We walk in circles, feet shuffling rhythm in the cold, sterile breeze. Staring directly ahead in a straight line, five columns of four, spaced out in divisions of nine beneath a series of seven moving fluently parallel to spirit brigades of nineteen. This mathematical precision is mind-numbing but they tell me it's necessary.
Necessary for what, I wonder?
"You must get used to the noise," says a wobbly man in a hand-me-down black leather pilot's jacket, ragged patches signifying some sort of rank. "Thus patience is instilled."
I remain unconvinced. The light is hurting my eyes...I'm not accustomed to being outdoors and the sun is a brutal bastard. I miss my cell already.
"It won't be long now," barks the flyboy in charge.
Do I even have to tell you I'm clueless?
Behind me I can hear the sound of heavy breathing laced with emphysema, a pre-death rattle from the throat of one who will not complete the drill. At any moment I expect to hear the sound of his burden dropping with a thud to the tarmac. Could be any second now he'll be out of the game, down for the count.
...And I will not turn around...
...And I will march on...
...And I know, as surely as I know my own name, that I could be next.
I swallow hard. My head aches, the pounding of kick drums getting louder and louder in my cerebrum, a precise tattoo inherited from some savage native residue.
What am I doing here? How did I get here? Such a heartless taskmaster who cracks the whip and keeps the procession in perpetual motion. I am ordered. The entire population is disordered. Or is it the other way around? I've stopped wondering if it even matters anymore. My slate is almost clean. Soon understanding will replace confusion. Soon chaos will metamorphosis into a sharp, mystical precision.
On the other side lies the prize of perfection. The mythical resolution to the infinite mystery. This is the abyss the poets dream of plunging into. It is the bottomless ocean of cabalistic oxygen, glimpsed rarely in dreams and visions but too pure to hope for in this incarnation. Mountains here are easily moved, but it is understood by all that mountains are just as they should be in the space the occupy. Therefore no one would think of moving them.
Here, to the left, all is pure. To the right there is nothing that is not immaculate. Behind no past, ahead no future...the moment is everything you need it to be, and the moment is never-ending...
...On the other side.
But the jet-lagged professor of patience wonders if even his most qualified grunts can tough out what seems to them like an endless waiting game. He knows that they have no conception of the goal he drives them toward.
I wonder if he realizes that I do?
But do I? The shimmer of enlightenment I was blessed with on the day before my father died was but a syringe-full of the ideal, and as it wore off I knew, even then, that a transfusion, such as the Messiah offered, wouldn't be enough to last until infinity caught up with itself (at which point the eternal explodes into another "big bang", resulting in a billion new uninverses).
Oh yes, I know, but only as a child knows the meaning of life.
I know, but only as one who has been teased with a foretaste of euphoria, told by the one who held me under the water that the best was yet to come (and I wondered how it could get any better than this...Until I comprehended that on the other side it may not get any better, but that it never gets any worse, and this understanding was the conception of hope within me).
So what, then, if the man in the dirty leather jacket thinks I'm just another one of his sheep? What do I care if he knows that I know that he knows? It doesn't really matter, does it? Let him go on believing that I play this game for his amusement. I have more patience than he has ever dreamed of possessing himself. What's more, I have no doubt that I understand our destination much more thoroughly than he ever could.
I suspect this because I have seen his badge. It is silver with 6 numerals engraved near the bottom, directly beneath a holographic image of a beast with seven heads and ten horns.
Signifying nothing, mind you.
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