by Terri Kouba
“We have three rules here in Plato’s Cave by which everyone, including guests, must abide,” Robert said at the welcoming meal a week after we arrived. It was the night of the full moon and they had pulled back the covers from the skylights and we ate by the light of the moon.
Honor the moon, my children, every night it grants you the privilege of seeing its face. During the hiding of the Slicer Wars it is true we hardly ever saw the sun, but what pained me the most was not seeing the glorious moon. The Slicers skin, that liquid metal that transformed into scalpel-sharp knives to pierce flesh, it captured the moon’s glow and flashed silver daggers at us in the darkness. During the day, at least, we could see death approaching on the metallic wings of the Slicers, but at night, in the darkness, the only things people saw a moment before death enveloped them were flashes of mercury, nature’s cruelty as she transformed the sweetness of the silver moon into destructive knives of death.
“We don’t take other people’s belongings.” Robert hung his head at this next part and his voice sounded like it was pleading. “We each have so little that belongs to us, individually, that this rule is so important that it’s the first rule. “ He looked up again and his eyes were sad. I knew then that he had many belongings before the Slicer Wars and he remembered how much he had and he coveted his current meager belongings all the more so because of it.
“With the death of so many, monogamy has died with them. Those who wear the yellow bands around their wrists are willing to share themselves with another. You may offer, but if that person declines, a no is a no. Do not try to convince them, do not attempt to force them.” He glanced at Marla’s wrist and the sadness of his lost belongings transformed into a pain of never having had that which he longed for most. “Those who wear a black band on their wrists are in mourning and request to not even be asked.”
“And lastly, there are some doors downstairs that are locked. These doors are off limits to our guests.” He looked at Derrick, our Irish military commander.
“We are not hiding anything, it’s just that behind these doors are our most precious belongings. They house our library. Books we have gathered, at great cost of life, so to retain the knowledge of our ancestors for our children. We will gladly escort you through the libraries, but we ask that you do not attempt to pass through any locked door.”
Derrick rose, winced, and glowered at his few remaining soldiers. “You will abide by these three rules.”
“Yes sir,” they answered in unison.
Derrick looked to his left. “That goes for you bookish people too. I know the temptation of books will be greater for you than it will be for my soldiers. Just respect their rules while we’re in their house.” Derrick sat down with a grunt. His back had been sliced from shoulder to waist outside of Prague and hadn’t healed well.
After a meal of goat curry and rice with raisins the Platonists performed their monthly ritual. Every full moon, just like we still do today, my children, they portrayed the Allegory of Plato’s Cave. They gave us pears for dessert. Real pears. Fresh pairs, not from a can. I was so amazed I didn’t even stop to wonder where they had grown them. I don’t think any of us Irish did.
While we ate our dessert, six of their members were shackled to the floor, facing a blank wall roughed to look like a cave wall. Behind them roared a fire and between them showmen danced with puppets, casting shadows upon the cave wall.
The prisoners were unable to turn their heads and so were unable to see these puppets, the real objects that passed behind them. What the prisoners saw and heard were shadows and echoes cast by objects that they did not see. They mistook appearance for reality.
A man named Frank read Plato’s Allegory, each paragraph first in ancient Greek and then translated in English. His voice was smooth in the moonlight, burnished in the firelight. He stood behind us and his voice came from nowhere and everywhere. It washed over us and under our feet and enveloped us with the timbre of gravitas. His words seeped into my bones and though I didn’t really understand the words, I felt the importance of their meaning.
A masked man rushed onto the stage and swung at the prisoner’s shackles with a hammer, freeing them. The prisoners turned around and saw the puppeteers behind them and they looked wildly between the showmen and the shadows their puppets cast. The prisoners realized that what they had thought was real were only shadows and they ringed their hands and pulled at their hair. A few of the prisoners raised their fists at the showmen and threatened to advance, but the masked man pulled them back. He turned his masked face away from the showmen and waved his hand at them, dismissing them as unimportant artifacts of the past.
He directed the prisoners to an opening in the cave where they saw sunlight for the first time. He nudged the prisoners forward. Some were reluctant to walk into the brightness and looked back at the cave wall with melancholy, bare now of shadows except those cast by their own bodies. Two of the prisoners returned to their seats and willingly put the shackles around their own ankles. The showmen raised their puppets and the prisoners smiled and rocked back and forth like children at the shadows dancing on the cave wall.
The remaining four freed prisoners covered their faces with their arms, protecting their eyes from a sunlight they had never before seen. The light they used to see was pale compared to the real light of the sun. They stepped through the opening and into a world of color. Music started to play and the freed prisoners danced in delight on a carpet of green grass.
Soon everyone in the audience had risen and was dancing on the grass in the sunlight. I looked down and saw that the grass was real. I looked up and saw that the sunlight was a special kind of lamp. Even so, I felt its heat pulsate through me. I danced with my father and laughed in the sunlight and I was happy. I had been at Plato’s Cave for less than seven days and already I was happy. I remembered my children back in Ireland, in the underground bunker, dank and dark. They were cold, hungry and frightened. Hunted by the Slicers. Maybe sick and dying for all I knew. I fled the stage for a dark corner and began to weep.
Robert found me there. He put his hands on my shoulders and squeezed them for comfort. “Do not cry, my child. Tonight we celebrate the living. The remaining thirty days of the month are long enough for us to mourn those we have lost or left behind. But tonight the full moon blesses us with its light and we dance.”
He took my hand in his and guided me back to the stage where he wrapped his strong arms around me and we swayed to the rhythm of the music in the glow of the full moon while soft grass tickled between my bare toes.
Many people slipped yellow bands on their wrists that night and shared their beds with another. I myself laid for the first time with Jeremiah, a man originally from Israel. My father left with a woman named Sarah. Marla left early and alone, twisting at the black band around her wrist as if it was a protective shield. Robert started to follow her, stared pointedly at the black band and turned away, heading downstairs instead. I thought he would find solace in his books. I knew so little then.