Then he emerged into the light and... A great
screaming came across the... He hadn’t seen a mammoth in... saw a valley
stretched out green and pastoral till it came up against mountain’s feet some
distance... sky, the plane dropping it’s passengers ever closer to God, the
valley floor... months, and his family was starving. He knew they couldn’t
last... off, though before it, a village, small, ringed by pasturelands, but
they looked... looking to swallow them all up. The pilot searches desperately
for a last reserve of hope, but he knows... the winter, probably couldn’t last
the next few... all dead, struck down by some terrible blight. He was shocked
to...
Wait. Something isn’t right. Start again. From the
beginning.
Let there be...
The torchlights burned overhead, phosphorescent,
their shadows tickling the table below, laden with meat, braised and smoked and
fried and boiled, delicate scents rising, calling (gaslighting,
philosophizing). The villagers all sat around the table in the centre of the
village. There were more of them then, enough to fill the table, though their
clothes were already moth eaten. Susanna picked at a hole in her dress, and the
light shone through it onto the ground and revealed a small puddle of blood,
Susanna’s naked leg reflected in it. Susanna was young still, only 114. She was
one of the oldest but she was still young and now I am old and now they are all
old, except the man who came from within the rock, though, try as they might,
the passage could not be rediscovered. They all filtered into the village
square slowly, as the sun set over the mountains, the cries of birds in forest
to the south, all light made as time before, from all, there was again none.
And God said... With them all sat down round the table, mild chit chat, side
conversations, something brushed his leg walking through the high grass. Then
Joseph stood up at the head of the table, his old pilot’s uniform cut down to
short sleeves.
“While these times may all be turvy topsy, at
least they know they are mostly together still, and that time shall some day
rightwards its bow. But today, they have meat! So today, they feast!”
Then Joseph sits down and the priest stands up.
“I am the alpha and they must thank, forgive us
for our contribution to our survival, her skin sloughing off, an eye for an
eye, running down no one dies forever, so they took what they need to, and they
feasted!”
Then the priest sits down. The priest walks into
the seminary for the first time, back straight, head... they begin to dig into
the food, the feast before them, firelight dancing alien like when the forest
will suddenly one day burn and all will be.
The first night they chop down a tree for firewood
but it won’t burn at this latitude, not with that pathetic little lighter. He
will walk into the shop on Michigan Avenue and he will hand the man the last of
his pocket money and the man will hand him the lighter, and during the first
night, though many of them bled deeper than flesh, in the morning, they were
all still alive, and their wounds were... stigmata upon the hands of...
The neanderthal will walk through the valley
prehistoric, and he will pursue quietly what will be the valley’s last mammoth
and the town will sit empty, the fields consumed by blight, and the man from
the cave will sit down hard and wonder at all the corpses, but his stomach is.
He readies the spear and the mammoth will fall, but upon cutting into it he
found that its belly flesh is rotting, but then he feeds it to his mate and
their daughter anyway because their own bellies will ache.
Joseph runs through the surf, head low, ears
screaming, eyes chopped up with the brine. Ahead of him, he sees another man
cut down. He fires wildly for a target and falls, slamming hard into the sand
and water. He laid there for a long time.
When cauterizing a wound, you must ensure that all
of your instruments are completely sanitized, as the risk of infection is
extremely high, and, as you well know, Doctor, we are presently experiencing an
absolutely unprecedented outbreak of death that, if we do not curb, could
disrupt afternoon tea next Wednesday.
Where were we again?
Were we in the dingy backroom of the butcher’s
shop with an old woman hung by her feet from the ceiling, her blood draining
out and intermixing with the sawdust on the floor, the concoction then flowing
in between the floorboards, trickling slow, to soak into the earth below, and
thus the cycle complete, blood subsumed by earth, while the woman above has her
bones removed, her organs set aside, and her flesh made into meat?
Or am I going too far?
Were we watching the young man whose fate and the
town’s would eventually become as the blood and sawdust is to the earth,
purchase the ropes and pulleys and lights and helmet needed for his descent?
Were we watching him wading through a river as a child? Were we watching him
dream of adventure? Were we watching a pilot first earn his wings?
Were we watching a group of thirty eat, ravenous,
occasional bloody juices trickling from the edge of their lips?
Were we watching a neanderthal cradle his infant
child as she died of starvation in his arms?
The young man slithers and shimmies his way
through the cave, careful to avoid damaging structures grown up out of the rock
over a millenia. Then he sees light where there should have been only darkness,
and he heads for the light.
A great beast stalks tall through the valley,
sniffing out its prey, birds scattering. The blight is already within the
beast, though she shall never know it.
In the first years, they cannibalized the plane,
for parts and materials and the luggage for clothes and the galley for whatever
food did not perish in the rotation of the sun around the earth. From the plane
they build the town. From the plane and the forest which burns high and bright,
screaming so loud the air can’t hear itself breath. Michigan Avenue burns. The
man who sells lighters is just a kid. The man who sells lighters is interred in
the earth in a cemetery near Lincoln Park, and it rains, and his daughter cries.
Cain picks up a rock. The last being, sentience only now, pure neural impulse,
lie out long in the last light at the centre of the universe, as what remains
of the universe collapses in on them, and no more shall there be light, and
sentience is finally annihilated from existence. In a garage, a man builds a
bomb. In a garage, a man repairs a car. In a garage a man builds a virus. In a
garage, a man slowly dies of a blight festering in his heart. In a valley deep
and primordial, the blight is first born.
Do you ever get the feeling that time hasn’t been
running quite right recently? It is a shame that all of our watchmakers now
build bombs. Did you hear that just now, or was it just me? They aren’t
hallucinations if you can connect a face to the voice. It’s not cannibalism if
it’s for a good cause. It’s not charity if it’s not tax deductible.
The man emerges from the rock, the man walked into
the village, the people slowly and quietly will emerge from their homes. They
look at the man. The man will look at them. They invited him to dinner. They
will not have him for dinner. The torchlights burned over head. The torchlights
will burn over head. The torchlights burn over head. They did not have him for
dinner. They did have her for dinner. They eat vegetables and fruits grown in
the fields around them for dinner. They sup on the good meat of the cattle, it
grazing about them. The cow stumbles and cries in the night and the next
morning it dies and its flesh rots by noontide and they will cut it open and
its belly is full of a white mould and it gets into their lungs when they
breath it and then they breathed it out and then they breath it in and then the
old man is dying and none of them have ever died in the valley, not in a
hundred years, and the crops are all gone, and they will cut open his lungs and
they breath in the white mould and then they slit his throat and he hangs by
his feet and his blood mixed with the sawdust and his blood and the sawdust mix
with the earth and the earth seeps his blood and the sawdust into the river
that runs out of the valley and the river that runs out of the valley runs into
the sea and the sea is absorbed by the sun and the sun emits dark matter and
the dark matter is absorbed by the universe’s fabric and then the universe’s
fabric breathes out the white mould and then the universe breathes in the
blight.
Do you find yourself ever repeating the same
actions repeatedly and the clock not moving, despite you repeating the same
actions repeatedly? No? Just me? They tell me I’m not mad, just that I’m a
little bit insane. Who are they? I asked them that once and they told me to be
quiet and go to bed Alex, they have work in the morning.
Did I ever tell you about that time the man who
emerged from the rock went a little mad? Did I ever tell you that eating human
brainmatter can make you go a little mad? It’s some chemical or something.
It was raining in that night Paris, and the city
looked like a snowglobe the man’s mother had when he was a child, kept always
on top of her piano, but when she died the man accidentally dropped it and it
shattered, and the snow globe shattered on the floor looked like Paris the next
morning.
Did I lose my place again?
Did I get to the bit about the forest burning?
Yes, but not really? I’ve been getting so confused recently. I hope it’s not
catching. Occasionally when I cough, I cough up this white dust. Do you think
that’s okay?
The man set down to a meal at the centre of the
town, though not before noticing as he was walking into the town that the
fields were indeed all empty, just mud with weeds growing up occasionally from
the mud, though even these coated thick with a white mould. In their midst were
the bones of cattle and horses. And when the villagers greeted him, they all
talked like they smoked unfiltered American Spirits. Occasionally, when they
cough, the air before them is filled with snow.
The man sits in a nightclub and the bulbs pulse
electric in his temples, his ears ring and the sibilance is backed by a dull
pulse. His face lights up pink. By his side is a beautiful woman and she wears
a crop top and he wears an expensive leather jacket, and then he sneezes and
the pile of blow before him becomes a pile of snow. The next day he decides to
go south, because he can’t stay here any longer. All the snow was killing him.
They sit down to dinner, and the man from the rock
gets sat right to Joseph’s right side. The lantern light flickering above
reminds him briefly of the nightclub, but the food before them is real, and it
wrinkles out a scent that calls him back home on a summer night when he is 12
years old. He wishes he was 12 years old on a summer night again. They serve
him a generous portion of the meat before him, and then the Priest says Grace,
though the man is pretty convinced the priest will say it wrong.
As the man saws into the meat, and as the man
watched those around him saw into the meat, he saw a bit of bloody liquid
dribble out, and sees that it is cooked to a perfect pinkish red, medium rare,
and he thinks again of summer nights when he was 12. He is eleven years old
now, and he thinks soon he will be 12, and he cannot wait to be 12, because as
soon as he is 12, everything will be okay, and he wishes that he will be 12
forever and ever.
He bites into the meat, and it is warm and juicy
and good, and the texture is tender and smooth. He bit into the meat. They bit
into the meat. They bite into the meat. Conjugated correlations. Contractions,
no contractions, not since they came to the valley. But why replenish what
never dies? But what if what never dies can be killed. And, after all, we all
need to eat.
The man asks what the meat is. Joseph says his
name is/was/will always be Robert. The man says
“Oh.” Then Joseph says Robert tastes good, much better than
Margaret last month. Then he explains that they are down to one a month, given
the recent downwards trend in population.
Though they never die.
They must eat, because what else is there to do in a valley that
cannot be escaped? And the blight has killed everything else that may be eaten,
and while they eat the blight, it doesn’t kill them, at least not the way it
kills the cattle.
So then the man says,
“Your village is dying out... because, even though you never die,
you eat your own?” So then the narrator says,
“Do we really need to outline the central tenets of the plot in
one simple sentence? Might as well just state the themes in detail with an
attached bibliography. Jesus, some characters. Then the narrator gets in a
rather vociferous argument with the man. The narrator’s wife asks him if he’s
feeling alright and if he took his medication, and the narrator says yes.
But then this isn’t really a story about a far off mountain
village in an unnamed country where the inhabitants eat each other because all
the crops and livestock were killed by a blight, despite their being immortal.
This is a story about the blood that runs into the ground. And
what is within the blood. And what the blood then transmits through an
escalating chain out to the universe itself. This is not a story about what the
blight is, this is simply a story stating, quite simply, that it exists.
There I go, explaining the themes.
They must eat.
The man asks.
The man sits.
The man crawls.
The man is born.
The man is an idea.
The man is an atom.
The man is the alpha.
The blight is the...
Wait, I feel like I lost time again. That keeps happening. When
does this village exist anyway? How long have its residents really been there?
I stand in the corner of a room and I stare at the walls and they
move.
I walk through a tunnel under the city, and even as I walk
forwards, I seem to make no progress towards the light at the end of the tunnel.
It rains in Paris.
It is sunny in Shanghai.
It snows in Prague.
Rome is built, though not in a day.
Rome falls to a bomb built in a garage.
A man’s head is severed from his neck in the middle of a crowded
square in Paris.
I don’t remember where I started.
I don’t know where I’m going.
Do you ever get the sense that the world is just running down? Or
maybe it’s just me.
And at the end the universe collapses in on itself, and the last
sentience in the universe is subsumed into the darkness at the end of the
universe. But the blight is still there.
Today as I supped, I cut into my food and it was revealed to me to
be consumed by the blight, but my wife tells me it’s just my mind playing
tricks on me again. My wife asks me if I’ve taken my medication. I bash my
wife’s head in with a stone bust of Adam Smith that rests on my mantlepiece.
No, the choice of Adam Smith is not actually symbolic of anything. My wife asks
me if I’ve taken my medication.
The man finds himself stuck in a tunnel beneath the mountain. He
sees a light glowing off far ahead.
The man watches as the last surviving in the village, the final
five, argue bitterly about who to eat last. And then it doesn’t really matter
because they manage to kill each and every one of each other. And yet he
remains untouched. And they bleed into the earth. And far off the man watches
the forest at the end of the valley burn. The man watches a plane crest the
mountains to the West of the valley and sprays down what he knows olfactorily is
napalm.
A man sits in his garage and makes napalm. Then he watches it
burn, but he decides it does not kill fast enough. A man sits in his garage and
makes a bomb, but knows it can never be big enough. A man sits in his garage
and makes a disease. But he knows it will just eat itself alive. The man’s
lungs are filled with the blight.
And then, God said let there be light.
And then the universe went dark.
And then the man was born screaming.
And then I die crying.
And then the man finds the mouth of the cave from which he crawled
into the valley.
And then the man walks out of the cave on the other side.
And then the man looks out unto the world.
And then the man realizes it is raining.
And then the man dies screaming.
And then I am born crying.
And then I walk into a room.
And the walls are white.
And the man walks into the village.
And the village stinks of iron.
And the men in the room wear white.
And the man sups on the flesh of the village’s last departed.
And the man does not go back through the cave.
And the man lives in the valley on the rotting corpses.
And the fruit of the burned out forest.
Did you hear that?
