Chapter 46 He began to come upon the wreckage of buildings strewn over the landscape and the road was littered with debris and it was work to get through. He sorted through the remains strewn along the road and in the end he just sat down. Bent over, coughing. He wiped the bloodstained mask from his face and then just sat there. His breath pluming white. Winter was already upon him. *** 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. *** Often in the man’s dreams Hartford came. Always him and none other. What other encompassing icon had the man encountered? He came as black stealth, silent and serene. Laughing, laughing. Dancing, dancing. He says the homily are presupposed on a origin of evil, and if that evil were a weight it would send the world falling from the walls of the universe into night and darkness and death and through whatever ultimate nightmare it is yet capable of manifesting and into a void of blackness and nothingness. He says that he is but a man and one man is all men. He dances and laughs and says that he never dies. And whatever his ancestries may be he is something completely foreign from their sum, and there was no system to subtract him into his origin, as he would not go. And any that searched for his history by the interviewing of witnesses, and the leafing through of pages, must at last stare dumb into darkness, and any science that could be brought up against him will discover no maelstrom blowing down through the centuries, nor clue of any malicious egg to have predicted his commencing and the night does not end. *** The man went on. All across the reaches of the land the howl of wolves relayed, and to the west the silent lightning in a broken lyre upon the earth’s dark rim. He moved across the dark sanctuary of the prairie night. He looked to the sky where the clustered stars were burning for eternity. He sat down to stare over the bone-strewn waste, and he appeared not so much dimwitted as insane. He went on, and seemed less the pursuit of a continuance than the verification of a principle, a validation of a sequence and causality and he moved haltingly in the light, like a mechanism whose movements were monitored, so that they appear restrained by a reflective which has no inner reality. *** One night the man slept on the floor of the desert. Sirius was at the left side on the southwest horizon, and Cetus the whale shown swimming in the void, and Orion and Betelgeuse were turning far from the galactic plane. He slept shivering in the darkness of the plains, and woke to find the stars by which he’d traveled not to be found, as if his sleep had encompassed them. A boy kicked at his boot. The man sat up. The boy stood with a group of three friends. “What in the hell are you doing out here?” the boy asked him. The boy was dressed much the same. As if another orphan of time had been drawn to this selfsame place. The man stared at him. His brother at last. He made a sound with his throat. “I asked you a question,” said the boy. The man reached into his pocket and took out a dried ear and handed it to his inquisitor. “What is this?” “An ear.” “What kind?” “Human. I knew the man who took it. Knew him and rode with him and seen him killed.” “So? You can buy the whole heads in New Orleans. Sailors brings ‘em in and you can buy ‘em for five dollars all day long them heads.” The man stood. The boy watched him. The man drew his gun. The boy drew his, too. But the man was slow on the trigger. The boy’s gun blasted. “You wouldn’t have lived anyway,” he said. The man bled out, was dead. His name was William Chambers. *** The winds blew in the desert as they had blown ten thousand years ago. It was beautiful, notwithstanding being there. Beautiful, this world, despite humanity. Beauty that can at last be recognized after everyone is gone. The End
Posted on: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 03:07:47 +0000
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