Existence

by James Frey

  He will blinkSHIVERblink bring them death, as he’s brought his father death, as his father brought his mother death.

  He will bring an end to everything.

  And then, when the earth is dark and cold and empty, when all is burned to ash, he will blink​blink​blink​blink​blink finally be at peace.

  His mother wakes him with a soft kiss on the forehead.

  “Happy birthday, Little Liu,” she says, tickling his feet until he laughs himself fully out of sleep. “Do you remember how old you are today?”

  An holds up four fingers.

  “That’s my little man!”

  “Am I a big man today, Mother?”

  “Not yet, sweet,” she says. “Don’t be in such a hurry to grow up. You have plenty of time.”

  “What will happen then?” An asks.

  “When?”

  “When I grow up. When I am a big man.”

  “Oh.” She smiles, sits down on the bed, and pulls him onto her lap. “I’m going to tell you a secret, Little Liu. Are you ready?”

  An nods eagerly. He loves secrets.

  “When you grow up?” She tickles him again, and he tries to wiggle away, but she’s holding on too tight. He hopes she will never let go. “Little An Liu, when you grow up, you’re going to change the world.”

  AKSUMITE

  HILAL

  Hilal is searching for peace.

  He sifts through the dark recesses of his mind, seeking an oasis of calm.

  The effort is in vain.

  He longs for the still inner quiet that has sustained him for so many years. In times of chaos, pain, fear, he has always had this escape: to a silence deep inside. A placid water, smooth as glass.

  But today, as yesterday, as the day before, he is troubled. Chased by memories.

  He sits on the concrete floor of his hut, back pressed to the wall. Sunbeams filter through the thatched roof, painting prisms of light across his ebony skin. The hut hums with electricity, it contains half the computing power in Ethiopia, but today Hilal has no interest in the bits of data whirring through its veins.

  This small compound in the Kingdom of Aksum is Hilal’s home, and has been since he was six years old. But it doesn’t feel much like home anymore.

  One year ago, he was sent away from this place by his spiritual master. Eben ibn Mohammed al-Julan had sent Hilal out into the world many times before, for purposes of training or education. Sometimes, there is no clear mission, simply the instructions: Watch. Listen. Learn. The true Player must be a citizen of the world, Eben likes to say, and so Hilal has sampled cultures across the globe.

  But this trip was different, for it was meant to last a year.

  “How can I leave for so long?” Hilal said. “These are my people. And I am their Player. If Endgame begins—”

  “If Endgame begins, I will summon you home. There are things you must learn that I cannot teach you, Hilal.”

  This seemed impossible to Hilal; surely, if it was worth knowing, his master could teach it.

  “It will be good for you to live among people for a time,” Master Eben said. “And it will be good for them, to live with a man such as you.” He smiled gently. “We can’t simply wait around for Endgame to arrive, can we?”

  “We must spend each day saving the world as best we can,” Hilal said dutifully. This was one of the first lessons his master ever taught him.

  And so he traveled halfway across the continent and took up residence in a village of strangers. He traded in days of study and weapons training for long hours of educating children, tending to the sick, cooking for the elderly, helping with the construction of a new sewage system. They knew nothing of him when he arrived. Hilal ibn Isa al-Salt was a mystery to them, and not a particularly interesting one. They didn’t know or care that he was the great-grandson of Ezana or the grandson of Gebre Mesquel Lalibela, nor that he was the Aksumite Player, sworn to save his bloodline when Endgame comes, nor that he was in lifelong pursuit of a being called Ea, the soulless leader of the Brotherhood of the Snake. They didn’t know about Endgame itself. They knew only that he was a stranger in their homeland, that he came bearing food and medicine and an ancient truth. And, gradually, they came to trust him, even love him, as he began to love them in return. He taught them what he could about the workings of the human soul—and learned, in turn, what it meant to be part of village life. Celebrating its small triumphs and mourning its losses, trading cheerful gossip and mediating petty grudges—Hilal became one of them. Or, at least, so it seemed.

  They came to trust him, and when disease swept through the village like a firestorm, leaping from family to family and leaving only corpses behind, they thought Hilal might save them.

  Instead, he abandoned them.

  “Remember,” his master told him, when he reported the situation, “your life is more precious than they know. Guard it well. Come home.”

  The village was full of brave men and women risking infection and death to take care of the ones they loved—but Hilal, who’d been raised to have no fear for his own life, to devote himself to the good of others, behaved like a coward. Snuck away in the dark of night. He was forbidden from risking himself; he was meant to believe that his life was more important than theirs.

  So he fled from infection, from tainted blood and stacked corpses; he fled home.

  That was two weeks ago. Fourteen days readjusting to the rhythms and comforts of home.

  Trying to forget the village he left behind. The faces of mothers clutching babies to their chests, of children kicking soccer balls across barren fields, of strong men bearing heavy loads, providing for their families. So many people, and Hilal loved them all, and now he can only wonder what has become of them.

  Whether any of them are left.

  As a Player, he has pledged himself to saving the souls of all men, but saving individual men and women, and their children? That is beyond his parameters.

  Still, he would have liked to try.

  Every night, in his dreams, he tries again.

  The door creaks open.

  Hilal flies to his feet, takes a defensive stance, battle ready.

  But it is no enemy. Hilal’s face relaxes into a smile. He has been meditating in isolation for two weeks, and if his solitude is to be broken, this is the man to break it. “Greetings, Master,” he says in eager welcome.

  “You are the Player now,” Eben ibn Mohammed al-Julan corrects him. “I am the master no more.”

  Hilal bows his head to acknowledge the claim, but will never agree to it. Eben has been his master and spiritual guide since he was a very small child—it was Eben who selected him, of all the children scrambling through the fields of his village, to train for this sacred role. Eben, a former Player, saw something shining from Hilal, knew somehow, even then, that Hilal had been anointed by the Lord. Master Eben took Hilal into his own home, taught him how to speak, how to think, how to fight, and, most importantly, how to follow a righteous path, how to serve and spread the ancient truth.

  Someday, Hilal assumes, he will be the one to venture across the countryside, searching children’s faces for the spark of the divine. This is how it has always been done: the Players of the past choosing those of the future. He has asked Eben many times what it was that the master saw—how he is meant to recognize the sign of a future Player, how he will know he has chosen wisely. Eben will only ever say, When the time comes, you will know. The future Player will make himself known to you, as you made yourself known to me.

  Hilal wonders whether he will ever have Master Eben’s wisdom—whether he will be able to train a new generation of Players as Eben trained him. It seems to him that Eben will forever be the master, Hilal the willing student.

  “You seem troubled,” Eben says, always able to read the truth in Hilal’s face.

  “I am having difficulty putting my memories of the year to rest,” Hilal admits. “I feel like a traitor to all the people I’ve left behind.”

  “
Those are not your people,” Eben reminds him, “any more or less than all men of Earth are your people. Their mission is not your mission.”

  Hilal reminds himself that Eben knows best, and that Hilal’s responsibilities to the Aksumite line and its future take precedence above all else. A hundred miles from here, a child is training with a master of his own, preparing to take on the role of Player when Hilal ages out, but he is not old enough yet—not ready. Were Hilal to die, the Aksumites would be left without a champion, and that cannot be. He had no choice but to save himself. He knows that.

  Still.

  Not since childhood has Hilal spent so much time amongst humanity, and though he did his best to remain removed—to remember that he was there to serve the villagers, not to become one of them—he was not entirely able to succeed.

  Eben discourages personal relationships, individual bonds, anything that might distract Hilal from his commitment to the Aksumites as a whole.

  God loves all his children equally, Eben likes to say, and so must we.

  Hilal tries.

  “I have come with a new task for you.” Eben smiles gently, as if he has guessed at everything Hilal works so hard to hide. “Perhaps it will help you turn your attention away from the past.”

  “Anything, Master.”

  “We have located the Book of Ouazebas.”

  Hilal’s eyes widen. “But I thought that was lost in the destruction of the Bayt al-Hikma?”

  Bayt al-Hikma, the House of Wisdom, once a crown jewel of the Islamic Empire and the largest library in the world, has been in ruins for nearly 800 years. Hilal believed the majority of its works—among them a sacred Aksumite manuscript from the 4th century AD—were lost forever. According to legend, the Book of Ouazebas tells the story of an early Aksumite king’s battle with the Brotherhood of the Snake. Some say it contains the secret of finding and defeating the brotherhood’s ancient evil leader, Ea, once and for all. Few have harbored hope of finding the manuscript intact.

  “The book has resurfaced in Egypt,” Eben says. “It was found in an archaeological dig several months ago and has since found its way to the Museum of Antiquities in Cairo. As you can imagine, we’ve done our best to negotiate for its return to its native land, but the Egyptian authorities refuse.”

  “You want me to retrieve it for you,” Hilal guesses.

  “For all of us,” Eben says. “This could be what we’ve been waiting for. The answer to centuries of fruitless searching, the weapon we need in our final war. You, Hilal, could save us.”

  Hilal sloughs off the guilt and regret that has been weighing him down for the last two weeks. He stands tall and proud. “I am ready, Master. Tell me what you need me to do.”

  All things being equal, Hilal prefers walking to any other form of transportation. He prefers to wear loose, flowing robes that conform to the motion of his body and flap in the breeze; he prefers sandals with a single strip that expose his feet to the sand and the elements. He likes to feel the ground beneath him and the people around him, to move through the world as the ancients did, at one with the Earth and its creatures.

  But walking to Cairo would take more than a month, and his master doesn’t want to wait.

  So Hilal takes a truck across the Sudanese border, then hops a rickety charter plane to Cairo, and does it all in the constrictive costume of a modern-day teenager. He wears jeans and closed-toe black sneakers and a garish T-shirt emblazoned with some nonsensical Japanese.

  “You need to fit in,” Eben told him.

  “They will stare anyway,” Hilal pointed out. “They always do.”

  He says it not with arrogance or false modesty, but as a simple truth. Hilal, with his dark skin smooth and fathomless as marble, his azure eyes, his high cheekbones and ivory smile, is beautiful—almost inhumanly so. He knows this because he’s been told, many a time, and because of the way strangers stare at him, sometimes with awe, sometimes with desire. It’s not a thing to be vain about or ashamed of, simply a quality he’s been endowed with, and he would be a fool to take exceptional pride in it. But he would be a bigger fool not to use it, when it can be used.

  Fortunately, the men on this plane—businessmen, from the look of it, convinced of the great import of their petty deals—have better things to do than wonder about the tall, almost regal seventeen-year-old sharing their airspace. Hilal dons headphones for the duration of the voyage and bounces along to an imaginary beat, pretending to be lost in his own head.

  Humans, he’s noticed, are all too willing to believe that they’re invisible. And it’s only when they think no one is looking that they reveal their true selves. So Hilal sees the nervous primping of the elderly man in the bow tie and understands that he’s on his way to a romantic rendezvous, while the furtive young man with the mustache and the briefcase he never lets out of his grip makes all too obvious his criminal intent. He sees that two other men are both employer and employee and father and son, that the father loathes and distrusts his offspring, while the son hopes and perhaps plots to soon have his father out of the way. He sees which of the men is a secret smoker, which is an alcoholic, which is satisfied with his life, and which hopes soon to end it.

  They don’t bother to see him at all.

  The plane touches down in Cairo as the sun is setting, and his taxi battles brutal rush-hour traffic as it inches toward the museum. Hilal shifts impatiently on the leather seat—of course, if the museum is closed by the time he gets there, it won’t be a problem; he’ll find his own way inside. But he prefers to walk in through the front door: it’s more dignified.

  The setting sun glints off skyscrapers; overhead, the sky burns, and Hilal draws his patience from the moon, which bides its time, waiting for night’s canopy to descend and the stars to show their faces.

  The taxi screeches to a stop, and Hilal gives the driver twice the requested fare.

  Here is the Museum of Antiquities, its white archway blazing bright against an orange facade, its classical Western architecture giving all the appearances of a European museum—belied only by the towering palm trees bracketing it on either side and the Egyptian flag flapping at its entrance.

  The museum, Hilal knows, has been instrumental in the cause of returning stolen artifacts to their land of origin, chasing Egyptian antiquities halfway across the world, statues and jewels from tombs excavated centuries before, bought and sold and hoarded in private collections—bringing them back home.

  Were he quicker to anger, Hilal might be enraged by the hypocrisy of it, the nerve of these curators and government officials who stake their own national claim while dismissing the Aksumites out of hand. But Hilal only smiles gently at the irony. It is another thing he’s noticed about people, including his own: they have one set of rules for themselves, another for the rest of the world. And all rules are allowed to be broken, for convenience’s sake.

  In the new era, the era Hilal dreams of and works toward, there will be only one rule for the whole of mankind: the golden rule, and this is what Hilal tries to live by.

  This is all that binds him, which is why it bothers him not at all to break Egyptian law and smuggle a priceless artifact out of the country. Laws like those are, literally, made to be broken.

  Hilal purchases an entry to the museum and lets himself be absorbed by the crowds. He ignores the exhibits and instead surveys security measures, the cameras lodged in corners, the alarm system trip wires snaking along the wall, the glass cabinets with their feeble locks protecting the most valuable of valuables. So many blind spots, beyond the reach of both human and mechanical eyes. The museum’s security is riddled with gaps he can exploit. It’s almost as if they want their goods stolen. Even the Aksumite manuscript, worth more than all the other artifacts in this building put together, is housed in a room protected only by a flimsy alarm system and a glass case. As the clock ticks toward closing time, Hilal drifts through the crowd ogling the Aksumite exhibit, noting both the foolish security measures and the bored expressions on
the tourists’ faces. They have come to Cairo to see elaborate statues and golden tombs, not some musty old manuscript in a language no one can understand. They don’t know the value of what they’re looking at, and they don’t deserve to see it—as the museum doesn’t deserve to hoard it. Hilal sees that the liberation of this manuscript is a righteous act.

  And he sees that it will be child’s play.

  Hilal melts into the shadows, slips past a yellow rope into a corridor meant only for museum personnel—a corridor without any cameras. As if employees are to be trusted more than strangers; the assumption is kind, if foolish. The door to the basement is sealed with a padlock—not a problem. Hilal’s backpack has several hidden compartments, packed with tools for any eventuality. He sprays the lock with compressed difluoroethane, which freezes the steel in seconds and turns it brittle enough to shatter under the pressure of a small hammer. He lets himself into the service stairwell and descends into the basement, where he waits out the time until closing.

  Above him, somewhere, the sounds of tourists oohing and aahing, children whining, parents snapping, guards patrolling, and then, slowly, all noise fades away, the lights dim, and the museum goes still.

  Hilal ventures out of his hiding hole. He slides through the shadows and the security blind spots and makes his way toward the special exhibit area, where the Aksumite manuscript awaits him under glass. He has spent years honing his senses and his instincts, and has developed an animal’s sixth sense of danger—he can feel the presence of the security guards in his bones. One pads across the floor above him; one snores in the corridor to his east. They should be easy enough to avoid—and, if not avoided, dispensed with.

  All things being equal, he prefers not to hurt anyone.

  But he will do what he has to do.

  The overhead lights are off, but the displays remain illuminated. Hilal passes marble statues and golden busts, ancient weapons and divine engravings. He tiptoes through rooms crowded with stucco scribes and wooden priests. So many of the faces he recognizes from his studies—there is Akhenaton; there is Queen Nefertiti; there is the gold mask of Tutankhamen; there is the head of Hathor as a cow. Then, finally, in a small room of its own at the far end of the western wing, is the Book of Ouazebas, lit from below, seeming to glow in its glass case. The book looks different, now that it’s alone—almost as if it were waiting for the tourists to leave before it came to life. The lock is alarmed, but this doesn’t concern Hilal: he has no intention of breaking the lock.