The last phrase I hear was selected for me: “Leave the dead to bury their own dead.”
I am on my knees not far from the mouth of the well. The scorched earth of a once lush oasis, the WADI FARIN, is a battle torn hell awash with pock marks from artillery, countless arrows protruding from the ground, and, of course, drenched in oil. Mike Washington lays next to me breathing, face down in a puddle of his own blood.
The army of the demon clown does not draw much closer. The face of the clown still flickers on a several mile high screen. The horsemen have black bags on their faces or what looks like masks of flesh with nothing underneath but TV static flickering from their eyes, souls long departed. They stand at attention moving not even a dull twitch.
In this silence I watch Mike bleed to death. The arterial red pool collects underneath him soaking through his duct taped grey bandages. The pistol hidden in his gut must have caused him incredible agony. He bellowed in pain when I dragged him out of our foxhole.
The horsemen stand over us less than fifty meters away. Their legions surround us and the well in a great enveloping circle of thousands of zeppelins and assorted craft. The deliberate lax and lazy apprehension is perhaps just a part of its game.
We are in a dead place. Only one day from the end of a four-year journey, we are beaten. Like in a good Western or tale of knights, they had the girl, and we were surrounded. No reinforcements were coming. I remember something Mike once told me about the early days of his rebel career, when he received his first paramilitary training in a cave complex deep in the hills of Judea. A reincarnated soul possessed with the ghost of the Chinese general of Sun Tzu was instructing the fighters of Bar Giora in the ancient arts of spear craft and asymmetrical war.
The oracle had enchanted a young boy whose blood made him able to receive the spirits of the dead. The oracle put Sun Tzu within the boy and the boy honed the irregular Hebrew forces of several thousand untrained farmers into the guerrilla army Simon Bar Giora used to smash Roman legions. Michael had served throughout the three Hebrew Revolts following the death of the man Jesus Christ.
He told me he was only 17 when the war against Rome began. The death of the man Yeshau Ben Yoseph was taken by many to be the sign of the end. The man Jesus Christ, born Yeshua Ben Yoseph became a symbol to many throughout the Roman Empire that the iron heel of Caesar could be cast off. The Province of Judea in 60 AD was the first to try. Michael served as an officer until the very end, through 57 years of grisly desert war. In the third round of Hebrew-Roman fighting an entire legion, the XXII Deiotariana, was completely wiped out. The Second Temple of Jerusalem was razed and every last Hebrew man, woman and child were deported as slaves into exile.
“The ghost of the Chinese general told us ‘Death to traitors and spies.’ The first we slew were those in our midst who were pawns of Rome. The tavern owners, our corrupted class of priests, our foremen and merchants doing business with the empire, the harem proprietors, the spies and turncoats. The ghost of Sun Tzu taught us that many of our people never thought for themselves, had forgotten their people to fill their bellies and pockets and were more our enemies than even the hated Roman occupiers. He called them the living dead, soulless animals that consume but are no longer human. He taught us to cut off the heads of these zombies, to wash the streets with their blood. He taught us these zombies were the enemy within, that which consumes its own kind.”
Mike continues with his story:
“I was there surrounded at the fortress of Masada in the first revolt, one of seven to survive the ordeal. They cut off our water, then forced our own people to build the ramp up the mountain. We slew those zombies by the thousands. When we ran out of arrows we threw rocks upon them,” he told me.
“The thing about zombies, or even these horsemen without their own heads, they take their orders not from a god but just one man. Kill a million horsemen they just keep charging. Killing a zombie just removes an immediate threat to your survival. But if you ever get to fire at a Caesar, you’ll only get one shot. But if you hit Caesar, hit him right between the eyes and you’ll bring an empire to its knees. Few men think for themselves. They mostly just follow some tyrant.”
As I sat there on the ground, on my knees watching my companion die, I remembered these words. The old, fat clown was Caesar. To him all human suffering was a joke we brought upon ourselves. A grinding of gears and spiraling of machinery from the grandest zeppelin above let me know the clown was coming. A great catwalk of warped metal and tubing was twisting down at me like snakes, descending to the dune directly in front of me out of these Babylonian atrocities. The screeching of the metal ramp did more damage than the air raid sirens above us. The ramp hit the oil-soaked sand with a mighty thud. I still couldn’t see it. The ramp towered into the bowels of a great blimp above us. It seemed as if the other craft had begun extending docking mechanisms intertwining them all into a great aerial city. They intended to dock with Zion, to put out the many, many lights and send something foul and wicked to my world.
Mike was dying. He squirmed on his side bleeding heavily from his gut. He spasms in pain but does not cry out.
As the dark thing approaches a quiet feel of creeping death take hold. Slowly and deliberately, it moved down towards us. It had gotten fat feeding on pain. It held a gold chain in its hand with a green tube attached to something behind it we could not see. It wore a regal white gown, a crown of thorns and white golf shirt. Its red face was circle with a leering smile painted in red. Its eyes were blackened orbs. Its massive spider limbs crept out down the plank. Its body pulsated under the gown rising and falling like a serpent. As it got closer the dark horsemen all fell upon one knee.
‘You’ll only get one shot,” Mike had said to me.
I knew that as soon as it got within firing distance. As it swooned over us to mock us, maybe shit on our head or piss on our wounds, I’d tear the golden pistol from my companion’s dying chest and shoot Caesar between the eyes. The rest of the things would crumble. The horsemen would fall one by one like dominoes. The zeppelins would fall and be rendered apart like the mother fucking Hindenburg.
In theory. But the best-laid plans and theories of angelic gunslingers and mentally ill young men . . . you know how the saying goes. Mike coughs more blood out on the sand when he sees it. A yank of the chain and she steps out in front of him. She is dressed in white, a burka nikab and a miniskirt, a miniburka. Her slender fleshy legs are exposed and nothing else. You could bend over to fuck her in the ass without ever seeing her face. I see her green eyes. She’s wearing makeup under the veil. The shirt is high like a burlesque show whore. The gold chain is around her neck. The green tube descends into her swollen pregnant belly. My nemesis is as cunning as we.
Mike’s sockets show no anguish, but his face is clenched in fury. But he’s too far gone to have to make the decision I’m about to. I see the redheaded girl tremble, a nervous flinch. She traveled with us too long to not suspect that we have some plan. ‘Knock around rebels for god’ like us cannot be brought to heel. But what makes her shudder is the look upon our faces seeing her like that, seeing her tied to him and knowing we can’t do a damn thing. The best laid plans. The tube goes out the clown’s beating exposed black heart winding down into her belly through a port and likely into the child.
When the creature addresses us it sounds like nails dragged across a chalkboard. It speaks in images.
“W,H,E,R,E,. IS,,, Y,,,O,U,,R; G,,O,D,, N,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,O,,,W?”
As it speaks I see buildings burning shortly in the City of Many Many lights. I see blood in the streets. I see its towers falling in flames.
“KIL,,L me wil’ yo,,,,,,,,,,,,u? You could try.”
Its voice makes me cry blood. Mike has no more eyes with which to cry.
“I am the gr,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,eat wooooooooorrrm. I aaaaaaaaaaa,,m the rot. In the darkness I feast on things which learn to kill each other.”
“WHA,,,,,,,,,T you do h;e,,,,re in the de;sert has had no meaning. We distracted you and ma,,,,,,,,,,,,de you si,,,ick like us.”
“WHERE IS YOUR G-D. IT HAS ABANDONED YOU ALL TO EACH OTHER. I am the w,,orm ,th,a,t, ,f,eeds on the dying; YOUR KIND is a flower of death. EAT OF MY TREE.”
The thing grows twice as big, its torso expanding out of the arachnid frame of limbs, a worm, a tree of death. The red-haired girl cries from behind her veil. I know Mike Washington says to kill Caesar. He ended his life and broke his wings for me to kill the clown. But what use is killing Caesar when it is Caesar’s happiness to die. It sits leering, its black heart exposed. I could kill the beast but not save the babe. The babe will be polluted with the foul things dying breath. If this world is a dead world, then I am death too. In the place of the whale there is hope. I’m going have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It thought us callous, but perhaps not hard. I tear the hand weapon out of my dying friend’s chest. I splatter open his abdomen into the sand. The gold pistol barks three times in my hand. The red-haired girl receives a bullet in her head, in her heart and in the heart of the babe. The babe with the power.
The thing screams its wretched screech. It’s bellows blow down its legion. The horsemen spasm reality shudders then stand suddenly still.
All around me is the scene of a great war put on standstill. I see the clown king reeling on its tentacles and limbs screaming, now frozen. I see Mike quite dead, splattered open, frozen. I see the red-haired girl who we protected for a whole year, whose baby was named Hope. We were close to helping her cross over. The white miniburka is stained in blood. I have just killed her and her unborn child. Frozen too is the fleet of zeppelins merging above us and the army we held off from a well for half a day the now scorched WADI FARIN.
I am SCUD the disposable assassin. I am G-d’s Knock around rebel.
But from the hills above the wadi I see two small things move. In addition to me they are the only pieces of this desert Guernica that remain unfrozen and ambulatory. I recognize them at once and am glad. These are my two friends who have been missing for eight years. They stand less than one foot tall and move about on furry, weathered limbs like plush beanbag animals. They have the appearance somewhere between bears and Klansmen. One is furry and whitish, the other is one furry and grayish. They have black marbles for eyes. I had thought them long vacationing in Mexico.
‘Black Bear and White Bear?” I ask amid the carnage, still on my knees still clutching a golden handgun.
White Bear has a voice like a smurf filled with glee. This glee-filled voice says to me, “Looks like you found the golden ticket to Palestine.”
Black Bear, called such even though he has a grey coat has a voice like a Negro Dick Tracy.
“Pedro thanks you for your going away present. He and his family are living in Los Angles now. White Bear and I joined a South Central Chicano street gang. Pedro’s girlfriend thinks I’m cute, but Whitey could use some new fur.’
“Such talk is fucking ridiculous Black Ass. Good to see you, old buddy. Looks like you’re still loose with the personal possessions. That girl is dead as a doornail.” His little voice is sickly cute.
“I didn’t teach you guys to curse.”
“The mother of the little Mexican boy did. We can’t fucking stop now,” explains Black Bear.
The two bears waddle up to me and I pick them up. They’re a little heavier than before. They also move, talk, and appear a little alive. I remember that the first time in my life when I sincerely cried and felt down and out and over-powered with sorrow was when I left these two bears in Mexico at the age of eight. Nine years later they walk about and spill foul language like milk and cheese.
“How now, Brown cow?” White Bear says to me. “I know you liked that girl, but you did what had to be done.”
“You did what needed the doing,” says Black Bear.
“I mean, you can’t kill the devil in you,” states White Bear matter of factly.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I almost sob.
From out of nowhere White Bear produces a remote control. With a click he turns off everything. One click and its just Black Bear, White Bear, me and the universe like back when I was a little boy.
We are lying again in the strawberry field. Black Bear hands me a cigarette. The bears grew up rougher in Mexico. “Where did you guys go?”’ I asked a little more calmly now that the battle has receded in the distance.
“You were growing up. You needed a role model, not playthings for reckless adventurism,” says Black Bear smoking a Noblisse.
“Good adventures went on though,” I say reminiscing. For the first time I can remember a lot of my childhood. It glows like a warm memory of the two little bears.
“Remember the Mohegan Dunes near Montauk?’ asks White Bear. “Do you remember when I showed you the rocket landing point, where the spaceship emergency docked and dropped off your coding?”
I remember a hastily constructed spaceport in the sand dunes of Eastern long Island. I remember playing a vast game of capturing the flag brought there by the Pathfinder’s Day camp. White Bear and I went off to hide and unearthed a spaceship buried in the sands.
“Almost,” I say.
“Remember when you took me to that Art Barge one summer and in the sub basements of the sullied ship we found the endless maze of coffins, the great leaders of the world cloned and frozen for the coming showdown between man and his nature? The Art Barge was the mouth of a bunker, which contained part of salvation within it. It contained a frozen pantheon of leadership for when the world turns finally and fatally upon itself.”
“I remember the Barge, at least,” I mutter. “It was near a long string of metal radio towers on a sandy bay.
“There are so many adventures left for you, Sebastian. I’m halfway jealous you’ve grown too old for imaginary friends,” says White Bear.
“Is Mike Washington dead finally?’ I ask.
“He taught you everything you needed to know. And you gotta realize nothing is ever created or destroyed. It just changes form,” states White Bear.
“Physics?”
“Common sense, change, movement, birth and even death are only upsetting to you creatures lacking a fourth dimensional perspective,” says Black Bear.
“Huh?”
“You might be like, ‘Wow! Fuck! I failed! The Old Man is dead. The game is lost. Mike Washington is gone. Who’s gonna lead me to Zion? I just shot the girl and her unborn savior baby (who might just be your own child). The Clown ain’t dead. I still haven’t faced G-d and I’m stuck in a dream field talking to my two long lost teddy bears.’ You might be like, ‘FUCK, FUCK and fuck. I’m a victim and worse, a failure,’ “rants White Bear.
I have no words to respond to all this maddness.
“But you’d be dead wrong,” says Black Bear suddenly breaking the awkward pause in the soliloquy.
“We, being fourth dimensional creatures can tell you definitively there is so much more going on than even the best human can gather in their mind’s eye. There is an infinity of worlds existing parallel to the ones you inhabit. You, as of just right now exhibit limited control in two,” continues White Bear.
“Just two,” states Black Bear. “Two, out of infinity.”
“There are world’s where Hitler killed all the Judeans and you were never born. There are worlds where you were raised Christian and athletic. There are worlds where the darkness reigns and worlds where the forces of Allah are triumphant. There are worlds where art is the sole and universal means of communication. There are worlds where humanity has wiped itself off the face of the planet in a thermo nuclear exchange. There are worlds. . .”
As White Bear continues his talk, Black Bear clicks his controller again and reality unfolds about us like a vast speedy filing cabinet replacing the strawberry field with countless snapshots, playing around us like grainy, silent films of the worlds the little bear talks of.
“Just because you can’t see a thing doesn’t mean the thing is gone,” says Black Bear. We step through one of the picture screens around us into a flat and grassy plain. It was the Midwest before there were Midwesterners to terror-form and colonize it.
“Hold onto your slippers, we’re back in Kansas,” says Black Bear.
“Where are you taking me now,” I ask.
Around me is a vast green prairie emptying off into a small electric city. I see a skeletal rail and river town in the distance that by size could only house and hold several thousand souls. A massive arch that makes me think ‘Saint Louis” anachronistically, somehow already constructed.
“Welcome to the grassy fields of Zion,” says Black Bear.
“Guess the Mormons had to be right about something,” I respond.
“You gotta be less judgmental. You gotta realize everybody sees little bits of the great truth,” says Black Bear.
I pick up the two Bears and put them on my shoulders. The plains are massive, and I see this outpost in front of me on a river running north to south, maybe the Mississippi, or perhaps the Jordan. I see a rail line, which runs ten thousand miles into the east. This is the last stop as far as western expansion, as far as people needed to take it. We approach the outpost walls. A large green stone sign in Hebrew reads:
WELCOME TO ZION
Population 144,001
“Doesn’t look nearly big enough to have that many people,” I say.
“Not everything takes place on the surface,” says White Bear.
It’s nearly dusk, but the city is bright as day on the other side of its massive stone walls. Its architecture is Victorian, wild western, but its fortifications are all red stone like the Alhambra. The tallest structure is the archway many stories above us, a giant gateway towering above the walls of the outpost.
“Everything is stone,” I mutter.
“Can’t burn a stone wall. Can’t break stone will,” mutters Black Bear.
We close in on the huge, sealed gates of the Citadel called Zion. The red, impenetrable fortifications loom above us, the archway of the City of Many, Many Lights illuminates everything.
“We’ll wait here,” says White Bear, the two little things jumping off my back. They sit their furry selves upon a small and grassy mound perhaps 40 meters before the first checkpoint established on the ascending approach to the gates.
“This place is not for Angels and Djinn; it is a sanctuary for lost women and wary men. You will find us when you get the answers you are looking for,” says White Bear.
“Try not to leave us behind again. Things are moving quickly now. Everything with a beginning…”
“Has an end?” I interject.
“Nope,” says Black Bear, his little Teddy face pulling off a smirk.
“Everything with a beginning knows not yet of God,” finishes White Bear looking like a cherub. The Bears seated behind me seem to glow with their own halos. But only Black Bear has a Halo. White Bear is a Djinn.
I make my final approach on Zion. The city outpost stands on a great mound. The vibrant green of the prairie at dusk is lit up not just by the towering arch, but also by watchtowers along the red walls. The walls are Spanish in character, massive maybe sixteen stories tall. Geometric and ornate, ZION stands like a great citadel.
The Wise Old Man and his great game were swallowed by the darkness. Mike was slaughtered bringing me here safely. It took four years to make our crossing. What struck me most heavily, what weighted down my stride were the Bears’ suggestions that the baby I had killed when I shot down the red-haired girl was my own. It was terrible enough to have fired upon her anyway. Three shots it took to keep the clown out of Zion and out of my own world of the whale. But how was it my baby and the clown’s baby at the same time? The redhead was pregnant when we first abducted her off the flying omnibus. Her name she said was….how come I couldn’t remember her name? I’d palavered with her many times in our journey, almost a year, about ten months that the three of us were together. The bears were babbling. What was I fucking saying? I was amid a vivid, lucid dream conversing with long lost childhood toys in a metaphor.
What color was her red hair, really? Orange red like Jessica Rabbit? Crimson red is like some Eastern European bombshell. She was Russian after all. Red like an Irish girl named Alice from outside Boston. Red like Rosy the working girl or Alana the Leisure Agent from Pardes Hana. I suppose if I crossed between the two worlds so could she. I suppose the only evidence of her original pregnancy was the word of the devil clown.
But I killed that little beauty because it had to be done. Either the wretched clown or I had made her with child. If she reached this place invested by it I’d be committing a vast inescapable evil. I put those bullets in the girl and her baby to save this city and my world from becoming like the land of the Pale City.
I was about to cross the threshold of a seemingly unguarded check point stacked in sandbags when it hit me like a ton of bricks. Well two things really.
Flashing through my head was the fourth dimensional truth that I was many things at many times and while these tribulations were so terrible because my condition allowed me live in two of these worlds at once, one dead, one dying. I realized I could be the scared little boy, the delinquent prodigal son, or even the romantic artiste. I could be the rebel prophet gunslinger, but if I wasn’t the black messiah and husband to this girl (which surely, I was not); then I was the rapist, devil clown too. The bears were right. The child was mine. I had forgotten what an evil thing I once was (am).
This hit me in the exact moment two men camouflaged perfectly with the ground emerged with lightning speed to bring the butts of their shotguns down upon my head. WHOOSH.
***
You can dream and still be awake. I know that now. You can struggle in the name of G-d and be confronted that you have been quite a devil, shrug and do nothing. The great whale keeps sailing upward towards the moon to make a roundabout approach upon the Pale City. Soon I will get my palaver with the One on the highest. I feel like a hanging man.
***
When I return to consciousness, I find myself chained to the sturdy, outstretched limb of some great tree. It is not so inhumane. My hands are bolted in manacles above my head to the large branch but I am seated in a wooden chair with a red pillow. It is very bright out in this garden in which I am a prisoner. There is a welt on my head from the stock blow and there’s blood in my eyes. But I’m back in the garden at least. At least they let me cross to the other side.
I can’t see so well because of the bright synthetic sunlight and the blood in my eye, but there are two chairs next to me at the base of this tree, both empty. One with a black pillow, one with a green pillow. I squint and see a young man across from me seated on a stool. I squinted again. It’s Nicholas Rosetree, my dear best friend.
“Rosetree?”
“Actually, here on the other side, it’s Rosetree, but yeah, buddy, it’s me.”
“What happened to me? Am I in Zion?”
‘Well, you’ve been down and out in heaven and hell.’
“I guess these are the trials of a prophet.”
“So, you know what you are now, buddy? Long scary ride to a simple truth if you ask me,” he smirks.
He takes a wet cloth, warm like at a Japanese restaurant and starts cleaning up my face.
“We weren’t expecting you so soon. You caught the sentinels off guard up top and security around here is tight as a drum.”
“It’s fine,” I mutter.
“They fucked you up good, this time my brother. You’re still my best wingman since Flannigan went faggot on me. You’ll heal up in no time. The women around here are something else. They got character like a Stacy Epstein, blazing beauty, super coy like Zoe or Sophie’s cousin whatsername.”
“Whatsername?”
“The one with the great tits you fooled with.”
“I can’t remember.”
“It’s been that many?”
“I guess it has.”
“Well, you’re a rock star. So, that’s what you get.”
“Am I finally dead, Nick? Did I run out of water in the deep desert and hallucinate my way to Zion through death.”
“Oh, you’re out of water in the deep desert back in the dying the world. That’s true enough. You ain’t dead yet though. You’re lights out on top of the JABAL ZIN riding the great whale.”
“So what happens next? Can you take the chains off me?”
“What happens next is you get to meet the management. Those chains too tight?”
“No, not really, the chair is comfortable as hell.”
“On some nights we get to sit on pillows.”
“Management?”
“If you have to ask at this stage.”
“I don’t have to ask. Why the chains?”
“When Pericles yearned to hear the sirens, he had his men bind him to the mast. Such rapture was the result of this sirens’ song that countless sailors had dashed their ships upon the rocks to get closer to the source. Being your best friend and an obvious player in this great game, I cannot allow you to burst afire when management bestows you with your answers and guidance. We’ve chained you to the tree of life, bound you to it so that you know that when your meeting is adorned you must return to the dying world with the gift of your life. Get it? You’re a man and you are to soon meet your maker. We don’t want a lawsuit. Clear enough?”
“Crystal.”
“I’ll see you back in the Upper West of York.”
He gave me a hug.
“Keep repeating to yourself, ‘it won’t be like in the movies,’” he says. Nick hugs me again then blindfolds me with a cool, damp veil over my head. I see grey then darkness and warmth.
In the darkness I hear violin music playing. I am a boy again of only 11 years in my grandfather’s home in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. The violin turns to a crescendo of Afro-beat, classical jazz. I’m in the wine cellar on a metal-framed bunk bed. There are four bunks that used to sleep my mother Briana, her sister Annie, and her brothers Bruce and Andrew. The house my grandfather built is on a homestead several hours outside St. Louis on a highway through the prairie called Beautiful Downtown Dutchtown. The music fills the big, warm wooden home Gordon Wallace, my maternal grandfather designed and erected. His children are all grown up. Just him and my grandma now. He was an emergency room surgeon for 46 years then retired to the Cloister as he calls this farm to harvest and press wine, tailor 1940’s style men’s suits, cook elaborate meals and read a good many epic books.
I’m very small and very, very far away from New York City, half a continent away. The music is beautiful and now I smell delicious food being cooked upstairs. I climb the steps into the living room with its red brick archways and big glass windows that overlook the valley, lake, vineyards and farm. My grandmother is putting the finishing touches on an apple pie. My grandfather has retired to an easy chair with a volume of some great book. He beckons me to come to his lap. My grandmother turns down the music and says dinner will be ready in five minutes. My grandpa has a weathered grey suit on with a golden pocket watch tucked in his breast pocket. It’s a grey suit with white pinstripes he tailored himself. The man can make just about everything, but not without my grandma’s adjustments and contributions. He’s very old, older than anyone I know. My mom said he founded the Unitarian church of Cape Girardeau, Missouri because they wouldn’t let Blacks in the Protestant one. He is an old-fashioned man, my grandfather, but the traditions he upholds are the universal ones that you don’t improve on much.
My first childhood memory is being with my mother in the strawberry fields near Montauk. The second farthest back is what I’m experiencing now, sitting on my grandpa’s lap, my grandma just about to feed us. He’s reading from a huge blue volume called ‘THE MISERABLE ONES’.
“We only have five minutes, Sebastian,” he says to me as I sit on his lap like a child.
“Let’s finish the story, Grandpa,” I say.
From the kitchen my grandma laughs, “That story you’re reading has no ending, and even if you finish all the pages, Gordon will just invent future exploits.”
“Well, that might be right, but I’ll give the boy some momentary closure.”
“We’ve been reading this book for years, Grandpa,” I say.
“You don’t like the book anymore?” he asks.
“It’s sad. Everybody is poor and no one cares about each other. The man Valjean was imprisoned nineteen years for stealing a loaf of bread. The women had to sell her own hair and prostitute herself then dies of sickness before she ever gets to be with the daughter she tries to provide for. Her daughter is adopted and then forced into slavery. Then most of the other characters die needlessly on the barricades of a revolution their people never rise to join. It’s a terribly sad book this old French tale.”
“These miserable ones are not just some characters in an old French story. These wretched are among us. They starve in the streets and bleed in thankless trenches.”
“We’ve been reading this book for nearly four years, Grandpa. How does it end? Do they throw the man in prison after all this time? Does the young rebel bleed to death or get to run off with the girl? Why did they shoot the little boy helping to pick up the bullets? What song are the people singing? You keep jumping around the book. I’m so confused.”
“Slowly, slowly, little Sebastian. Life is not any kind of linear story.”
“Please tell me how it ends. Please?”
The young people take to the barricades with their rebel group because they want liberty and justice for the workers. The National Guard that supports the dictator of France kills all but one of them. Thousands of young idealistic, men and women die because the masses don’t stand behind their rebellion. The barricades came down three days after. They kill the little boy trying to take ammunition from dead National Guard troops. They kill the rebel leader as he waves his flag rallying the students to keep fighting. They shoot down the girl because she loves the rebel leader and is on the barricades because of this love.”
“But one rebel survives. Marius, right? How?”
“Valjean carries him out through the sewers during the fighting.”
“Why?”
“Because Cosette is in love with Marius and Marius with her and Valjean realizes that their love is more important than Marius becoming another dead martyr.”
“What’s a martyr, Grandpa?”
“A person who sacrifices himself so that others can realize some truer freedom and some higher truth.”
“What truth did the students die for?”
“That working people must resist the iron heel trampling upon their liberty.”
“Isn’t that a good thing to die for?”
“Better to live and let a young man know what the thing is called love. In the case of young Marius, there were many, many others who fell that day in his place. He would have died had no Valjean risked everything to save him.”
“Because Valjean loves his adopted daughter, Cosette?”
“Exactly.”
“How does it end though, Grandpa?”
“With the revolutionaries soundly crushed and defeated and a thief stealing silver from the wedding of Marius and Cosette.”
“That’s a little boring. Wasn’t Valjean stealing silver from the priest in the beginning of the book and gets caught? Then the priest lets him keep it rather than send him back to prison.”
“This is the original act of mercy that rehabilitates him and puts him on the path back to G-d.”
“What about the thief at the end of the book? Does Marius pardon him?”
“No, they have him arrested and imprisoned, I think.”
“That doesn’t seem fair.”
“But he’s the villain, Thernardiers who worked Cosette as a child and then betrayed the rebels in the rising.”
“I don’t get the point of this book. Is it about rebels, about love? Is it about God or about forgiveness? We’ve spent so much time reading these people’s stories, but I don’t get the ending at all.”
“Time for dinner, boys,” announces my grandmother.
I climb off my grandpa’s lap and he set the book about the Miserable people down on the nightstand.
“The only greater human purpose than martyrdom is true love and the only thing that catches God’s attention more than a person in love is an act of true redemption.”
“Is that the song the people sing?”
“The real story in this book is of Jean Valjean. It is not enough to change the way you live your life. This does not fully please YEHAVAH. Your G-d is most impressed when not only do you change your past wicked ways, but that you act and deeds to help the broken and the damned.”
“Why did you pick this story, Grandfather. It’s different from Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.”
“Only because it is epic and further from home.”
I join my grandmother at the table.
‘Are you ready, Sebastian?’ she asks me.
A great flood of white light. Everything is illuminated.
The reason I would suppose I have been chained to the tree of life is because experiencing the management, that is to say to stand in the presence of YEHAVAH’AllahAdonoiElohanuHashem, and that’s only a 32-letter name, is comparable to how a caterpillar perched atop a pebble stone of grass might feel having a cup of tea with a supernova. Like measuring a dimple on one’s cheek then using this length to gauge the distance to the end of the universe. Like the government of Grenada in the Caribbean being asked to represent the solar system at some inter-cosmic clearinghouse. The feeling of something very small juxtaposed with something great of which your cloth is cut.
A great flood of gray light in the intricacies of existence is revealed as a thing of precision and clockwork. I’m floating up and up. For a minute I see the fourth dimensionally. I see the existence of a great X/ Y axis of possibility and coinciding pasts and presents and futures. It’s like a cosmic factory, a storyboard picture showing all things that ever were and could ever be. Along my sides spanning out in an endless corridor are all possible realities playing at once. Up and down are past lives of the souls inhabiting each possible world and rising toward the lives they will live. And then a golden flicker wraps about all these lives and images spiraling this X / Y nexus into a great unified sphere. It’s not the ‘holy spirit’ generating dimension three of this perfect, endless orb as much as it is this beautiful flame interlinking these countless human journeys like a shapeless, perfect fire. I see it. This is God. The interconnectivity of the dimensions of time, possibility and space. It asks me in the form of rose petals fluttering in the wind that I do not grovel or beg. Can’t I see it’s been with me all along and could never bear to leave my side. I can.
Around me in vast, amazing linear order I can see the great game the old man sought to render on that board. I see stories unfolding about me. I glance for a second at the same story retold in infinitely different ways. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose, but every single time we get to choose. And even the stories with gruesome endings, whose beginnings seemed weighted for failure, these souls get round after round to bring themselves back to where they began in some beautiful place with a gentle breeze at their back. Allah is all about them whispering possibility.
At the side of such power and union, you cry out to the Lord.
“What use have you for me?”
And It needs no words to answer you. Though the gaze you feel upon has no eyes, what you can see feels like the first time you were in love and the feeling you got on the holidays giving your mother a hug. It loves me. Now I know that I can bear some other worse emotions because I have felt good things enough times to justify the fighting in the trenches down below.
A billion blue birds whisk up from the viewing post I stand upon. Up and up. Still up.
“Am I righteous yet? Am I good enough?”
The birds launch me through the pool on the ceiling on the sphere. Through the window in the ceiling underground. There’s a sound like when a thermonuclear weapon goes off and then the smell of lilac.
Drink deep from the waters of existence. I love you and have never left your side.
I am now seeing the fourth dimensionally. I am connecting dots. I am living far more than two lives at once. I am not a Buddhist monk. I am not enlightened.
As Tyler Durden once said, “Putting feathers in your ass doesn’t make you a chicken.”
Being invited to drink from the water of existence does not prevent you from drowning in it.
They say the hardest part about seeing things in the fourth dimension is returning from such a state. You’ve become one with God. You see all that has been, all that will be, and all that could be. You are briefly at peace. You are briefly at mercy. You realize that the greatest power there is wraps around you. True and total love. You worked so hard to fight your way back to this place. You may be catatonic, stumbling through the desert water bankrupt at the foot of JABAL ZIN, but that is only one time, one place. Oh how far you’ve come. In the fourth dimension you’re shed of your humanity, of the human myopic egotism that your one silly life is the center of a vast cosmic circus in which you star. I’m floating now. At any moment now, lift off is achieved. I am as pure as a baby in the womb. I am not my race, not my deeds past nor my future. I have no religion thrust upon me. I am for a short time without any sin.
“Don’t make me leave your side again. I see the terrific folly of our ways. I see what we do to ourselves when left in the darkness too long.”
The waters of existence can be anything. Man can mold them into a thing like a furnace and a hell. I will always send prophets to each world, to every man woman and child from behind those foul enemy lines. Your war is always waged with yourself in trying to believe that you have been forged in the waters of creation. In the furnace of your sweltering ignorance, in the dark of the mind’s cave, I said, ‘Let there be light.’ Who will be my torchbearers? Who will be my dawn breakers, my beloved rebel prophets? I said help was coming to your dying world, Sebastian called Zachariah. You are some help out. You drank of me and grew humble. Now drink again of me and cast your fists in iron like a hero soon to be.
Someone’s holding me as every atom of my body attempts to reject reintegration.
Shake. Shiver.
I want to refuse this torch. I want to lie in the water of eternity just five minutes more. But I can’t. It’s not what was intended for this round. I plummet free falling back towards reality.
Memories, sweet memories return.
“Roxanne I did all this for you to see the good in me.”
There was another battle, once again a giant and inconclusive atrocious draw.
The whale dashed against the gates of the Pale City walls. On a giant wave it washed this blight from the dying world. The whale launched back up to the heavens, toward the moon. In the morning it rested again in the place called Biqu’at Tzin. The Pale horsemen were but dust. The Pale rider was only a delirious boy clutching ripped up holy books, babbling like a mad man hidden in his satchel parchments and plans.
The Pale City lay obliterated. Its gate to this world closed, it lies like a metal boneyard. Only its guts are exposed like a refinery and a phosphate strip mine. The threat is gone.
I remember chasing the clown, firing at it with Mike’s pistols and putting hollow tip explosive holes in its hide. I chased that thing across the JABAL ZIN over into Jordan and into a pit of sharp spears. I rendered off its head; but it can never really die.
WALTER SEBASTIAN ADLER 