Chasing Shadows!: A Dream

by Arthur Zulu

CHAPTER 8

  CROSSROADS

  I feel the earth under my feet shake, and the explosions deafen my ears. Day change to night as the thick dark smoke obscures visibility for hours. And I begin to see death with my naked eyes. But after all the shootings and bombings, the smoke clears at last. And we expect to see seven dead devils: Hatred, Oppression, Frustration, Injustice, Mistrust, Fear, and Enmity.

  But there they are—laughing and falling over themselves. And the kings, Sunrise and Sunset, are full of wonderment. What sight is this? they ask. Did not the winged-man in white say to wipe out these devils? Or are these not the weapons that destroy spirits? What are they to do now with all their bombs, missiles, and bullets expended?

  When the seven spirits finish their laughters and free falls, Hatred, their leader, comes to address the kings.

  First, he says that the kings have used the wrong weapons. For neither guns nor bombs can kill the seven deadly spirits.

  Second, he tells them that these seven deadly spirits that they are trying to destroy live in their various lands. And they are the dangerous parents of Inferno, the terrorist. So he wonders why they had spent time and money looking for their son, Inferno, while he is right in their midst. He then turns it into a question-and-answer section, and demands that both kings reply him.

  “Do you not hate, oppress, and frustrate each other?” he asks.

  “We do,” reply the kings.

  “Do you not cause injustice, and mistrust, and fear each other?” he further asks.

  “We do,” the kings answer again.

  “Are you not in enmity with each other?” is the next question by Hatred to the two kings.

  And they answer: “We are.”

  The vexed Hatred, King of the seven deadly spirits, now asks, “Do you know the meaning of the word hypocrisy?”

  The kings look at each other again in confusion, and I remember my dictionary again. As to this question, there is no answer.

  The questions and answers now end, and Hatred makes a long speech beginning with a question:

  “Why do you then make war at us with your guns and bombs? You should instead have proceeded to eradicate the political, economic, social, religious, health, and environmental problems that are bedeviling the world. People are fighting for political freedom; some are sick and hungry; and there is racial and class discrimination; religious strife; including land, sea, and air pollution in your lands.

  “These are the very things that cause hatred, oppression, frustration, injustice, mistrust, fear, and enmity, which make Inferno, our son, to terrorize you. But remove the causes of all these cankerworms, and you will see that we will not exist anymore, and Inferno will not attack your lands. Then the world will be like The Golden City. It is only then that you will have Love, Peace, Freedom, Justice, Equality, Dignity, and Trust.

  “That was what the winged-man in white meant when he said to destroy us. The man speaks in parables. But now, you are chasing shadows—fighting the effect instead of the cause, the symptom and not the disease. Since you did not understand, or refused to understand the meaning of the message, and come shooting and bombing at us—the wrong targets—instead of solving the world’s problems, we are going to give you double trouble.”

  Going on, Hatred tells the kings of Orient and Occident to prepare for the last war. Because they have caused more problems than solutions for themselves with their weapons. Because war is not the road map for peace. And because man himself is the problem, and not the solution.

  Then the bombshell! He says that the kings should gather all their cinema, film, and moviemakers, and ask them to suggest apocalyptic scenarios. For the world is going to end with the worst case ever imagined. The world, he says, is now a more dangerous place than it was before Operation Hell Fire and the search for weapons of mass destruction.

  Finally, Hatred, the leader of the seven devils, says that the belligerent kings, Sunrise and Sunset, have sown wind in the country of the Devil, and must therefore reap the Devil’s whirlwind. After saying this, he disappears with the other deadly spirits, laughing…

  But I know that this is not a laughing matter. Because I know a sad story of a boy who liked chasing shadows.

  Now this boy, called Day and Night, was born on the day of a solar eclipse. On that day turned night, everyone in his village thought that the world was going to end. For they did not know what is called an eclipse of the sun, being an illiterate people.

  There was panic throughout the village on that day. Men and women hurried home from their farms, weeping children searched frantically for their mothers (about a dozen confused children were declared missing), while the domestic animals and birds scurried for their sleeping places. At least five warriors, who did not want to wait for fire or a stone from heaven to kill them, were known to have taken their lives by either drinking a local poison or falling on their swords.

  But the father of the boy named Day and Night did not die. He was the greatest farmer and keeper of animals in the whole village. He, instead, prepared a grand feast for the villagers. He ordered his servants to slaughter all his animals for making a hot pepper soup to be eaten with dishes of pounded yam (for he has demolished his entire yam barn). And this delicacy will be “washed down” with the best wine in his farm.

  The town crier who the great farmer had asked to summon the villagers for the final feast did his work well. For soon everybody was there—eating and drinking—all hoping to die together with food in their bellies and wine in their mouths.

  But as more food was still being prepared, and the villagers were eating and watching the moon and the stars, waiting for the world to end, night changed to day again. The surprised villagers turned the Last Supper to a happy celebration—eating up all the farmer’s livestock and yams. And the farmer could not stop anyone, for he himself had invited the villagers to feast.

  At the end of the day, the great farmer did not have a single animal or yam left. So he came to be called the Most Foolish Man of the Year. Because he impoverished himself, and the world did not end.

  So Day and Night, the son of the Most Foolish Man of the Year, grew up to like shadows. If you beat him, he would retaliate by beating your shadow. And when you do not feel pain, he would ask: “Does it not pain you?”

  Day and Night was always chasing shadows of people, animals, and things. If a bird or an insect flew by, instead of catching it, he would gladly start chasing its shadows. His playmates said he was mad. Others said he was a strange one, while some uncharitable people called him the child of the Devil.

  Then one day, Day and Night saw a flying airplane. He chased the shadow of the plane—running through dangerous bushes and scaling over hilltops.

  No one tried to call him back, for it was thought that he would return as he always did. In fact, it was only once that he did not come back home after chasing the shadow of a circling hawk. They said that he must have circled over a hundred or one thousand times. (I don’t know which.)Then he fainted and laid there, until they picked him home.

  But on this day that he pursued the shadow of a flying airplane, he never returned. And this had fueled gossip in the neighborhood.

  Some said that he must have run into the mouth of a hungry lion, or tiger. Still, others were of the view that he must have simply dropped dead on his tracks, perhaps in a crocodile-infested river. And some conspiracy theorists said that he must have run into the waiting hands of the Devil, his father, in some evil forest. Nobody knows. Because of this, I have loathed stories of people chasing shadows, knowing the tragic outcome.

  I, therefore, see that this dream has reached a climax. I look at the kings and all their numerous impotent soldiers. What can they do now? They have seen that this is a war they cannot win. It used to be said that winning the war is not winning the peace. Now, they have won neither the war, nor the peace. Prometheus has been unchained. And the world will never be the same, anymore.

  Now, to ask moviemakers to suggest how th
e world might end, is like living in an imaginary world—Utopian. But the kings have no choice.

  I see all these in my dream. So I wait patiently to see how the movie stars would configure the end. And I begin to wonder if life itself is a dream.