Louise found a long branch and stuck it into the water. She hoped she wasn’t poking a cousin in the eye.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t think,” she apologized softly.
She wanted very much to see spirits, especially any she might be related to.
How would it feel to have a family, she wondered. A family like those she’d seen on television shows at the hospitals where her mother sometimes went for treatment. Unfortunately, such hospitals were few and far apart, often impossible to reach due to the violence of factious warlords. Even if they found one, it might be overcrowded with victims of ruthless carnage and patients infected with the many diseases the devil gave as his largess to the poor.
If I were to see a spirit, she thought, would it be dark like me? Or would it be white, as some said ghost people looked.
Her mother coughed.
Louise turned as she heard Shimani moan. Blood speckled the young woman’s lips and chin, old and new crimson stained her dress. Her face glistened with fever.
Louise understood she would soon be alone. How would she survive? Could such a killing ground ever become a healing ground?
Don’t be a baby.
She looked at her Mama Mzazi. Her hacked-off arms. She was buried alive, thought Louise.
She survived.
Louise gazed across the river, the surrounding land. She heard insects and birds, saw an abundance of life. The pair had traveled too many countries for the little girl to count. (Never did they travel in a straight line! In patterns… The arts and zigzags of careful refugees.) She had seen the Atlantic Ocean and the Indian Ocean. Africa was so beautiful even if droughts pushed the Sahara Desert farther south each year.
Why, then, did not ever feel safe, fully-fed, and in God’s sanctuary?
The stick still stood upright. Louise thought she’d stuck it much closer to shore. She shouldn’t leave it there as if it was an offering to the bits and pieces of her ancestors.
It took the bits and pieces of ancestors to create every child.
Louise glanced back at her mother. Maybe she couldn’t drink the water, but Louise had to do something to help and comfort her.
Shimani’s eyes fluttered open, pupils cloudy. Her little girl lay damp leaves over the fever in her mother’s forehead and high cheeks. She held a large leaf in her tiny hands, full of water, and cupped it to Shimani’s mouth.
“No-o-o…” her mother moaned, voice the purr of a mortally wounded lioness being fussed over by a worried cub. Yet she had nothing with which to push away the leaf.
“It isn’t from the river, Mama Mzazi. It only just rained, do you see?” Again, she offered the pure, hopefully sustaining water.
Shimani now saw the recent, brief rainfall’s sparkle. In the shadowy eclipses of her eyes the shine hurt, as each droplet blazed. Blazing the way that head lamps on Jeeps, driven by bandits in uniform, did on nights when even the densely-populated camps for those displaced by civil outrage could not protect themselves, could ever protect themselves.
Shimani drank the water, letting it trickle down her throat, as nectar down a hummingbird’s.
In a cracked voice, she repeated a prayer she’d heard when she and Louise had walked through Nigeria.
“God in heaven, you have helped my life grow like a tree. Now something has happened. Satan, like a bird, has carried in one twig of his own choosing after another. Before I knew it he had built a dwelling place and was living in it. Today, my Father, I am throwing out both the bird and the nest.”
Louise sat down next to her, resting her round head against her mother’s sunken breast. All the Kifo had somewhat round heads. Sun and moon people.
They both went to sleep.
They both dreamed.
««—»»
They were crocodiles from the waist up, men from the waist down. They wore penis sheaths adorned with the dripping fangs of vipers, their scorpion tails posing a question in their curves:
“How much pain will you survive? Will you give us the child all of us together have fathered upon you, in order to satisfy our lust and hunger? Then, and only then, may you live, even if it feels like you are inside the very guts of the beast!”
««—»»
Shimani was stretched between pairs as the ravening monsters turned her over and over. That is what crocodiles did to their prey before they dragged them beneath the filthy mud for abominable feasts.
««—»»
Louise awoke with a start. Could a child share a parent’s dream, bound by blood, mutual orbits of circular brains, and the endless convoluted permutations of Time upon Space—it’s conjoined twin and alter ego?
She stood up and kissed her mother’s lips.
“Please don’t give me to the ngwena manonumes, Mama Mzazi.”
The child trotted off to the river’s edge, then slowly waded in. She pulled at that stick but it wouldn’t come free. Over Louise’s shoulder Shimani’s cough carried a misery of shattered lungs, saintly yet devastated blood. Wheezing sounded like the kiss of a burning body, flesh consumed, skull bursting from the swelling of a dumpling-ed brain. Creating its own funeral song, as if it mourned its own passing.
Louise ought to forget this stupid stick and go to tenderly hold her mother. She could put her own arms around the thin, armless shoulders, stroke the face, sing for her.
The child let go of the stick, trying to turn back to shore, but her feet went out from under her. The swift current caught Louise, unable to swim.
She gulped air and went under.
While swirling out of control, the girl saw a sad old woman reaching to embrace her. None of the crone was connected to itself. Legs moved lazily back and forth like silvery scissors, arms extended, round head tilted—none attached to the torso. Others gathered, moving as meat and bones boiled apart in a long-fired stew. They circled as the river dragged Louise to its silty bottom, far from the surface. This deep the river looked like blood, mixed with tears.
She heard her mother’s words: “With my own two eyes I have watched at least one hundred thousand die, with my own two eyes, not even able by the grace of God to lift my own two hands to help them. An old legend says that in a land where many meet their deaths unjustly, by murder, there will be reborn a great surplus of crocodiles.”
Puzzles of bodies, not from Louise’s family, swam closer to her, too. They did not have round heads but long ones, now hollow-eyed, picked by fish, bellies opened by machetes and bayonets trailed a recollection of entrails, those elegant heads half blown apart by guns now leaking brain clots of useless, restless vendetta.
Had Kufa also been slaughtered and dumped in the river? Did wars have casualties on both sides?
Snap! Snap!
She saw jaws, saliva and spittle in their depths, the elongated scaly forms of the accursed. They swam with forward talons but kicked with men’s legs, so covered with blood not even the river could wash them clean. Their eyes were the split rubies of war gods, mouths so deep they stretched in grins that went backwards in time.
Louise’s family made a protective jigsaw wall around her, their severed heads whirling among bare cracked teeth and fierce partial jaws wishing to harm the little girl. Their faces mouthed bubbled prayers, floating free like the empty masks on the wall of a shaman’s hut. As the others, the intruders lunged, then backed away, Louise was lifted by the ancestral fragments of her family. Her family—not wayfarers and orphans—were as real as she could ever have. The current parted as they split the surface, bearing her to the distant shore. Barely conscious…
Unless dead?
Was she dead?
Louise floundered, trying to paddle, trying to float, and doing neither. The remnants of kinsmen disappeared in shallower water.
She was carried to the shore. Hands pushed rhythmically at her chest. Breath slid down her throat until her lungs surrendered the water she had swallowed.
“I’ll never give you up to the crocodile men, my asali,” said Shimani.
Her mot
her smiled, wiping mud from her child’s face with gentle, graceful fingers. Louise shouted with joy at she staggered to her feet. Miracles!
“Nakwenda, my asali,” whispered Shimani. I am going, my honey.
The image vanished.
Louise looked back across the river. There was the stick, still upright in the current. Perched atop it was one small blue bird—not the devil.
Beneath the tree lay Shimani’s body, armless, breathless, the round face visibly blue, even across so great a distance. A dark cloud of flies already attended this mistress, late of the African feast.
“Allah, the Merciful, be praised!”
Louise blinked at the words. She looked at the lady—the long-headed lady graceful as a dragonfly—who now leaned over her.
Not Shimani. Not her mother.
The little girl pointed. “My mother is dead.”
The woman nodded. “Also my children. Years ago. In there.”
She gestured to the river where the crocodiles were as many as the ripples and waves. She held out her hand. “You need a mother, I need a child. Come with me?”
Chapter 3
————
“And the Angels who kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day.
“Even as Sodom and Gomorrah…giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth… Suffering the vengeance of eternal fire…
“These are the spots when they feed with you, feeding without fear, clouds they are without water, carried about by winds, trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead…”
– from the Book of Jude
————
The boy held a towel over the emptied socket so he wouldn’t bleed upon the pages, not wishing to be punished for that as well.
The Enantiodromia had wisdom from many sources, acknowledgments given to authors. He read some italicized text, words he knew were written by the Angel:
The most radical delusion of Time as both occult and scientific element—useful (but barely) to initiates—is the self-observed disintegrating on the event horizon which spins about the black hole, the integral information dismantled…and of the identical self inside the black hole, simultaneously entire, aware, and descending toward the gravitational hell of an ultimate nothing. And yet it is theorized that this core may eventually flash itself into a ‘singularity’, alight and beginning over in a cosmic breath of brilliant fire what it has taken so long (by human measurements) to destroy. This person torn asunder in bifurcating multiplication along the whirling event horizon and the one falling yet undamaged are the same…fractured, separate dreams of a single genetic code. Energy (or as some physicists prefer: Information) cannot be destroyed—only changed, only challenged.
So how does one simultaneously exist in two places? It is by not admitting that Time and Space are immutable conditions. Whether or not the two can exist separately of one another depends (apart from the fracture on the horizon and the shadow plunging through utter blackness—or perhaps because of it) on the dream of the self and the dream of the Falling. One contains the Soul, the other: Fate. If you accept that sin in its truest conscious reality can and does exist, then you have been granted the knowledge that the Earth had a beginning in violence and will suffer its end in terror.
The boy felt something sliding back and forth in the socket of his eye. Pushing the Book back from his edge of the table, he removed the sodden towel and stuck his little finger into the hole. He poked around, the Angel’s draught having done much to ease the pain. He tipped his head left, right, forward, and abruptly the fingertip caught a raw gobbet. He had to scratch at a thread of it still attached but finally drew it out.
She hadn’t plopped the eye out whole enough, her nails too long for precision. He could still taste the gluey tissue of it from when she’d stuck her fist in his mouth to stifle his shriek. What now sat on his finger resembled what he’d spat out then, bits of right eye and hocked-up mucous.
And if thy right eye offend thee…
The medicine did make the boy sleepy.
I’ll just put my head down for a minute, he thought.
Wait, had he just heard a door open and close, a rattle in its lock of more than a century?
The front door? He shook off the feeling and read more:
The most common form of mutation involves a single base pair in a DNA molecule and is placed in the category of ‘point mutation’. A different base is substituted for the normal base, therefore producing an alteration in the genetic code. If a new amino acid is substituted in the final protein, the subsequent mutation is called a ‘missense mutation’. Certain mutations alter the genetic code and destroy the information it contains. This result produces a mutation that microbiologists refer to as a ‘nonsense mutation.’
– from The Enantiodromia
In the Book’s margin were written the words: What about a no-nonsense mutation?
The boy’s words.
He’d put them there the first time he’d read this part. The Angel had not been amused, even if her expression never showed it. She’d beat him with the large leather-bound book until he understood how sacred knowledge was—even to the seditionist.
Throbbing like the cranium of hell, he again laid his head on the table.
Dozed.
Bled as he slept.
Was that the front door?
Again?
Waking up after a great deal of effort to fight the drugs, he watched in surprise as words manifested… Spontaneously generated on the page. As if written by an unseen hand. The boy’s wonder turned to fear as he read:
{Bangtime, and years later a universe distributed in rhyme, then slipped as a strange hand flung galaxies apart, leaving us lonely and cold in the dark. We feel diamond-old in the rough, and Time as an arrow just isn’t enough.}…
{Nothing travels faster than the speed of light. Time sprays like a sneeze in all directions of its thoughtless propulsion. Or it may drift as a sigh does—buoyant on a predetermined rift in logic, willed by those with strength of purpose and no patience to await the dictum of reasoning’s plodding method.}…
{Dark matter/dark mutter/dark mother/dark mitre…worn by the king of the race.}…
{Nothing travels swifter than the speed of darkness.}…
{God did this in seven days?}…
{So shall ye undo it.}
The magical words stopped.
God did this in seven days?
So shall ye undo it.
The final two lines echoed in his head.
The boy wondered if he had written them himself—as he had the silly, stupid comment on the subject of mutation in action which had left him deeply bruised, bedridden for days and at the mercy of the angelic feather mites.
Yet he knew when he’d done that. This…these new words appearing. He had no memory writing of them. He’d stared at the words manifesting on a blank portion of page, and plainly saw his own hands motionless.
Shock, from such a devastating injury? Or effects from medicinal herbs which might have psychotropic properties?
He read on, focusing on the next words already there, words referring to the end of the world, words like:
Gotterdammerung
Fin du monde
Fin des siecles
Au seuil de l’apocalypse
Then:
Bene ha’elohim + Cain’s flesh = Hybrid = a chain reaction, like the enchanted broom in Der Zauberlehrling
Being: rigor and absolution in bacterial conjugation.
(te absolvo et mortis)
[SV40 + E.coli = Nah ist und gehwer zu fassen du Gott]
Mysterium tremendum et fascinans
The boy read on, wide-eyed, the Book describing end-of-days plague:
‘Pandemic’: a global disease. As opposed to ‘epidemic’ which would affect a large number of victims in a smaller area and a given time.
Pestilence: an epidemic of a serious, typically infectious disease.
‘Vector’: an intermediate vehicle, such as an animal, that is the carrier of an infectious disease or an insect capable of transferring an infectious agent from one host to another.
‘Know ye not that we shall judge angels?’
1 Corinthians 6:3
Time, Space and spatial revelations, and in the end of everything is a neurophysiological disorder based upon the religion of self, which begins with the erroneous notion that a Supreme Being (with an intellect so vast and so alien as to be incomprehensible to a species routinely using less than 10% of its brain) recognizes that a creature as insignificant as you are is worthy of being considered as if you were not genuinely beneath contempt—and would ever deign to intercede in any matter on your behalf, unfolding upon a planet among billions of such accidentally incidental rocks.
We are germs here, as well as being the vectors for all that poisons. Nature’s perfect disorder. Our fascination with fair, foul, and violent is stereotypical of eschatology’s species. Our drive to harm and kill is chronic…
The boy paused, absorbing all he’d read. There was so much thought out in the world, so much philosophy that could apply, that could reflect or defy or just remind one of the ideas in the The Enantiodromia, if the boy only knew more, was exposed to other reading. Thought which appeared in the Book, like:
Containment: The Death of Earth Page 3