Dead End of a Circle

by David Myhro

  My eyes burned like charcoals and I could feel myself moving very unnaturally. "Truth be told, old man: I have never felt love for any child. All I can ever feel is hate for someone like you."

  "My lord," he begged, "I hold my life in as little regard as you do. All I ask is that you do what is right, and that you do not harm the innocents. I will help you in any way that you need, and I will willingly subject myself to your wrath when this matter is through."

  "This is not reciprocity," I scorned.

  "But, my lord, I know that you will follow your heart. I know that your heart will take you to your Starla, and to my little one as well, for you are mighty and in you beats the heart of a hero."

  "I have no heart."

  "Yes, my lord, but you are not heartless."

  I sighed with great emphasis. "Where did this devil take her?"

  "I… I don't know. I—"

  "What? You don't know? You said that no mortal can fetch her."

  "Yes, because of the nature of the one that has taken her. But I swear I do not know where she is."

  "What game are you playing, old man? Are you the mourner of one of the nameless souls that I have slain? Has it happened already that I, in my careless slaughter of thousands, have refined one enemy from the blood and slimy parts that have accumulated in the gutter?"

  "My lord, inasmuch as I know that you, in your infinite wisdom, would not visit revenge upon a man by harming a third party, I, too, would not involve an innocent for such a petty endeavor," he said.

  "But you have involved an innocent."

  "But, my lord," he beseeched, "this is not vengeance. I am not acting on behalf of a weakling that you rightfully executed. I assure you that I have done this only because my love for my little one outweighs my love for my own self and even my value for what is right and just."

  "I hope for your sake, old man, that you tell lies. I hope for your sake that Starla is safe." I beckoned to my men. "Take him out of my sight."

  Chapter 6

  I'd lived for thousands of years before man had the ability to harness the secrets of electricity, and countless times I had experienced total darkness of night with no pollution from light. But there was something different about this vault. When I held my hand in front of my face there was no wraith outline of a hand that I could picture in my mind. It was like this place was so brutally dark that I lost all sense of orientation and coordination. It was like I lost all sense of the self, and I did not even have the instinctual knowledge of where my hand should've been in relation to my face.

  I could still feel and taste and touch and such, but it seemed like I couldn't. I had some kind of panic in me that made me feel like I could not feel. It was like I could reach out and feel the door, but my brain wouldn't know that it was there. If there was light in here, then I doubt that I would have even been able to see. I was completely out of touch, out of existence. This vault… I didn't even know where it was anymore. I was no longer sure of the existence of Earth, or of reason and logic, or of my senses.

  The only thing I knew for sure to be real was the darkness.

  Chapter 7

  We put the crazy old man who claimed to be young in tow behind our horses as we journeyed to see the oracle. By the time we were halfway there, he was being dragged because he was too tired to walk.

  The oracle didn't live in a house. Instead, she lived under a canopy of sorts—greenery that had been condensed into a thick rain cover—and she slept on a large, polished rock.

  She had brown eyes and brown hair and perfect pink lips. She had breasts that were dipped in sin, curves that could make your loins boil, and legs that could wrap around you and grind like a tight pair of clockwork gears. Her earthly bed gave her a natural posture and a certain way about her when she walked that would have made her words true to any man, even if she did not have the sight.

  As we stood on her porch, she looked at me, then at my men, then at the crazy old man, and then back at me again. "You are the one with no heartbeat," she said. "You rule the city that has no wall. You have more wealth than a thousand kings. Everyone from here to the end of the earth fears you more than death itself. Even still, you come to me because there is something that you lack."

  "I offer you the weight of ten men in sculpted silver. In exchange I ask for mere words."

  "Keep it," she said. "There is only one thing that I want from you."

  "Ask."

  "Immort'tality," she droned, with an emphasis on the T, in a way that was both deliberate and mindless at the same time.

  "You have my word that it will be granted to you if you can help me."

  "I want it right now or else I will not help."

  "If I give it to you now," I responded, very diplomatically, "then I will never see my Starla again. Therefore, this is my offer: if she lives, then you will never die."

  She eyed me and smiled. "So you want me to be just as desperate for her survival as you are. I will accept this transaction because your word is worth very much in these times."

  "Good. You will have to do nothing but tell me where to find her. My men and I will retrieve her, and then you will receive your reward."

  "No," she said with lamentation. "That is not possible. Your men will not go with you."

  "They will go wherever I tell them to go."

  "But they would not go to their own deaths. I know the arrangement you have with them. You have given them immort'tality in exchange for permanent service, but they, unlike you, are not invincible. They would not die for you, would they?"

  "I did indeed promise them eternal life in exchange for the perpetual service that you describe, so, as you correctly deduce, I cannot order them to their deaths. But what is this place of which you speak, such that these immortals would be in danger? And how, if these immortals are forbidden upon their lives to enter, is it possible that my Starla should survive?"

  "It is a great risk for anyone to enter, mortal or otherwise," she said, staring at some arbitrary tree leaf behind me. "There is but a small chance that Starla lives."

  "Tell me where she has been taken, oracle."

  "You must find your way to the Garden of Truth; there, the answer will be revealed to you."

  Chapter 8

  The only way to get to the Garden of Truth is to travel through the Land of Lies. Many mortals have gone into the Land of Lies in search of this garden, and none have ever come back.

  They say you can never believe your eyes in the Land of Lies. It is a wasteland wherein the weaklings die and the strong go mad like the other inhabitants. Water is as black and thick as crude oil and fire is as cold as a nun's touch and nothing is ever as it seems, but it is not a dream.

  My men had the crazy old man's eyes put out and we readied a blindfold that would eventually be wrapped around my eyes, and we traveled by horse carriage to the road that would take us to the Land of Lies. We rode for days, and the crazy old man became increasingly fragile for the lack of food; my men kept him alive with the creeping and slithering things that we could find underfoot.

  After some time we reached the road. Anyone who traveled upon the road to the Land of Lies was well advised to not use his eyes, lest he go mad and become one of the scuttling wretches that haunted the land. And this was as far as my men could go, for their loyalty was not to the death; they blindfolded me and left.

  The road to the Land of Lies was strait and narrow. It was strait and narrow, but it was not straight. It was as crooked as a man's heart and as treacherous as his deeds. At the end of the road was the entry point. It was a great pit of tar, and it fed every day upon rot and decay. You could say there was no rotting in this place, as the process of rot is actually a result of the proliferation of life—this place had a death rot, and the air was like the air in the lungs of a dead man.

  The trees here were leafless and black, and the sky was always dull and gray—so I've been told. Don't bother looking for t
he sun, it's been maimed. This land was so dry and desolate, so empty, that a mere drop of water, if given to the earth, would, with the invocation of osmosis and equilibrium, disperse itself in all directions, every which way, spanning several paces before surrendering its will.

  The tar pit was the point of no return. The crazy old man and I arrived at this nexus point and we could hear it bubbling and frothing, slowly consuming the environment around it. Underneath these black depths was the Land of Lies, and there was no known way of coming back. So we took one last moment in this world and then gave up our bodies to the pit, descending through the darkness.

  I had been counting in my head and I knew about how long a man could survive before drowning. As the time continued to proceed we kept descending, but we could not sip through the bottom. There was nothing beneath us but more tar. Something was wrong. When I felt that the crazy old man's time was about to be up, I waded back up through the muck until I felt air on my face.

  "My lord, is that you? Are you there?" he cried, the tar in his mouth forcing slight gag sounds as he spoke.

  "Aye, it is I," I said.

  I had anticipated that the tar pit would swallow us up and then defecate us into some deep underground cave, many paces below the surface; instead, the Land of Lies rolled itself out on top of reality and claimed the horizon in all directions while we were in the black deep. I could see now why there was no known way to leave this place.

  And everything felt so different here, like we didn't belong, like the place was waiting for us to leave. It was cold and barren, and nature was different.

  Chapter 9

  More years passed as I was reduced to mere existence in the vault. I began to lose my mind, and at some point I was totally unable to distinguish between my thoughts and the actual sound of my voice. Even my bloodlust was just simply gone. It was an emptiness that I had truly never felt before in my entire life. There was nothing in this world except for time, and my heartbeat was the world's clock.

  There was something happening to me in this vault, something that I cannot explain. It was something like the phantom-limb phenomenon. When I touched the walls I could feel the metal on my hand, but I could also feel what the wall felt. I felt my cold, steel body being touched by a fleshy hand. I shared some kind of a biological entanglement with the vault, and I somehow was aware that it was alive and that it could feel my heartbeat. My heartbeat wasn't real, and I knew it, but I could still hear it pounding, and the more I focused on it the louder it got. And I knew the vault could hear it, too. I knew it could feel it. I knew the vault was just as indestructible as I was, and I knew that I would never leave this place alive.

  Chapter 10

  We were as unarmed as soldiers of peace and the chances of success were not promising. The tar that covered our bodies had dried into ash, but the ground beneath us was moist from the mingled tears of all the forgotten children.

  Each step I took in the mud took me deeper into agony. It was like my heart was cut up and unfurled and stretched out like a banner, and I could feel it being pulled every which way. Everything felt so significant, like my body's nerves were the roots of all the trees of the earth so that I could feel the pain and suffering of the whole world.

  The blind worms slithered in the mud below me, surviving off of this misery, waiting in salivating anticipation for each new teardrop. I marched on but I was sinking, and everything was like an atmosphere in my eyes and I wanted to cry. The worms knew, and they began to undulate up my legs and up my belly to taste the tears that so desperately wanted to leak down my cheeks.

  I slowly began to fall like a crumbling mountain and I braced myself with my arms, and the worms came up my arms and they were all over my body now. I had the feeling like a chill and a shiver all over, and it felt like there were a thousand wriggling fingers beneath my skin. The darkness got inside me and I began to tremble in my sadness. It was like the heat rushed out of me because the world around me was a cold of infinity. I could feel my breath becoming shorter, and the muscles in my face were sorely fatigued from the sorrow that they were forced to portray. The trenches of my eyes were holding water like an overwhelmed dam and the slightest blink would have flooded the world.

  The very short moment that I'd spent in this land was like the time between when you tell a lie and when it's found out; now the time of reckoning had come. There was no way to hide that we were here. This place—it had an aura… it seemed to wrap its fingers around my eyes and remove my blindfold like a seductive lover, not lacking in sleight of hand, and it was then that I saw a great gulf before us. It was an enormous canyon that stretched out to the horizon on the left and the right, and there were three bridges offered up as compensation for this.

  To the left, a long, long bridge made out of hellfire;

  To the right, an ornate road that filled you with paralyzing dread whenever you looked at it;

  And straight ahead, a path that was an impossible structure, a one-sided helix, winding forever into the distance.

  "I… I don't understand what I'm seeing," I confessed. "I cannot put this into words."

  "What is it, my lord?"

  The distress in his voice was not subtle, and when I looked upon him I could see that he, too, was afflicted by the worms. I took him by the hand and led him to the ornate road.

  "Follow this path," I said.

  The crazy old man obeyed without question; I followed the path of hellfire, for after having seen the ornate road I would have been overwhelmed by it even if my eyes were closed.

  The hellfire purified me of the terrible worms, but the crazy old man was not as fortunate. As I looked through the flames I could see that he began to drip apart like a punctured heart, and then he finally buckled under the weight of his own anguish. The worms left him in the same physical state that he was in when they had first found him, but yet there was definitely something tangibly different about him now; it was as if something inside him had been extinguished.

  In my perverse observation of the crazy old man's torment I invested a dangerous amount of time looking upon the ornate road. And I felt the dread in me now, that suffocating feeling in me like there was a balloon lodged in my throat, and I closed my eyes but I still couldn't move. I couldn't breathe. The dread was so overpowering that it felt like it was coming from the entire external world, and in response I allowed myself to completely let go. I collapsed as though I'd been shot in the head, utterly limp and totally indifferent as to whether I might land upon the bridge or fall off of it.

  Chapter 11

  "What do you see, my lord?"

  "What happened? Where are we?"

  "I think we are in the garden."

  "How did we get here? I lost time, and I… how did you rescue me from the hellfire? I see no singe or sizzle on your skin."

  "The hellfire only burns living things."

  "The worms siphoned your soul?"

  "Indeed, my lord. I am done for. I can never leave this place."

  "Why is that?"

  "If you tell too many lies, then you will only be able to save yourself with even more lies. And so it is with this place… it has gotten inside me… it's become a part of me now… I can no longer survive outside of this place.

  "If you have become twisted with lies, then how is it that you can be standing in the Garden of Truth?"

  "If that is truly where we are now, then I do not belong here."

  "It looks like any other garden that I've been in."

  "What's that sound? Have you been hearing it? It's water. There's a fountain. Do you see a fountain?"

  "I see nothing of the kind and I hear nothing, you old fool."

  "Maybe it's a large waterfall that's very far away," he suggested.

  "Then let us find it.

  So I took him by the hand and I began to guide him through the garden, but then he tripped and lost his feet after a few paces.

  "My lord?" he cried in
confusion. "You let me trip over something."

  "You fool, there is nothing there."

  The crazy old man reached out with his hands and pantomimed them in the air, as though he were feeling the contours of a solid object. "Can't you see this? This thing here, is it not a statuette?"

  "Old man, there's nothing there. It's just air."

  He then rubbed his hands over the ground. "What is the substance of the ground?" he asked. "Is it soil?"

  "We're standing on a grassy walkway."

  "Oh no… oh no."

  "You've lost your mind, old man," I snapped.

  "No. I know exactly what's happening. We're not in the same garden."

  "What?"

  "Can't you see?" he cried. "We aren't in the same garden. It's trying to tell us something. The truth is that there is no truth."

  And just then the oracle came out from behind a hedge. She had cut out her own eyes, just the same as we'd done to the crazy old man. And she spoke:

  "Your friend is almost right. The truth is that truth is meaningless."

  And I already knew the complete and exhaustive formulation of this argument and I knew the inescapable conclusion: statements are made of language, language is circular because all words are defined in terms of other words, and so statements are circular and thus their truth value is completely arbitrary. Furthermore, without any logical axioms in place, everything can be both true and false at the same time, and the truth will be indistinguishable from anything else. We are only able to baselessly assert the validity of a set of completely unverifiable logical axioms so that we can use our language, which uses itself to define itself, to conclude that a favored statement is true.

  And I suddenly had the feeling that I'd had enough of this garden.

  "Where are you going?" the oracle asked.

  "I have to find my way out of this place so that I can save Starla."

  "What do you mean, my lord?" the crazy old man asked. "This is where we need to be to find her."

  "I'm talking to the oracle, but only I can see her," I said. "Only I can hear her."

  "Then I was right," he said. "There is no truth. There is none! We are in different gardens. I cannot hear her."