by John Keene
Have you really forgotten me so fully? Purged the text of your memory? Prophet of Society you would recall that I took and still take little pleasure in the sorts of things you did, not in building airports or hospitals or reducing them to rubble. Not in appointing generals to march my armies or ministers to oversee the economy or human welfare or the mint. Not in bludgeoning them with my own fists when I have tired of the extent of their looting, even though I ordered it. Not in flushing towers of bureaucrats or rats, of democratic activists or patriotic neo-fascists. Not in standing beside yet another pale monarch or prime minister or even our browner ones, their many thousand-dollar suits or dresses or traditional garb smelling of the enslaved child workers and women who assembled them. Not lying with my wives in any of our hundred beds knowing that not even they would dare think of slitting my throat for fear of what would happen to them if such a thought entered their heads, nor with any of the whores in the most sumptuous hotels in foreign capitals, nor any of the others here or anywhere else in any of the countless beds I requisition for a night or a week or a month, depending upon my moods and whims, the circumstances. Not in giving speeches or proclamations or orders, not issuing decrees, ultimatums or threats. Neither in condemnation nor clemency. Not in rites or ceremonies, not before our gods or God, not before Christ or Allah or any other, not in our languages or in Arabic or English or Chinese or any other tongues. Not in the countryside or the savannahs, nor atop our highest peaks nor in the sea’s mouth, not in the cities the colonizers left nor the ones you built nor the ones I willed into being. Not in pets or children or noise or silence. Not in telling the truth or in lying, both among your many arts, though I sometimes must. Not in a single one of these actions, or most others, including not taking pleasure in a single thing at all.
No. You used to enjoy our time together.
Yes, but those days are irretrievable, as you should have heard grasped by this point by my words, my tone, my weariness. It’s an audience, really, not a conversation. You’re not listening. I do take pleasure, however, in one thing.
Yes, something. Though wealth isn’t it—
Once I thought, following your lead, O Prophet of Wealth, that I would take the greatest pleasure in riches. Vaults of treasure, buried deep in blast-proof bunkers, a mile into the ocean floor, vaults behind virtual walls of zeros and ones only the most brilliant of the geniuses I hired could penetrate. I thought I would feel pleasure bathing in money, sleeping in money, clothing myself in money, eating vomiting crapping fucking money. I followed your lead and had jewelry fashioned out of rhodium for every appendage, the entire interior of a tower in silver, a new arena for my birthday and it and everyone in it painted in gold leaf. Anyone there quickly grasped the appeal of the golden calf. To warn off anyone else it’s now an abyss.
Yes. I once erected a massive obelisk wrought of platinum studded with red diamonds, jadeite, garnets, red beryl emeralds, black opals, all of them. It became a shrine.
Don’t you think your dildo paid off our foreign debt? I give money away, some of it, why do you think the people love me so much? 100% of the vote, every election. It mints itself faster than we can spend it, look at how the vultures from every continent are circling our ports, such are the bounties the earth saw fit to bequeath us.
No. And it isn’t power—
Power, that aphrodisiac as someone once said, I don’t take pleasure in it either. Prophet of Power, that you were. Such a point of idiocy and a truism that money equals power, or some such thing, money buys power, power buys money, always the two shall meet and screw and someone ends up as the surplus in the equation. I can crap on the floor and order someone to lick it up. I can have an entire block of apartments leveled and raised anew in the span of a few days. I can throw every book in every library into a furnace and order that new ones be written to fill the shelves. I respect power, especially the power that hides in things, that resides in things over which we have no control, the power that surges up out of the pages of one of those books you torched, the ones some intrepid fool rescued, the power in one of those mountains looming over us that decides it is going to batter everything around it with its sublime volcanic breath. The power in atoms whirling about towards a bang that brought the earth into being and that will clear us all from this human plane. Would that a man should become a god, or what’s literature, or politics, or physics, or the military for? Yes, but I don’t take any great pleasure in it at all.
No. Though you wield it better than a prince. Or a king. Or queen, of the chessboard or the savannah. Better than I did. The king of the savannahs, the greatest lion of this nation that ever lived.
Yes that’s how they refer to me. The Lion devoured the Prophet, though they’re still hunting for you in Switzerland and Tehran.
Yes, voracious, eaten whole.
What gives me pleasure is . . . can you guess it?
No . . . I don’t . . . I can’t say. Not money, not power, not sex, not religion, not, not death. I . . . can’t.
What do you hear?
I hear you leaning back, your face calming as you peer in my direction, your back arching as it settles into position, you briefly touching a crucifix, though you are not a Christian and haven’t been one in a long while, that talisman that nevertheless rests uneasily in the valley of your chest as a kind of reassurance that you have stumped me and this is going to end horribly.
You’ve almost gone deaf, then. Listen.
No . . . please. Not laughter or weeping, not seeing me laugh or weep. Not even knowing that you have stumped me completely and there is nothing I can do. Not even screaming. No. I can’t hear the answer. Please don’t. I can’t.
You can’t? I don’t want that smell to reach my nostrils. Try harder. Open one of those books in your head; turn on one of those screens. Listen, Prophet.
Yes. No. I can’t. Not the fact that you even if I outwitted you now, as well as every single degenerate member of your cabinet, your military, your family, I would not leave here. I . . . can’t. Don’t, have mercy.
That smell is reaching my nose. Crossing the space between us. Listen, Prophet, listen. The roaring, isn’t it fearsome? Pure poetry and science, beyond symbols or words.
No. You know how this will turn out, and are trying to will me to save myself, because you know I won’t. I can’t. Don’t, though I give up.
I can smell the abyss your ears have become, your existence. Some prophet. That was your third chance, your time is up. Fearlessness. I take pleasure in that, tremendous pleasure. Unimaginable pleasure. Do you hear me growing hard at the very mention of the word? Do you hear my salivary glands filling, the sweat rushing into my pits, the adrenalin quickening my heartbeat? Fearlessness. Do you hear the dopamine surging through my brain as I think the word? A volcano surging through me. A terrible, sublime roar. I don’t even have to say it, from it an entire world flows. That is what I thought we both had back then, chest to chest in that clearing. I remember how in our school that professor of ours called an extreme version of this mindset the greatest danger known to humankind, and I immediately looked at you, though at your core you were all fear. Fear, fear, fear. You were never fearless, though you had me fooled. The coups, the progressive changes, the preemptive attacks, the coronation, the wars. All fear’s handiwork.
The reason I wanted to speak with you was just this. I am no longer afraid.
It was always fear. I can smell you trembling into the void. It’s nauseating. What did you think was the true source of anyone’s sovereignty? Did you take nothing from all the people you plastered on every wall? Yaa Asantewa and Anacaona, Toussa
int L’Ouverture and Dessalines, the Bolshevik and the Long Marcher and the rest of them, Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir, the sage who defied Kennedy, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. and Patrice Lumumba and Thomas Sankara and Nelson Mandela? Those eyes staring back at you? Did you really not listen to the stories you told everyone else, Prophet, the stories they told you in response? Did you not take anything from our ancestors who survived the depredations of the gods, and later the encroachers from every corner of the continent? Of course they were frightened but were fearless nevertheless. Some more than others, all more than you.
No. Listen to me. I am no longer afraid.
Did you not learn anything from the brazen creatures who seized our mothers and fathers, who bought and sold them here and across the sea, who fought them here and over there and did not back down? The ones to whom you signed over so much of our matrimony and patrimony? Their puny bodies that melt in the sun, all their sicknesses of the flesh and mind and soul, yet they keep arriving. Their words, their ideas, their abstractions, the ones you love so much, gave them an armor of fearlessness. I, however, scare them out of their sleep, not infrequently. They never know what time it is with me. Did you not take anything from every single soul that dared to challenge you at penalty of things worse than mere death? What do you think allowed any of them, me, to survive you?
I screamed my throat onto the cement floor to tell you this, I’m not afraid.
The prison of hope, you used to say, which was easy for one who controlled the future. Did you not hear the clue? I gave you several. You with your statistics and plots, you who could place yourself inside the heads of others like the Trojans, or a medium. A walking antenna. You touched one of the keys aloud but could not open the door. Why else would I have worn that cross around my neck, invoke Christ of all people? What use is a prophet without his powers? Should I have roped it around your neck? Stuffed it your mouth? Rammed it in your. . . .
Listen to me, I know what’s coming. I accept it, I am not afraid.
You requested me for this? My time, for this? All that hollering for an entire season, for this? I must admit, you still have the power to make me even more cynical. The Prophet of Cynicism has created a Deliverer.
Why not parade me before my people, Deliverer, send me back to them, and let me die in shame at their feet? I won’t fear them.
What people? You have no people anymore. Can’t you smell it?
Bury me in the desert, Deliverer, cast me into the ocean near my home, you can broadcast it on your station, on the Internet. I won’t fear it.
You have no home. No home, no state, no brothers, no sisters, no people, no lineage, not a thing. Truthfully, I could smell it all the way on the other side of the world, years ago.
Listen, you could force my allies out there to reveal themselves and to eat my beating heart, mount me on a steeple, but do it in the middle of the capital’s main square. I fear nothing now.
Absurdities, who ever heard of such things? You have no allies, I was your last one. You are nothing and you have nothing. You are not even the ghost of a recollection any more. In the air, diving in the sea’s depths, I could smell it, and can smell it now, it’s almost unbearable.
Rendition me, send me to one of their special ops sites, let them lock me up in Guantánamo. Nail me in a coffin and mail it to the Hague. Have them fly in the drones. Wash your hands of me and cast me into theirs. I have nothing to fear.
I must be going. I’m a man of few words but I have a speech to give. I’m nauseated by the stench, and have been for too long.
Ransom me, you could buy whole blocks in Paris, London, Miami with my head. I’m not afraid. I—
A speech on a theme you spoke on many times. Everybody is a monster, but only the monsters know it. Cautionary tales for cautionary times. Absolutely nothing like it, this odor, not even death. It’s enough by itself to kill.
I appeal to you, vanguard of our nation’s resistance, I appeal to you at this grave hour. The monsters no longer have to send their superjet fighters, stealth bombers, hypersonic technology vehicles, and flocks of drones to rein down bombs upon us, to stamp out our freedom like a boot heel on a single bloom. . . .
. . . .
I hear you rising from your seat. Standing. Shaking your head as if under water, as if this alone could reset the clock. No longer smiling, your face muscles wiring into a grimace, your brow slashed with a frown. You are choking back the retch. Your eyes are boring in my direction, at what’s left of me, propped up here.
. . . .
Your eyes fixed on this still breathing lump in the darkness, I hear you pushing the chair back with your calves, you want space, I hear you pushing the chair back even further and you turn and move it to my left so that it is out of the way. I hear you unbuttoning your shirt with your intact hand, which you have learned to use as if it were the dominant one, the other, a prosthesis, dangles at your side, above the prosthetic foot, proving I should have cut off both sides when I could. I hear your shirttails falling over your belt, your pants.
. . . .
I hear your removing the cross from your chest, so built up, sliding it up across the smooth skin with your long, thick fingers, your platinum pinky ring and your gold and ruby signet ring, your manicured nails, you are pulling it up out of the cleft of your chest, you have always been powerfully built, no less so today than when we were just boys, I always envied that of you, that body and the force that you carried in it, that force of feeling that was fearlessness, that was always the only ethics you clung to, fearless to do the worst things and the best, to commit unspeakable crimes and then not contemplate another horrific thing on this earth, I feared that in you, I knew, too late, that it would be my end.
. . . .
I hear you lifting the tool from around your neck, you holding it in your left hand while with your prosthetic hand you are extracting a glove, two, latex, you hate it and are allergic to it but there’s no other material that will ensure you keep me off your skin, my flesh and memory off you, you have doctors on call to give you a shot before you face the crowd once you leave here, you cradle the weapon as you wrestle the glove onto your right hand, your prosthetic hand which you use as if it had left the womb with you, your left one almost too large for the glove, the same hands that generations ago would have wielded spears, or clubs, or an axe or machete, the same hands generations ago that would have slapped a cow’s or horse’s flanks to move them into a pen, the same hands that would have wielded the spade to furrow the earth or hoisted the walls atop which the roof might sit, the same hands that would never have been found in a schoolhouse, or a college classroom, or a luxury hotel, or a castle in the middle of here or anywhere else, except cleaning such rooms, scrubbing them from corner to corner, scrubbing the pits the powerful crapped in, your hands, the one I did not cut off and the one I did, that could have torn off my own hands, my arms, my feet, my legs, my nose, my tongue, my ears, but didn’t, that wasn’t fear or cowardice but distress at having to dismember what you had come to completely, utterly love.
. . . .
I hear you shifting the weapon to your false hand in preparation, now your real one, working by intuition, that was one of your gifts, unerring always, living by feeling, your feelings as light as wind and taut as a mainspring, all my planning and booklearning couldn’t match it, and you so beautiful back then, so fearless, the greatest lion of our youth, always more so than I, you didn’t know it because we didn’t have a language for it, we had it but you didn’t know it, we knew it but you couldn’t speak it, that time would come, the leader feared that in you
as much as your courage, or rather fearlessness, they are different, I was courageous but not fearless, I was daring, brave, impulsive, reckless, I put the bullet through his temple and so many others, I was not a prophet or saint but I was your apostle, apostle of what everyone loved and feared in you, most of all me, that beauty and the fearlesness.
. . . .
I hear you leaning forward, your eyes having never left this lump of me, what’s left of me, so beautiful, it was almost painful to look at you after my eyes adjusted to the blackness that night, you were too much to bear, it wasn’t just the beauty or the fearlessness but that I knew it would come to this, I would have to get rid of you, I would have to destroy you, eliminate you, do what our leader couldn’t do, one of us would remain in the end and it wouldn’t be me if I didn’t do it, I hear that, I hear you reaching forward . . . seizing hold of my chin with that prosthetic hand, the grip tight, firm as a vise, so tight I can barely speak, I hear you thinking that having to do this distresses you more than anything else, disgusts and dismays you, I hear you thinking this distress won’t even kindle into rage, you will transform it somehow into indifference, I hear you thinking I could simply leave him here as he is to rot, no one would ever find him, you could pour in molten metal or concrete, just as I did to your parents, your siblings, your ancestral village and neighboring ones, unleash a torrent in minutes because no one would ever find me, none will, I hear you thinking that would be too easy, I hear you thinking I failed you completely when I had the opportunities to rid the world of you, I hear you thinking I did not do so out of pity or love but sheer ineptitude and greed and fear, not even the most stupid creature on earth would have let things come to this, I hear you thinking I slaughtered countless people but I could not manage to liquidate this earth of you, stamp out you, filthy degenerate lion Quisling, I was too afraid of doing so, not with my own might or that of my allies overseas, I hear you thinking you are going to flush this earth of me, but slowly, as you have been, reducing me to the nothing I’ve become, and that not even this will atone for all I’ve done, all the lies and betrayals, all the vast continent of discontent and destruction I wrought, and but you are wrong, I have now surprised you, I am hardly displeased with myself for having let it come to this, I am pleased beyond measure at everything I ever did and would do it again, and you hear now how I do not fear what’s about to happen, how I am no longer begging but welcoming it, no more pleas, no more imprecations, I know what’s due, how I would send my partisans into flight rather than rescue me, burn the gods, not a single one of them can save me and I would reject them if they tried, I hear you raising the bandanna gag from around my neck with that hideous freakish American hand, the sound of it makes me want to explode with laughter, your hideous freakish American foot, prosthetic, cyborgian, not human, I did that and not even all the money and the power in the world can make you whole again, your inhuman fingers on that same bandanna you pulled down earlier so that we could speak, as I requested for four straight months this time, every waking second of every day, screaming through that fabric so loud they could not not hear me, the same one I used to wear all those years ago, the one knotted around my neck that night and many days and nights thereafter, tonight, or today, I hear how in a few seconds you will stuff the ends of it into my toothless mouth, I should have pulled out all of yours, and your tongue, and your throat, I should have cut it out when I had the opportunity, I laugh fearlessly at my folly now, why should anyone fear a lion with only two paws instead of four, a lion unsure if it’s a male or a female, a lion so unafraid of anything it is incapable of understanding the sheer terror of life and death, a lion who will itself be devoured by another waiting nearby, the lion’s roar is anything but music, just animalistic howling, I hear how, in a few seconds or many, only you know the time, you will cock your arm back like a spring with the makeshift cross like a knife pointed out and swing it forward hard into my right ear over and over, and how you’ll find my left until I am no longer crying out through this muzzle and you won’t even have to let them know you’re done, you’ll scurry away knowing the same will eventually happen to you, one you’ve bred just like me who will come hunting, the bead’s on your throat, I can hear that language clear as a bell, a whistle, can you hear it, you cannot, in fact, she’s doing so right now, he’s gliding right through to get you, in no time, the man who listens only to death hears nothing of life, your time will be up, out of time, and I’ll lie here until—