Any exchange of thoughts, sporadic greetings, or vague transaction of words felt inadequate.
The technical condition of the Leviathan was assured, measured by the bubbly gimbal mechanism.
“What a story, huh?” Amos Oz said, standing on the raised platform—the bridge of the ship.
“Stupid and talentless. Perhaps those are inevitable ingredients contained in every minute of a tragedy,” replied Victor Drake, tinkering with the concave displays.
Amos Oz looked around and went in search of a puffer. Plowing furrows in the water, he sniffed and said again, “You know, I’ve served as almost all positions in mankind—wherever my fate has offered me bread. I seen a lot. From the whaled ships departing the shelter of Nantucket while glaring into chunky snow, to the fields of copra and pearls of Ceylon. And I’ve seen sailors thrown to death, those who caught scurvy or dysentery.
“And I swallowed, like every other man, year after year, the morsels of sloppiness that life presents to us, stuck with hooks and loops in a trap.
“And once the greed for the several doubloons had thrown me into the Gulf of Guinea, where I agreed to hire in a blackbirding ship,” he said and after a long silence added, “There is no worse thing than the muffled curse in this world, Victor. It tightens and tightens like a noose, stifling any hope.
“So this is the way I felt listening afoul to those unfortunate ones who had been kidnapped from their homes as slaves. And that’s the way I feel now—a man whose nature is not only ashamed, it has been strangled by reality.”
“You’re right, Amos,” answered Victor. “How could you say that we have some premeditated plan, such as one who strikes with smartness by giving meaning to every obstacle, like a ladder whose view is worth every step?
“Life with His paintings doesn’t work in such a way. You know that much better now.
“He often takes everything about us, including and finally, us.
“But you know, no matter how diligent the sadness is, it cannot destroy everything.
“And when I traveled with the battered van selling books, in which everything is much more meaningful, I was not happy because I knew where there are hidden treasures. No, I was happy, because I gave a kid a sheet of imagination in which he could find such things.
“Because in this world, dreamers are a lot more than we can imagine.
“To increase it within one person, hmm, this is something worth fighting for,” he finished, pulling a few handles through which the conductors rumbled. The swings of the propellers increased, and the submarine started to bear down like an arrow through the icy waters.
So it was that the vessel changed its direction. Now it was headed southwest, leaving the shiny chrome glacial waters of the white North Atlantic. A lot of hours had to pass before the ocean released its embrace, but the friction eased their way, and I will say that they did get past it. After that, warm water, heated by the Gulf Stream, was in front of them.
The Caribbean Sea glittered like burning acetylene mixed with immortal grass-green hues. Like a coveted pie, it stretched out and heated the souls of these men that had been chilled by the thousands of miles.
Even so, swimming in the swirling, patterned tops, as dense as gasoline in water, the Leviathan headed to the Yucatan; it approached like a tucked sickle, mowing in the sea-blue waves.
Chapter Fourteen
The spinning motor rotor pushed the frozen air, squeezing it through the fins like the arrows of a ticking clock.
The Behemoth strained its surface, shimmering like a scaly fish or thousands of budding diamonds while brick-red fallow hung like curly hair to the Earth underneath.
In the bridge by the oriel windows, bent into a horseshoe globular basket, were Tammuz, Sharukin, and the rest of the crew. They watched as the view stretched out before them.
Behind them, the space mechanisms operated; they were clicking and periodically altered their evidence. They blazed as if the rubberized buttons were made from twinkling stars.
The Behemoth flowed in the air streams through rivers and great heights, leaving Crete as migratory birds remained in the horizon.
Nobody talked. The sea was pleated like links and links of beads were floating and poking glimpses into the water.
They had seen a lot, but they still had a lot more to do in the earthly directions that would keep them intertwined forever.
The desire of these banished people overlaid their compulsive cravings and dreams for home. They worried as if in their minds something had been caught, like a bug stuck in the nets of a spider.
They sighed as one, leaning on the railing of their lives, and looked into the abyss that swallowed all living creatures without any issues; the abyss would digest them in its corrosive gastric fluid.
Being at the Earth’s focal point, at the junction, the bridge between continents, this fellowship wondered where and what to keep.
They set the machine, pressed the keys, and pulled the throttle, watching the flight and feeling in their heart the weeping wound that drops of salt-bitter sadness that evil had left to its taste.
The men were amending their course, walking forward and backward. They were busy with something unimportant. Through the thumbnails in the vestibule, Sharukin said in his sorrowful voice, which only somebody cleansed of sin who has once again experienced it, intentionally or unintentionally, would understand, “What was that all about? To get rid of all the evil in which we are struck, we had to sink him and twist ourselves with hanging ropes?”
“Sometimes, besieged by darkness, it is our only option,” Tammuz said, staring at the plastic, imitation cherry wood panels.
“Oh, fuck off with those arrogant words. I remember my childhood spent near the willows of the rivers of Babylon. I remember the military expedition that made me an orphan and all the crimes committed out of hunger, revenge, greed, and finally from apathy. I think that it’s time to show us the rumpled white threads of that seemingly sewed story.”
Tammuz breathed, and kept on breathing, as if trying to create rings of smoke. Perhaps he was just trying to put order in his words, which had faded away in his throat as nothing more than dull stagnation, created pain.
“Each of us is a time traveler, but not many can say that they have literally done it. Well, I’m one of them. I come from a broken canvas, gaping and frayed. It is a glazed place with concrete cities where some of the residents were eating food from the galvanized steel trash cans.
“Like anybody else, I wanted to do something special with my life, to stand out, in that way that only the truly great achieve. But wishes are castles in the air that often rise only to collapse and be buried as a part of us. Because we are all waiting in a green, oil-painted hospital on the benches of bitterness. Yet we are still walking forward, picking up the pieces of the puzzle of life that rush from its everyday changes. I did this with a body whose cells were resurrected after symptoms played hide and seek with death. It turned out that I was the most appropriate participant for a program that originated on paper, and we all know how smooth everything appears when written done. We were baptized and promised the most expensive thing in the world—a ‘New Beginning.’ Or, more simply put, the ability to travel in time to give or prevent everything that would encourage or threaten humanity. So as Buddhists have said, ‘Nothing happens and nothing will be.’
“The people have become the gods or the aliens that came down from the heavens and so it was that the largest living project ever had been created. For instance, the myths and legends in your Sumer, Sharukin, for the divine children—Anunnaki—were created. Those are the things that eventually eradicated the paths of time. I was gifted to take foreign memories. Every day I ask myself while staring into mine and others’ past, why is the candle of hope being extinguished like a falling star in the sea?
“I do not know, my friend.
“Sometimes faith is the particle, that great wisdom that we can carry in this world.
“And with it, and w
ith God’s help, I say, ‘Forward!’”
As if fragrant oil had been poured on the heads of group and chilled them, the men felt merged with those life-giving forces. It seemed like they were being sucked from their bodies.
They caressed the console’s appliances; they shook them and the zeppelin, as docile as bird turned and twisted as if its axis were spinning like an umbrella. They were now headed to the south.
The Libyan Sea began to mesh with the Cretan as sickle stars come from a Van Gogh painting pulled into chrome-brilliant whirlpools and splashing across millions of stages in their width.
It’s that dimension of the warm, dry, desert winds that brings to mind a sense of timeless lost in the sand.
Thus the blue spilled into the molten, red-yellow glass, suddenly ended, and an ocher-white, mixed like clay appeared while the sands of the desert spread like cosmic dust from horizon to horizon.
There hidden as oyster pearls, melted in the hot heavenly slope, separated by thousands and thousands of breadths of distance, flashed Alexandria, Carthage, Dougga, El Dzhem, and Timbuktu.
They were piled like star systems separating life on Earth and life in space.
Here, the songs floated like strings of armadas, stretched in the flour-like sand sea. They can only be compared with two longing hearts that have finally merged in the partitions of everyday life.
Man knew that wilderness is the cradle of the human soul over which God himself has sung, telling a shroud of miracles and hope, which had been appointed to humanity.
Perhaps, apart from Him, we need just the nomadic mat to go back to those lost cities in the jungle, hiding in the catacombs ingots of treasures, children’s dreams, and the great gift that He has given us.
In exactly that way, crossing the celestial diapers like a dolphin or otter and cleansed in the streaming rays, approached the Behemoth.
Therefore, with the mastership of transmitted narrative, we will cut their progress and we will continue on to several days ahead, exactly as they reached the shores of Africa.
So after a few breaths of air, just as it takes a fabulous gin to clap hands and carry mountains, rivers, and seas, the Behemoth is now already in front of the Nile delta with its wrapped and stratified roots or veins. It is an area flooded with life-giving green square kilometers and square fields that disappear deeper and deeper into the view.
Chapter Fifteen
The dense tropical vegetation tapped to the rhythm of the song of dozens of different species of birds with bright plumage.
Under the halo of the green and flowing down through tawny trunks were islands of lushness. They had been created greener and were associated with the bracelets of boulders. Here and there, camouflaged in the jungle, fields of sugar cane, sweet potatoes, and pineapples were shaded by palms that grew askew. They grew in front of the eye, charming man with a rich harvest—a cornucopia—that could only be compared to the reverie of the island in one of the stories of Arabian Nights.
Among them, walking in the park, arranged as if by the experienced eye of an artist with ponds, water lilies, reeds, and countless tropical flowers with a palette of colors, and surrounded by colorful craters, were Takeshi, Akuma, and the others.
In a single file line, they had pierced their way through wildly grown forest, purified, as we have said, of clay or sand-like vestibule farms. The structures were shaded by strangling vines and lianas, oil or coconut palms.
Moving as trivial as it sounds, foot after foot, the group progressed among the green twilight, breathing the stale air of decay and paradoxically the enriched air from recent photosynthesis, which came from the orchids that had been drenched in a number of colors.
Sometimes, doubt grew because of the waterproof roof of the forest. They thought they saw the outline of strings of heather paths warped with arching bridges over rapids and hidden among grassy logs that stood abandoned. Such things had been gradually conquered by the jungle and were the last evidence of human activity.
Therefore, among the plants that crept with their ivy wrappings, it’s not difficult for a man to imagine that at the next turn he will come across something like the granite bell of a temple full of the nests of birds and dens of monkeys cast by ancient builders.
Who knows what miracles here we’re looking at in the ethereal, blue lakes that can be found on this island of the Western Pacific Ocean, separated from human breath by the creative genius of Asia.
Therefore, with this initial discovery and passion, shouldering their packs and heavy-legged with primitive muskets from Korea, the company traveled the roads in this pristine, untouched paradise, seeking something wrong and captivated by what was before their eyes.
On this occasion they bypassed (perhaps mainly because of Takeshi) the rise of lampshade-braided huts and Asian houses in which senile old men huddled around the outbreaks of copper cauldrons to tell the swarms of shaved to bare skin children stories of sudden happiness, which, as has said one great man, never miss even the most unfortunate ones.
The men were among those clouds of flora that we peer at only in our dreams. They started adventures in the haze of the jungle.
Here seemed to be no evil or cruelty, only that which nature with its infinite wisdom has allowed to be reasonable. There had been created a microcosm of balance and meaningfulness.
And life had been arranged like units in an exquisite Chinese box with brass fittings. They landed on this site and it left little room for doubt.
As we have mentioned, crystal blue beaches with porcupine-like needles in the form of palms dotted the area and cast shadows over the valleys. The combs were tucked like glades of fairy tales.
Around them, as if adding even more to this idyllic scene, a grain of crushed powder unfolded like a fan of colors. Waterfalls flowed and fish jumped under them, stunned by the outflow of gallons of water.
This was a site without care, which the Almighty had prepared for His children to give them a piece of His essence.
But sneaking up like the snake in paradise, the evil, hour by hour, seemed to increase its strength and was seducing people with the flattery of its tongue.
Thus, the group rushed even deeper through this wilderness, leaving behind the grass and houses abandoned by every living soul that had appeared here and there. These abodes, as if still filled with peering eyes, hinted at the gazebos and wells that also weren’t looking too friendly. Floating over them and cheapening the view soared mysterious balls of blue flame that people in later centuries would call “hitodama.”
The company, like in the fairy tales, delved deeper and deeper into the scary forest that nobody had been able to find their way back home from.
And the farmland, the smelled of the kettle, disappeared, giving way to the wetlands. They kept an ashy green haze and croaks from frogs could be heard like in those old movies where the frame shifts and changes into a pastora background with sad Celtic music suctioned from a symphony made of bones.
The company, like many others in life, unloaded as if in a park in front of the hospital with iron hoops stuck in alleyways. And despite the seemingly ambient amount of life, they still got the sense that everything was simply saying, “Get out of here.”
But as happens every day, they had no choice. As if blinded by that fatality that remained as a stigma that ulcerated the body and spirit, they moved on, pushed forward to every action.
Because in life the big bad wolf is the grief that played like a cat with us and then broke the backbone of our dreams.
But even so, finding a clean place for our hearts and dedicating it to what we like is the courage with which we go into the forests of the beast.
The men remembered those terrifying moments in which they waited with one another for death itself. This time death encouraged them as they moved along the path of the jungle, which implemented sounds that stretched out like a sleeping giant for miles and miles.
Soon they began to encounter broken or hollowed out gravestones. There were bil
lions of stones, pieces ground to powdered palisades until they reached a wall whose ruins had tens of thousands of plants and shrubs that clung to it like leeches.
It had been made of cyclopean stones, stacked one after the other and designed to hold something both inside and outside.
Although there were plenty of dissolved holes covered with relegated material and loose vegetation like ropes, it took the men awhile to climb the ruin, which was hundreds of feet high. As we have said the plants had grown one over another like baobab.
But, finally, after they had climbed it—a task that would have hampered even the most experienced climbers—they came to the rim and looked down across the green jungle that spread out and away from them. A slope curved down like an amphitheater crater, so they descended, breathing rapidly from the height.
Then they were climbing down.
The men soon lost track of time. They were careful not to slip on the slopes of the crater, which had been carved by the incalculable strength of nature.
They rested, leaned over it, and marked the trail so that they would be able to go back again. After three hours, as measured by the sun’s rays, they had climbed down and backed up several times with a piece of bread, salted meats, and cheese, they came to the bottom.
There more greenery greet them. It gave them a loose, open view of the almost vertical cliffs and a hidden valley; it was practically impenetrable because of the stumbling rhizomes and creeping shrubs.
Soon those plants disappeared, giving way to unhealthy, burned straw-yellow grass that turned to powder with each step and raised clouds of unusual shiny purple locusts.
Every step slowly seemed more difficult and after a bit, unusual weakness—nausea and vomiting strains—made themselves known. Then before the men’s eyes, but still in the distance, a matte bismuth-colored, glamorous, half-emboweled, huge spaceship laid in the sand.
Chapter Sixteen
Crematorium for Phoenixes Page 7
