Chapter 43 The boy holstered his gun. He walked away into the sunlight. He left the town and walked away. Through the remnants of a world gone by, one that could not be put right once more. There were no Natives. They died by themselves somewhere in the darkness. And there is no other story to say. *** Perhaps in the world’s final destruction it would be at last attainable to see how it was made. Like the dying world the newly blind indwell, all of it slowly fading from memory. *** The boy wandered for years. In a time when there were the quick and the dead and the quick were dead already. Once more amid the wastes and the stone of the open plain, outlaw journeyman beyond black fate and unforgiven. *** Out on the roads he set out as nameless as anything in the ancient dark beyond. The wind circled in the hollows. Even the dead have disbanded, vanishing through the earth no more men than were the ruins of any other living thing there once was. In the daylight he went westward and when the night came he took to the water. What could be endured in the waking world could not be endured in dreams. He stood in the self-same rain. He stared to the stars. He saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world in its terrible totality. The planetary motion of the earth. The crunch of the universe. To die out forever. The crushing black vacuum. The universe has no instinct to survive, devoid of emotion, of human sentiment, and it is not beautiful, or honorable, nor striving to be, and the entire mechanism repeats itself, in what can never be called harmony, and if war is subtracted, so, too, is humanity. *** How is what never was different from what is never to be? *** And the dead in the crust of the earth turn in the diurnal motion amid the eclipse, the stars, the nova. Their names are ancient, fable, ash. *** And now fading life, and fading memories, and fading world, and a fading human heart with which to morn it. *** That night he built a fire against a small rock in a canyon and would eat his last tin of food. A man approached. The first human being that he’d seen in almost a year. Cloggy with human flesh. Who had made the world a lie every word. He told him to be on his way. He tried to vacate him from his life. But he had no life other. He chose a can of sausages and another of beans and he opened them with a little army knife and placed them at the fringe of the fire and sat watching the labels crisp and char. In the night he woke in the black and freezing waste out of gently colored worlds of love. He listened to hear if he were breathing. *** He was sitting on the steps in a town when he saw something move. A face was looking at him. A boy, his age, wrapped in out-sized coating. He stood up. He ran after him. “Come back,” he called. “I won’t hurt you.” He looked toward a house and then ran across the yard to the door and opened it and went in. “What are you doing?” the householder hissed. “There’s a boy here,” he said. “There’s no boy here.” “Yes there is. I saw him.” “Don’t come in here. Go on.” “I just wanted to see him.” “There is no one. Do you want to die? Is that what you want?” “I don’t care,” the boy said, sobbing. “I don’t care.”
Posted on: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 10:13:13 +0000
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