Infernaut - part three

PART III - ASCENT


A Moment on Earth

A love recovered is love rediscovered. Finding her again, I also found myself. Like a unimetamorphosis, the same two bodies – our bodies – had assumed a single new form: simply, the form of Us. It was stronger, older, tougher, more resilient, more flexible than before. Our love was living its second springtime and we had assumed a new bond. We spoke without talking, we understood without hearing, we felt without seeing. We had both weathered the stormy seas, perhaps apart, but also together in our separation, and now all we knew was each other. Words had lost their spell, promises had lost their worth, love became something less, and thus our love – We – became something more. It was simpler, more refined, easier, yet richer. It was silent, it was calm, it was almost timeless. It no longer counted, it no longer knew numbers, it no longer knew the days and the months and the years. Nor was it sacred. We had been through too much to propound such high ideals. We knew love came and went, and that love was all and only in the living and that it depended upon us whether it would live or whether it would perish – and perhaps take us with it. We both knew love would not conquer all until it conquered us first.

Today it snowed again, and I sat looking for a long time outside my window and into the garden where the neighborhood kids built their snowman on the frozen pond amid laughter and song. The cold would keep its figure and harden its stature, I thought, and perhaps it would soon be ice, like rock, seemingly unbreakable, for the kids anyway, seemingly everlasting. But the world will turn and new seasons will come, and the sun will come in the springtime and the iceman will be long gone. He will lose his rock-hard figure, he will lose his face, his head, his arms, his body, and he will melt back into formlessness, into nothingness. The warmth will melt everything else around it and soon the iceman will melt back into the pond. Perhaps we will miss our iceman, but we will still see him in the shimmering and still waters of this pretty little pond – perhaps not in form, but in essence. And perhaps the butterfly that flitters over this pond now was a caterpillar not so many months ago, when it was dangling on the branch that drooped over the head of our lost iceman. But now the children build the snowman and that’s all that matters to them.

Our lives also change. What was built with diligence, what was made with song and laughter, will soon fade. Like a pond, it will become deeper, less conspicuous, calmer, quieter, but also more beautiful. With the fading days and the passing years, we learn to see not the forms but the depths from which they are born and to which they inevitably return with the passing of the seasons. As long as we can take a moment from our lives to look every now and again and appreciate a still body of water glimmering in the sun, or a butterfly flitting over a pond, or children making a snowman, we know love will always still have a place in our hearts.


1. Omnividance

And to pass the eons that span the ticking of a second…

No sooner had I taken the Peacock Throne, a flash of light blinded me and for a few moments all I could see was pure whiteness. When my eyesight returned, everything seemed to have changed. The colors were different, totally different, and not just in tone. I still couldn’t figure out where I was and what I was looking at. Then as my eyes gradually adjusted, I noticed a man sitting on a throne right before me. It was the Peacock Throne and I was looking at myself, but from where? I looked to the right, I looked to the left. I saw the two demon peacocks looking back at me. Could it be? Was I indeed looking through the eyes of Satan? I must have been. I had become Satan and yet I was still me, still my own consciousness. I was utilizing the Devil’s eyes. I looked closer at myself sitting on the throne. I was in a perfect trance. My eyes were closed and my body sat rigid and upright, without so much as a twitch. I tried to move my limbs, my fingers, my toes, but to no avail. I had assumed a double character, mine and the Devil’s. I thought of how this had been presaged in the play, in the Labyrinth of Knotharsis, in which, toward the end, I had taken on both the character of Dionysus and Theseus.

Then something strange happened. I could see both before me and behind me at the same time. Soon I could also see on either side of me. Both demon peacocks were in my sight. I had perfect 360-degree vision. And my sight kept incorporating new realms. Eventually I could see the endless darkness above me as well as the floor beneath me. But I couldn’t see my body – or rather, the Devil’s body which I’d inhabited. Like a cell splitting into millions of new cells, my eyesight too was splitting into a million new sights, incorporating a million new perspectives. I had never experienced anything like this before. It was like seeing from the inside of a globe, or a ball, from the very center, and being able to see everything at once, since everything grew and stretched out from the core that I inhabited. Both directions of the great hallway were one, both rows of columns were one, the floor and the dark, invisible expanse above was one. I was a global eye on which the pupil covered the entire surface, and now I could see everything that stretched down to the core, the core of the globe that was my eye.

I kept seeing more and more, now beyond the hallway. I saw the great Heart itself, pulsating rhythmically. I could see both inside and outside. I remembered the vision of the tree by the river of tears, how I could see the tree, see its being, as if it was the first time I’d ever seen anything so entirely, so completely, so essentially. Now I could see the great Heart and I could see the red dome, I could see under the red rock, and I could see myself as part of the heart and the heart as part of me. I saw everything. And I saw forms, I saw creatures, I saw other souls besides myself. I saw cephalodrones, the well of misery, the ghosts and their requiem, the unborn, the nymphs, the maenads, the theater, the sea and the isles of sin, the aquasphere, the oneirosphere, the isle of knowledge, the irenogogues and chronophobes, ego-mongers and oneiroclasts, the biotimorous, Knotharsis, the Labyrinth, the self-debasers, essence and inessence, the infernosphere, the adipods, being and non-being, the Lucidome, the piscemots and the pseudandrons, the demons and androsaurs, the Tortutron of Krak and the mines of the elixir, the arachnorids and the clodbores and the centaurs… I could see the entire universe and I could see a speck of dust. Yet I could still see myself sitting as silent as death on the Peacock Throne with my eyes closed.

At first this all was an overwhelming sensation for me, but gradually I could focus on particular areas in my sight. I could focus on an island, or a room, or even a tree, a rock and an individual person. I glanced from one object to another trying to hone my newly acquired gift of omnividance. I could focus on a single leaf twittering on the branch of a tree, or a single animated form, a single human soul. Then, just when I thought that this was as far as sight could possibly go, I saw inside the soul. As I fixed my gaze on one of those hapless victims suffering an eternal damnation in the Tortutron, I felt my sight suddenly fall into this person, or rather sink in would be a better word. I dove in and could only make out a blur of random images of emotions, memories and thoughts that constituted a person’s idea of his or her self, an idea of themselves that was considered the soul, the essence, the locus of their existence as an identity-conscious being. Then physical shapes and forms could be discerned. I could see the muscles right down to each fiber, I could see bones right down to the marrow, I could see the organs and all the viscera of this person; or rather, the representations of all those things, as I dared not believe that flesh and bones actually could exist in hell other than as representation, even though they seemed real enough to my consciousness. Now I could hone in on particular parts of the person. I moved up into the brain and saw a mish mash of more vivid memories, sensual stimulations, emotions and thoughts than I hah seen before and that all coalesced to form that mythical essence that we call the psyche and willingly mistake for the soul. I saw the child as I saw the man. I saw the good as I saw the shameful, I saw the father as I saw the son, I saw death as I saw life. Then I honed in on the heart, I penetrated its soft, moist myocardium, its ventricles and its arteries, until I saw from a great distance (indeed this heart, like the great Heart, seemed infinite in scope) a great hallway, just as the one I was in. I went further and further in, past the pseudandrons and past the theater (where we were all still performing in the Labyrinth of Knotharsis!), past the endless rows of pillars, until I saw the two demon peacocks, myself sitting before me on the throne, and I gazing at my own body through the eyes of the Devil. As if looking unto infinity between two mirrors at an angle, I could see universe after universe through a heart. I could see all through one, and one through all. I was in all of them and all of them were in me. The Heart was all hearts, and I was all consciousness.

I decided to use this new skill to explore further, to see beyond what I’d ever seen. I was excited. I felt like an ancient sailor would have felt had he reached the edge of the world and prepared to sail over and beyond. I looked above me at the receding pillars that stretched off into the endless firmament and decided to go up to explore its vastness. I was now more adept at directing my sight and I began rising up effortlessly, without body, without weight, without substance, pure sight, pure omnividance. It’s strange and impossible to explain, but I could still see everything; the grain of sand upon which I trod as I alit from my little rowboat on a distant shore, the look in the eyes of a piscemot as it swam by me, the chlorophyll in the leaf of the poplar tree by the river of tears, a star reflected from the surface of the infernal ocean, the bed of flowers where the spirit of my father lay. And yet I could focus above me and perceive my voyage up into the darkness of the great hall with total concentration.

As I rose, the air around me grew darker and foggier. I could still make out the endless shafts of the pillars that stretched off above me, but eventually those too disappeared. It became pitch-black, but I could still perceive clouds around me. It was as if I wasn’t in the hall of the great Heart anymore, it was as if I were in the air, in some sort of atmosphere. And sure enough, I saw the first tiny glitter of light above me. I saw stars. Soon the whole black night around me was twinkling with thousands of them, perhaps millions. Their distant fire lit up the sky. They were all around me. I was pure perception floating in space. Then from the corner of my eye, I saw the entire earth, blue and white, like a magnificent giant marble that had been flicked away by a Titan’s thumb. I focused on the earth and sped toward it, through its clouds and down unto its surface. And I saw random images, insights into lives, experiences, feelings, emotions. I could see anything, anywhere, sense it, touch it with my mind, feel it in my heart.

I saw armies of men and their lost civilizations, covered by time and faded to dust. I saw legions and hordes that conquered the world and vanquished the earth, only to disappear again and sink back into the pores of the earth. I saw great men and women rise and fall in the blink of an eye, and I saw lesser men and women, whom no one saw, whose greatness was silent and unknown, who were heroes without followers, conquerors without conquests, leaders without subjects. I saw all these grand illusions pass and fade before my eyes, until I could see the earth’s smaller secrets, its more delicate beauties, its lesser but richer charms.

I entered a small room in a little house where I saw a pair of long-fingered hands play the undulating finale to Frederic Chopin's prelude number eight in F sharp minor, Opus 28. I saw a pigeon watching her injured mate die under the unrelenting peck of a magpie. I saw a man remembering how his mother cried when he said goodbye to her all those years ago. I saw the stars and the mountains and the deep sea’s swell. I saw the trembling hand of a murderer, remorse in the eyes of a sinner, doubt in the heart of a prophet, hell in the mind of the guilty. I admired the aesthetics of a foot, of fire, of a drop of rain. And as I flitted from image to image, I knew that I saw not only anything, anywhere, but also any time, as if all the ages, all the lives, all the histories that had ever passed the face of earth all lived and occurred eternally, over and over, in the one moment, in the infinite present, for there was no beginning, no end, and no encore. Everything that had ever happened was in a constant state of happening.

I saw an ant walking on a leaf that was floating in a pond deserted in a garden forgotten by a man sitting in a room looking out a window thinking of a girl dreamt of in a place heard of in a song once played on a piano laying in a house with a forgotten garden and a deserted pond where floated a leaf with an ant walking on it…

I saw the last moment of an insect’s life, in the corner of a room, behind the bed of a man who was standing in front of a cracked window that emitted light unto a rusty city that was trapped in the camera of an old woman who showed the photo to her grandchild in a village in the country, in a house by a grove, fed by a river, on the shores of which grows a poplar, swaying lazily with the wind, in the mind of a dreamer, laying in a bed, in the corner of a room behind which lay a dying insect…

I saw two lovers laughing together in bed. I felt the feeling of invisibility in a city full of people. I felt the nakedness of the famous and the invincibility of the infamous. I heard a leaf fall in a forest. I perceived a child dreaming of a secret room in which lived everyone she knew in the world. I saw the instant when a drop of rain lands on the back of a hand. I saw the first tears welling in the eyes of a grown man. I heard a prayer on the lips of a believer, and I felt the moment when a man’s fingers brush against the palm of a beggar’s. I saw the repose of the dead in the first flight of a bird. I heard the crack of a skull under a steel sword’s blow, and I saw the loved ones that the dead left behind. I saw a fisherman go down into the waves for the last time and see death in his own hair that swayed gracefully before his eyes. I felt a heart skipping a beat. I heard the sound of laughter in a schoolyard. I saw a passing glance in a mirror. I felt the blushing of skin as two lovers’ hands touched. I sensed the wonder of a child reading a book about enchanted lands, and I saw a man gazing out at the stars from the bow of a boat in the middle of an ocean. The moment between sight and recognition; a memory discovered in the scent of freshly cut grass; that which is left unspoken; eyes that meet for the first time across a room; the taste of a snowflake; a man's life passing before his eyes… another sitting in a room, gazing at a wall of vines and ivy, writing a story about hell. Such were the secrets the earth kept, and that kept the earth in turn.

On earth I could see the future – or rather, that which proceeded me. It was like a revelation.

Then I floated back up, away from the surface of the earth, rising up again through the clouds, with blue giving way once more to black. I could soon see the outer atmosphere, and the endless, black void of the universe that lay beyond it. The stars once again embraced me with light in their millions. I sped away from the earth and watched it receding rapidly until it became a small blue ball and eventually nothing more than just another little speck among millions – and then not even that. I saw the sun behind it, a small golden disc suspended in its own sky. I saw large rocks, meteors, and asteroids speed by without light or sound. They crept up suddenly, they gave a glimpse of their haggard, tired, craggy complexions, then they disappeared back into the darkness. In the distance I could see a small red dot that must have been Mars. It became bigger and bigger, until I could take in the whole planet within my arms; its red, craterous surface, its canyons and dried river beds. Soon Mars too was a distant red speck whose light was engulfed by the golden disc of the sun. I sped on into the immensity of space, past the great gaseous orb of Jupiter, and then out of the solar system altogether. And although I was aware of the cold of space, it did not bother me. It felt like it was a part of me. Even though I had no body, nothing with which to touch, feel, see, hear, taste, I could yet sense everything thousands of times more acutely than I could ever imagine when I had a body.

The sun was now no larger than a tennis ball and I could begin discerning strange, colorful, nebulous shapes forming in the far reaches of the galaxy. I was approaching the core – a massive white mass of millions of bright stars with their own millions of planets in millions of solar systems. I passed through immeasurable gaseous clouds of blue and orange and red, stars that had extinguished, and stars that were reforming. In some spots there was no light at all, pure blackness of such density as did not even emit light. And then the Milky Way too was behind me, and before me there was nothingness, pure and dark. There is a feeling of lightness no mortal can experience, and I was feeling it. A feeling so light as to be, simply, inessence. The void I had felt inside me was now larger than ever.

The darkness seemed to envelope me a long time. Perhaps ages and eons had passed, perhaps only a nanosecond. It was impossible to tell. There is no time where there is no light, where nothing happens. There is this inessence. And yet our linguistic handicap which so painfully reflects our human limitation compels us to say something as absurd as this! That inessence is, that no-thing can be some-thing. But there it is: this inessence.

And so, through the eons that spanned a microsecond, I was suspended in this void. But I started seeing vague, large, forms. They were totally unintelligible at first. There was not color, or even light, but just these forms. It seemed like a great massive round object pressing against another amid which I found myself (my consciousness that is). It looked like a big round depression pressing into this universe. Perhaps it was another universe? And was the universe a finite thing with borders and boundaries? How many were there? Millions, perhaps, or an infinite number. Perhaps there were an infinite number of earths in other universes, perhaps there was an infinite number of me, or whatever I was. Perhaps despite the infinite forms, there was really only one consciousness? These thoughts ran through me as the great round depression grew and then receded, as if swaying to the rhythm of a wave. I noticed the same thing from the other corner of my eye, with more great globular universes pressing into my own.

Then something happened. Slowly, gradually, within the eons of a microsecond, I felt the depressions forming upon me, upon my own consciousness. It was as if two great masses were pushing into my eyes, if I had had eyes that is. I could not see – but somehow sense with something beyond any of the five senses – two great orbs pressing in upon me, all around me, crushing me, now seemingly infinitely large in scope, then receding into minuscule smallness. The successive alteration of these horrific perspectives that were beyond all scope of perception began making me feel nauseous, not least because I’d remembered having experienced this before, in recurring nightmares as a child. Then as this sickening scenario played out, I saw before me a grayish bright haze that seemed to cover the whole sky above me and these two other immense universal orbs. And the sky approached me, or I rose up to it, but it seemed very, very far away. It seemed not to be a consistent, static color, but to be in such rapid movement as to seem static. I noticed great white balls of an electricity I had never seen before passing the sky so rapidly, in such quick succession that before the light of one pass could fade, the ball would have completed its orbit around me and so on, so that the whole sky seemed white with the indescribably fast, whizzing balls of light.

The other two orbs seemed to disappear; or rather, they seemed to become absorbed into me, so that we all formed one big orb. Then I moved out of the great orb and headed up toward the whiteness above where the two or three great white balls of electricity raced and lit up the entire universe. As I approached this streaking white firmament, I noticed that sometimes the balls sped closer to me and sometimes further, and every time they shifted the range of their orbit, a great white flash would occur like lightning and without sound. The lightning bolt would shoot out and away from the white sky. I eventually reached the streaking orbit of the balls and passed through it. All became a white haze around me as these phenomenally speeding white balls passed through me, around me, and soon below me. I saw a whole other universe of great orbs with white balls zipping around them, some with more, some with less. And all of them were interconnected. As I gained more and more distance, this whole intricate web seemed less like a chaos of colliding orbs and balls, and more like a unified substance. Of course, I thought. I was looking at atoms that formed molecules: the orbs were protons and neutrons, the streaking balls were electrons, and the great flashes of lightning must have been photons shooting off with the changing orbits of the electrons.

I perceived the molecules forming vaster, more complex structures. I found myself in a gelatinous ocean of a color I’d never seen before. I was proceeding through this ooze and could make out strange shapes, like blobs, some round, others oval, like mitochondria, which is what they must have been. I went through another layer, an endoplasm, and swam through another gelatinous ocean where beady little shapes swam by me, probably ribosomes. I found myself in the nucleolus and, as with the previous orb, I – my consciousness – expanded and filled into the nucleolus and became the nucleolus, but without stopping there. It expanded and occupied and filled the entire cell. Then, no sooner had I become this cell, I started dividing up, exponentially increasing in number in twos and fours and eights, and so on, until I became a million cells all at once, inhabiting each and every one, conscious of each and every one, yet also conscious of their entirety. I flowed through blood and dodged great red globules; I seeped through bones and inhabited marrow; I raced like a spark of electricity through nerves and traversed the entire body in a millisecond; I became a thought in the brain, a sting on the skin, a sperm in the testicle, a strand of hair, a feeling, an emotion, an eye, an ear, a mouth, a face, a body, arms and legs and brain, and muscles, and heart, and as I pulsated with life and vitality, with the entire universe pumping through my veins, I opened my eyes…

There I was, sitting on the Peacock Throne in the great hallway. Only this time, I saw not myself before me, but the Devil, with demon peacocks on either side. The Devil looked at me plaintively. I observed him without remark. Then he kneeled down before me and spoke.

“Now you have seen. Now you will bow to none. Now you are near freedom.”

I heard him and I understood him, but my mind was still lost in that revelation, that glimpse into a future I had never seen until that moment. Something about it – some vague recollection that remained hazy in my mind – unnerved me.


A Moment on Earth

Marry me.

The two words mingled in my mind, in different tones and different textures, with faces and without, never daring an answer, but neither bearing a doubt.

Marry me.

Under the poplar tree that once shaded your eyes from me, from between its branches where the sunlight traced upon your face the outline of my destiny.

Marry me.

From among all these faces that sped away from me and left me, save this one that lost me and then found me.

Marry me.

For no other angels have tread in the stone garden of my misery, nor sung songs so sweet in the labyrinth that has spanned the breadth of my infamy.

Marry me.

Here on this shoddy piece of earth where the wind in our ear howls, here on the surface, before your eyes now, here where even the ghosts flee the chill, here in this godforsaken town, here among the blood-thirsty hounds, here where the decrepit faces behind cold walls do at young lovers scowl, here, in this monstrous construction where granite dreams by granite deeds are bound.

So marry me my dear, do not forsake us this bliss. Marry me, and answer with nothing more than a kiss.


2. Omnissence

And see the far horizons,
Of space and time,
Reflected in the nucleus of an atom…

I remained seated and silent on the throne, still unable to comprehend and digest the intensity of my experience. With omnividance I saw all, with omnissence I was all. I was all essence, I was all being, and yet, though I inhabited the entire universe of being, I was one consciousness. It was unfathomable, incomprehensible, and yet it seemed at the same time so obvious, so simple, so unmistakable. Every thought was my thought, every being was my being, every experience was my experience, all essence was my essence, as if I had become omnissential. All the while, I felt that strange sense of emptiness expand further in me.

I noticed a another change around me. The great hallway itself looked different than it had before. There were the same pillars, the same marble floors, there stood the Devil still kneeling before me, and the two peacocks, but the hall was now circular and no longer stretching out straight ahead and behind. It now spread out all around me, albeit at a great radius from the Peacock Throne that was its epicenter. And whereas before I could not see the entrances to other realms – the realm of the elixir or the Tortutron of Krak – I could now make out doorways behind the pillars that were lined along the great circular wall. I saw the way the Devil must have seen the great hall. My perspective had totally altered.

There was a slight alteration in the form of the Devil too. He still looked similar to the way he was before – not his more human appearance, but his horned and red one which he assumed (or couldn’t help assume) when he was enraged. He still had the same horns, the peacock eyes, the red, leathery skin, but now he did not look frightening. In fact, he looked pathetic. He maintained his plaintive expression, and perhaps the reverse he’d suffered on my final move still weighed heavily on him. He had the overall appearance of complete and utter dejection. Such I have seen happen in others who have sought to build an aura of invincibility on a shaky foundation when that foundation had given way. The shattered illusion is more than just the shattering of an illusion; it is the end of an entire personality, the death of a whole identity. And vanity had been the end of the Devil. It had been the shaky foundation of his awe-inspiring aura. But he was now merely a hollow shell. He was empty. He was nothing. His eyes lacked luster, his shoulders sagged, his face hung listlessly, his movements became slow and pained, he lost the spring in his body and the quickness and wit of his speech.

“Off your knees now,” I said to the Devil. “You need not bow to me.”

He seemed at first not to hear, but he had. He slowly gathered his lugubrious body, as if he were not of his body, as if he were carrying his body as an excess weight, as a burden. He rose off his knees, and he slowly raised his head and looked at me with his despondent peacock eyes.

“You have conquered your demons, traveler. For that I commend you. When one sees from the throne, one sees all. And when one sees all, one fears none. One can no longer fear even the Devil.”

The images of my conscious voyage on the throne were still before me, still in my head. They did not crowd or clutter, they did not cause anguish or despair. The experiences all seemed somehow to fit perfectly with each other, among each other, in my head, before my eyes. They were not ordered, but clear; they were not sequential, but whole; they were not moral, but good; they were not important, but meaningful; they were not only true, but of the essence.

My eyes gazed around at the hundreds of doors that lined the circular walls of what had been the great hall and was now a great atrium, with me on the Peacock Throne at its epicenter. I saw every door head-on. Every gaze stretched directly away from me in a straight line and reached a door, a pillar, an alcove, a wall. I could not tell from where I had entered the great hall, thus nor could I tell from where I could leave the atrium. Everything now seemed to orbit around me. I was the beginning and the end, I was the only way in and the only way out. Was this my final destination, where there was nowhere left to go, where everything would instead come to me? I remembered the Devil’s words, that true freedom does not exist but that that didn’t mean it was unattainable. But I knew I hadn’t achieved that yet. And hadn’t the Devil told me I had neared it, that freedom was nearer now to me than ever? Suddenly I did not even care anymore for the throne, I did not even care for the omnividance and omnissence that it had granted me, that I had found upon it. I could only think of that one enigmatic word: freedom. I knew my destiny would not be complete until I had attained it. And although I did not know how or where it would be attained, I knew that before it ever would, my conscience would have to be given peace, for this was a hell that was its own creation, and this was a journey for its exoneration and its cessation. My conscience would have to be laid to rest. I had crossed its deserts and braved its oceans, I had faced its monsters and traversed its isles, I had wound my way through its labyrinths and slain its monsters, I had wrestled my demons and I had become my demons. I had been everything I had tried to overcome, I had fought, and thus far I had won. Now my conscience would have to be laid to rest. This would mean its termination, and that in turn would mean my termination, for I too am but its own emanation. Freedom, I now understood, would be the end of me, but also the end of my damnation, and the beginning of my true being, as one, as all, but as none. I was beginning to see now.

Ariadne… I needed to find her. But I could not see her from the throne. She eluded my omnividance. We had been separated in the cube. The only one who could know where she was, was standing before me, the fallen Fallen Angel.

“And what of my companion. What has become of her?” I asked the Devil imperiously.

He looked up at me with his lifeless eyes. He hadn’t left. Perhaps he thought he couldn’t leave. He seemed like he was ready to serve me, as if he’d accepted his fate and was awaiting to be addressed by me. In slow, careful diction he answered me.

“The girl you seek is beyond your eyes, and beyond all eyes. Her journey continues, as does yours.”

This puzzled me somewhat.

“And tell me, hunchback,” I said suggestively, referring to the first time I had encountered the Devil as a kindred spirit with his hideous form on the red road, and the first time I saw the now unmistakable peacock eyes. “Am I then a part of her journey, or is she a part of mine? And if who let off dreaming of who then, eh?”

But the Devil’s demeanor did not alter, so complete was his fateful misery. He answered me again slowly and cautiously.

“Both and neither – my liege. For some, their destiny is intertwined.”

My heart lightened and then weighed upon hearing this. At first it felt light in the knowledge that Ariadne and I were inseparable, that we would either perish or overcome together, side by side, arm in arm. But my heart also weighed by the fact that I knew not where she was and I knew not how to find her. This contraposition of sentiment soon melded into one emotion: that of excitement at the task ahead. At that moment my thoughts wandered again to the Devil, toward whom I felt a sense of sympathy. He was now a broken, fateful creature, in the same way that I was when I had started my journey. I even noticed the way he made sure to stress the words “my liege” when referring to me. He had opposed me, yes. But did not his opposition only serve to make me stronger, and thus help me in my task of escape from my infernal fate? Would I have arrived where I was without him, or would I have wandered aimlessly and forlorn in the infernal wilderness of my conscience for all eternity? The Devil would have my support now. He would be by my side as he had been before when he had the upper hand and I was but a lost spirit.

“Lucifer!” I said firmly, conscious of the meaning of this particular sobriquet. “Lucifer, you have been a guiding light. Come help me find her, come help me find the one who escapes my sight!”

I used rhyme hoping that this would bring back memories of the Labyrinth of Knotharsis, and would add some cheer to his gloomy mien. But no glee was to be aroused from his dark soul. He looked down at the floor and then raised his head yet again, this time slower than he had done before.

“Yes, my liege.”


A Moment on Earth

I will, my dear. I will. I will stand before you naked, as you are now. We will shed all our possessions, we will shed all our fears, we will shed all that would stand between our bare chests that have withstood all those lost years. We will put our arms around each other and draw each other near. Our breasts will meet, our hands will join like little furnaces to spread their warmth into our bodies and into our lips, and seal our love with a simple kiss.

I will, my dear, I will. I will laugh at our sorrows and I will cast away our doubts. We will be arrogant and strong, you and I, we will despise cowardly insights, we will brush away all critical eyes, we will see only what we dream, and we will no longer heed the world of lies. And if my mother, who did me raise, and if my father, who did me praise, if they both should fight against this will, then we shall strike them with our hearts and spite them with our love, for hatred does only the hater kill.

And I will, my dear, I will. When so much time has passed, when so many of our hopes have upon this earth’s surface been carelessly cast, I will now seek not for stars and heavens and oceans. I will seek only the relief of drowning in a little pond that is hidden and small, that is nothing to anyone, but is our own sweet secret, like our own little love potion.

So let this be, my dear, let our wills meet and let our destiny be sealed, and with this single kiss let a new light to our hearts be revealed.


3. Ariadne’s Escape, and the Womb

To be drawn toward a loneliness,
That leaves no place for you in the universe…

When the Devil gave the word, Ariadne and Argus were led away by their demon captors and separated from me. We looked into each other’s eyes until hers descended and sunk away into the square from which she disappeared. And though my story from there on has already been told, Ariadne’s had just begun.

Ariadne was taken through the infinite confines of the Tortutron, which was as vast and unforgiving as the human psyche. The cube, this edifice to human frailty, now was to be Ariadne’s damnation. She too was led through it, encountering one lost soul after another. A mother whose moribund child was forever dying in her arms, a man who hung for dear life expecting the help that would never arrive, another who thought life was a joke and endured the laughter of children who pointed at him and never dispersed. In every cube she saw these poor tormented souls and thought that she too was going to be confined to her own chamber to suffer her own peculiar punishment for eternity. Such was the price, she thought, of spiting the Devil.

Finally they arrived in an unoccupied chamber. It was the same as all the others, save for the fact that it was uninhabited, with the same number of square tiles, and the same blinding whiteness. Argus flew above her; the demon and the androsaurs stood hideously behind her. Then when she turned to look at her captors she noticed that while their grotesque, monstrous bodies were at first clear to her, they rapidly started fading. And as they did, the color of the chamber changed, becoming darker, changing color, a reddish pink. Eventually the chamber too lost its geometric shape and the smooth, white, sterile walls that surrounded her became porous, fleshy, viscous and moist. The demon and the androsaurs were now gone, the walls had transformed into what seemed like the inside of a womb. She had become the prisoner of the chamber. Now others would pass through, other spirits, and they would see her clearly in her cube, as if she were sitting there in the middle of the chamber. But she would be unable to see them. She would spend eternity in a womb; alone, frightened, condemned, under the gaze of all but able to see none, just like all those other poor souls that she had seen trapped in the other chambers of the cube.

As the pangs of conscience seemed to throb with indifference and malice, she had the strangest feeling. She thought that somebody or something was trying to kill her. She felt a sudden fear that she was in mortal danger. She knew it didn’t make sense, for she was not among the living, nor was there anything or anybody there for her to fear. But she felt it nevertheless. And then it dawned on her like a recurring nightmare. She was horrified at its realization. It was the host who did not want her – the mother. It was the host mother in whose womb she now resided that was seeking to kill her. The feeling that she was to be killed at any point was not half as frightening as the feeling that it was her mother who wanted to kill her. It was a feeling beyond loneliness, it was beyond despair, it was beyond disgust, it was beyond abandonment or hatred or rejection. It was a feeling that she thought only the unborn could know, the unborn who have no knowledge, no memories, no sight, no hearing, but who feel with their whole being. She felt it with every heartbeat of the mother, with every movement, with every vibration, in every cell, in every vein and every nerve, with every hormone, with all her being. It was the sickening feeling that there was no place for her in the universe.

She coiled up into a fetal position and started shaking. This unprecedented feeling gripped her entire being and she was as if stunned. She lay there waiting – praying – for a death that would never come. The trembling of her body intensified. A strange sensation gripped her, as if there was a rumbling growing more and more violent inside her. And as this rumbling intensified, she felt a hatred grow within her – a hatred toward herself. In her mind there evolved a strange image of a figure. Although she recognized it as hers, it was twisted and grotesque, like the demons that had led her there. She shrank away from the image, and then from herself, but wherever she tried to seek succor, she only encountered the same figure. It grew and grew in her mind until all her thoughts were occupied by it. It left no space for anything else. It seemed to feed off her mind and gain strength as it ate away at her psyche. The rumbling grew, the figure grew, the wet, fleshy walls shrunk, and the hatred in her welled alongside her tears.

When her entire being was nearly consumed, when the convulsions reached their peak, when she was ready to accept her fate, she knew that she could still hear – just barely – a flapping noise. Although the din within her and around her was overwhelming, she was not mistaken. She heard this flapping noise. And though the sound didn’t seem to have any significance in and of itself, it served an invaluable purpose in keeping her from losing everything, in keeping her from losing her mind. Although she knew not its cause or origin, it seemed familiar, and familiarity was all that kept her from insanity at this point. It gave her renewed courage and strength, and even a small sense of hope, that somehow she would yet escape this damnation. She held on and tried not to lose track of that sound. And it worked. It didn’t fade or recede, it grew stronger and stronger until she looked around her for signs of its physical manifestation. But so far, there was nothing but the inside of her womb-prison.

When the flapping grew louder than it had ever been, she looked up and saw a very faint light, like a white shadow, like a phantasmal apparition. It hovered in the air devoid of form or feature, a small cloud from which seemed to emanate this strange noise. She looked up with her sweat-drenched face, with her fear-ridden eyes, from her coiled body. She noticed that the apparition would sometimes fade and sometimes intensify, depending on her own thoughts and emotions. But it did not disappear. She summoned all the strength within her for one last push. She gave everything for this one last hope. She grit her teeth and she closed her eyes, and she withstood the oppression of her circumstance down to the last breath within her. When she opened her eyes again, the apparition was stronger than ever. It eventually assumed a form, a face, a head, wings… It was Argus! The cephalodrone had saved the day. He was now flapping above her, fully distinct and completely visible. It was almost miraculous. The harbinger of insanity, the manifestation of madness, the alingualogical dead-head, the flying, bumbling birdbrain had inadvertently saved her from losing her mind! Her captors must have forgotten about the creature, or else not given it any serious thought. It had remained in her chamber and its familiar presence had kept her from drifting away and becoming a captive of her own fears, from being trapped in her own nightmare. Argus was the anchor that held fast in her a sense of perspective with her surroundings so that she didn’t drift away on a solipsistic sea of simulated perdition like so many others she had encountered in the cube. As the cephalodrone came fully clear to her view, her horrific surroundings began to fade away. The slimy walls lost color and shape, gradually assuming the previous white, flat, sterile surface that was familiar to her from before. So too, the oppressive hatred and fear within her receded and she ceased sweating, her mind cleared, her body no longer trembled, she felt like she was relieved from a parasitic dread that was eating away at her, freed at last from captivity.

She slowly gathered herself up and couldn’t help but look up at Argus with her grateful eyes and smile at it as she would at a sibling she hadn’t seen in a lifetime. The cephalodrone showed no particular expression, but Ariadne couldn’t resist jumping in the air, grabbing it by the wings and laying a big kiss on its cold, grey forehead. Argus didn’t know what was going on and was frightened for a moment but later seemed to blush with pride. It flapped around stupidly and red-faced (the first time Ariadne had ever seen any color on its face). It couldn’t manage to hide a smile any better than it could manage to hide its embarrassment.

“I never thought I’d say this Argus, but thank you! Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

The cephalodrone nearly flew into one of the sides of the cube when it heard this. It didn’t know why it was receiving all her gratitude or what exactly it had done, but it was very pleased with itself.

“Yyyes, well, yes, indeed… It was nothing really. I had a bit of trouble at first but I soon sent the demon fleeing. As for the androsaurs, yes, well, they received a tight whipping…”

“Oh don’t be silly Argus,” interrupted Ariadne. “If anything they would have fled of their own accord because they couldn’t stand you. But I mean what I said – thanks for being there.”

“Ahem, yes, don’t mention it. We are companions after all, aren’t we?”

“Yes we are. Now come, we must find a way out of this place.”

They looked around the chamber trying to find a way of escape. In a moment they heard an unwelcome noise, a heavy breathing, and saw one of the tiles above their heads begin to open. They recognized the heavy breathing of their captors, the androsaurs in particular. Ariadne quickly reassumed her fetal position and general fear in an attempt to fool their captors and see that they moved on. Argus also quickly moved next to Ariadne to act as if it were sharing the same punishment. The androsaurs and the demon gave them only a passing glance, paying no heed to their feigned misery. They disappeared down another square. Ariadne got back on her feet and started thinking aloud about what to do.

“These creatures keep coming and going Argus. We must find a way to follow them out of this cube. Only they know the way back out.”

“If we followed them in then certainly we could follow them out too,” offered Argus. “There you are right. But we did not follow them anywhere. They took us by force, so I don’t think they’ll look kindly to being followed.”

“Well then perhaps we should let them take us out by force too, no?” responded Ariadne sarcastically.

“To force an eruption from a forced irruption?” said Argus.

“What?”

“What what?”

“What eruption?”

“No, irruption.”

“Yes, that’s what I said, eruption.”

“No, you said irruption.”

“Ok, forget it Argus, nobody’s erupting.”

“Nor irrupting?”

Ariadne decided to remain quiet before she might lose her patience, and then quite possibly her mind. She thought about a course of action. Just then another square opened from another wall and she saw the scaly heads of the androsaurs coming back into their chamber, but this time without the demon. Ariadne winked at Argus. Before Argus could wipe the puzzled look off its face, Ariadne began moaning and wailing at it, hurling curses and begging compassion at the same time. Argus continued flying around not knowing what was going on but also trying not to show this by playing along as best it could. The androsaurs had almost passed but they suddenly halted just as the square they were to exit from opened. They turned and looked suspiciously at these two. They walked toward them slowly, sizing up the situation as they did, their reptilian eyes squinting, their forked tongues zipping in and out of their mouths. Ariadne opened her eyes suggestively at Argus, but Argus still did not get it. Then just as the androsaurs began lifting their muscular arms to seize the two of them, she finally shouted:

“Woe is me, to see before my eyes the avenger of murder, fair but foul, here is Tisiphone!” Her eyes widened painfully obviously.

“AAAAAAAAAH, yeeeeeeeees, yes, yes, yes, that is me, Tisiphone, the Fury!”

Ariadne dropped her head as she let out an audible sigh, both relieved and exhausted, and continued her wailing and moaning like a true thespian. The androsaurs, seemingly fooled by her performance, dropped their massive arms and went on their way. Ariadne was glad the demon wasn’t with them, as the demons generally seemed to be less credulous and a little brighter than the androsaurs. On the other hand she was worried that if they didn’t know where the demon was they might just soon run into him at an even less auspicious moment than this. As soon as the androsaurs had left they made their way to the square through which their former captors had exited. They waited a little to make sure they did not enter the next chamber before the androsaurs would be leaving it, so as not to be caught there. The plan worked. They saw the androsaurs leaving just as they were entering the next chamber, and they made a note of which square tile they left through. They did this chamber after chamber, inhabited by one poor victim after another, timing their entrances and exits perfectly (so as to see which square to proceed to without being spotted by the androsaurs) until they had memorized the pattern of progress through the chambers of the Tortutron. 1, 4, 9, 16, 25…

As soon as they were confident of their course, they changed direction and went the other way, retracing their path back to the great hall from which they had entered the Tortutron. They encountered the same victims and the same chambers. Ariadne was always wary before entering a chamber, keeping watch for the demon that had taken them there and later parted from the androsaurs. Argus flapped behind her, trying to keep up. They soon came upon the chamber with the old man of skin and bones as he uttered his eternal mantra…

“Here I wait, a thousand years dead, having cut off the Minotaur’s head…”

A chill ran down Ariadne’s spine as she came now to the final hurdle. One more chamber and then they would be back in the great hall. They entered, and slowly – more cautiously than before – they proceeded to the final square beyond which lay their escape from the Tortutron. As they approached the square, Ariadne couldn’t take her mind off the demon that she dreaded encountering. When one bears in mind the worst of all scenarios, one also harbors a slight but unashamed hope that the chances of it occurring are small, seeing as most of us are used to seeing our expectations dashed by experience – or at least that’s what our memories tend to dwell on. But this time the square opened before they were in range, and as if she had conjured the demon herself with her own morbid thoughts, first she saw the horn, then the ochre-colored forehead, followed by the piercing, nefarious eyes. It all happened as if in slow motion and the feeling was less that of dread than that of irony. She did not make any sudden moves, nor did she panic. The same could not be said for Argus, whose emotions flitted and flapped even louder than his wings did, expressing themselves in the form of random words, gawks, and squeaky exclamations that resembled the yelping of puppies. The demon stepped out into the chamber and carried a malicious, three-dimensional smile that had not only a form but even a depth to its evil. The sharp black nails on his clawed feet tapped and clicked with ominous sharpness on the hard white surface of the cube. The demon did not for a second take his eyes off Ariadne, who was slowly backing off to the far wall. His massive frame dwarfed with its sheer bulk Ariadne’s own supple figure. But though her eyes showed caution, they showed not an ounce of fear, and this soon ate away at the edges of the demon’s smile, giving it the appearance of a bird of prey that had just had its wings clipped. Those clipped wings nevertheless fanned even further the irate fire of his demonic eyes.

“Huret, huret shen… Kara har-e tsin ettem,” said the demon in Incubata, no doubt intended for Ariadne’s uncomprehending ears.

But the meaning of the words she did derive, not from their etymology, but from the tone in which they were uttered. She receded no further, and did not let her back touch the wall behind her before she stopped. Argus was still fluttering around above her in a panic. The old man was still reciting his eternal mantra…

“Here I wait, a thousand years dead, having cut off the Minotaur’s head…”

The demon’s eyes squinted, the smile disappeared, and his great body sprang in one leap at Ariadne. She evaded her predator with the agility of a doe and she too in a few light bounds was above the demon and on the other side of the chamber. The demon went crashing into the surface with a deafening thud that actually left a deep and large dent in the square tile where he had hit, no doubt caused by his horn. Ariadne’s heart was now beating fast, and while the demon tried to gather his senses, she noticed that that would be her chance to make for the square from which she could escape. So she did. The square opened to her and she was ready to jump through, but when she looked up she saw the demon with Argus in his hands, the cephalodrone’s face terrorized, its wings flapping frantically. She couldn’t leave Argus behind. She must save it as it had saved her. She backed away from the square and descended on to the same surface as the irate incubus, facing him once again. The demon tucked Argus under his left armpit and once again made a sudden, massive leap straight at her midriff, head first, horn aimed at her heart. Again she managed to evade him, although this time it was closer than before, and she actually felt his left shoulder (which was the size of her head) hit her left arm painfully as she bounded away. Again there was a huge thud and again a dent in the wall, but this time there were two groaning, sore heads: the demon’s and Argus’. Ariadne looked behind her and noticed where the demon had left the dent. She thought that this could be her chance for escape. Considering how deep the dent was, if she could evade him one last time to send him smashing into the same dented square, the force of that impact would surely send him crashing through the surface, thus giving her the chance to make for an escape through the resulting hole. The demon was coming to his senses, though sorely bruised again. As he tried to recover, Ariadne was able to make contact with Argus’ eyes. She signaled for him to bite. At first he just imitated her, not seeming to understand. Ariadne brought her hand to her mouth and made as if to bite her hand.

“The hand, the hand!” Ariadne whispered.

“AAAH, BITE HIS HAND YOU MEAN!” shouted Argus excitedly, aware of his folly the moment it was out of his mouth.

But before the demon realized what was happening, Argus opened wide and bit with all its strength into the leathery, thick hand of the demon. It was a good thing the cephalodrone got one of the demon’s fingers into his bite, for otherwise little damage could have been effected on his hand, let alone his arm. But it worked. The demon let out a horrible bellow, more monster than human, and as the demon’s arms flailed out, Argus was released and flew hastily at Ariadne like a baby-bird to its mother. The demon was soon in control of himself and now had an altered expression altogether. These demons were an expressive lot, and this one was no exception. The eyes were never this wide, the teeth were never this big, the muscles were never so tight, the veins were never so prominent. The wide nostrils flared, the great bat-like wings flapped, and in an instant, this humungous mass of evil hurtled at them like a meteor. Although Ariadne and Argus just got out of the way, they couldn’t help but scream at what was coming at them, as frightful a sight as it was to behold. This time there was not only a thud but a loud crash behind her, followed by a massive gush of air that was sucking up everything behind her like a giant vacuum. Something was shattered. She looked back and the demon was gone! There was a great gaping hole in the cube. It worked. Argus was also gone however, and she too was being sucked toward this hole. She tried desperately to withstand the suction but since there was nothing to grip, it was futile. As she flew off she grabbed hold of the side of the aperture, her body and legs dangling off helplessly out of the gaping hole and into the void behind her.

She looked around her even as she held on for dear life. It was pitch black around her outside the cube and even where she gripped, it looked like there was no cube or any structure, just a white opening in the blackness to the edge of which she held on. She felt a bite on her leg and looked down to find Argus, who had flapped and struggled its way back to the hole and barely held on to Ariadne with its teeth. She thought if Argus could fly back then so could the demon, but there was no sign of him. It seemed like a gravitational force that was pulling them out and so the demon’s own weight must have proved impossible for him to overcome, whereas Argus was relatively small and had relatively strong wings vis-à-vis its weight. It grew strangely oppressive around her. Although she seemed to be pulled, it was not the pull of air that she had thought before, not really like a vacuum, but more like gravity. And it felt exceedingly oppressive upon her body, as if a great weight were pushing in on her from all sides, on every square inch of her body surface. She looked back down to Argus and screamed for him to hold on. Her voice was loud and clear; booming, in fact. Argus did its best, but its wings were no longer flapping from the pressure out there which was growing by the second. The pull became more and more intense and their bodies became heavy and immobile as lead. Ariadne was now feeling the pressure on her chest and couldn’t speak. She was losing control of her muscles and she was losing sight in her eyes. She started seeing a general beige haze with geometric forms, like what one sees when one applies pressure to one’s eyes. Now there was no sound either, nor light. She was petrified and she lost all control over herself. She thought this was it, this would be the end. Her consciousness was all that was left her. Soon that was to fade as well. She was being swallowed up. She heard the dying echo of a vanished old man’s voice whispering for the last time…

Here I wait, a thousand years dead, having cut off the Minotaur’s head…

She gave up. She let go to be taken and crushed by the force of the great void.


A Moment on Earth

The inundation spread like nebulous waves of regeneration through the abode of life’s cradle. Millions of the swarming host flooded the fecund fields, directing their irruption toward the inner sanctum that harbored the future of their race. In wave after wave, the millions came and the millions fell, until only one pilgrim gained the passage to the temple. As the fastidious walls embraced with their enchanting spell, the circle was complete. All that was and all that would be, prophesy and history, destiny and desire, imagination and will, followed the course of their mysteries until the balance of the universe would be set in blood and bone, and life would be the reward of earthly pleasure…

…thousands streamed like dust-gathered corpuscles through the veins of the edifice, descending down the hungry pipes to be vomited from the same toothless mouth that had swallowed them, that will yet swallow them, only to spit them out again, day after day, week after week, year after year. The fodder of the thousands lay strewn across the streets like rubble, degenerated, broken, and silent. Thousands went in and out of their beds and thousands dreamt of the ocean; thousands ran from faceless monsters; thousands prayed for mercy; thousands saw loneliness in their reflection. In the morning, thousands sacrificed themselves again to the toothless monster; and as they did, each and every one of them thought of the best days of their lives…

…hundreds came and hundreds went through the cerebral maze, riding the spark that shocked into creation knowledge and memory, emotion and pain. Ideas raced past their own doubts and reflexes pushed aside calculated accounts. Lips uttered words that rode the tails of lightning rods, hands shook and trembled with the currents that charged the spirit in the flashing brilliance of their hearts…

…two came and met like the rising waters at the meeting of the tides. The boy and the girl sat down, each shining like an apple in the other’s eyes. And though the gods and the fathers, the mothers and the flock did curse their fate with their spiteful cries, neither life nor nature dared betray their beauty for lies…

…one look sufficed to convey the silent joy that life offered the avatars of youth in its prime…

…one child was conceived before its time…

“I’m pregnant,” she said, and the millions and the thousands and the hundreds flooded back into one.


4. A Helping Hand

To trust the hand that reaches out,
And brings you from the brink,
Of a last chance grasp,
From the darkness into which we sink…

Just at the moment when she had given up and let herself go into the void, a hand reached out and grabbed Ariadne by the arm. The Devil and I had rushed into the cube and found her slipping away into the breach that was perforated by the demon’s lunge. I dived for her the moment I saw her and just caught her by the wrist; but even though I supported myself with the other arm, my strength was not enough to keep her from slipping away. I held on nevertheless, knowing that if I let go she could be lost forever. I looked to the Devil for support, but I couldn’t see him either to the left of me or the right. I realized now that I was in a very compromised situation, and thought that perhaps I had been a fool to trust him. For all I knew he was right behind me and he could if he wanted simply push us all off into the irresistible darkness. Sure enough, I heard his ominous footsteps approach me from behind. They were slow, and although I couldn’t see him, I could imagine the look on his face. Each step seemed as if in slow motion, like a foreboding calamity. I closed my eyes, but I did not let go. I was determined to hold on to the end, for if I were to go I would go with her, even though I knew it was not our time yet. The footsteps now quickened and I braced myself. As I felt the Devil’s sharp claws close in around my shoulders I gave out a final cry.

But I did not fly off into the void. At the instant the Devil had grabbed me – and in one amazing feat of strength – he had pulled all three of us back into the cube; first me, then Ariadne, then Argus, who was still biting into Ariadne’s leg. The Devil had saved us all at the last moment. Before we could recover, I heard the unfamiliar steps of many other feet. I looked up and saw some strange little creatures scamper around us, creatures who were probably all the stranger because I was still lying on the floor and looking at them upside down. When I raised my head I saw four of these creatures scuttling up the walls around the hole and busily working on it in some strange way. Each one had a brown, hard-shelled body the size of a watermelon, but with big bright eyes, the size of oranges, wide and alert. Their four legs were like those of a spider’s, but there were small hands and long fingers on the ends of each. Their most bizarre feature, however, seemed to be their mouths – mouths without teeth or lips, but which kept sucking in air.

“Cipherovores, my liege,” explained the Devil behind us, breaking our stupefied silence. “They feed off the emptiness.”

And as he said this, these cipherovores were, sure enough, eating at a hole. It seemed absolutely amazing, but they ate nothingness, and as they did, the long-accustomed sterile white walls of the cube closed in behind their little globular bodies and eventually patched up the gaping hole which itself had only moments ago nearly eaten us all up. The great sucking pull from the void had ceased also with the successful completion work. And just as they had come, these little cipherovores scuttled away past us and down a square, sizing us up with their big and curious eyes before they disappeared.

“They are the manifestations of the spirits of great killers. They maintain the upkeep of the Tortutron and feed off the emptiness of their own conscience. You just saw Robespierre, Torquemada, Borgia and Namyna.”

“Namyna?” The name seemed familiar to me, as if from a dream.

“You will have seen him from the throne.”

And with those words, I thought back to the strange figure I had seen but not recognized during my omnividance. He was depraved and sickly, with a shaved head that was shorn and bloody, with a face and eyes that were smeared with blood, and he commanded legions of followers who gave their lives to him without question. I saw the tips of a million knives that plunged into a million hearts with the fury of a singular hatred that devoured the souls of killers and victims alike with a never-sated hunger that only fed off death and destruction. And before each stab from a million knives I saw the eyes of Namyna shine on a million blades before the reflection was disfigured by the blood of a million deaths. I had seen past and future, I had seen living and dead all in one eternal present, and I had seen Namyna scuttle away from me like a giant insect before my very own eyes, and the eyes of the Devil.

“Yes. I have seen Namyna,” I said after a long reflection.

Ariadne’s eyes were still closed tight as she trembled unconsciously in my arms. Argus was lying on the floor looking dead. As I waited for them to come to, I thought back on how the Devil had saved us. It would have been so easy for him to be rid of us there and then, vulnerable as we were. But he didn’t kill us. Perhaps he had hesitated at first, for I remember his slow, cautious steps. But he saved us. And he had guided us – me – all along through my journey, manifesting himself in different forms, always challenging me to challenge myself, helping me strengthen as I overcame, even to the point of overthrowing Satan himself. I had suspected his deceit and his desire to maintain mastery over my fate, but had I perhaps misread it? Had I not understood his true intentions? There was something that bound the Devil to me – to us – and perhaps the Devil was a fellow traveler, perhaps his own destiny was entwined with ours, for otherwise it made no sense for him to help us. Was the Devil seeking the same thing as us? This made sense, for if the Devil was an emanation of my own conscience then our interests and our destiny must have been interlocked.

Ariadne let out a groan. She suddenly came to with a shock. Her whole body jumped up as if electrocuted. Her eyes opened wider than I’d ever seen, and this whole instant startled me so that I too jumped up out of fright. As she awoke she let out a loud moan. Then she put her hands on her head and started screaming. I grabbed her strongly but she tried to fight me off with punches and kicks. I didn’t let go until she stopped fighting and calmed down. She soon regained her composure as she recognized where she was. Her foot must have swung violently loose as she awoke because I noticed Argus lying a meter away ruing its sore head that lie next to the wall it had just been kicked against. The typical red, horned figure of the Devil towered silently over us. Ariadne still shook with fear and she held on to me tightly. Eventually she calmed down. When she had regained control of her breathing, she told me her story since we parted in the Tortutron, which I have recounted here. She was conscious of all until the moment before she let herself go into the void. I in turn told her about how the Devil and I had encountered her and how the Devil had saved us. Upon hearing this she looked up at him. It was a strange exchange of glances, both silent, both unemotional, both conveying nothing other than a primordial curiosity. But I thought I saw a hint of suspicion in Ariadne’s eyes.

Then she looked at me. Before I could open my mouth, she said…

“There’s more.”

“More?”

“Yes. I saw something extraordinary as I held on there…” She pointed behind her and looked at where the hole had been, surprised to see it was no longer there.

“The cipherovores fixed it up,” I explained. She looked back at me as if to dismiss my last comment.

“I saw something,” she repeated.

“What did you see?” I asked.

“I saw…” and she was struggling to explain what it was she had seen. She tried again.

“I saw… I don’t know what it is I saw. It was like an epiphany, like a revelation.”

The Devil’s eyes widened. Argus moaned clumsily.

“I think I saw… everything.”


A Moment on Earth

The sweet illusions of love prove fickle when confronted by the weight of the world. I always thought love was something strong, something indestructible. And I think it still is. But no longer do I think it is something that alleviates, that cures, that mends or that makes better. No longer do I think that hope can rest in its erratic and tempestuous bosom. Rather, love is something tough, something gritty that sustains, that fortifies, that guards, and that protects. It’s tough and it’s rugged, but any illusions and promises it seduces us with only blow away like fluff when the infinite imperfection that is life comes to bear its burden upon our naïve shoulders and we can turn our eyes away no more.

I’m pregnant, and I’m happy. I’ll wed him. He loves me. I am happy. I tell myself that, always. Is this not what I – we – have always wanted? Is this not what we deserve; the happiness of a love that is consummated in marriage? But why do I feel this weight upon me? Why does it seem not like a new beginning, but like… an end has been reached? That’s what it feels like to me. Like an end, like happiness has not been attained but acquired, like it was a prize or a trophy. Why does this child worry me? This grain of life I carry inside me, why does it weigh on me? Why do I feel compromised? Why do I not know what is right and what is wrong? Oh god, why do I feel so alone?

I have nightmares about my child. I have horrible nightmares that I’m ashamed to tell anyone for fear that I might be culpable, for fear that I would be accused of being a bad mother, for fear that I would be considered a monster, for fear… for just fear. I see my child in pieces, ripped and torn by wild beasts before my eyes. I hear my child drowning in a well, I hear its little screams, and I am helpless and alone. Some nights I dream that I am trapped in a womb, in my own mother’s womb, and I can sense that she hates me, that she wants to kill me. I wake up sweating, sometimes screaming.

When he asks, I never can tell him. But I know he is worried too; he is not happy. He also feels alone, even though he’s sleeping beside me.

I feel like the world is closing in on me. I’m working day after day. We’re going to marry, and I’m already pregnant. How are we going to make ends meet? I told my parents and they are against it all, against the marriage and against the baby. They didn’t say as much, but that’s what they meant. They are against it. He writes and he writes, but there’s nothing so far. I guess it’s the life of an artist. The artist pursues his art, and the rest of the world pursues “lesser” things, like money, like making a living. I pursue those things. I do that, I do those menial things, because without that I could not live. And nor could he. But he’s an artist. I have to accept that. He has to write, and it will all come good for him – for us. It will all be good in the end. Five in the morning and I can’t sleep. I have to close my eyes and stop worrying, I have to be brave. It will all be good. The nightmares will go away. He looks like a little boy sleeping next to me. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll put my arms around him and sleep.

And It’ll all be good…


5. Revelation

We turned from the brink,
And found in each other a revelation…

“When I was sucked out of the hole and literally clinging to the substance of the cube with my nails, I felt an oppressive weight gaining on me, pressing me as it dragged me into the void. The pressure eventually became so unbearable that I started to lose consciousness. As I faded out, my grip naturally loosened and the last thing I saw was my hand break away from the hole to which I clung, as if in slow motion. I remember at that moment that the pressure, the oppression, was suddenly lifted at the same moment that I let go. It felt good. It was a sense of having been freed from a burden or a punishment. And though you would think it would have felt like an end, it rather felt like a beginning. It was at that same instant that I let go and felt this relief that I saw it… whatever it was. It must have all occurred to me and passed before my eyes in an instant, even though it felt like it spanned millennia.”

I was fascinated. I thought she must have experienced the omnividence that I had experienced. Perhaps even omnissence. I asked her to continue as we still lay there resting on the floor of the chamber, the Devil still towering over us, Argus now slowly recovering from his knock.

“It all started with the darkness into which I had begun drifting. As soon as I let go you must have caught me, and yet I remember seeing that hole move ever so slowly away from me until it was a mere speck in the dark void. I remember that though the darkness became complete, I was totally free of that prior feeling of oppression. In fact, I felt I was expanding. Yes, I was expanding, but not interminably and without limits. I felt like I was expanding into something. I became – and this is strange, but bare with me – I became something else! I became a great big ball or an orb, or a globule or something…”

I felt excited when she said this, wanting to tell her of my own experience, but I did not interrupt her.

“…And I noticed other globules like this around me. I was touching them, brushing gently against them, bumping into them slowly. It was an amazing sensation. It was… sensual. It was a complete being, something beyond just experience, beyond even just the five senses, beyond comprehension. It was a complete Being; it was a metamorphosis not just of the body but of the mind. And it was still all dark around me, pitch black, but gradually I could make out a bright, electric atmosphere that spanned across the whole sky. At that moment I started to ascend. I broke away from my globular form and I broke through the brilliant electric canopy above and I saw now more orbs, great orbs with the same buzzing white atmosphere around them, where little white balls of fire orbited at incredible speeds…”

Ariadne was getting more and more excited and breathless as she related her epiphany…

“…And then… I saw colors, red and white and every color imaginable. I saw rivers of red, with other little orbs; I saw paths of blue, I saw hard corridors of white and red, soft pink fields and porous grey wells. I was racing through a grey maze where more of these little electric flashes of brilliance danced and whirled around me. Then I saw the brain, the heart, the stomach, the eyes, the mind, I left the body and I found myself on earth – among the living again. And I saw the past and the present and the future of the human race. I saw empires rise and fall, armies fight and die, youth turn into old age, old age slide into death, and death lead to new life. I saw love and hate, greed and envy. I saw random images, like an insight into existence. I saw a speck of dust floating above a city of skyscrapers; I saw a flower spore flying above the trees on the leg of a bee; I saw laughter in an eye and hatred in a word. So many things… Then I raced away again and I saw the universe stretch out before me, engulfing me and drawing me to it. I saw the earth and the moon, the planets and the sun, galaxies and solar-systems. I saw and traveled until there was nothing anymore, until the universe itself had been exhausted and I was in pure darkness once again. Then I saw a speck of light in the distance. It sped toward me so rapidly that it was right before me within a moment. I saw my hand stretch out toward it in front of me. I thought it was the hole in the cube and it seems not a second had passed as I saw this whole vision. I was only a few centimeters further away from the hole than I had been when I had passed out. But I realized then that it wasn’t the hole of the breach in the cube that I saw shining before me and for which I was reaching out. I then saw a face – your face – and I realized that the little light was your eye as you were looking at me. And that’s what I saw as I awoke. I saw into your eyes.”

“And that is your epiphany…” I said.

“Yes… but the most incredible part of it was not what I told you. It was when I saw into your eye.”

I was taken aback, and the Devil also took an interest.

“I saw in your eyes… that you too had seen the exact same thing. You have had the same epiphany. I saw it in your eyes. I saw everything in your eyes.”

She did not take her eyes off me as she said this. I could tell she implied more than she said. Even though she lay there in my arms still trembling from her experience, her eyes were clear, almost translucent. I could see into her as she could see into me. Soon everything else that was visible, even the body, disappeared. We were as if the same mind, the same heart, the same kind. In our eyes we both saw everything, the entire universe, and we could see ourselves as a part of it. We were omnissent within each other and with each other. Before this moment, eyes had seemed opaque and obscure. Now it was like she said: like a revelation. We finally saw each other in our eyes, eyes that were no longer mirrors, no longer reflections, but windows, clear, pure, and bright. And I knew she was not telling me something, something she saw during her epiphany, something that I also saw but found difficult to face.

I felt what she felt. We were nearing something portentous, but something wonderful. But I knew it was not yet reached. There was something else. I know the Devil sought it too. I know the Devil wanted to reach it with us. I looked up at him and found him looking down at me, at us. He still had a sullen expression on his face and an uncharacteristically phlegmatic air about him. He still had the look of a beast, horned and red and muscular, but it was the paradoxical physiognomy of a conquered beast. Argus had finally come to his senses and was flitting over our heads with its usual nonchalance. We got up and readied to leave this damned cube behind forever. As I arose I thought about the breach.

“What would have happened, Lucifer, if we had all let go and floated away into the void?”

The Devil had his back turned to me, ready to lead us out of the cube. He didn’t turn around as he replied.

“It would have been too early,” he said.

“But what if we had?”

His back was still turned to us.

“It’s an irrelevant question. Ultimately, you didn’t let go. If you could have, you would have. But you didn’t. Thus it is not for you or I or any being to know what if. There are some things that can never be known, nor should be known. There are some things that can only be done, that leave no space even for thought, let alone doubt. You will only know when you do it, and nothing besides.”

And with these idiosyncratically cryptic, riddling words, he led us for what I hoped was the last time out of the Tortutron of Krak. As we descended down the square and back out of the cube, I turned to the Devil, who still avoided my eyes.

“And do you still believe that true freedom does not exist?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “And I also still believe that it is attainable.”


A Moment on Earth

The nausea built up in her, morning after morning, day after day, week after week. Fortune looked on with indifference as her feelings of alienation and guilt took hold of her by the throat until it pained her to even breathe. When she swallowed she felt the grip that had her fast in its grasp. When she slept she saw savage birds of prey whom none could withstand nor fight away, who were hungry, who were forever ravenous, who could wait a whole lifetime with the patience of vultures until they have their way, until they feed on everything, and even devour your mind.

Even her lover, her fiancé, had become distant. Even he had seemed to shrink from their fate. He withdrew with a sense of his own doom and misfortune. He withdrew into his own loneliness, and he battled with futility his own vultures. He tried to write, but his conscience would no longer let him. He felt pressured, he felt he had to rush, that he had to hurry, otherwise he would miss it, he would lose everything. He felt the pressure to succeed until it blinded him from the task at hand and he could write no longer. He felt an impending doom. He felt fate squeeze his neck like a noose. And when he slept he ran, always. He ran endlessly, night after night, from faceless creatures, formless demons, angry malefactors, and more ravenous beasts. And his steps were always too slow to get away, to find distance, but just fast enough never to be reached, to always be just one second and one millimeter away from a doom that never came, in a labyrinth from which there was no escape. Even when you wish for the end, when you wish to be caught, to be killed, to be put out of your misery, your steps seem to hasten you away from the captor; and when you seek to escape, to run away from your insidious pursuers, your feet become heavy like lead and your captors are always just behind you, just around the corner, forever in pursuit, never letting up.

With the passing weeks, silence and loneliness was all they would share. When they made love they were like strangers grappling with each other. They no longer made love to find each other, to celebrate themselves in each other, but to find something they both felt they had lost in each other and had to find again in each other. They fucked with the zeal of the wayward seeking salvation, of the guilty seeking grace. But they never found it again. Their faces grew hard, their eyes grew icy, their libidos were whipped up by their frenzied desperation, their bodies were like hecatombs upon which they sought to sacrifice all their demons. They had never been lonelier with each other – and yet they had never enjoyed fucking each other as much as they did now.

Like the last glorious epoch of a civilization coming to an end, their spirits never sang out so forcefully, so beautifully as when they had begun dying.


6. Freefalling

There are those creatures,
That inhabit,
The infinitesimal spaces,
Left in the lapses of time,
And trapped in the crevices of the mind…

We emerged back into the atrium. The Peacock Throne was still there in the epicenter. The peacock demons had gone and it was absolutely silent except for the sound of our breathing and footsteps. I was happy that Ariadne was again by my side. It was even good to see Argus again. I saw around me the same circular walls with the pillars and doors. The Devil led our way back to the throne.

We went up the steps and stood around the throne. The Devil bade me sit. As I did, the circular walls around me started multiplying into layers, both upwards and downwards, stretching out above and below like the concentric tubes of a collapsible telescope. When I looked around me I saw infinite levels rising conically up above us and down below us. With each level, the doors and the pillars were also identically multiplied, and the dais upon which we stood must have been floating in mid-air! There was certainly no dearth of twists and turns to the great Heart. Every discovery boggled the mind and dazzled the senses. Around every corner lay something incomprehensible, unimaginable, things one never thought one could see or feel or ever attain. And once the fear was conquered, once the demons were destroyed, once the guilt was laid to rest, perhaps this inferno could even yield forth something… dare I say it, beautiful, perhaps? An endless, infinite, self-contained universe where every discovery is a discovery of the self, and a step closer, perhaps, to salvation, to escape… to freedom. I had once thought that only children could imagine and dream of such places as this. Perhaps they are the only ones capable of it. But the potential of the mind is immense, and its capacity well nigh infinite. Within each mind resides a whole universe. We fill our minds with trivial, quotidian drivel as we grow older, and we lose sight of this potential. We even forget our own childhood. Perhaps only with death do we see again that most of what we thought important in our lives was in fact meaningless, that we had squandered ourselves with pointless details, self-important causes, extravagant but innocuous ideals, and conceited ambitions. Perhaps only with death could we see again with clarity and simplicity the boundless horizons of our own being. Standing as if on air in that magnificent edifice of the Heart, I felt as though nothing in life had ever really mattered, that it was all just fluff brushed aside by a contemptuous and simple autumn breeze.

I shared my thoughts out loud with my companions. Argus made no reply. Ariadne was lost in her own thoughts. The Devil seemed, however, to display a contorted smile. I asked him to explain himself. He spoke almost with a hint of disdain.

“It is the fundamental limitation of the human mind which causes them to perceive that which they cannot fathom as incredible. Such things are infinite and eternal and incredible precisely because the human mind is too limited to understand infinity and eternity. That is why, to the human, life – and even death, which you humans erroneously consider the opposite of life – seems full of wonder. Because your mind is limited in its understanding and potential that is why you explain something as infinite – something even as limited as your mind. I will admit, however, that even though your capacity for understanding leaves much to be desired, the human capacity for entertaining itself is infinite!”

“That capacity is our imagination, and it is indeed infinite,” I rejoined indignantly.

“Yes, in imagination resides the infinite misunderstanding of the limited mind,” he answered sarcastically.

Despite the Devil’s mocking demeanor and abrasive tone, I heard him out. He was bitter, but I knew to listen when he spoke. I continued to look around me, above me and below me, still marveling in this great… I didn’t know what to call it, and perhaps this habit of having to name everything was starting to annoy me; perhaps it was another typically human trait that bothered the Devil himself, but there you have it. Because we can see our own limitations doesn’t mean we can overcome them. And before I could give in to the all-too-human proclivity to nomenclature, the Devil himself acted as nomenclator and announced that we were still in the great hall.

“The great hall of the dome – of the Heart – has many conformations, but no single form,” he explained, and left it at that.

I noticed we were slowly rising upwards on our floating throne. As I looked directly over my head I saw layer upon layer stretching off beyond sight in concentric circles. Every layer was the same, every door, every pillar was identical. I now looked forward to the adventures ahead, to new discoveries around me, which were actually, of course, discoveries within me. Limitations or not, this journey of the mind, in the mind, was to me, in all my limitedness, infinitely amazing. I looked up to find the same wonder and fascination on Ariadne’s face, but she was still far away in thought. I new what was going through her mind. I too had seen what she’d seen and I knew we had to face it sooner or later. Perhaps we were on our way to dealing with it now. I posed questions to the Devil.

“What are all these levels, Lucifer? Where do all those doors lead to? Why are there an infinite number of them?”

“What you perceive around you is what you perceive within you. Infinite are the realms of the mind, and so, infinite are the realms that stretch before your eyes.”

It was still completely silent in the great hall and the silence was all the more pronounced – almost loudly so – considering the immense space that we found ourselves in. Just then we heard the unmistakable sound of a door somewhere above us slamming shut. It could have been anywhere above us. This aroused my curiosity and I braced myself for something ahead. I looked again at Ariadne and took her hand into mine. She squeezed my hand but still looked worried.

“Ariadne… I know what you saw.”

She didn’t look at me. She kept her eyes above her. But I know she heard me and understood me. Her eyes flickered and blinked nervously as I spoke to her. Then we heard another door slam shut, this time from behind us. We all (except for the Devil) turned around to see what it might have been, but of course, as before, we were too late. Now we kept our eyes pealed for signs of open doors, to see what or who was at the threshold before another door slammed. I turned again to Ariadne.

“I know about Namyna and what followed. I saw it too…”

She wrenched her hand out of mine and moved away from me. I decided to get up and followed her. As soon as I got out of my throne I heard a cry from the Devil telling me to sit, but it was too late, I was already up. All of a sudden, at the moment that I rose, our gently floating dais plummeted down below, throwing all of us off balance as we barely held on and saved ourselves from falling over and into the emptiness. Argus, who was flying, was left flitting about at the point at which we had started falling. He was out of our sight in an instant as we gained more and more speed during our descent. Ariadne and I were holding on to the armrests of the throne as our bodies and legs flailed around helplessly above us. The Devil shouted at me to get back on the seat (“before it’s too late,” I think he added, but I couldn’t hear too well). Level after level zipped by us until it was all a blur of doors and levels. Then I heard a clapping sound around us as we fell, like it belonged to an audience. I realized it was just more doors slamming shut as we passed them by. There were so many of them and we were falling so fast that all those doors shutting sounded like hundreds of people clapping. As our speed increased so did the clapping, until it became just one constant, unisonic noise. Eventually the blurred levels flew by us so fast as to assume once again the constant form of the original atrium. We were going so quickly through the air that everything looked like it was standing still! So many pillars and doors flew by at such speed that we saw around us what seemed like the circular hall, unmoving and stationary. But now the doors and pillars were much longer, in fact they were all endless, and we were still flying through the air. It was incredible that everything looked so static and placid while we were still hurtling at incalculable speeds through the great hall, with our bodies still flailing in the space above us.

And then something strange happened. The clapping stopped and there was complete silence despite the commotion within us. These doors that stretched endlessly above and below opened from among these endless pillars that surrounded us. They were like the doors of giants, of infinitely large giants, and they all opened at the same time. We were all looking around us even as we held on in our descent. Behind the doors was a blackness where no forms could be perceived as yet. But then, sure enough, shapes started emerging from the darkness. They were wild, undulating, titanic, amorphic shapes that belonged to beings that only existed or could be seen in this freefalling state, in the most remote corners of this hall and of our minds and hearts.

I felt my heart pounding as they emerged.


A Moment on Earth

She came home from work tired and broken. It was already past eight and she was hungry, nauseous, and alone again. He came and went like a ghost. When he was in the house he closed himself up in the little room he had set aside as his study and where he wrote, angry when disturbed, ill-tempered when around her, contemptaplating when alone, mired as he was in thoughts of self-loathing. The only way he knew to deal with his self-hate was to project it on to others, to want to see it everywhere else, to spread it, while never facing it within himself. With each new frustration, with every day that was wasted the same way as the day before and the day before that, he found his spite take hold of his mind like a voracious weed slowly taking over a garden. With everything he did he felt the certainty of his own ineptitude. Fear assumed a pathology, and so did his self-hatred. He enjoyed his degradation, he enjoyed pitying himself, and he was unsatisfied unless those around him were not only always aware of his degradation, but also always subjected to it. Such was the all-consuming torment of a contemptaplator.

She felt the oppression of his presence in the house. It manifested itself passively, through silence, through an anti-pathos and anti-action. They were both always aware of the antipathy within them. She sank down on her couch, the same couch where she had found him again after those years, lost like a child. He came out of his room and he greeted her with a quick kiss that nevertheless meant something to her at that moment. Deprived as they both were of affection, a kiss – no matter how perfunctory – had never seemed so comforting. She never asked him how he was, she knew he hated those questions. He always thought there was another, a truer, question that hid behind that which was asked. And she knew it was true; there always was. To ask“What’s up?” was tantamount to saying “When the hell are you going to do something?” She knew he couldn’t talk about it, not even for the sake of alleviating her worry. He knew it wouldn’t alleviate her feelings to talk about it. If anything it would cause even more anguish. He knew he was not in good shape. He felt the pressure of his writing, he felt it was not good, that it was rushed, pressured, too belabored, because he knew he had to succeed and succeed soon. And even if he wanted to do something else, he couldn’t. It would feel like he was betraying himself. He was in the most unenviable situation a person could be in: he was caught between two doubts and he doubted he could deal with either one. To at least be certain of failure would have been a comfort. But he doubted even that.

Now with the pending marriage and her pregnancy, he felt more pressure than ever. It stifled him, it petrified him. He flailed and thrashed and rushed everything he did, he rushed everything he wrote; he was frantically inept, and everything he did seemed uninspired and mediocre. The harder he tried, the more unsuccessful and unfulfilled he felt. He lived and worked in jerks and spasms rather than in the groove he longed for but could never find. And there she sat, the poor girl, looking and smiling at him. All the things that must have been passing through her mind at that moment, he knew it all, he could read her mind because he could read her face. But he hated even the way she still smiled at him, condescendingly, matronizingly. She didn’t mean it that way, he knew. But he knew she doubted him, he knew she didn’t believe in him, and so the fact that she was trying not to show it with this fake smile, this affected sympathy, this feigned courage, bothered him even more. It bothered him and he just managed to hold his urge to lash out at her. He wanted to shock her from her misplaced optimism. He hated her because every time he looked at her he saw what he hated in himself. He wanted to project his hatred upon her until it consumed them both. Where self-loathing reigns, it tyrannizes, and it can stand no opposition, nor anything other than loathing in return.

He prepared a little something for them to eat. Neither of them said a word until she said she wasn’t too hungry, that she was nauseous. He felt his hair stand on end. The subtle hint at the baby. She always put the idea of the baby in his mind. She never wanted his mind off of it. And it worked. It festered within him until he couldn’t concentrate on anything else, on himself, his work, his writing. The nausea, the baby, the headaches, the baby, the fatigue, the baby, the baby, the baby, the baby. He chose to ignore her and he shut himself again in his room. She watched him disappear. Her gaze lingered on the door. The sound of it slamming echoed on in her mind, over and over again, like a million doors slamming, over and over until it was a unisonic noise that eventually evolved into yet another headache. It felt like a slap in the face. Her eyes began to well up, her vision blurred with the tears that were conjured. She felt the same helplessness he did.

They sat there, each in their own space, each hiding behind a door, hiding from the other’s eyes. And despite the antipathy of their togetherness, they both still felt a residual empathy in their shared loneliness.


7. Namyna

I am everyman, and everyman is me…

The figures crept out one by one from their shadowy abodes. Phantasmal and titanic apparitions with hollowed eyes oscillated around us like pallid flames in the air. One by one they emerged and surrounded us. A hissing moan gained strength from their diaphanous frames before assuming a cadence that was more becoming of a siren’s song than the wailing of ghosts. Their voices were caressing our skin and passing through our ears, entering our minds and then disintegrating within us, like ripples of sonorous air. Once they had emerged, they danced around us, slowly, the way oceanids would dance in a deep sea eddy. We plummeted through the eye of their congregation until our senses were engulfed and our minds were taken over by our hosts.

One by one, the visions gained form with their swaying and dancing. As our bodies flailed above us, we too were like flickering flames, dancing in the phantom whirlwind. We heard the Devil behind us, but we could not see him.

“Don’t let go, lest you be swallowed up forever!”

Ariadne and I gripped as tightly as we could. One of the phantoms opened its mouth and stretched it over us, over the entire dais, as if to eat us and swallow us there and then. Its mouth opened wide and a chilling roar emanated. Then the grotesque face backed away and as the phantoms continued whirling around our feeble bodies, we heard the faint sounds of drums, great orchestral drums that pounded away like a giant pulsating heart. Perhaps that’s what it was, the sound of a heart, a sound we hadn’t heard since entering the great Heart. It grew stronger and stronger. It was the same sound as that which we encountered as we entered the great dome. When the pounding reached a crescendo, the voices spoke to us of a future that was already our past…

When the crows nested on the wings of angels,
When the thorns pricked the skin,
And broke through the skull of our prophets,
When the idols fell by the wayside,
Of streets flowing with the blood of our human kin,
Then did the armies of salvation and doom,
Give in to an army all-conquering,
The might of which had never before been seen,
Striding forth with arrogance and ease,
The Army of Indifference finally claimed,
The last of Adam’s rotten seed…

This was an army never before seen,
An army without weapons,
Without leaders, without a creed…
This was an army,
Whose existence nobody believed,
This was an army that swelled with the depravity,
Of every foul and contemptuous human deed…

This was a force that conquered nations and empires,
From within, like a parasite with an insatiable greed,
This was an army that conquered,
Through the weakened soul and the feeble mind,
Of human cattle that roamed the earth,
In their most desperate hour of need…

Its soldiers were fattened calves,
Indifferent to nature’s demise,
Its soldiers formed lecherous ranks,
Of stifled bourgeois minds,
Of technocrats old before their time,
Its soldiers were silent, dying pseudocrats,
Still clinging to a soft cushion,
For the sake of their precious blue-blood behinds…

This was an army,
The likes of which were never seen,
This was an Army of Indifference,
And its battles were fought,
On fields of waste,
They themselves had stripped clean.

The phantom titan sank back into the whirling, ashen flames that formed its body. Another phantom then came forth from among them and made as if to swallow us, like the first. Its face was a mere arm’s length from ours and I could feel the cold of its undulating body as it oscillated before us, to and fro…

And as the nations, one by one,
Fell and died and withered,
And as the oceans one by one,
Swallowed the human race of refugees,
One man emerged from among the ashes,
Of a civilization crumbled and on its knees…

That man was Namyna,
And he was no savior,
But a blessing for all and of all,
The last nail in the coffin,
Of the idolatrous human seed…

With Namyna’s coming,
Came also the certainty,
Of freedom for a god-fearing race,
From the shackles of its ignorance,
From the ignominy of its own disgrace…

With Namyna the legions of fate,
That had swallowed this dying race,
Gave in to a new leadership from within,
A leadership devoid of leaders,
And also followers,
A leadership of one’s own spirit,
And the conquest of a destiny,
Freed of fateful slavery,
Freed of good and evil and sin…

The struggle was long, the battle was fought,
And no prisoners were taken, neither friend nor kin,
Namyna’s battle was fought and was won,
With the spirit of his ancestors,
That shone behind his merciless grin…

And what said they,
The Army of Indifference,
To this enemy that shook them,
To the very foundations,
With their deafening din?
What did these legions of fat and pale cowards,
Have to say to Namyna,
As he flayed them of their wrinkled skin?

The Army of Indifference just stood and watched,
And welcomed the end that would with their deaths begin…

The flaming bodies of the phantoms gained momentum as they orbited our dais. With one phantom’s regress was another’s egress and we listened to it recount the end of our days…

When the tides of indolence swept away,
The last vestiges of man’s virtue and sense,
When the lukewarm waters of ease,
Extirpated the burning fires of his noble heart,
When a democratic glaze and a sheepish smile,
Overwrote the fierce killer’s spark in the eye,
When integrity was swallowed by fame,
When pale vultures in grey suits nurtured man’s greed,
When discomfort became a greater ill than suffering,
When narcissism strangled substance,
With a faux boa-skin pride,
That’s when the seed of Adam,
Succumbed to the epicene demons,
That ate away its spirit from the inside…

Namyna came and rose like the foam swept off the crest of a wave,
And Namyna dispersed into the wide ocean again,
For he was wise and he knew the weaknesses of men…

And Namyna saw the pasts and futures stretch out before him,
He saw himself in the great annals of history,
As he saw history in the grooves and contours of his face,
Namyna sought not salvation or freedom,
Only the bitter but true secrets of nature’s silent grace…

And when the nations and the empires succumbed to the great cities,
And when the borders and boundaries of maps were overwritten,
And even the borders written in their minds were erased,
That’s when Namyna came forth on the crest of the waves,
And put to flight, once and for all,
All the idolatrous superstitions that had shackled his fateful race…

Regress, egress, open mouth, roar, phantom comes, phantom goes, in the shadows lie the forms we can no longer ignore…

And Namyna said unto all men:

“Only the heavy ones, they can fly,
If it be flight that’s been called for,
Only the eternally dead and eternally dying,
They can live,
If it is life indiscriminate,
That has become so precious…
Only the heartless ones they can love,
If it be love that they are lusting for,
And only the ugly ones, they can thrive,
If beauty is what riches are paid for…

“Only the mediocre, they can be heroes,
If it is heroes the masses are looking for…

“And what of the light ones?
What of the beautiful ones?
What of the brave ones?
O son of man,
Not even grace can save them anymore.”

Regress, egress, open mouth, roar, phantom comes phantom goes, listen to the words you can no longer abhor.

And man said unto Namyna:

“Your boldness astounds us, my friend,
Are you so daring, or perhaps just careless,
As to overturn all these conventions,
So daring, so intrepid,
As to seek oblivion for us all,
At the risk of even losing your own self?

“Perhaps, for you, time must stand still,
And give account of itself in shame,
Perhaps even the river must seek a new route,
And new oceans,
To purge all its plundering and possessions…

“I see a camel, my friend,
Led by a being I have never before seen,
Like a lion of the future,
It is strange and fearsome,
Its eyes betray a wilderness,
At once barren and beautiful,
Yet also terrifying…

“Your burden is heavy, like the camel’s,
And the horizon is distant and inhospitable,
Such is the domain of the lion…

“But stop my friend,
Stop and listen carefully,
Listen to the voices,
And the perpetual chatter,
For even unto you they have a name,
Even unto you a time and place,
Made and unmade in their own image,
As if a phantom,
Composed not of flesh and blood,
But of mere words,
In an all too familiar language.”

Regress, egress, open mouth, roar, phantom comes, phantom goes, each one bellows like a lion’s roar…

Namyna prowled like an animal,
And he gazed out upon his fellow men,
With his feline eyes, silent as a lake,
Ferocious like an ocean…

And Namyna said unto his fellow men:

“If I too have a time and a place,
It is my time and my place,
And if I too have a name,
It is my name,
And if I am a phantom,
Composed of naught but ether and air,
Then ether is my flesh and air is my blood,
And this phantom body is mine alone…

“These words, son of man, are my words,
And they are indeed spoken in a language,
That is familiar to us all…

“But let me tell you, son of man,
That I have shed many a tear,
For us and our seed,
And I have also shed many a fear,
Of this you must take heed,
For time will wait for no man,
Nor will fortune bestow a fancy,
On any, regardless of deed,
And fate will always stand sentinel,
Ready to slay those who betray,
Their own potential to lead…

“And when I look out upon your world,
A wasteland is all I see,
Of stifled minds and benumbed senses,
Of men who are no longer men,
But hollow servants of their greed…

“You speak of words and time and places,
But you take no responsibility for these,
For you think you live, happy and free,
When time is neither your time,
Nor any place or any name,
Is your place or your name,
And you are always a slave to another’s need…

“And I have cried much before I have called you to rise,
And reclaim a future that was once promised to you,
Not by gods or other men,
But promised you in your own hearts,
In your own flesh and blood and bones,
A future written in your own body,
No longer as a fate to be followed,
But as a destiny to be reached…

“And I have cried, son of man,
As I watched you be swallowed,
By statistics and machines,
And I have cried as I saw you wallow,
And cast away your dreams…

Regress, egress, open mouth, roar, phantom comes, phantom goes, Namyna speaks as the phantoms soar.

“So listen as I tell you, son of man,
That heaven knows, as hell does too,
The chemistry of those tears,
For beneath our breath do we all hear,
The ripples swimming through the years,
As in moments one, and yet with all,
Do the gods and demons sigh,
Yet not for the sake of love,
Nor even remorse,
Does any pain subside…

“And if in this hollow we choose to wake,
Let not the stars above be our guide,
But let us arise and force to wake,
Our pride alone,
For pride alone can lead forth new life…

“Our souls are pale and hollow,
Our spirits phantoms forced to hide,
But in our fears neither shall we wallow,
So fearsome is our pride,
A pride that leads us forth on the slaughter,
Into the clearance long and wide…

“Here neither hell nor heaven,
Nor any spirits abide,
Here neither pain nor sorrow,
Imbues with their lonely eyes,
Here neither vanity nor fury,
Envelopes our minds,
Here there are no voices,
But neither are there lies…

“Now lay my arms across my chest,
And lay my chest bare across the skies,
Let the earth be my body,
Let the clouds be my eyes,
Let the winds pick my bones,
Let the sun once more rise,
And let my tears,
Accompany my blood,
Back to a new beginning,
To glisten in the sparkle,
Of a young boy’s eyes.”

As the phantoms whirled and danced and sped, the final words echoed around us and in our heads. And the young child’s eyes appeared before us, emerging from the empty eye-sockets of one of the phantoms. The wraith with the boy’s eyes stood before us, silently, observantly. The eyes were my eyes and Ariadne’s eyes. They were our eyes. As the general swirling of the wraiths gained momentum, gradually becoming a frenzy, the phantom before us started shrinking, smaller and smaller, until what was before us was a baby. The eyes were the same eyes and the baby looked at us. It was as had been revealed to Ariadne and me in our omnividant epiphanies. It was the ineffable vision that we had both shrunk from and dared not face. It was an image neither of us had ever forgotten: the child that looked into our eyes. For we both knew this was not just any child. This was our child and it gazed at us silently amid the whirling corroboree of the wraiths that still inhabited the shadows of our hearts and our minds.


A Moment on Earth

I need peace of mind. I need solitude. I’ve gone in over my head. Now we’re losing even the love that brought us through so much, that saved us both from the clutches of conformity, mediocrity and indifference, that kept us alive for so long. Now we’re losing even that. I see it slipping away from our grasp. It dies when not nurtured and it dies before you even know how or where it went, so consumed are we in ourselves when things go wrong in our lives. I feel so trapped. I can’t work, I can’t write a single line. My mind is always elsewhere, it’s always pulled away from the page before me by thoughts of our future. It’s what I have to do, it’s the only thing for me to do, and I can’t do anything else. If only she could understand that. And perhaps she does. But the pressure... No, we have to postpone the wedding, I need time to think, to sort myself out, to write, to find a groove. I need to do that first as a priority, and then I can think about the marriage. But what about the child? We’ll still be occupied with the pregnancy. God, it’s such a bad time.

But she won’t understand me. She never would. She who was – is – like the other part of my mind, of my soul, she who has been my one true partner, even she wouldn’t understand me. Why now? Why postpone? And would I want to postpone the baby too? Would I prefer it if she just held on for another nine months, or however much I - His Majesty! - would prefer? Would I like to keep living off the money she earns, working and pregnant, which she labors for every day in that horrible office where every cubicle is like a tomb and every task is like a noose around her neck? No, how could I be so selfish, so fucking callous? She’s already making a sacrifice for us. Will I now ask her to make another? Why should she understand me?

But it’s what I need, I know that. I need this. Without this respite I’ll be dead. If I cannot write I cannot do anything else. If I tried anything else I would do it badly and soon quit. I would feel that I was betraying myself. And if I were to keep trying to write here under these conditions I would never be able to concentrate on the writing, always thinking of the marriage and the baby… the baby, the baby, the baby, the poor helpless baby. My poor baby.

How strange… how long it seems since I last saw a poplar tree; and how long it seems since I last looked into her eyes.


8. Argus’s Story

And if you have legs, how could you not run?

As the baby was suspended before our eyes, everything seemed to slow down. The speed at which we were falling was diminishing. Our bodies felt less downward pull. The speed of our descent had created the uniform white doors and pillars that stretched on infinitely upwards and downwards and which formed the hidden, umbral abodes of our terpsichorean phantom hosts. But with our slowing, these great single doors and pillars would vanish and be divided up again into individual levels. The wraiths’ dancing whirl slowed and waned, their pallid bodies lost form and became a mere circle of bluish pale and cold flames that surrounded us before being sucked back into the closing doors from whence they had emerged. Our descent had now slowed so considerably that these endless pillars and doors were once again broken into the familiar levels of the great hall. We were no longer going so fast that everything seemed still. We were again aware of our freefalling and we saw the doors and pillars of level after level of the great hall whiz past our eyes. The sounds of the doors slamming around us could be heard again. When we came to a standstill, I heard the clapping doors descend away down into the fathomless depths until only their faint echoes were heard, and then not even that. I looked over at Ariadne and put my arms around her. I think we were both relieved now that we’d confronted what we had feared, what had been eating away at us for so long. The visions, the dreams, the epiphanies, always having to face it, confront it, to try and forgive oneself. We both felt a sense of relief. I gave her a kiss on the forehead and as I did my eye caught the Devil’s. Neither of us needed to say a word. I quickly sat on the throne and sure enough we were once again floating back up through the infinite, tubular hall. Finally, we were ascending.

As the layers of doors and pillars floated past us and we sat silently to recover from the ordeal, we heard a strange noise from up above us. It was like a distant whistle that seemed to be approaching us at an incredible speed. We looked up as the whistling evolved into a sustained shriek. There was something coming at us at an unbelievable speed. Soon enough we saw a tiny little dot up in the great distance. The dot was screaming and getting bigger and bigger. We saw it was coming straight at us. We all jumped away to the sides as this ball went slamming into our dais! The whole vessel shook violently under the impact and swayed and shook us all around. When the impact died down I got up to find none other than our friend Argus the cephalodrone’s winged head lying on the seat of the throne. Its eyes were half open and, considering the speed at which it fell, it was probably feeling like one big headache.

“Argus,” I cried out, “are you ok?”

“Oooooookay?” it said stupidly.

“Good thing you’re already dead, otherwise you’d be dead,” joked Ariadne. But Argus wasn’t laughing. The Devil didn’t even pay attention once he learnt it was Argus. But then he suddenly turned around and took very keen interest indeed when he realized that Argus had landed on the throne.

“A cephalodrone on the Peacock Throne! Now that’s a first. Who knows what a cephalodrone would see. Bring him to, let’s hear it my liege,” said the Devil.

“What if he’s in some sort of dream-like state, is it okay to wake him?”

“Of course. An epiphany is timeless. Even though one may have a concept of time in the epiphany the epiphany itself takes up none. Besides, what would it matter to a dead-head? Wake him up, my liege.”

I grabbed the cephalodrone’s head and slapped it around a little, but to no avail. I picked up the heavy head and tried to shake it out of its stupor, but Argus seemed to be in a trance. It’s wings just flopped on either side of its head. Suddenly I saw a fist fly past my chin and land plum on Argus’ nose with a big thud. The head in my hands awoke with a loud shriek and its hitherto limp wings started flapping around uncontrollably. As Argus flew out of my hands like a headless chicken (or rather, a chickenless head), I saw Ariadne also let out a cry as she held her hand in pain and fell back down behind me. We must have looked a right bunch of imbeciles. I could see from the corner of my eye that the Devil was not impressed. He seemed to sigh and mumble something to himself before turning his back on this slapstick comedy of ours. Argus flapped around shrieking unintelligible gibberish while Ariadne was still writhing with the pain in her hand from the punch she had dealt Argus. Soon both had calmed down. Argus recognized us and hushed, flapping silently above us, floating upwards in unison with the dais, bemoaning its massive headache.

“Well Argus, that was a hell of a dive!” I said.

“Yes, well, yes… but it was worth it! For the first time I let go! At first it was to catch up with you lot, but then I actually enjoyed it. Freefalling, yes, that’s the way. When one has wings one cannot help but fly. That’s what I had said. Perhaps. But to do something against one’s nature, to NOT fly when one could fly, it was a strange sensation. It was exhilarating. Yes, that’s it, exhilarating!”

“Well done Argus. I’m proud of you. It felt good?”

“Good? Well, like I said, scary, at first, but then… no, not good, something else…”

“How about very good, real good, great, wonderful…”

“Hmm, yeees, I guess… more like, liberating. It’s like being free of yourself, if only for a moment. Yes, it’s good. It’s very good. But I saw something else…”

“Yes, you landed on the throne, I’m sure you did…” I interjected, but I don’t think Argus heard me as he kept talking, engrossed in what he was about to say.

“…something like, well, hard to say really…”

“Like everything?” I asked, but Argus didn’t hear that either – or he was ignoring me.

“…something like… EVERYTHING!”

“You don’t say.”

“Yes indeed.”

“Care to explain it?”

“What’s to explain? It was like a light had penetrated every little corner of the universe and reflected back into my eye within a single moment. It was like seeing an ocean in a grain of sand, or a tornado in the eye of a needle… or… or…”

“Shame it wasn’t a camel you saw instead of a tornado,” joked Ariadne. “There might’ve still been a chance for you to get to heaven.”

“Well at least we’re now going the right direction,” replied Argus. “Up.”

The Devil turned around and told us to put an end to our nonsense. We shut up like scolded children as we sat down and dreamily watched circle after circle of doors and pillars pass us slowly by. My thoughts lazily wandered off and I pondered how in this state of existence I felt no need to sleep or any sense of hunger or thirst. I could sleep if I were so inclined, perhaps I could eat or drink too, but I had no need for it. And I could sense cold and heat, wind and water, but never did I feel cold or warm myself, never did I feel the need to don clothes or shed clothes. Although this may seem an ideal form of existence, it wasn’t really. I thought about all the times I had felt hunger and thirst, sleep and cold and heat. I thought about how my body at certain moments had needed those, and I thought about all those moments when those needs were satisfied. To eat after being caught 5 stormy days in the middle of an ocean; to eat red meat at the end of a long sea voyage; to drink cold, fresh, clear water after coming down from a day’s excursion up in the hills with my friend when I was child; to walk into a log cabin to escape from a snow storm in the mountains; to dive into the clear turquoise waters to escape the heat, and encounter a kaleidoscope of colors bursting with life in a coral reef that stretched out before me as far as my underwater eyes could see… I thought of how delicious it was to satisfy a need, how it made you feel alive and replenished. Jumping in a cold shower or a river in the morning; sitting by a bonfire on a cold desert night; tobacco after a fine meal; a sip of alcohol after a tiring day; lying in the grass as nature bloomed around me and the sun warmed my bones on the first day of spring, among the lazy chirping of crickets; every moment of sleep I could find in the army; every time I conquered my fear and did something that made me feel a sense of pride. These were the moments I remembered. They were the moments when I knew how good it was to be alive, moments with which I measured out my life. They were moments that warmed my heart even here in this barren hell that was my death.

We glided up, lazily, all of us now lost in our own thoughts. Perhaps Ariadne was thinking the same thoughts as me. Maybe Argus was dreaming of those days long ago when it too had a life, and perhaps it too had loved and lived and perished like us all. Perhaps it too felt hunger and thirst, cold and pain, and perhaps it too was thinking about how good – how so very good – a cold glass of water tasted as its cool, moist drops first wet the dried lips then inundated the mouth and tongue before pouring deliciously down the parched throat in gulp after gulp of satisfaction. Perhaps Argus too was thinking of those moments that seemed to it, as to me, a lifetime ago. I took solace in the fact that I could now remember those moments, and if I concentrated enough, I could remember every single touch and taste and smell and feeling so vividly that it was almost as if I were reliving it here and now. Nobody could take that away from me, and that brought a smile to my face.

“You’re smiling. Why are you smiling?” asked Ariadne, who also smiled at me as she ran her hand over my hair.

“I was thinking of how thirsty I’d like to be right now,” I answered.

“I wish I was too. Let’s think about being thirsty and then we can think about a tall, cold glass of water, and then we can think about drinking it…”

“OK”

We looked up with our eyes closed and with big smiles on our faces we both started smacking our lips as if they were dry, then we started gulping and at the exact same moment we opened our eyes, turned our faces to each other and said “AAAAAAAH” with great satisfaction. We laughed and decided to do the same with hunger and with cold and with heat, and anything else that popped into our minds. It was almost as satisfying as the real thing, and it brought back memories. Even the Devil turned his head in curiosity to see what all the commotion was about. Soon we were feeling almost tired from our laughing and concentrating, and we both just sat back and looked up at the endless concentric circles gliding away over our heads and into the invisible distance.

“It’s as pretty as looking up at the stars,” I said. She just sighed without answering. Argus looked down at us curiously, though it too seemed pensive like the rest of us – even the Devil.

“Argus,” I called out. “What are you thinking of?”

Argus thought the question strange and hesitated to answer. Before it did answer I went on and told him what we’d been thinking of. The water and the hunger and the thirst all seemed to bring a glow to even Argus’ pale, grey face. Its eyes widened as I went on about drinking a cold glass of water or eating a hot meal and smoking tobacco on a cold winter’s night…

“It was a long time now… it seems, yes, a long, long time ago…” ventured Argus, “but I too used to be among the living, yes indeed… I remember being thirsty too…”

Ariadne and I stopped giggling and looked up at Argus, listening with interest.

“I used to be a young man once, I remember that much. I used to live out in the country and work on the land, as a farmer in my native village. In spring I used to eat the wild cherries from the trees. We used to climb the trees and eat them just like that, sharing them with the sparrows whom we’d try to shoo away. In the summer I tasted sweet, cold spring water that used to flow down from the mountains and right through our village and past our fields. In autumn I used to jump into the stacks of dead brown leaves that we made to entertain ourselves as children. In winter we used to have fights in the snow and always enjoyed getting back into our snug and warm houses to sit down by the hearth and take a steaming hot bowl of soup in our hands. I remember all the seasons and what those little things once meant to me…”

“But now you have wings, that’s not bad compensation is it?” said Ariadne.

“What good are wings when they’re only a burden? I also used to be in love…”

This raised our interest and even took us by surprise. Neither of us had ever thought it likely that this creature – this cephalodrone that was a horrible hybrid of corpse and raven – could have ever been a man once in the heyday of his youth, in love with a girl.

“Yes, before I had completed my 14’th year, a young girl came to our village. She was an outsider and so she was of course the talk of our little village, as was her father. Her mother had died when the girl was very young and her father bought an acre of land, and having retired from government service, he took to working on his land. It looked like he was running from something then, yes, like he was fed up and wanted to start over again, to escape, perhaps. We didn’t know what. My father and I would go to them to help on their fields and help him fix up what was an old and broken house. I would see the girl every day, but we were both very shy and we’d always avert our eyes and blush and feel embarrassed around each other. But I always went there and looked forward to it. Maybe she did too, yes… maybe. And so day after day we became accustomed to each other. She’d expect me and we’d go for walks when our work was done. This was in the summer. We were in the same school. We’d sit together and we grew fond of each other. Her name… well, never mind. What’s in a name? She was just a year younger than me and she was smart. The other kids never took a liking to her. She was smarter than them and she was quiet and she was an outsider. I was always a bit of an outsider too and so I liked her and I helped her and protected her when I could. We used to sneak into orchards and pick apples as irate farmers chased us away and complained to our fathers. We used to lie in the grass and spend hours just watching the clouds roll by. Yes, I remember that feeling of the fresh breeze that came every now and then in those wide, hot summer fields, and it felt so refreshing, you know?”

Argus looked down at us excitedly, overcome as he was by his memories and the feelings they conjured. We listened silently, letting him continue his story.

“Yes, they were long, lazy days. There are so many of those when in the country. There are many of those when you have somebody to share that with. To swim in a river together was… I don’t know… it was like sharing something important, you know?”

Argus looked back down at us.

“Yes, like sharing a fun secret. Well even then, and now when I look back, those days seemed so long. They do when you’re that age. And you know what was strange now that I think of it?”

We listened on.

“…It was strange that I never knew I was in love with her. It was like it wasn’t even important to know it or not. I just was. And I guess she was too. Only years later, when I was a man, did I realize it and give those memories the titles that one felt inclined to give, to imbue them with those nice big glossy words, like “First Love” and “Joys of Youth” and so on. But back then, when it was lived, when it mattered, we never spoke of such high words, even though she would read me poetry and paragraphs and pages from books that she found and introduced me to in which princes loved princesses and knights performed great deeds and love conquered all, and so forth. She used to read those to me, but we never thought of those when we were together. And when my head was in her lap and I gazed out into the sky and dreamed of castles and great cities, and she just stared at her feet or sang songs like girls do. Even then words never sufficed to give any meaning to our pleasure in being together. Words never meant a thing. They couldn’t make it better or more precious. It was lived then and there, and that was all, you know?”

We listened silently.

“Yes, I remember it all too, like you… the smells, the sights, the sounds even of the crickets in the fields. Like it was yesterday, yes… And I’ll never forget the day my father told me, after we’d finished the harvest, that they had left. Just like that. She never told me either. Her father went back to the city. He had found the going hard, we knew that. But he sold his land and he sold the house and he went back to the big city I had only dreamed about. Well of course I didn’t believe it and I bolted from the house – I was now 15 – and I ran to her house and saw no-one. But I kept running. I ran through the village and the kids pointed at me and laughed. I must have seemed ridiculous. But I ran. The dogs barked at me and the elders asked what was the matter. But I just kept running. I couldn’t stop. Sweat flew from my forehead, I gasped for more air, swallowing it down in great gulps like I was about to drown, wishing I could swallow more… I mean, if you have legs how can you not run? If you have the damn legs, how can you not run, you know? I wished I had wings then, there, at that moment, I really did. But I didn’t, so I ran as fast as I could. How could I not, you know?”

Argus was emotional.

“So I ran until I reached the train station and I saw her being getting on the train. I ran up there but I wasn’t allowed on. I ran up and down outside the carriage looking for her, but I couldn’t find her. I remember I was crying at that point. It was the first time I was shocked from my little world. It was the first time I was confronted by loss. It was the first time I had to make a decision. It was the first time I was confronted by a moment after which I knew my life would never be the same again. I saw her finally. She had both her hands on the window of the carriage. Her father was behind her, sad and seemingly worried, oblivious of us. She looked at me with her big, dark eyes and I saw a tear stream down her cheek as the train started moving away. I had never felt so helpless in my life. I felt I had to fight everything and take on the whole world at that moment. I had to, and I couldn’t. So I watched her leave forever.”

There were tears in Ariadne’s eyes as she listened. Argus paused a moment before going on.

“Do you know what I did? I ran and ran after the train, even after the train was long out of sight and had disappeared over the horizon. I just kept running and running until I collapsed and they found me and took me back to my home. I had to run, you know? If you have legs, how can you not run? So I ran until I fell by the tracks. Yes… it was something. It was a sad day. But it was also the day I became a man, all those years ago. Some say becoming a man has to do with sex or some brave feat, but it doesn’t, you know. The day you can’t help but run until you drop for the sake of something that means more to you than everything else, the day you wish you could change the world for the sake of something you love, no matter how futile you know it is… the day you cannot help but do everything you can, that is the day you become a man.”

We sat back and stared at Argus whose eyes were looking far, far away. I noticed even the Devil had been listening. He did not hide the fact that he was also gazing at the cephalodrone with a look of melancholy. Ariadne and I remained silent, as if dreaming the same dream as Argus and living that moment ourselves. I felt tears well in my eyes, feeling both pity and pride with my little companion. It was the first time I thought of him not as a beast, or an aberration, or even just as a companion, but as a friend.

“I understand now, Argus, why your wings are a burden to you,” I said somberly, as if to myself.

Argus paused for a moment and then its eyes suddenly lit up.

“Ah!” said Argus, with renewed spirit. “But if only I had my wings then! That would have been something, eh?”

It was quiet in the great hall as we all sank back into the forgotten depths of our minds.

“Yes Argus. That would have been something alright.”


A Moment on Earth

When she walked out of the hospital she felt the weight of the world again on her shoulders. Her breathing seemed conscious and forced, and she even started hyperventilating. She had to sit down on a park bench to regain her composure. She had to be brave. The doctor warned her even this early in her pregnancy that there might be complications. It was the last thing she wanted to hear. She had felt so trapped for so long, so alone, so helpless. Her parents never demurred from showing their displeasure with her situation, and especially to her pending marriage. They were not even supportive of her pregnancy. It was unforeseen, yes, it was an accident perhaps, but they should be supportive of their daughter, she thought. She was tired of hearing them, tired of arguing her case, tired of trying to convince them of her love for him. But now she even felt she had to convince herself of her love for him. How had things ever become this bad, and so quickly? She felt nauseated with her whole life and she felt like ripping her clothes off, her flesh off, ridding herself of her whole oppressive being.

She calmed down and closed her eyes, trying to relax. It was, despite everything, a nice day. She felt the sun warm her bones in the cold morning. She smiled and felt a little warmth when thinking that she had this day off from work. She would dedicate this day to herself. It would be her day. She wanted to forget her troubles, even if only briefly. She would sit in the park and soak in the sun and then she would do whatever she fancied. With her eyes still closed, she thought of what she could do. Maybe go to the zoo? Or the cinema? Or perhaps visit a museum. She loved the museum and it had been so long since she’d been. She thought about that and felt sad that she never gave herself time anymore, time to enjoy the things she used to. She felt sad that she felt she shouldn’t enjoy them, that she had responsibilities, that time would be wasted, that precious, precious time would be better spent working or planning, or being productive or forwarding her life, forward, forward, forward, ever forward. There is no more time for playing around like children. Time is precious, everybody said, time slips away so quickly, we’re never getting any younger, we’re always getting older, older, older. Sweet, sweet sixteen, GONE forever, the twenties vanish, before you know it you’re thirty. And do you have your MBA? Where are you working? How much are you earning? There’s NO TIME FOR THIS! Are you married, are you divorced, have you had children, do you have a family, does your husband treat you well, where do you take your vacations, are you watching your figure, do you work out, what do you think about the war, who did you vote for, how’s your cholesterol, what do you think about hunger, and that epidemic, and what about poverty, and that actress, have you seen the movie, is there going to be a sequel, what do you read, what sign are you, are you in control of your life, do you have goals, have you ever been in love, how do you maintain that healthy glow, do you like a drink now and then, have you given up cigarettes, where have you worked before, do you know that person, what age did you graduate, how old are you, how old were you when you got the job, how old are you now? And what the hell are you doing in a museum on a Tuesday mid-morning? Why the hell are you looking at paintings? Why do you waste your time reading a book? DON’T YOU HAVE A LIFE TO GET TO? AND ISN’T IT FOREVER SLIPPING FROM YOUR GRASP?

She opened her eyes. Her mind was only seconds ago swimming with thoughts. But when she opened her eyes she was amazed at what she saw. Nothing! There was nothing happening around her. Only a few meters behind her, people still rushed and raced, fought and battled. But around her nothing happened. Birds skipped around picking crumbs and seeds off the grass. A squirrel glanced her way before scurrying up a tree. The trees were quiet, still, their leaves did not so much as rustle. The whole world was so peaceful. She’d always walked past this park and she’d never gone through it, not since she was a child. She never realized this peacefulness. She never realized something like this existed here, of all places, here before her very eyes. She never realized the things she could see if only she didn’t try so hard, if only she let herself go and just let it appear to her. She realized how blind she had been for so long, how blind people were without even knowing it. The sun radiated on her skin, caressed her senses and loved her with its rays. There on the bench, with eyes wide open, she felt happy again.

She would go to the museum that day, she would go for a long walk in the park, and she would go to a part of town she hadn’t been since she was a child. She would visit the house she grew up in, she would see what happened to the neighbors, where they are now, who lives there now. She would reminisce about the neighborhood from whence the world had once looked so big, so wide, so wonderful, so promising. But she would not be sad. She would be happy that she had memories to remember. She would enjoy her day. She would buy a book and she would start reading it. She would stop and observe people she wanted to observe, people who interested her, people she would want to look at but was always embarrassed to, because it was not appropriate, because it was rude, or strange. She watched a boy and a girl running across the avenue with a big bag of cherries in their hands, laughing all the way. She watched an old lady walk quietly by, alone, talking to herself. She looked into the moist eyes of an old beggar whom time and fortune had long since vanquished and forgotten. She looked up for the first time since she could remember and she marveled at the city that rose above her head and forged a path into the blue sky. Then she looked at the heads all around her, heads tilted down with eyes fixed on the ground, and she smiled when one or two of them saw her looking up and did the same.

She enjoyed her day. It was her day. And even when the world came crashing down around her head, she would have this day to remember. She would remember what it was like to open her eyes and see again, the way she used to.


9. Ascent

That which goes down must also go up,
They who endure must also forgive,
And be forgiven in turn…

“So how did you become his liege?”

Ariadne asked the obvious question now that she had the chance, and I told her the story of my escape from the cube and the confrontation at the Peacock Throne. She was quite amused by it – it was like her own victory and vindication. I looked over at the Devil and he looked back at us with indifference. We fell quiet again and watched the hall float on by. I think we both felt a little embarrassed about having been less than magnanimous toward our conquered host.

“You know,” I began, thinking out loud and hoping to change the subject, “this is the first time in our journey that we have not been descending. It’s the first time I remember myself – us – ascending instead. This is promising.”

My musing was directed more at the Devil than anyone else. But he chose to remain silent.

“Who knows, maybe we’ll eventually run into Saint Peter?” added Argus, with misplaced mirth.

This change in our journey was also obvious in our moods. Both Ariadne and I, even Argus, were more lively, more light-spirited, hearty and strong. We had stood firm and faced that which we had dreaded in our epiphanies. We had been resilient and brave enough to endure it without losing our heads and being swallowed up by the phantoms to be lost and to wander aimlessly forever in the secret chambers and darkest, most hideous depths of our minds and our consciences. We had passed it, we were now ascending, and we would continue to do so. We were finally on our way to something, something wonderful, something we all knew we were headed to but which none of us could really fathom. It was something we all desired, something we all longed for with all our hearts. We sensed this and we felt good. Not hopeful, for hope meant nothing anymore. We felt certain this time. We felt we were destined for something beautiful.

The silence was again broken by the distant sound of a door closing on a level somewhere way above us. We all instinctively looked up. The echo reverberated for a while before passing us by and sinking away into the endless depths below. Then there was silence again. Enough time passed for me to think, and then believe, that the sound had merely been a figment of my imagination.

But then I heard it again. It was louder and closer. This time it was followed by the pitter patter of little steps running to and fro. We all looked up again and saw nothing. I turned to the Devil. He was the only one not curious as to what was going on. He was the only one who knew what it was. Before I could ask him, I heard the thunder of hundreds, perhaps thousands of doors slamming and opening constantly, just as frighteningly as it was during our descent. The little steps that followed were so numerous that they sounded like the trickling of water. We could even make out voices, soft, delicate, childish voices. Suddenly a heavy, heavy weight descended upon my heart. I felt my knees buckle under me, I felt a knot in my throat and in my stomach. I felt sick. Ariadne was shaking too. I had miscalculated. Were we faced with another horrible obstacle, another grueling task, more wraiths? I bit my tongue, I regretted my false optimism. The thunder of the doors were descending down upon us, closer and closer, louder and louder, more and more terrifying. The Devil did not stir. He did not so much as look up.

Then we came to a standstill. The dais stopped moving altogether. All the doors that were immediately around us on this level flew open in one terrifying instant and from behind them came streaming out… little children! The familiar marble surface stretched out under their feet as they ran toward us and the floor of the great atrium was under our dais once more. Ariadne and I, who were ready for the worst, were relieved as soon as we saw the children appear. Argus was flabbergasted. The Devil did not even stir. The hordes of children kept streaming out of the doors and soon we were surrounded by great multitudes of them. Every one of them was clad in a simple loincloth, and they covered the whole surface of the great, circular hall.

Despite our initial panic, we calmed down. For the children didn’t have malicious looks on their faces. They were not a sight to be afraid of. They were just like ordinary children. They pushed and shoved to be the one to come up to us. Only one could make it in, on to the dais. Then from among the teeming multitudes, just one child stepped forth. He was a beautiful little boy with curly hair and green eyes, perhaps barely seven years of age – that is, if he had an age anymore in this realm of the dead. He stepped forth and all the other children immediately stopped pushing and shoving as they all fell silent and simply observed us with curious and wonder-filled eyes.

The boy came up the steps of the dais and stood before me cautiously, but with a confident and even playful look on his radiant and glowing face. When I looked at this child’s face all the dread that had initially inundated me vanished. Ariadne was also calm now, though wary. We didn’t know what this was, nor what it meant. But it wasn’t bad. Then the child extended his hand out to me and smiled a smile that now inundated me with the obverse feeling of warmth and security. His smile, his face, his eyes, his hair, his whole head was like a heavenly orb. I immediately felt a bonding with this child, as if he were my own flesh and blood. Ariadne also smiled when the boy looked at her. There was a connection between them. The boy extended his hand to her as well and she took it with a look of disbelief and joy. She looked the boy up and down, she touched his hand, his arms, she ran her fingers through his locks and she took his cheeks in her palm and ran her thumb along his brow and across his prominent cheek bones, along his strong jaw and his little nose. She could not control herself. She knelt down and kissed the boy on the forehead. We had, seemingly in an instant, come to love this boy. But it felt like we had known this boy all our lives and had only just met him now. Then the boy spoke, and his voice was like a melody to our ears.

“We’ve been expecting you,” he said, and there rose a murmur from the thousands of other children that surrounded our dais.

I didn’t know what to say, so I said what I felt at that moment.

“I think… we have been expecting you too.”

The adorable child smiled, and our hearts melted. The other children also laughed. They were all so beautiful, so playful. Some had the skin of fire, some of copper, some of bronze, some had skin like fine chocolate, some like the pure driven snow, some with eyes green like emeralds, some with eyes almond-like and brown, others black like the night, yet others blue like the sky or grey like a cloud. In the great hall there was an alleviation of melancholy, a general sense of well-being. It was the first time we had sensed this in all our journey. Now our journey upward had begun, now we were ready to ascend. Tears came to my eyes and when Ariadne looked at me she couldn’t hold them back either. We each gave the child a kiss on the cheek and rejoiced at where we had arrived. All the torture, the suffering, the pain seemed to vanish here. It was an alleviation of all our guilt. We had confronted our deepest, darkest fears, our most hideous feelings of guilt and pain, and we had overcome them.

“Do you know why you are here?” asked the child playfully.

Such a weighty, difficult question was asked with such nonchalance and innocence. We did not answer. We didn’t even know what the right answer was. We just smiled at the child and basked in his radiance. The child understood us. He understood everything. He had the wisdom of youth about him, the wisdom that one is born with, pure intelligence, instinctual knowledge, something that is corrupted and degenerates with age, with education, with becoming a man. He was the child-king and I knew there and then that he would take the Peacock Throne. We stood aside and bade him sit. The child smiled, and without pomp, without a hint of pretension or conceit, the child jumped up and sat on the throne. We watched his easy, graceful moves with wonder. He laughed on the throne. He looked about him. All the other little children, thousands of them, laughed with him. We couldn’t help but laugh too. The sound of so many children laughing was something I had never heard before. It was like an antidote, like a remedy to our heretofore heavy hearts and heavy consciences. We laughed with them like children, uncontrollably, laughing until tears came to our eyes once more. Argus, though initially baffled, was also laughing. Only the Devil remained placid.

Then the child jumped up out of the throne and took our hands.

“Come with me!”

The thousands of little urchins made a path for us that led to one of the doors. We smiled and let the child-king lead us away through the crowd of these precious and beautiful little people and toward the threshold of the door that led to a child’s realm. Argus followed us in. The Devil stayed behind, watching us with melancholy. Before I entered I looked back, but the Devil was no longer there.

The child looked up at us brimming with a smile as we entered, and he said, simply:

“Welcome!”


A Moment on Earth

He met her as she was leaving work on a cold, grey evening when the city smelt of burnt coal and exhaust and dust. She was surprised to see him there, but only for a moment. Hardly anything surprised her anymore, hardly even this. She knew why he was there and what was coming. He would be understanding to her now because she knew he would want understanding in return. She was almost relieved that the moment had come, that they would finally face it – that she would finally face it, rather, and that he had summoned enough courage to tell her he was too much of a coward to face it. Coward, she thought… Coward. And her eyes filled with tears.

They took a seat at a cafe. They only realized when they entered and sat down that they’d been there once before, when they were students. Neither brought it up, nor had to. He ordered a coffee, she didn’t order anything. She sat and looked at him fatefully. He was nervous and silent for what seemed to both of them a long time. She spoke before he did.

“Why can’t you say it? Why can’t you be a man?”

He was shocked by her frankness. He gathered himself together, but still could not bear to look her in the eyes. Eventually he brought himself to speak.

“You know the situation. I just need more time. I can’t do it like this. I can’t…”

She interrupted him.

“Don’t say anymore. I knew this was coming. I’ve tried to be brave, really I have. How do you think I feel? Just when we need each other the most we become beasts. We hardly even talk to each other. I feel like we’ve become antagonists. I’ve fought that feeling for months now, but I’ve lost. You see me and you see the enemy, you see me as a hindrance. You can’t even look me in the eyes anymore. What more do you want from me? I’m working, I’m working in that fucking job all day. And I’m pregnant, I’m carrying OUR child, OUR baby. And now you don’t think it’s good timing? Is that it? I’m sorry but we’re in this now, we’re in it, you and I, and you should start owning up to yourself, to us…”

“Listen…”

“Wait, let me finish… Please… We didn’t come this far to let it slip now…”

Her eyes suddenly grew soft and vulnerable and she took his hand in hers moving close into him. She spoke softly even as her voice broke and tears welled in her eyes.

“Don’t let it slip now. I know how you feel. I want the best for you baby, I believe in you, I have faith only in you, I love you, I want the whole world for you, for us, but we can do this… We can do it. We’ve done it before, we’ve been there for each other, we’ve saved each other before. This is when it counts. Right here, right now. This is where we have to make our stand or fail forever. If we run here, if we turn our backs to our future here and now, at this very moment, I’m afraid the consequences will haunt us for the rest of our lives. I’m sorry, I don’t want to be melodramatic, but I feel it. I don’t want us to regret anything baby. I can’t do this alone, I can’t. I need you… please… please don’t be a fool… Here and now. Will you stay or leave?”

He was overwhelmed with feelings of guilt, but also desperation. He was cracking up inside and tears came to his eyes, as they did in hers when she saw his tears. They both withdrew and tried to gather themselves together again. He looked at her and thought how beautiful she looked there, his woman, his brave, beautiful woman. She looked at him and saw her man, her lonely, vulnerable man who had been there for her, and who now needed her more than ever. But she knew the outcome. This was their last chance.

“I know it’s selfish, but I need you to understand; for the sake of my future, for the sake of our future. I can’t do this…”

She smiled morosely, fatefully as she fell back on her seat with resignation. She knew he had already made his mind up. A lone tear streaked down across her cheek like a shooting star. He watched it roll away down her chin and drop off into space. He got up to leave. He never even touched his coffee.

She sat there gazing into space. He reached for her hand as he stood for a moment beside her, but she withdrew it.

The marriage would be put off. They were now completely alone. As he was about to leave she turned and looked him fiercely in the eyes.

“I hope you never have to regret this like I will.”


10. The Child-King

The child that lies in the heart of a man,
Bears the wisdom that lies in the heart of a child…

As soon as we entered through the door our eyes had to adjust to the darkness around us. But the children, and not least of all our guide, were excited and took our hands and led us hurriedly through the narrow passageway in which we found ourselves. When my eyes had adjusted I noticed the stone walls and stone ground. It was like the passage to a dungeon. I was at first alarmed – we all were after having escaped from the Tortutron – but the children’s laughter and adventurous spirit kept us in good faith. I asked our little host where we were going and he made an exaggerated gesture for us to hush and be quiet. He then spoke to us in a whisper (and all the other children that followed us in began murmuring in a whisper as well, as if in imitation of our little host).

“This is a passageway to our secret hideaway!” said the child.

I was immediately enchanted by what he said and smiled cooperatively, indicating that I would be as quiet as I possibly could. Ariadne and Argus also seemed relieved. The passageway became narrower and narrower, and thankfully, just as it seemed we weren’t going to fit anymore, we came upon a wooden door. As we came to a halt, our little host again motioned for us to be quiet before proceeding to utter something incomprehensible, probably as a password.

“Thelobbish,” the child said, and the door opened.

What we saw inside was something so incredibly enchanting as to take me immediately back to my own childhood days, days filled with wonder and adventure. It was a humungous cavern containing many smaller caves and thousands of stalagmites and stalactites, like a big underground city that wound and twisted away as far as the eyes could see. Thousands of children could be seen here and there, playing games, laughing, running, skipping, climbing. Some had flimsy uniforms and led other children in games of adventure or war. Others were explorers and led expeditions into the furthest (visible) corners of the great hideaway. As soon as we came in, our host let out a loud chuckle, and as loud as he could he said:

“WELCOME TO OUR WORLD!!!”

As soon as he said this, all the children that came in with us and all the others in the great cavern let out screams of joy and excitement. Some danced around us while others took us by the hands and joyfully led us here and there to show us everything they had in their hideaway. They showed us their games and their toys, which they seemed to have made themselves, and loved them no less despite their apparent flimsiness. They told us of what lay beyond the cavern, for there were passages leading away from the cavern in all directions. Some of them, they said, they had never been in. Some they had. In some there apparently lived fabulous monsters, in others treasures that only the bravest could reach. Some told of other worlds where wonderful things happen, others of worlds filled with demons…

“That’s why we had to be quiet until we came in… we are afraid of demons. They speak funny and they hate children. You are lucky to be alive after being out there so long!”

I noticed that this child who was our host was like the little king of these children, all of whom followed his movements and listened to his words. And he was the most benevolent and modest king I had ever seen! He was a make-believe king in a game with fantastic adventures and dangers and secret hideaways. The child-king looked at us with admiration before turning to the excited crowd of urchins that surrounded us, and said:

“They came from out there in the Pretty Room,” he said. I assumed he referred to the great Hall. “And they may have even seen demons!” he said as his crowd of little subjects let out a collective gasp of horror mixed with wonder.

“What were they like?” asked one little red-haired girl.

“Did they have big teeth and horns?” asked another with grey eyes.

“Did you run from them, or did you kill them?” asked a boy with a scar on his forehead.

“Or did they catch some of you and eat you on the way?” asked a girl with long black hair and epicanthic eyes.

We were overwhelmed by these little people and their little questions. But our hearts rejoiced along with theirs. We felt the same wonder these children felt. We felt the same joy and excitement. I felt that I loved every single one of them as if they were my own children. They asked questions and they kept telling us animatedly what lay in which passageway and through which cave of their secret hideaway, even as they kept running out of breath from their excitement.

“Don’t go there, there are demons!”

“You have to be careful for the giant centipede!”

“In here there lives an old man who eats children if they wake him!”

“There is a castle at the end of this one. One child went in a long time ago and returned to tell us of it! There is a king and queen and their armies cross mountains and oceans in their country, looking for dragons and a prince for their young daughter, who is no more than our age, but lonely and sad in a room of the royal palace…”

I laughed as these words flew around us. I asked them questions too and they answered me.

“And where is this monster now?”

“He hides in the cave waiting for careless children!”

“And what does he do to them when he finds them?”

“He eats them!” said the children, and then a look of pure fear came across the littlest ones’ faces and they hid behind the bigger children who acted protective towards them.

“You can be my lieutenant,” our host, the child-king, said to me excitedly.

“I would be honored, your highness,” I said as I bowed ostentatiously. The child-king accepted my bow with his own, which he delivered very solemnly and ceremoniously. Ariadne smiled and curtsied. Argus had trouble just bowing his head and so kept rotating around and around as it tried to tilt its head forward, squawking and cursing until it became too dizzy to go on. The child-king was bright-eyed and pleased. He took Ariadne and me by the hand once more and led us through the giant winding cavern. We ran past caves and open plateaus where children played, ourselves laughing and running as if we were mad. We ran up a steep incline, through a big open-ended grotto, and out again on to a high terrace that looked out over the great cavern where children played below and the thousands of rock formations of the cavern resembled a petrified city of ghosts. The children pointed at rocks and told us what they were, as one would with clouds. One said he saw an elephant with tusks, another a lizard-man with a forked tongue (did he mean an androsaur, perhaps?), and yet another would say she saw a demon with horns, and they would all tremble and shake. There was a faint incandescent light that came from the invisible depths of the cavern, and from over a precipice that lay in the distance. We ran down the terrace carefully, and then made our way to the edge of the glowing precipice that lay at the end of a small forest of stalagmites. The child-king came right to the edge and stopped just in time, seemingly oblivious to the danger of falling. Although we were a little alarmed at first, we looked down with him and saw the cavern drop away endlessly below. Our host looked down for a while and then looked back at us.

“That’s the Big Drop. Nobody’s ever come back from there. Some children fell in once. But they never came back. Sometimes you can hear strange noises down there. Listen…”

We strain our ears but hear nothing.

“You hear that? I think there are demons and monsters down there and they eat children like us.”

Ariadne, Argus and I looked down and for a moment we shuddered as we thought of what lay down there, of what we had left behind. The child-king didn’t lift his eyes from the bottomless pit. But rather than observing it with aversion, as indeed we were, he looked down with a sense of awe and longing.

“I’ve always wondered what there is down there. I know there are monsters and goblins and demons and all those things. But I’ve always wanted to go…”

He kept his gaze down as he spoke. I didn’t know what to say. I – we all – had been through such things, such trials that had been so painful to overcome, such discoveries into our own selves as had been so difficult to face, that I felt I had to warn this child. But then I looked at him again and I wasn’t quite sure. For no matter what it was that we had encountered, was it not necessary for us to encounter them? Were we not better for it, stronger perhaps, and perhaps even happier, and dare I say, wiser? If we hadn’t had the stomach, the courage, the need to confront those depths – ourselves – would we not have wallowed eternally in our own guilt and denial, in our own weaknesses and failures, in this eternal hell that we ourselves had conjured? And yet on the other hand, could you willingly, knowingly tell yourself to go through that – to walk through hell? Could you tell another person to do that, knowing what lies down there? Could you encourage it? I decided at the end of these thoughts that advice is useless, that we all face what we must, and that we all have our own paths to walk, our own journeys to fulfill, our own selves to live with, our own destinies to find. I could not say a word to this child. I would let him find his own way, as he must. We all just stood there gazing down into the abyss, each lost in their own thoughts.

“Maybe one day… Maybe someday I’ll come back a conqueror! Yes!” said the child-king. I noticed an adorable little girl that always stood by him – just behind him – and always cheered him on. She had big brown eyes that shone with intelligence and mischief, a little nose like a button, and light brown hair that sparkled like gold when light shone through it from the mysterious light that came from below and away. When she saw the sparkle in the child-king’s eyes as they lit up with future prospects of glory and conquest, this adorable little gamine let out a cheer for her hero. She threw her arms in the air (and her arms were very small, as she didn’t look more than four years-old) and cheered “hooray.” The child-king turned to her and said:

“Yes Gretchen, maybe one day!” and as he said this he took her in his arms, picked her off the ground and spun her around in circles as she laughed gleefully and he shouted, “SOMEDAY, SOMEDAY, SOMEDAY!”

We all laughed heartily with these two little creatures. I felt a warmth infuse my heart every time I set eyes on them. Then when the child-king put Gretchen back down on her feet (and she still laughed on and on), he turned to us curiously.

“You’ve been down there, haven’t you? You’ve come from there. What was it like?”

We all looked at each other as if unsure what to say.

“Go on, tell me! Was it scary? What did you find? What did you see?”

“Well…” started Ariadne, thinking what to say. “Let’s just say that you’re better off up here with your little friends.”

The child-king frowned at this. Gretchen noticed it and also stopped laughing and frowned as she tried to imitate the boy.

“But there’s so much more to see! Isn’t there? I’m bored here. We all play games and we all dream of other realms, of new adventures and conquests. But none of us can leave here. Because we’re all afraid, but we all dream on, thinking one day we will grow old and leave, that one day we will be big and strong and fearless… Like you!”

“Well… maybe one day you will be,” replied Ariadne, only to hear a loud sigh from the restless boy.

“One day, some day, it’s all the same. There never is that day. We are always the same. We died as children and we exist here in this place, in our secret hideaway as children. Forever and ever, we are here. Nothing changes, nothing comes of it. When we were among the living we used to dream of other realms, of magic kingdoms and great adventures. And more than anything, our secret hideaways, our secret places were precious to us. We would share them with our closest friends and we would count the minutes until we could be there and dream of everything we would do from there, of all the adventures we would have and all the glory that would be ours. You were children too once, you remember don’t you?”

We nodded silently.

“But we have spent an eternity here. When we died we found that all we had was that secret hiding place. And there are passages and caves and precipices that lead to other realms, but we can never take them. We have remained children and that day never comes. Some day is never here…”

The boy looked sadly down the precipice. Gretchen went beside him and looked sad too. She always mimicked his emotions. She looked down too, but not too close to the edge, scared as she was of falling. Then Argus flapped over the edge and little Gretchen let out a sigh of awe and fright. When she saw that Argus did not fall but remained airborne she looked amazed. The boy also looked up at this strange creature.

“Who is he? Did you bring him from down there?”

“Yes,” I answered. “He’s a cephalodrone.”

“A… safadrone?”

“A cephalodrone,” I said. Argus looked self-conscious as we talked of it.

“Wow. And they have wings?”

“Yes… there are many more strange creatures down there,” and I pointed down the precipice as I said this. Argus looked a little indignant after I said “strange.”

“What else are there?” he asked.

Gretchen had a look of intense curiosity on her intelligent little face, as did the boy. Other children that were around us also took an interest as I proceeded to recount our journey through hell. I told them of the strange creatures and spirits we’d encountered, of the oceans and labyrinths, the cubes and the isles, of our adventures thus far through the inferno. With each description the children gasped and sighed, ooh’ed and aah’ed. Every time I mentioned the Devil they shuddered and the little ones grabbed the bigger children for comfort. The demons also frightened them, and they often looked off behind us toward the precipice, embellishing their curiosity with their imagination as they pictured everything so lavishly and so graphically in their heads. When I saw this natural children’s curiosity, and their immense potential for imagination, I also started enjoying my storytelling! I was as enthusiastic as a child myself. This seemed to have rubbed off on Ariadne and Argus as well, and they too were soon adding their own adventures and stories to mine, often interrupting me to add a detail here or there. We were all caught up in our images and stories, all of which became so vivid that we all felt we were reliving them again there before the children – indeed, with the children. Sometimes we all laughed, sometimes we were all frightened, sometimes baffled, and oftentimes we were sad, and some of us shed a tear or two along the way. We felt like children again, Ariadne and Argus and I, and the children felt like grown-ups exploring those worlds for themselves. Perhaps hours passed, perhaps years, perhaps the eons, for what was time in hell? Eons would span a second and a second would encapsulate an eon. What was true was that our universe was boundless, like our imagination. And the imagination of children – of each individual child – was like a universe unto itself.

When we finished our stories, the children were silent. There was awe in their eyes, a mix of fear and fascination, but also a sort of temerity. For stories, no matter how frightening, only whet the appetites of young ones, as they should. Indeed, for the young – whose youth is contemptuous of danger – curiosity is always stimulated by fear. Without fear, curiosity would only be superceded by indifference, and there’s plenty of time for that when we grow older.

The children asked us all sorts of questions. How long were their horns? How far did you fall? How sharp were their teeth? Why didn’t you run? How did you not get lost? And every time they asked a question, no matter how simple the question seemed, I was stumped for a reply. For nothing was simple in this universe that we inhabited, in this hell. I thought any simply answer would be merely a parody of simplicity, and furthermore, a travesty of intellect. For everything that I related had a significance beyond mere image and form. Everything, every moment, had an underlying purpose, a meaning, a destination, a logic, that even I couldn’t grasp sometimes – I who was its origin! With every answer I tried to give, so many more questions arose in my head until I couldn’t give just one answer. When I did try and give answers the children found it difficult to follow. So they soon grew bored and in small groups of two’s and three’s they wondered off back to their games and to the far ends of their secret hideaway. The child-king interrupted my thoughts following a question about the strange dancing beast on the Isle of Knowledge.

“After everything that has happened, do you regret anything? Do you regret the things you saw?”

I didn’t have to think before I answered.

“It’s the wrong question, begging your pardon your highness…” I replied playfully as the boy smiled at the title I had used, for he really did fancy himself a king. “I have seen and endured all of this precisely because of my regrets. Here, in this universe, I have faced my regrets, my guilt – we have faced them…” and I looked at Ariadne as I said this.

The child-king looked a little bemused.

“And why did you have regrets?” he asked.

I didn’t know how to answer this question. Being a child, he had probably never experienced such a thing. His conscience would have been – is – in its infancy, like him. Perhaps he wouldn’t understand me, but I said nevertheless:

“Because… well, because sometimes we do things that betray ourselves.”

“Why would you betray yourself?” asked the child.

“Fear.”

“Fear? Fear of what, what are you afraid of? Demons?”

“Demons? Well, perhaps demons, yes. Fear itself creates the demons. You will see too, maybe, one day, that if you are not afraid there will be no more demons. No… fear is something else, something that always comes before everything else, something more sinister, more merciless than even a demon or the monster that it creates. Fear lives within you and only you can fight it and defeat it, and only you will be the victim if you fail in this. We all have this fear and we spend our lives trying to conquer it as we discover new fears to overcome. And this makes us stronger, it makes us happy because anything difficult raises within us a fear, fear for our safety or fear that we may not succeed. But when we do face it, whether we succeed or fail, we feel happy. In fact it’s the only true happiness there is, when you conquer your fear and accomplish something in spite of it. But sometimes we don’t have the strength to face it and so we choose the easy way. We sometimes choose to avoid it. And we regret this, because no matter how safe we are, we always wonder what would have happened if we had conquered it. What would we have become? What would we not have lost along the way, and what would we have gained?”

The child-king looked at us silently for a while.

“I know. Sometimes we go exploring. But before we go we feel scared, so scared we can’t eat or sleep! And sometimes we stay behind. But when we do stay behind we feel even worse! We still can’t eat or sleep, even though we know we are safe and sound and there is no chance of danger. But when we go – even if we’re scared – when we make it back we think of how good it was we went, knowing it would be dangerous. And when we eat and sleep after such an expedition like this, it’s like then the food tastes better and the sleep is sweeter than honey, and being back in our home, safe and secure, is so much better too! It’s strange isn’t it? When we’re comfortable we’re restless, and when we’re in danger we dream of the comforts we willingly left behind! There’s something wrong there… Not that we eat or sleep anymore, but we used to once.”

The child-king looked out again over the precipice, as if looking for the right word for this thing he – we all – understood instinctively, yet hardly ever put into words.

“It’s like…” continued the boy before being interrupted by Argus.

“Like… like a Dialectical Dissatisfaction!” squawked the cephalodrone. “You have something but you wish you had the opposite. Then when you find a synthesis between the two, you have something else, but you wish you had the opposite of that, and so on.”

Ariadne and I were much amused by Argus’ cerebration. The boy was trying to figure out the word “dialectical,” but laughed with us anyway.

“Not bad for an alingualogician,” I said. This word also baffled the child-king and little Gretchen.

“Ah! You’re nonce-ensical as ever!” said Argus. “Besides I am rather an ana-lingualogician… my use of language is not without logic. On the contrary, it has a logic all its own.”

Ariadne raised an eyebrow and smiled wryly. I had to admit Argus was making more and more sense – our type of sense – as our journey progressed.

“Nonsensical?” repeated the boy.

“No,” said Argus, “Nonce-ensical.”

I saved the boy from the imminent frustration of getting into an argument with Argus by telling him never to mind the cephalodrone. Gretchen held the boy’s hand and looked up at each and every one of us with her big, beautiful, curious eyes, not understanding what any of us were saying, except when the child-king talked. She always lit up and smiled from ear to little ear when the boy opened his mouth.

We were all silent again for a moment as the child-king sat down and thought. He then looked up at me with his bright green eyes.

“Yes, I think I understand now what this hellish universe means to you,” spoke the child-king with a surprising degree of seriousness. “I think you mean this: that the weight of the past must be lightened, and that any lightness shown when dealing with the past must be weighed.”

Gretchen giggled and nodded intelligently, as if she’d understood immediately. The rest of us stood there dumb-founded, still trying to process what the child-king had said.


A Moment on Earth

She could feel the child inside her. It was no more than a fetus in her womb, yet she could feel its heart beat inside her with tiny palpitations that vibrated in every cell of her body. At night she could sense its loneliness, and other times she could sense its hunger, its thirst, its curiosity, its despair, its sadness. She felt as though her own emotions were resonating inside her, as if being amplified by those of her child. She felt her despair in her womb, and she felt her loneliness in her womb. She sometimes dreamt that it was in fact she who was in her own womb, and she felt the same loneliness and sorrow as when she woke up and found herself alone in bed. She thought that’s what her child must be feeling. Mother and child were like an organism with two hearts living in the same body.

He still came and went, but she no longer even thought of him. They had undone that which bound them to each other, and more importantly, to the future. They would not wed now, she knew that. And to think that love could withstand an ocean of troubles only to be shattered like glass by a mere grain of doubt. He would come and go, when he was not writing. He would come and go like a ghost.

She knew her child could feel this hopelessness that she felt. She wished she could make it right and hide her feelings, or dissimulate them for the sake of her child, but she also knew this was impossible. They were in the same womb, her and her child, and there would be no more secrets. Even before her child would be born it would know sorrow, it would know loss, it would know fear, and it would know pain. A feeling of hopelessness came over her again. Her emotions ebbed and waned like a relentless corporal tide.

She felt like a different person now, and even the thought of him was secondary to her new state of being. Although there were times she was miserable, there were others when she felt a euphoric sense of significance within her. And when she felt this way the thought of him seemed detached from her emotions, as if he had only a functional and utilitarian place in the scheme of things. He had inseminated her and was now redundant. Her child was everything now; they were everything. Sometimes she even laughed aloud when she thought of him as a giant tadpole swimming to and fro and never reaching his destination, nor ever maturing into a frog, let alone a prince… but amused as she was, she felt guilty for thinking so and promptly ceased her giggling. A dark shadow would then descend over her eyes and she would think of how he hated his own child, how he wished it was dead or never born… she would picture him as a Moloch with claws drooling over a hecatomb of sacrificial children screaming to the beat of drums and the sound of horns amid the flames of Tophet. When these thoughts besieged her she would put her hand over her stomach and close her eyes, feeling as if she were communing with her child and dispelling those horrid images from their common body.

Despite his protestations and those of her family, she decided to quit her job. She felt her burden lightened by this. She had money saved, she would do this herself. She learned she couldn’t trust anybody. Though she loved him, she felt he had betrayed her. The wounds would never heal entirely, if ever. In her – their – moment of need, he had failed her – he had failed them. She would go it alone now. She felt something was going to happen, something beautiful. She didn’t know exactly what it was, but she felt it in her gut, in her womb. She was a new being now and she would live up to her new responsibility.

Alone she sat as the shadows of the branches of an oak tree crisscrossed her face in the evening solitude of the park. Two hearts beat simultaneously like distant drums, accompanying the otherwise silent orbit of the earth around the sun.


11. A Familiar Face

The shapes on the rocks, etched in endless time,
Resemble the faces of those left behind…

We followed the child-king back from the precipice and away again through the sinuous caverns of their secret hideaway. Gretchen ran alongside her hero with her little steps, trying to keep up and doing a determinedly successful job of it. We passed by groups of children who gamboled happily around us, playing their games and whiling eternity away. They ran alongside us and took our hands and wanted to include us in their games, but the child-king declined them this pleasure with a stern demeanor. He seemed pensive (in keeping with his delicate and moody nature) and soon led us away where there were no longer any children, into a winding maze of grottos and caves and strange rock formations. The air became darker, danker, colder. Eventually the sounds of the children’s voices became no more than a far off murmur, and then not even that. The child-king and I had taken torches that had illuminated the main area which the children inhabited. The silence was broken only by the sporadic sounds of the flames moving through the air and the sounds of our feet stepping and scraping through the wet, eerie underworld. Strange, subterranean shapes and shadows danced around us like phantoms dancing around a fire. The craggy, porous surfaces of the rocks assumed every feature, face and form our nervous and vivid imaginations endowed them with.

When we had entered a vast area with more stalagmites and stalactites (which were bigger than we’d ever seen) the child-king turned sharply and out of sight as we found ourselves weaving through a forest of conical giants until we came upon some steps which we hadn’t seen until the last second, hidden as they were among the rocks. We ascended for a while before we continued on level ground. Now the rock formations were larger than ever, the stalactites dipping down precariously over our heads, the stalagmites rising up from below and all around us, some of them with bases that must have been a few meters in diameter. The child-king walked with a bounce in his step, oblivious to any topographic obstacles, light-footed as a gazelle.

“I’m going to show you something,” said the child-king as he walked on. When we had passed through the largest of the forest of rocks, I also noticed a change in Gretchen’s face. She was frightened and she didn’t want to continue, though she did so hesitantly behind the child-king.

“Are you frightened?” I asked Gretchen, and she looked up at me with furrowed brows and a protruding lower lip in a drooping frown.

“All the children are frightened,” replied the child-king. “None of them come here. But I want you to see it. You won’t be frightened.”

The path narrowed once again as we ascended a ridge and found ourselves standing before a dark, stony passage, only a half-meter wide. The child-king stood hesitantly before the entrance. Gretchen clutched at his tunic and shielded herself with his body. The child-king told Gretchen to wait outside and he left her his torch, which she had to rest on the ground and balance up with both hands. Argus said someone had to look after the little girl and so graciously volunteered to stay outside with her.

“Here we are,” said the boy, turning to us.

“Where does this entrance lead?” asked Ariadne suspiciously.

“Don’t worry,” replied the child-king, smiling reassuringly. “It’s not just an entrance; it’s also an exit.”

Ariadne and I followed the boy into the passageway. There was a feeling of uneasiness in me. The darkness inside was so thick, so heavy, so oppressive, that it seemed to have body, weight and density to it. Even our remaining torch seemed useless, for it illuminated nothing and its flames were all that we could see. The air grew colder. We could still gain a sense of orientation from the narrow rocky walls around us, but then we lost even that palpability. The lack of orientation grew nauseating. It even felt like the rocky ground beneath our feet had disappeared, as if we were walking in pure space! I looked down at myself but could see nothing, not even my hand, which I had placed directly in front of my eyes. I called out to the boy, but I couldn’t even hear my voice. We were indeed in pure space, or some sort of vacuum where sound didn’t carry and where even we were non-existent. Our only point of reference remained the flame that we followed – and then that too disappeared.

Whether we were walking or floating I did not know, but we went forth in this void for some time before we could see a small ball of white light that we were approaching head on. The ball of light grew and grew until white hair could be seen to cover its entire surface. Soon we were standing directly in front of it. It was the back of an old man’s head. He seemed busy with something and did not turn to greet us, even though he was probably aware of our presence. Then his head started glowing even brighter and a light began radiating around him which illuminated the cave slowly. I looked and could now see my hand, my body, and eventually also my companions, Ariadne and the child-king. The full figure of this old man came into view. He seemed very weak, fragile, even moribund. His bones protruded from beneath the thin white cloth that draped loosely over his body. Around us, as the light increased, I could begin to make out shapes and forms. It was a small, cold, rocky cave with only the bare essentials: a wooden chair, a bed straw, a decrepit bookshelf with some tattered books. That was all. The old man was still sitting on the chair with his back turned to us. He got up and took a book from the shelf before him and sat back down facing us, all the while keeping his head lowered and his eyes out of sight. He fingered through the book in front of him slowly and carefully, as if looking for something. Then after having found one page in particular, he read carefully before leaning back and pausing for a moment, his eyes still lowered. He let out an almost inaudible sigh.

“Here I wait, a thousand years dead, having cut off the Minotaur’s head…” whispered the old man.

Was this the old man we had encountered in the first chamber of the Tortutron of Krak, the old man who had my eyes and my voice? Was I looking at my own dead and dying, tormented self, finally subjugated by my guilt, a prisoner of my conscience, rotting in this eternal hell? His voice was familiar, though the sound carried strangely in this cave, as if it had trouble penetrating the languid darkness, as if it was swallowed up as soon as it was spoken. The old man’s long white hair fell over his face as he turned another page of this strange book.

“…am I a manifestation of your hell, or are you a manifestation of mine?”

Having said this he sat back once again. I remembered the creature who had uttered this to me so long ago, at the beginning of my journey. Again the voice was strange but familiar. I felt ripples of electricity flood across my skull, the kind that rise in response to an eerie realization. It was as if the old man had a book in which was written the story of my time in hell, and he picked out quotes made, and perhaps would pick out quotes yet to be made, passages and pages yet to be written. He turned another page, and he read aloud:

“…to glisten in the sparkle of a young boy’s eyes…”

Again there was a silent pause before he read aloud once more.

“Welcome.”

The child-king went up to the old man and affectionately took up his hand. As the child spoke, the old man spoke with him, reading from his book the very same words that came from the child’s mouth. In chorus they said:

“They are here.”

The old man slowly looked up at us. Glaring at me behind the strands of white hair, I saw the unmistakable peacock eyes.


A Moment on Earth

And so he wrote. He had no more excuses. He had broken off the marriage. He had given himself time and space. He thought this would be better for her as well, but he knew deep down that he’d deserted her in her time of need. He also knew that she’d lost her faith in him. He felt bitter about this. It gnawed at him. This freedom he’d claimed for himself turned out to be no different than before. In fact, it turned out to be his prison. He was not relieved. He felt guilty. He felt low. When he thought about his pregnant fiancée, when he thought about his child, he felt sick. Now he was confronted by an even more daunting task: to live up to the sacrifices he had forced upon another – upon her. He had no more excuse for procrastination or failure, he had no more distractions. He had to work, he had to write. But he found the pressure even more intense, and the outer distractions and responsibilities that he had fled from were now inside of him. His anxieties were more internalized than ever, and he felt like he was slowly suffocating.

He still went regularly by her house, and he checked up on her. But it was a sham. Although he tried to let himself believe that he did this as a good deed, to compensate for his flight from that very house, he knew that he was only going there to procrastinate and to alleviate within him the burden of guilt that was weighing on his conscience. She would not even greet him. They were too far apart now. He had already left her flat and moved in with a friend. He tried to make it work, but realized it was futile. When a woman gives her love, she gives her whole self, she gives everything. Once given, there’s no turning back. Either the man affirms it and lives up to it, or he must lose her forever. He tried to stay involved, but he felt shut out. She only tolerated him because he was the father of her child. He felt secondary to his child, and he had the sickening realization that he was redundant in their life. When there, he felt outnumbered and unwanted, as if the child’s eyes were piercing him through its mother’s womb.

He tried to write. He thought of these trials in his life and thought how it would make good material for his writing. But somehow he couldn’t. These trials, these emotions were still too close to him, too close to the bone, too charged. He was still living them and so found it impossible to distance himself enough from his emotions and circumstances to be able to take them on objectively. He needed the distance of memory, and that was something that only time could grant him. But time was something he did not have. There was only Now. The future was Now, and without affirming it he knew there would never be a future. And so the nausea continued. He slept badly, he ate less and less. He lay in a pool of cold sweat every morning. When he wrote he felt rushed, he felt impatient, and he ended up leaving his desk and going for long, lonely walks as a world of troubles swam around his head and led him away from everything that he had felt was important to him. He felt – in one word – panic.

She told him that she had quit her job. They fought. All their pent-up hostility, shame, insecurity and guilt flew out in recriminations and accusations. His estrangement made her selfish, her reclusion made him a coward, their child made them both ashamed, ashamed they had erred, ashamed that they could not live up to their responsibilities, ashamed that they were to blame for everything to come. Doors slammed, phones slammed, silence without solace again held sway. Their souls dangled on butcher’s hooks, gutted, eviscerated and flayed.


12. The Old Man

I have always been here,
Here, in the darkest corners of your mind,
In the lost opportunities,
And the regrets and failures of your life…

I have been here to show you the way,
So that you can find me,
I have been here to show you the way,
To kill me, but not despise me…

When Ariadne and I had gotten over our initial dismay, we approached the old man and sat opposite him, on some rocks. The light in the cave was improving, or our eyes were adjusting, because I could spot patterns on the walls. They were faces. They were so realistic and expressed such varied human expressions that – rather than having been carved into the rock – it seemed the rock had grown over them in one sudden, violent surge, trapping a momentary gesture for eternity. I looked back down at the Devil who was once again reading from his strange book.

“Follow thy tears back to thy heart…” uttered the old man, reading from his book.

“I have to say, Lucifer, I didn’t expect to encounter you here,” I said.

The old man kept reading without even looking up. His lips moved silently and quickly. Then he ceased his reading, reclined back in his chair, and finally looked up at us with serious eyes. It was a strange sight to see: it was my own body in old age, but with the peacock eyes that were the Devil’s. The old man finally spoke after a drawn out silence.

“Where else would you expect to find me? I have never been anywhere else.”

This sounded just like the Devil’s cryptic, riddling self. Yet there was indeed a difference. I didn’t know what it was exactly. It was something subtle, perhaps even minuscule, something that was not only not obvious but not even visible. But something was different. This old man was neither me nor the Devil, though he was indeed a bit of both, it seemed. In fact I had the strange feeling that I could see in this man’s features the face of every person I’d ever seen. It seemed ridiculous, for it was not a chameleon’s face that he possessed, ever-changing. It was one face, one unchanging face, yet it was all faces. I could see people I knew in his face, people I’d loved, people I’d forgotten, people who’d forgotten me. I could see Ariadne in his face, and I’m sure Ariadne could see me.

“But I have seen you before, have I not?” I said. “In the Tortutron of Krak? I have heard your voice. I have seen your eyes. I know your body. I know you.”

The old man smiled and all of a sudden I jumped out of my place as I saw that all the faces that protruded from the walls around smiled with him. The old man noticed that both Ariadne and I were startled.

“Here we are, face to face to face to face…” and his voice echoed on long after he had closed his mouth.

The child-king stood by the old man’s side and making the most of the silence he spoke.

“They’ve had ever so difficult a time finding you!”

“I wasn’t aware that we were looking for him,” I responded. The child-king and the old man smiled.

“Then how else could you have found me?” asked the old man.

“And who are you?” interceded Ariadne with the most pertinent question of all. “Who are you then old man?” she repeated.

But the old man didn’t immediately answer. He sat back and he looked off into the distance, over our shoulders and away, as if something could be seen in that pitch-black, oppressive darkness.

“Look behind you,” he said.

When we turned to look behind us we found anything but darkness. There, stretching out before our eyes as far as we could see, were distant mountains, oceans, valleys and lakes and islands and lands in all shades of red and blue and green. It was as if we were looking upon this infernal world from a great distance, as if from space. It was by now a very familiar world to me. I recognized it immediately. It was hell. Above it stretched the endless void, full of stars, infinite and inconceivable.

“You see stretching out behind you the realm of your mind,” said the old man to me, even though Ariadne had asked the question. “You see the universe that you inhabit. You see the hell that has been your ordeal. You see your companions, you have your memories, you recognize yourself, but let me ask you this: do you now know who you are?”

As ridiculous as this question sounded, as sure as I was of myself, and although I had confronted this question before, I could still not say who I was. I remained silent. It was the only response I could give.

“You remember many things,” the old man continued. “You recognize many things. But a name? A simple name is something you cannot remember? But what’s in a name, you’ll say. What is in a name? Nothing. Like a face, nothing. You cannot recognize a being from either, and you cannot recognize yourself through either. You cannot recognize me from a mere face either, so what makes you think you can recognize me from a name? Who am I? How can I answer that? But look behind you, look and see the universe of your mind and recognize yourself – and me.”

The old man brought his gaze back down to the strange book that was opened in front of him. He seemed to be reading again.

“Do you know who I am?” I asked the old man, who answered me without looking up.

“Perhaps you want to know if you have a name. And perhaps you do have a name. In fact I know you do. But you could be anyone. You could be any man, and any man could be you. There lies your answer.”

“You speak like the Devil himself!” said Ariadne testily. “And you also seem to have his eyes.”

As the old man’s eyes were fixed on his reading, Ariadne threw me a stealthy look and whispered: “He can change his form, but he can’t hide his eyes. This looks like another of his tricks.”

“The Devil?” replied the old man, eyes still on his book. “Yes, perhaps I do resemble him…” Here the old man looked up at Ariadne with his peacock eyes. “But I can assure you, dear girl, that I do not perform his tricks for him… not anymore.”

We were taken aback by the old man’s keen sense of hearing and recoiled at our own carelessness. The old man continued reading as he turned a page. Then he flicked back a few pages in his book and seemed to find something he’d been looking for. He read aloud.

“True freedom does not exist, but that does not mean it is unattainable… Indeed!” He laughed as he flipped back to the previous page.

“So you know him? The Devil, I mean…” asked Ariadne.

“Yes,” said the old man in a weary tone. He continued reading out loud.

“Don’t let go, lest you be swallowed up forever.”

“And do you know us? Do you know me?” I asked.

“Of course. I have manifested you.”

I felt indignant. This old man was telling me that I was the mere figment of his imagination, when all along I thought I was the mere figment of mine! I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, and I suspected trickery. Perhaps Ariadne was right, perhaps this was indeed another diabolical trick of the Devil’s. Her instincts were never wrong. She looked at me with steadfast eyes, a look that was both comforting and militant.

“How is it you are sure, old man, that you are not a manifestation of mine?”

“Who said I wasn’t?”

I now approached this encounter with utmost care, suspecting any moment to be snared by some diabolical twist of logic. I felt Ariadne’s body touching mine. She was giving me her support. This gave me a surge of confidence.

“Explain yourself old man… we are then a manifestation of each other’s? How is this possible?”

The old man seemed to be looking wearier by the moment. He seemed even more decrepit than when we had met him, but I suspected this may have been part of his trickery.

“How is it possible, you ask, when you know me all too well.”

I thought of his words, “am I a manifestation of yours, or are you a manifestation of mine…” I looked into his peacock eyes. It was indeed the Devil. And it was the end. Finally, his time had come. I knew at that moment that he wasn’t up to any tricks. I recalled his various forms: as the kindred spirit, the serpentine riddler, the gentleman, the horned beast… I never thought that I could envision the Devil as an old, dying man. But here he was, spent, broken, waiting for his fate to finally claim him, his physical appearance reflecting his own degeneration. I felt sorry for him at that moment.

“How is it possible for the flower to exist without the bee, or the bee without the flower?” continued the old man.

And I had seen that kindred spirit, we saw each other as hideous monsters, as hunchbacks, and we manifested each other in our own image…

“How can you conquer your sorrows if your sorrows do not offer themselves for conquest?”

And I had been granted entry into the great Heart by having passed the serpentine riddler’s gate, above which I had read those words… “Follow thy tears back to thy heart…”

“How can you face your weaknesses if you do not know your weaknesses?”

And I remember meeting the Devil and witnessing the production of Ideals in the Mines of the Elixir… I remember wandering through his cube of tortures, I remember being that which I despised and being the despiser, I remembered being the monster and the slayer in the labyrinth, I remembered being the One and the Other on the Isle of Knowledge, I remembered it all as every moment of my journey flooded through my head…

“How can you affirm your destiny without killing your fate?”

And I remember defeating the Devil, I remember ascending the throne of the great hall in the great heart, I remember kissing Ariadne, I remember my omnividance, I remember my omnissence, I remember my will to freedom, my will to inessence…

“How can you not kill the old for the sake of the new?”

And I saw the child-king and I remembered the phantom that proclaimed the coming of Namyna…

The old man opened his book and he read.

“Must one not overthrow the tyrant to escape the tyranny?”

And I remembered what the Devil had said. I had to kill to succeed. I had to kill the tyrant king. For there to be a victor there must be a loser…

“The Book!” I exclaimed, and my eyes were fixed upon it.

“Yes, the book,” said the old man.

“It’s written there isn’t it!? Everything…”

As I spoke, the old man spoke with me simultaneously, in chorus. He knew every word I would say and he said them with me…

“Everything/Everything is/is written/written in/in the/the book/book… it/it is/is my/my Thanatography/Thanatography.”

I staggered back. There was a deathly silence and the old man looked up at me.

“At last you have arrived…”

“I have arrived…”

“To/To kill/kill you/me.”

“And when I kill you…” I said.

“We will both be free,” he finished.


A Moment on Earth

One morning, feeling sick and alone, it hit her: the absolute emptiness of the universe. Love had failed. Faith had failed. History had failed. Philosophy had failed. Family had failed. Humanity had failed. He had failed. She had failed. Life had failed. The universe was an empty, lonely failure.

Her child would also fail, and her children’s children would fail. Love would also fail them, the world would fail them, life would fail them. On and on it would go – the great cycle of failure. Only death awaited with any certainty, as every man, woman and child, indeed every generation, would live, seek, fail and wither. The natural state of the universe was non-existence. In such a universe, death was the only affirmation, the only vindication. Death for her and death for her child. She would go it alone, they would go it alone, they who shared the same womb, they who were two hearts in one body. They would go it alone, but what for? What was the purpose? Merely to prolong their own suffering and the suffering of their race? No. Death for them – that was the only option. She wished she could take the entire human race with her, to start again, to end this misery that was existence. She wished she could take everything with her, to destroy everything that had ever left any trace of her own being. The earth, the stars, the planets, the entire universe would perish once and for all and then there would be peace. This would be the only way to relieve a heavy heart, to fix a tortured soul, to mend a tormented mind. Annihilation was her precocious fate.

These morbid thoughts flooded through her mind before she would start crying, feeling guilty for having thought such things, guilty for feeling like both a murderer and a victim. She needed help. She felt her child’s pain in her womb when she had these thoughts. And the child felt her pain – the unwanted, unfortunate child. It was excruciating. She was agonized with guilt. She was alone now, completely and utterly alone. She tried one last time to reach out to him, to find him, but he wasn’t there. He was never there anymore. She couldn’t do this alone. She thought she could, but she couldn’t. She only hoped now that he would forgive her.

She could hear her child crying out from within her womb. And the fetus’ voice emanated from her own mouth in the form of a shrill and terrifying scream. She writhed in agony. She told her child to hush, but the child would scream on and on, over and over again. She told the child to be still, but the screams kept emanating from her womb, ripping through her heart, tearing through her throat and escaping from her mouth. Her child wouldn’t listen to her. She wanted the child to shut up. She couldn’t bear it anymore. The loneliness, the despair, the emptiness, the guilt… the child must shut up… the screams… SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP! She punched herself in the stomach, repeatedly, over and over again, but the screams just kept getting louder, the child wouldn’t stop. She kept punching and punching but the screams just grew louder and louder… She felt the pain in the womb, but it would not be long now, it would all be over soon. And with every strike, the screams grew louder. Tears ran down her face, down her cheeks, down her neck, dripped on to her breasts, flowed over her stomach and flooded over her womb. Every fist that came down threw up splashes of her own tears. Still the screams went on and on… Finally, she reached for a knife and with one final, deadly strike, the screaming ceased. There was peace again. There was harmony again. There was, above all, relief. The world sped away from her, and she saw it leave.

As she lost consciousness, lying in a pool of their own blood, she was relieved by the silence. When darkness descended over her eyes, she felt the cold grip of nothingness. Alone and silent, it felt as though the universe had reclaimed them. When they found her corpse in the apartment it was said that she had a smile on her face and that her hands embraced her bleeding stomach as if trying to protect her child from the world she had briefly exposed it to, only to save it from.

The last vision to pass through her mind was of her standing on a deserted isle wearing a white wedding dress, with her brown hair waving in the wind, gazing out on a strange red ocean, waiting for something she never knew she could find, nor ever retrieve…


13. Diabolicide

…While only the Minotaur,
Welcomed his fateful end…

“This is your thanatography,” said the old Devil, indicating the book. “Your fate has already been written in these pages.”

“The story of my death! Written by whom? By you, old man?”

“By both of us,” answered the Devil. “The Devil you have spawned is the keeper of your fate.”

Lucifer looked up at me with sad eyes. He had suffered his existence long enough. He had reached the end of the road. He sought my death blow, I who had called him into being was the only one who could now end him. I felt sad all of a sudden, as if I would lose a companion. I knew this was no trick. This is what the Devil had led me to, not only for my salvation but also his own. I felt I knew this ever since he took us captive, ever since Ariadne hurled her vitriolic invectives against him, her words which had cut through his heart and begun the degeneration of his spirit, a degeneration that had finally manifested itself through the form of this old man that sat pathetically before me. His physiognomy bespoke of his decay. But I bore no ill feeling. I knew that if he had not tried to defeat me, to capture me, to break me, then neither of us would amend ourselves and escape the clutches of hell. I also knew that he had guided me on the right path, though perhaps not the righteous one.

“My fellow infernaut, you have come this far. As you have grown stronger, so I have receded. And now you see me here in this hovel awaiting my fate as you await to finally conquer yours. I have wearied of my vacuous existence, an existence spent in the shadows of your mind and of your inferno, the existence of a specter, of a ghost, of nothing but idea… I have never tasted cherries, nor ever surrendered to the sweet arms of sleep. I have neither touched the skin of a woman nor ever felt the satisfaction of quenching thirst or sating hunger, or feeling the sun on my skin. I have been your torture, I have been your regret, your spite, your guilt, your lies. But you have no more need for me. You have overcome them, you have overcome me. Now finish the task. Destroy me, destroy the book, be free of your fate, be free of your hell.”

The resolve I had felt began to fade and slip. Only moments ago I would have accomplished the task without hesitation. It wasn’t out of pity for having to kill him, for I knew that it would be cruel not to. It was out of curiosity: curiosity for the book, my thanatography! I wanted desperately to read it. My eyes were staring directly upon its open pages. The Devil suddenly seemed alarmed and quickly closed it with a stern and scolding look in his small, dark, beady peacock eyes. But I couldn’t take my mind off of it. The Devil spoke with a loud voice.

“You have now come to finish the task at hand. To kill me and to destroy this book.”

I kept my eyes on the book. I felt suddenly obsessed with it. I wanted to read it, I wanted to see my future, to see what would happen. I had to…

“I want to read the book first,” I said commandingly.

Ariadne was now alarmed as she sensed my change of tone and the danger that I was having difficulty avoiding. She turned to me and grabbed me by the arms.

“Get a grip of yourself. Don’t you see that this is another of his tricks? You’re too gullible. He has snared you by putting the thought of the book in your head. He wants to destroy you. He knows this is his last chance. Be on your guard, he wants anything but to be killed… are you listening to me?”

My eyes were still entranced by the hideous book. Its pages were inviting my eyes as if a spell had been put over me. I remembered passages that the old Devil had just recited, passages from the book. I suddenly wanted to read it, to learn more, to learn... my fate.

The child-king also seemed alarmed and didn’t know exactly what was going on. Ariadne turned and looked maliciously at the Devil, as if to let him know that she was on to him. The Devil still had a pathetic expression on his face. I made for the table where the book lay under the Devil’s clawed old hands. Ariadne prevented me from going any further.

“Don’t do this! Look at me! Look me in the eyes…” she pleaded, but I didn’t listen.

I pushed Ariadne aside violently and made for the book. The Devil’s hands were still on the closed cover. I looked in his eyes and I thought I saw a flash of red, and then the Devil slowly moved his hands from on top of the book, leaving it completely exposed to me. I was trembling with anticipation. I wanted to know what was to happen to me, to all of us. I wanted to know the answers. I wanted to know who I was.

“Don’t do it!” shouted Ariadne desperately from behind me. The child-king was worried and came up to me with the torch, but I pushed him away too. I had to read the book. Ariadne made one final, forceful lunge that surprised me, but I soon wrestled her down and pushed her away. She began crying and pleading with me, begging me not to do it. My hand went forward toward the book. The Devil still looked at me sternly, but he couldn’t hide the sparkle in his animal eyes. I noticed it, I saw it, yet I was mesmerized and could do nothing against this spell that had been cast over me by the book. I touched the cover and a cold chill ran down my spine as I did. I moved my fingers over the surface, feeling its beautiful, thick, smooth leather binding. Ariadne was crying out, repeating over and over: NO, NO, NO. My thumb rested on the side of the cover, my index finger moved down vertically over the thick and solid stack of pages. I felt my heart racing in my chest, I felt excited. But then I halted. What if I couldn’t handle what I was to read? And if I read it, how could I ever escape its implications? If I would know everything that was to happen, I would be a slave to that knowledge. I would not be able to think of anything else. I would truly be a victim of my fate. The Devil would assume his mastery over me at last. He was cunning. This was perhaps his last chance at victory. Through such ratiocination I tried to shake myself out of this spell. But my hand remained on the book. I felt beads of sweat forming over my brow. Ariadne continued pleading with me. The child-king was looking on in confusion, the torch still in his hand. The Devil was silent and didn’t take his eyes off me for a second.

I slowly raised the cover of the book, but before I could see what was inside, I felt arms wrap around my legs and take me down on to the floor. Ariadne had me pinned down. This only seemed to strengthen my resolve in reading the book. I wrestled against her, but she was just as determined as I was. She screamed at the child-king…

“BURN THE BOOK! BURN THE BOOK WITH THE TORCH!”

The child-king was frozen and didn’t know what to do. He looked at the Devil and the Devil smiled at him and extended his hand asking for the torch from the child. The child-king hesitated between Ariadne and the Devil.

“DON’T DO IT! IT’S A TRICK, DON’T GIVE HIM THE TORCH,” shouted Ariadne, but I was now overpowering her as she grew tired. I finally pinned her down. I told her not to worry, that everything would be alright, that I just wanted to read a little. She cried and kept repeating over and over that it was a trick, that it would be the end of me – the end of us. I got up on my feet as she lay on the floor in tears. She had given up hope now and accepted the consequences. The child-king was afraid. The Devil snatched the torch from him, and the only resistance he encountered was the tense grip of the stressed boy’s contracted muscles and strained nerves. Ariadne was lying still, motionless and resigned to her fate. The boy backed up into the cold walls of this miserable cave. I stood before the book, as did the Devil – on the other side of the table – with the flaming torch in hand. I felt the air grow heavy and warm, as if it were suffocating me.

The Devil’s eyes became red and they were gazing straight into mine – powerful, despite the old man’s demeanor; forceful, despite his debilitation. I tried to get a grip of myself, to avert this calamity, to avoid falling prey to my fate, to escape the captivity of guilt for all eternity. I looked again at the book before me. It invited me toward it. Its spell was powerful, my will felt weak and subjugated. I was being drawn irresistibly toward a task that I knew would enslave me. Everything would have been in vain. The Devil drew near.

“This is our book,” he said. “We have written this together, you and I. Open it and let yourself be revealed to you. Open it and forget your companions, forget this girl, forget this boy, forget everything, leave them be, affirm yourself… affirm ME!”

The torch flickered before his face, exacerbating his hideous features and his malicious eyes. Shadows danced over the cover of the book, whipped into life by the torchlight. This was the moment where I would succeed or I would fail. I felt the weight of the every man upon my shoulders, as if this was a decision for all humankind. My conscience was the conscience of every man, of any man. If I failed now I would fail not only myself but humanity.

“True freedom does not exist, but that does not mean it is unattainable…”

The words echoed in my mind.

“…to glisten in the sparkle of a young boy’s eyes…”

I looked at the child-king. He was the future. He was the young boy prophesied to me by the phantoms, by Namyna. He was me, he was Ariadne, he was our child, the child, he was every child, the child we had never had, the child we had never given a chance, the child we had regained, the child we could not any longer betray, the child we could not any longer forsake, the child we had lost, the child who would now save us from this hell we had created, who would lead us out and away to – dare I think it – freedom?

And then it was all crystal clear to me. I knew what I had to do. I approached the table where lay the book and my hand went toward it. The old Devil smiled smugly. Ariadne cried again. But my hand went directly over the book and all the way to the Devil’s throat. I looked into his peacock eyes and as I throttled his throat I saw fear descend over those small, beady eyes that had become so familiar to me. Contrary to my expectations, his throat was soft, vulnerable and yielding. I expected resistance. I expected his powerful arms to grab mine, to put up some sort of fight. But he was truly weak. He was old. I squeezed tighter and his little eyes bulged. He desperately put his torch-free hand on my arm, trying to shake himself free, but it was useless. He was too weak. I barely felt any pressure, just a cold, bony, withered hand. The child-king was still afraid. Ariadne couldn’t believe her eyes. She was slowly getting up, unable to take her eyes off what was unfolding. I reached out with my other hand and I grabbed the torch effortlessly from the Devil’s hand. I glanced at the book one last time, and despite feeling a moment’s hesitation, I kept to my task. The Devil saw his last chance vanish. He now knew what his fate was and seemed resigned to it. I stepped around the table and lay the Devil on the bed that was behind him. When I looked at it carefully I realized that it was not a bed at all but an altar, like an altar of sacrifice. The Devil was so debilitated and light that I could lift him by the throat. Ariadne and the boy came up next to me and watched with captivation as I lay the Devil on the altar and held him down with my hand.

“Bring me the book,” I said, and the boy brought it over.

“Give it to him,” I said, and the boy placed it on the Devil’s chest. The Devil wrapped his arms around it complacently.

“Goodbye Old Hornie. Looks like you lose,” I said, but the Devil just smiled.

“No, infernaut. It looks like we both win. The fate of Dionysus and Theseus was one and the same. We are two characters performed by the same actor, in the same play…”

I put the flames to the Devil’s body. It immediately caught fire. The fire spread onto the book and I heard the pages crackling. The thanatography was destroyed forever. The Devil’s body seemed to unite with the flames rather than be burned and destroyed by them, as if they were composed of the same element, as if the Devil was returning to his essence. He felt no pain, he felt no remorse. His eyes were the last to be swallowed up. I saw them for the last time as they disappeared among the flames.

His final words came as he was being consumed by the fire. I heard his voice whisper from amid the flames one last time…

“…Finally, Death has fulfilled its promise…”

Behind us, reappearing like an epiphany revealing itself in the darkness of the Devil’s cave, we saw the whole wretched inferno slowly implode before our eyes. The valleys and mountains and islands crumbled, the oceans were sucked in, and all the hideous, wretched manifestations and beings of a tormented mind vanished into thin air. The universe was shaken by a deafening, cataclysmic noise, and then all was peaceful again. With hell’s demise, the universe – and the cave – once again assumed its black, empty, silent aspect, illuminated only by the red glow of the dying flames.


A Moment on Earth

He felt a foreboding sense of dread as he approached her home. He could feel the eerie silence from the stairwell. Tears started welling in his eyes as he wrapped his palm around the door handle and inserted the key into the lock. He opened the door slowly. He saw her lifeless body laying in a pool of blood on the floor. He vomited. He lunged at her and tried to wake her up as he sobbed with cries of despair. He shook her violently, as if trying to redeem her. He was in shock. He couldn’t accept it. Her purple lips smiled at him in that one eternal moment that death had created and captured. He rested her head on his lap and stroked her beautiful brown hair with his trembling hands. His tears dripped down his face, his cheeks, his chin, and on to her lifeless skin, leaving a moist path of memories, regrets and sorrow across the elegant contours of her body and face.

He could never forgive himself. He would never forgive himself as long as he lived. He had killed her. He had abandoned her. He was a murderer. And he had killed his child, his very own flesh and blood, the flesh and the blood that was now smeared upon his hands. The guilt made him sick. He was hyperventilating. He threw up again, but only with dry heaves. His hands shook so violently that he couldn’t hold anything. The room swam around his head like a nightmare. Anything he looked at seemed strange, unfamiliar, alien, hostile. When he had steadied his nerves he called an ambulance. He was able to control his trembling voice just long enough to give them an address.

He fixed his eyes upon her. She looked so beautiful, even under death’s spell. He covered her body with a blanket, as if to keep her warm. He kept stroking her hair and whispering to her under his breath, “It’ll be alright, it’ll be alright, it’ll be alright.” The world had stood still for him. Everything stood still. No noises or sounds, nothing before his eyes but her. The stillness, the tranquility surprised him. One by one the memories of her passed before his eyes. He thought he would dread them. He thought he wouldn't be able to withstand their weight upon his conscience. But he did. They unfolded before him like a soothing epitaph in honor of her. He relived the journey of their lives and their love along the contours of her face and body. He relived every moment that they had held each other and kissed each other, every word that had passed through her lips, every time he had looked at her and felt his heart beat faster, every time he felt that tiny moment’s happiness that made his heart jump every time he saw her, every time he heard her voice, every time she uttered his name. It was those tiny moments that he remembered the most vividly. He smiled. He would miss it forever; he would never hear her voice or see her face again. She would never look him in the eyes the way she used to and utter his name to him again. He wished he could forget his name. He didn’t want to hear anybody else utter it. He didn’t want to hear it ever again.

He rocked back and forth with her head, and like a lullaby he repeated over and over, “It’ll be alright, it’ll be alright, it’ll be alright.” Gradually, surprisingly, he felt a strange sense of relief. Everything felt unburdened within him. He had made a decision. He had made the only decision he could make. He dreaded it at first, but now he was relieved. It was a choice of life and death. It was a choice of being and oblivion.

The ambulance arrived. The paramedics in white robes entered like anachronistic priests performing a thousand year-old ceremony. He gazed at her face for the last time. He felt happy. He would destroy himself. He would destroy the universe. It would all be over. Finally, there would be an end. Finally, he would be free of himself…

Finally, finality.


14. A Belated Union

…Like pixies dancing on a hill…

The child-king picked up the torch from amid the last glowing embers on the altar upon which the Devil and the thanatography had been destroyed. I looked to Ariadne with gratitude, but also with shame at having been so weak as to nearly banish us all to a miserable, eternally recurring doom. I sought her forgiveness and she granted it with her relieved and joyous eyes. The book was destroyed, the Devil was no more. I looked at our child-king. The old had died, the new had been born for us. The child-king was now our destiny, just as the Devil had been our fate.

We went back the way we had come. Where we had seen the hellish epiphany crumble and fade, there was now only darkness. The torch bobbed and flickered before us until we had left the Devil’s tomb and emerged in the great cavern where we encountered our old friend Argus and little Gretchen. It was a happy moment for us all. The weight of the universe had lifted off our shoulders and there, in this strange realm that was neither hell nor heaven, that was perhaps some strange and forgotten corner of my own psyche, I was standing with those that I loved, those who were my companions, those who had endured and suffered with me, those who had discovered and overcome with me, those who had been there by my side throughout this journey. And what a strange assortment of companions they were: they who were all that was left of my universe, they who had been by my side, to help save me from this fate that had indeed been worse than death. I had started this journey alone. In life I had betrayed my beloved and chosen solitude even at the price of begetting intolerable regrets that haunted me into oblivion. It is a limited and unenviable person who has not learned to value solitude, but the person who has not learned to value companionship seemed to me just as limited and unenviable.

Argus, my strange and beloved cephalodrone, was arguing with Gretchen, that little soul of innocence and youth, about something concerning the volatile personalities of female piscemots. Gretchen listened to Argus reveal the strange creatures of the netherworld to her. Next to me Ariadne wiped the dirt and sweat from her brow, and despite everything she’d been through, she smiled the one smile that could console my heart with its warmth. And the child-king was like my own son – like our own son. I saw in him a new chance, a new future, a new beginning. Gretchen jumped and shouted with joy when she saw him and he took her in his arms and lifted her up and twirled her around, shouting her name as she giggled away. It was an endearing sight, the five of us there at that moment, like true companions. In every precious moment I could see the ravages that would be wrought by chance and the inevitable erosion of time. No sooner was I aware of what I had, I was aware of what I’d lose. I was conscious of the fleeting and ephemeral nature of every moment. I used to be saddened by this, by thinking only of the ironic presence of inevitable loss that was inherent in every moment of my existence. But this feeling I had now was different. I treasured the moment and treasured that which was reached, rather than wallowing in that which would inevitably be lost. At least, I thought, the moment was lived, and that was the important thing. I took Ariadne in my arms and I closed my eyes and kissed her, letting the moment linger on, as if feeling grateful for her proximity. I kissed her again and looked her in the eyes and thanked her for being by my side. It was a nice moment.

Argus finished explaining the pseudanrons to Gretchen, and the child-king let out a little laugh and told us to follow him.

“Pseudandrons are nothing compared to what we just saw, isn’t that right?” said the child-king excitedly. “Come, we’d better get back… there is a surprise for you!”

The child-king ran on ahead with Gretchen running behind him. We wound our way back through the strange caverns, through the forest of giant stalagmites, up rocky ridges and down steep declines. Argus asked us question after question about what had transpired, to which we all answered as we knew best. The incongruous features on the surfaces of the rocks which we had passed with a foreboding sense of despair and fear before now seemed to us tranquil and serene, reflecting our own spirits in their lithiognomy. Soon we heard the distant sounds and laughter of the children, and it fell like sweet music on our ears.

We emerged once again in the main cavern where the children greeted us with an amazing scene of festivity. They had been expecting us and they had dressed the cavern in ribbons and colors. They even had flowers – thousands of flowers! The floors of the cavern were covered in them. Their hair and their little hands were full of them. Life was bursting all around us in whites and reds, yellows and purples. They cheered as we returned and threw the flowers at us and jumped up and down with joy. We were all moved by this spectacle and none of us could keep ourselves from laughing like children. They jumped up at us and we carried some on our arms and some on our shoulders. The child-king tried to open a path for us through this carnival of infants, but he soon gave up the effort. Again we were bombarded by questions, so many and so frequent that it was impossible to satisfy any one of them with an answer before there were another three questions hurtling our way.

“What did the old man do?”

“Was the old man a monster?”

“Did you kill the old man like you killed the demons?”

“Is he still there?”

“Was he waiting for you a long time?”

“Were you afraid of the forest of stone?”

“Did the shadows follow you?”

As the children swarmed around us from all sides, so too with their collective mass they guided us toward the small wooden door of their secret, eternal hideaway. With fanfare and ribbons and laughter, songs and dancing and skipping, our little carnival followed the child-king out of the cavern and through the dark tunnel until we emerged once more in the great hall where there was another massive throng of children all assembled around the peacock throne. We were again amazed by this spectacle, and then we ourselves were taken on the shoulders of the children. Dozens lifted each of us up over their shoulders and led us toward the peacock throne. Argus flew excitedly overhead, taking in the festivities with utter delight. The children that were between us and the throne parted to reveal a red carpet leading up to the throne. Flower petals of all colors and sizes were sprinkled over the entire hall. A large choir of children burst into song from behind the throne. Their angelic little voices lit up the entire hall of the great Heart with their song.

… Happy are the eyes left blinded by the sun,
When once they’ve seen the light,
Happy are the souls taken by the sea,
When once they knew not to swim or fight,
Happy are the two who will now become one,
Emerging from the long and eternal night,…

As they sang we were led toward the throne by the children. I looked to Ariadne, who was laughing, and saw that they had placed a garland of flowers on her head. They did so upon mine as well. Two little girls skipped before us throwing petals left and right. The child-king jumped up on the dais and sat on the throne as we approached. The children let us down on our feet. The choir finished their song. The child-king rose to speak before us, and the excited hall eventually became quiet as we all waited to hear what the child-king would say. He bore himself like a king now. It was strange to think that I had begun thinking it a game and referring to the boy only playfully as a little “king,” but he had filled out into this character perfectly. For a king was considered by me something pertaining to riches, pomp, ceremony, ostentation, blood, and a million other meaningless details. But this child proved himself a king without recourse to such silliness. His innocent childishness seemed so much more significant and noble than all the inanities that complemented the roles of royalty. The child was natural and simple, but wise beyond his years. He was loved and he was looked up to. His nobility was that of character, not of blood. His importance was within him, not around him, not appended to him. He was not vain, for he knew his worth and did not need to justify himself by seeking flattery. He knew that flattery was like cheating, like trying to win somebody’s recognition without having to earn it. The old king was annihilated. This boy was now the true inheritor of the Peacock Throne.

“Brothers and Sisters!” the child-king called out to this happy gathering. “We have joyfully gathered here at last to bind these two souls in a union that had once been denied them – if not denied by them. We have passed away the ages here in our little realm, our distant and forgotten hideaway, waiting for this moment as if it were a moment on earth, as if for a brief time we could step out and imagine life again as we knew it, as we wanted it, as we remembered and wished for it. I know each and every one of you has waited for this moment. And we thought it would not come. We thought only of loss and of that which was left behind. But our patience has borne the fruit of its endeavors, and our perseverance has carried the weight of its sacrifices. And here they stand now before us…”

He looked at Ariadne and me now with tender and affectionate eyes, as did the entire gathering in the great hall.

“…Their story is one that has begun together and it must now unite. For we are all headed for something wonderful, something… beautiful! And they will reach it together. They who have shared the same fate will fulfill the same destiny. They have wallowed in the netherworld of their minds for long enough. They have conquered themselves. They have looked themselves in the eyes many times. They have faced the demons and the Devils of their minds…”

The crowd of children let out their accustomed collective gasp upon hearing of such creatures…

“…In short, my brothers and sisters, our guests have not betrayed us. Our guests have not betrayed themselves. They have come through and they have saved us. Now it is our turn to unite them once and forever with the eternal bonds of their loving embrace… You may now hug!”

Ariadne and I faced each other, happier than we ever remembered being, and we embraced. The great hall rose up in a roar.

“…And you may now kiss!”

And we kissed. Two children ran up on to the dais and handed the child-king two crowns of leaves and branches which were placed upon our heads, over the garland of flowers.

“…And with the crown of poplar leaves… I now pronounce you… MAN AND WOMAN!! You may now exchange vows!”

Ariadne and I looked each other in the eyes. The children hushed in anticipation of our own words. She looked as beautiful as the day I had met her. Her pale face glowed, her brown hair shone, her rosy lips quivered. I held her by the shoulders and I recited the words that had been etched in our hearts, in the Heart.

Now come sweet love, let’s take this land,
And let our differences stand,
If one may come to wither,
The other will be at hand,
Thus we both shall bend and meet,
Eternal in this wedding band,
And with this vow I share with you,
Those forests and flowers,
Once more we shall plant.

The entire hall went up in a roar and the choir sang, the children danced, the child-king clapped his hands and Gretchen imitated him. Ariadne and I kissed, and as we did we imagined ourselves under the poplar tree once again.

We hugged the child-king and Gretchen, put them on our shoulders, and we danced away in the great Heart like children, like innocence, like the living. And the impromptu choir of children sang a song from a distant summer’s day, long ago and far away…

…A little ray of sun
Like pixies on a hill
A little ray of sun
Found these two hearts still beating
After the long winter chill…


A Moment on Earth

Dawn awoke the cold, dark morning with its first timid rays of light. The sound of the scissors snipping around his head complemented the feeling of the tufts of hair that fell lightly upon his naked body, with the sound and the touch imprinting a single entity upon his senses. One could not occur without the other. They were manifested together. They would be or they would not be together. And now they would cease to be together. The clippers hummed around his ears and glided across his skull. The individual snips and drops now succumbed to a constant humming and a constant sprinkle of itchy little hairs that sprayed all over his body with annoying consistency. When he was done he ran his fingers along his skull for the first time in his life and closed his eyes as he enjoyed the touch of the tiny bristles of hair running smoothly, uniformly, without variation across the surface of his skull and beneath his palm. He admired the shape of his skull, the lumps he never knew were there, the blemishes and scars and moles that heralded the discovery of a new part of his body, the feeling of skin that had been touched for the first time, tender and sensitive to the light, as if breathing in the air for the first time and with relish. He explored its surface, its strange new features and contours, its imperfect symmetry. The stimulation of his senses excited him, as did the discovery of a whole new aesthetic perspective to himself, to the world. He opened his eyes and beheld his freshly shorn head. He was looking at a new being. His features had never looked like this, his eyes had never been so large and clear, the cheek bones had never been so high, his jaw had never seemed so strong, his nose had never seemed so prominent. Most of all he was surprised by his nakedness, the physical nakedness that even exposed his character, his soul. He had no hair to hide behind, no superfluous aesthetic tricks to balance the unbalanced and meliorate the faults and disguise the conscience. He was now raw, naked and true. He went under the shower and decided to take it cold. He never had, but he thought somehow, for some reason, that it would be apposite. When he got over the momentary shock, he relished the invigoration of the icy cold drops that rained all over him like liquid acupuncture, soothing his nerves with their crisp and unwavering penetration. His heart beat faster, his blood flowed freer, his mind opened, his muscles tightened, his skin colored, his adrenalin pumped and, more than anything, he was delighted by the feeling of the little cold drops raining upon his shaved scalp. He closed his eyes again. He felt purified by his hyperborean ablution. It was like a catharsis.

But he knew it had come too late. He wanted to tear off his past from inside him, to rip out his memories, to destroy his heart, to banish his soul. He had to destroy himself. He knew he could not live anymore. There was nothing that could redeem him anymore. His catharsis was not aimed at survival or redemption; it was the first step to preparing himself for his destruction. He had taken the decision. It relieved him. Punishment was his only comfort now; to be punished, to suffer, to end it all, and then disappear. Only that would be condign. The pain of existence would be extinguished finally, brutally, mercifully by his own hands. He would purify himself as far as possible until all he would have left to destroy would be his being. His possessions would go, his clothes would be burned, his friends and family would be relinquished, his soul would be consigned to flame.

Naked and alone, shaved and cold, he stood before the mirror and looked into his own strange eyes.


15. Something Beautiful

And each life is but an orbit,
Around a distant sun,
Lost in a wayward galaxy,
Of the cosmos within…

Voices and song, laughter and happiness swam about our heads, as if palpable, as if painted into the air around us and consumed by our senses. The hall seemed to be swirling around us as we became dizzy with ourselves, with our little hosts, with our ascending fortunes and our conquered misfortunes. The touch of the little hands and the smiles on the little faces emitted a warmth that was disproportionate to the space they occupied in this universe, but equal with the place they occupied in our hearts. The spinning intensified, the hall whirled around our heads, the faces streaked and melted into one giant collage of colors, and soon we were riding out the levitation of our own spirits.

We let ourselves be carried up by the angelic melody of the children’s singing, our heads spinning and our hearts glowing, riding on the ascending waves of youth, love and innocence that had now flowed into the great Heart and imbued the great Hall with this regeneration and rebirth. The child-king sat on the Peacock Throne by our side as we rose slowly upward. When we opened our eyes and looked down, we saw the children spin away from us like a kaleidoscope of colors and sounds. They waved at us and kept singing even as their voices now faded into the distance that we left behind. Finally the hall of children was nothing but a bright circle below us. We watched until its enchanted image disappeared and sank back into the depths of the infinite hall.

Level after level of pillars and doors passed us by as we swirled upward, riding the crest of our wave of bliss. Level after level receded into the past we were leaving behind. The child-king, Argus and Ariadne, all of them whirled around me as I saw familiar shapes appear, emerging through the pillars from the passing doors in the passing levels. They were my own images at different stages of my life. One by one they came out of the doors, looked me in the eyes, and then jumped into the abyss and fell away from me, down into the endless depths of the great hall. Myself as baby, as a child, as an adolescent, and finally, as I remember seeing myself last: as a decrepit, emaciated, bloody man with a shaved skull. I jumped over and over again over the edge and disappeared into the depths of my own past, before my very own eyes.

The further we ascended, the more the light around us seemed to dim and fade. It grew darker and darker. It was harder to see the circular hall around us. Below us too, the great hall was dissipating into black, fading into nothingness. As it grew darker, there could be heard a very faint thumping sound. When it had grown almost pitch black around us, the thumping grew louder, and we could feel the vibrations left in the wake of each palpitation. It was the unmistakable palpitation of the Heart, of our hearts, and we shook with its every beat.

With the darkness came the inundation. A warm, thick, viscous flood surged up from beneath us and carried our dais, our throne, ourselves up with its immense force. The warm liquid splashed against us with the consistency of blood. And that’s what it was that was gushing all around us: blood. Into the blood had drowned, melted and sank the very hell we had left behind, the hell of my memories and my past, all had liquefied into the blood that now surged through this hall. From the darkness above us there arose a crimson glow, like an inner dawn. The walls and the pillars, the doors and the floors of the great hall had now transformed into a giant blood-red tube, like the inside of a vein. We were hurtling through this vein, riding the tides of blood. The beating grew loud, the walls of the vein contracted and dilated, the blood pushed us along at enormous speed.

Then everything went white…

I was looking directly into my own dead eyes.

Then everything went white…

The world imploded before my eyes.

Then everything was blue…

I saw Argus before me. The wings fell off the head, a body grew under it and it became a man, the man it used to be. He embraced me. This was the end of our journey together. I saw my face reflected in his eyes. They were living, intelligent eyes. His graceful figure floated slowly away from me and silently disappeared into a million atomic fragments that burst around us like a million stars as my friend and companion faded into the light, out of my universe and out of his existence.

And everything was blue…

I felt a small hand take mine. The child-king looked up into my eyes. By his other side was Ariadne. We floated upward through the whiteness, the three of us hand in hand, each one of us lighter than air, and lighter yet in our hearts. The sky was lit up with a million atoms that Argus had become. The atoms shined around us like stars and we floated through them, able to see each and every one of them, taking in their brilliance, their light, their now formless, primordial essence that seemed to guide our way. Argus was all around us, before us, above us, below us, within us. He was never so close as he was now.

And the blue grew darker, deeper, thicker…

A great gush of water arose below us like a river that had the volume of an entire ocean. It consumed us, and the roar of the waters became silent as we were immersed in it while being hurtled off at incredible speeds. There was no more fear, no more sorrow. The three of us held hands and blissfully rode out the blue swell. We hurtled past incredible underwater forms, sunken mountain ridges and deep, barren ocean valleys. We felt the cold and hot currents, the swells and the eddies, the fecundity and the desolation, the beauty and the bleakness, the simplicity and the inscrutability, claustrophobia and agoraphobia that brought to our senses the inherent contradiction of nature, of every vast, inhospitable expanse, every ocean, every sky, every desert, and that same contrast that infiltrated every rock, every pebble, every grain of sand, every atom. Subsumed as we were in these eternal waters, we let ourselves go to the forces around us, the forces that guided, created and formed us, and the same forces that would reclaim us and take us back into its primordial essence.

Then everything was red…

Red molten earth lifted us and shot us through crags and caves. The heat was a part of us, we were a part of it. And the heat did not affect us. The same awesome forces were at work now. We let the mysterious workings of the universe guide us through another realm of which every atom in our bodies was an integral part, yet we felt no anguish in our total lack of control over ourselves and our surroundings. There was an inevitability to our existence, and there was also an inevitability to our insignificance that made us feel part of something greater, happy to be insignificant, happy to be nothing but a part of a greater significance, happy to be thrown and caught, molded and shaped by a force that was to us only chaos and anarchy, but seemed in our hearts to be ingrained like a law.

The red tide lifted us further and further, pushing in all around us, hurtling us on at incredible speeds until we saw a black sky with white pearls and streaks of red glowing chunks of lava shooting all around us. We hurtled up in the darkness that was lit up by a million stars.

Then everything was black with little specks of light…

The heat gave way to cold, but we were unaffected. We were mere spirits born of a substance older than us to which we were now returning. Everything that had ever been was within us, and we were in everything. We were a part of everything. And names and faces and lives and petty memories no longer mattered. No longer did we feel hampered by an existence. No longer were we the captives of our conscience. No longer were we estranged, individualized, subjected and identitious. Such pettiness was melting away before us and around us and within us. Our being was no longer divided, it was shared.

We floated on through the starlit firmament, through the empyrean void, and the child-king’s hands held ours tight. We went faster and faster, and the stars began getting closer and closer. But they were getting closer from all sides. They were coming in on us, as if we were the centrifugal force toward which they were pulled. They became larger and larger and with their approach everything around us became brighter and brighter until it was almost a blinding light. In one instant, the stars all flooded in upon us, and all the matter, all the substance, all the atoms of the cosmos had swallowed us. We were at the center of the universe.

Then everything went white… and it was beautiful.


A Moment on Earth

He stared into the mirror, into his own green eyes. They looked like the eyes of a dead man already, as if he could see into his own future, into his own fate. The ticking of the clock behind him resonated and echoed around the room, becoming louder and louder as the sound magnified in his head. The chirping of a bird outside the window and the buzzing of a fly inside the room did not distract him from his gaze. Nearing the end, he was amazed at how honed his senses were. Sounds and colors were louder and more vivid than he had ever remembered them being throughout his short but all-too-long life.

A ray of sunlight that had momentarily escaped the besieging clouds streamed through the small window and reflected from the razor blade before him and into his eyes. He took the razor blade between his fingers and he held it up to his face. He could see his own face reflected in the smooth, clear, cold steel. “Perfection,” he thought. “Perfection, my love, more perfect than a cloud…” He heard the words escape his mouth and he shrank within as his own voice sounded strange and foreign to him. It sounded like the voice of an ogre. But he did not shed a single tear. The time of despair was over. It was now the time of decision, and it was a comfort to him. He thought of those placid, almost happy faces of soldiers who had frozen to death in a book he had looked though years ago, as a child. He realized now that to give up and surrender the ghost is a relief that the dying feel only as death takes hold of them. But he felt that relief even now, even before he had begun to kill himself. He already felt like a ghost.

He looked out the window one last time. He could hear an ant crawl up a tree, he could hear the air disperse under the wings of a bird. And he could see the ghosts now without trying, without looking for them, without seeking them, without remembering them. He saw the ghosts crowding the streets below, oblivious to him, oblivious to his plight, oblivious to the whole world. They came and went like phantoms, like apparitions of the mind. He thought he saw one of them look up and smile at him, but the bodies streaked away in a tail of light and every face was now an incongruous blur that evaded his gaze.

When he was back in front of the mirror, with the razor blade that had now become warm between his finger and thumb, he thought of himself. He thought of himself like he was another person, like he was any person, any person at all. He thought of himself and looked at himself from the outside. He looked at his shaved head, rough but clean, sleek but raw. He could be any man, he could be anyone. This comforted him. To think that one could feel such empathy, such a bond with all mankind while at the same time feeling such loneliness, such despair, the loneliness and despair of all mankind. He thought of Adonis, of perpetual death and rebirth, of the revolving seasons, of death for the sake of new life. He thought for the first time of Christ. To bear the weight of the world on one’s shoulders, to die so that others may live, to be Anyman, to see that you and I and all are Anyman, and Anyman is I… and you… and all.

The blade pressed into his skin, into his flesh. He saw his skin resist the pressure, sinking so deep without letting itself be torn. He thought it strange, even nonsensically heroic, how his body sought to preserve itself despite him. Soon the laws of physics prevailed over the unconscious will of the body. First a globule of dark red blood formed around the razor’s sunken corner. Then, as he dragged the razor down, the blood sprayed over his face and over the mirror. He felt his flesh and his veins tearing painfully as he looked into his bloody eyes reflected through the bloody mirror. He almost felt a kernel of regret for a brief second, but it quickly passed. He lay back in the tub. He felt life leaving him, draining out of him, fleeing him as if it had been betrayed, as if he had hurt it and it wanted out. But he couldn’t think anymore. He rose up with one final effort and he wrote the final word that came into his mind, above his head, on the white tiled wall, in his own blood.

He collapsed back down into the tub and he felt tired. He felt weary, drained, fatigued. As his eyes closed he looked up one last time into the blood-smeared mirror in which he saw reflected his final, inverted, crooked word…

NAMYNA

A heartbeat reverberated around his head in echoes that shattered the otherwise deathly silence that had consumed him. Wump-wump, wump-wump, wump-wump… now dying, now fading, the rhythmic beat of life now abandoning him...


16. Freedom

Death is only a beginning…

I became small within the white brilliance of the universe, and the Child-King grew until my hands were small in his. He grew out and filled into the cosmos that had enveloped Ariadne and I, into all the stars, all the worlds, all the atoms that had converged upon us. We were now a part of him. He was everything to us. His hands wrapped around my body and I felt the warmth of his touch, like sunlight once again on my light-deprived body. It regenerated me. The energy that flowed through him and into me was like a new lease of life. My thoughts, my self, continued to fade, and so did my consciousness. I reached out to Ariadne, I took her hand, and we were as if electrocuted by each other. Our senses were so honed that a simple touch created a delicious vibration in our entire bodies, like a spasm, like an orgasm. The stars and atoms, the galaxies and life-force of the cosmos composed the anatomy of the Child-King’s body. The brilliance of the light and the warmth that emanated from his being was for me the feeling of being home, of being with family, of belonging. To be in his presence was simply to Be, even as my sense of self was disappearing.

We were absorbed into the being of the Child-King, into the center of the universe, into Everything. Within this condensed cosmos, Ariadne and I commenced our final journey. As we delved into the shining white brilliance, we felt our own selves forge with those of the universe we entered. We were attracted further and further in, pulled in by the will of our bodies, of our molecules, of a will that manifested itself at an atomic level. Within every atom, the will of the Child-King was experienced. Within every inch was compressed all the matter that would form a race, a star, a million lives, a galaxy. Within every space were to be found a million colors and a million pasts and futures. We floated through this density as every atom that formed us rolled and melded with every atom of the Child-King. We swam through the universe and became a part of everything.

Voices and colors formed and reformed into song and poem, music and laughter. Our own voices and our own forms were shown to us. Images of all our lives passed before us. Even as we faded, even as we were disappearing in form and melding in with everything, we still were aware of ourselves, of everything we encountered, of everything that we were now becoming a part of. The words and the names that molded our lives, the moments and the places that were as if a map of our existence, the love and the sorrow, the loneliness and the togetherness that we had shared and that had shared with us in turn, these all became more vivid than ever to us. I still felt the warmth, the almost painful presence, of Ariadne’s hand in mine. I felt that now we were fusing, melding, forging into one, even as we were both melding into the Child-King who had melded in with the cosmos. First our hands, then our bodies, then our lips, and finally our eyes forged into each other. I could feel every single atom encountering its mate and sharing the same orbit of electrons that infused everything with the life-force. We lost our hands and our bodies, we lost our sight and our being. We lost ourselves, and we found the One. Man, woman and child was finally One.

At that moment we felt an expansion, like we were bursting, like we were part of a great explosion. The great burst came, the universe, the cosmos, every atom, every molecule, us, the Child-King, we dispersed back into the reaches of endless time and endless space, and we were a part of everything, but we existed no longer as self but as All. We were everything and nothing, everywhere and nowhere, and our consciousness was all consciousness. And somewhere in the endless silence of the universe there still resonated the lone echo of a voice long past and silent to all except to the One…

True freedom does not exist, but that does not mean it is unattainable…

Freedom was the loss of Self. Freedom was inexistence, and we had finally attained it.

Finally, death had fulfilled its promise.


A Moment on Earth

A nine year-old boy runs through the labyrinthine corridors of his house, in and out of rooms and then back onto the corridors, around and around. The halls are inundated by lush summer rays that reveal the rising dust as it dances and swirls like a swarm of pixies around the boy's waving, golden hair. The boy rips through their tiny bacchanalia again and again in the course of the timeless hours of the afternoon. He creates images of beings in his mind and then gives them life and sets them on his tail, not so he can run away from them, but so that he can outrun them. Soon his footsteps become their footsteps and soon his breath becomes their breath, shouting, laughing, panting, breathing. Then he stops, and with him the revelry stops, the noise stops. He stands in the corridor. Behind him the amorphic images of his mind have dissipated into the dust that his feet have awoken and stirred. Before him the sun's heavy rays stream in like the last vital remnants of a star that must have exploded a long time ago and very far away. An extinct star warmed him from the furthest reaches of the universe, warmed his body as if he was himself composed of stardust. The light and his body felt like the same essence. He could still hear himself breathing, even though he thought it seemed odd that it sounded like a stranger was breathing, as if the person breathing and the person who was aware of the breathing were not the same. More and more pronounced was the beating of his heart as he stood there in the empty corridor, with the golden rays and their little dancing fairies before him, and the last inaudible echoes of his footsteps and his pursuers behind him. He stood there, alone. He stood there, eyes wide open, seeing more than just what they saw, his little chest heaving, not just breathing, but sucking the air in with voracious hunger. He stood there as if he was suddenly at a threshold. It was the first time in his life that he didn't feel alone, even though he had never even felt lonely before. It was the first time he felt that he was everything and nothing, and it was the first time that he felt unafraid, even though he had never even felt fear before.

His moment on earth remains suspended, like the flames of the sun trapped in his green eyes. It was the last moment he remembered as he lay dying, and his life – and death – flashed before his eyes.