The First Storyteller

by Varun Gwalani

  The darkness was closing in.

  The torch was sputtering out. The trees were growing thicker around me. It was becoming harder to breathe, as if what was keeping the fire alive had also been keeping me alive. Now we both were dying.

  All around me in the Forest, there was nothing to light the fire with anymore. No twigs were breaking off trees; only my spirit was breaking. The ground was bereft of wood, I was bereft of hope. The trees were running out of ways to sustain me, I was running out of ways to eloquently fucking convey what I was feeling.

  The fire had dimmed to a soft glow, which infuriated me. I brought it closer to my face, almost daring it to singe me. As the panic in me grew, and as the darkness cajoled me, I willed the fire to burn. I willed it to burn, and to keep me going.

  The flames danced slowly as if they were enjoying the desecration of my fast-approaching grave. My breathing was growing even more ragged, my hands trembling as I walked unsteadily down the Path I could barely see.

  It simmered down, maddeningly slower and slower until my eyes glazed over and the emotion that was building up inside me finally manifested itself: Rage. Rage against the dying of the light, the constant destruction of what was pure inside me over and over, the constant renewal that I had to undergo. No more.

  In one fell swoop, I swung the torch and threw it away, extinguishing it. The darkness came in to conquer me and I screamed. There was no light in my life anymore. But I would not stop. This Forest would not beat me.

  I walked straight onwards, flinging my hands around, smashing into trees, hurting myself, but not caring. Instead, it only fuelled my rage, made me want to hurt more.

  Every time I caught hold of one of those thin branches, I would pull it down, try and break it. Not anymore so that I could use it, but for pleasure. But they didn’t break; they did not even bend too far. I had bent too far. I was broken.

  The rage was now an intoxicant, brewing a heady mixture of violence and recklessness in my mind. It did not make me feel invulnerable; it did not reduce my pain. It did something even better, even more liberating and strangely joyous; it made me not give a damn. The darkness around me could not conquer me. I did not need any pithy light. A new kind of fire burned now, a dark fire that made my eyes glaze over once more.

  Suddenly, there was nothing around me. I felt around and found that I was in a clearing. I heard a rattling sound from below as my feet struck a pile of sticks.

  It was beautiful. It was magnificent. The Forest was allowing me to go on. It was giving me the tools I needed to make my way through, to renew the journey in earnest. It was absolutely poetic and-

  I could not sustain the farce anymore. I let out a laugh, a bloodcurdlingly cruel and hysterical laugh that made me feel such rapturous joy as I have never felt before. I clutched my hair as I raised my head to whatever mythical being lay above and laughed, laughed right in his puny face because I didn’t care about his immortal vengeance, I was not a member of his clan. I was in the hold of my glowing darkness.

  I took hold of two of the sticks and I rubbed them together vigorously, sharpening the blade of my murder weapon. A flame arose, unlike any other that I had seen but more beautiful. It was red, a deep murky red that had at its heart a bluish core. It gave off light, but in a gross perversion of any actual kind of firelight. I could feel it inside me, feel its tendrils sinking into my skin, melding with their fellows there. We choose the light we give off, after all.

  A mad idea gripped me, an idea that I probably had since my first trial in the Forest, since my first smatterings of rage against the entity that caused me such turmoil.

  I could’ve just thrown the torch into the Forest then. But that wasn’t enough. I walked closer to a tree, noticed its rings of age, its majestic sweeping branches, and I lit it. I stood there and I watched as the fire spread down the tip of the branch, to its bark and then to rest of its unholy body.

  Since the trees were packed so closely together, it wasn’t long before a few more had caught fire. There was a deep glow that was emanating from those trees, more radiant in its darkness than anything I had ever seen.

  As the fire spread, a wild desire arose in me to join the blaze, to add all the darkness that I had foolishly subdued for so long to the one around me, to become part of the horror I had thought so long I was the victim of.

  I laughed once again, hysterically, madly, joyously at the image that I was going to produce as I lit myself on fire.

  There was no pain. Quite the opposite. All the pain that was previously in my body faded, burnt away by the flames. My eyes suddenly went dark. I was the most powerful person in my small world, and nothing could harm me. A wild thought occurred to me that that must be what death feels like.

  But then why did I feel so alive?

  When light was restored to my eyes, the whole world was tinted reddish blue. The fire was all around me, it was me. I could cup my hands together and blast these trees away with my newfound powers.

  I left the Path and walked into the Forest fire. It was raging on around me, as my own spirit raged on inside me. As I walked through the flames, I fed on them, on what they showed me. I saw in the flames things I would never have other thought of. All my friends, my family, everyone for whom I had “cared” so much, and yet had been cared for by so little, all of them in the flames, dying, choking, burning, crying. I saw them holding hands with the people they claimed they loved, but who could not actually feel love; I saw them accomplishing their petty goals, but dying inside because they could not do more. I could feel them die, their sorrow fed me, lifted me.

  Then I saw myself in the flames; saw my wild hair, my wide eyes and dry mouth grinning maniacally. I grinned at the image, but thought it too happy. Happiness could not be allowed. Happiness was an illusion.

  I brought my nails to the top of my cheek, really dug them, and then jerked them down violently, scratching myself deep to the bone. I saw the corresponding change reflected in the image, and I cackled. I took the knife I had made earlier and examined it. Its blade was curved and black now, made for sacrificing animals for dark rituals. I sniggered at the comparison.

  The fire was rising to a greater height now. The flames danced at a higher tempo, and the cackling flames were chanting all around me. My laughter seemed to move in sync with the flames around me as I ran the cold blade down my arm, gasping with pleasure at its touch. The knife’s edge would serve me now.

  I put the knife on my forearm, leaned in close to savour the moment and with a cry of exultation cut down the length of the arm.

  Warm, dark liquid that might have been blood spurted out of the wound, bathing my face and arm with it. It soaked into the ground, travelling deep and killing everything that grew below. I tasted it. It was the taste of ash.

  I squealed, my yellow teeth bared, excited at the implications. I licked a few more drops to taste the hopelessness and despair again.

  I raised the blade further, aimed at my heart. The chanting grew louder, the dancing faster. My heart pumped faster in anticipation, the dark liquid spurting out faster in a glorious fountain. My body was stretched tight across the sky, all-seeing, ready to tear at any moment.

  The knife plunged into my chest. Then I was torn.

  The dark fire and I rose to the sky together. I was suspended in the sky, the laugh frozen on my face as my body writhed with excruciating pain. My skin cracked away, the bruised skeleton was exposed to the flames.

  All the pain, all the meaning that the anger was trying to burn away rose to the surface and battled the flames. The fresh wound pained like nothing else I had ever felt. It pulled me towards the ground, fought against the firelight and told me that I was real, that it was necessary.

  Pain was fireproof. Fires inevitably burn themselves out. The pain will always remain.

  Pain filled my body, reminding me who I was, why I was. The fire around me started fading, the sounds started dying out, but I could only feel the agony that was inside me, every pore of my b
ody that was burning more painfully than any real fire ever could.

  The sounds suddenly cut out; there was blackness all around me. I don’t know what made me pass out first, the pain or me dropping to the ground and smashing my head.

  In the blackness of my unconsciousness, I was still conscious of the pain. It stayed with me till I opened my eyes. The pain had receded, but I didn’t believe that it would ever leave again.

  As I stood up, I hoped beyond all hopes that it hadn’t actually happened, that everything had magically reset after I learned my lesson. But I immediately saw that it hadn’t. There were charred trunks and broken trees as far as my eyes could see, or rather, couldn’t see. There was no real magic here, only dead nocturnal creatures. I had killed them. I had actually wished those horrifying things on everyone knew. I wanted to throw up but I didn’t. There was a reason the Path had not reset. I had to live with the consequences.

  But even as I put my head in my hands, racked with sorrow; even as I walked back to the Path, there was something inside me now that I could no longer suppress, that I could no longer pretend did not exist.

  I could not pretend that I was not glad for the darkness within.

  19

  A Story

  This is the beginning.

  This is the beginning of another one.

  I know the feeling by now.

  Now that I’ve started with an opening that piques your curiosity, dear listener, I can give you the usual recap before we really get started. It was dark. I was making my way forward through touch. There seemed to be certain indicators on the trees which guided me forward. I’m sure you don’t want me to go into an elaborate detail about tree barks, do you? I feel like we’ve done that before. I don’t want to keep giving you the variations of the same setting over and over. I don’t want to bore you.

  Now that that exhausting recap is over, we can get started. You must be curious about why acknowledging you directly and why I’m being un-ironically self-referential. Well, even though I started talking to an imaginary listener because of my crippling loneliness and need for validation, you somehow became real through the very telling. I, who had set out to find stories, became them. I have been in several stories. A new one just began. It’s pretty exhausting, let me tell you.

  Some time ago (or some stories ago), I was stuck in the blank space, the space that occurred between words and stories like these. Did you get annoyed at that one and decide not to listen? Your loss. I don’t usually bring up previous stories explicitly because each one is supposed to be about something in particular. That’s from what I understand about them, anyway. A funny thought just occurred to me (Because I’ve never had those before). When you meet someone in their life, you’re a part of the story of that time. But unless you’ve been with them since the beginning, unless you’ve listened to everything they’ve had to say, heard every thought in their mind like you have with me, can you really judge them? If you had stumbled onto this story without first hearing how I got here, you would think I’m goddamned nuts.

  Actually, probably don’t use that as an example. I am goddamned nuts. You know what else I am? Goddamned tired. While all this stuff has been swirling around giving me a headache, my body is utterly exhausted. I was hobbling along for no reason whatsoever. I could not think of a reason why I was trying not to figure out a reason. Maybe I was trying to consciously stop reasoning so that I could escape this narrative. Maybe I needed a break from my narrative about narratives.

  I need a break from you, listener. I’m not as lucky as you. You can shut me up, walk away from me and go on and live your entertaining life, coming back to me at your leisure. I’m stuck in the confines of these words in my mind, words I cannot stop saying. I can’t stop telling my story.

  All of these tales were of approximately the same length, so maybe if I waste some time, fill some space, it’ll end quicker. So I walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked.

  You’re probably so befuddled by ringing of the words “and walked” in your ears, that it’s lost all sense of meaning, all sense of real sound and turned into a bunch of disjointed syllables.

  Although...isn’t that what language really is? Disjointed syllables made important by the meaning we give them?

  If this was a regular story, I probably would have taken the implications of this idea to its conclusion, but I refuse to be sucked into a veiled discussion on the nature of language, which would metaphorically transform into a discussion on how language really means life (Because in the end, everything metaphorically can fucking mean life), since life like words is only meaningful when STOP IT!

  Time to stop talking to you and start talking about doing.

  I bit back my scream. I needed to move. I needed to escape these thoughts and find something that would advance the story; that would highlight its purpose so that I could accept that purpose.

  I scrambled to check the markers on the tree next to me and I froze. I checked it over and over. It was the same. I had encountered it before. I felt the next tree and the one after that and they were all the same! The exact same striations I had felt before, in the same order. I rushed forward, frantic and it was the same as before.

  I was going around in a circle.

  There was no way to advance the story. There was no way forward. I was stuck in an endless circle.

  Unless that was part of the story.

  I felt a subtle shift in the air around me as something changed. This was it then: The turning point, The Problem. Discovering this Problem was the only thing that made the story work. Or was it the other way around? My head was throbbing. Why would these ideas keep coming to me? You must think I’m mad for talking to you, listener. Unless you really are real, in which case you can’t really think I’m mad for thinking you’re real. If you’re imaginary, I am crazy but no one is listening to the crazy. Good God! Who would think these things? They’re the ravings of an insane person.

  Since I was not going anywhere, I could rest. I lay down. Abed, I realized that I couldn’t escape the story, so I had to do what it demanded. I relaxed my body, and my mind let loose its crazy theories.

  Had my journey been circular? Had everything been circular? It made sense because all the great stories of journeys ended with a return back home. It wasn’t necessary that anything had changed at all anywhere else, the person itself had changed. But we had established that I’m not a hero. So? That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hold true. But my journey didn’t have any magical gift or reward. There was no supernatural help, more like supernatural annoyance and hindrance. I had transformed so many times I must have overtaken the circle of transformation. I had undergone several initiations, I had fallen even more. There was no battle between good and evil here, unless I was one of them. Was I good? Was I evil? Or was I both?

  The battle between good and evil, after all, was never-ending. Why was it fought? Why was I walking this Path if it indeed was circular, and if I was going to end up in the same place at the end? Wasn’t that a question for living, then? I was told I was going to die soon, and I probably will. Or had I already? But then how was I here?

  Was that why I was thinking about this? I pulled myself up. The feeling of change was growing, the thoughts giving impetus to the story. Even if I had not died, I was going to, soon; that’s what the darkness was for. But without the darkness, I might never have noticed the circles. Darkness led to a certain kind of truth I would not have known otherwise, a truth that was important. I stood up. I had been worried that the darkness ahead might not provide any answers, might take away my knowledge. But the Forest was telling me that a different kind of answer could be found here.

  I acknowledged it and felt the tree up ahead. It was different. I snorted and continued walking. This wasn’t any kind of victory, moral or otherwise. I was not energised or cheered or rev
italised or anything to that effect. I was exhausted to the verge of collapse and deeply disheartened. This was merely a way of carrying on, a way for my mind to sustain itself till the next story while my body crumbled underneath me.

  The feeling subsided. The story ended.

  20

  True Love

  A human without retention of a sense of perception constantly sees the same things as if they were new. Trees are not trees, they are living organisms that take dozens of years to grow to full height, and are chopped down in an instant; every step taken is completely new, not one of a thousand steps; the constant ability of nature to sustain itself under the most absurd conditions is a marvel that is impressed upon you constantly.

  Time is the greatest victim when a sense of perception is lost, and that darkness did not spare Time. I lost all feeling of any sense of regularity; every second was new to me, every sound and sighting led to a fresh violence of emotions, even if it had been observed or heard a hundred times before. I could not fathom how long I had been in the darkness, how long since I had set out. I could not navigate the Path well, but I moved so slowly and had to rest so often that it did not matter much. My bones felt brittle, my joints weak and muscles loose. Time moved slower, as if it had itself aged with me, and we shared a compulsion to complete the relentless march forward at any cost.

  I spent whatever moments I wasn’t recovering from exhaustion to wonder if my body would give out before Time decided to stop flowing; decided that there were no more circles to turn.

  I grabbed my walking-stick, which could have been recently acquired, and stood. I set out to make whatever little progress I could make, when the air was filled with a strange humming. This humming swelled and transformed into a soulful, melancholy song. It filled me with a remembrance that brought tears to my eyes. If memory keeps someone alive, then a voice of that memory spoke to me, to assure me of the truth of that statement.

  “Hey.”