by Mat Laporte
Such are the times, Balamir thought, and he felt no shame. For whom would he feel shame? The cats? He was just following their example, and to think himself better than a cat, he thought, would be to sow the seeds of elitism and resentment in an already severely limited economy.
As he squatted and emptied himself, Balamir noted a scrap of paper with handwriting on it, lying face-up on a withering pile of garbage. What he could see of the writing, just the thin blue scrape of it, disturbed a series of memories that had been lying dormant inside of him. He remembered a hot water bottle placed under bed sheets, a dark wet stain, the reek of stagnant flesh, animal stress, a bedframe made of wooden crates, and a handmade mattress stuffed with straw, on top of which he saw the puffy face of his little nephew Shaunce.
He remembered the country home filled with neighbours as they conducted tests, made diagnoses, scribbled notes, and made up songs in the stuffy room where Shaunce lay dying.
Balamir remembered that the procession of neighbors, doctors, and curious folk from the Council went on for days. Days of whispers, crying, and very little light, just the frantic scratch of pencils and a slow caterwaul of prayers sung softly in the darkness, with small breaks in which the sun shone through some porthole-sized window in his cousin’s sickroom.
Balamir recalled Shaunce’s eyes, which seemed to be begging him from dark pools of suffering for some relief. Balamir’s own eyes became deep pools themselves as he remembered the psychic bond he and Shaunce once shared. He would sit and stare at Shaunce’s pale face, as it struggled to breathe, willing him to become well. Eventually Shaunce’s eyes began to fade. They no longer pleaded to Balamir for relief. Instead they seemed to focus for a short interval on some distant planet, before closing permanently.
The entire Council mourned Shaunce’s death, as was the custom when an infant died. They wrote stories and poems, composed musical accompaniment for trios and quartets, one of which was for clarinets, as Balamir recalled; he could still hear the faint reverberations of this song and he wept as he remembered the other beautiful pieces that were created, many of which, he realized, might be under his feet or mixed in with his own feces by now.
He stood up and fastened the rope around his pants, once more. Years of wandering on his own had made Balamir old and senile before his time, but he had enough sense to make a plan, foolish as it was. In his simple mind, if he salvaged the Council archives, read the stories and songs again out loud (including the procedures, histories, and rules of how to conduct a civil society), if he organized and restored all of these documents, one at a time, he might make the Council appear once more. Or, he thought naively, he might at least come to some understanding about what occurred there, what had reduced his city to a single citizen (himself), and the rest of it to garbage and wandering, feral cats.
And so, like his foolish childhood-self had done at Shaunce’s bedside when he was merely nine, Balamir’s plan was to achieve this feat of salvage and revival, using only the force of his mind.
Balamir’s plan was to piece together the histories and stories of the Council of Grandmothers first. The Council of Grandmothers was the bedrock of Council society. He knew that there were thousands of folios committed to outlining the creation of the Council of Grandmothers. It involved a lengthy democratic process in which, if his memory served him, grandmothers from each of the wards of the city were nominated, and over a few weeks, the lives of everyone in the Council were filled with ceremonies, festivities, tests of strength, power and intellect, all culminating in the casting of ballots, and finally a vote that determined the holy Council of Grandmothers.
The Grandmothers ruled until one of them died and when one of them died, they all died; that’s what the final ceremony was for: the tying together of bloodlines into an unbreakable pact. After that, the Grandmothers functioned as one invincible unit or not at all. This corresponded with the Council’s core doctrine, which said that the smallest unit is the person and the biggest unit is the Council. These two—the big and the small—work together, or not at all.
Balamir remembered that the folios, which contained the Histories and Teachings of the Council of Grandmothers, were kept in the basement of the Church of the Original Seven Grandmothers, which was in a part of the city he never visited anymore. He’d built up some psychic resistance to that part of the city, he wasn’t sure why. It had been a long time since his parents had taken him there to hear the songs and stories and he had not been in a rush to return.
When he finally did return, the place was old and feeble looking, not giant and domineering as he had remembered it. The Church of the Original Seven Grandmothers looked as though it had suffered from some great illness and then violently succumbed to it: a multi-generational archive lay as though vomited from its front doors, now broken off their hinges; the windows were all smashed, and heaps of folios, books, stray paper ledgers, paintings, magnetic tapes, and film strips that had once comprised the precious archives of the Council of Grandmothers, lay in one awful wretch on the front steps that then spilled out into the parking lot.
Balamir spent a few days moving the archival material away from the front of the Church, just so he could get the doors shut. He was surprised he couldn’t remember where everyone had gone. Had he lost his mind? They say that memories begin to form only once you’ve learned to speak and, likewise, if you cease speaking for a long period (or if you find yourself stranded on a desert island, or forced into solitary confinement for a prolonged amount of time) then you can lose the ability to speak, and so, the logic suggests, you must be able to lose the ability to remember, as well.
Maybe that’s what’s happened to me, Balamir thought to himself and then he poked a pile of paper and spliced-together tape and celluloid, which toppled and spewed out years of memories and the inventions of a people who had disappeared without notice and left him behind.
Balamir sifted through the archival material in the Church. He parcelled out the stacks of information into some semblance of order. He wanted to find the Grandmother’s histories so, he arranged the materials by subject matter, and then, if the documents bore such a distinction, a subcategory was made for authors. He kept a handwritten index of each category: author, subject and title, cross-referenced with a code that he would use to assemble it all later.
He took a break from a long day of reading and organizing in the Church’s basement. He could still smell the cooking fires and broiled meats of some of the people he had just finished reading about. Their faces had become as real to him as the stacks of paper in front of him. He heard a floorboard squeak and then looked up to see an old woman in a soiled grey dress observing him with suspicion. He wasn’t sure how long she had been standing there.
At first, Balamir thought the old woman was a character in a story, no more or less real than anything he’d imagined as he read throughout the day. But as the old woman continued to stare indignantly at him, he realized that the story he was reading required his participation in order to proceed. Balamir stood up and patted away some of the dirt that had stuck to his filth-encrusted pants. He opened his mouth to speak and was alarmed to find that he had forgotten how. He tried a few more times, opening and closing his mouth, moving his tongue around inside his mouth, feeling what it might be like to push air and syllables out.
This must have been an alarming sight to the old woman who stared and squinted at him. “What’s this?” he ended up saying, more like a statement than a question, followed by another flat statement, “Do you live in this thing?” He nodded at the piles of paper that receded far away into the church basement’s shadows.
He noticed the old woman flinch right before she pushed past him to inspect the orderly piles of paper he’d spent all day creating. A few stray grains of rice fell out of a burlap sack that she was carrying and she felt along the bottom of it, looking for where a hole might have formed. She lifted the bottom of the sack up to avoid losing
any more grains then continued past him, through the labyrinthine stacks of archived materials, towards a flight of ascending stairs at the other end of the basement. Balamir watched her go, the first human being he’d seen in, he didn’t know how long. When she was gone, as far as Balamir was concerned, she had disappeared, like the words and characters disappeared from the pages of a book when he closed his eyes.
The first thing he remembered about people was that you weren’t supposed to reveal your poops to them. In Council society, you did that sort of thing in hiding, and he felt shame for the trail of defecations he’d left in his wake, having thought himself alone. He wished he hadn’t scared her away, because he wanted some of that rice.
Out of the pitch black on the other side of the basement, he saw a spark and heard the sound of flint on stone. A tiny flame appeared as the old woman set something alight and walked up the flight of stairs. Balamir waited, fighting the urge to follow the smell of fire, then he did anyway, instinctively, mesmerized, across the basement floor and up the flight of stairs after her. There was a moment in the darkness of the stairwell when he was afraid the old woman had led him into a grave or some sort of tunnel he’d never get out of. He didn’t like the darkness, so he focused his attention on the sliver of light being shed at the top of the stairwell. As he approached, he realized that this was coming from the top of a door frame, and as he climbed the last step, he pushed the door open and found himself in an inner courtyard, with the sky open above him and the old woman tending to a small fire in a metal bowl.
She ignored Balamir’s arrival in the courtyard and dipped an iron pot into a barrel of rain-water, and set it on a wire hook hanging above the flames.
From the looks of the courtyard, the well-used, smoke-blackened metal bowl with the fire inside it, the paper for burning piled around the stone court, she had been burning the stories and histories of the Council of Grandmothers instead of firewood, for some time. Balamir groaned when he saw that.
The old woman dumped some grains of rice in a pot and gave him a severe look that he understood to mean he shouldn’t come any closer. He pointed at the piles of tape, celluloid and paper: “You burn that…for fire?” She answered him by spitting into the flames and onto the half-burned reams of paper with a hiss.
“I came here to read them, those stories, to find out what happened…” he murmured, unable to take his mind or eyes off the flames.
“You won’t find out what happened from those,” the old woman nodded at the reams of paper she had made a woodpile of in the courtyard, “Because you can’t read or understand what’s not been written down.”
Balamir croaked, his rusty vocal chords strained, the new sensations of speech unnerved him and he uttered a string of distressed and ugly sounds instead.
The old woman continued, as though he wasn’t there, “Nobody saved the stories at the end. No one had time,” she said, “First there was the boulders…” she trailed off and stared into the fire for a long time and then started telling him the story, mechanically, without inflection, as if by rote, like she had told it many times before.
For Sandy, every day was the apocalypse. Inside her bones were the burning embers of the world; her disposition was to destroy, and as she hovered over the field, two boulders the size of planets were about to converge. The boulders were lobbed from one side of the Council to the other and the whole country was screaming, tied up, sentenced to death by firing squad. But the boulders were taking forever to arrive, and Sandy pushed down into herself, causing the embers inside her to glow, redder and hotter, as she gripped the air, and everywhere she gripped the air became thick and the clouds began to boil.
Tiny specks of people ran by in squads on the ground, trailing carts filled with supplies and ammunition. The microwaves generated by Sandy’s internal combustion, that emanated from her outstretched hands, caused the ammunition carts to explode. The hurtling boulders sounded like a hundred fighter jets without mufflers as they ripped through the sky. Tiny explosions took place as the atmosphere relocated itself to accommodate the boulders’ weight and shape. The sound of the boulders caused tremors; mountains shook, releasing stores of ice, water, magma, ash, as though in concert with the moon-sized rocks, tracing a path through the inner-skies.
Sandy felt nothing. She hovered in a pocket of evacuated air that cleared out her senses. She could hear a tinny whine coming from her eardrums as they strained to hear inside the bubble. With each tensing of muscles and flaring of the embers in her bones, she laughed, unexpectedly, and a rip formed in the vacuum where her sound should’ve been. The rip turned inside-out and created a tiny silver point in front of her eyes, and then the silver point was ejected out by way of the rip in the bubble.
She watched the boulders migrate across the country, knock out the sun, and cause unseasonable hail and snow to fall on the farms below. She could see the tiny people huddled together on the ground, trying to escape the icy barrage. She felt in awe of the contrast between the glowing boulders on a collision course in the sky, trailing fire as they caused parts of the atmosphere to burn up and explode, and the cold, grey fields where the people and their families lay motionless and slowly froze to death.
Sandy didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She could destroy both of the boulders and save the Council, but they would just launch more. She felt pity for the people on the ground and wondered if it might be slightly better for them to die quickly in the immanent collision of the boulders than to die slowly in the crossfire of a war between two factions who were using all the people and resources of the Council as their fodder. She pressed down on her bones, which caused them to burn and implode hotter than ever before.
The boulder-projectiles were forged amidst suffering and despair, in a foundry not much bigger than the boulders themselves. They began as tiny, silver specks with the intricacy of a microscopic diamond. In these early stages of their growth, the boulders were small enough that one attendant could hold this seed of future destruction in the palm of their hand. In fact, in the early stages, they did hold it like that; for twelve hours at a time, the speck of silver was placed just above the attendant’s hand, where it would levitate and glisten in the refractions of light from the phosphorescent, slime-splattered walls and floors of the foundry. The stone flake was incubated that way and, after a few more months, grew to the size of an apple: hard and silver, with something slippery and multicoloured swimming around inside it. At this later stage, more attendants were brought in to breathe and bleed onto the silver stone. The bleeders were chosen by a casting of lots. Once chosen, these attendants were sent down into the foundry and locked up to be bled until they had no blood left. They were laid out on an improvised table surrounded by bowls of green slime. Four attendants held them down and another one pressed a rock sharpened to a thin point into one of their veins. Head veins were the most popular choice but at times, on the whim of the attendants, arm veins or eye veins were also used; anything that could bleed out a thimble or two onto a stone plate. The blood would then flown through a thin trough dug into the plate’s surface into a basin where the silver rock was fed. Eventually the rock grew; its multicoloured insides oozed and exceeded itself then hardened and, in that way, advanced in height and circumference with each feeding. When the boulder reached and began to exceed the capacity of the foundry, an explosive charge was triggered in the chamber beneath it. The air-tight foundry then crumbled and the boulder burst out of the ground amidst glowing red fireballs and parts of the sky imploded as it began its long, slow arc, to fulfill its purpose on the other side of the Council.
Ludmilla looked up where the giant boulder seemed to be frozen in mid-flight above her and snowflakes fell on her eyelashes. Her favourite horse Brace didn’t look up, but seemed to register the boulder’s presence by nervously patting at the ground with his fetlocks, as though he wanted to run but found himself in a dilemma, having to choose between his screaming instincts and
his good training.
Ludmilla paid extra attention to Brace, brushed his coat and whispered to him while she did. Brace panted and kicked the dirt of the frozen ground. More snow fell and then hail, so Ludmilla went into the barn, found Brace’s rough blanket, and returned to drape it across his back, the whole time patting and singing to him in her girl’s high-pitched voice, while the three other horses her family kept padded around nervously in the stable behind her.
Somewhere above Ludmilla, her high-pitched singing voice and the nervously kicking horses, was Sandy. Her molten bones had incinerated all her hair; she stood out from the blue and grey clouds and the snow falling like ash on all the farms, like some orange flare being transported across the sky in its own private bubble. Sandy hovered over the darkened fields; as a member of the Council of Grandmothers she was an assurance to the doomed country folk below.
Ludmilla saw her, the horses saw her, anyone who was outside and still not frozen to death saw her, silhouetted against the artificial eclipse caused by the two enormous boulders as they raced toward each other across every inch of available sky.
Then Sandy’s bubble, glowing orange and faintly yellow around its edges, burst. All anyone could see after that was a fiery trail from her emaciated skin bubble as it ripped clean open and fell to the ground in leathery sheets and the molten core of Sandy’s skeleton tore across the sky toward the point where the two boulders were about to meet.
The horses in Ludmilla’s stable, including Brace, started to kick and whinny. Their lips parted, baring their hideous yellow teeth, their eyes open wide with fear. Brace kicked out with his back legs and Ludmilla wasn’t able to get out of the way fast enough. His hooves collided with her face and caused her head to burst open and bleed a purple splatter onto the white snow of the horse’s pen, as Brace and the rest of the horses in the stable hissed and cried and pranced around.
