I Am Me
Page 24
“And in the summer,” he was telling me, in a casual, charming voice, “When the herds migrate east towards the river, I commence my personal quest for meditative salvation.”
“Oh? And how do you do that?” I enquired.
“Through observation,” he informed me. He had a pleasant manner about him, yet I sensed a great deal of arrogance within, a trait best reflected in his voice. “I walk, I think, and at times I merely exist, allowing the Universe to educate me with its endless wisdom.”
I nodded. We were surrounded by gigantic trees, and seemed to be in a very dense part of the forest. The air was cool and humid, yet I neither shivered nor perspired. I tried to look down to see what I was wearing, but my gaze wouldn’t shift. I seemed incapable of controlling where my eyes could focus, and it felt much like I was watching the world through a television screen, which pivoted and moved by its own will rather than mine.
“You seem distracted,” he noted.
“Do I have a body?” I asked.
He did not turn to me—maybe he couldn’t control his vision either. “Oh yes,” he answered at once. “But it’s still new, so you must give it time to accommodate you.”
“It’s new?” I said, surprised. “So who… or what am I?”
“You are who or what you were before.”
I tried to remember who I’d been before, but for the life of me (no pun intended) I just couldn’t recall my past. I remembered having suddenly awakened here in this forest, walking next to this talking zebra, but I couldn’t remember anything prior to that.
“Let us not speak of the past for the moment,” he said, gently.
“Are we dead?”
“You most certainly are.”
“What are you?” I asked, annoyed. “Suspended?”
To my surprise he laughed. “Yes, and rather permanently,” he said. “Ah… look.”
He stopped in his stride, as the trees suddenly thinned around us, and we looked upon an enormous valley, populated by thousands—no, millions of weasels. They sat idly, climbed about, danced around, or merely hung upside down from trees. I didn’t know weasels liked to hang upside down from trees, or even that they were biologically adept at doing so, but nevertheless there were hundreds of them hanging from the branches of the few trees scattered within the valley. But the most distinctive about the entire population was that every single weasel was juggling ceramic pots, even the ones hanging upside down from the trees (with understandably poor results). The air was filled with the noise of ceramic pots crashing and breaking every second, and in large, echoing numbers. The weasels though never seemed to notice anything, and merely went about juggling the pots, while carrying on ever so casually with their normal activities. I studied a few particular weasels, and noticed that every time one broke a ceramic pot, another one appeared readily in its hands, out of thin air. They juggled continually—each weasel broke about a dozen pots a minute! I watched them with fascination.
“Ah yes,” the zebra said, smiling (do not ask me what a smiling zebra looks like, I beg you, for it is a gesture more difficult to describe than a disapproving frown on a giraffe). “The valley of weasels—do you know what’s going on down there?”
I listened to the steady sounds of ceramic pots crashing and laughed. “Mayhem, by the sounds of it,” I said, as one weasel threw three pots into the air and then simply walked off.
“This valley bears close, personal significance to your life on earth.”
I scoffed almost immediately. “You’re kidding me, how?”
“Every time a ceramic pot breaks, an accident occurs in the real world.”
I tried to let his words sink in fully, so I could better understand them—an accident occurred every time a ceramic pot crashed? “What kind of accident are we talking about?”
“Dropping a plate, stubbing your toe, spilling your drink, slipping on a banana peel—you name it, these weasels cause it.” He then lowered his voice and tilted his head towards me. “Between you and me, they seem to derive a great deal of amusement from the process.”
“Well, of course they do,” I cried. “They’re weasels, and you’ve given them responsibility to such an important matter! Do you know how much trouble they’ve caused?”
I listened to the pots crashing in the valley with a renewed perspective. I had a sudden flood of visions within my consciousness: someone’s birthday cake fell onto a tiled floor; a car backed into a mailbox; a cellphone was dropped in the toilet; a jar of pasta sauce shattered on a white Berber carpet; someone slipped on a patch of ice and broke a wrist; a cricket ball was hit into a window… I still had no solid, tangible memories of my former life, yet all these accidents reattached themselves to my memory, like disjointed fragments of an incomprehensible picture. And despite the fact that I neither remembered the significance of these accidents nor the consequences that arose out of them, I still felt remorse at the fact that they’d occurred.
And to think that these weasels had been the ones to cause them all! I tried to glare at them, but since I didn’t know if I had eyes let alone eyebrows to accentuate the glare with, I doubt the gesture had the desired effect. I did however wince every time a pot broke.
“They don’t have opposable thumbs,” I said, sadly.
“Indeed they don’t.”
“So why are they trying to juggle pots?” I said.
“They’re weasels. They’re not particularly smart.”
“So why don’t you stop them? Do you know how many accidents they cause? In my life alone, they’ve caused hundreds and hundreds of stupid, needless—”
“I thought you said you couldn’t remember your former life?”
I tried to turn to him, but my vision stayed rooted on the annoying weasels. “I can’t, but I somehow remember a lot of accidents. I can’t explain it, but I know it happened.”
“Well, the weasels have a purpose and that purpose is being met,” the zebra said, simply. “Accidents are a necessary part of existence, so does it really matter what causes them? Would you feel better if an accident occurred every time a hyena laughed?”
I watched a weasel try to catch a pot when it already had a pot in its hand, causing both pots to break upon impact. “It couldn’t occur more frequently than this,” I said. “That’s what makes this so unbearable, is that it’s so needless! So many accidents could be avoided.”
“Oh believe me, the frequency of the pot-breaking is pre-decided,” the zebra said, with a chuckle. “If an accident were to occur every time a hyena laughed, then all the hyenas in this existence would suffer endless tickling. That is to say, they would each still laugh as often as one of these weasels break a pot. That’s how fate works.”
“Well, then why do accidents happen? Who decides the frequency of them?”
“I don’t know.”
We watched the weasels attempt to juggle in silence.
When we moved on from the valley, I began questioning him on anything he might know about life, death and existence. I asked him if life was indeed a circle.
“I’ve always thought it was a straight line,” he said. “But then my imagination is rather limited. For me, life is linear: there is birth, followed by existence, leading to an eventual death.”
“Yes, but isn’t there reincarnation?”
“Most definitely.”
“Then wouldn’t the line begin all over again? Leading to a circle?”
“Ah, I see your misapprehension,” he said, with a small laugh. “You asked me if life was a circle, but not if your life, or my life, or the life of a single person was a circle. Our existences are too irrelevant to be signified by either circles or lines. Our births and deaths and rebirths are inconsequential in the linear progression of Life. Life in its entirety is a line.”
“How do we factor within it?”
I thought about his words as we came into a tiny clearing in the woods, where there were hundreds of monkeys scattered about. They were everywhere: on the trees, on the ground, on boulders, within bushes, or even on the pieces of wood floating in a little brook between the trees. Chattering busily, they were all methodically picking lice off each other. It was a comical sight to behold; for though they were vocally animated, their antics were limited to the apparently scintillating task of grooming each other. I laughed aloud at them.
“I’ve never seen monkeys so excited but so calm at the same time,” I said.
“Oh yes, they’re very calm,” he said, plainly. “They’re working, after all.”
“More like playing.”
“It’s not mere play, I assure you,” he said. “Every time a louse is picked off a monkey, a death occurs within your world.”
I gaped at him. “That’s preposterous!” I cried, shocked by his declaration.
“It’s the truth. Why does this disturb you?”
I watched the monkeys as their fingers searched the fur on each other’s bodies and triumphantly brought out one of the little bothersome critters hiding within—I didn’t laugh, because it wasn’t funny anymore. To think that every time they picked a louse off, someone died on earth. Mothers, fathers, children, spouses, partners, siblings, friends, mentors, neighbours, colleagues, or mere strangers… so many deaths, affecting millions daily! And to think that all of those tragedies were caused right here, right before me.
“It was different with the weasels,” I told him. “That was just—accidents are annoying, but death is… it’s tragic and…this is ridiculous. Why would it be this way?”
“You would have been happier perhaps to learn that the Grim Reaper causes every individual death, when He roams invisibly through the earth searching for souls to feed upon?”
“No,” I admitted, after a pause. “I just… I never realised death was so random.”
“Who says it is?” he said. “Death follows a pattern, a precise, cosmic plan that you and I are ignorant to. But just as we play a role by living and dying, these monkeys play a role by picking lice off one another and inadvertently affecting lives on earth. They are not God, nor are they heralds of death. They are but links in a chain, much as you and I are.”
I smiled wryly. “How much more are you planning to show me? Because I don’t think I can take much more of this.”
He smiled back. “You’ll see.” He showed me many animals, each of which had a purpose as strange as the weasels and the monkeys, if not stranger. He told me that every time a lion roared, a storm erupted; that when an elephant trumpeted, a fight or some form of conflict occurred; when an owl hooted, people woke up inexplicably; when a cheetah captured its prey, someone got caught either morally, legally or physically. Some of the correlations he told me about were just plain silly—for instance, he showed me hippopotamuses wallowing lazily in a stream, and told me that every time a hippopotamus sneezed, two people fell in love on earth.
“Do hippos even sneeze?” I asked, after we spent what felt like hours watching hippopotamuses, waiting for one to sneeze.
He shrugged, but I saw a knowing smirk crack at the corner of his mouth.
“There is so much I don’t understand,” I told him, as we took a path through the jungle again. It was growing dark—the forest felt dangerous and foreboding all of a sudden.
“There is only a little you need to know,” he told me. “But I will tell you a little more—death is the switch that flips reality to fantasy; birth is the switch that flips fantasy to reality. In other words, mortality is the bridge that connects the realms of fantasy and reality, much as sleep does. So as long as you dream in both worlds, you’ll be fine.”
“I still don’t understand,” I told him.
“You’re not supposed to.”
As we walked deeper into the woods, under the twilit skies, I wondered why he was my designated guide through the afterlife and not an animal that bore a more pronounced association with human beings, like a monkey or a lion or even an elephant. But then I realised that the answer could be found in the distinctive nature of a zebra’s appearance, which is exotic, while still being somewhat domestic. For a zebra in essence is just a striped horse. The very black and white stripes that lend distinction to its appearance, symbolises the fusion of two contrasting halves: the plain and the striking. Through some imaginative license, it can even be argued that a zebra blends fantasy with reality, for horses are far more abundant and accessible than zebras, and are therefore a more concrete part of reality than their exclusive, striped cousins. So a zebra was in many ways the most suitable candidate to lead me, a lost soul, through the labyrinths of the afterlife, a realm that hovers somewhere in the ambiguous territory between the tangible, mortal world, and the near-whimsical paradise that was heaven.
“You will find colour in this world, wherever you search for it,” he told me, rather abruptly, “But take care that you do not project this colour where there is none.”
He suddenly stopped in his stride. I wished he wouldn’t linger here—it was practically night now and the jungle was dark, eerily bathed in indiscernible but frightening shadows. I felt vulnerable and helpless, like a wounded antelope in the middle of the savannah.
“Death is nothing to fear,” he told me, in a strange voice. “Death is like falling asleep, but it is also like waking up. It is a dream and it is real. It is a lie but is undeniably true.”
I stared at him from a great distance, even though I was merely two feet away.
“You did not ask for a guide,” he told me. “You were sent to me, and I was told to guide you. There is an animal you did not see today, with a higher purpose than the rest. Take comfort in the knowledge that you are being guided through life by something more capable than an ornery old zebra,” he said, and his eyes twinkled. He then looked thoughtful again. “You asked me before if life was a circle. I dismissed the idea, but perhaps in your case, it is more circular than I expected.” He leaned into me. “Remember this last truth: you are not real—you are one.”
I heard his words, but they didn’t mean anything to me just then. I sensed it would happen a moment before it did—I heard a thunderous roar from somewhere behind me, and before I could turn, was thrown to the ground. A great weight fell upon me—an inhuman weight, which crushed me as I fell. I felt searing pain spread through whatever body I possessed. I knew I was dying. I caught sight of the zebra’s face before my world turned to darkness.
A bell tinkled as I stepped into the store. A large, tawny owl, magnificent and regal, peered down at me with lamp-like eyes; his gaze seemed at once inquisitive and accusatory. I fumbled through my mind for an explanation, for an answer that would appease his curiosity, before I noticed he was perched atop a wooden coat rack. He wasn’t real. From a distant corner of my mind, a corner where a few, frail remnants of a fading past lurked, I vaguely remembered having been told that I myself might not have been real. The circle continued.
Epilogue:
Absolution
One
It is time.
Is it? I check the skies… but there is no giant digital watch floating in the skies. Have the arrows of pragmatism shot down every last feature of fantasy,
I wonder? For though it is a cloudless sky that I gaze into, there is no alarm clock suspended in mid-air; there is no hovering time turtle; there isn’t even a dancing sun-dial. Imagination itself has been shot down by reality.
The Banyan leaf and I are alone in this world. This sea is my home. But how long will I endure this existence, I wonder? How long will it be before the sea is drained? If these are my last few moments of life, then I must chronicle my every thought and preserve it.
I have no paper.
Two
He dreams of a notebook and an ink pen; instead he is given a notepad and a pencil—his powers are weakening. Realising that the end is nearer than he feared, he prepares to hastily scribble down his every thought, even as it occurs to him. But as though shy of being captured onto paper, his thoughts refuse to fall into formation. He tries to coax them out by allowing his mind to ponder over this endless sea, the unblemished sky, and this plain Banyan leaf. But there is nothing here to stimulate thought. So he closes his eyes and meditates upon himself, upon his past and his present.
The sea watches patiently.
Three
The world had once been teeming with people, scattered like ants over a picnic lunch, and left to tussle with one another in their quest for food and survival. It took a lifetime for us to realise that we were all just one ant, and that the picnic lunch contained no food.
There are two versions to every tale, two tales in every truth, and two truths within every lie. Yet all we see is the lie, hollow and fickle, an unworthy residue of imagination. We discard it like we would the shell of a pistachio, and instead eat the nut. But the lie is the nut. Truth is the shell that guards the nut, and it acts like a noble camouflage, preserving the treasure within. The camouflage is clever enough to deceive most of us, for how many ever look past the truth? We seek it like we would air in a suffocating world. But air is a temporary solution to the curse of breathing. Lies on the other hand enlighten us to the possibility that there is no air, and certainly no need for it.