by James Curcio
I recognized him, if you want to call it that, as Zagreuss, the subterranean bull-god. The minotaur of the labyrinth. But here at a book signing? Well, what can I say? At least he’s waiting in line politely enough. I just didn’t know he was a fan of my work.
I’m not sure if you’ve ever seen something like this in the light of day. It takes a certain sensibility – or madness – to see these dream beings when they break through to the waking side. I have a bit of experience at it. You learn to hold your gorge or your hysterical oh-sweet-Jesus, I’m-losing-my-mind guffaws. You sign the damn books and move on. And give a deep sigh of relief when you see that he has dematerialized upon your next hasty scan of the room.
The girl standing in front of me leaned a little closer as my hand completed the stroke that passed as my signature these days. She didn’t turn to leave, instead biting her lip hesitantly and then blurting out, “The places you write about. They’re real, aren’t they?”
I found myself adjusting my glasses for no particular reason. “What do you mean by ‘real’?”
Her hand rests on mine for a moment. Warm. Real.
“What we experience is real. If you’re asking me if I write from my experience, well yes...Mary,” I said, looking down at the name I had just written on the inside of the book. “The freakish contents of your dreams, those half-glimpsed scampering beings in the woods, and the cog and wheel world of the physical world are all equally real. Just in different ways.”
“I’ve wanted to get into one of your classes for a while, but I’d have to transfer. Because when I was in high school I had a lot of experiences like that, a friend of mine, she was a Wiccan, and we did this thing with these candles and...”
Here it comes, I thought, very rapidly losing interest and tuning out. Let me guess, you were dancing around sky clad and some curtains rustled. Maybe some of the shadows didn’t line up quite right. Yeah, yeah. You didn’t hear me. None of you are hearing me.
“The Gods... the forces that posses Demigods... are like Yoruban Orisha. Those spirits don't die, they are patterns that re-occur time and again, embodied in whatever matter will take them. The flesh dies. These spirits are just immortal ideas. But they are living. They are legion.”
The girl's eyes widen slightly. She takes an unconscious step backwards.
“Sometimes we remember one another, we even get these little inklings of our relations with each other in the past and future incarnations...like when you meet someone and hate them or love them, and have no godly idea why. We don't reincarnate. The flesh withers, dies, rots. The spirits that possess us, they are eternal. But the memories they have of the time spent in these bodies is hazy, mixed up. We share bodies, my eternal other and this particular self, this aging meat suit...”
I trail off. No one is listening, and she had this zoned out look on her face like she'd just been hit with a massive dose of intravenous morphine. She laughs uncomfortably and asks if she could have my number.
The people behind her were doing some rustling of their own. Finally, I manage to hurry her off after accepting a slip of paper with a phone number on it. I promise to call her. We could talk about the time she played spin-the-bottle with Lucifer.
I look back at the line. It seems even longer than before. Haven’t I played this game long enough? I don’t even care about selling books anymore, trying to put a spark into a youth who I doubt will grow to see adulthood. I’m fooling myself. I just want to go home.
I stand and walk out of the room.
Maybe it was just her name. Mary. It reminded me of an old friend. Sweet, peaceful; of the girls, she was the most averse to the idea of combat training. She belonged on an organic farm in the Hudson valley, going on springtime jaunts in a bio-diesel van, growing vegetables in the garden behind her home in an old converted chapel.
No. This world makes no goddamn sense anymore and no amount of blow jobs will set that right. I’ve never belonged here and I never will.
I just want to go home.
2021
I escaped a firestorm in the desert to be blanketed for all eternity under forgetful snow. It patters like a million fluttering eyelashes against the windowpanes.
The snow makes a sound. It’s an ever-present husssssh, though I can’t say who it is telling to remain silent. Amazing, that something so fragile can crush and bury people alive. It called to mind an article I'd read by John-Ivan Palmer about the man who beheaded Yukio Mishima.
He said that there exists an onomatopoeic sound for absolute silence. The Japanese word for silence is “sin,” pronounced more or less like “sheeeen...” with the sound trailing off at the end. Like “whoosh” is the sound of a sword cutting through the air, and “gurgle” is the sound of blood spurting out the neck hole, “sin” is the “sound” afterward, when all is done, the bodies removed, everyone gone home, and only the silence remains.
That's the sound I am hearing now.
All I do anymore is write. Write, and watch the snow fall in electric blue night. One snowflake, another. They add up, soon my past will be even less than a memory.
I’m not sure who I am writing this to, or why I’m doing it.
Habit’s a bitch. By “write,” I am referring to a complicated routine, which, among other things, keeps Colombian coffee growers well enfranchised. The process is no longer feverish, or goaded on by the dangling carrot of purpose. I no longer publish. I no longer teach. I live alone in a cabin. My life is orderly, simple. Perfectly meaningless, like a koan.
The process and the product are inseparable, and one exists only for the sake of the other. Anything that does not belong in this delicately balanced web has been pruned away long ago. It is a peaceful but also lonely and somewhat sad position to be in, to sculpt your entire existence around such an isolated activity. I may as well spend my life tending bonsai trees. Except, they are at least living things. A word never read is a dead thing. They come alive in your mind, or they’re nothing. (I can say “your” and mean you specifically because, well, who else could I be referring to? Someone stole my journal and is reading it, or it’s moldering in the corner and I’m speaking to no one.)
Mostly, I write about my past. The days that led up to my hospitalization. Our glorious last stand against the directed force of one of the world’s oldest and most powerful entities. Ariadne. Artemis. Jesus. Lilith...Some of them I knew were dead, but the others...Was Cody still strumming his guitar at some bus stop with his calloused fingers? Was Artemis out there somewhere with an army of her own? I don’t know, and I’ve always been afraid to find out.
On some level, it’s probably the same with everyone – you have close friends, you feel what you think are unbreakable bonds, whisper secrets to one another at night, enjoy a beer together after work, however it is that you share life together. Then you notice the crowd begins to thin. With all those who are left, all you have to talk about is the past. You see them at weddings, but you lose them that way too, and to their jobs, to lymphoma, to simple apathy.
Along with each of these losses, whether gradual or sudden, you lose not only a friend but an entire vocabulary. In the time spent sharing space and life with another, a lexicon develops that no one outside that inner circle can penetrate. An almost magical, shared language ripens in the growth of a relationship. With the death or loss of a friend, you lose their company, but you also retain something. You retain the fecund language that you developed with them, rich with nuance, inside jokes, and meanings which have become so layered and subtle that you can only but feel them, for they have escaped the conscious sphere altogether.
But here’s the kicker: it is a dead tongue, a language you can share with no one else. If you approach new faces with it you risk alienation. If you never speak this language again, you do a disservice to your past, and find that – maybe not all at once, but eventually – you live in a world entirely in your head that no one cares about any longer. Their indifference isn’t the result of callousness, though there is plen
ty of that to go around in the world. They don’t react because they don’t and can never really understand. All of those who could have are now gone.
The world shrinks so slowly you may barely notice this process, until you find yourself old and exhausted, sucking oxygen through a tube, a liability to the few who stuck around. In my case, there was nothing gradual about it, so I can only imagine at the experience of sliding down the slippery slope from adolescent exuberance and idealism to infirmity and obscurity. But in terms of effect, it’s really no different.
I don’t write any of this for shock value. It’s a simple point of fact. All the same, this pleasant line of thought is why I have isolated myself, and it is why I write. The more I pen my ideas to paper, the less I am stuck in the reality of that past. I used to think it was the other way around. I thought that by writing I could put the pieces back together again. The truth is, the words replace the memories. Events are replaced with their representations. Today, an entire year of my life became 7,324 ink characters on paper. One day I will awake, and my past will be entirely gone, converted to symbols. Then I will be free of it.
Yet this doesn’t feel much like freedom. Counting days in my results; stained coffee cups, stubble that has turned to a full beard, dog-eared books on the Orphic mysteries piled slowly under my desk. Snowflakes, each unique, falling one at a time.
Maybe, in a manner of speaking, the snowfall has already buried me alive. I just haven’t realized it yet.
December 23rd, 2022
It would seem Judgment day came nearly eleven years late.
I woke up this morning with the certain knowledge that it would be my last. I have fallen my entire life, as if through empty air. Now I can see the ground rushing up to greet me, and I am almost eager to make its acquaintance.
But it isn’t just me. The world is changing: the tide rises a little each day, never receding. There are terrible floods, fires, hurricanes. Solar storms. The constant catastrophe numbs you to the end result. Then one day you realize you’re about to eat asphalt.
Of all the people in this crumbling city, I had the most warning. I could have fled and started yet another life from scratch. Maybe I could have stood out on the sidewalk wrapped in three layers of thrift store trench coats, showering passersby with prophetic warnings and a plume of spit.
We all had our warnings. This end has been prophesied in our religions, in the newspaper headlines, and in the countless feverish dreams we choose to forget upon awakening. It has even happened before, and it will happen again, when the next civilization comes to its own grinding halt.
At the end of the lifespan of a universe, a culture, a life, it is destroyed, and a new one born. But for it to be born, and for life to be renewed, a divine sacrifice must be made. On the other side is a new dawn, and a new world.
One of the oldest myths that we have tells a story of a God shedding his blood to feed the crops. He is cloven in two, and redeemed – in the underworld, or at the bottom of the ocean – by his wife, the great mother. This story is older than the tales we have of brother slaying brother, older than the Garden of Eden.
As I look down over the thirteen stories of open air beneath me, I remind myself of this. There is no such thing as death. Only dying. Death? Death is a single heartbeat, but never again. A grain of sand. It is nothing at all.
What am I? I am that grain of sand, and I am Dionysus. When the world has need for me again, I will return. Now comes the hard part: the time for that sacrifice. Ariadne, I haven’t forgotten my promise.
I have always been afraid of falling. But I am not afraid now.
