* * *
The sea breeze smells sweet. Ingot’s hand, the warm little thing, picks at my lifeline. The moon above us is nearly full. In half a week’s time, it will be. There is a single set of railroad tracks that run near town. They run to us from far in the desert and then turn toward the dunes where they disappear, winding around those hills. As it pulls away, Ingot’s little hand goes still and she pulls herself against my leg. Her last vision of her brother will forever be his taut body vanishing into the train, dressed in the starched cloud blue uniform of the General’s army.
As we watch it pull away from the station, a thin long building erected on the sand without a foundation, I decide two things. The somber mood of the evening has remained plastered in good cheer and optimism. As Emery sat there picking at the last hunks of kung pao with chopsticks he will never master, dressed in the uniform, unbuttoned to show his white t-shirt beneath, I begin to think about what it is that I really want out of all this. The train shushes slowly away, until all we can see is the moonlight caught in the plumes of steam, and then even those dissipate around the curves of the dunes, and Emery is gone.
The station is abandoned. But as we turn to walk, I see the unmistakable outline of Preacher Johns’ fedora in the distance near town, watching us from atop a short hill. Frank puts a thick arm over my shoulder. I twist my torso to pull away from him, take three quick steps, and then maintain my pace there. I guide Ingot to go before me so I can pretend to be catching up to her, but it is obvious. The shadow of Preacher Johns descends into the shadow of the hill as we approach. Tomorrow, I am going to call my Benjamin. I want to tell Mrs. Engel that I have claimed my fire, and that I’ve done so because of her. And then, because I know the pain she is struggling with every day, then I will kill her.
Three: The Magician
At first, I try not to notice the masquerade. I try not to notice the way faces transform as they approach me. The wincing, the drawing up, as though monsters are born in my radius, as they orbit toward my epicenter, and then revert again to normalcy as they approach and escape the imaginary perimeter drawn around me. I watch children become sniveling buzzards. I watch men become the shadowed drooling things feared in the backs of closets and I watch women become haggard witches with hex on their dirty minds. It’s a sour sight to see.
I spin with the slowness of a planet, rotating the gravel beneath me as I do, to secure the hot wax sun in place behind the bubble of the old water tower. That sun is an accusing eye. Ironic as it is that I use the water tower to duck away from it, I cannot quite stand the thought of staring directly into its fire. As a boy I go out to a wide empty field, and as I stand on the edge of the great shadow cast by a palm willow, I do stare up into the sun. My eyes bleed tears that I let sit upon my cheeks, and the wires of muscle try to shut the light out but I snap those with pliers of will and they fall limpid beneath my sockets. I stare until the planes of my eyes become burning solar flares. I imagine two small mounds of fire on the surface of the sun that give way to blooming irises in tandem. I stare to decipher the sun and its secrets, stare until the liquid surface becomes a series of distinguishable strands and fibers. If I choose to concentrate, I am sure that I will be able to pluck any of those strings, let it reverberate with the crackle of embers and the cackle of hydrogen, or I can snap the strings one by one and watch the atoms slide piecemeal away like beads until the sun is nothing but a filament shaking lifelessly within a bulb of hazy atmosphere. But I have no interest in that, in destroying it. I want the knowledge of the sun to seep into me. I want either the answers to the millions of mundane questions or the secrets of the three great ones: What do I do? What had I done? What does it mean that I am?
As a boy, I feel the sun drain me, pull everything from me, all intelligence, until I am left there dumb, an empty socket of skin attached by gravity to the wide planet. A scarecrow.
Eventually I become vaguely aware that a caterpillar has descended from a fine diamond string to crawl across my foot. At the time, I believe that caterpillars are the souls of the dead come to watch over us until they are sure that we have adjusted to their absence, at which point they will cocoon themselves. It is only when they sew their angel wings within those webs and hatch as butterflies that they will be able to travel to the afterlife. At the time, there is only one soul I have ever lost to the great sea of death. That is the first memory sent back to me by the sun after we have switched minds.
My solar flares extinguish, the bloomed irises wilt and are swallowed in the lava. The sun and I had traded eyes and come back. I tear my gaze away with the fear of becoming altogether lost between here and there. I step into the shade, beneath the striated curtain of the great willow, to cool. My face has burnt. It is hot and flaky to the touch and it hurts to cringe or blink. The very pressure of the pads of my fingertips gives a twang to my nerves. I look down. The caterpillar crawls off my shoe into its tangled mess of a nest of cool grass. My dearest, I think. It is for you I sought out the wisdom of the sun. I realize, watching the segmented pulse disappear beneath a thick blade, that my wish has been granted. I have come to know things that I hadn’t known before. I have battled the sun and stolen its sight. Since then, it has hunted me down to steal that knowledge back. I exist in shadows, tucked behind corners, manipulating the principles of occlusion to my advantage. But in my age, I feel as though the earth has come to find me out and is trying to change its spin so as to point me out to its master.
I see Mrs. Hesse hurry down the sidewalk, bundled in a coat unnecessarily thick for the temperature with the collar turned up. I lift my arm in the air and wave the old rolled-up newspaper I’m clutching at her and scream something about the coming end of the world. She looks at me and pauses. One of the saddest, pitying looks crosses her face and then she hurries on again. Poor woman, one of the few who refuses to transform in my presence. She always was a devoted one, and though I could always tell that her husband wasn’t nearly as interested in my sermons as she was, and of course who can blame the children for lilting their eyes toward the domed ceiling, they always came with her. When Reverend Wiley strolled into town, it was Elizabeth Hesse who led the protests, who wrote the petitions to the archdiocese, who picketed outside the church every Sunday morning. It touches my heart to see how deeply I have affected her, but at the same time it has been deeply troublesome as well.
I go to her one Sunday morning, as she marches back and forth with her children playing jacks on the sidewalk nearby, and I say to her, “Elizabeth, I think you’ve placed too much importance on me.”
“I haven’t, Preacher Johns,” she says to me.
“But you have, dear. You have. What I do in there—” I nod my head toward the thick oak doors that, for some reason, have been jeweled with a horridly snarling gargoyle face, intricately carved, split straight down the center with a long curling horn on each side to grip. “What I do in there, anybody can do. It’s a profession, no different than a doctor, or a businessman, or a chef. I lost my job for reasons that, whether valid or not, were real. Going in there, Elizabeth, it doesn’t mean that you’re accepting what happened to me, it just means that you aren’t giving up on your faith. Reverend Wiley is a messenger, just as I was. It’s the message that matters, Elizabeth, not the voice delivering it.”
“But it does matter, Preacher Johns,” she answers. She up-ends her picket sign and leans on the post, looks over my shoulder at her children. “Because we both know that he isn’t delivering the same message you were.”
I never quite know if she knows what she is talking about. If she knows who has sent him to town, who it was that secured the Reverend’s position as well as my dismissal by becoming a profligately superfluous benefactor to the archdiocese. Or if she just senses the subliminal differences, in infinitesimal degrees, between his sermons and mine. The way he stresses his words, the places he chooses to pause for dramatic effect. The analogies he makes to current events, to the coastal front, to the General,
whom I have never mentioned to an audience.
I wipe a line of sweat off of my forehead. The gravel beneath me is starting to bite into the soft parts of my thighs. Normally I would spend a few more hours before returning home, but the heat has slowly been rising the past two weeks, despite the coming winter, and I haven’t come quite prepared to deal with it. I gather my hat from the ground, into which passersby who didn’t know me, or who hardly knew me, have tossed three dollars and change, slide them with a rattle into my pockets, and then stand there until the streets are empty. I continue waving my hands in the air, waving the newspaper and smacking myself lightly with it from time to time until a break in traffic comes and I slink back out of the street and into the alleyways that forge the less-traveled paths of town.
The coolness of my shaded kitchen sweeps over me as I step in from the street. I toss the newspaper into the wastebasket and shut the door behind me. I never lock my doors. There is no need to. Not in this town.
I have gotten in the habit of, upon entering my home, stopping to listen to whatever sounds might be around me. There is the scurrying of the rats in the basement, hungry things with small, sharply focused eyes. There is the slow dripping of water in the sink. There is my breath. It comes heavier these days than it used to. I am older these days, than I used to be.
I go to the refrigerator. I know before I look that there won’t be much in there. I don’t get out much, except during the mornings when I go out to spread the good word. There is half a packet of ham from the deli, leftover from two weeks earlier and, by the smell, not quite yet spoiled. I take it out and make a sandwich on two slices of bread that, though stale, haven’t quite yet begun to mold besides for a tiny white starburst on the corner of the outermost slice. The bread feels heavy, it’s surface as rough and crannied as the desert floor that leads up into the dunes. I slice it diagonally. The surface resists and snaps, shatters a screen of hard crumbs onto the plate.
I open the basement door and stand there, listening again, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness. The only sound is the scratch and scurry of the rats, which stop as soon as the slow creak of the door echoes. I flick on the light. The jolt of the electricity pouring down into the cup of the filament shakes the wire from which the bulb hangs, down above the drain imprinted in the floor, above the old wash basin I haven’t used in years. There is a quick flurry of long-nailed claws as the rats run to the shadows that remain behind boxes and in the deepest creases of corners.
The stairs creak with my weight. Since my retirement a year ago, I have dedicated myself to the sin of gluttony. Better than some of the alternatives, I rationalize late at night as I sit at the kitchen table by the distant light of the windowed stars reflecting off the desert. I keep one hand on the guardrail, one beneath the saucer that holds the sandwich, and my eyes on the spaces between the slats of the steps, the spaces where my heels are vulnerable. The basement has no windows, and the stairway bends so that the light from the kitchen cannot continue past the first half dozen or so. I stand above the drain and watch my shadow sway around me as gravity pulls the bulb in a wide arc over my head. I watch for the shadows of the rats. I think I see movement in the back corner behind a stack of boxes that contains clothes I should have donated to the church years ago.
I place the plate just to the side of the drain, step over it, and go back up to the kitchen, shutting off the light and locking the door behind me as I return to the daylight. These days, the rats are all I have left to myself. I wonder if they might appreciate the things that I do for them.
The bathroom is down the hall. I go with the intentions of showering the morning’s dust off of myself. On the way, I pass my bedroom and go in to sit on the edge of the bed. From there I can see out onto the city. My house is built on a low hill, and so even though it is one of the scarce one-level ranches in town, I actually have a better view than most people. I’ve been lucky to find it after being dismissed from the church. The latter half of my former life was spent living in the small home attached to the rectory. Though, I suppose there isn’t much market these days for homes, particularly not here where the world is closer to ending than anywhere else.
And indeed, the world is ending. As a boy, my parents frequented South America, where my father owned several burgeoning mining companies. I spent the majority of my days being served by the natives who worshipped my father as an economic god. He brings with him jobs, prospects, hope, for anyone who needs such things. In fact, it is the worship and devotion the villagers pay him that will one day inspire me to become a Preacher. While we are there we live in a humble three-room hut, stitched together with bamboo and palm leaves on a bare dirt foundation (one of the reasons why I feel so immediately at home when I come here to this city for my job). It is a ravishing difference from the scaling east coast mansion we live in for most of our lives, the months when my father can outsource his duties to vice presidents and accountants and developers all who swear their allegiance to him.
It is there that I go, as a boy of sixteen, just fallen out of love with a native South American girl who dies of a spider bite, to the field in search of the knowledge of the sun. One of the village elders has, over the years, taught me the myths and legends of their people and how, though many of them have tried, none have successfully been able to commune with the god of the sun. Why I was able to, I don’t know. I tell the elder who had taught me the story what happens when I go out to the field, and he falls without hesitation to his knees, waves his arms toward me in reverence. I ask him to stand up and I tell him, “Don’t worship me. The only messages I’ve come back with, will make the world hate me.” I tell him everything I have come to know, all of the intimate knowledge I have stolen from the sun, and he agrees that we will tell no one. In fact, we agree that I should make every excuse not to come back to that village again, a difficult conspiracy by which I loyally abide. I am old enough, I argue six months later as my parents begin preparing their next trip south, to stay home without their guidance, and they permit it.
Of everything that seeps into my brain during those three hours when I stand like an Easter island statue gazing skyward as my skin crisps and peels, the most pertinent is a series of teachings by a thirteenth century Italian philosopher, Asam Cifezzo. Though he is unpopular during his own time, and in fact during all times after his, he maintains a small and thoroughly devoted cult following that serendipitously accepts his teachings for what they are. And what they are, in fact, is the knowledge of the sun. In his youth, Cifezzo studies ancient mythology from the furthest reaches of the world, and in a unique, some might say fateful, synthesis of otherwise disconnected strands of a greater truth that have never quite been glimpsed by any of the individual cultures who stumble upon the crumbs, Cifezzo makes the revelation all on his own. He spends four years standing on the peak of a mountain on the island of what will become Sicily, unmoving, staring into the sun. If what I gain after three hours is enough to redefine the most basic marbles of the grander universe, I can only imagine the horrid secrets Cifezzo uncovers after four years.
Wars wage around him, with his skin as blackened with char as the rocks that stand sentry around him. Soldiers are afraid to touch him because, they will later say, his eyes are boiling pots of fire with the lids peeled wide, his skin that of a burnt lizard, and they think he has become a demon or, if possible, something worse. Even after four years, Asam Cifezzo does not manage to steal all the knowledge of the sun, but only a slight majority of it before, fearing that he will lose the way back permanently, he decides to prematurely sever the cord he has tethered between the sun and himself. Upon waking, he returns to his home, a small village in southern Italy where he was once a sheepherder in addition to his private hobbies of scholarship, and he transforms it into a church. He does not preach, he does not advertise. But slowly, by word of mouth from confidante to confidante, friend to friend, rarely between strangers—those who hear what Cifezzo has come back to say immediately take it for
capital Truth, and nobody wants to risk setting the religious authorities on him as a heretic by alerting someone they don’t already trust with their lives—he gains a small following. They come to his home in the deep of starless nights, taking twisting paths and alleys that circumvent not only the most straightforward way to Cifezzo’s, but also the slightly inconvenient ways. There are times when his disciples, some of which live not five minutes away by foot, take upwards of two hours to reach the man’s home just so that they can listen to twenty minutes or so of dogma before treading another two hours home.
Had he died a martyr, victimized for his beliefs, perhaps the world would have learned of him earlier. Perhaps he would be recognized, at least in historical texts, as a religious visionary. Instead, Asam Cifezzo, the unpopular mulatto child of a voluptuous Muslim spice trader and an Italian sheepherder, dies of what will later be diagnosed as syphilis, contracted from a local prostitute. He dies alone and raving mad, or seemingly mad as he professes the truths of the sun god, clawing at the walls of his bedroom even though his window is open and his doors unlocked.
Chiefly among his tenets is the proclamation that the universe, and to a smaller extent, the Earth itself, is analogous to a living animal. And at the end of their lives, in the midst of their death throes, such animals will writhe and convulse, wildly, savagely, with the hopes of staving off death for just a bit longer. And, like an injured animal, this convulsing will lead to unpredictable behaviors. Time will begin to overlap with itself. Individuals and objects might exist as simultaneous duplicates of themselves at different ages. They might disappear altogether for a time before reappearing someplace else, if at all, and might appear as incomplete, fragmented partials of what they should be. A man without a face, perhaps. Or a rock that might be hollow behind its shell. Or perhaps filled with something it should not be filled with, filled with intestines. They are wild, fantastical claims, and even I, who glimpses bits and pieces of these claims directly from the sun as I gain Cifezzo’s life story, have trouble believing that they might have any real bearing on the world. Philosophy, as theology, is not much more than a guessing game at how an endtime might appear. If there ever really is an endtime, chances are good that none of us will be around anyway to compare it to what predictions have been made regarding it. So I believe, for too long.
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