Category: Excerpt

In the child’s fifth year it fully memorized all five of the sacred texts and decided to destroy them. While the rearing mother was outside the hut tending to the matters of the village the child tore the pages from the sacred texts and left the books spineless, ripping the lifeless pages even further so that the floor of the hut was littered with small bits of paper like shaved ice. The rearing mother arrived to find the child seated on the carpeted floor with a mound of paper scraps before itself, a sullen look on the child’s face, and the rearing mother didn’t understand what had happened until her eyes fell upon the disconnected spines of the texts, whereupon her eyes metamorphosed into a darkness deeper than night and she rushed over to the child, beating it with her open fists, screaming that the child was a devil, nothing but a devil, a devil all along, the child unconscious after the first ten or twelve blows to the head, and it wasn’t until an adolescent male villager outside the hut overheard the violence within and opened the hut door to find the holy child’s rearing mother astride the bloodied and motionless body of the pale king. The young man separated the rearing mother from the child and set her outside to face the fate of the profane while inside he tended to the child and ensured it was still alive, it was still breathing and could move. As the child’s broken bones healed and its wounds became scars the people in the village orchestrated a ceremony whereby the rearing mother was beheaded with a machete and her head displayed upon a stick for the people to parade about the woods with their torches of fire guiding them in the night. The people of the village sang and howled at their joy, they celebrated the holy death of the heretic, they returned to the village to find the child of god huddled by candlelight over its papers, its ever-present words and ideas that the papers couldn’t contain, for with age the human intellect activates, and the child, for reasons unknown to this omniscient narrator, had finally become convinced that the words he or she had been writing so feverishly were words or the pictures of words delivered directly from god, messages for the people, for the future, for all time and all people from the heavenly king. Everyone had been right, all the people of the village were correct, the rearing mother had indeed been the caretaker of a holy person, a medium between the common man and the god they worshipped, the child thought. The electric current of power slid though the child, intoxicating and rapturous.

I looked over at her. The breeze tossed her hair, a dark nest of serpents at dusk. She looked out to the darkening world beyond the lights of the vessel and I could see that she was in her forties but that time had been gentle with her. I was curious about her, as I knew she was curious about me, but with age comes a particular degree of respect and decorum, and neither of us would yet voice our curiosities.

The solitude, the mystery, she said. I can’t help but hark back to a time when the sea was all there was.

I smiled and nodded, leaning over the deck and looking down at the water again. The pitch and roar of water cascading upward towards me.

I hope I’m not disrupting your peace, she said.

No, I told her. It’s fine. It’s nice to hear a voice other than the voice in my head.

I can certainly understand that, she said, and for the first time we looked each other in the face.

How long have you been aboard? she said.

I boarded this morning in Madrid.

After a lengthy pause, she said, I’ve been on this ship for three months tomorrow.

I looked at her, wondering what might have brought her out to sea for so long, what sort of personal outrage forces a woman and her family to seek refuge in the great abyss for such an extended period. Then I remembered almost immediately that the abyss calls for all of us at one point, and we all of us must answer that call.

Have you found it particularly dangerous? I asked.

Actually quite the opposite, she said. I’ve found these past few months, and especially the last few days among the most peaceful of my life.

Congratulations, then, I told her. The erstwhile world is not nearly in the same condition.

Would you be interested in a brandy? she asked me.

I’m afraid I would, I said, smiling at her.

You don’t strike me as someone who fears many things, she said.

We left the deck sinking into shadow and walked down through the narrow corridors of a labyrinth to her cabin, which was not far from my own. I sat on a stool near her cot and watched as she poured brandy from a small bottle into two plastic cups. She sat on the bedding and we touched cups and drank, feeling the gentle rock and sway of the ship in the water. The brandy was good, almost as fine as something Jorge would have kept stowed in his desk drawer, but not quite, perhaps a bit too sweet. The woman’s cabin was similar to mine and everything was tidy and well kept, much like the woman herself, who looked at me through dark pools and then down to her cup, and in the soft light of the room I could at last make out the delicate contours of her face and neck, the elegant geometry and proportionality, her eyes and hair a matching depth of black, and she said to me, or perhaps to the room in general, to herself, to no one, I’ve dreamt that the world is going to end.

I wake thinking of my mother, just as with every morning, no matter the haze or the rain, no matter the cold, I wake with the birds outside the window and air chilled taut seeping through the crack, I wake thinking of my mother though I hadn’t dreamed of her. I dreamed instead of a bulbous tree root, rotting yet strong, predictable, nothing exceptional other than its existence, a bulbous tree root deep in the ground where a faint seedling hatched long ago, springing upward toward the world of light and air, a seedling burst open like a cellular flame into the high day. On my right hand is a scab and I don’t remember how or when the wound was received and yet there it is, about the size of a small coin, scaly and maroon by the light of the window in morning repose. I lick the scab and it is dry and salty, its saline scales bulbous like the tree root of my dream, bulbous and asymmetrical. I pick at the scab, I study it, I try to understand. Is not the human body remarkable? Does not the world seem as though it were made for man alone? 

I wake thinking of my mother and continue thinking of her until I force myself up out of bed with the birds singing somewhere outside, bleeping, chanting, a coded gesture of communion, I force myself up out of bed and to the desk, looking down at it, the clutter of papers and three books, all rented from the library and thoroughly read, my current notepad nearly full of words, a glass of water from last night, just a few hours ago, an apparition, myself a walking apparition. I think of my mother just as I do each morning despite not having dreamed of her and I don’t know what to believe, none of us really knows what to believe, we’re all apparitions, or the memories we so tightly clutch are all apparitions. Apparitions of apparitions. This desk, the books and notepad, the finger-smeared glass of water, this is my life. This is my life now as I know it. I sigh and sit down to write, the chair so familiar beneath me:

I imagine I’m a slave in ancient Rome during the early reign of Octavian. I’m approaching middle age but in fine shape, and my meager education allows me to work as an accountant for a quite reasonable and beneficent consul. I do not know any other life or situation, for I was born into servility and have demonstrated strength and aptitude in my duties. The respect I display and the ethic with which I perform my work has awarded me a sense of freedom and respect from my master and in my community. The Republic is in disarray with the separation of Antony to the Egyptians and the whore Cleopatra. The consuls and the local population all fear the worst, that a total breakdown of the Republic is inevitable. Octavian has begun recruiting a vast naval army and I volunteer, resigning my work as a clerk in hopes of being completely freed after military service. For months I train as the tension tightens and war becomes more of a certainty.

I have no wife, no children, and no family in a world that makes little sense to me. The machinations of man seem to govern all rules of the Earth, for we have truly become rulers of the land. There are no gods and the Republic is full of imbeciles who have nothing better to do than believe in mystic flattery. We are the true gods; the world is a hostile place where men encourage this hostility through politics and war and the perpetuation of enslavement. If I die in Agrippa’s war at least I’ll finally be absolved of this systematic separation of those with privilege and those without. The world is a cruel and barbaric place and the Republic is an ornate façade. I have studied Cicero and believe that a man stripped of the ability to govern his own fate is a gross injustice. So I will fight for my own freedom and nothing more; I shall not grieve if the Republic perishes.

Most other slaves have it far worse than I. They toil and bleed and are murdered for no other reason than for the powerful to assert its control. I observe in silence, grateful for my luck, but am aware that it is luck and only luck that separates the diseased slave from me, only luck that separates the servile from the privileged. Is not man in his status as god the most cruel and unjust?

[painting by Thomas Cole]