At The End Of The Earth

Upon a large rock, on a yellow, sun-burnt hillside, beside a flock of white sheep and a sleeping shepherd. There, upon the rock, was the book that I had seen. 
It was thick and bound in a reddish hued leather. Although there was a slight breeze, not a page wavered. I had lost count of the days, the moons that had passed as I slowly wandered to this rock, this book. Now I was shy to approach it.  
I sat on the path and rested my head against my hand. The grasses, the tiny white flowers that crowded the book like a garland, the wind, the tree leaves, all of them gently swayed to a slow rhythm. The book held a place in the center. What it was, dream, myth, truth, emptiness, I did not know.

*   *   *
In a tavern at the end of the earth, just past the forest where the thickets grew so dense no light penetrated, beyond the huts where the banished lived and died of loneliness, in a tavern that hosted the wisest of seekers, their hearts blackened by courage. There Josephine sat among the dirty earth scoundrels.
She sat before a mug of mead, the cup so large it mocked others in the cupboard. Her gestures were both calm and wild, a hurricane contained within the confines of a small woman bound in leather and pauper’s armor. 
She turned to me as I entered and watched me approach. I knew we had never met before. But I also knew that the magnetic bands of earth and star had brought me to her feet, had pulled me through the vacant valleys of sand, past the meadows and siren’s songs, through the cities and graveyards and wastelands of the dispossessed, had brought me here, to the end of the earth, where the black hearted sat on wooden stools, watching time unfold and refold, unwind and rewind.
I took in her lips, her pale skin and tousled purple hair. I took in the presence of magnets, wind, stars. I observed how the push and pull of all energy ended and began with her. 
“Would you like a drink?” she asked. 
The mug slid towards me like a comet. I grabbed it easily and brought it to my lips. One taste of her drink shocked me. It burned, and as I swallowed, it moved through me like fire, lighting me from the inside.
I saw myself, sitting there before her, beside the other earth men that had come, the others that would follow the invisible paths for years through sandy valleys and burned grasslands, past the cities and stark villages until they arrived at the end of the earth, at the tavern where all energy began and ended.
“So you see now,” she said.
Her words came from my mouth, from my eyes. There was the large rock on a yellow, sun-burnt hillside. In one second I saw the route, the many moons, the many years, the thousands of steps through valleys and forests, away from the end of the earth and towards the waters, then the seas and rivers, down through the ancient caves. 
There were many scenes at once, one imposed upon the other, each of them changing as easily as water. They arranged themselves in a line, then spherically, then rotated as a series of shapes that touched ends like a mandala.
I looked at her then, on the wooden stool beside the bar, stone walls on all sides, torches lit on the walls flickering, casting their stories along the floors and our faces. She smiled, her dark eyes alight with mischief, with knowledge of earth and wind, happy to share her secrets with me.
We did not talk. We shared the mead and the silence, the visions which allowed us to see one another from the inside. I saw the book on the rock beside the white sheep and the sleeping shepherd. One day I would find it.

Belief

Belief was a golden-haired child born in the state of desire within the realm of the word.
The word: right, gleaming, sometimes dark and full of clouds.
All was true.
None was true- just like dreams during bouts of thunder.
He had never been in the realm of the Real, cushioned as he was by the pillowy softness of DESIRE and THE WORD; he only caught short glimpses of the Real, tiny fragments of light he could never remember. It was as if they had never happened. The golden-haired child, born on the white bed during the time of blue, little did it know that nothing born of the word could walk in the realm of the Real.

Belief was born in a place where the urge to fulfil needs is transferred into abstract longings whose ends can never be met, a place where yearning goes on and on because there can be no end to yearning. Belief was a necessity, a logical conclusion to such yearning. It worked like a bottle with a cork, how tight it kept all those things locked down. Blue and brown bottles all lined up and evenly spaced on the shelf, tidy and ordered and gleaming like church windows in noonday sun.

Belief was a natural product of desire. Oh, that dress. That kiss, more, more, please.
Whereas a need could be met, a desire knew no fulfillment and so it naturally blossomed into Belief.
Oh, that touch, more, more please.
It is the notion which makes us believe that what one longs for does exist, will happen, is coming eventually to those who are good, to those who believe. The houses they promised, the dream they spoke of, the heaven that awaits after toil and suffering, the approval of the father after a lifetime of whipped dog-like subservience, the love of one and only one other human.
All of it- belief.

Once, not too long ago, Belief knew he was a man of god. He was a street preacher with long blond hair pulled tight behind his head. Many people regarded him as a semi-delusional zealot who imagined he could hear God in his head. He stood by the courthouse steps and told them the evil of their ways. He was a man in an old brown suit that was one inch too short for his pale limbs.
Many people prayed to god. Hands clasped tightly, desires leaking from their mouths. They talked to him, some even thought they heard answers or saw signs in response. But when a man did nothing but stand on the street and preach and shout and lecture to the passers-by about the word of God, the majority, even the church-going people, thought that his mind had slipped into the cave of fantasy. From his own perspective, he was the only one who believed in the lord enough to give up all other things. He saw himself as truly devotional, the messenger, a solider in God’s army.

It all happened for Belief within the realm of the symbolic order. All of this happened because a symbol was not the thing itself. A car was not a car, love was not love. Words, words, symbols. It was like a shadow, it took a shape that couldn't be grasped, a shape that could take on a life of its own and birth new shapes with no correspondences to the Real. These shapes, these shadows with no correspondences, were the makers of DESIRE, the grandparents of Belief. They were dark storms that clouded the Real.

Belief constructed a world around himself, as we all do, to explain his existence. It was elaborate and full of detail, rich in explanations which he liked to share often with whomever would listen. In his world, God spoke to him, God commanded him. There was one word that mattered, one sound that trumped all others. In his world, men could do what they wanted with their women as long as they were married. It was what God commanded, what he actually wanted for the men of earth. He knew that people must be humbled, for now their pride eclipsed their accomplishments, and their ego would not let in the glory of the lord. They needed to experience the low human-state so they could one day experience a higher one.
It was the only way. He knew it. As God’s solider, it was his mission to teach THE WORD. God told him the way to humble these humans who coveted their fine clothes, their hot meals, their whims and merriment.

Belief was a prince in the house of DESIRE. He ran to and fro calling for some action or other in his name. People gladly indulged this spoiled child because it gave them Hope, his lovely sister and wife. She was only another word. Hope lacked anything that could keep it from floating away during the night. Hope was the golden-haired sister of Belief. Sticky, sweet and empty. Always encouraging one to embrace Belief, for if you stuck with him, you would get to taste her sweetness, like dime-store candy.

Once, not too long ago, there was a family that trusted Belief. This family hired him to help repair their roof which had been leaking for many years. He worked at their house for five hours one day.
On the 5th night, as had been his plan for several days, he cut a hole in their screen door, which was partially open to let in the wonderful summer-scented night air. He let himself in while the moon was still high. As everyone slept, he kidnapped Hope from her bed.
He had recognized her as his long lost sister and lover. He took her to the woods where he had told his wife to wait for him under the trees. His wife gave Hope a robe and told her to change into it.

Hope and Belief, together once again, offered justification to the house of desire. Like the children of a couple that has become disenchanted with one another, they were the fantasies that made all other fantasies survive.

A small ceremony was performed and Belief proclaimed Hope as his wife. He become one with her, as he would many times afterwards, many times each day. Hope was found nearly a year later walking on the street of a town she once had seen through very different eyes. The colors she remembered had taken on a fractured quality, as though she had merged with some other creature while chained in the woods. The blue authorities wrote down her words:
"Anything I showed resistance or hesitation to, he would turn to me and say, 'The Lord has commanded you to do this. You have to experience the lowest form of humanity to experience the highest.’ I watched him from the ground, talking as he did with emphatic movements. Then he would get on top of me and humble me once again.”

Belief and his first wife were taken into police custody. They were both declared mentally unfit to stand trial. It was Belief's explanation that the court saw as unstable. His preaching on the courthouse steps, his very thoughts on God.

If we could only have Belief we would join God in Heaven and bring Truth back to life. With Belief’s hand in mine, it was okay to kill and take another’s land. His presence supported actions borne from desire, his company justified all actions. Human thoughts became God’s thoughts.

With Belief at your side, you will do any number of absurd things; set out cookies for an immortal in a red suit, or eat crackers and wine and call it the flesh and blood of your God, or burn a person at the stake, or drive your neighbors from their homes and push them into the sea, or destroy all of the natural resources available to you and the rest of your race. With belief, it is what God desires, what God has asked for in an inaudible voice that shook the walls with its power.

The writer of a particular text about Hope used words like “horrific and sick” to describe Belief. This is the conflict. One man believes he is doing what God wants him to do. He is humbling a young woman so that one day she can reach a higher state, so they can both become what they were meant to be. This is Belief.
One deed is thought of as righteous, the same deed is seen by others as evil. Both are words used to describe an action.

There is nothing that “can’t” or “shouldn’t” be done when you can say that Belief is with you. No door can be closed to you when you come from the house of Desire, frothing at the mouth with want of a satisfaction that can’t be had, golden Belief and fair Hope marching at your side demanding that you take, take, take. Take what you want and say it was for Belief. Your basket is full, Belief is there at your side, a parrot on your shoulder.

Even in custody, Belief continuously sang hymns to himself until he was removed from the courtroom. The world around him was crazy, full of evil men who had no contact with God. He sang to remind himself that he was the one with the truth. He was the one with God on his side. He had to sing to protect his world. He sang to protect his symbolic order, the world he had built for himself, the only world that still had a place for him.

He ran amok under the shadowy banners of the house of Desire within the Realm of the symbolic. There it was glorious, there it was beautiful. In the realm of the Real, Belief and Hope vanished like evil spirits.
In the realm of the Real, you stand alone with blood on your hands, raw animal death under your fingernails, spattered on your face, shivering through your bones.

The Real is void of Gods, void of hope, void of salvation or damnation, void of any branch to which you might cling and profess “It is so!” In the state of the real you would not search for your lost sister, because there is no sister to lose, no “other” to humble or cling to, to subordinate or raise higher. There is an endless sea of “something” which defies explanation, which eludes capture in the realm of the symbolic. Whenever you dip your hand into the well of the Real and try to bring it into the realm of the Word, what you retrieve is transformed from life into death, from unity into separation, categorization and humiliation.

The Real cannot be perceived through the word, not through the damaged eyes of Belief or Hope, made of words as they are.
Nothing that can be said is true.
All those who speak lie, from dawn till dusk they lie and only in the darkness is the truth revealed to them, in their nightly visits to the well of the Real. Something voyages between these two realms, the land of THE WORD and the kingdom of the REAL.
When it is in one state it is one thing and when it is in the other it is another. This something is a voyager, sometimes captured by the gravitational pull of the WORD. To be free of the word and of desire you must sacrifice Belief and Hope, stop expending vital energy in supplication to these false deities. They are closest to you, and therefore easiest to reach.
Then you must tell Mother desire that you know she is a lie forged of the illusory substance of Father word and then your tongue will be tied by the white hot heat that leaves you howling and wriggling as you abandon the WORD, achieving lift off.

The Game

Papers littered the street, pink and yellow and blue, stuck to the asphalt, turning to pulp in the gutters. The tall buildings looked sick themselves with their boarded up windows, the silent papered street running between them like a nurse sitting bedside, helpless and hopeful, feeling the first signs of sickness herself but denying it.
The absolute silence and sweet stench betrayed death’s zeal despite any efforts to keep her presence hidden behind boarded windows and doors. Whole families were rotting away in apartments that no one would be coming to clean out. No one was on their way with a stretcher to carry the bodies off to the hospital, no one was digging graves in the cemetery. Who was left to do such things?
“Sophie, Sophie listen to me. Come out of there. We have got to go. We have to get out of here.”
From behind the closet door there was some muffled crying. Aletheia’s hand was on the knob trying to turn it, but it refused to move.
“Sophie, let go and come out. This has gone too far, come out now!” she cried.
“How do I know,” the muted voice behind the door asked, “that you aren’t sick?”
“Because I can’t be Sophie. Just like you can’t be. You know that we can’t die, but we can get stuck. There is nothing here. It is a stupid game, come out before you get stuck.”
Sniffles from behind the door and a whimper,
“Mamma and Papa and baby Nelie all got sick. I might get sick too. I might die.”
“Sophie! Don’t you even think of trying that! Do you hear me? Then you really will be stuck. Those weren’t your parents or your sister. You know this, you’ve just forgotten. Come out now. I’m your real sister, Aletheia.”
Footsteps in the hall. Alethia turned to see a dark headed man pass through the doorway into the cluttered room. The white sleeves of his shirt were rolled up revealing muscular arms.
“What a reeking mess.” He frowned “What’s the hold up?”
“The hold up is 1918 New York!” Aletheia spat, whirling on him. “We should never have played this one!”
“It’s just a game Aletheia, don’t get so upset, you might get stuck.” He frowned at her.
“Save your disapproval Thelesis. Sophie is the one getting stuck, she won’t come out. She’s talking about dying. We should never have let her play as a child, the physiology is so unstable.”
Thelesis’s frown deepened.
“Sophia?” He called, “It’s time to go.”
Only a muffled whimper. Thelesis nudged Aletheia aside and gripped the door knob himself. He jerked the door open and a child with long tangled brown curls spilled out onto the floor screaming.
“Stop this Sophia. Logos is about to open the way out. You must relax the muscles of that body, relinquish control. We’ll go have a rest and play a different game later.”
“I don’t want to die!” the child screamed loud and fiercely. Her tear stained cheeks were crimson.
“Sophie I told you, you can’t die.” Aletheia said soothingly. “Just listen to us. Calm down.”
She kneeled and reached out to stroke the little girls face. Sophia jerked away and continued to sob.
“Get away from me! Get away from me! This isn’t your house, get out!”
“You shouldn’t have jerked open the door.” Aletheia said, “It’s made her worse.”
“Try to listen Sophia.” Thelesis said backing away and giving the child space, “You must calm down. Try to relax your whole body. Let Aletheia hold you and sing you a song. It’s time to go.”
“No! Don’t touch me, you get away from me! You shouldn’t be here!”
“Please Sophie.” Aletheia pleaded.
Thelesis cocked his head as if hearing a sound.
“Aletheia, Logos is opening the way now.”
“What about Sophia!” she cried.
“Sh, sh, don’t get upset. You must stay calm. Breath and turn your attention to the gateway.”
“But she’ll be stuck!”
“Aletheia,” Thelesis cupped his sisters face in his hands, “You can’t help her if you are stuck too. We can come back when we are stronger.”
“But look at her,” Aletheia whispered, “I think she has a fever. She is letting that body get sick. It might die.”
Thelesis gathered Aletheia into his arms,
“Logos might find a way to retrieve her. He is a brilliant technician, remember. Now Aletheia, breathe and turn your attention to the gateway. It’s time for us to go.”
She nodded and they stood together breathing and looking into one another’s eyes until they were through the gateway.
The child on the floor watched the man and woman disappear. For a moment she almost remembered who they were. Then she resumed her crying and crawled back into the closet. Inside there was only the sound of this child crying while the silence swept through the streets rustling papers, pink yellow and blue.

Going To Irak

The sun rose just a few hours before, but I have already done my breathing and written my dreams and sang a few songs. It is early and the light streaming in through the airport’s wide windows is pale blue and I stand, feeling young and protected from the world by my black hood, making me look like a lost forest creature in modern clothing. I am standing in a line that moves geometrically through a wide tiled space that echoes with machinery and groggy voices. It is the boundary of the airport, the place that divides the travelers from the stagnant. Beyond the artificial boundary is the place of arrival and departure, the doors where we step into the sky and hope to return, intact and breathing. I say my mantra and grasp my heart, holding onto the thin contact that wavers like a long silvery telephone line in the morning wind.
Hello? Are you there?

The line is seventy people deep and we are corralled through the space by metal bars, leaving us like cows waiting for the truck, only we think we know what lays ahead. Around me, people are still weary with sleep. Business men in their gray and black suits. A foursome of Norwegians, two blond guys and two girls. I stare at the pointed nose of the shorter girl that ends in a singular dot, I have never seen a nose that looks more sketched. She laughs and touches the arm of her female friend and they both begin laughing while their men remain solemn, looking at the line and x-ray machines waiting dutifully fifty feet ahead. The line moves slowly, winding like an angular snake, bending at 90 degree angles every dozen feet.

Two men in matching navy blue pants and white collared t-shirts are at the front of the line. One on each side. The man on the right is Asian, just crossing the threshold into middle age. His black hair is streaked with white, his face is etched with lines. He looks weary and sad, it will be a day of names and numbers, impatient travelers and fussy old women inconvenienced by the bureaucracy of it all, remembering a time when it was different. On the left is a young Latin man. He is a few heads taller than his coworker, seemingly fresh and unfazed by the repetitive nature of his job. Each man holds a pen in his right hand and a small flashlight in the other. They are TSA men, looking to match correct names to their matching tickets, looking for the things that don’t match too, foreign sounding names and distant, obscure destinations.

The young man is tall and slender. His long silky black hair is bound in a small bun at the base of his neck, shining in the early morning light wafting through the skylights. He has two paper tickets in his left hand and two plastic ID cards, his right is beaming the focused light of the flashlight into them. He looks over the information. An older couple, fifty people ahead of me stand in front of him, waiting quietly for their ticket and ID cards back, both are much shorter than him, coming just to his chest.

The woman is portly and wide, having expanded with time. Her cropped hair is styled into a wavy helmet that hovers around her head like a halo. She is dressed as I have seen many Asian grandmothers, in dark polyester pants and a thinly quilted jacket. The man is facing another direction, though I notice his head of white hair.

The young TSA agent looks at their tickets, then back at the two of them.
“You’re going to Iraq?!” He pauses, taking a breath, “I guess you want to go there.”
Incredulously, he looks back at the tickets and their ID cards. His mind seems to be spinning, unable to process the destination or the possible reason for going to such a god-forsaken country.

Neither of them say anything in response. The older man is turned away slightly, his attention already focused on the next thing, the x-ray machines and scanners that lay just a few feet ahead. The woman, holding her purse strap with one hand, merely looks up at the young man, saying nothing, nodding almost imperceptibly with a polite smile on her face, as though she has learned how to deal with young men that think they already know the secrets of the world.

Looking at the information on their paper tickets, looking again at their ID cards with his slender flashlight and finding no irregularities, he looks up with a smile on his face. Handing the items back, he says:
“I guess you want to go there.”
The woman nods again and opens her mouth slightly, though no sounds comes out. She reaches out for her items and then steps away, looking at the next stage, the next hurdle to cross. The young man turns to the next person in line, reaching for a ticket and identification with his right hand.

The Silent Call

The road crinkles with my word. I am the crown. The gold. I am the ears of a thousand men, a long lineage of horns and stinking goats and cups of blood. I am the road. I am the cave.

The road spins with my sweat, and I drip.

They are the seeds of my power, the spouting of a new fern, the joy of a new wisp of green.

I have seen the villages along the coast, on each side of the path. Always standing, always waiting for what will never come. They have heard my call, my cry, the horn. They have heard. Those with ears listen as though it was a passing wind, a kiss from a spring morn.

Though it is not. It is the call of the path, and only the children run, letting their buckets and yarn fall to the fields, forever losing the signs of their world. Their mothers look for them in barns, beneath the cows, in the stacks of hay and in the silver shop. They never return.

They follow like the rats of fables, coming though they only heard the song and the promise of something buried within the melody. Blind as they are, they see more than the old maids in the kitchen, more than village after village, stuffed with priests, forever preaching about desires they cannot control.

I come with a sword of liberation. With the stain of blood, with cut throats and twisted bodies.
I come, though liberation is made by men, not kings.

The scepter,
the bones of ears and horns,
the purple cloak that promises in whispers.

Come to me, though you move like zombies through a thick gray haze. This is the time, the one chance to reach through tidal waves, through the mess of noodles and the window shrouded in time.

Come if your heart permits, if your mind, for once, cowers in the corners, unsure of direction. The compass stands steady in the center of your chest. Each chest.

Between white breasts.

Beneath a spurt of hair. Beneath the bones of both. Feel it though the cold wind blows.

I am calling.

And I call, though no answer is expected.

Though no body emerges from the fields of wheat and millet.

Though I hear no laughter and feel only silence.

I see the world, waiting at the horizon, waiting for death to emerge through the clouds. And I know,
it comes. It comes and I walk, sending out my call.

Voyage And Transformations

I was walking down a long wide empty street when I met the first friend. His face would soon be one more among many, and I would lose track of his distinctive features, but on that first meeting his uniqueness would have been clear.
There were leaves flying in the wind all around me, and the sound of children playing in the distance, releasing tiny screams into the air like atomic explosions of enthusiasm. Several little restaurants were open on the street where I was walking and people ate quietly, reading a newspaper, chatting in soft voices, looking out at the world that only sometimes looked back.
I looked straight ahead of me as I walked and suddenly there he was. As much as I knew who he was, within the scheme of my unspoken story, he know who I was as well. We both instantly knew that we would travel far together. It was hardly necessary to exchange any words at all.
From that moment on, our loyalties and our purposes became entrenched with each other. We became a single voyager looking for ways to move through a strange world that we only barely understood. Our movements became so aligned that people would routinely confuse us with each other, even though we hardly looked alike.
We found others, one by one, in little bookstores, in dark alleyways, in old brothels, in desolate rooftops. From two we became three, from three we became four, and from four we became many. When there was as many of us as we needed, and maybe even more, we found a ship and we began to travel. We all knew that we were searching. The object of the search was never spoken but it was known in the way that only things unspoken can ever be known.
This invisible search would take us far away from everything we had ever known. We left behind the wide streets of the cities and the soft spoken people of the bookstores and the cafes. We dived into the great expanse of the open ocean, the endless flat blue surface that offered amazement and death from every cardinal point.
I remember many afternoons of sitting on deck, looking out at the waves, at the far off mountains that stood like lonely sentinels in the middle of blue emptiness, at islands that passed us by like fellow lonely travelers made of brown earth, green trees and shining black stones.
We traveled so long that we forgot ourselves, we forgot our previous existence but we never stopped to identify a new one. We began to notice that things had changed in ways we couldn’t have predicted. We were no longer the same men who left that quiet city that now only lived only in our memories. We were no longer in the same ocean that we had once stared at from the city’s concrete piers. This new ocean now stared at us with eyes of open and unforgiving mystery, it was a restless blue question that never offered an answer.
We had become something strange even to ourselves. Our manner of speaking to each other had changed. Our voices were rougher and louder than we remembered. Our bodies were strong and violent, they had lost the delicateness that had flourished in the languid afternoons of city streets. Our eyes were sharp and piercing, more like hunter animals than human beings. We looked at each other and we could only vaguely accept that we were still the same men that had set out on this great voyage, we could only vaguely accept it and surrender all misgivings before they became so large that they would swallow us like giant waves and bury us under their heavy weight of watery shadows.
It was around this time that I began to realize that this had all happened already, so many years ago that it was only understandable that I would have completely forgotten. It was around this time that I remembered the letter I had written to myself, the letter I was now in the process of writing, the letter that spoke of memories of the future, of things that had happened so long ago that I could only barely glimpse at them as they appeared on the thick manuscript page.
I was writing for myself, under the light of a dying candle, so that I would remember, so that I would recognize, so that I would know that everything I could conceive of as my life was in fact a memory. I had been running through it like bright light through an old film reel. It was all fixed and unmovable like a stone statue or an ancient island or a sphere of rock floating in endless empty space.
And then I saw the island itself, which rose out of the water like a kiss of earthly power on the waiting emptiness of the sky. It was a single peak, a volcano that loomed over our boat as we approached. It was surrounded by deep dark jungle which I could smell even from so many miles away. It smelled of strong life, life that drips hot and humid, life that claws and rips apart whatever stands in front of it, life that waits in dark holes under wet dead leaves.
We dropped anchor close to the island, close enough that we could make out the shape of the long green leaves, but far enough that we could still leave if we decided that it was better for us to do so. We all sat on deck and stared at the tall palm trees, at the thick dark bushes, at the open and untouched white beach. We all looked and looked, trying to spot danger if it waited for us in the green darkness. At last we decided that we could see no movement other than the wind, no life other than the trees, no hunger other than our own.
It was determined that we would disembark and explore the island. It was no longer clear to us what we were looking for there, maybe we were looking only for food, maybe for something more. We had changed so much that even the vague object of our search had been dissolved in the white oil of our own strangeness. Still the decision had been made and we prepared little boats for all of us, five to a boat and there were so many of us.
At the last moment I told them I would stay behind and wait for them. I would keep guard on the boat itself and on the island from a distance. I would look for something that we may have thought was only wind but could be otherwise, something that we may have thought was only trees but which could actually hide evil eyes.
It was agreed that I would stay and so I did. I watched them floating away on those little boats, and they waved at me with open smiles on their faces, their eyes newly washed in the fresh hope of adventure.
I found myself alone for the first time in as long as I could remember. It felt strange, as if I was missing several limbs, as if I had just lost essential elements of my body.
“How would I protect them if I saw danger coming? What would I do if it came for me?”
I read the words on the ancient letter and I nodded, knowing that the question was truthful and knowing that I had no answer, no answer at all. But still I looked towards the beach where the men were now leaving their little boats, and I looked towards the green edge of the jungle where the men were now disappearing one by one into the heavy darkness, and then I simply looked at the island itself which was now as quiet and still as it had been when we all had searched for suspicious movement.
I stood like that for so long that it seemed that nothing else would ever happen. Maybe they would never come back, and maybe the boat would never move from where it now was, and maybe I would never leave this spot where I was standing and maybe I would never know the difference. But just when I was completely convinced that nothing at all would ever happen, something did.
“Strange beings appeared from under the surface of the calm ocean water. They were half men and half fish, and they moved towards the ship where I was standing. Their skin was thick and covered in gills. Their bodies seemed strong like a shark’s and yet flexible like a stingray’s. Just as I had predicted, I could do nothing to stop them. There was nothing I could even try.”
The letter said it, and it happened just as it described. I stood fixed on the deck, unable to respond in any way that was reasonable for I was facing the end of reason, and it was scaling with many wet green hands and feet up the side of our moored ship.
Soon they were next to me, twelve of them altogether. Their eyes were big and shiny and black, and they stared at me and made no move to hurt me or even bother me in any way. Still I wanted them to disappear. It was their very presence that hurt me in ways I couldn’t pinpoint. Their presence burrowed under the skin of my perception and pulled at the exposed tissue of my understanding. I stood like that for hours and still I couldn’t bring myself to reconcile with the utter shock of these beings’ existence.
Eventually many of my fellow voyagers came back. They didn’t come back all once. For reasons that were never explained to me, they had become separated in the perpetual night of the jungle. As they returned, they found me standing on deck, surrounded by these strange creatures that didn’t speak or attack or leave or do anything at all other than exist and stare at us.
The men stared back at them and their eyes grew wide with fear. I realized that my eyes were pouring out the same fear that I now saw clearly in my faithful companions. It wasn’t a fear of violence or pain or even death. It was a much deeper fear that I had thought had disappeared from among us long before we embarked on this strange voyage. Our basic assumptions about the nature of this world we inhabited were in the process of being shattered.
I heard some of them crying, some of them talking quietly, some of them running below deck to hide in their own compartments. Some of them even jumped overboard, refusing to deal any further with the single great question that was now standing on our deck, dripping with green water.
I looked towards the calm ocean surface and I saw more of the strange creatures. They were floating there, staring up at me with their deep black eyes without pupils, eyes that were big and oval and empty. I looked back at them and then at the ones close to me.
We had changed so much, the men and me, and yet there was so much further we could go, so much more to discover. Maybe some of the men would continue with me. Maybe our voyage had only just begun.