Containment: The Death of Earth

by Charlee Jacob

  Perhaps a village! With good folk willing to grant food and shelter.

  “Mama wa kambo, do you think they will have sweet yams, baked soft under coals?” Louise asked, so hungry for real food. “Maybe ginger and peppers, or cassava chips?”

  Aziza answered, “What I wouldn’t give for a piece of bread. Milk! When was the last time you tasted milk?”

  “Lentils,” Louise suggested, giggling.

  “Tomatoes,” Aziza added, laughing.

  “Rice fritters,” the child replied, swallowing, her mouth overwatered by mere suggestion.

  “A banana,” the woman put in, swaying from the dizziness of such delicacies as the half-starved craved, a far cry from the edible roots and few grubs that tasted, with a great deal of imagination, a bit like buttered chicken tripe. At least the first one or two did, providing a bitter source of protein.

  Aziza worried, though. She doubted the village would have a variety of food, and much less to spare. But evil as some people could be to one another, she’d also seen how generous others could be. It sometimes seemed that the less folks had, the kinder they were, knowing how it felt to have one’s belly button scrape against their own spine. And with that thought, and her faith, Aziza kept on.

  Louise chuckled, whispering into her stepmother’s ear.

  Aziza feigned reproach at the child.

  “Pumpkin cooked in coconut milk? Greedy thing! You are a pumpkin!” she exclaimed.

  “I am not. You are a pumpkin!” Louise shouted.

  Aziza nodded. “You would turn into a pumpkin if you ate everything we just talked about.”

  Louise looked toward the village. She mumbled a word: “Embe.”

  Aziza’s eyes rolled. “What? Now you want mango? Does sound good at that.”

  “Not embe. Embe mwanamke.

  Louise pointed ahead of them, her finger shaking.

  Out of the air or behind the blink of an eye, ‘she’ was a soft orange. Hers was as the flesh of a ripe mango. Except this was flesh… teeth… eyes… and hair, upon her head and in the fine down upon her body. She was naked, her most personal, private hair sprouting in curls in the same color.

  “Embe mwanamke,” Aziza muttered.

  Mango woman.

  The woman even wept orange tears. But her apparition flickered in and out, the way that pictures in television sets in some of the hospitals Shimani used to visit would go to nothing and then return, according to their cheap cable’s whim.

  The woman blocked the path.

  No. Not a woman. She was kizuka.

  Ghost.

  Louise and Aziza watched in shock as she manifested, vanished, appeared again. Horrible scars covered her mango-colored flesh. As if she had been systematically taken apart, then reassembled as some ominous doll. She gestured into the village, shaking her head no at the woman and child before her. Opening her mouth as if to speak, a piece of mango fruit fell from her lips, bleeding a juice bordering on an orange so dark as to almost be red.

  Aziza pleaded for Louise’s sake.

  “Please, let us pass. This little girl is weak. That village may be our salvation. If you will let me carry her there, I will immediately return and submit to your will.”

  “No, mama!” Louise cried, clasping Aziza’s hand.

  Then the image began moving, her hands miming a sunrise turning. The wind, which before had been blowing toward the village, suddenly changed direction. It carried to them what they had not been able to smell before.

  Aziza knew the stench. The profuse odor of bodily evacuations, the gruel of watery purging containing tiny pieces of victims’ guts. She had seen it in the refugee camps where poor sanitation among those packed together created a fecal stink none could forget. She’d seen extreme dehydration shrink people’s features, their eyes only pits in their faces but wild in convulsive pain. The skin even on a dark-hued race could take on a bluish tinge.

  Then came shock.

  And death.

  Kipindupindu.

  Cholera.

  Why nobody from the village was on the path… Nor any of their livestock.

  The mango woman disappeared, slipping sideways into the rotten wind.

  Aziza quickly carried Louise in the opposite direction.

  Chapter 5

  ————

  “The iterating of these lines brings gold;

  The framing of this circle on the ground

  Brings whirlwinds, tempests, thunder and lightning.”

  – Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus

  ————

  The house, old as it was, was always lit with candles. Yet altogether they produced nothing like the sun. Even all the candles from his entire life, their guttering luminosity combined, created nothing so radiant as the ball of fire in the sky above him. The way its heat bathed him as if the boy were, himself, a roaring fire on a winter hearth… Winters he’d only read about, dreamed about. It moved him to tears.

  The colors of this outside world, too, rich, vibrant—green grass from jade to emerald to chrysoprase, purple/fuchsia/crimson flowers the size of gemstones and of the size of heads. Turquoise sky, its color prized and discovered in the tombs of Egyptian queens. And in the vaults where Heaven seemed the highest was lapis lazuli, prized by Inanna of the Samarians. At the edge of his sight where the world bent a little, the sky was traced by indigo, streaked with threads of suicide scarlet.

  Was it his lungs or his soul that drew such a deep breath? Trees climbed toward swiftly-gathering clouds like stalks of incense.

  It began to rain just as he stepped from the house. He saw the drops on the sidewalk and he cowered, fearing what he knew must be out there…

  Was it true? Did aggrieved angels lie wounded around him upon a world of retribution? If he looked out only a few feet would the cracked marbles of their eyes, of mother’s eyes, be gazing back at him?

  The water from the sky wasn’t blood. It was only washing the blood from his ruined eye away, and from his cuts and bruises from the Angel.

  The shower lasted a few moments during which time he stood up, strangely clean.

  There were people on the street but not a single mangled one in sight.

  Homes along the block had other children playing on neatly trimmed lawns.

  “Look!” one of them announced. “Two rainbows!”

  The boy began slowly at first, down the crackled and buckled walkway of the Angel’s precious but ill-kempt sanctuary.

  Why, the earth hadn’t been destroyed by mankind at all! This metropolis was large. Heavily populated.

  Alive.

  The angel had lied to him. She’d outright lied, obviously so she could keep him as her prisoner and acolyte. The creatures that morning, the ones from the sunken circle—from the pit where she slept—had demanded his release. Well, he was out now; he’d never go back.

  The boy walked what must have been miles, listening to a strange rolling roar, at first distant, then closer and closer as he came to a corner. He turned it, finding something almost as profound as the sun seemed to him. An enormous body of water tossed beyond the shores, stretching all the way to the horizon. People rode its climbing, falling waves. Not scared, but truly riding, no fear, just joy.

  That was how he wished he might fall in his (Dream).

  “’Scuse me, dude.”

  A kid pushed past him, striding toward the beach, carrying a long board. It bore only two things the boy recognized in the Greek symbols for Alpha and Omega—the beginning and the end.

  People stared. “What happened to your eye?”

  “You a pirate who forgot his patch?”

  “You got a little of that—that Rum guy in you? Yo ho ho?”

  “Yeah! Yo ho ho! You should cover up more. You got quite a swinger and sac under that robe.”

  The surfer turned, seeing the boy’s injury for the first time. “Leave him alone. Can’t you see something went down?”

  “His drug deals gone bad ain’t none of my business.”

/>   “Let me take you to the hospital,” offered the surfer.

  “I’m okay,” the boy replied.

  Nearby others batted a ball back and forth across a net. A mother sat with a baby only a few days old. He couldn’t see the mother’s face for a wide straw hat.

  The street, the beach began to rumble. Not a rumble like the falling water before him. This was bad. In the distance, the boy saw high-rise buildings sway. Everyone but the boy screamed. They tried to run but couldn’t keep their footing as the shaking of the ground grew worse. A fissure split the shoreline in two.

  The boy ran for the baby and mother, hearing the infant cry. He saw an orange blanket just before the mother threw the child into the fissure.

  “No! Why did you do that?” the boy demanded of her, looking hard for the baby. “How could you? I can’t even see the bottom.”

  “Never scream. And if you must weep, weep quietly,” she replied beneath the hat.

  He found himself just stepping from the house, shocked and in awe of the sun.

  A hard hand landed clawlike on the boy’s shoulder as the Angel pulled him back in, then locked the door. It was the first time he’d ever noticed that it was a key she wore around her neck.

  She glanced at him, her face an icon of the inert.

  “I guessed this would happen one day,” the Angel said. “Now you must suffer the punishment. Not of the fearful but of the damned.”

  The boy was terribly afraid. What was a worse punishment than tearing out of one of his eyes?

  She dragged him toward the kitchen.

  “But the door! I didn’t force it…it was unlocked,” he argued, trying to pull away. Part of the Book flashed into him as if it had been written there for this precise and unjust moment:

  What do you know of justice?

  Does it come from the gut?

  Does it come from the spleen?

  Does it come from the heart?

  Is it an argument for philosophers?

  Is it a matter of revenge?

  Is it the sole right of the gods born among lesser men?

  It is all these things and more.

  Justice is always punitive, whether or not you did the deed.

  It arises from guilt in the mind, that which we all commit,

  And for which all will one day taste our own blood for vengeance.

  What is your catastrophe has resulted from everything

  That has ever happened, from the beginning of the world until now.

  Eventualities and Apocalypses

  – Peter and Yoo Xhang

  “Don’t act innocent or as if I have insulted you,” she told him. “Unlocked or not, I’ve made a strict commandment that you never open that door or go outside. It was one of the most important rules.”

  She grabbed him just beneath the stomach and twisted the fistful until the pain was so bad he almost couldn’t voice it. He sank to his knees as she beat him on the top of his head. Then she started pulling him again. He slid across the splintered pine floor of the kitchen, smelling the collection of rancid fruit, far too overripe on the pitted counter. Flies buzzed around the taped window over a yellow sink, unable to escape. He understood how they felt.

  The Angel unlocked another door in the kitchen, yanking him down a long, dark flight of steps. So, it wasn’t a back door to the outside… it was a basement. A doorway to, like the words of a writer in The Enantiodromia, “…to the super subconscious of the soul.”

  She shoved him to the bottom of the stairs. As he lay gasping for breath and folded in pain, she lit a lantern and descended.

  As his eyes adjusted to the dark, the boy made out a pile of dirty clothes heaped in a corner. When he recognized skulls and other bones scattered within, he guessed murder had been done. Yet who they had been and how long ago it happened he could only wonder.

  Then he saw the winch and crank, two sets of long chains, two rusted, heavy hooks, thick as a man’s thumb.

  The Angel ripped his robe from him, then forced him to stand. She pinched the flesh of each shoulder blade with one of the thick, sharp hooks. Did he imagine them scraping bone?

  She turned the winch’s handle, pulling the boy off his feet. When the hooks had first entered the backs of his shoulders, he felt a gushing wet heat run down his skin. As he moved upward with the initial jerk, he heard the spurt as it struck the Angel. Muscles and tendon ripped, blood vessels popped apart.

  “Do you dream of falling?” the Angel asked. Then before he could answer, she quickly added, “How about flying?”

  He didn’t know, for right after this he fainted.

  ««—»»

  The night was night because blood obscured the sun. Thick enough and without light, gore will appear black…especially if it is older than original sin, wordless years talking to him. It eventually found its way into the earth, formed pools which over perhaps millions of years the dinosaurs left footprints. It made lagoons in which species drowned, creating a sickening soup of oil and bones.

  He flew over this (as who? as what?), above a sanguine ocean that reflected him as a scarlet thing.

  He sang: “Blessed art Thou, O Eternal-our God, King of the universe!”

  The forests rustled with his voice and the mountains bled from their open faces. The wind blew with the permeating fragrance of iron as comets streaked the heavens, their light flashes of insight.

  [Types of Shock:

  1. Hypovolemic—excessive bleeding or fluid loss

  2. Cardiogenic—heart failure or erratic function;

  3. Vasodilatory—arterioles do not properly constrict.]

  And he never touched that hallowed ground; his feet never touched it.

  Yet the insides of angels obscured… He only remembered the ages before. Time/Space bent back on itself like the 0uroboris, the holy serpent that— in devouring its own tail—begat the first circle of Power…and then raised the renegade cabal. Even the fathomless turned out to be ephemeral, bottoming out in sin by those bred to be the pure and paramount.

  He’d been flying, then he was falling. A being of the air, pouring out his devotion in hymns to God. Next, he was a cursed creature delivered of his immortal and immutable organs into the chaotic storm darkening an already embittered world. His screams were lost in the gristmill of celestial carnage, the penalty for transgression.

  [N.D.E.: near-death experience. An acute awareness or experience of a heightened sense of other worldliness to those at the brink of death. Many appear to enter a numinous place, considered timeless and eternal, a supernatural realm that few words can adequately describe.]

  The boy, still unconscious, thought to himself, I’ve done nothing wrong. Why must I suffer, being only born to this?

  The answer floated from the red-become-black, just as strange words had in The Enantiodromia.

  The True Original Sin! And The Sins Of Fathers Are Passed On!

  Indeed, he seemed to be flying when he opened his eyes at last. Except there was no euphoria in it. For the sounds of creaking chains. For the excruciating pain.

  Who was he, this dead boy, this Goya’s witch, discarded mongrel of Heaven and earth?

  He swung his feet. Therefore, he couldn’t be dead.

  Could he?

  Again, the ground rumbled, grinding as teeth when pressure becomes too great to keep still.

  Stupid—as was his silent weeping. Where was the catharsis in that hopeless, ridiculous gesture?

  He saw a circle through his haze, in the middle of which sat a pale-haired little girl, skinny arms wrapped around knees shaped like diamonds. Seven adults stood around her, holding hands. One woman spoke softly to her. “We know you see them. Come on, baby. Oh now, don’t cry. But if you must, do so quietly. We don’t want them to think our little indigo Angel is afraid.”

  The torment now consuming every neuron seemed nothing to do with air and everything to do with fire. The boy looked down at himself, expecting to see flames. Below him, beneath his own fresh gouts, was old blo
od upon the floor resembling a fresco of a silhouetted nativity, of a baby with darkened halo and wings, invoked by splatter. What was this ambiguous emanation? Was the basement floor cracking? Dust and dirt plumed from the ground beneath and fell from the ceiling where, in the dilapidated house above was the Angel—the Angel, counting a rosary of her many cruel primordial talents.

  The ground shook and suddenly the rusted chains snapped, plunging him (I fell. I fell. I fell.) to the floor and directly atop his own blood, and the dried blood from what previous outrage?

  Growling, whimpering, snarling, the boy struggled to reach behind and remove the hooks. They had already come out, further ripping the chunks of flesh from his shoulders. Under the steps he saw a mirror, the first he’d ever seen. Was that what he looked like, the face and body of a boy becoming a man? He turned and spied—reflecting the awful injuries he’d just sustained. When (and if) they healed, how much would they resemble the Angel’s horribly scarred shoulders where her wings had been torn from her body? Of course, she had both of her eyes…

  But no insides. The next time the boy broke a major commandment, would she disembowel him? Further disfigure him? If she takes my other eye, how will I read The Enantiodromia? He was delirious with near comic thought at his pain. Nor my tongue, for how can I summon spirits? He needed at minimum one ear. But not two. No need for two, ha! She could cut off his nose to spite his face. The boy glanced down his muscled torso. No…!

  The shaking earth stilled itself again as he climbed the stairs. She’d locked the kitchen door but he used one of the hooks, succeeding after a time in opening it.

  He went to her room.

  Liar! She was face up on the floor, lightly snoring. So cautiously did he remove the chain and its key from around her neck. Leaving her to (Dream?), he tiptoed to her closet. What mysticisms and cataclysms would be inside to enlighten the boy?