Containment: The Death of Earth

by Charlee Jacob

  At the mention of Laura’s name, Adam howled like a wounded animal and rushed forward—the driftwood club upraised. Boy or not, he’d break open that skull.

  “Be careful, Adam! If you step into this circle, you will end up trapped in it, as I am,” the boy warned him.

  “You destroyed Italy on purpose, didn’t you?” Adam challenged, lowering his weapon, his feet only a couple inches from the outer ring of salt. “And the mutated plagues. And Laura.”

  The boy shook his head and his expression revealed his horror.

  “I was in a dream state, out of which only the image of me came. In those dreams we were the elements of my revenge. I didn’t yet know—but he did,” Ben Azzael said, glaring at the angel. “My own father who did nothing to protect me—or the world.”

  The angel wasn’t a swirling, alien shadow now. It had become a radiant being, lighting up its darkened corner of the room. It answered, “I could not. Destiny is very much a real element to Watchers, just as solid a manifestation as Gravity or Time/Space. We manipulate what is permitted us. Angela thought she would be the catalyst of her own genius to direct the Apocalypse. But she was every bit the puppet she believed she’d made you into. We were forbidden to interfere, beyond some restraint upon the disasters.”

  “Liar!” The circle flared with the boy’s anger. “The Watchers are famous for disobeying. I am more celestial than human. Should I be judged more harshly than angels? I was tricked into all of this. I was nothing but a pawn, so how is what I did a sin? Isn’t God omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, as He pulls the strings of the puppets to accomplish a sick subversion of his creation?”

  “Who is to say what Destiny is, except for the One Who created every beginning and each end?” said the angel. “I can only reveal this: It isn’t what you think.”

  “What happens to me?” Ben…son of…Azzaeal raged. “I don’t age within this circle. I cannot die in it. I don’t need to go to hell for what I’ve done.” He grimaced, defeated. “I am already there.”

  The angel fixed a sad look on Adam, saying nothing. Was it trying to communicate something to him with those golden eyes?

  Yes, it was. He experienced, again in a rush, every vicious thing that Angela SaclasEX had done to her child. Then he was being shown the last two entries in The Enantiodromia—and what Laura had gone through to get them.

  How isolated we are…forever alone in the dominions of deception we call self-determination… Were we just an accident of nature or did we briefly matter in the constant motion that is the mind and motives of the Greatest Intellect?

  Each of them were but half of the whole.

  Adam dropped the driftwood. He stepped into the circle and took both of the boy’s hands in his own. Adam said, “Your sins are my sins.”

  He didn’t feel being absorbed. He was just where and who he was supposed to be.

  The boy began to chant words so old they were scarcely human. Outside the wind roared as the ocean rose higher and higher. A giant wave knocked down fantasy’s tower, then swept over the house, throwing off the roof and smashing the walls. The water washed away the circle of salt, optic tissue and blood.

  No longer imprisoned, the boy was free to fall…and fly.

  Part Eight

  The Myth of Returning

  (The Desire for Rebirth into

  Innocent Conditions of Mindset;

  Salvation and the Second Chance)

  ————

  “Esotericism sees the 8 as signifying a resurrection into a higher consciousness, and representing the eternal and spiral motion of cycles.”

  ‘Encyclopaedia of Numbers’

  – A. E. Abbott

  ————

  “A man’s body has seven orifices but a woman’s has eight, and it is through the eighth that new life comes into the world.“

  – Man, Myth and Magic

  ————

  “She blinded me with Science!”

  – Thomas Dolby

  ————

  Narrator

  I watch in this place of longest solitude, removed from illusions of sacred and profane spaces.

  In prosperous times, people forget to thank God.

  In the most dangerous times, people either collapse to their bloodied knees to pray to their rediscovered Lord for deliverance…

  Or to curse Him.

  Celestial voices—nearly forever stationed away from the throne—make jokes through the left side of their mouths, even as they perpetually sing His praises by rote through the right side. Perhaps there is human failing within the highest ranks. Thus we have faces of stone, even as mankind often seems to have a heart of the same icy flint.

  God cannot be wounded, only abandoned. It is your own fault if you have made yourself so lost that even He cannot find you to protect you. It is through the bonds of love that you reach Him and He reaches you. But if you made a wasteland of your soul…

  Damn! While I set my sights elsewhere, my shield was stolen.

  Epilogue and the Math After

  ————

  “You travel on until you return home;

  You live on until you return to Earth.”

  – African Proverb

  ————

  Louise woke up just after sunrise. Aziza was crying.

  “Ubani is gone,” her foster mother told her, wiping her swollen eyes with the sleeve of her dress.

  A few days ago, when both were still in Nuru and confronting Sam Joto, the dress had been crisp with a bright pattern. Now it had faded as the world had, patterns of orchids and leaves a memory lost to extinction. “Ubani must have heard us last night as we talked about the Adango War. She heard what I said about what I did—to her grandmother and mother. Now the deaths of all three are heavy on my head. Allah, the merciful and compassionate one, forgive me!”

  Louise shielded her eyes with her hand, the early sun harsh even through the septic/infective fog. It might just as well have been a nuclear bomb’s flash, it hurt her head so much. She stood to look beyond the circle of the mango woman’s tears. These were hardened, resembling amber, a fossilized resin imprisoning insects for millions of years.

  Though the women were protected (imprisoned?) in the circle, all around was death. The predators they heard and smelled, whose eyes had glowed in the darkness—these beasts had perished last night. And beyond were the animals who joined them: gazelle, zebra, giraffes, wildebeests, elephants, rabbits... Every creature known in this country lay upon dead grass and the extinguished beauty of flowers. Their bodies spread to the dead forest and the poisoned waterway stinking and stagnant, unable to support even the mosquitoes, also dead. No single living thing endured. Not even what thrived on the dead. The quiet was nerve-wracking.

  “The square of the hypotenuse in any right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides: H/squared = A/squared + B/squared.

  – Pythagoras

  The truth is only what is believed, opinions and popularity need preachers and followers.

  – The Enantiodromia (Revisionist)

  Louise spied a narrow path. Had the animals moved so Ubani could walk out? Did she make her way back to Lake Mojonsi? Or did the 16-year-old perish from disease and plague, or become the last meal for a hunter of flesh?

  A ghost stumbled in the blaze of sunrise. The body’s shape—however disincarnate—kept changing with first a withered twitching, second a bloated wobbling. Louise focused on the shivering form…no…no…Ubani. And she saw that the constant churning agitation came from numerous parasites devouring the girl from without and within.

  Go away, Louise thought. Asali mustn’t see you.

  Her heart ached, both for Asali and Ubani.

  Aziza stood up now, squinting into the rising sun. What did Louise stare at with such intensity? Louise quickly turned the old woman around to face her, sparing her a look at Ubani’s apparition.

  “You cannot blame yourself. You didn’t take your boys
to the Ncema’s farm. You do not even know who started the fight. You saw your three sons killed in front of you. You lost your mind,” Louise told her, using Aziza’s own words from the night before.

  She tried to see out of the corner of her eye. Ubani’s spirit was coming their way…oh, no!

  “Kudhumani and little Nyota were only in their doorway, doing no harm to anyone,” Aziza replied, her head bowed.

  The quivering/jerking/shriveling/swelling specter continued to sway in the direction of the circle, wayward, barely conscious.

  “You have always been the best, the most generous and caring person I’ve ever known,” Louise told her truthfully.

  Aziza tried to turn away, to deny her daughter’s kind words. Ubani was so near their circle but if Aziza completed the turn she would see the worms nesting in the young revenant eye sockets.

  Louise grabbed Aziza’s shoulders, hugging her tightly, having swung her away from the site again. She said, “The world has usually been a terrible place. God has taken away the world. Perhaps He saw so many terrible things down here that He finally lost His mind.”

  Ubani drifted away, on the opposite side of the circle now from the path through the animals. Louise held Aziza until she’d gone from sight. What if she came back?

  “…there is something essential about the Now that is just outside the realm of science.”

  – Albert Einstein

  “The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat.”

  – Confucius

  Schrodinger probably killed it. Its soul was taken from Now and removed to Then. Now and Then the cat’s spirit stalks the flat earth. But God took the dark room first and spread it from zero to zero.

  – The Enantiodromia (Revisionist)

  Asali stirred, woke up startled, looking around her. She touched with her remaining hand the spot where Ubani had slept next to her. Her eyes widened, seeing the path through the dead multitude.

  “We must go after her!” Asali cried, jumping up.

  Louise caught her by the collar of the oversized shirt. “No, kipenzi. Ubani is gone.”

  “But why? She only became my sister last night,” Asali argued. “She was happy, I could tell.”

  Aziza, downcast and wretched, began to confess. “It was my fault. I…”

  Louise shot her a pleading glance and quickly cut her off. “It is not your fault. We were going to share watching over the children. You are nearly 70 and were exhausted and fell asleep because you took the first turn. Ubani may have walked away in a dream. You used to do that when you were little, remember, Asali?”

  “I do remember, Mama Mzazi,” the girl admitted.

  The ghosts of the animals prowled around their circle. Spectral doubles of the long grass and the trees rustled as if in a wind the ladies couldn’t feel, or as if even these life forms tried to shake off whatever killed them. Small children disappeared completely into the waddling ends of fat hippopotamuses emerging from the cavernous mouths. Prides of lions slinked alongside tribes of human revenants. Apparitional serpents wriggled between the stumbling feet of disembodied people, all poisoned by a microbial soup more venomous than any snake ever possessed. Monkeys without faces clung to great non-existent branches in ebonies that were nothing, nothing left even fit for the gallows. The three pregnant women could hardly see the corpse of the once-beautiful forest for the armies of phantoms and viral mist.

  The mango woman.

  She motioned for them to follow her, her scarred breasts heaving with her laments, into this center of nothing. They entered quickly.

  Visions overtook.

  Louise…

  Black stars in a white sky.

  Asali…

  An enormous darkly-grayish lump turning over in sleep. Its mouth, shaped like a machete, widened in a yawn very black, stretching backwards to consume itself.

  Aziza…

  She saw two pale silhouettes in barren blackness. In her heart, she was as Sarah—wife of the Patriarch Abraham. Sarah, too, had become pregnant in old age. But not until after she had given her handmaiden, Hagar, to bear an heir for Abraham. Afterword she feared Hagar’s son would eclipse hers, and she nagged Abraham until he reluctantly had both mother and son driven away—condemned to perish in the desolation. Aziza knew the pair had to be Hagar and poor, discarded little Ishmael.

  Each assumed that the others saw what they did.

  Static rolled across their skins, danced in their hair, sang like embers smoldering in a cooling cook fire.

  When they walked out the other end they found a steaming lake—not Mojonsi. In one direction were ergs, pyramid shaped dunes. The sand smoked in the wind. They heard pounding, the spirit of the drummer of death. There far away stood a single Pachypodium namaquanum…what the peoples of the Northern African Desert called ‘the half human tree’, because it looked like someone standing in the distance. This one was so skeletal it might have been the drummer of death himself.

  Beyond the lake, a range of tall mountains stood, their tops disappeared into red clouds. Rainbows and every shade of blood arced from a waterfall that shimmered down a central peak. Only, it was fire, blinding as if it were the noon day sun. But there was no sun in the bloodshot sky.

  “What is this place?” Louise wanted to know. The mango woman didn’t answer for she never spoke. The hot sand baked through the soles of Louise’s shoes.

  “I think the embe mwanamke has brought us to hell,” Asali said fearfully. “Peponi. Did we die, too? Is Ubani here somewhere? Is Heaven full now that the earth has been killed?”

  Aziza whispered softly, “For me, mahali zinapoadhibiwa roho za watu walio kufa.”

  There were two hells in the Swahili language. One—peponi—was location for the pepo, or disembodied souls. The other—what Aziza anticipated as her soul’s fate—was a place of punishment.

  Asali continued, not hearing her grandmother’s remark, “I’ll bet Heaven only had one spot left and they gave it to Ubani. That means I will never see her again. But it’s okay. I would rather she be in Heaven, wouldn’t you, Bibi?”

  Aziza managed a smile. “Yes, I would gladly give up my place in Paradise, if I had one, to sweet Ubani.”

  Louise pondered how they arrived there. “I think the mango woman turned space inside out. Why, there were black stars and white night!” She went on in wonderment. “Perhaps we only imagined that part, though. As if our brains insisted we see something. For how can we see ’nothing’? Maybe the angels murmured it into our ears, the way a hypnotist places a suggestion in his subject’s mind.”

  Black stars/white night. Louise thought it absurd. ‘Nothingness’ made more sense. A wormhole, the shortest possible distance between two far points.

  In trillions of years the universe will have expanded until there will be less than one electron per quadrillion cubic light-years of space, ending in an approximate zero density of virtual emptiness.

  – The Enantiodromia (Revisionist)

  There was a large, colorless disk on the beach, near the water. Like a saucer, it curved slightly inward. Geometric designs moved as the ladies watched. Being almost transparent as glass, the symbols on the disk became floating mathematical equations. Louise had never seen this number system before, not even on Sam’s extensive cable television.

  The mango woman’s sobs hitched. She seemed more heartbroken than ever in the 25 years since Louise and Aziza first began seeing her. She pointed first to the strange object, next to the falling flames. These sizzled as they connected with the simmering surface of the lake.

  Asali’s jaw dropped. “Is she trying to tell us to go under that?”

  “We cannot stay here,” Louise replied, surveying the desert wilderness on this side of the water.

  “That doesn’t mean we ought to go over there,” the 10-year-old protested. “The fire would burn us up.”

  Asali looked at her grandmother for support.

  Aziza shrugged. “The mango woman
has never led us to harm. There is nowhere else left to go. We must trust her—and trust who sent her.”

  They approached the disk, nervous. From its size, it had to be heavy. Would it float? If they crawled onto it and set out across the lake, would it sink? If it truly was glass, would it crack under their combined weight? Yet, it’s shape did suggest it might be a boat.

  The mango woman sat down, knees drawn up to her chin. She rocked back and forth, humming a dire lullaby. She shed exactly three more tears. When they rolled down her cheeks, they hardened when hitting the sand, turning into a solid very like amber. Louise knelt, seeing no insects within. Instead she saw the shapes of—

  She drew back, troubled. She saw infants in the hardened tears. Aziza, Asali, herself, all carried babies. These couldn’t represent their children, could they?

  “Get on,” Louise told her mother and daughter, then pushed the disk into the water. It wasn’t heavy after all, as weightless as it was almost invisible.

  Louise jumped on. The disk glided across the lake. There was no rudder, no oars, no sail to direct it; she hoped it would take them where they needed to go.