an ethical decision for the jaguar. Two strikes. Give him something to hit? Kyros realized. Ehecatl could have just walked him. Four unhittable pitches, entirely out of the zone. It would have been over. But he’d thrown him two hard pitches. Good stuff. Stuff you’d see Spahn throw in a World Series game, or Gibson in a pinch. Real stuff. But what would he throw oh and two? Kyros had a moment to think, as the priest gathered the ball from his mitt and fired it back to Ehecatl. Fastball. He decided. He looked at Ehecatl intently, his focus narrowing on his face. He saw on the corner of his lips, something almost like pity. Empathy maybe. Sorrow. For his condition… but for Kyros too. Trapped.

Kyros hated to think this, but he prepared for a fastball down the middle. Maybe a little middle in. He’d have to anticipate based on the millennia of psychology against Ehecatl. Millions of at bats. But he could never tell if Ehecatl was actually there for any of them. Only a fury. But now. There was questioning. Doubt. A being, gripped by what Kyros could only call emotions. Did Ehecatl want Kyros free? Mankind, free? Did he care?

Ehecatl wound up. Seams flashed through the fingers of his mitt. Kyros saw the seams gripped vertically with his claw. Two seamer. His knuckles twisted white around the bat. Arm slot — three quarters. Ball released. It was coming into his wheelhouse. A pitch he could turn on. The swings in the cave flashed before his eyes. Mania would watch as he emulated. Ty Cobb. Shoeless Joe Jackson. The Hero Twins. Hips engaged; firing. Like a bruise on the skin.

It was middle in, a little low. Height of the hip bone. He turned on it violently, core engaged; posterior chain erupting from the scattering earth. The bat whipped around to make contact. Sweet spot, just a shade toward the label of the barrel. The ball shot off like a rocket as the bat vibrated back into the flesh of his hands. Faintly, in the background of the focus of his eyes, he could see Osiris’ jaw drop as he tracked the ball.

Kyros’ first thought was not that the game was over. Had Ehecatl fed him that pitch? He was too good to slip up that easily. As the gods watched the ball fly into the reeds, he ran towards Ehecatl. Ehecatl’s face betrayed nothing.

“Speak! Did you feed me that? Was it you? Who commanded you?”

Ehecatl’s face and eyes didn’t move. They just observed Kyros’ speech.

“I know it wasn’t the gods. They’re supposed to stay out of this.”

Ehecatl spoke, for the first time in hundreds of thousands of years.

“I did all that I could do, exactly what I was supposed to do; when I was supposed to do it.”

Kyros sat with this before replying.

“What is that? Is that fate? Is that reason?”

Ehecatl spoke with a quiet, measured tone. Neither surrendered, nor defeat.

“The game unfolded how it was supposed to. I had little say. I threw the pitch I was called to throw. You beat it.”

Kyros was crestfallen. The gods clamoured; bickered in the stands. He dropped the bat; walked out of the tunnel Ehecatl stood and stared at him as he left. He passed through the field of reeds; returned to the cave.

Kyros, to himself: “I can’t… he fed it to me. What does it mean? Did I win? Did we win? No… no. But why today of all days? All it ever was is failure.”

Mania heard him arrive; she tiptoed out of the cave. A fire was still burning. He could smell fresh meat. He barely noticed.

Ehecatl had never given him a pitch like that. But part of him registered the new conflict in the jaguar. Did this mean he saw something new; there was a psychological opening that allowed him to get a read? All it had been before was guessing. It was like the jaguar had opened himself up to a new zone of feeling. Only fury, only fury, then doubt. Is this the mind?

Something had passed between the two of them. Now Ehecatl spoke. And he didn’t speak wildly. He spoke like someone who had received information; was acting in line with it. But the gods were not supposed to be involved!

Kyros was infuriated. He paced before the fire. Mania re-entered the cave.

“I saw the game.”

“How? You weren’t there.”

“The same way the pharaohs watch. We don’t need to be in space and time to receive what runs through it.”

“Ehecatl gave me that pitch.”

“Who’s to say what Ehecatl did or didn’t do, beyond throwing that fastball. You don’t know. You can’t know what was flowing through him. Do you even know what’s flowing through yourself? Why did you swing? Nonetheless the way you did?”

Kyros thought about this. It was a blur. He’d registered the tells. Ehecatl’s face. The seams flashing from the mitt. But why did he act? And why did he act how he acted?

“Instinct… I suppose.”

“That isn’t good enough. You don’t know what flows through you. And the gods revoked their license on the speech of the game. It required new forces to enter the field. Why else do you think Ehecatl responded to your cries to him? Why else do you think he wore what he wore on his face? The spell, however temporarily, was broken. The phase of the game began to shift. It was a lockstep. The lockstep is now broken. You’re in the aftermath. The time between times is over.”

“This was all allowed. Why? The above world? My efforts, all of these years?

Mania: “How can you know, Kyros? How can you know. Any one at bat. A splitter you took in the dirt. A book you read about Rube Marquard’s contract. An election in the upper world. A thought a little boy had, miles away from the New York game. Indonesia. A Venezuelan baseball card about the Popul Vuh. A journalist in the Peruvian mountains in 1975. You can’t know. It isn’t about you. It’s the release of four million locks, all at once. And within those locks, gears that wound for fourteen billion years. Inside the mind of a butterfly. The gestation of a child. The fuse of a star, throwing off a green vine of light which was caught in the supernovae in a galaxy ten stations besides. You’re the hero of the ballgame. Do you think Perseus took the head of Medusa and history was resolved? You toiled here for three thousand years. You survived, life out of life, death out of death, while your civilization fell to dust and stone. You warred against Ehecatl. You lost, for three thousand years. As the gods around you fell into forgotten witness. And today, you won. But that does not make you knowledge.”

She continued:

“The stations of those ordained at the crossroads of life and death.”

“Are what?”

“Are just that.”

Kyros’ mind stopped racing. He thought back to the swing. He’d brought the barrel around perfectly. Like Ted Williams’ book. It was a golden moment of the American game.

So what happens next?

Mania smiled.

“You keep playing, but free this time.”

As she said it, the veil of the waves above him opened up. Light, unfiltered, streaming in through the open window of the sky.

“It’s my choice?”

“Now, moreso than ever. If you want to keep playing.”

Kyros felt his hands tighten around the knob of the bat. He thought about Bullet Joe Rogan.

“I think I’d like to learn how to pitch.”

---

THE SONG OF DYLAN THOMAS

Dylan wrote as the bombs fell, shaking plaster from the ceiling of the shelter. A mother shielded her daughter’s eyes from the falling dust.

“It’s a farce. Millions dragging their nails across the earth to death. I have nothing.”

He took a swig from the brass canteen. A man shouted from the far side of the room. Convinced the roof was going to cave in. It wasn’t Dylan’s first bombing. He sat there, composed, as the walls intermittently shook. It was like lightning. First you heard the whistle, then you braced for impact. By the heat of the whistle, you could tell general proximity. Steel braced the basement.

Dylan was a failed poet. He wrote old Welsh songs. A dead land. Nobody to read them. And now, the British government had commissioned him to write propaganda films. His literary ability had been consigned to the war effort. He spent his days composing montages of images that would subliminally convince young boys to get blown up by German fanatics. Talk about religious devotion.

His notebook was covered in soot. This one had already survived three different assaults on London. He’d been caught in a pub, at his mistress’; now, in a hotel where he was meeting with a publisher to discuss a manuscript. He thought he’d take a turn at short fiction, maybe mingle some longer, epic pieces of script. They’d barely shook hands before the sirens started to ring.

He’d been raised religious, in a period between the wars. Far off on the peninsula of Llansteffan. He came to London as a young man for the girls. What the fuck else was there? Girls, liquor, and the march towards oblivion. The Germans were doing all they could to accelerate that development.

“And death shall have no dominion.

Dead men naked they shall be one

With the man in the wind and the west moon;

When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,

They shall have stars at elbow and foot;

Though they go mad they shall be sane,

Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again

Though lovers be lost love shall not;

And death shall have no dominion.”

Dylan shook his head. He was fucking delusional when he wrote that. Now in some rat-ridden cellar, shoveling rations down his throat. Surrounded by scared animals. He was writing poems to people who couldn’t die. Hell, he was writing poems to another race entirely. The infinite ones. He touched it when enough whiskey hit his throat. Or singing old Welsh songs in the pub. Everything else was a gray fog. Out on the water. Hanging clothes on the line. Stewing about in a cabin while a winter fire poured on endlessly. The damp beating in across every wall.

And then there was Caitlin. He’d met her when he was just a young man. Her falling, tresses of red hair. Like some pagan goddess. They’d fucked and fucked until there was nothing else left to do. She would smoke, lose her mind; go back and forth between drugs, drinking, and lashing out at the canvas of the thin air. Over and over again. On repeat. Dylan had gotten tired of it. He’d remain tired of it until she popped into the eyes of his dreams again. Her perfectly shaped breasts, riding his cock. Her lipstick smeared as she ran drunk around the town. Uptight, fucking London. She looked like some woodland nymph, torn in from some impossible place. Landing on his lap while the businessmen in their suffocating collars stared. Smoking cigars. Reading the news on pounds and drafts.

It was between her and the new girl, Pamela. Wartime. Blitz. In the pub, her black dress hugging the curves of her waist; nearly tearing at the seams of her thighs. She couldn’t have been older than Dylan was when he’d published his first poem. He drank her in like some long lost water. 1943. By now Dylan already felt like a washed up old man. Barely thirty years old. Not even. He’d been staying in hotels for months. What felt like years. It was easier during the chaos of the war to just pick up and move at a moment’s notice. Easier to spend some months with Caitlin acting like she was his wife while she went more mad than he ever did. Then coming down, like a sad fool. She couldn’t even say she was sorry to Dylan when she went off the rails. Couldn’t even say sorry to herself. Beneath it all was a sad little girl. And torn all over that little girl’s face was a well of suffering. She couldn’t even touch the surface of the water without teetering between madness and suicide. And Dylan suspected she’d live this way for the rest of her life. Somehow, before, he’d loved her just the same.

Pamela was something new. She was educated. Creative. Like Dylan. Turned to singing to soldiers to make a buck during the war effort. Swan songs to the dead. Dylan could see the cruel irony. He’d seduce them to die, she’d soothe them to death. Like two snake bites across the neck of the British poor, hopeless, and drowning. He’d read the papers. Worse and better than any poem he ever wrote. The whole country was desperately trying to find a way to cope with a world war they’d sunk into like a bad dream they couldn’t wake up from. Religious conviction. Patriotism. Morality. He’d heard it all before, from a preacher, or in every other man and woman’s mind who spoke to him. The Christian girls he’d fucked as a boy. The Christian girls he tried to seduce as a man. The slogans. Statements of faith. Salvation. Dylan didn’t begrudge them this. Even then, they were the least mad of them all. At least they had a north star, regardless of what the story was, or meant.

The country was drowning in oblivion. Ever since Eliot had released The Waste Land two decades prior, they’d rapidly, frantically tried to rebuild a nation torn apart by the first war. And then the second came. Stronger. Harder. More advanced weaponry. Planes. Bombs. The United States had built something big. Trying to capture Heisenberg. Whatever else. Dylan didn’t give a damn about whose side he or anyone else was one. Beneath it all, apes swinging fists in a dying fire. It kept going out in the clenched fist of those trapped in the flames. And all the crying, all the fury, all the aching, dying light. Dribbling from the mouths of those who couldn’t do anything else other than just watch it go.

His drug of choice was romance. Caitlin and Pamela were perfect. He’d rather not write. He’d rather swing back and forth between them like two luxurious pendulums until the fire burnt out from the stars forever; he forgot everything and just drifted into oblivion. There was a good chance Caitlin would get committed before it happened. Her sister was dying of alcohol, barely thirty years old. And Caitlin had caught such a large strain of whatever the hell bit the two of them, in youth, in the womb, that Dylan suspected she wasn’t long for this world either. They were practically raised on wine. The girl herself was half illiterate. Working as a waitress. But damn, was she smart in a way that numbers or letters couldn’t grab. Smart in a way that she’d come from the ancient stones their ancestors had dropped on the land; left, even when the fables and bards had died. Earthly smart. Like it lived in her body before the mind. And this was what Dylan caught on the nights where she could let herself go. Sometimes she couldn’t even look at him during sex. Like the violence had killed her, and she’d left him to mate with her corpse. It was lonely as hell. He’d roll off her, take his pipe; when she drifted off, get Pamela on the line. She’d have just finished a show at a pub, in a hotel ballroom — hell, even a tunnel in the underground. He’d find her. At the Savoy, Claridge’s. In her black garter, dark red lips still on. Bending her over the door and having his way with her until the lights went out in the room of his mind and he could see the clear stars perfectly. Wrap himself up in his creased trousers; pull the shirt back on, and finish a poem on the typewriter. One night, she’d asked him:

“Lonely, Dylan?”

“Only you would ask that, Pam. You know damn well how I feel.”

“Are you going to stay with her?”

“Are you going to leave the dead men alone?”

“I sing to them so they’ll let me be. They think I’m some siren, maybe a star. Maybe an angel before they’re shipped off on some boat. The French shore. German wilderness. They get a chance to love me now, before they go.”

Dylan rattled off a line to her.

“Before we mothernaked fall

Upon the the land of gold or oil,

Between the raid and the response

Of flesh and bones,

Our claim is staked for once and all

Near to the quarry or the well,

Before the promises fulfill

And joys are pains.

Then take the gusher or the field

Where all the hidden stones are gold,

We have no choice, the choice was made

Before our blood;

And I will build my liquid world,

And you, before the breath is cold

And veins are spilled and doom is turned,

Your solid land.”

“It’s beautiful, Dylan. Would you let me sing it?”

“Not to them. In this room, to me.”

“Won’t you come to the party? There’s a ballroom at the Ritz. For the radio. They’ll have me sing there. Before they send the new batch of boys off to Paris.”

“You know I don’t give a damn about the parties, Pamela.”

“It makes me feel like you don’t give a damn about me.”

“You know that’s not true.” Dylan’s hands against the typewriter keys.

She looked at him intently, until he raised his eyes.

“Am I special, Dylan?”

Gruffly. “Are any of us? On this fucking wandering, dying earth. Are any of us special, Pam? Damn it if you ask me that question. And damn it if you care, unless the answer flatters you to me.”

Her eyes filled with tears.

“You know what I mean, Dylan.”

“Do I? Do I know that as soon as I write this poem, no matter how damn good it is to anyone or anything — might be the best damn poem since the motherland died almost eight hundred fucking years ago. And I write it in English, here, for you, or for anyone else who bothers to fucking listen. Is it special? It’s going in the ground. Like you. Like me. Like whatever’s left when this is all over. Rubber, shrapnel. Love. Dreams. Whatever.” He spat on the table. Bits of tobacco mingled with saliva. Pamela naturally recoiled. Her voice stiffened.

“Well I’m going, Dylan. And those sailor boys, those drummer boys, they may not be you. They may not sing like your words, but damn if I can’t and won’t find one who loves me.”

“I never said I didn’t love you Pamela. But I need you to understand.”

“Understand what?”

Dylan paused, too long. “I don’t know if I have words for it.”

“With fists of turnips punishes the land,

Some let me make you of the heartless words.

The heart is drained that, spelling in the scurry

Of chemic blood, warned of the coming fury.

By the sea’s side hear the dark-vowelled birds.”

Pamela’s pupils grew. She sat down next to him. The tears had bunched near her nose. Two dripped down and rested upon her upper lip. It had dislodged her mascara. She looked like she’d been awake for years.

“You see, I love you Dylan.”

“You love what you can see. The words. You don’t know what’s beneath. Or how much it hurts.”

She tried to touch his hand. He backed away like she’d attacked him.

“Damn it Dylan! Can’t you let me close to you. Can’t you let me be the one you call on.”

“You think it’s safe for me to call on anyone? The songs you love come from a place too high for you to reach. And I fucking know it. Come on up here, and see if you can help me get down. I was born here. I have to live here. And I stay here, in the face of the bankers, the clerks, the bombs. It’s all iced me out, Pamela. And the song says what you and I both know we can’t say. There aren’t words to say. God, I love fucking you.”

Pamela looked disgusted.

“But what good does it do? How can you climb inside me and put this to rest? This thing… this thing that runs on natural laws. And all I can do is sing it until it breaks out of me. And the rest…” He paused. “The rest is the land of death. The island of death. And the island means alone.”

“What does that mean for us?”

“It means I’m made of something unknown. Your boys in the band don’t know shit about it. What it’s like up here, Pam. And you know it. You love the thing inside me that you don’t understand. And if you understood it, it would break you.”

She stood up, smoothing out the satin in her black dress in vain.

“You put me in a place I can’t move. And I’m supposed to stay content in it? It’s not even a cage, Dylan. It’s a corset of love. And it’s too fucking tight. And I have to sit here and admire you. I won’t do that.”

“You’ll call me when it’s over. One, two AM. You’ll call me when the wine runs out, when the bottle’s empty, and the only thing left to do is smash it. Wanna know how I know it, Pam? I know it because I know what’s at the bottom of everything. It’s fuck. It’s a pit of hell. And you’ll waste all of your satin, your curls, your love songs. And you’ll crawl right back to the only thing that’s worth anything in this filth. A man who will stand in the face of the maw of death and laugh as he tilts the bottle back against his lips. The brown stain of this world, Pam. And you can’t put enough perfume on to hide the smell of it. The smell of shit, and the bodies burnt. The smell of the tide at Normandy. Close your fucking nose for all I care.”

He’d gone right back to the typewriter. And by the time he’d looked up, she’d picked up her purse and cigarettes and shut the hotel door. That was the last time he’d seen her. Two weeks ago.

The walls shook again. Now he was writing by hand under five flickering candles. Jars of eggs and picklings lined the walls. Some had shattered against the ground by the force of the bombs. A little boy nibbled at a crust of bread by his right knee. The boy stared up at him, with wide blue eyes and a dirty face.

“You think this will end soon, mister?”

Dylan smiled back at him.

“Everything will end soon, my friend.”

The boy smiled; went back to nibbling at the dry crust with renewed vigor. Dylan almost laughed. ‘The kid gets it,’ he thought to himself.

Back to composing the poem.

“Turns ghost to ghost; each mothered child

Sits in their double shade.

A process blows the moon into the sun,

Pulls down the shabby curtains of the skin;

And the heart gives up its dead.”

These lines would work well as a close. Dylan finished the last rope of the ‘d’ in dead, and closed the ribbon marked notebook with a flourish. It was too easy. These were some of the best poems in the modern English language. And he’d write them with the ease of a half-drunk man pouring nursery rhymes from the pit of his stomach. Automatic. He’d have to find a new vocation. Dylan did not suspect this. Such a pulse in his life. Having mastered the poem so sufficiently, so exactly and completely, that all it had become is boredom. Boring. Almost a fucking waste of time. Poetry was his love as a boy. He read Shakespeare, Milton, Marlowe, Eliot. All with a verve, with a fervor bordering on obsession. He’d promised himself at age ten that he’d become the best poet who ever walked this earth. At minimum the best poet walking it. And, looking around at the whole sick show, he supposed he had. Eliot was now an old man; Dylan was in the prime of his life. And as soon as he’d mastered the art of the verse, he’d, frankly, just stopped caring about it at all whatsoever. Maybe he’d throw a bomb into some last works. Then find a job as a traveling salesman. The propaganda films got him thinking about writing his own work of film art. The Americans had begun to really make something interesting. And Murnau and Lang out of Germany in the decades prior had woven a fever dream of images that Thomas could only compare to the great works of modernist poetry. Not that he cared about modernism, or any of it. Hell, even literature. Dylan only cared about truth.

And truth made him think of Caitlin. The photographs she’d given him of her in her room. Her supple, erect breasts falling out of her white shirt as she pulled it up. Her thin, white finger pulsing against her clitoris. Her head tilted back to oblivion. Fucking Caitlin was like fucking the dead. It was like reaching back in time and ringing the doorbell on some ancient stone castle. Out came pouring the millions of rungs of dead men and women who had thrown themselves together making her. And she’d pass right through it too, just like a shade. Maybe she’d have a kid. It almost didn’t matter. If she did, how would she raise the thing? What the hell did she know? Caitlin only knew how to do one thing. Rage against the abyss and beat it back with the fear and agony of one who only knew too well. One who was only too conscious of what it is, what it was, and what was to come. As far as Dylan knew, she’d never been institutionalized. Maybe she needed serious medicine. But in the same breath of thought, he knew the two of them were the same kind. Only difference was, Dylan had the gift of words, the gift of music to get it all out. She only had the drugs and her midnight screams. The breakdown. The big breakdown. It would always creep back up.

He’d published when they were first together. Living everywhere. Making a home nowhere. Drinking every day. Drinking every night. Marriage; the publication of The Map of Love. Dylan remembered writing it. Thinking over and over again ‘what the hell am I doing here?’ Not just with Pamela. Not just in Wales. In some temporary cottage with her on their long honeymoon in the bottle. Not just in the collapsed corpse of England that half the countryside was holding in their arms and mourning without saying a word. But on this fucking earth. In this fucking body. Writing these poems that nobody alive had any say in remarking upon. Because they didn’t come from here. They came from a gift that wasn’t for this world, or long for it. And yet, the poems landed in the world. And so did the propaganda films. How many Christian born, Christian named, empire’s sons marched off into some trench and peeked out over the bloody hill of dirt just to lose their eyes. How many more mothers mourned forever in dark, dingy kitchens over photographs that aged with each passing day into an oblivion only marked by tears and the scars of emotions unspeaking?

It was a joke. Man was a joke. Tobacco, smokes, women. Barsides. As he’d aged, poetry had gone from a boyhood passion to a vocation to a coping mechanism to a way of wasting paper. Toss and toss into the wastebasket. And the more publishers clamored for the words, the less they seemed to mean. He was glad his poems made soldiers weep. Girls fall in love. But all that was a drop in the water. It stirred a swamp of dead souls, who festered on this earth and discovered a million and one ways to go mad. Nazism. Mussolini’s face on the government’s buildings. Saying “YES”. Yes, yes, to live. Yes, yes, to die. And doing whatever it takes to remain in a body as the war took Warsaw, Paris, wherever else. Monuments to the brief history of man. Africa, Egypt. Ashes.

He took another swig from the canteen. Almost empty. Not deep or wide enough. For the war, he might need an ocean. For Pamela, Caitlin, and the crisis of being human with the lights on, he might need two. To drift off into an oblivion of sleep. But the softness of her skin. Both of them. The two, at once, in his bed. Fully present, enamored. This might be enough to break the swift stick that beat him even in his dreams. The nightmare wasn’t sleeping. It was between the moment he passed into the night unto the moment he woke up. And each morning he woke realizing that this was in fact life. That this was London. This was the year of the lord, 1940, or whatever the hell it was now. And there was no going back to old Wales. The druidic songs that fell across his lips like crystal spring waters of blue and gold. That tumbled from him like the inheritance of a dead bard into a bombed out hell. Into ruins. Of signs. Cigarette advertisements. Modern women on the edge of the force that would cause the madness for them to rip out their skins. Shine the blood of living into the light. As impersonal bombs continued to rip through abandoned, impersonal devices. A life of flight, a few poems. A hearse. Singing the only name. Mari Lywd. Give me Y Chwedlau. Give me the forest night and the stars that shone down upon the earth and the spread legs of the maiden woman. The song that birthed man from fire and shadow.

Dylan felt his poems were filtered through centuries of blood. Death. Mud. And what came out were the old prophet songs scarred with war. Trenches. Tanks. Cars. Airplanes. Everything useless. Everything he didn’t need. The song, the maiden, the night, the fire. He lusted for Annwn. Deep in the nature of the bowels of the earth, where he could feel the union. The union of everything. He got a whiff of it, like a starving dog, in bed with Pamela and Caitlin. Maybe a peripheral shot in his blood when the bottle was halfway gone. The first drag of a night’s cigarette. And after that, it was careening into an abyss of black vomit.

Give me the look in Pamela’s eyes when the orgasm opens the gate of her body. It’s like she’s trying to push out a whole world with the contractions of the temple of her walls. Her body threatening to flip inside out and reveal the nothing inside her. Beneath all the pretty names. He knew her dreams. A nice man. A cottage home. Somewhere near the woodlands. She’d read the children the old tales. Tell them about Rhiannon and the prince who sought to catch her at speed upon horse. Suppose she thought he was the prince who exchanged places with the ruler of the world of the dead. At least until he was supplanted by someone else, who could play a better part in the story. Dylan was a poet on the edge of the abyss. He couldn’t touch the land of the blessed but in measures of substances. Alter his mind. Stretch his body between this earth and the next. Make clear the stars, and the blood that runs through and between them. Marking this and the other side. She sensed this in him, and it drew her to him like a magnet in her loins.

He supposed this was the same crisis that possessed the Germans. All this talk about the volk. The old songs. The death of the homeland. It was all, in a way, true. The same way that Dylan couldn’t crawl back into the womb of the time of the old songs. He’d been spat out into department stores and empires carving up slices of the earth. Old Wales had already been long scarred with knives. And the land had ceased to sing. Only the silence of the beetles and the birds. Raped. Raped of the old song. It was the same crisis in Caitlin’s blood. All she was — a drunk. She couldn’t even remember the old songs. She had no idea where she came from. Where her blood reached, back into time. Who had made the prophecies, tended the land. She was displaced. Dylan’s blood was too strong. The song was in him and came out through the nose and mouth of 1943. The song would come and arrive forcefully through him like a blood flute. For her… for her it was the abyss of a casualty. The music for her was a strain. She strained towards religion. Towards song. Anything that might save her. But her body had been clipped of the cord of birth. An umbilical cord of the ancient place, where the drum rhythms still held sway and the night was still a story the gods told to us and we told back to return to the gods.

Now there were the bombs.