Gilda Trillim

by Steven L. Peck

  “So your theory transcends all these places no matter what the law, what the structure of the world?”

  The beetle chuckled at my question, “Yes. Yes. My little theory. My small abstract. It’s the key to all being. For consciousness. For meaning.”

  Then I saw a hundred million worlds, with as many physics structuring odd and unique matter in each, and in those where complexity flowed, the three-fold held and structured that very complexity. Although often it was not sufficient, it was always necessary. And what forms! What remarkable life exists! In multiple instantiations of excellence! I’m weeping as I remember the things I saw.

  I looked up, observing the ship resting in the quiet waters of an earthly lagoon. I could hear the sounds of surf beating upon the shore, and above me the blue sky was graced by white clouds floating comfortably through that expanse. I felt exhausted and small. I’d seen too much. My irrelevance to the greatness of the universe screamed from every pore.

  “It is time to depart. For there is one more entrance into the universe that you must know.” The pigeon was speaking now, “We will say goodbye and farewell.”

  Suddenly, as if in a dream I found myself on a sandy strand, watching the ship as it disappeared over the horizon.

  The Third Guide

  The beach upon which I was left, fronted a stand of tropical trees including a few palms. The sun had just set, and the first stars of evening were appearing low in the eastern sky. It was breezy and pleasant, although my hand felt oddly warm. I sat down and rubbed it and waved it in the air trying to cool it. The sky continued to reveal stars and I wondered when my guide would appear. The night unfolded. I looked at the heavens and pondered the wonders I had seen, the expanses of eternities that stretched out in dimensions of infinite intricacy and multiplicity, unfolding and condensing, in patterns of complexity unimaginable. I thought about the rise of the shepherds, a higher order of evolved beings, who could manipulate entire universes. But why? What was their motivation? Power? Influence? What did they do?

  “What did they do?” The voice startled me because of its mocking nature and when I turned there was a dark shadow standing between me and the ocean. It was not cast on the sand like a normal shadow, but stood like a paper cutout glued onto a photograph, like something added to reality that should not be there. It had a long pointed snout, strangely narrow and that bent upward unnaturally, its yellow eyes were crescent shaped slits, and ears sharp and erect, it was like a cartoon wolf, drawn sinister and distorted, and like a shadow two dimensional. It paced back and forth menacingly. A baleful creature that seem to emanate malice and ill-will. I suddenly became apprehensive, rattled that my hand hurt and burned so badly, and that this beast, unlike my other guides, seemed dark and treacherous. When it turned it was apparent that it was more like a sheet of paper than an organism of our world. A shade made flesh.

  “Are you my guide?” I asked, feigning a bravado I did not feel.

  “Am I in the presence of the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come?” The creature sing-songedly mocked back to me, “Are you going to say, ‘I fear you more than any specter I have seen. But as I know your purpose is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another woman from what I was, I am prepared to bear your company, and do it with a thankful heart.’ Fool, this is no fairytale, I can smell the fear thick about you. You are a worthless thing. Did you think you could drink a shaman’s poison and live? Can you not feel the pain in your hand, getting worse, and worse, torturing you? Burning you up? Soon your body will burn similarly. You foolish girl, you wanted to see beginnings? I will show you endings.”

  It was true, my hand was burning so badly I could scarcely think about anything else. The creature continued to pace back and forth, never taking one of its eyes off me, watching intently as I stood, my feet in the sand.

  “Who are you?” I whispered, starting to shake.

  “You know who I am.”

  “Name yourself.”

  “Name yourself.” It mimicked me exactly.

  “Please.”

  “Please.”

  I looked around me for a weapon of some sort but there was only sand.

  It mocked again but with even more foreboding than it had yet mustered as it spat, “Throw a bucket of water on me and see if I melt.”

  Its pace became quicker. Inching nearer and nearer, I started to back away.

  “Run!” it said. But I did not. I sensed that if I did, it would pursue and take me.

  “Run!” it again commanded and threatened.

  It needed something of me. It could not attack. It was coming to me that this thing needed me to run. To tear into the forest perhaps. I stood my ground.

  I remembered when I was little, my father and I had once gone for a walk through the potato fields near our house. We were cutting through the tuberous crops when we surprised a cottontail that had been hiding under a pile of old railroad ties. But rather than running away, it looked at us for a second, and then bolted right at us! It was terrifying. Even my father jumped back in a panic and we both ran. We laughed and laughed because the bunny could have done us no real harm. I asked my father why she had done that when we were so much bigger. He told me, things fear confidence more than anything else. Most things don’t attack unless they think they can win. When something comes at you like that, you had better get out of the way because if they are so sure they can take you, you’d better take it seriously. Wolverines can drive off a grizzly. Not because they are tougher than a bear, but because bravado works. Nineteen times out of twenty when a wolverine attacks a grizzly the bear runs off in a panic, just like we did.

  I considered the horrid thing pacing before me. Then ran at it. When I reached the beast and lunged out to seize it, it was gone. Like that. It just disappeared. I looked around and the terror that had afflicted me by its presence had evaporated as well. A full moon was starting to rise from the east and as its light stretched out into the night, it disclosed a small figure walking toward me down the beach.

  I could tell it was not tall, about three feet high, although distinctly human. It carried none of the menace of the previous specter. When it reached me it was clearly some sort of ape. It looked like a small human with long arms and a distinctly chimp-like face. It stopped before me and raised its right hand and said, “Greetings.”

  “Are you my guide? I’ve met Schelling and Darwin, so who are you?”

  She gave a chortle and said, “You will not have heard of me. I am named Mbacoob!boo!a, giving strange clicks within the name. I will introduce her, or er … me, to you later for your time is running out and you must hear her speak.”

  “The other guides were animals I knew, but what are you?” I asked because I found her a strange mix of human and ape that was disturbing the equilibrium of my mind. My hand was also still distracting me, but the pain had lessened somewhat, though it had moved more toward my wrist.

  She chuckled, “I am represented as one of your grandmothers. But come. We have a bit of a walk and we must get moving if we are to get there in time.”

  We walked down the beach in silence, until I asked, “What was that other dire creature?”

  My guide looked thoughtful, “It said you knew its name. What is it?”

  “I don’t know its name.”

  “I think you do.”

  “Satan? Beelzebub? Loki?”

  “Are you so bad at this as that?” She was smiling now, almost at a laugh.

  I thought of all the evil creatures from myth and fairy tales and listed a few, but she just shook her head like a disappointed parent, “Come now,” she said, “You are better than this.”

  I thought some more and then a smile crept across my face. Of course. “Ahh,” I said, “I see.”

  “Name it.”

  “Gilda Trillim.”

  We both laughed. An archetype so common as to be almost a cliché. You must defeat yourself.

  “I never really defeated it. I just ran at it.”

  “Of
course you can’t defeat yourself. Can you? All you can do is cease to fear your darkness, then you are free to use it, overcome it, whatever. You did what needed to be done. You quit being afraid of it.”

  We chatted some more and finally I asked, “Can we just fly? My wrist feels like it is on fire.”

  “No, we need time to talk.” She pointed out over the sand to the ocean, “Do you see where the waves break? There is a reef there. What do you know about coral reefs?”

  “Not much, just that they are places where many kinds of fish and shelled creatures live.”

  “Why?”

  “Lots of things to eat I suppose.”

  “Because coral makes a substrate that things can make holes in, holes that other things can cling to, holes that things can hide in. It makes space for lots of other entities, which in turn opens new worlds for the fish and other creatures. These in their way make places for other life forms, which once again change the world for even more new and varied plants and animals.”

  She waved her hands excitedly, “It’s an upward spiral of making place, which makes more place for more life. Savvy? Life makes new, which makes more life. Life makes life richer. More things, more kinds of things, more relationships and connections and possible connections among the myriad things existing.”

  I thought about it, “Like a beaver dam makes place for cattails, brown trout, birds that feed on the dragonflies that arrive, and the birds that feed on them, and frogs, and more birds and snakes because of the frogs, and turtles that show up along with things like muskrats, which make room for the weasel and hawks and the many things that all have a place because the beaver made a home first by dragging a few aspens to make a dam.”

  “Yes, you understand exactly, the beaver dam changes everything, someday the pond is replaced by a meadow which will enrich the possibility of many small birds and mammals, provide forage for elk and deer that support wolves and on and on. Such is how the universe is made and unfolds in newness and novelty.”

  I nodded. I knew this and thought much about it. It is not surprising that my brain, steeped in a drug, brought out these themes that I had played with for years. The universe is open and surprising; truly new things spring out of nowhere. Some of these things that come about appear over and over. Like predators and parasites that appear in infinite variety and in countless manifestations and forms. Always where autonomous agents emerge they appear too—things that live by stealing what other riches individuals have acquired. Intelligence also appears in such variety that it would stagger your mind as things evolve to cope with the newness that the universe throws at it.

  My guide looked up at me slyly, “But there is something that emerges that is so wondrous that it changes everything. It is this that I have come to teach you.”

  “What is it?” I asked, rubbing my hand. It was still burning fiercely and it was starting to distract me from the conversation.

  “It is the currency that the shepherds value more than any other thing and expand their influence to encourage and promote it in the universe. But they are up against obstacles many. As your poet Tennyson says, life is red in tooth and claw and that is necessary for complexity to grow. The struggle to survive must always be present—individuals in battle with others to grab what rarities they need to provide for their own offspring. So the miracle the shepherds crave to share is balanced with the need for the universe to grow in complexity and opportunity and novelty. It is hard. For the shadows in the intelligences are always present, like your own, that you just met and face. This dark side comes from the needs of individual agents to survive. You would call it selfishness, craving, desire …”

  Her speaking suddenly drifted off as we rounded a small hill. Below us a campfire glowed in a small bowl where a group of humans were gathered, singing. The music was strange. Beautiful. Not like anything I’d ever heard. A small antelope was turning on a spit being cranked by older children taking turns at the effort. They were dressed below the waist in loose hide skirts, well-tanned, with vest-like coverings over their upper bodies. The women and men sported strange tattoos patterned in geometric shapes on their arms and legs. A male cut pieces from the haunch, and gave them to the children who speared them with sharpened sticks. The women’s hair was adorned with flowers and the beards of the men were graced with beads and seashells. The meal was eaten with much chatter and laughter. Because of the distance I could only catch occasional words (again has it had been throughout this ordeal, the language was utterly transparent). I motioned to my guide to question if we could go closer. She nodded assent and we crept forward. The night was decorated with a night sky that would have normally left me breathless, but after a vision like I’d seen not long ago, such beauty, while recognized, did not fully overwhelm me.

  The meal was over, and people sat down upon logs and rocks that had obviously been dragged there for this purpose. I was near enough now to hear their voices clearly and they were telling stories. The first I heard was about a beloved grandfather and his slaying of a leopard armed only with a rock fashioned as a device used to crush bones and extract marrow. The teller, whose age was hard to identify, maybe as young as 30 or as old as 40, showed the children with his hand turned into a claw where the grandfather had been wounded on his back and on his leg. The children sat rapt as the teller with clever exaggeration described how the grandfather had crushed the beast’s skull. The children asked for details and the man telling the story produced from a bag tied about his neck a leopard’s claw. There were ooohs and aaaahs as the children passed it around.

  Next a woman told a story about why it was essential to share. She talked about a selfish goddess, who wanted all the power/mana/spiritual strength for herself, and so stole it from the other gods and goddesses who had spent time gathering it. One day she was caught in the act and the other deities gathered in council to decide what should be done with her. It was decided that she would spend her life as a thief. She was turned into a honey badger that would ever after have to stumble on honey and steal it from the bees with their dangerous stingers. But the goddess’s husband, another of the great gods, thought the punishment too harsh, for he knew she would never be able to find enough honey to survive in the Serengeti. She would die. But the other gods would not be swayed to change their minds. So he transformed himself into the chirping and chattering honeyguide bird. As such he can lead his changeling wife to honey and who, after she opens the hive to extract the honey, shares the feast with her husband.

  The next woman to rise was strikingly beautiful. Her black skin glowed in the light of the fire. I noticed that everyone, men and women, focused on her with devoted attention. I knew she was a shaman or priest with exceptional power. She radiated it. My ape guide leaned over and gave me an elbow and whispered to me with delight, “That’s me in life! Mbacoob!boo!a. Listen to my words!” The woman began to speak.

  With authority and power, she said, “Brothers and sisters and wives and husbands and children and small babies who only speak the language of the beasts. Lady Moon. Gift Fire. Antelope Friend who has sacrificed his life that we might continue to learn the ways of the shepherds who know many things. Who wield the power to make stars, like we do the stone tools of the earth we love. Those great ones who wield the power to make a sun, like we do fire with which to cook and watch. Who wield the power to make our land like we do the power to make our clothes to protect our children.” Her voice was sing-songy and musically rich. As she spoke, she began a rhythmic cadence by slapping her hand against her thigh.

  “Listen to me and you will hear words of power.”

  “Listen to me and receive the gift of the shepherds.”

  “Listen to me and you will find that in your heart you are a friend to all.”

  “Your hunts will be successful. And if they are not, you’ll find that when you pass on to what follows that you will be made a guest at the shepherd’s fire, whose hunts never fail.” What followed was spoken with great force: almost yelled,
and sternly commanded.

  “Be generous with what you gather.”

  “Share your hunt or what you collect and do not look for it to return to you again through the same person.”

  “Be not afraid to take what others have shared. Have no expectation that what you share with others will be returned, nor try to return that which is shared with you—what has been given is given.”

  “A gift is a gift. The grace of the shepherds is generous and unfettered.”

  “For the shepherds, who made this starry sky from the dirt of the first offering, there is one thing they crave above all others. There is one attribute that they share and desire for you. It is this: that you evermore among yourselves and among the strangers that you meet upon the open grass and which have approached you with open hand and heart, offer the greatest gift which is—”

  And with that I was suddenly awakened back into the hut. I had been thrashing about under the influence of the drug, but no one was watching me. In my delirium I had crawled off my mat and lain down next to the old potbellied diesel cooking stove. My right hand had fallen underneath and had been burned entirely away. I lifted up my hand to my face and saw only bones burned black which broke and which crumbled apart as I watched. I began to scream and scream and scream.

  Gilda was taken by burro and jeep and canoe to Iquitos. She was in and out of consciousness. Several times her Russian companion despaired of her life. She stayed three weeks in the city hospital. Her mother flew down and stayed with her. Her arm was amputated just above the wrist, after which she was flown to Salt Lake City for further treatment. When she had regained some of her strength, she returned to Idaho for further convalescence.