by Mon D Rea
Death offered and described to me the deal exactly as it was. No more, no less. I sensed this easily enough from my semi-divine negotiator. But it was something in me, something in my own character that flew towards the bargain and made me know my answer even before it had entered my mind. Like it had been written right from the start in some diary of destiny that I would accept.
And so I did. I suppose in my heart of hearts I wanted to be in the best spot this time, at the podium or even the imperial box. It didn’t matter whether I was an active participant or a helpless spectator, I desired to watch over the cessation of bitter-sweet life for every breathing thing in the world. I burned with a sick voyeurism towards the struggle of all creatures that cling on to something so fragile, so ephemeral, and so pointless. After all these formal considerations, I shook Death’s ice-cold hand and walked away from the mortal world without a backward glance.
I couldn’t interfere with human affairs. Only in that final moment between life and death was I permitted to make my presence felt; when I severed the thread of life, the umballicus, that anchored humans onto the land of the living. These were the first of the rules I had to live by in my new role as the Atropos Wyrd, one of a triumvirate of Fate-dealers.
In between my duties, I often watched Aquilia in my phantom form yet was unable to console her with the news that I had moved on to a better though stranger place. I yearned to tell her stories of all my travels and to instruct her how wide the world was – certainly much wider than she had thought or could ever conceive. And when she was finally compelled to marry by her father, I was there too in the house where she had been raised and looked on knowingly at the sadness that hid behind the familiar smile.
Still she became a dutiful wife and a caring mother. And if the affection she eventually learned to feel for her husband was ever found wanting, the love she showered on her children more than made up for it. I watched her attain a life of genuine happiness and contentment.
She surrounded herself with a string of pets: a Vertragus, which was a Celtic breed of hound, a house-snake, a fawn, a tortoise, a swan, a peacock, a pair of doves, a dozen geese, five green parrots, three ravens, a family of hares, and two monkeys. But when she finally lost the fight against old age and succumbed to senility, what names would she be calling but those of the long-dead performers of the Cavea: Barrus the elephant, Artaxias the lioness, Innocence the white bear, and me, Diegis, in her rheumy eyes preserved in all my youth. She would often make hurried and furtive preparations for our elopement and make her way to our long-expired tryst, to the annoyance of the house slaves and the amusement of all her grownup children.
I must admit I was almost tempted every time to violate the rules and reveal my supernatural nature to her. It was very curious how the human mind worked – or faltered. The most urgent things became immaterial while those that are decades-old were pushed to the foreground as though they had happened only yesterday. If Aquilia could only see, she would know that her fantasy was not far from the truth. There I stood in the same room with her, unmoved by the sweeping hands of time and as tall and eternal as the first time she laid eyes on me. She, on the contrary, had been transformed into a shambling, stooped, and wrinkled old woman. Everything had been eroded away but for that small space in her memory where her first love still burned bright.
In the blink of a reaper’s eye came the crumbling of Rome and all its grandeur and decadence. There were looting, rape, more atrocities, and the unrelenting death toll. More work for me and the Crows. We were kept busy. Deep down I also knew I was tearing off and burning the pages of a book that held what little evidence there was of my human existence.
Wiping the world clean of all traces of my former self was a much easier and more irrevocable step than I had anticipated. First there was the Plague of Flavius Justinianus. After that came Atra Mors, the Black Death. Both made all the victims through hundreds of years of the Empire seem nothing more than a drop in the bucket. With poetic justice, the fleas and the black rats took vengeance on man on behalf of all the wolves, the great felines, and the gargantuan elephants that the Empire had slaughtered. And though the masses feared the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, there were only me, the Crows, and the anger that I had kept tempered in my heart.
I was the “Pied Piper” who in 1284 bought scores of children and orphans from the German village of Hamelin and had them settle in parts of Central Europe, some of them even in my own motherland, Dacia Superior, left empty by relentless barbarian invasions. The only difference was, I was the more sinister and dramatic version with the rats and instead of taking away waves upon waves of the filthy creatures to drown them in the river, I brought them with me. Yes, scurrying with their tiny feet off the ships and along the mooring lines down to the sewers to breed a whole army parallel to the unsuspecting city; three rat mercenaries for every cringing human. Humankind, for me, was the real vermin that had to be eradicated. Everyone was guilty either in complicity or inaction.
Still, I wasn’t as frenzied as the Crows. And I bore witness to how, in the event of a great pestilence, the line between the living and the dying blurred. There were more than a few executions that passed unaccounted for. It was all I could do stop the insatiable Crows from preying mindlessly.
I suppose what I wanted was to play the role of the flute-playing satyr that the Romans had been so fond of. What was running through my mind but kept eluding me was the marching tune of the Cavea, the Trepak, still formless and sleepless inside my head in that era. I only played pieces from old Petipor’s repertoire as poor substitutes. I had the exact aulos he had gifted me and playing it rewarded me with the feeling that I was in a way avenging him. All of us. For Petipor in particular, it was the aulos subverting the lyra; the slave outwitting the master. Madness finally overtaking reason. No man in all the land was safe. Every soul, from the bowed scum to the lofty emperor, was dancing to my tune.
And the weak, delirious, highly-sensitive children from the frozen steppes outside Khanbaliq to the crowded plague houses of London, they kept hearing me, humming to themselves and creating new tunes. They passed them on to the surviving ones till ultimately the words took shape out of their separate contributions on the playground:
Ring around the rosies,
A pocket full of posies,
A-tishoo! A-tishoo!
We all fall down.
But for all these theatrics which would’ve made the Cavea proud, I had been helpless to do that which I desired the most, to be with Aquilia. In her last days, it was like we had exchanged places with the beasts and we lived like exhibits inside a giant terrarium, a pane of glass constantly between us. Or at least I lived in this world, my own version of Pluto, cursed with the ability to see her but not to speak to her or to touch her, and she was perfectly unaware of my presence. It was the pain of non-existence that I suffered.
Yet I held on to hope because our worlds inched closer and closer as she counted down the remaining days of her life. At exactly midnight in her clock, our worlds would both orbit near enough to touch.
But then she was inducted into Heaven. They called it by a different name: Helium, but it was the same paradise most people had been raised to believe. To this ethereal land, it was the elemental Storks, the great white angels, who escorted Aquilia and robbed me of my fraction of time, my sliver of opportunity. There was no possibility for a servant of the dark like me to steal even a glimpse of her or to send word to where she was. Aquilia and I had drifted close and were worlds apart again; this time forever.
The only chance, my predecessor explained, lay in Aquilia’s choosing to be reborn to earth. And tragically, to be reborn is to allow one’s mind to be wiped clean like a slate.
“To find a single soul in all creation is to find a particular star in all the universes,” the previous Atropos taught me. “Leave her be. Refrain from turning back to your mortal shell. Shed all order, outward or inward, that you find comforting. All this sentimentality and your need
for a familiar face; what you consider strength is weakness in the eyes of the inhabitants of Terra Mortis. And in the eyes of the Crows in particular. Do not appear humanly weak to them or they shall overthrow you.”
I heeded her advice. It occurred to me then how the human quality, no matter how diluted, was inserted into the equation in the guise of the Atropos. This even though the two other elements of the Fate Trinity, Clotho and Lachesis, were purebred immortals. Indeed, no matter how the Crows detested it, the Atropos Wyrd played a humanizing and balancing role.
Old Death left me to be the last of my breed. She disintegrated and passed on to the Smoke, a place that was neither Heaven nor Hell (nor Limbo) built especially for semi-immortal and ambiguous workers like us.
But let me give you an idea how immense the undertaking was to search for Aquilia in the ocean of souls. Human scientists have estimated that there are ten times more stars than grains of sand in all the beaches and deserts of the world combined. And if I gave them precise knowledge of how big the universe actually was (and how many others there are), it would surely break their flimsy grasp on reality.
Chapter XVIII: Sam and Me
I take my leave. My job in hooking up the two love birds is done and there’s little else I can contribute. Sephtimus seems to be doing just fine on his own, too, having assimilated a working knowledge of human communication and behavior through the Lachesis monitors.
More importantly, seeing the possibility of love in the shape of Lessa and Chester leaning towards each other across the diner table has torn open a wound in me that no amount of discipline can plug up. I feel like an old, mangy lion that remembers the smell of grass on the savannah but forced to spend all the remaining days of its life inside a cage.
I need you, Sam. Now more than ever.
I walk through the memory-riddled streets, taking in the dim lights and the muted sounds of the city that acts like a baby – little by little quieting down but still refusing to fall asleep. I put my fluid, chameleonic, now-you-see-’em-now-you-don’t hands into the pockets of my aqueous hips and jeans, and hang my head. It seems as though I’ve retained the erratic properties of the carriage.
I wander the avenues that I used to take on my way to university. To be exact, I haunt them. A grotesque specter of a man that had his shot at happiness but totally blew it. I had crossed a line where as soon as I did, I realized I had left the most important thing behind and there was no turning back. Now I’m the one doing the haunting but I’m still not left alone by the memories.
I remember the psychiatrist breaking the news to me in the small, sublet office. The doctor dispensed scientific words but I fancied I could read his mind like I sometimes could and catch the gist of what he refused to say in so many words: That I was going crazy. In those days, I would often feel the street wobble under my feet as though it couldn’t wait to swallow me whole. I was an outsider in the midst of normal people because I never got the hang of the business of living. There was something seriously broken inside me; a fatal flaw in logic or the absence of a reason for being. Something that had to be fixed first before the world would accept me, or I would accept myself.
So I shut the door, locked out Sam. Started fantasizing about death. And who would think Death, of all the angels, had his eyes on me and listened to my prayers?
Then again, I probably wasn’t as tough a job for him as I hoped I was. Technically I didn’t even exist. My own mother didn’t stick around long enough to give me a name so it followed that every extension of my special birth certificate – my social security number, tax ID, everything about me was a lie. If I wanted to, it was easy enough to fall through the cracks because that was what I had been born to do anyway, to disappear.
But for a while, none of those things mattered. I was able to trick myself into believing I had a shot. I felt content, laughed, celebrated life with my friends and fell in love so passionately. Here in this very city.
Whenever people asked how Sam and I met, this was the story I told them:
She was a striking freshman in ponytail and sleeveless blouses. She’d bring you right back to the high school days you thought you’d left behind, when girls were women and boys were still kids. She’d make you feel this even in the university you had staked out for your own by virtue of seniority. The effortless grace with which she carried herself, whether seated or walking, hugging her textbooks on the way to class or eating a burger at the cafeteria; her voice which rang as clear and musical as a bell of fate; the air of independence that bordered on arrogance; all these affected you with animal magnetism, things that no man of any generation could resist.
We both sat in the last row of Philos I, which was an introductory course but belonged to the General Education curriculum, meaning it was something impossible to escape. I had put it off for so long I had to take it together with all the snotty-nosed freshies and – but the stars did shine on me – with Her. I paid little attention to the lectures and spent all my energies rediscovering the lost teenage (and caveman) art of charcoal painting like some unwashed hippie Art major, perfecting her profile in the middle back row and with the edges of my hands always sooty.
This, in hindsight, was the wrong medium of expression. Being a Math major, I was a complete amateur in the eyes of a Visual Arts major. Nevertheless, after an unimaginably long period of practice that lasted well into the second quarter, I finally bit the bullet and in a very small voice asked my seatmate to please pass my masterpiece.
But our professor, who of course had been on to me from day one, intercepted the sketch and saw it fit to show the whole class and to read aloud my love note on the back: Venisti, Vidi, Vicisti. (You came, I saw, You conquered.) Both Sam and I blushed furiously amid giggles and cheers. From that day on, I always had with me two things: the nickname “Caesar’s Salad” and her phone number.
****
Tonight it seems the Lachesis monitors back in Death’s office won’t give me a moment’s peace. It’s hard to tell if I’m acting of my own volition or for an audience as I walk towards a very familiar place, People’s Park, teeming with live memories like a fisherman’s net. Towards memories that were once happy but now only too painful, I find my immaterial feet carrying me.
The park of course is gated and guarded at this time of night. But not against my vacillating form. I walk right to and between the impossible bars and catch a glimpse of the napping security guard’s partly open mouth. Though it feels miserable realizing that even in death I’m trapped in indecision manifested in my very shape, I take consolation in how I have more or less stabilized back into my human form, still sporting the coachman’s uniform, the jacket that’s very likely someone else’s burial suit.
It’s pitch-black in the park but shadowy and dappled in places by moonlight. More silvery and magical than ever. I wonder how it is I never noticed these things when I was still alive.
Fortunately, the spiritual dimension seems keener on remembering, which supports a theory of mine that the places people haunt in their lifetimes will carry traces of their presence forever. And to the psychically-gifted, the voices would still ring as true as when they first did:
- What’s this? Is this another of our heart-to-heart talks? Because they all boil down to one thing, you know, to me not introducing you to my parents. Is that what this is about?
- There’s nothing wrong with wanting to meet your parents. It follows, if we’re seriously committed to this relationship.
- What’s wrong is you’re always asking about my personal life. You know why you keep getting disappointed? It’s because of me. I keep pretending I’m who you want me to be. So why don’t you do both of us a favor and just leave me the hell alone?
We broke up. That was the longest we had ever gone without speaking to each other. But not a day passed that she wasn’t in my thoughts. Every morning that I opened my eyes I would just lie in bed and think about what I had lost and the emptiness that waited for me the rest of the day, adding joyle
ss testament to the adage that humans never truly appreciated anything till they had lost it.
I was determined to win her back. So what I did was go to a music store and buy an acoustic guitar. This was something I had been putting off all my life. From the Internet I started to learn how to tune, read chords, and play. Every time I found myself thinking of Sam, I just grabbed the guitar and played away.
Day after day I practiced till my fingers were sore. I didn’t want to stop playing till I knew Sam would be satisfied with the result. I even dared to write a song of my own. I called it “The Right Time” and it was about a guy waiting for his soulmate.
All these happened in August and September, the rainy season in the Philippines. I was trapped indoors a lot and it hurt to be missing her all the time. We were still not on speaking terms and avoided each other on campus. I had noticed her eyes were swollen from crying in the first few weeks of our breakup and she dropped out of the couple of classes we were taking together. But then she started hanging out with her friends and she at last looked happier.
As soon as I felt ready, I recorded a video of myself playing and singing the song I wrote. I burned my performance to a DVD and then placed disk and accompanying letter in her school locker. Truth be told, I still had a duplicate key to the locker that we used to share and apparently Sam still hadn’t gotten around to changing the lock.
I waited, for a call or text, but I didn’t hear from her. Weeks passed and the DVD went unmentioned. I was tempted a couple of times to ask her in person but I had to assume that she didn’t want me to do precisely that. She seemed to be doing better and better and it just felt wrong to suddenly be pulling her back to my life, to all my angst and complexity.