Nobody: An American Tragedy

For the poor souls who have to know
and for the blessed who can believe,
for the listless ones who do not care,
and for the lucky few who’ve seen.

THE DREAM OF THE LOUSE
can be found online at:
http://thenoblesfrequency.com/brandon

Brandon can be reached at:
brandon@thenoblesfrequency.com
and you can write to him at 201 Washington, St., Whitmire, SC.

THE DREAM OF THE LOUSE
A NOVEL
BY BRANDON K. NOBLES
________________________________

NARRATOR’S NOTE

This story is based on real events. The dream of the louse was a recurring dream I had for many years. The conversation with the devil took place in my room, right here, in front of my writing desk. I am not the first man to come face to face with a hallucination dressed as Satan. This story was written based on what someone might say if they were to find the devil in their bedroom. How would you respond to the questions and opinions put before Roger in this story? I have my own opinions. In this story I am the mediator between these different aspects of my mind, as this is where this dialogue took place, between divergent personalities, Roger and Mara, in my mind. Roger’s faith must confront the tragedies of the world. This can be a brutal, uncaring world, and the devil goes to great lengths to put this on a plate for man to see and eat.

—Brandon Nobles, 2008
Whitmire, South Carolina.

1: NERVOUS TRAIN WRECK

Roger had been awake for several days when he stumbled into his dark apartment. He walked like a drunk. He looked as though he had been mugged and robbed by Time.
Roger flipped the light switch on. He looked at the slender panels of dusty glass for a moment. They flickered on. His pupils retracted as the light hit his face. He put his forearm to his brow to shield his eyes. He turned the light off. He would rather stumble in the dark than deal with the light.
The windows in his small apartment were covered with trash bags. Roger went to bed at dawn and woke at dusk.
He was a weirdo, you see.
Roger had some sort of vendetta against the sun. It burnt the skin and was too bright. Roger’s argument against the Sun began with Miss Sol’s make-up.
The thought of a massive nuclear-hydrogen fireball being ninety million miles away from his writing desk didn’t settle well in Roger’s head. The thought rattled around inside his mind like a lead ball in a can of spray-paint.
He threw a small stack of notebooks at his bedroom door then walked into the den. He collapsed on the lounge chair. He clasped his ears like the man in Munch’s Scream.
Roger tried again, in vain, to silence what he called the coliseum of selves. To Roger, his mind was a courtroom where arguing ideologies shouted back and forth at one another—where the Ego and the Id went nine rounds every day. Roger believed he was allergic to life and that his body didn’t fit.
Roger’s doctor prescribed a wide variety of medication for Roger’s nervous illnesses. The doctor, aware of Roger’s past addictions, wrote the prescriptions to last a month so Roger wouldn’t abuse the medication.
Roger abused the medication.
Roger was an all or nothing type of man. He knew the dictionary definition of moderation. That was as far as his knowledge of the concept went. He either went too far or went no where. He went through his anti-anxiety medication like a bowl of mints. Now he was out of pills. The reservoir was empty, drained the happy fountain. Every day was a suicide Tuesday until his bottles were refilled. Now he had a week of insomnia and anxiety to look forward to.
Chest pains, headaches, hallucinations, visits from Satan—all normal events for a man such as Roger. C’est la vie, he thought.
Roger was a state certified psychologist; he was, however, unable to write prescriptions for himself. This annoyed him. It made no sense.
How could a legal psychologist not prescribe himself medication?
And his self responded:
Because you’ll write the prescription for Morphine Roger, just like always. Then you’ll get strung out for half a year, just like always. Then you’ll come round looking haggard and pink-eyed, claiming you were hard at work on a novel, just like always. Then they’ll ask where the new novel is. Then you’ll have to write a book in a day so they won’t know you’re lying, just like always.
That’s how he answered himself—he and him being polar opposites, one Buddhist, one Satanist, one apathetic, ambivalent, ambiguous, without moral character or malicious intent.
Several of the selves still believed he, Dr. Roger Solomon Manwell, the name attached to the nerves, should not be inhibited by law to prescribe medication for himself. The volume of the coliseum was at times intolerable. Pressure against the skull, and cluster headaches, often drove Roger to the point of desperation: he would, of his own volition, slam his face against a wall until he blacked out. Sleeping pills just ain’t what they used to be.
He wasn’t concerned with misery when he sat down. That could be rescheduled. He was sanguine; he had a nice sized ball of Turkish opium. It would tide him over until he was allowed by law not to suffer again, until Roger’s favorite day: refill day—a much celebrated event for Roger and his imaginary friends. He wouldn’t give dope to his real friends. They were capable of getting jobs and buying their own. Imaginary men and women face an impossible challenge in the workforce, as existence is a requirement for a lot of jobs. He did know imaginary men who worked at the bank, though, and played poker with the Miller’s every Wednesday.
Roger thought it would be rude not to be someone’s friend just because they weren’t real. He had several hallucinated friends whom he adored. He wrote letters to them. They responded. He married two, had wild love affairs with several, and played chess with one.
In reality, to those fortunate enough to exist outside of Roger’s mind, it was a well played game between two prodigious grandmasters in the same body. Roger considered every game a loss, even when he beat himself. He expected the glass to break, so, when it didn’t, he broke it himself.
Roger was a collected individual with his public face on. Now, since he was home, he could take off the mask, be himself again, and suffer the wrath of everything that incurred.
Roger either had opium or his medications or he suffered. Every second, every day, he was a prisoner in his mind, looking out, at the soul, through eye-shaped curtains from afar, in a world of pain, alone.
Anxiety forced Roger into making a big decision: the gun or the pipe. Roger chose the pipe.
Roger had been an opium smoker since he was seventeen. Now, at twenty-seven, he was every bit the opium addict he always dreamed of being. Morphine was his mistress, his vice, and his first true love.
Roger had penned sonnets, songs, and poems to Morphine. He had the molecule tattooed on the back of his neck. This way, he said, he would never run out.
Roger’s drug of choice was more.
Add in a life of schizophrenia, illusions, delusions, chest pains, cluster headaches, inexplicable visions, hallucinations, strokes, and panic attacks, and you’ve got the nervous train wreck known as Roger.
To put the proverbial cherry on top, he was also born with Cocaine Fetal Syndrome. The side effects: racing pulse, rapid heartbeat, and shortened life span; edginess, anxiety, panic, and insomnia. It was rare to see Roger asleep, sleepy, or without dark bags over his eyes.
Roger was a genius, of course, though his mind brought him pity instead of admiration. His mind tortured him. Since he was young he never thought he would live to be thirty. He was sure he’d have a stroke or kill himself.
The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long.
Roger chased a thousand rabbits, all at once, because he didn’t know how long he had to hunt.
He was awake all night, every night, and, instead of sleeping, Roger sat alone, in the darkness of his living room, with a pipe full of opium in one hand and a phone in the other. He printed a list of numbers every night and prank-called them all, in order, and asked to speak to Roger.
He thought this was genius:
Ring. Ring. Ring.
Hello?
“Hi, is Roger there?” he’d ask.
When they tried to speak, Roger would say, in a different, more distinct voice:
“I’ve got it! Hang up the phone!”
Then he’d argue with himself. He would get sad, write a sad poem, throw the poem away, and then write a sadder poem about the poem he threw away. Roger empathized with the poem in the trash.
If a Roger lived there, or answered the phone, he accused the person of copyright infringement, threaten legal action, and then hang up. You think you’re funny, huh?
Roger’s mission was to prank call everyone on Earth. Roger took this mission seriously. No matter the situation, there was Roger, with intense focus, probing with one giant, bloodshot eye, unflinching, scrutinizing, deducing, calculating into infinity.
Some nights he stood in front of the bathroom mirror, naked, slapping himself and screaming Malaria, look at me at his reflection. His fever hiked. Delirium crept in. His face in the mirror looked away, ashamed, refusing to acknowledge him. He screamed Malaria, look at me, over and over, until he blacked out. Everything to Roger was life or death or else.
He was like Shakespeare’s Iago in a way. Though, unlike Iago, he played against himself, through others, in every aspect of his life. It had always been that way. The only person against whom Roger ever played was himself, his arch-nemesis, the eyeball on the page. The last laugh, in the end, would always be on him.
Without his public face he looked like a distraught madman on the verge of panic.
He was, in fact, a distraught madman on the verge of panic.
To look at him when he wore the public face, however, you’d get the impression he was serene, calm, and tranquil, well composed. He gave no implication there was a shouting match inside his head which he sometimes had to shout over.
Roger hid the confusion of his life under the public face, the clown hat, and other such masks.
Roger pulled from the pipe again, inhaled, exhaled, and put on the final movement of Don Giovanni.
Don Giovanni! A cenar teco m'invitasti!
Roger melted into the chair, phone in his hand, relaxed; his chest didn’t hurt or twinge. His feet didn’t kick or twitch. His hands were no longer shaking—even though he was sure the devil was following him.
The mind says it’s there, but lies, and tricks itself.
Today’s magic, a shadow show, the Devil, brought to you by the brain; the eyes can be a prop…
It’s hard to accept things like being followed by the devil. It’s like being followed by an insurance salesman, only slightly less evil.
The devil appeared before Roger as a shadow with his back turned.
The chair on the other side of the room was turned to face the window. When Roger left it faced the other way, toward him. The trash bag on the window had was gone. Puddles of light poured in. Roger stared at the shape in the chair.
The shadow shape of a man, silhouetted by the dreary grey of twilight, sat in a chair facing the street. The shadow held a lit cigarette. The devil is here, Roger thought, and he’s stealing my cigarettes!

II: THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

“Afternoon, sir,” Roger said. “Would you like some Turkish opium?”
“Afternoon, sir,” said the Stranger, “and no, thanks.”
Roger lit the pipe again.
“Sorry for breaking into your apartment,” the Stranger added. “I just wanted to talk.”
“Not a problem,” said Roger. “I like people on my side of the law.”
The Stranger turned the chair around to face Roger.
Roger pulled from the pipe again. Finished, he placed it on the coffee table between them as an offer.
The Stranger ignored the pipe.
Instead he looked into Roger’s eyes.
The man, dressed as though he were young, conveyed immense age, or worse, immense thought, with the knotted wrinkles above his eyes. His once fine silk business suit was now in rags, an affectation, Roger thought, his furrowed brow a masquerade. Mud was caked to the Stranger’s shoes and pants.
His shirt was torn and tattered under a dingy sports coat. His hair was black, shoulder length, and disheveled. A thick layer of dirt and grit congealed under his fingernails. It seemed as though this man had not slept for quite some time, at least a week. Roger thought he looked familiar.
Not much would distinguish him from a common man. He would not stand out in a crowd. His eyes, though, were the color of coal; set amidst a heavy masque of interwoven layers of oily flesh. Stringy, unkempt hairs hung from his chin.
He rocked back and forth in the chair as though eager to speak but nervous to say whatever he was there to say. He tittered restless like, as Roger did after a few days without sleep.
Roger thought the Stranger might be mad. Good, Roger thought, my kind of people.
”You're a great man, Roger,” said the Stranger.
Roger felt a curious sensation, a sensation equivalent to delirium, as one might feel on Peyote. A dream-like feeling crept into his consciousness.
And Roger saw, as clear as day, the shadow of himself before him; in one hand the Stranger held a light bulb. In the other hand he held a half spent candle.
Roger found it hard to believe this was a hallucination. This was something different than the garden variety hallucination. Roger had never spoken to a shadow.
“I prefer the candle,” Roger said. “It is natural and noble. The light bulb is detestable; too alien, plastic, too fake. I prefer the candle.”
“And so it is,” said the Stranger. He placed the light bulb on the floor and stomped it. He smiled. He sat the candle on the table beside the pipe. The Stranger lit the candle. His eyes were illumed. The rest of the Stranger remained a shadow.
“Excellent choice, Roger,” the Stranger said.
“How do you know my name?” Roger asked.
“Lean closer,” the Stranger said. “Bring the chair closer to the table. That’s good, right there. Now you’re at listening distance, in the dark with me.”
“I want to know how you know my name.” Roger said. “You broke into my house, made a mess on my carpet, and stole my cigarette! Now you’re making me move furniture? I think it’s only fair I know your name. I won’t let a mystery break out, not here, not on my watch. You do, however, look familiar, but I can attach no name to the memory.”
“I was trying to sleep,” said the Stranger. “I was by the payphones, in the train station, and I heard your conversation with that old man. I must ask you to discard his opinion and carry out your experiment.”
“He has won two-thirds of my opinion,” Roger said. “There is one third of my mind unsure. So, let us hear this story. You’ve already broken into our house.”
“You shouldn't let these Holy types, such as that old fool, stand in the way of progress, Roger. You can’t let them deter you from your goals. How could you even consider such advice? You would sacrifice fame and fortune and immortality for the sake of truth and faith and decency?”
“I know it sounds awful,” Roger said, “but it has shown promise in the past. The old man was a drifter, cheap cigarettes, muddy boots, an old car-salesman tone.
“He showed me a perspective that, if not for him, I would’ve never considered it. I never thought I’d hear such a voice of reason. The voice of that old man was a voice I had never heard, a voice of simplicity and tenderness and love.
“I anticipate responses based on probabilities, patterns, and percentages. That’s how I keep myself together.
“Whenever something comes to mind the variable mechanism begins to turn, the cogs, people, being fed in and fed out, project variables, weigh them against percentages. Then I go through probabilities, look at the situation from all the perspective of all involved, and consider who stands to gain the most by any given action.
“Sometimes I run event simulations on my friends who never know they’re actors on a metaphysical stage I’ve erected for the drama’s sake, for the thought police, the prosecutor, the jury, and accusers like you.
“In my dreams I stand in a dark room naked under a microscope. Faceless watchers without noses laugh. A giant eyeball covers the ceiling, pulsing, straining, harder and harder. Water falls from the ceiling, onto pools, by frogs, croaking under Luna a sad, sad song of the last frogs.
“In the courtroom there is no defense but myself. Whenever I try to speak I can’t. I realize my mouth has disappeared. There’s no defense, just me, and the jury is on trial. God, the Watchman, the judge in drag, says there’s no place like home and he fades…”
“You remind me of that old song,” the Stranger said. “I think it’s by Sting.
Only the devil… Roger thought.
“It goes, ‘he deals the cards as a meditation.
And those he plays never suspect.
He doesn’t play for the money he wins.
He doesn’t play for respect.
He deals the cards to find the answer—
the sacred geometry of chance.
The hidden law of a probable outcome,
the numbers lead a dance.’
“That’s how I play the Jaded Game,” Roger said. “And when that man passed by, I was struck by something I didn’t understand, whose words I didn’t understand. That’s how he got to me, you see, the intrigue, the mystery. I think an arch nemesis is the most valuable type of friend.”
“Another old man,” the Stranger laughed. “Another Dharma bum, like Siddhartha under the tree, telling you the grand, grand secrets of the game? The opinions are still there, in the dark ages, dying over and over again. Those opinions are from the dark ages, back when man’s mind was still enslaved by the thought of Gods who cared. And trust me, if there is a God, he does not care. Look at the holocaust. God’s own people were being treated like roaches. And who stopped the slaughter of the chosen people of Israel? Not their Yahweh. If it was Yahweh’s choice, how would God’s chosen few survive? Hitler would’ve chased them from the Earth. Who saved them? Other people. Decent people. People who couldn’t stand to see the senseless death of human beings.
“Vast armies had to do what one God was supposed to do and didn’t. If you do not go through with your experiment, and delude the world into thinking that it failed, you will be responsible for ten times the amount of deaths Hitler is responsible for. And you’re Jewish! You must understand. Your faith is unfounded. Look at nature. It’s chaos, disarray; people are pulling out their hair, running from people with bombs strapped to their chests. Women and children are mutilated by mining equipment. The Watchman in the Belltower is asleep.”
“The Watchman leaves the equation up to us,” Roger said. “Our pains are self caused; our pain is self chosen…”
“Ha!” the Stranger laughed.
“That’s what my cousin Kahlil used to say, anyway. He lets us choose; things are as they are because of our ability to choose. If we could not choose, the world would be a lot less violent.”
“Kahlil Gibran?” the Stranger said. “He is of your family?”
“He was related to my mother,” Roger said. “That would make us cousins. Both Jews! And yet you compare me to Hitler. You should read some of Khalil’s work. He had a beautiful soul. Read his poems, his parables, and then, perhaps, you might not be so deluded. The Watchman is Awake, and those awake know that. You refer to God as ‘he,’ still confined to human understanding.”
“I believe He went to sleep on the seventh day and has not awoken. And all of you are dreaming, like me, like a louse clinging to a tuft of hair. You are the nightmare of your Lord, a bad impulse in his mind at rest. And that old man with whom you spoke proposes such a naïve, assumptive notion that it makes me want to vomit.”
“Don’t vomit, man,” Roger said. “My cat will eat it. He has no shame.”
Roger turned toward his sleeping cat and gave him the finger.
“I love my cat,” he said.
Roger tried to keep his emotional, spiritual, psychological, and intellectual distance. This allowed the Stranger to throw arguments at Roger’s brain to see if one of them would stick. Roger was ashamed of himself, those shouters in his head, that coliseum, who agreed or sided with the Stranger.
“His argument is the argument of an unenlightened mind,” the Stranger said, “naïve, and futile, an idiotic notion if ever there were one.”
“Allowing the continuation of natural evolution is an idiotic notion?” Roger asked. “It’s served us well so far. See? Look at the thumb. Do you know how easy this thumb makes life sometimes? I can drive a car. I can eat cereal. I can drive a car while eating cereal. It’s fantastic. I love having a thumb.”
The Stranger leaned forward in the dark. The candle revealed more of his face. It seemed as though Roger had peered into a dirty mirror, a corridor of his mind not yet confronted, a door sealed off long ago now open. Roger did not like what he saw.
Roger began to feel the tightness in his chest get tighter. He became disgusted. He became nauseous. That hollow voice, empty like an echo, made Roger sick. He felt his heart skip a beat. He flickered for a moment like a light. To an observer, it was a psychotic twitch; to Roger, it was spontaneously leaving one’s body. To him he was gone for a thousand years, or more. To those around him, he blinked and his eyes rolled into the back of his head. He mumbled incoherent nothings unaware.
The Stranger continued to speak. A terrible odor surrounded him. He had hot and musty breath that smelled like gin. Roger reacted with aversion. Less credulous parts of himself were drawn to the Stranger, as man is drawn to tragedy, to the train wrecks of humanity.
“What sense is there in wasting words?” the Stranger asked. “The old fool has wasted too many as it is.”
He noticed Roger's visual sweep of his clothes. He sensed Roger’s aversion.
“Of course I stink,” the Stranger said “I live in the back of the mind. That’s my curse, you see, to forever walk those alleys. And my smell doesn’t turn you away any more than it would a horse fly in a cow pasture.
“That is your beautiful human nature. It’s attractive isn’t it? Explosions, mutilations, children dying in accidents, children molested, abused, and mistreated, the maimed, the mutilated, the doomed. Turn on the news. It’s an unending list of man’s mistakes. Every night at ten the list of sin is read. When was the last time you saw a good deed, by a good man, reported on the news?”
Roger was silent.
A look of pain crossed the Stranger’s face. The Stranger spoke again.
“The last good deed I saw on television was the experiment you conducted in human reanimation. You brought a man back to life, Roger, like Lazarus, only this time a million people watched. There is no need for a second coming. This world needs no second coming. You’ve brought Heaven to the Earth, for all of us, not just the goody-goody few. There’s no need for religion anymore. It will be a brotherhood of man, just like Lennon said. People will no longer be able to kill each other over God!”
“With or without God,” Roger said, “man will struggle and kill. And in the end, it’s all a struggle with oneself, externalized, his unhappiness a response to the happiness of others. I agree, people have fought and died over God…” “
“That’s where you’re wrong,” the Stranger said. “They don’t fight over God. They fight over what God’s name is! They fight for the copyright, the monopoly of God, the monopoly of mind. And you’ll absolve them all. Go through with your experiment.”
“I can’t destroy the faith of man,” Roger said. “I considered your argument, but I’m not that egotistical, not to the point of thinking of myself as a savior. I can’t even save myself.”
Roger pointed to the needle tracks on his arms, the scars on his knuckles, his wrists.
“How would you not be the Savior?” the Stranger asked. “You wouldn’t make any promises. You would offer man, for a price, what God offers for a lifetime of slavery. That is religion—organized slavery, of the mind and will, slavery to a self conscious father figure who needs to be told every day how great he is. What rubbish!”
Roger was silent.
The Stranger again seemed to be in immense pain. His face quivered as he spoke.
“Just by discovering the Sisyphus mechanism, love the name by the way, and discovering the way to stop it, to stop age and death, you have immortality in your hands. You have immortality in your hands, Roger. And you debate it! You debate whether or not you will offer this extraordinary gift to man.”
“If humans were no longer afraid of death,” said Roger, “or no longer had a deadline, who would be kind? A lot of people are kind for the sake of fear, fear of punishment, or hope for reward, and without that fear or hope, they’d turn into monsters. Nobody would finish their novels. We’d have no reason to follow medicine or study the body or try to better ourselves. We’d have no reason to learn. We wouldn’t have to eat. We wouldn’t have to worry. We wouldn’t be human. We wouldn’t pray or sin or be ashamed or proud. We would not be human. No one would seek salvation; no one would seek redemption.
“The people of the world would have no reason to repent and half the world would spend their days as gluttons, stroking their egos, feeding themselves. Obeying you.
“Most people are only nice because they’re afraid of what might happen if they’re not. Sounds crazy, but it’s true. They’d never worry about the consequences of their actions. They would not fear the Calculator who works out Karma’s Equations, old Bog in his Heaven.”
“Understood,” the Stranger said. “You base this on the assumption that you know that undiscovered country.”
Roger was silent.
“Look at what you are!” the Stranger yelled. “When a firefighter saves a kitten, what a trifle. When some kid, fed up with life, empties round after round into a school full of kids, it's the biggest hit in town. Oh how terrible! they cry, but do not avert their eyes. How awful! they say, but never change the channel. They never change the channel Roger, never. It is depravity they desire, though behind the screen they sit and go 'ho-hum, another day, another tragedy!' This is your decent human being.”
“There is decency in humans,” Roger said. “There is beauty and virtue.”
“They claim revulsion, but they circle filth like fruit flies!” the Stranger said. “And you, sir, you could be so much more than just a human being.”
“I am content to be human just,” said Roger. “The Sistine Chapel, Caravaggio’s Madonna of Loreto, Bernini’s sculptures, Turner’s Seascapes, Shakespearian soliloquies, opium and chardonnay, the beauty of a child, the beauty of the good in man; I am content to be a human just, if all too human too. If all too human now, someday I might be more. That is my dream.”
“Perhaps you will give in,” the Stranger said. “Perhaps you won't. Regardless, I will speak to you. Nobody else can hear me, just you, Roger. Open your mouth and they’ll call you a madman. No one in this era has seen me as you look upon me; the last to look upon me was Kahlil Gibran.”
“And he didn’t give in to you,” Roger said. “I will not give in either. Why appear before me, Mara? I’ve got to go bed or I’ll wake too late to watch cartoons.”
“Why?” The Stranger mocked. “Because nobody else cares; they take me as a vagabond, a disposable man, a throw-away person. Why pay attention to me? That is why I've talk to you. I can see inside you, Roger. It is the mind of man that fascinates you, yes? That is why you hear me; that is why they don’t. You’ll talk to anybody. I’ve seen you talk to homeless men for hours. You always need to know. That, I know. You always have to answer!”
“And you’re here to talk about what? The man I met in the train station?” Roger asked.
“Yes,” The Stranger said. “I heard that old fool speak to you yesterday. I heard him preach the tired philosophy of the countless corrupt religions of the world. It’s a pity he didn't take off his stylish hat and ask for a donation or pull a rabbit out of it. I saw. I listened. But that's what I am, you see. I'm a listener. I always have been. I'm the one the finger is pointed at; the Goat named Scape, that's who I am. How could I be something other than what I was made to be? What can man do other than what he was made to do? It's not like you have any sort of choice. You are what you are.”
“Man can choose,” said Roger. “There is choice... There is free will. When a rational creature can choose what brings him pain, he is capable of free will.
“Oh, give me a break!” said the Stranger. “Free will is an illusion. You don't have to agree. You just can't see it; it's a silken veil sewn over your eyes by piety and imperfection. It’s not the robot’s fault for the incompetence of the programmer.
“You have no more choice than a snail. Your species is no more important. You made the wheel, big deal. New York and Paris, France, the flags, and China’s wall, will sink into the Earth. The Eifel tower will succumb to time and fall, as will your mountains and your murals, as has your Rome and Babylon. The centuries eat them all.
“The snail would never choose to crawl into a pile of salt; that's true. Perhaps man alone has the ability to choose that which he knows will bring him pain. That's not free will. That's stupidity. Why would a snail crawl into a pile of salt? It wouldn't. It behaves as it was made to behave. You can break the rules, but you can't change them. But is that your fault? Of course it's not your fault...”
“My problems are my own,” said Roger. “I take full responsibility for the current miseries of my life. I'm quite proud of them.”
“I could program a robot to say, 'I think therefore I am,'” the Stranger said. “Would that make him sentient? It wouldn't. It'd make him capable of reading command lines. And say I program this same robot to run into a child care center with a knife. Say I program the robot to kill and maim and eat or bury the children alive. Who would be at fault: the robot with the knife between his teeth or the programmer who made him?”
“A robot is not a human being,” Roger said. “You're over generalizing. And you're annoying me. I’m tired and running out of opium.”
“Fair enough,” said the Stranger. “I only ask one thing of you.”
“And what is that?” Roger asked. “I don't have any change.”
“I only ask you to do what you were born to do. Go through with the experiment. You’ll win another Nobel Prize. Isn’t that what you always wanted to do?”
“Yes,” said Roger, “but for literature, not for biology. You know how long it has been since an American writer won the Nobel Prize? The panelists must be French.”
“Why would you rather preach than stop suffering and death?”
“I do not wish to destroy the faiths of man. You tempt me, Stranger; I do not sway. I didn’t pursue this for reward. I pursued this because I was sad; a sad child whose life was a boulevard of dying friends, because I thought that death was bad. I chose this line of study because I was afraid of death, because what happens is unknown to us.
“How do I know what I am to deny? It would end the evolution of the human race synthetically; I can’t be responsible for that. When I wrote The Voice of the Soul as a graduate student, after translating DNA into English, I began having severe strokes. So, I abandoned it.
“Then some scientist with a lot of money found my doctoral thesis in the Princeton library and called me. He wanted details, of course. I told him I could synthesize a virus to put the human body in a natural stasis of sorts, not allowing growth or age. In order to preserve the flesh and organs, I translated lizard DNA into human DNA to make our regenerative capabilities stronger. Biological immortality, life forever, in a pill, for one low fee.
“So the man said he could get together a team of people to make it possible. Together we made it possible. When we brought that old woman back to life, she couldn’t speak in our language anymore. All she could say was, ‘The beauty, the beauty.’
“And think about the religious implications! The implications of a man born on Galilee finding the secret to immortality brings up questions I will not answer. I have no such ego. I just did not want to see people die because it saddened me. How selfish! Now I see death for what it is: the great equalizer, no pain, no suffering no taxes, no nothing, just the Silence of the Eons—the Voice of God. And that is the language I shall speak to you.”
“What you can accomplish outweighs the religious implications, regardless of what old men would like to say. What will you do?”
“I haven't decided yet,” said Roger. “I haven't chosen. The snail would avoid the salt, that is nature; but I have the right to chose. I can walk into the sand by choice.”
“Ha!” The Stranger laughed. “How droll. You know ... I'd like to tell you about a dream of mine.”
Roger’s interest piqued.
“Ever the psychologist, aren’t we?” the Stranger asked. “I knew that would get your attention. Can I tell you about my dream?”
“Will I have to write a prescription afterward?” Roger asked. “If so, you’ll have to schedule an appointment.”
“Nope,” the Stranger said. “I just want to tell you. I’m sure you, as a psychologist, and student of the mind, will appreciate it.”
“Go ahead,” Roger said. “I’m high and have nothing better to do. Tell me about your dream.”

III: THE ANGEL IN THE WATER

Roger began seeing and hearing things when he was a young child. Some say this is due to an accident, an accident where he suffered severe trauma to the head. Roger says he hallucinated before he split his head open.
The first hallucination he remembers well. He was a young man then, and walked in the woods behind his mother’s house. One day he saw three young men, in their twenties at the most. They had a dog tied to a slab of plywood with a pentagram painted around the dog. A red X marked the spot on the poor creature’s stomach. Roger tried not to be heard. One of them stuck a knife into the dog’s stomach. The dog let out a bloodcurdling howl. Roger screamed. Roger ran. The three men followed him.
The fastest caught up with Roger by a stream. He grabbed Roger by the collar, dragged him to the stream, shoved him, and held his head under water.
Roger screamed gargled screams for half a minute or so before the angel appeared before him. He knew she was an angel. Her face was pale blue, lined in gold from the light of the sun, and her eyes were blue. Roger kicked and screamed. The angel held a finger to her lips. Roger stopped screaming and kicking. A moment later, the young man let him go and ran off.
Roger did not think the angel was a hallucination. His family and his friends thought it was a hallucination.
Throughout his life, from that moment forward, he would see the same young angel in crowds, and each time he saw her, she held a finger to her lips. Why she shushed him was a riddle Roger, with all his genius, couldn’t solve.
He had seen and heard strange things in his life, but never had a non-entity, as the one who sat before him, spoken with such clarity and strength of voice. If his mind was playing another joke on him, this was a good one.
Superb, he told himself. Thanks.
You’re welcome, his self replied.
Then he remembered the distinct feeling of being followed by the devil. Then he realized to whom he was talking.
“Tell me about your dream, Mara,” Roger said.
“Mara?” the Stranger said. “I like that name! I’ve never really had a definite name, but that’s very apt, that is. You can call me Mara. How very Buddhist of you! At least you’ve got the wit to recognize me. Some people look in the mirror and see nothing!”
“I’m not going to listen to you all night,” Roger said. “The Twilight Zone will be on in a couple of hours, and that’s not something I can allow you to interfere with. I have better things to do than debate hallucinations.”
“Alright, relax!” said Mara. “I will tell you of my dream. I sometimes dream I am a louse trapped on a free man’s head. I always have this dream, and it’s so real to me; it’s as though I have the real memory, the memory of a past life as a louse. I was once and angel, now a louse, but still I dream.
“In that dream I do not suffer. I go about my life with gaiety and bliss. Then the finger’s come and we’re afraid. There is a constant fear, fear of floods and poisons, of fingers from the sky. The finger’s take my family. A finger cannot hear our screams, but we still scream. We ask the hands to forgive our sins yet they do not hear. We sing songs. We ask the dirty fingers for forgiveness.
“To us lice the free man’s head was as your mother Earth, and the plastic apartment light above us was our lovely sun; a giant candlelight filled the sky with beams of light, and sends them in fragments through the tufts of hair. And you, ha! And you and your fellow man, Homo sapiens, you are lice like me—as I am in my dream. You crawl around like lice under the sun, as though it were a dim lit apartment light. Like ballerinas, in a box, you go in circles ‘round and ‘round, to the melody of some unknown lovely sound. Like those ballerinas in the box, you are wound up from the start, your circle chosen, unable to stop.
“You see, your mother Earth is the head you crawl about, where you conscious lice live long. You kill and steal and lie, but not the lice. They are more noble than human beings.
“When the dim light-bulb swelled overhead, when I was that nobody louse, I fled as though a moth burnt by the light. We lice made up nice stories, too; they gave meaning to our lives. And what fantastic songs the lice sang about the head on which they were trapped, and the God whose finger killed them, whose will was theirs to live by. You suffer the same delusion of a dreaming louse—the delusion that some God somewhere cares.”

IV: MARA’S IN THE VEINS

“The majority of men believe the sun was parked high into the sky for man, for nothing but man’s good will and gain. Instead, it represents nothing but itself, and that is why it means something. The only thing with any meaning is that which represents itself. Think about that. Perhaps if I repeated it for two thousand years it might sound like wisdom.
“Have you realized that? The more you repeat and analyze and probe and prod and suggest and infer, the more meaning you can read into anything. The shroud of Turin has a stain on it. After a thousand years of he-said she-said it’s the image of a man-God burnt into a blanket like toast. Isn’t that a curious delusion? But you don’t want to hear such pomposity. We were talking about my dream…
“The lice were happy and it was enough. The head of some human being was our mother. She cradled and supported us and we loved and respected her. She orbited a strange collection of lights and objects. Some lice even speculated there could be lice on other heads.
“The dream went on. The lice evolved, of course. If you keep getting hit by a car, you stay out of the road, right? They became conscious and intelligent. They basked in the warm glow of understanding. They discovered their sun was a dingy apartment light.
“They throw themselves to the ground and hail the light. They understood the world and themselves and lived in peace. That was enough. God was happy. Their God loved them.
“You see, Roger, God loves a slave. Look at the history of man, from one oppressor to another; it’s all his Highness they kill for, his Highness and the manmade book of rules. These books didn’t arrive from the sky. A man wrote them and a man uses them to enslave and manipulate.
“You have to be a slave to be loved by God. Read the Bible. Look at the Ten Commandments, a special list, just for you, from God. You must obey the list or else you burn. That is not true compassion. That is not true love.
“The lice rejoiced under the sun and sang sweet hymns for him who killed them all. They had discovered the nature of the Universe, the house, the other heads. They invented a telescope to look for lice on other heads. They never found another of their kind.
“This is a dream, of course. Lice, I doubt, are building telescopes on people’s heads, but that is in my dream.
“The lice appreciated their world. They kissed the scalp each day as they woke. They kissed the scalp regardless of how many times poison rained from the skies. They kissed the scalp as the finger’s killed them. Millions under each finger nail. What had they done to incur the finger’s wrath as he squished them under his thumb or pricked them with a comb or poisoned them?
“And look at you! Mara’s in your veins. And here you are, arguing with yourself again!
“Wouldn’t you rather talk about the weather?” Roger asked. “I once heard it’s always raining somewhere.”
“You’re right,” Mara said. “I’d turn my head, too. Why would anyone want to hear the truth? What freedom do you have when you’re born with rules, born sick to die, and life is but a beautiful mutation that ends, and bows before a curtain, performed before an auditorium of empty seats? The only witness to this poor tragedy is an eye that cannot see itself, with no lips to speak, whose voice is, as you said, silence.
“When you were young, when they left you in the dark, in the silence, you cried out in pain. Do you remember? I remember well.
“When you were almost drowned, when the silence saved you, where went you then? What did you think in that cold water, dreaming as you died?”
“I dreamt I visited the Oracle at Delphi,” Roger said. “Plato stood by the doorway to her hearth. She sat upon a triangular chair. I began to speak, and she, like the angel, shushed me, and bid me leave.”
“I went to speak to her, too,” Mara said. “I told her about my dream. She told me, if the eye can’t see itself, it sees nothing. If the eye can’t see the self, it is a show for no one, performed in silence, in front of a thousand empty seats.
“I am the louse in those dreams, Roger,” Mara said. “And you are the louse in this world. To you I appear as a worm with a human face. But I’m not here to tempt you, as you seem to think, I’m just telling you what you need to hear.”
“You tempt me with eternal life, something many men would not pass up,” Roger said. “A man who can choose to die is the only man who lives. Why would I want to live forever? I can barely afford to live once. You cast illusions; you manipulate the shadows in the corner. But I will not be moved by you.”
“What I am is born of man,” Mara said. “When they desire nothing, what I am will disappear. I’ve seen you in the alleys, in the streets, walking the shore with a bottle of vodka in your hand.
“If God wrote our Book of Tales, the sins would be the good bits, and the preachy pages would never yellow like the rest. So who is to blame for the death: the programmer or the robot with the knife between his teeth? Think about it.”

V: THE PROFITEER OF MISERY

“Could you watch an unending assembly line with faulty parts being put on faulty robots without telling the programmer that the experiment will fail? To be programmed is to not be free. If it is not desire one is controlled by, it is piety. If it is not piety, it is humility; it is all a form of control. It is enslavement to notions or to impulses. Piety is the Tower of Babel and still it stands today.
“They fight over the copyright, not the beliefs, but the names of whom they name their Gods and prophets. How silly is the man who fights for peace, how foolish! Oh how many wars are waged for that Immaculate Copyright. That is why they fight, you see; the monopoly on God, copyright infringement. How dare you call God Yahweh! His name is Allah! Ha! No his name is Shiva! You will die! How ignorant and futile! Oh well, let them kill each other. They are weeds in the Garden of Evolution and they need to be pruned.
“Many of them say the same thing; people are fighting and dying over the name. Yahweh and Allah and the Tetragrammaton are the same being. The monopoly on God is how and why the wars are waged. God is not on anyone’s side. Even the lice know this.
“There are tidal waves, monsoons, and earthquakes. The lice had lots of these. And what does man have? Hospitals, river dance, haiku, daytime television—this is a world without God.
“Not for the righteous, nor the wretched; for without the wretched, how could one know the righteous? How can one know up without knowing down? How can you have good deeds, without sins?
“This is a story written, another verse in the Narrator’s Book of Tales—another verse upon the walls of eons written. I’m a madman. That is true. The robot is malfunctioning. There is no programmer. Diagnosis terminal, but you can treat it with medication. Oh, how you treat it with medication! You just take it for the pain, right? Love that alibi. Your chest hurts? Anxiety, sorrow, and so much of it; I hear ten thousand voices when I crawl inside your head.
“You see, I came to speak to you because you’re the head on which I lived. The light above us, your tawdry plastic bulb, to us was a glorious sun. We worship and we pray to you. That is my dream. In that dream, I wished to be you. The lowly louse dreams to be a man. What does the lowly man dream to be?
“Then my dream gets stranger, Roger,” Mara said. “It gets much stranger.”
“Stranger than lice worshiping a writer who uses medicated shampoo to kill them?” Roger asked. “I’ve always felt as though I had lice, though I’ve never found one on my head. I feel them crawl. My mother always checked my head, because I was always scratching. The doctor checked. There are no lice. But I feel them anyway. They’re there; they’re psychological. They’re you. And God is the Profiteer of Misery. Your concern is not with me, but with the state of man.
“You’d like to see the world bow before the Altar of the Ape. I will not let that happen. My path is chosen. I will not waver from it. I will not go through with the experiment.”
“But you know it works!” Mara shouted. “You ignorant, primitive, self righteous dunce! You watched your mother hang for a crime she was innocent of! And your father killed himself at Pigeon Rock. Do you remember that? That part of the story has been read. You spend all of your life looking for answers, and then you find something more important than an answer; you find a reason. Death will be a thing of the past.
“Don’t you see that? You’ve done it. You studied the human genome for ten years to translate DNA into English, all to read the imprints of past lives. Your stroke was not caused by God because of your discovery! Your stroke was caused because you abuse Morphine and have since you were young.
“You’re a brilliant man, and at twenty-seven, you have the secret to immortality buried in a golden notebook somewhere near Galilee.
“Remember Entae, Roger. Would you have given her this cure of yours? You deciphered the programming language of life and translated the Voice of the Soul into English and now you’re going to let yourself be killed so your experiment will be thought of as a failure?”
“Yes,” Roger said. “When they see me die, the experiment will be abandoned. My greatest failure will be my greatest success. Faith will prevail.”
“You fool!” Mara cried. “Why is every Jew I appear before so dense? Every person who dies after that day will die because of you. You leave the children of the Earth to die because of dogma! How can such a genius be so superstitious? You have a golden notebook that could save all men that come to live after you. It’s real, Roger. No one will ever have to die again! And you choose to make it a failure… to prove what? To prove that faith is more important than science? How outdated you are!”
“That’s not the reason,” Roger said. “Even science itself requires faith. I choose to fail because of what man might be denied because of me, the ability to die. If man evolves to such a state, then evolution is finalized. But to use a semi-synthetic drug to induce immortality is not how it is supposed to be done. Everyone knows that my reanimation hypothesis was correct; we can bring people back to life. That is against the natural order of the world. You were watching when that old woman said, ‘The beauty, the beauty!’ and everyone else saw it too, live on national TV. Lazarus part two. Now they wait for me to prove my other hypothesis: immortality, biological stasis, and limb regeneration.
“We’ve never had a living man take the antidote and not be killed. I’m going to take a large injection of Morphine to ease the pain, and let them give me the lethal injection. Then I’m off to Neverland, though I don’t care what is there. I will not risk depriving human beings of anything.”
“Other than life!” Mara shouted. “How foolish! You do not know how long it will be before humans achieve that state; why not do it now? Do a hundred billion tragedies have to happen before another man discovers what you bury beneath a tree?”
“Tell me about the dream,” Roger said. “I don’t have to explain anything to you, Mara. There is nothing to tempt me with. You cannot tempt me with a Nobel Prize. You cannot tempt me with eternal life. Tell me of your dreams, louse; you’ve truly fallen— From an Angel to a snake and now a louse. What next? To mud? Tell me about your dream; that is all I want to hear. I don’t want to hear you make your case against God. The existence or nonexistence of God is irrelevant. I’m not going to be harassed all night by parts of my psyche; no man of reason argues with a hallucination at this hour.”
“Fine,” said the Stranger whom Roger called Mara. “I am not the devil whom you name me.”
“But you ask me to become the Antichrist,” Roger said. “If I go through with my experiment, I will become the Antichrist, the Dajjal. That I cannot do. You cannot hypnotize me; I will not speak to you again after this day. I will fulfill my purpose. Fulfill yours and be gone!”

VI: THE BODY ODYSSEY

“It gets a bit strange, Roger,” Mara said. “Even for a man like you, and you’re Aquarius; so I know how strange you are. I’ve read your novels, too. Songs of Galilee was beautiful and touching—a most sublime work! Déjà Vu was great, very clever—as was The Body Odyssey. That’s the last work of yours I read. I loved it! When the Psychiatrist finds the soul at the end… Such beauty! That story had a deep impact on me, Roger. It followed me into my dreams.
“At the beginning of your novel, the Psychiatrist, pardon the pun, shrinks himself to be a hundredth the size of a louse. Then he shrinks his exploration ship. Have you noticed all of your protagonist’s are lost?
“Remember that? It’s brilliant. Your Psychiatrist protagonist traverses the mind, his patient’s mental landscape, in search of the soul. It’s a fantastic story. When they open the door to the soul… that image imprinted itself on my mind.
“When the Psychiatrist opened the doorway in the center of Broca’s area… The novel became sublime.
“‘And there I stood, at the edge of the opened doorway, looking into the vastness of the soul. The conduit which linked the man’s melancholy mind had been blocked, but with the doorway now unlocked, the patient was, in an instant, plugged into the universe as a river is plugged into an ocean. Love, from all sides, escaped into the mind and made the once sad man rejoice.
“’I stood there for several hours thunderstruck, with that beautiful doorway open. I gazed into the unfathomable infinity of the soul. The joyful patient rejoiced as he felt the heartbeat of all creation. He saw the Truth in a flash of light, of revelation, and saw how his actions against others were actions against himself; he saw the eternity conduit in all other beings, and felt connected to them, one with the Universe entire.
“’How sad is the man whose door is locked, who sees light through the cracks in boarded windows of the mind. Tears streamed down his face as the soul swept through the doorway and out his mouth. The patient opened his mouth, but said nothing. His eyes rolled to the Heavens and he said, ‘The beauty, the beauty!’
“I love that!” Mara said. “The night after I finished your novel, I went to sleep under the payphone in the train station, where you saw me, where I heard your name, where I heard that senile old man. So I followed you home.”
“The dream!” Roger said. “Finish the dream and leave! Leave me to suffer in peace!”
“Alright!” Mara said. “Relax, robot! Back to the dream! The dream became stranger when I went back to that world where I lived as a louse amidst your curls. I lived there for a hundred years. We had evolved. We were self aware. We were about to take a journey into the cavern by the great mountain—the ear—and I was one of the explorers. We built a craft quite similar to the Psychiatrist’s craft in The Body Odyssey. They count down the launch into the ear: ‘ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, blast off!’ And off we go into your ear.
“Our destination was your consciousness, your mental landscape, your soul. We cut our way through the eardrum and into your physical brain. Not your consciousness. We saw before us the physical interior of the inner ear. We were just exploring. The inside of your mind, to us, was as big as the world we lived in. Pink, breathing, pulsing mountains throbbed in all direc. Strange structures surrounded us.
“We had not yet made it to your consciousness. That was what we wished to observe; we wished to find out whether or not our world was conscious. After all, is it not what one loses in death? The same body parts remain. The robot is assembled, but the essence has fled—back into the eternity conduit.
“As we neared your conscious mind we beheld a land sublime, tranquil, drowsy, by the Sea of Galilee. The sun was going down, and the sound of humming was ever present. It filled our tiny vessel. We did not know what the humming was. When I woke I knew that sound. I recognized it. It was the song your mother hummed. Had I not read Songs of Galilee, that magisterial humming would have remained an unknown tremor in the bowels of our Earth. Your mother hummed as our ship went deeper into your mind. It got louder and louder. Hm, hmm… hm, hmmm…, hm, hmm, hm, hmm, hm, hmm…”
Roger finished the song, “Hm, hm, hmm—hm, hm, hm. Yes, that’s what the title refers to in Songs of Galilee—my mother’s humming. I hear it in my head all the time.”
“It was splendid and deafening to us,” Mara said. “To the lice inside the ship inside your mind it was as the sound of thunder. As we maneuvered through the images, I saw a short man, hunched, bald and watching television, drinking beer and screaming at something on the screen. ‘It’s C!’ he shouted. ‘It’s C you moron!’ Like I said, I’ve read Songs of Galilee. It was the backbone for every image we lice encountered in your mind. We didn’t understand what we were seeing; we were seeing massive beings, humans, a windmill made of paper, a golden sea and pale sea shore, a calico cat with a white spot on her nose…”
“Entae,” Roger interrupted.
“…following a man and woman along a shore. You are in the vision, but you’re a young man, there on Galilee, staring across the water. Your mother asks you to come with her; she tells you he’s not coming home. We heard these words as you hear the sound of cats who speak to one another—unintelligible murmurs, indecipherable to a louse, but clear to me awake. We saw slices of your life.
“Another vision flashes before the screen. A child, with his back to us, stood with his hands in his pockets, watching the sun as it went down.
“We see a child leaning against a door and crying. Someone is pounding on the other side of the door. You refuse to let them in. They pound the door down, and break it, but disappear when you look into the hallway. I have trouble putting the pieces together.
“Roger, I don’t know which are memories or ideas or dreams. Words come at us as we maneuver, at a thousand miles a second, to us, words like failure, like disgrace, like madman. I see you standing in front of a stump with a porcelain angel figure on it. You’re just a child. You place bread on the ground. Birds come down to eat. You’re standing above a grave.
“The landscape is something out of a sublime dream, drowsy, restless. Such sounds are heard, the sound of seagulls by the Sea, Don Giovanni, too, crying kids, screaming men, a weeping woman in the den.
“Our ship is shaken as you toss and turn. The movement of our world becomes irregular. We knew our planet stopped in orbit every day at the same time. Every night the lights go out. Our daylight and night is your sleeping cycle. Sometimes we go several weeks without a break from sunlight. Sometimes we spend thirty days in the dark… as you did. Remember that, Roger? Remember disemboweling yourself with a kitchen knife to get the ‘little humans sent to destroy your brain’ out of your stomach? Ha!
“We lice see the image of a young man running through his home into a large room. His entrails are hanging out. His left hand cups the guts as they spill into the floor. His right hand grabs a woman’s shoulder. She turns around and screams.
“‘You’ve got blood all over you! She shouts. What have you done, Roger? What have you done?
“We hear all of this. We even hear you speak:
“‘They’re trying to take my mind. They tried to crawl in my ears but I stopped them, then, while I nodded off for a moment, they managed to make it into my stomach. They were trying to destroy my brain.
“The vision changes, dizzying lights, sounds of screaming—an ambulance goes by a country store in the dark. You lay there on the gurney. You’ve got on an oxygen mask and your eyes are dim. They inject you with your mistress Morphine. Your face turns to a languid smile, and it looks as if some great weight or stone has been lifted from your back. The pain you feel is not my work. It is yours. I am made of you, but exist in and of myself as well.
“We come upon a bustling crowd. They look like pale white silhouettes. The afternoon is brown. The day is grey. A woman is pulled by her hair onto a stage.
“Other people come on stage. The woman with the black hair kisses the feet of the man in the black mask. Then she is hanged. The crowd cheers. Your face betrays no emotion; you look steady ahead, transfixed on her dancing feet. The child watches the dance upon the air in silence as a tear rolls down his face. Then he paints those feet in the dance of death.
“You stay there long after the crowd is dispersed. Your mother… it’s your mother, isn’t it? I remember now! I’m glad I knew your work. If not all those images would have made no sense. They would be vague impressions of sight and sound passing by a view screen…”
“That’s what life is,” said Roger. “I don’t understand. Why do you do this? You know you won’t get anger out of me. I came to terms with all of that, that past of mine, in the last sentence of Songs of Galilee.”
“I’ve always wondered,” said Mara. “Why is there no period at the end of Songs of Galilee? There is, ‘C’est la vie, my mother said. And then, under it, simply ‘c’est la vie,’ and there is no period. Did the editors miss that or did you intend it to end as such? You seem to have a reason for everything.”
“I left it out intentionally,” Roger said. “I thought of ending it with a comma, too. But by ending it without a period, it did not end, and thus never ends. Please get on with your story, and let me enjoy my misery alone.”
“Alright,” Mara said. His tone had changed. He sounded friendlier than before.
“I see you as a young man, driving down the road, with a dog in the car beside you. The dog isn’t moving. It’s late. You’re speeding down a dirt road. You’re crying like a baby. You come to the end of the dirt road, let the dog out, return to the car, bring food and water, and place it before him on the ground.
“He can’t eat it. You hold his mouth open and force the food into his mouth and rub his throat. He vomits. It’s all over you. You try again, and again, and again, until you scream. You return to the car, leaving the food and the water, and turn the car on. The red brake lights illuminate the image in the rear view mirror. You sit there and watch the dying dog crawl in a desperate circle before falling to the ground. Why did you watch until you knew he was dead before you left? You knew it would hurt you even more. And it does. That red-lit dying dog made me weep. I wept for him and wept for you. We pass by the visions of your unhappy life and touchdown in the center of your mind.”

VII: THE THRONE OF MISERY

“We arrived in Broca’s Area,” Mara said. “It was absolute dark in all directions. I had never heard anything so loud. The voices came at us from all directions. We heard your thoughts as you thought them, and it hurt. I realized you suffer the weight of every question you cannot answer, don’t you? We’re all confused, Roger, men, and lice alike. Why do you detest me? Would you not pity a being once an angel now a louse?
“How can such a brilliant man think so lowly of himself? It is not humility, not with you, but shame. Why would you dream of being a louse? The voices in the cavern echoed:
Failure try loser why win accident ruined abortion redemption forgive me song hmm silly little fiddle again forgive again redeem me’s all the time forgive me louse junkie bastard meditation medication garbage stain typo in the book pain self panic backwards never full half full half empty half empty broken.
“It got louder as we neared the doorway to your soul. It was just as it was in your novel, The Body Odyssey, when the Psychiatrist got closer to the center of the mind. The demons of your past blocked our way.
“I feared that I would be forever trapped inside your noisy brain! Images began to appear before us. An old man. He stood there with a dead fish in his left hand.
“‘Want to go fishing, Roger?’ the ghost-like image asked. ‘What do you want to be when you grow up? A prophet? You tryin’ to get yourself hanged boy? That religious junk is nonsense. Can’t you go fishin’ with your old man once in a while? Poetry is for girls! Roger, come on. You know I don’t mean that. Come here! Look at how pretty this fish is, son.’
“He thrust the fish in front of the screen and laughed a toothless laugh. Oh, what visions passed before the screen: we saw a man holding a woman by the throat. We saw a child running up the stairs. We saw a child looking for something in a dim lit room. The child finds a painting of a ship under a stack of porno magazines. A meteor shower goes by the adjoining window.
“All the images of your life passed before us in an instant. We had no idea what they were. The images became more rapid.
“We saw a young man fall lifeless onto a table in a library. Papers scattered. Someone yelled, He’s having a heart attack! Call an ambulance! A young attendant stayed with you. I saw her again. You’re in an ambulance again. I saw her smiling in a bed beside you. I saw her screaming. I saw a child. The woman called the young girl Galilee. I see a court. I see her leave.
“Your father disappeared. A young child stared across the ocean. We crossed the reckless waters and saw the doorway on the other side, the doorway to the soul. It was locked. In front of it sat a King on a glorious throne of gold.
“Oedipus Rex in the Throne of all your misery sat. The lice attacked the king. He was slain in battle. All the noises stopped and the doorway opened.
“The other travelers were taken aback. The other travelers—the other lice—gasped as eternity unfolded before their eyes. But I, the cursed one, could not see it. I could not see beyond impermanence. They saw what I could not—the conduit of eternity, as you call it, which connects every human mind into the infinite. I have been cursed to never see it. But I was a louse. How can I comprehend infinity if I can’t comprehend a microwave? I realized, facing that intangible space, how small I was.
“What are you sir?” Mara asked.
Roger was silent.
“You’ve had that dream,” Mara said. “I know you’ve had that dream. So what are you, sir? Are you a worm or a man? A louse? An insect? I’ve seen you in the streets, followed you in the alleys, watched as you come and go. I pay attention. You never give homeless people money, but you spend a lot of time talking to them. I’ve never understood that. Does it amuse you to talk to them?”
“I talk to them because nobody else does,” Roger said. “Because I…”
“Because you are free of judgment!” Mara exclaimed. “That’s it! Oh, poor Roger! How helpless you really are. You suffer for no reason. You suffer the love and hate of the world, and accept it, as though it could be no other way. You didn’t ask to live or die. It was forced on you—like slavery. Life is a beautiful and terrifying natural disaster. Life is a fatal sexually transmitted disease. You die from day one and spend your entire life dying. Why call it living? Life should be called dying, since that’s all that happens. Where then is God? Intelligent design? That’s ridiculous. Want evidence against intelligent design—look at a hospital. The genome is full of God’s typos. You can correct them.”
“’The fool hath said in his heart that there is no God,’” said Roger.
“You’ve heard that drivel, too?” Mara laughed. “What about this one: ‘And God said in his heart there are no fools, for all children are the children of God!’ Then who created the fool? Who created the fool and his atheist heart? Why would he be born with the opinion already there if not to be forever scorned for being a fool?
“He was made a pie and the baker is upset he’s not a cake. Why would a pie be punished for being a pie? So, he’s left behind, on his knees in Israel, as the Holy march in glory onward. You could say He chose for it to be this way. Perhaps there is marginal choice amongst human beings, but only within predefined parameters. God made the robot with the knife between his teeth and God is who to blame.”
“You ramble like the best of lunatics,” Roger said. “You’re trying to imply that man behaves according to a natural, preprogrammed inclination, and that his awareness of his choice does not mean he chose. I agree to the extent many animals are programmed DNA to survive, but man has much more on his mind than food and reproduction. We are capable of abstract thought and reasoning. We can choose our path; we can choose the contrary of what our natural inclination would suggest. To survive, I admit, is something we are programmed to do. To be a snail that walks in salt is to be a creature capable of choice. If you are a louse, then I am a snail, and I choose to walk into the salt.
“And furthermore,” Roger went on, “you contradict yourself. You say there is no God. Then you blame the force of life, God, for the errors of our way. It’s easy for people to believe all their misdeeds can be attributed to outside sources, when sometimes they can, though this is the copout of a delusional, guilty mind. It’s much easier to blame the devil than it is to accept responsibility. You might be the lord of Illusions, Mara, but you’re not omnipotent or omniscient, and therefore in no position to diagnose the whole of humanity as a failure. The master knot of human fate has yet to unravel. The equation of our lives is as of now unsolved. Man can choose: they can save themselves; they can destroy themselves. The choice is up to them.”
“What then is omniscience?” Mara asked. “What good is the power of God when it only works through people who believe? It’s the power of people. That’s all it is. We are the children of God, they say. And if that’s so, I’ve always wondered. If we’re all the children of God… what makes Jesus so special? Is it that whole ordeal with the cross and the nails and crown of thorns?”
“What made Jesus special is what made my cousin Kahlil special; it is what made the Buddha special; it is what made Elijah special; it is what made Mohammad special; it is what made Bob Marley special; they are of an essence, an essence of love, of understanding, and compassion.
“Not all the children of God are so compassionate,” Roger said, sighing. “I endeavor to be like my cousin, one half of me, anyway. The other half of me wants to do as you suggest—polish my ego until it shines so bright I’m blinded by my desire. And God… God is beyond your understanding. God is the magic in the world, the good; the good in man is God made manifest. Whoever removes all the Mara Mind, the devil inside, is the voice of God made manifest. You prey on the weak, Mara. You tempt men to bet their life savings in a game of poker. That is true. But you will not tempt me to destroy the faith of man. God is the magic in the world.”
“What a load of garbage!” Mara said. “Look at Joseph Stalin. Was he whom God made manifest?”
“No,” said Roger. “He had nothing but the Mara Mind. You bent him under your will and wound him up like a devil doll toy.”
“So?” Mara scoffed. “He was happier with his sin and power and glory than any of the monks who don the saffron robe. You sacrifice the rewards of this life for the possibility of a bigger reward in the next? Stalin was my happy slave, a slave happier than you’ve ever been, without drugs that is. I take my fascist dictators with extra megalomania and a side order of crazy! But my coffee? Always black!”
“Look at Gandhi,” Roger said. “Look at what the force of Good and Truth is capable of.”
“Look at Hitler,” Mara said. “Look at all the fun he had without God getting in the way. In Gandhi’s era Hitler mutilated the majority of your ancestry. How can you stand alongside a being who allowed such monstrosities? Where was God when the first concentration camp was built? Where was God when they were gassed and gagged and murdered?”
“Maybe he was in a meeting,” Roger said. “God’s have things to do. We’re supposed to learn to manage our own affairs, and as long as we do so, we are free. And what does it matter if there’s a bearded man in the clouds who watches over us? That’s not a concern of mine. I didn’t need to read the Bible or the Gita or Koran to believe in miracles or Good or God. All you have to do is look at the formation of a caterpillar, and how it blossoms into a butterfly, and you will feel the divine—the perfect symmetry of the wings, and the transformation into beauty. Look at selflessness and charity and love. That’s enough.
“As Douglas Adams said, ‘A garden is beautiful enough without believing there are fairies at the bottom of it.’ I tend to agree. The world is full of miracles, caused by God or Gods or not; they are miracles.”
“So God is a magician!” Mara exclaimed. “A one sided coin. What else could He be called? To turn a caterpillar into a butterfly is brilliant. It’d be even more brilliant if God could turn a dead man into a living man. He can’t. You can. You have to go through with the experiment, Roger. The world has been waiting on you. This world doesn’t need more preaching prophets who advertise a paradise to come. They need a real man, flesh and blood, who can stop the suffering and death of the world.”
Roger lit the pipe again.
Another long night, he thought. Not enough medicine, not enough opium; nothing is enough to save me from myself. The Ego fights the Id in everybody; why does it have to last so long? I could kill myself with a shotgun. How could you? You’ve got too many books to write. Yeah, didn’t think of it like that. You can endure. You won’t die because of the words of this louse masquerading as a man. It is the devil. The devil is on my sofa, smoking my cigarettes, tittering back and forth as I do. Maybe if I slam my face into a wall I could stop myself from torturing me. Ivan Karamazov didn’t have to deal with this kind of torture. Maybe I should throw water at him.
Roger was a strange, strange man.

VIII: ONE SUMMER IN THE SUN

“Ah, forgive an old man!” Mara said, changing shapes. “I’m just an old drunk…”
I do know how old drunks are.
“You know how old drunks are!”
Drunken old men are often the most pretentious orators.
“Let me be pretentious then! What’s so wrong with that? I’m just a clown with a broken heart, like you.”
Roger offered him a cigarette as he pulled one from a silver case. The shadow accepted the cigarette.
“You change shapes, Mara,” he said, “but do not change nature. I am amused, but not persuaded. You are a clown.”
“Very astute, sir,” said Mara. “I’m a broken clown, not put together right, with an engineering defect that won’t let me smile and mean it. I am the weakest baboon of them all. That’s what I was made to be. That’s all I can be. I am a fool, but whoever made the wise man made the fool. Don’t you realize this, Roger? Whoever made the sheep made the fox; whoever made the predator made the prey. You think there is good. You think there is evil. Good for one is evil for another. What is good to you might be evil to someone else. There is no universal standard for evil. There is no good. There is no evil. These are your alibis. There is no one in charge, Roger.”
“But there is Right,” Roger said. “There is love, and there is right, and all works of love, are works of right. All words of love are words of right. That is good. And that work is God.”
“You call love what satisfies you in another person,” Mara said. “Your love is self serving. There is no such thing as love for anything but Me. You love others because of how they make you feel. If they make you feel good, you love them, and again you’re a slave to me.”
“I always tell my patients,” Roger said, “to never fall in love. They always ask me why, and I tell them, ‘because it’s sticky, and nothing gets the stain out.’ It makes them laugh yet conveys a truth. What I would tell them in sincerity would be to never fall in love, but forever love. You only see the selfish love, the self rewarding love. You only see one sided love, and not the love that’s true. You cannot understand selfless love.”
“Tell me about it,” Mara said. “I’d be delighted. I’ve heard it all before.”
“True love needs nothing,” Roger said. “True love needs nothing. It does not need a beneficiary; it does not need to be reciprocated—yet it remains. It needs only itself, no object to attach to, no person or object to place it on. If it is true, it is attached to all persons, and all things, and oneself. This is not the love of Narcissus, which is the only love you know.
“Love the man who spits on you. He may hate you, but feels love in his satisfaction. He feels love, but loves you, not himself, and no one else. You are his puppeteer, plucking at the strings of his desire. If someone you love does not love you—it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t disappear. What was loved remains. Love remains. True love requires nothing but itself.
“To love another, the love should not be the result of how they make you feel, but the love of what they are, the love of what is true. Love if you are happy; love if you are sad. That is love, and that love does not serve you, yet serves all.”
“Give me an example of real love, then,” Mara said. “I ask you to cite precedent.”
“Entae was a cat of mine,” Roger said. “I still have nightmares about her. I let her out the day she died, and that night I had a disturbing dream. I woke up crying and screaming, help her, help her. In it I’m killing stray cats with slingshots and bagging them up in trash bags. I’d never do this in my waking life; I think it was my own guilt, the guilt of a young man feeling responsible for a dead loved one. Then a trash truck comes and a man in grey pajamas stuffs the cats into a garbage compactor. I tried to close my eyes but had no eyelids there. I was forced to watch and listen. I was forced to watch them die.
“I remember the day we found the shivering kitten, Entae’s mother, another stray from the nearby town. Lots of strays came by our way and mother always fed them.
“She was under the edge of my father’s truck, hiding from the rain, cold and trembling. I got down on my hands and knees, and, crawling in the mud, reached under the truck to pick her up. She had a white belly, a black coat, with beige and white stripes to the tip of her tail. I kept saying, ‘here, kitty, kitty! Come on, I won’t hurt you.’ I coaxed her into the living room with a bowl of food and after that she was our cat. We named her Calico Kelly. And not too long after that she had a litter of kittens, and Entae was the runt.
“I remembered the thousands of other cats we often saw dead in the road on the way to school. I even hit a beagle in a car one night. I circled the block to see if he was still alive. He was dead, no collar, no idea where the owner was. So I buried him under grandma’s pecan tree. The horrible sound he made when I hit him made my blood curdle and my heart skip beat.
“I buried dead animals every time I found them. To see them waste away like that, with flies in their eyes, and maggots in their brains, is disrespectful to life. To look at that shivering cat we found was heartbreaking. She huddled in the corner, fearful, now out of the cold and rain, not knowing if she’d live to see another day.
“She got healthy under our care and lived a happy life. Everybody in the family loved her. We picked the runt of the litter, a wee little black kitten with a white spot on her nose. She was the smallest, solid black with one white foot and another yellow foot, and had beige calico stripes down her back. We named her Entae.
“Mother loved her at first sight. We took the other kittens into town in a big wicker basket to try to pass them out to people who would provide a good home. Most of them made their way back to our house through the hills.
“Entae never showed hostility, never hissed or scratched at anyone, not even strangers. She was forever loving and passive. Whenever a stranger tried to pet her, she just rolled over on her back to play.
“The way she filled the spot my long gone father left was a perfect fit for the jigsaw puzzle that was my life, and with her there it was complete.
“The scariest dream I ever had involved Entae. I woke up screaming, soaking wet with sweat, breathing heavy. My pajamas clung to my skin. In the dream Entae walked behind me on the shore. I was collecting seashells, something I did a lot, and she was with me, you know, to sniff them out, to help.
“One of the seashells wouldn’t come up. I put down the jar, squatted, and pulled as hard as I could. It finally came up. The sea drained like a bathtub and a giant jar, from the clouds, scooped us up with a bit of sand and water.
“We were trapped inside a jar with no air holes in the top. Strange faces pressed against the glass. I tried to shout but had no breath to do so. When Entae suffocated, when she slumped and fell, I woke up screaming.
“One night she got lost in a storm and ended up halfway across town. A neighbor brought her back to us. Her back was torn in half, blood caught in her whispers, clotted. She looked like she was dying.
“The neighbor was hanging clothes when he saw Entae walk into his dog pen, looking for some water, maybe shade. The dog, a hunting dog named Yoyo, attacked her when she got in the pen. He ripped her stomach open and shook her back and forth between his teeth like a lifeless toy.
“The kind old man jumped the fence, opened the cage, and pulled her out of the dog’s mouth. And she never tried to scratch or bite him. She was Gandhi in a cat’s body.
“We wrapped her in a towel. Mother called a veterinarian, on the other side of town, and he said, ‘Come on in and we’ll have a look at her. Can’t promise nothing.’
“Entae sat on my lap, wrapped in a towel, all the way to the vet’s office. Blood seeped from her stomach, onto the towel, onto my stomach. Stains of blood won’t wash out with Bleach. The ride seemed to take forever. I sat and watched her bleed.
“The vet told mother she would die. ‘It’d be best to put her to sleep,’ he said. Mother refused. The man said it would cost a thousand dollars to keep her in the hospital over the weekend. My mother always worried about money, but didn’t hesitate to pay, not when it came to Entae. She taught me a profound lesson that day: a living thing is more important than money and as important as every other type of life. Not just people mourning people, but people mourning friends, not pets, but dear and cherished family members.
“We waited in the parking lot the entire weekend. The vet came in on Monday. He went in and stayed there for a while before coming back to tell us somehow she was alive. For better or for worse, she was alive.
“We spent every night together after that, sprawled across my bed. She purred beside me as I rubbed her belly. Every hour awake I was with her. When she got tired she would crawl onto my chest and go to sleep. At seven in the morning she went to the front door and waited for us to let her out. She slept on an old parasol on our front porch during the day, in the shade, just lounging and loving her life in a way I’ve never been capable of.
“I never walked past her without stopping to pet her and kiss her and tell her I love her. I really did. She was my friend, a real friend, who could feel and love and feel empathy. It’s pathetic, isn’t it, to hear about a grown man who still cries over the death of a cat? Maybe it is. But I loved her, and I still love her. I still miss my friend.
“She was fond of long hikes in the woods behind our house. She prowled around the high grass in the day, chasing grasshoppers in the field, or fishing moles out from under the boathouse at night. But her favorite place was the porch, where she slept on an old umbrella, a tiny parasol with broken wires. When the sun was high in the sky and the heat beat down, Entae slept on the parasol, in the shade, or under an old pear tree. That is where she’s buried.
“Entae loved nothing more than shade; that’s what she went looking for. That was her little life in the bush of the sun.
“I remember the last time I saw her alive. I’d stayed up all night the night before with her in my room. I wrote for a while on the computer, with her on my lap, and seven came. She went to the door and I let her out.
“‘Be good,’ I said, kissing her head. She ran across the porch, stopped for a moment to clean herself, and then ran down the steps, into the yard. I never saw her alive again.
“When I awoke later in the day my mother said Entae was gone. She had tears in her eyes. My father and my mother walked all the streets in town shouting her name. I walked through the woods with a flashlight and a bowl of food, rattling as I called out, ‘Here kitty, kitty, kitty.’ But she never came.
“I went out to look again at three in the morning. I called her for an hour at least, throwing pieces of ham around the porch and walkway, hoping she would find the scent and return home. She didn’t even come when mother called her; that’s how I knew something was wrong.
“I went back out at seven, in the morning, with a housecoat on, not even sleepy, unable to rest. I looked under the house, under the pear tree, and on the parasol. She was nowhere to be found.
“I went to go look for her again around lunch time. My mother stopped me at the door. She told me they found her. Tears stained her face and my stomach knotted. Her eyes were bloodshot and frayed at the ends. Mascara ran under her eyes.
“Entae, four years old, so brief a ride on life’s carousel, was down dead behind our deck, in the high grass, in the shade.
“It’s the saddest thing I can remember feeling. When I pictured such a beautiful thing, alive, and moving, vital, animate, and now so cold and lifeless, I wanted to slam my face against a wall. I wanted to pull my teeth out and scream at the sun. I did. I said to my mother, ‘Sometimes I wonder if God cares about our lives at all.’
“Mother stood beside me with a towel, Entae’s towel, unwashed and stained, and we wrapped her little body in it. Together we dug a small hall in front of a stump by the pear tree, her favorite spot for shade. My face was buried in mother’s morning gown when she sat Entae in the hole. I had a soapstone angel, in my room, that grandma made, and I went to get it. I found it and placed it on the stump above where Entae lay. I stood there blank for several hours; a sick feeling, empty, complete despair, washed over me. She was gone. And all the begging in the world wouldn’t make her meow again for me.
“I cleaned her water bowl and took it to my room to keep. Every time I look at it I see her on the porch, on the parasol, her little eyes closed, her white stomach face up. I hear her strange meow inside my mind and the sickness overwhelms me.
“Sometimes I put pieces of bread on her grave so the birds will come, so she won’t be alone, like that little boy in The Brothers Karamazov. There’s nothing I wouldn’t give to pet her and kiss her little head one more time, or hug her and say I love you. I did love her. I do love her. Had I but cherished our time as I do now. Now she’s gone and all my tears won’t bring her back.
“I’ve always believed every human being has done something in his or her life to make them guilty of a crime and deserving of punishment. I’ve done things myself I feel I deserve to die for. Maybe I’ve done things to deserve being dead behind the deck, but Entae didn’t. Entae didn’t deserve to die.
“I remembered what my mother told me of Heaven. I spent a long time wondering if Entae went, and if I’d see her if I got to go. But human beings are the only animals who think they’re going to Heaven and the only animals that don’t deserve it.
“Before I left my home, now so long ago, I returned to where we buried her, under a long row of dead pear trees. I looked at the cross I made her and the soapstone angel on the stump. I screamed at a nonchalant sky. She was dead, in the ground, dark and in a cold place, wet in a wet ground where I could never dry her off. She was alone and hungry, out in the rain, still looking for a home, still looking for some shade.
“If I could talk to her, I’d say, ‘Rest, Entae, as you did on the umbrella, in my closet, at the foot of my bed. Rest, like you did at mother’s feet when the chill of winter came. On the day I sat the toy boat in her namesake out to sea, on which a rose red candle burned away, I hummed a little song for her that day. I named it Entae’s song, and I buried it with her, not knowing where to mail it.
“We loved her with the real type of love, Mara, the type not based on profit or gain, or convenience, but with the real kind: love for love’s sake. Real love comes in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes it’s a towel to wrap a starving cat in. Sometimes it’s a new television. We loved her for what she was and while she was. That love does not serve you, nor us, because every day her death addressed we cry the tragic memories away. This is the love that makes you fail and fall. Entae’s gone, and that old song, has been sung a thousand times before, but when I hear her name, again, I feel the pain, and wonder where she went.
“Wherever she is, in the ground, or in the sky, I hope she found some shade.
“And the Love of God is never seen or felt,” Mara said. “You give the honor of your own species to the Anonymous Santa Claus. You sweep what you don’t understand under a carpet labeled God.
“Do you think people on the other side, in the fires of Hell, speak about the love of God or love at all or their pet cats? Do you think the people being killed during the crusades believed the Crusaders to be righteous? They believed them to be evil. And so they were. You hear the screams don’t you? The screams of the innocent burnt upon the stake of piety, by those who thought themselves to be righteous.”
Roger began to feel even sicker.
It could be the potency of the opium, he thought, as good opium always makes one queasy at first, but it could be the talking shadow with his cigarettes and rhetoric. I should kill myself. That would shut him up. And your daughter? I’m not going to do it. I just like thinking about doing it, as I know in some alternate Universe I’ve killed myself, and since there are billions of other universes, I must have killed myself a million times by now, and in others I must have escaped the torments of this shadow before me, my Mara. But he makes a good point. There is so much suffering in the world. Shut up. I know that. The suffering in the world is the result of the Mara nature in all beings. How could a cat suffer because of Mara? There is suffering apart from the Mara mind, the suffering of age and death. Good point. Thanks. You’re welcome.
Roger tittered so, as he often did, worrying about slipping back into madness. He mimicked the movements of the shadow who still sat before him. He felt the shame again.
“You hate yourself, even now,” Mara said. “You hate yourself for everything I say which you agree with. You look at me, the beast inside, and you are ashamed. You are ashamed because I point out the beast in you. Still a beast is more useful than an angel made of soapstone on a grave. At least a beast can act. You are beasts, but it is not your fault. Do you punish the robot for the crimes of the programmer? Do you punish the dog for the crimes of the Master? No, for the Master has given desire to the robot, programmed it into his mind, and left him alone in his own head, with no sense of how or why.
“I’ve observed you creatures for centuries. And you are a natural disaster, a mutation in the flotsam, unable to crawl out of the bowl as one by one you all go down the drain. Mankind is a beautiful and terrifying natural disaster.”
“You repeat yourself,” Roger said. “So?” Mara laughed. “Mankind is circling the toilet. And you, the genius from Galilee, will leave them in the bowl? You could be much more than Christ ever was. You could give people what he promised for a hundred dollars instead of a life of servitude. No sin, no shame, just freedom from the slavery of religion.”
“The Christ essence exists inside all persons,” Roger said. “The Buddha nature exists in every man. And you, Mara, are in all persons. You can, as you often do, destroy the Buddha nature, and leave people who are nothing but your slave, your gaudy ventriloquist act. You can silence the Christ and the Buddha in all beings by blinding them by desire and making them your slave. You enslave people by desires of pleasure. When a person cannot be persuaded by you, and you leave them forever, they have only the voice of good, and they speak on behalf of good, and that Good is the work of God. When you are gone, nothing but the Christ in man remains, and there, Christ is born again, and the man in whom he manifests, speaks on his behalf, on behalf of good, on behalf of God. Anyone who cannot be persuaded by you is the Buddha again awakened. This is how Siddhartha awoke; when you could not persuade him under the tree. This is how Christ saw the light, when you could not tempt him in the desert. This is how my cousin Kahlil dealt with you. That is why he is a man of truth the world admires. This is how Gandhi became the heart of the Earth, the consciousness of all of mankind, a bright light in a time of darkness. You could not persuade him with any of your pleasures or rewards.”
Roger lit the pipe again.
“And what happened to Gandhi?” Mara smirked. “A man under my control sent him to Neverland. And what happened to the Christ? I invaded those who nailed the Son of Man to the cross.
“They knew not what they did,” Roger said. “
“Ha!” Mara said. "Humanity is a laughing stock and a disgrace. You are thought of as the lice are thought of, only worse. You are capable of great things, and fight each other because of me. I am the soul of the weak minded, and the weak minded kill the men of greatness; because your prophet’s only love, they let themselves die at the hands of those who only hate. You are all capable of so much, but concern yourself with toys and pleasures of the world. And why not? I’m sure they find more joy than those who don the saffron robe as you have. The lice are not so deluded about their purpose. It is worse to be capable of acting and not act than it is to be unable to act. You are the lice I dream of. And you are the dreaming lice who look upon the bulbs above as though they were the sun. What impression will you leave upon the ages? Bloodstains and footprints in the sand which disappear with dust. If you could put humanity in a box, what would you put inside, Roger?”
“Hamlet, a picture of a human family, pictures of all known animals, recordings of Mozart and Pink Floyd, War and Peace, a portrait of a male and female of every age and race, the Bhagavad-Gita, The Prophet, The Brothers Karamazov, my Songs of Galilee, and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. I’ll leave each as a copy in binary, and each as a copy in their own language, and on every one I’ll put a speck of blood, to preserve it. Our DNA would be amidst the strands. That would be enough to represent this world and our existence.”
“How would you keep the box from being torn to pieces throughout the quiet eons? The silence in space is deafening, and space can keep a secret. Perhaps you beasts will kill in space as well, and the blood might drip down, drop by drop, from some abandoned ship, and form a ring of blood around the Earth. I’m sure you’re eager to colonize those other heads so you can cover them with mini malls and trash. You fancy you are important. You’ve got cars and planes and monuments unto yourselves, but they all fall to ash and rubble. What good is Hamlet and his to be or not to be soliloquy when no one is left to read? What good is the verse of Old Khayyam when there is but one eye, the eye of God, and that eye can’t see itself? Roger, the camera sees the entire world but cannot see itself.”
“God could see Himself in a mirror, as a mirror, infinity in all directions, eternity, and silence speaks the glass.” Roger said, “The Narrator writes to see himself while we write the stories of our own. We choose the paths which take us where we go. It is choice, and nothing but, that accounts for our life, how it started, and how it ends. The state of man is due to the algebra of the human equation.”
“And this is how it ends,” Mara said. “After today you will become, Rodin’s thinking man undone, and chip away like stone. No one will believe your story, of my visit and my dream, and you’ll write a story about it, under a nom de plume, and make a character that speaks for you, but says what you disagree with, just to see another side of the human equation. And they’ll call you blasphemous, and cruel, and mad, a crackpot Buddha wannabe. Few will see under the philosophy a beating heart of love, though you speak out of love, of the nature of man. This doesn’t entertain people, Roger. But you’ll write it down for your own sake, that you may know more about the mind. Oh, how far you go to know thyself! But, in the end, the comma’s there, and whoosh, you’re gone, E.T. phones home, and the whispers of the dying are forgotten when the screen goes blank.”
Mara blew the candle out. The smoke curled in slender tendrils to the ceiling before fading.
The pipe was empty. No more opium, only misery, in endless supply, so unlike joy. The happiness reservoir, fountain of youth, was empty as Roger sat in his chair in deep despair but had to speak.
“I will not yield to you,” Roger said.
“But you will disappear,” Mara said. “Like your mother and father before you, you’ll go into the ground. And there, you will be moved. How brief the time you have to stay, one chance to live, and wonder why, to rise and fall under the sky, and then, from where you come, you return to sleep, to never be aroused again, like that poem of yours, One Summer in the Sun? Could you read it to me?”
Roger read in disconnected monotone, embarrassed, the poem that first got him attention as a poet. His father once told him, when young Roger wrote him a poem, “Poetry is for girls, boy.”
Roger was not proud of his poetry and preferred to be known as a novelist or playwright, poetry being a hobby more so than profession.
“Candle in the music box,” Roger said, “spotlight on the show, light the paths which once were dark aglow, so ballerinas in the box will know which way to go.
“For their summer in the sun, one long yawn before winter’s breath, a ring of smoke blown through the gates of nowhere, and life, that beautiful nothing, brief candle for its own sake lit, begins to blur, to fade, another song from the jukebox played. Once so loud, and now a drawl, becomes a whisper in the hall.
“One chance to live, and wonder why, to rise and fall beneath the sky. Sun rises. Sun sets. A summer in the sun is all we get. The sun to smile, sun to fade, a single dash, between two dates, poor written by the hands of fate. One moment caught inside a bulb, our hour to abide, with all trapped living things inside, light but a moment, as snow on the desert’s dusty face, glimmer in the hall and go their way.
“One after another, into the sky for miles, a blind caretaker, with a hammer, forever walks the aisles. His calloused feet oft scratch the path; he on occasion taps the glass, releasing light into the air, to Saturn’s seat without a care.
“Destiny behind the veil will play, with all us vessels on the waves, slaves to the lighthouse, in the rain, Miss Destiny, the ball and chain; until she folds, and counters her pay, then in silence walks away. No moments from the box to take, from the fountain by the waste. Life, brief candle, one summer in the sun, tomorrow, and tomorrow, then there are none.
“Life itself, a momentary scream, amidst the sea of nothing gleamed, a murmur in the ivy by the well; one book, the Narrator’s book of Tales. The title of our story is One Summer in the Sun, tomorrow and tomorrow, and they are done. One chance to bloom, once chance to shine, once chance to look up at the sky.
“One summer in the sun, in winter’s way, our life’s passage does delay. All of those who into light have went, after their pocket watch of time is spent, turn brittle in the air, and silent strike the ground. The sun will rise. The sun will set. One summer is all we get.
“The finish line, same as the start, oh what a nobody has in his heart. A thousand roads to nowhere, lost highways to the sun, the finish line is the same place the human race begun. And in that race together, we all finish last. Faceless watcher’s, in the crowd, recline their heads to laugh.
“Again and again we cars go in desperate circles ‘round and ‘round, sometimes to brush against each other, though seldom make a sound. And blind we pass each other by in a tempest tossed around.
“Before the blind man, with his hammer, turns to face your aisle, laugh with the best of them, and smile. This is just graffiti scrawled on time’s unending wall, for no one left by nobody, a fragment in the stall.
“Tangles in the Earth’s coiffure, for life, the limited time offer. The human condition, the same will remain, no cure ever, stays the same.
“Another verse, just one more song, like an old-time sing-a-long, by pebbles lost in sand and foam, who sing alone, and murmur make, while they a ride on the carousel take. And then they sleep, perchance to dream, of the things that pass by the screen: patterns in the ivy, and their seams, an arabesque oft told before, of those who run blind on the shore—all of them on their way, to see, the Wizard of Oz for empathy. The highway is long, how awful to know—the door at the end of the road is closed.
“Let the hands wind up another, song for the music box. And let those shadow shapes around the candle, loll till the melody stops.
“By candle light, or dark of night, their path forever paved. Every second of the life the same sad song is played. Again and again we figurines spin, a lullaby loud for no one to hear, turns static into silence, fades, as dust upon a mirror.
“Another poor player, whose hour forgot, those passionate words on the stage. Another soliloquy, the sound and the fury, bit player lines erased. Characters live, and characters die, some do nothing, instead wonder why. All of them are together lost, together to laugh and to cry. Some of them love, and some of them hate. Some look out, some in. For a morning fleeting contact made, another to begin. There’s no such thing as yesterday, no tomorrow, and no end: just one long now that never ends.”

IX: NO EXIT

“Very good, Roger,” Mara said. “Such a beautiful, emotional, and subtle work—sublime and dreamy, not one line or word is meaningless or wasted. I hate it! Are you just trying to sound deep or entertain?”
Roger smiled, saying nothing.
“I just thought about Entae,” Mara said, Roger’s brief smile disappearing, “and remembered a cat I knew. I’ll tell you about her. A middle-aged man, a regular guy, found her in the woods. He had Down syndrome, but a tender, compassionate heart. He’s walking through the woods one day, by himself, and finds a group of kittens. All of them are dead but one. They’re covered with damp leaves, black hair stained black. The only one left alive goes home with Herman. He loved her before he got home.
“As much as he loved her it never occurred the cat was starving. So he takes her inside, wraps her in a towel, and takes the leaves and grass out of her hair. He pats her dry with a towel, feeling her bones, jutting out from her ribs. She meows and he thinks she wants to play, but she’s starving and he didn’t know.
“Several hours later he prepares dinner for himself and the kitten. He makes a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich for himself and the kitten, the kitten he named Lucky.
“He placed the sandwich on the floor in front of the cat. She was too weak to stand up. He tore off a piece of bread and tried to stuff it in her mouth. She couldn’t open it, and died right there, as he screamed, ‘please eat it! Please! Please don’t die. He squatted in front of her cardboard box with the sandwich, pushing it against her dead face, crying, ‘wake up. Please wake up.’ Lucky, you okay? Please… Look, I’ll eat it. Look! It’s good. Lucky, please wake up. I can find you something else to eat…” And that sad man sat there in the floor, screaming at the body of the kitten, whose sleep would not be broken.”
“You knew my father,” Roger said. “I wish I could see him in hell. We could blackjack for eternity, and he can win, and he can laugh, and I will laugh with him.”
“Everything disappears,” Mara said. “The maze covers a million miles, a thousand years, and at the end there is a door that says NO EXIT. The door that waits at the end of the path is locked and no one made a key. Those who sit in Sunday suits atoned will die. Why do people die, Roger? Because they’re born sick, Roger. That’s why. We all are. You can stop the suffering, the misery, and death, but you refuse out of piety! You’d rather die than stay with the world you love so much?
“One day your Mother Earth will wither as an elm and die, no longer capable of letting leaves fall to the ground. And all your memories, the images of what you’ve seen and done, will die with you, forever lost. Go through with the experiment; no one will ever have to die again. You can make man immortal. You must go through with your experiment! How can you be so selfish?”
Roger was silent.
Mara’s face twisted in agony.
“What importance can you place on life? You shapes of shadows dance around a far off candle with too small a wick to support your life forever. The candle burns the long eons of the waste away, collapses on itself, and swallows existence whole. Then the Master host will close the drapes and leave nothing but the silent night, to say nothing again, and nothing after plays except the silence lullaby.
“What will anyone know of humanity after Sol heaves her final sigh to die? What will be known of this world? It will be seen as from a far, at a glance, by an eye which cannot see itself, which has no hands for comfort, and no shoulder for the crying children. The children of god are crying and hanging themselves and cutting their parents in half. Forgive them, Lord, they know exactly what they do. Forgive them anyway.
“A big bang will not chase you from the Earth. The tears and muffled sobs of loved ones left will chase the departed into the sea. And the endless tears, shed for loves long gone, will water roses by the grave, and that Eye will be watching then, with no lips, unable to smile.
“Where is your master now? You behave like dogs whose commandments are but three; sit, stay, roll over—though they are written out as twelve, by lightning, by commandment of Lt. Colonel Burning Bush. Does that make sense? Sit, stay, and roll over: those commandments would make sense. Do you believe you can buy a ticket to the Heavens by whispering I’m sorry oh so sorry on your death bed as you die? You are dogs. You beg and play dead for treats not guaranteed. At least a dog can see the biscuit, not like you. You stumble in the dark with outstretched arms, feeling your way through the maze, looking for answers, answers that hurt, as apple after apple is taken from the tree. You are a dog for whom no treat exists, a rat whose maze does not end with cheese, but with a locked down with NO EXIT spray-painted on it.
“And that is what the old man has talked you into remaining: a slave in a maze with no exit.
“Man is such a cunning and devious monster, the most wicked animal of them all. A tiger would not kill its cub for pleasure; it would not disembowel a gazelle for amusement just to see the thick red blood pour from the creature’s throat. A lioness won’t kill her cubs for money. She would not devour her son and pull out his entrails and lick her black lips to taste the blood again. Men and women do this. This is the creature man before you on the plate. Your faith refuses to swallow what I put before you. Look at man, naked, without the costumes and the pomp, and you have a desperate animal, confused, and dangerous to himself and others. You must look at this passively, as God looks from the Belltower, seeing but the wasteland of our lives.
“What will you do to stop this when the words of murdered prophets cannot? How will you remove the beast from your blood? There is a beast inside of man, a beast and an angel too. As you say, the Mara essence, selfishness, megalomania, more fiends, and cruelty is in all beings. The Buddha essence, in all beings too, the compassionate, caring man, seeker of wisdom and knowledge, serves Good and Love and thus serves God. The majority of man amuses me. I play with them as puppets by the strings of their desire. And when I control the strings, mankind is an idol unto himself, who does not care about the suffering or the disposable ones of the world.
“And the number of those whom I control far exceeds the number of those compelled by chosen Good. But the lots of you are dogs. Dog eats dog and man eats all. The men of this world, the greedy and the selfish, will always choose my side. I offer the reward, the ego polish, the self esteem primer paint. They’ll crawl the mud on their belly, the worm, if he’ll win a grand prize give-away. That’s what they want. That’s what life is to some. God blows the whistle and man comes screaming through the gate with a shopping cart. He piles all he can into the buggy before the time runs out and he can’t keep anything at all. This is truth, but what does truth matter? Truth doesn’t always make one feel good. I give people the pleasures they desire. That’s what they want. That’s why they dance about my strings. Giving into temptation is much more therapeutic than fighting it as you do.
“There’s a lying angel in your mind, Roger. She tells you to calm down. Everything will be fine. She tells you to endure. She tells you to relax. Everything will be just fine, Roger. You just have to relax a while. You lay there, trembling misery in the dark, and the angel tells you the sweetest life of all. There is a God who cares. If a man is talking to angels he should be put on medication. One pill and the angel’s gone, like that.
“The angel appears before you in the evening. She loves your hair. She loves your eyes. She even says she loves you, and a handful of other lies. She points toward the Garden of Eden with a lying smile.
“Close your eyes and you will see the mirage upon the hill. The mirage is dressed in white. You hear wind whisper by. The wind dances with the sand. It howls. You are distracted by the sand, and turn around—the angel dressed in white is gone, like that.
“She waves by with the dust and smiles, and speck by speck she disappears. Her tranquil smile floats but a while, before you on the mound, before rising high into the air, only to be scattered by the dust against a breeze.
You wander around distraught, confused, in a fugue. You look for the angel to appear again. You find instead, crawling down your arm, a lowly louse that too is lost. He is lost amidst the hair on your arm, exploring the deserts of his world, and there, in the desert, you feel like that lost louse. That lost louse is you. That lost louse is me. The louse is all who look yet never find.
“It is the louse I dream I am. It’s the louse you dream you are, another lost louse in the desert of the mind.
“His family has been destroyed by shampoo. He is lost. Does this feeling sound familiar? You wandered through the crowd in a daze after your mother was hanged. You know how a poor louse feels. You know how it feels to be lost in a maze with no way out.
“But what concern is shown? You squish the louse and turn away, to crawl up the hill, like Sisyphus, waiting for Zeus to be impeached.
“But God, you can agree, has sent down one pesticide after another: storm and fire and floods and sulfur and hurricanes that whirl across the surface of our world, leaving nothing but monuments of rubbish, stacks of metal, and bodies in its wake. Or is this another off day for God, your Profiteer of Misery?”
Roger was silent.
“What makes the monster man lick his lips more often than the tears of the meek and the suffering of the sinless ones?”
“You,” Roger said. “You are the Pleasure Principal. Your students get good grades for desire. Your bubblegum is their reward and that is evil. I can’t stand bubblegum Contentment is the path that leads to wisdom. Contentment with life, as it is, is not a sin¸ but a virtue. And every night I dream of sin, and in it find redemption, because sin narrows the path of virtue as it grows, making the path smaller and harder to see, and truth occludes it more, but I found my way through the woods once in my dream.
“Tell me about this dream, then,” Mara said. “I’d love to hear this one.”
“In the dream I walk into my father’s room. He’s sitting on the edge of the bed with a plastic pipe, connected to a breathing machine, and leans against a pillow. The television static reflects in his eyes. The scar from open heart surgery pulsed pale yellow in the TV light.
He always had a napkin to stop the blood from getting on his expensive shirts.
“He opens his mouth and all I hear is a high pitched frequency. I fall to the ground. When I open my eyes I find myself in hell. I had been there before. I knew all of the locations, the sights, the sounds; I knew that place was hell.
“People were huddled together in the dark, terrified, bumping into each other as they walked, blind with outstretched arms, shrieking, mumbling incoherent. They’re all packed in close together, like a fair, like a group of cattle being led to the slaughter. Everyone was hysterical, panicked, and horrified.
“There were flashes of fire in the sky. In the distance a cylindrical column, maybe a billion stories tall, slammed into the ground at random, killing millions when it struck. It resembled a roly-poly made of metal, a giant centipede. It slammed into one group of people, then another and then another, then another, coming closer. I was trapped in a panicked crowd, unable to move, trapped in a sea of ragged clothes and sweating people running desperate.
“Everyone was screaming, running around on fire, like cigarettes with legs. They turned into cigarettes by metamorphosis. The young cigarettes were happy, because they were tall, not burnt too far down, like their parents were, whose ashes fell as they walked, or the dead and forgotten, the ones who had long stopped burning and collapsed, extinguished, on a pile of ash. Some didn’t mind being on fire. Others ran around and screamed and tried to climb the wall of the ashtray. Giant thumbs stubbed them out as their sibling cigarettes screamed, hair on fire, running around like madmen…
“There were two crowds. Between them was a never ending cliff. Shops lined both sides like old time bazaars. Merchants, peddlers of death, set up shops along the street in Hell to sell their goods, but there nobody had a way to pay. I had the very real feeling I was in hell. I knew it. I had been there before.
“The massive column was the most familiar. I have memories of riding on it, and memories of being crushed by it, and memories of me being trapped in the gears of its black and cavernous mouth. It made its way toward us, making the ground tremor as it crawled across the barren landscape of the scorched Earth.
“I ran into one of the shops, a small casino, poor lit, with overturned tables and scattered papers on the floor. My father set behind a blackjack table, wearing a uniform, name tag and all.
“’The game is twenty-one,’ he says. I have a seat in front of him. His height is exaggerated. Instead of the stumpy man my father was, I saw a towering giant, twice my height, as though a God, looking down on me with judgment.
“He dealt a card to me, a card to him, a card to me, a card to him. We each turned a card over. My face card was a suicide king. My other card was a ten of hearts—twenty, just one shy of blackjack, almost perfect.
“My father turns over an ace. He looks at me and smiles. I’m sitting there with twenty, and he shrugs my tense demeanor off and says, ‘I’ll stay.’ He smiles so wide—I had to believe he had blackjack; otherwise he’d never smile like that. So I hit, with twenty, and father turns over the card. ‘Two of spades,’ he says. ‘Twenty-two, bust!”
“He turns over his other card to reveal an eight of diamonds, the ace making but nineteen. Had I stayed I would have won. This dream never changes. I always hit with twenty and lose. He always laughs at me. I ask him why he laughs, and he says, ‘Oh, it’s just your book.’ What book? I ask. ‘Roger’s Book of Sin,’ he said. ‘I’m on chapter seven thousand, where you’re killing the chicken for no reason.
The dream ends. I wake my mother screaming, ‘Cheater! Cheater! Liar! Fraud!’
Then mommy gives me valium and I go back to sleep, another sin to rest, to wake to sin again.”
“What knows man of sin?” Mara asked. “You hang your sin over your breakfast table. You wear golden pendants of your savior murdered. And look at you now, going nowhere, content with it.
“Without God’s intervention, where would your species be? You would have finished the Tower of Babel. Go through with your experiment, make man immortal, and the Tower is complete. There would be heaven on Earth, everyone’s dream come true, yet it is hidden in the Earth like you, and two feet underground in a haggard volume bound. You act out of piety, not compassion!
“Your race could throw off the oppression of the dark ages and no longer need a God. They’d have no need for hope or fear.
“You call a push in the right direction providence! What a push can't accomplish a hammer to the skull can. What can a prayer do that a pistol can't? Then what do you say but 'it was His will I shed thy blood!'— This is still the truest of mankind's great illusions, that he can kill for good. And it is I who trick him. He dangles on my strings and loves every single moment of it.
“I see nothing when I look into the mirror. What do you see, Roger? A dying animal is what you see! Look at all those wrinkles on your face. And yet you are so young.”
“I was an old man before I hit puberty,” Roger said.
“Well,” Mara laughed. “Did you think you would stay young forever? What matters of your work and discoveries if it will disappear? Soon you will cease to be. And with you will go all the pursuits and plans and novels you wished to write. It is buried, and wrapped in the silence of the ages, where you cannot scream for help.
All your suffering, misery, toil and work, is locked away in silence in a box, with no Mara mind to argue with, no true Good to prevail. No work matters if your reward is nothing! You come from nothing and go back to nothing with nothing in your hands. What purpose had you then to come?
“What one calls sin another calls virtue. How do you clip off your insect wings? You grab the hands of God as they come down, and ride them into Heaven. You complete the Tower. There’s no confusion of tongues capable of stopping you. You can speak all languages of the spoken world. Speak to them and tell them how you act out of the good of man. They will fall to their knees before you, Roger from Galilee, who brought Heaven to the Earth for three low payments of thirty-nine ninety-nine.”
“Iesus hominum salvator,” Roger said. “Om gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi swaha.”
“You've heard that too, huh? Does it ring true for you or is it just something you thought was wise to quote?”
Roger was silent. The throbbing in his skull made him nauseous. He felt as though he would never shake the shadow of his Mara mind, and forever be the slave of that which tempted him, or a slave to fighting off temptation.
He feared he would not have the character to do what he was born to do, reignite the faith of man in men.
He would make sure the world knew the reason for which he died—that they may reconcile their fears of that undiscovered country.
But Mara’s eyes still looked his own, and he despaired. Then he heard the voice of the old man in his mind:
Endure, Roger, said the voice. Pain is impermanent. It will pass away. No blade can the Atman cut. Be a mountain unto evil, unto Mara. Do not advance. Do not retreat. Do not move. Endure, Roger, the pain of the world. It comes and goes. A thousand frowns are worth one laugh. A thousand tears are worth one smile. Even the most beloved suffer sometimes, that they may know true joy and freedom.
The discomfort in Roger’s chest turned from cold and misery to warmth and euphoria. The strange sensation, the lightness of being, scared him at first, as he struggled to regain control. Then he let go: waves of warmth and ecstasy passed through his body electric like. He looked at Mara and smiled.
“I’m so glad you decided to stop by, Mara,” Roger said. “Please, continue. I think you have a point. Perhaps you’re right.”

X: FOR ALL THE MANTIS PRAY

“Yes!” Mara exclaimed. “The time is at hand, Roger! You will be reborn in front of millions, immortal, the first to walk the Earth. Don’t die for the sake of humanity. You know foolish, cliché, and silly that is?”
“I see how silly it is,” said Roger. “You’re right.”
“You will bring man to the summit of evolution, and fulfill all those ancient prophecies,” Mara said. “You will offer them something grander than the wheel and fire, what Prometheus once offered man.”
“Prometheus is immortal, though tied to a tree, and every day the buzzards come to eat his entrails. But every night they grow back and the buzzards pick his guts apart again. Bad example, Mara. You could’ve done better than that. Please, get back to the religious mumbo-jumbo.”
“The seven candle sticks have been lit in Asia,” Mara said. “The first begotten of the dead will be you. It won’t be Jesus descending from the clouds. It will be you, the poet who comes from Galilee, not a man now dead two thousand years. And every eye will watch the demonstration of your remedy to the ailment death. It will be broadcast throughout the world, on television, on the radio, in the newspapers, on the internet.
“I’ve read about the second coming. I’ve read about ‘he who cometh quickly,’ to be seen by every eye, as he descends from the clouds. This is you, Roger. You will descend from the clouds in your chartered plane.
“The Earth was flat to those who penned those ancient dogmas. They were wrong about that and so much more. I’d hesitate to put much stock into the words of a primitive race whose most advanced being was killed for being kind.
“The whole of man can't see the sun at once. So nothing could be seen by 'all eyes,' as the ancient fable goes. I think all of those old stories are ridiculous. Of course, not so long ago, one would not hesitate to heap the embers of the fire upon the feet of those who dared to disagree. If we were all created by the unerring hands of God, how could they be wrong or disagree? Are different God’s on different sides, like opposing coaches at football games, with culture as their team of children?”
“All will be right when all the children of the Earth wear the same religious uniform,” Roger said. “They’re all playing for the same Coach, yet call him different names. All will be right when tolerance doesn’t end, when man can look at another and see himself, a flawed being looking for a way to make it all work out.”
“But they can’t,” Mara said. “They divide like a virus and spread. That is how they were made. They were made to disagree and were tortured for it.
“What choice had they in the knowledge of good or evil? They had none then and have less now! Everything is digital these days; automated confessions, digital vigils, electronic flowers. People share electric kisses, and smile, with love, to loved ones far away…”
“The blind hear a description of a smile. The deaf read explanations of Don Giovanni…”
“Ruined gamblers are tied to chairs and shot,” Mara interrupted. “How many people now have died? And how many children lay in bed, plugged into tubes, waiting on God’s garbage boys to come pick up the trash.
“Blessed are the blind,” Roger said, “for though they do not see, they can hear the sounds of birds, and feel a lukewarm sea.
“Blessed are the deaf, though symphonies hear they none. They still can share, and get to stare, at the beauty of the sun.
“Blessed are the ruined, whose lives have gone awry, though at one moment, in their life, they smiled and watched the sky.
“Blessed is a child in pain, his fettered limbs, and weakened state. For soon he’ll see the majesty, of Heaven’s golden gates.”
“So you’re like the sheep?” Mara asked. “You bow before the poetry that satiates your fear, which calms the panic of the unknown in the world, whose wisdom washes the ache of truth away, and eases the mind as a loving mother would.
“Inside those temples, adorned with gold, where God’s receptionist works for minimum wage, they lull the sleepy children to sleep with plagiarized angel songs. And while they sing their songs, somewhere in the world, some innocent man is being executed, ripped to pieces, splattered across a highway, flesh baking in the sun.
“I imagine St. Peter knocking on God’s bedroom door to say, ‘Sir, the world is going mad. Children are killing their parents and hanging themselves and women run shouting through the streets pulling out their hair.’
“And to Peter said the Lord, ‘Just five more minutes,’ and rolls over, back to sleep again. He hits snooze on the alarm clock when it hums a hymn.”
Roger’s face was yellowed, eyes bloodshot, wanting nothing but one more hit. It’s always just one more hit, Roger. You’ve had one more hit ten thousand times by now. You can’t get a fix when you’re broken.
“What makes my words so terrible?” Mara asked. “I take your nature, your failure, what’s under the carpet, in the closet, and put it on a plate for you to eat. And there it is, like Bill’s Naked Lunch room, right on the end of the fork, repulsive, and delicious. Look at them wolf it down!”
Roger felt like he had to vomit.
“I’m sorry to have ruined your appetite, Roger. What do I say that does not hide in the alleys of the mind?
“I am the accusing calculator, you can say, who derives the sum of man, from countless equations over time, and gives you the dreadful number, sin in binary. When humans cease to offer me countless reasons to accuse them of savagery and sin and ignorance and intolerance and prejudice and hypocrisy and dishonesty and megalomania, I will cease to calculate their sins, and cease to be at all. That is how I live forever.”
“You fail to see the beauty of the world,” Roger said.
“And you never see our mother’s naked belly,” Mara laughed. “No matter how much you suffer from your sicknesses, or how much you wish to die, you cling to life, and revere it, and adore it, misery and tragedy and all. That is the paradox of your being. And look at that, Roger, the pipe is empty.”
Roger clasped his hands and leaned forward.
“For what does the Mantis pray?” Roger asked.
“You are a great man, Roger,” Mara said. “Why fret away the hours hoping it all will turn out right?
“This is what the angel's whisper in your ear, beside you, on the pillow as you fight for sleep. The quilt of human destiny, Earth’s complex arabesque, will not unravel by the road. What are we but intersecting stitches in the quilt? Karma is the quilt and we're interwoven in it. Stitches, one over the other, like vines, our lives intersect and cross. It’s a delicate quilt, made of us, the universe, and everything. If you could save a life, would you run the needle through the quilt or stall?”
“Dieu défend le droit',” Roger said.
“But who defends the wrong?” Mara asked. “Who defends the failures and the homeless and the doomed, those cast a failure from the mold? Who stands with them, without shame, and without pride? Who defends those left behind, God’s forgotten children, when the elect ascends to Heaven? Who speaks for those who don't? The elect will climb the stairway to the sky. What about the meek, the left behind, the forgotten, those left to suffer the endless years alone?
“The devil defends the wrong. The devil speaks for those who suffer the inaction of the Lord. I speak for those who prefer the bread of Earth to the bread of Heaven. It is for those I fight. I defend the men of logic, who believe in what they can see and touch. Roger, if God defends the right, who defends the wrong?”

XI: SISYPHUS UNEMPLOYED

“Do you think everything in the world is as it should be? Not even the biggest dunce alive would believe such nonsense. I say the world is a prison where inmates run the show, and high above them, in his tower, the Watchman is asleep.
“Think of Sisyphus, Roger. You named the process of deteriorating cells in the genome the Sisyphus Mechanism, right?”
“Yes,” said Roger. “That was the discovery on which I wrote my doctoral thesis, The Voice of the Soul.”
“Why call it the Sisyphus Mechanism?” Mara asked. “You have a reason for everything.”
“Because,” Roger said, “that one string in the genome led to death and deterioration and the breakdown of cells. Sisyphus always has to watch his stone roll back down the hill, as death often did to us.”
“Do you think that Sisyphus should suffer so?”
“No,” Roger said. “I don’t so. I bet he doesn’t get workman’s comp. Scabs…”
“If the punishment of Sisyphus is just, then Zeus must be impeached. Sisyphus would be free, unemployed, but, knowing humans, he would choose to roll the stone again.”
“Sisyphus unemployed,” Roger laughed. “I like that. Perhaps I’ll write a poem about it.”
“The holy land has shut its doors on you, Roger,” Mara said. “You're not welcome. So you have to kick the door down. Sad you are, a child of God, left in the rain as the draw bridge rises in the storm, creaking as the old rope heaves, shutting you out of paradise.
“What do you do when the door is closed on you, Roger?”
“I trick a nemesis of mine into kicking the door down for me. I’ll insult him, tell him where my house is, a fake address, and wait on him to kick the door down.
Roger was silent. Mara reeled. “One more story,” Mara said. “And I will leave you.”

XII: ADD AND SUBTRACT

“Last night I followed a woman through the streets,” Mara said. “She pushed a baby carriage in the rain. I just watched. I dared not hurt or hinder her in anyway.
“The streets were dark, lit by a streetlight, which flickered on and off. Smoke filled the cold December air.
“Homeless men slept in the street. They did not care if I observed them. I sit and observe, and sometimes, when I do that, I see incredible things.
“The young woman walked in a hurry. I hung a bit behind her, close enough to see, but far enough away, in the darker parts of the street, that she could not see me.
It was after midnight when the man emerged from a side street into the alley. He knocked her to the ground. The stroller turned over. The child spilled into the street. The man carried the woman into the darkest corner of the alley. The man ripped off her clothes and raped her to the sound of her shouting child. Then he stabbed her several times in the chest, took her pocketbook, her jewels, and left the child crying in the street.
“I stood across the street and watched in calm. I watched my work and saw that it was good. The screams of the child got him off the most. The blood, a sickening black, glistened under the moon. The robber disappeared again into the darkness.
“I walked over to where the dead woman lay in the street. Her blood seeped into a drainage line by the curb. It flowed so well, drop by drop, like black ink into a well.”
“Did you follow the man?” Roger asked.
“I did,” Mara said.
“And what happened to him?” Roger asked.
“On the other side of town he was hit by a teenage driver as he ran across the road in haste!” Mara laughed. “Life and death is such a stupefying comedy when viewed from the outside. It’s an interesting circle isn’t it? And you think God is just?”
“God is just,” Roger said. “We are not. If all men acted on behalf of Good, none of your stories would exist.”
“Is God merciful?” Mara asked.
“God is merciful,” Roger replied. “We are not always merciful.”
“How can you say the Magician is merciful in the face of such tragedy? A beautiful woman is ripped to pieces as her young child watches, screaming, alone in a dark back alley. Is that His mercy? The child will grow up in a foster home. He will forever have the nightmare of the night he watched his mother die. In his dreams he’ll see the shadow grab his mother and drag her into the dark. He will see the shadow swallow his mother whole and leave him there to die. He’ll never find happiness. He’ll drink and do drugs and drift from one place to another before he puts a gun in his mouth, in a trailer all alone, and blows his brains out.
“Or will the same child grow and go to that same back alley in the night, fall to his knees, kiss the earth on which his mother was ripped to pieces, and cry hosanna? Will he find forgiveness in his heart as I scream vengeance in his ear? If so, he is a fool!
“How does it not sicken you to see such naked depravity and tragedy?”
Roger was silent. Mara reeled in pain.
He’s beginning to become weak, Roger thought. Maybe if I asked him to read my screenplay he’d bugger off. He’s not finished. Not yet, but he’s about to become desperate. I must not be swayed. I must not be moved. I must not let Mara play with me as though I’m on his strings. Fear will dissipate. Fear will leave. The shadow who sits before me will leave. If not, I know I’ve never done this, but I will be forced to call the cops on a hallucination believed to be the devil. I’m sure they’ve got a warrant on him somewhere! He’s Satan! If not, I’d like to at least get a restraining order.

XIII: DOES NOT COMPUTE

“This story…” Mara began.
Roger interrupted.
“You said one more story, and it has been told! Now leave. I’m sleepy!”
“You’re not sleepy, Roger, you are dreaming. And when you wake up, I will be gone; allow me one more story and I shall leave.”
“Then tell it,” Roger said. “It will not sway me.”
“This is something I witnessed not too long ago. A meth-head, you know, a man addicted to amphetamines, a happy chap for sure, sat on a balcony overlooking a beach. He was depressed, as so many of our unhappy generation are, so when his bottle of bourbon ran dry, and his pill supply depleted, he put a pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
“He wished to die but he survived. His teeth shattered like a wicker basket as blood splattered against the wall behind him. The maid found him on the floor an hour later. The ambulance came to pick him up. He was in the hospital for a month. His little girl was put in the care of her aunt and uncle as her father waited for his health to return.
“Her aunt and uncle were meth-heads too, and heroin addicts. Your kind of people! They smoked from a light bulb, and discussed their philosophies on the world and God. These humans had scrambled brains. Perhaps somewhere in their genome was a typo made by God.
“They would say 'there is no God' and agree with one another. That's not the problem, Roger. There is a God: that's the problem. There is a God, but he does not care.
“A radiant baby girl, just three years old, had to live with these monsters as long as her father was in the hospital. It was a court order. The gunshot had blown her father’s nose off and shattered his teeth. As such, he was in no condition to take care of a child.
“Before I finish this story,” Mara added, “I’ll tell you now. It is best for you to not believe me. You will feel a lot better if you think this story is false.”
“I’m not afraid of truth,” Roger said.
“Then you shall have it,” Mara said. “These two robots, her aunt and uncle, were unfit to care for her. When she cried for food they punched her in the face. They knocked her unconscious to silence her cries. They did this without hesitation. It was noise, and noise is bad, so they cut off the speaker at its source. If she cried again they’d lock her in the back room of the house with no way to escape. They then returned to their semi-circle of broken beings, whom no band-aid would fix, who murmured in the poor illumined light.
“They walked around like out of order robots, needles in their arms, stuttering like a broken record, stumbling over their own feet. Nothing excited them more than torturing the poor young girl. They hated her father, you see. So they tortured her.
“She was defenseless. I guess it was more enjoyable for them to torture the defenseless. I’m sure you’ve pulled the wings from a butterfly.”
“I have not,” Roger said. “Go on.”
“The girl had been in their care for a week when she got lice. This is why I have to tell you. This is where it all comes together!
“When the little girl got lice, what do you think they did? They did not care for her as they should have. They pushed her into an aluminum sink until they felt the pressure of her face against the cold surface. They ran scalding hot water on her head. What then dreamed the lice as the fire rain came down? Did they think the hand behind the rain cared for them or loved them? They did. They thanked God for the rains as they were burned alive! The lice flung themselves to the scalp and cried, ‘'hosanna! Thou art merciful, o God! Thou art merciful!’
“The poor girl suffered third degree burns on her scalp and side of her face. Her hair fell out. The lice that did not die clung to the blonde strands of burnt hair in the sink.
“The last louse cried, as he circled the drain, 'Thou art merciful, oh Lord of hosts! Thou art merciful, but not to us!' They cried out to the meth-heads, who abused that beautiful young girl, ‘thou art merciful!’”
“What happened to the little girl?” Roger asked.

XI: SUFFER THE CHILDREN

“She was bald and all the lice were gone,” Mara said. “Her benefactors locked her in the back room. They walked about the house like broken robots still. Their brains were fried. They were bereft of intellectual activity. But what good is intellect? It won't help you climb out of your grave. All the mind of man is good for is figuring out interesting ways to kill and die. I’ve just had a most interesting thought! Life is the number one cause of death! Ha-ha! But what a great show it is! These robots acted as they were intended to act: without thought, intellect, or reason. That is the beast in man let loose.
“These burnt out, malfunctioning machines staggered about the house, click-clack, click-clack, grinding their teeth, buzzing, and shooting off sparks. They were outraged that the lice survived. But this time, the lice lived on their heads. Their heads went under the water too. I’m sure this was the equivalent of the holocaust for the lice.
“But hey, 'God works in mysterious ways.' Right? Right!
“After they cleared themselves of lice, they stuck the young girl’s soft face against the aluminum sink again. They ran the scalding hot water on her head again—even though she didn’t have lice. Her pretty hair had fallen out. She had on dirty clothes.
“Because she gave them lice, they had to teach her a lesson. Her uncle placed her face between the door and the bedroom wall. He held her there by her hair and slammed the door on her face until she collapsed into a pool of her own blood.
“Their hearts beat faster and faster until the adrenaline boiled in their veins. They dragged the unconscious little girl across the room and locked her in the closet. It was just a sport of sorts to them. They didn’t consider the possibility she was a human being, a once beautiful little girl, when they slammed her face against the wall and locked her in the closet, in the dark.
“They walked about the dimness of their own hell until she woke up again. They were tired of her crying, as though a child is not supposed to cry! Her cries hurt them more than anything could. So they locked her in the closet again, only this time they tied her up, put duct tape over her mouth, and fitted a noose around her neck. They suspended the rope from the pole their clothes hanged on. Then they stood her on an old crate and locked her in the closet once again.
“If she moved and fell, of course, she'd hang herself and die. For three days she stood there, crying in muffled silence, sobbing, beating at her chest and screaming. Who was there to save her? You say, ‘Dieu défend le droit!’ Well who the hell defends the wrong? Who was there to save her from the suffering closet in the dark? Dieu avec nous! They say. Where was God when the box shook and the noose turned her screams into a whisper? Where was your merciful God when she hung there, kicking her feet, pulling at the noose around her neck? Where was he then! Where was he when this little angel sobbed?”
“Did she die?” Roger asked.

XV: HER NAME WAS HANALEI

“Not from being hanged,” Mara said. “‘God works in mysterious ways’—perhaps he does, but not for long. Sometimes he seems to run short on miracles. The bar the noose was suspended from wasn’t sturdy enough to hold her when she fell. It collapsed to the ground on top of her.
“She had been there for three days, without eating, peeing on herself. Her urine covered the box and the carpet around it. When she fell from the bar, she fell face first in the puddle and suffocated. God defends the right! How was this little girl of so few years so wrong? She was a child! Her name was Hanalei! She liked fireflies and coloring!
“This beautiful young girl, not old enough to be a beast—but an angel— suffocated alone in that closet, face down in urine, blowing bubbles trying to breathe. How could anything but a monster or a beast do this to a little angel? As I’ve said: do you blame the robot with the knife between his teeth or the programmer?
“Would you accept God’s free will knowing the price that’s paid for it? Free will isn’t worth the suffering of that young girl or anyone. Those men could have chosen to save her. They had better things to do. They were more content to serve me than to save a life. These two people have long since died, and they never went to jail for their crimes.
“You say you are not a beast, and you, are, perhaps less of a beast than the majority of your species. You are disgusted. Yes, I see it. You think I'm a liar. Is it that much easier to dismiss tragedy than it is to acknowledge it?
“Her father left the hospital rehabilitated, off drugs, and ready to be a father. He found nothing but a grave on which a dozen roses lay.
“I was in his closet while he uncorked a bottle of champagne, the day he got out of the hospital. He was going to celebrate. He sat on his un-made bed, and looked at a picture of his little girl. I heard him cry out. He was on the phone for less than a minute. He slammed the headset on the receiver and screamed at the walls. I heard the sound of a gunshot. I heard a sickening thud as his body fell to the floor. That time the melancholy man succeeded; he put the gun between his eyes. I stood there under the ceiling fan for a moment, looking down on him, and felt such immense pity and empathy.
“There is a God, Roger. That's the problem. Sometimes I visit that young girl’s grave. I planted flowers there.
'And when my grave is full, crumble up pieces of bread on it. So that all the sparrows might fly down, that I might hear them; and this will cheer me—not to be lying alone.’

“I was there in the prison cell when Marie Antoinette was roused by guards. They cut her hair and bound her arms behind her back. I walked beside her slow carriage.
“I was just a stranger in the shouting crowd. But that’s what I’ve always been, a strange in the crowd. I followed the cart through the shouting streets, as the ragged cart bumped along the cobblestone road.
“I walked with them until they reached the Place de la Révolution. The crowd was gathered. They screamed at her as she passed. The guillotine loomed before her in the distance, silhouetted with the sun behind it.
I was there when she apologized to the executioner for stepping on his foot. What did they do? They let fly the blade and cut off her head. Her head dropped into the basket. The crowd cheered and roared and I was there. When they held up her head, the crowd roared even louder.
She was defenseless, bound, and murdered. And they cheered the murderer. For the revolution? What became of it? Today’s pomp and splendor is tomorrow’s dust and ashes! The revolution is over, but another one will come, and it will be over; humans will forever attempt to build the tower only to get to the top and watch the stone roll back down the hill like Sisyphus every night.
“What went through her mind, my friend, on her way to the guillotine? If she was wrong then God must not have protected her. She was wrong, yes? What did she think of 'O kind God' as she lay bound with the executioner beside her? Should she kiss the hand of the merchant that holds her by the throat?
“They say that God protects the right, Roger. But what happens to the wrong? In the hour of their creation they were made to be what they are. Are you telling me they're punished for the way they were made without even asking to exist in the first place?
“So, God made you as you are: wrong. He made you as you are—and is going to punish you for it! Then why were you created? For amusement? Just to be a worm, an insect, a beetle trounced by the feet of the holy as they march onward, knowing they are the chosen ones. Then what becomes of the others? Those whom God forgot, what becomes of them? It's as though you're created to be a cake and then are punished for being a pie. Where is the justice, Roger? If you act as you were made to act—then why are you to be strung up on a hook and flogged for your imperfection when it's not your fault at all?”
Roger was silent. Mara’s face betrayed a bitter feeling.
“Was that young girl, noosed in the closet, to drown in her own piss, born for that reason? If a God exists, an omnipotent all knowing omniscient force, who created us and loves us, yet knows all which shall occur in the future, then he knew the fate of that young girl the moment she was born. Where was sweet kind God when she wobbled on the egg crate in the closet and fell? She said over and over and over, Help me, God. Please help me. Oh, dear Lord Jesus, forgive me of my sins, and help me please.
“Why was she wrong, created, and made to die like that from the start by a being that has knowledge of the 'beginning and the end'? If you think this is justice, you've got that same veil over your eyes; hewn by poverty, piety, and imperfection. It's an illusion laid before your eyes to hide the blemishes and boils of the beating heart Earth. But why even bother bringing her screaming into the world if it was known she would choke after hanging, shaking, crying, and beating her chest in a closet? Who but the devil would listen to her screams?
“Look at how things go, Roger. You could end suffering and death and war. You could end it all. After all, you're thrown into this world you did not contract; for what, just on behalf of some imposed piety to act? Where did you come from then, my friend— and why? Just to find some tragic reason for which to live and die? Look at your situation, into which you're thrust. From the very beginning told to do what you must—but of what reward is there for you in sight, if in the end you descend back into dust? What type of reward is this for all of your tragic endeavors and disputes?
“You suffer day in and day out and for what reason? Do you believe this is fair, Roger? That you come into being without wishing it so, just forever in the winds like rain to blow—only in the end to dust descend, and from the Earth not ever to be roused again? The game the hands of fate play with us is a game that isn’t fair. We don’t even know the rules.
“Why live to suffer? For the dream world beyond the grave where roses grow and never die? All the roses of this world are born to die, yet you will not change this for some poorly reasoned why.
“You can change this, Roger. You can complete the Tower. You can correct the flaw in the Programmer’s design. Human beings are obsolete and die; look at hospitals—profiting from the inadequacy of prayers. Look at hospitals like I do; decent men and women doing the work God will not or cannot do.
“What purpose can you offer to me for the existence of man at all?”
“Because the eye can see all but itself,” Roger said. “I don’t think the human race is some grand design. I don’t think we’re the most important creatures on the planet, or in the universe. Perhaps the creation of man is a means by which God can see himself, as he is in all persons. When Mara leaves the person, the voice of God is all that remains. That is the design. The few who go the distance do so to benefit humanity by showing them the ways of right and wrong, of good, of evil.”
“It's selfishness at its pinnacle!” Mara exclaimed. “In the middle of the woods, for example, say a tree falls to the ground. Does it make a sound? It makes a sound, of course; but sound does not exist unless someone is there to hear it. Apply this reasoning to God and you see the answer for creation and intent. Without mankind God is but a tree that falls in the middle of the forest which makes no sound, and therefore doesn’t exist.
“Without man what is God but a one sided coin? Can a one sided coin exist at all?”

XVI: MEDUSA’S MIRROR

In arguments throughout history, drunks, buffoons, philosophers, seers, sages, crackpots, and prophets have brought their reason to be to the table. The question stands in the mind of every man who thinks. The reason to be is a question every man debates inside his head. Roger had spent a significant amount of his life debating this question. Roger’s mind was a battlefield of ideologies, where Ego fought the Id. Roger would not be moved this time.
“The question of why we are what we are, Roger, is answered thus: adaptation to the environment to have a better chance of survival. How is what you propose different than eyeglasses or corrective lenses or artificial limbs? It’s a step toward the ultimate goal of human evolution and you dismiss it out of morals. You disgust me. Your God disgusts me. If this Universe had a conscious soul in it, you’re right; God would be an eye that cannot see itself, so, to God, creation is the Mirror of Narcissus, a means by which to see the self, as we see ourselves in the eyes of others.
“You think of me as a louse, and so I am. I am as God made me, sir.”
“You are as you choose to be,” Roger said. “That is true for all sentient beings. Sometimes the choices are limited, but they’re always there. To deny free will is to give oneself a reason to act on your behalf. It’s easy for a man to say, ‘Oh, the devil got a hold of me and made me do bad things’ than it is for that same man to say, ‘I have been wretched of my own accord. Forgive me.’ You chose to be what you are, Mara.”
“And what do you think of me, Roger? You think of me as wretched. You react to me with aversion and remain under my control. You are honest, but nothing is more deceitful than pure honesty. Honesty! You have no sense of honesty. You don't even know your history. History is a story based on true events.
“I could defeat God by rewarded people for their sins in hell,” Mara said. “I could reward people for what they enjoy so much, their sin and vice, and offer them for rebellion what God offers for obedience. If it was known I reward people for their evil, God’s stock, if it was the stock market, would crash.
“What is God without man but a scream that no one hears?” Mara asked. “To hell with God! His followers have the sensibility of a wall. The only way to take down a wall is to drive a truck through it. Think the same is true of Christians? Would their God provide them the strength to bear the force of a two ton truck? Ha! It would be funny, regardless, to see them standing there, holding a hopeless crucifix, only to be plowed over and die.
He’s becoming desperate, Roger thought, to get a response out of me.
“Have you thought about the ramifications of what you intend to do? You intend to save the faith of man by tricking them into believing your cure for death doesn’t work. And you will die, Roger. Your Elise will die; your daughter, Galilee, will die. The centuries are the garbage men of man, like vultures waiting as the hours subtract from the sum of life one day at a time until the sum is zero.”
Roger was silent, and again felt Mara’s displeasure.
“The slaves of mine are happy, Roger, and live in a dream world. They are happy because they don’t worry about the search for truth. They're happier than you by far. Would you agree,” he held two fingers to his forehead and pointed at Roger with his other hand, “that if ignorance is bliss, then genius must be misery?”
Roger was silent.
“Would you not rather throw your wits to the wind than be conscious of your miserable little life? How fast it passes by, and all your joy, and memory, is but one summer in the sun. You’re lightning bugs who flicker once amidst the night to never flicker again. Do you realize how fast time will pass us by?
“Once, a long time ago, far before your time, there were cities such as your New York and Rome. Their monuments towered high into the clouds. They gained control over the forces of nature and they prospered. They built a towering and sophisticated civilization. They held mother Earth by the throat.
“Brick by brick they built the tower. It climbed high into the clouds. The dominion of man prospered but they were not content. What is it that makes man forever look, forever seen, and forever look for even more?
“Is it human nature to advance by any means necessary? A hundred generations passed away before the buildings began to rise. Planes went through the skies. But then they did not call them planes. This was a long, long, time ago, before man decided to chronicle their lives in stories and songs. Irrigation systems were plotted. The earth gave forth much fruit. The species evolved. As they evolved, what happened? Their cities got bigger. A small group of shady individuals controlled all the money, and all those of lower social rank were declared obsolete. They were disposable if they did not serve the state. They were thrown into rivers wearing concrete boots. They weren’t needed so they were destroyed.
“Technology came into the world. They had the means to control the seasons and the weather. They began discussing voyages to the other planets, starting with Venus. Their reasons are so diplomatic: to colonize space, look for other intelligent life form, and then use their abilities against them, kill them all, take their native land, and put them in reservations. I don’t know why they look for intelligent life in space when we’ve yet to find it here on Earth.

XVII: THE SILENT SUTRA

A thousand years later I return to find the civilization in ruin. Nothing but decorative statues and rubble line the streets. Newspaper clippings waft in the breeze and clog the gutters.
“I learned a madman came to power over the world. The propaganda machine was massive and all knowing and a billion cameras watched all the men and women all day every day. There was no such concept as freedom, not of thought, of speech, or action.
“All power was transferred to the Madman and his self appointed cabinet of assassins and enforcers. What did he do with all that power? He flooded the streets with the blood of the innocent. He overtook the reins of the beast.
“The priests and the elect and the normal men and women were made to bow before the beast and lick its feet.
“They wept and wailed before the beast, and the beast had three faces and three eyes; one face wore a smile, one face wore a frown, and one made none. Two eyes looked out and a third eye, always closed, looked in.
Roger thought, All the king’s horses, all the king’s men, couldn’t put my mind together again. There’s no such thing as Neverland, no Peter pan, where children, without worry, play and laugh and sing. This is not the world. The world, cruel maze, the doorway with NO EXIT and judgment it’s reward. I hope they have a payphone in purgatory so I can call my mother, high in Heaven, to tell her I got what I deserved.
If only I could somehow see the Wizard of Oz for empathy, like that silly poem of mine. If I got to see him, I’d probably ask for morphine. The door at the end of the golden rose has now for oh so long been closed, blocking the path to Vahalla and Neverland and Elysian fields Eternal, just a silent jukebox playing. The song is Silence, composed by got, and off his greatest hits album. God, a number one hit, big time, and the other men are long, long gone, and silence is the only song, whose terror pitch is eternal. How beautiful is everything, the worms, the snakes, the devil in the mind be gone, and all is still, and the void where silence is the only song on the jukebox is silence, by God, and the man in boots with the cowboy hat never runs out of quarters. And devil is the bus boy at the bottom of the steps whose intent is the soul and how it wayward goes. A brief delay with disillusion, before the curtain closed, and the drapes, what life and light, of the night disposes, leaving nothing but the sun. There is no Neverland, no place for us to go, where children forever play, to never die, or wonder why, under the sun to lay, by the sea, who’s soliloquy, is but the sound of sand. In their dreams the children sing sweet songs in Neverland. There’s nowhere for us to go where children ever laugh, where clouds in slender listless trails drift by like lazy carousels, and children watch them pass. And every night, by lantern light, to pray, they fold their hands. They sing sweet hymns, for seraphim, to take them to Neverland.
Roger snapped out of his trance. Mara was still speaking. Nothing he said had the least bit of effect on Roger’s mind.
“Even the elect are not always in good grace,” Mara said. “Civilization is like Jenga; take out the right piece and it all falls down.
“The buildings were destroyed, torn to the ground, and set alight by flames. And as each ember of righteousness and retribution consumed the civilization—so did mankind turn the wheel over again.
“I walked the streets of a once powerful and populated civilization alone. I shuffled through the rubble of the buildings and trash. Newspapers drifted in the wind. I saw a few men gathered around a bonfire with dirty gloves trying to warm their hands. Their children stood beside them, tugging on their coat, saying, ‘I’m hungry! I’m hungry!’ The children of these men stood barefoot in the cold as I passed them by.
“I passed through the empty alleys and abandoned train stations and observed what they had left behind.” “Then what became of their culture?” Roger asked.
“They began again, as they always do, beginning Ouroboros again. Brick by brick they began to start the tower once again.
“They rebuilt their building, their towers, and maintained their technology, but the lessons of the past were lost. They reached the summit of human evolution and prosperity again. And there they stood, at the top of the mountain, and looked down at the valley with such pride.
“They reached the top of the mountain, as high as man could go, though they wanted to go higher. There is a fire inside of men that burns, and that fire is me; yet I am not easily extinguished. I burn the long candle away inside the mind.
“Brick by brick the new tower was built. The Tower of Babel is standing today, and you have the insurance it will never fall. It will fall, without you; if you refuse to act, the circle begins again, and Ouroboros will feed not only on itself but us throughout the ages. But it's always toppled.
“What happened then, you might ask. I walked the back alleys as the song of man was in the air. Humans were on top of the mountain again and they sang, 'O thou art merciful!' and cried hosanna, flinging themselves to the soft floor of the forest. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?”
Roger was silent.

XVIII: THE DEVIL’S DREAM

“You can never know anything for sure, Roger. All facts go back to sources without references. Why is the faith of human beings your responsibility? You read too much meaning into everything, and get in so close to scrutinize, so deep into the subject, you don’t see the image as a whole.
Roger was silent. Mara became furious. Roger saw it in his eyes.
“On the day your daughter dies, and she will, will you fall to the ground and ask yourself why oh why didn’t I listen to myself and go through with my experiment?
“Do you think the lice, with their tiny minds, dare to dream themselves? Perhaps they dream of being something more than a louse. I’m sure you can relate to that. And if the louse doesn’t make it, will he beat his digits against the scalp until you squish him under your thumb? They will sing songs in your name, even as you poison them, burn them, and pull them off to throw them in the trash or sink. Tell me about one of your dreams.”
“I had a strange one last night,” Roger said. “I woke up delirious, sweaty, with chill bumps all over me. In the dream I was at my father’s house. He was in the bedroom of our cabin near Pigeon Rock with the radio turned up loud.
“My mother was in the kitchen. She stood over a boiling pot of cabbage. I said something to her, but I can’t remember it now, not sure. I tried to grab her shoulder and my hand went through her. It was like, I don’t know, like a ghost.
“I couldn’t see my hands when I looked at them. I ran up stairs to daddy’s room. He sat on the bed holding a gun. He stuck the barrel in his mouth and closed his eyes. I tried to tell at him to stop but no words would come out. The gunshot echoed through the house.
“I saw his brains when they splattered against the bed and wall. He convulsed for a moment and then fell to the bed. I yelled and yelled and no help came. I went into the bathroom to get a towel and found the mirror very strange. It was me, though younger, and the reflection wouldn’t me. I wouldn’t look at myself.
“Then my mother came into the room, ‘Supper’s ready,’ she said. She sees father on the bed, brains spilling out of his head, and she shrieks like a bat in fury. She slams her face against the wall, throws clocks around the room and out the window, and then, turning to me, she said, ‘What are you doing, Roger?’ I had my easel and paintbrush out to paint my father dead. I walked up to my mother and I said, ‘Mama, mama, I’m out of red. There’s just too much for me to touch all the blood on the bed. Then my father begins to revive, to come back to life, and I say, ‘Mama get your gun!’
“That’s the end of my dream. I also had another one recently which intrigued me.
“I begin a walk across country to meet a girl whom I adore, to see her hand in marriage, and I walked a thousand miles, all the way to California, and when I got there she was gone. I was on a boat full of sailors, guided by a lighthouse light, a lighthouse which did not have a shore. Regardless we followed it even more. The beauty of the bulb was enough to keep us out at sea. I never spent a day in the Elysian fields, but on my way home, my phone on vibrate, I receive a call from God. I don’t feel it vibrate so I don’t answer. He didn’t leave a message or a call back number.
“I began my long walk back to my home, unsure of where it was or how it looked, unsure of why I left and what I was looking for. I had a what-why moment in my dream, as one often has in life, often in the elderly. They stand at the doorway to the room and forget why they wanted to be there in the first place. That’s how I felt, and the whole time home, as I walked with black birds following me, I tried to dig through my phone to see if I could find God’s phone number.”
“We’re not so different, he and I,” Mara said, “the old of whom you speak. He has the naiveté of a child. Perhaps we are free and that is God’s mistake.”
“Have you read the Tao Te Ching?” Roger asked. “Long creates short, yes? Hard creates soft; hot creates cold. Does it not follow that good is only possible because of evil? Good to one is evil to another. They cannot exist without each other.”
“And what do you understand of evil?” Mara asked. “Evil is not words or curses or books or self-satisfaction.”
Roger said, “Evil is the destruction of the good. To destroy what is good in man, all you have to do is pervert their mind, offer the fountain of happiness, and reward them for rolling over like good dogs to have their bellies rubbed. They will crawl naked through a mine field to reach that fountain and they do.
“The holy books on the shelf won’t save you from the fire,” Mara said. “Water can’t put out the fire inside. The fire inside of man is me. They love their dreams. Reality is for idiots, Roger. Paint a prettier picture of the world and believe it. That’s all you have to do. Repeat it until you believe it. Or go to a bookstore blindfolded and pick out a holy book with one of those grab machine claws. Then never touch another. Believe it. You will know their joy.”
“I would rather know truth than joy,” Roger said. “I would rather be miserable with the truth than happy with a lie.”
“Our arguments are from different eras,” Mara said. “You prefer the mentality of the Stone Age to the genius of our era. You prefer the candle to the light bulb, even though the bulb is twice as bright. The books you have were written by confused men like you. They feel the devil crawl in their ear to re-wire their brain.
“What do you have but screams upon the page, in which you reconcile your madness? Complete your work, Roger. You can roll the stone over the mountain, down the other side, and never have to pick it up again. Or, of course, if you prefer to die—be my guest. If you prefer the death of your Galilee for the sake of other men—by all means throw her to the wolves.
Roger was silent.
Mara felt rage and aversion.
“Your daughter will be pulled to pieces, by hours as they fly, and you can stop it but you won’t! You coward! How can you allow every person on this planet to die because of one of your moral issues? You will sentence billions to death by inaction. How can you live with yourself?”
“Because I pay the bills,” Roger said. “If not, I’d live with somebody else.”
“You will be allowing every little girl and creature on this earth to suffer and die for no reason,” Mara shouted, standing, his rising. His suit gave way to relaxed currents of fire in the shape of a man.
“Think nothing of me,” said Mara. “I just wished to tell you my hard luck story.”
His teeth, too, turned to flames of white. His eyes hollowed out, accentuated by dark red flames, and the fire rose upward toward the ceiling.
“In human form I am a shadow, the form I was when you arrived, the Stranger. This is my true form. Know how painful it is to be fire? I dream, like the louse, that someday I will be accepted as I am. But I will be forever scorned and hated. Through interactions with me, man achieves great wisdom, though still I’m scorned.”
“All men should speak to you,” Roger said. “And you’re welcome to stop by any time.”
Mara was silent.
Roger was silent. He felt Mara retreating as the fire dimmed.
“But all is good, yes?” Mara fumbled, speaking awkward, without articulation. “You don't yet know what you are. You say 'I'—don’t you? But do you even know what it is you call I? If it's your brain, then why do you die if your brain doesn't go anywhere? Your brain will be there long after the 'I' you refer to dwindles out.
“Do you even know what 'you' are?”
Roger was silent. Mara cringed again, betraying hatred on his face. “It comes down to this, Roger: do you remain a caterpillar, or do you become a butterfly? That’s the question you have to answer for yourself.”
“I once had a very passionate conversation with a homeless man,” Roger said. “If this does not prove the good in man, nothing will.”

XIX: HOPE AND CHANCE

“The night was cold,” Roger said, “and from an earlier rain the roads had turned to slush and mud. The warm breath of the coming and going people drifted in the air before them.
“At the end of the row of building was the church. The porter stood at the door with a torch. He looked out into the night for a moment, and then closed the doors of the church. The glowing cross was switched off and the church became dark. The wooden doors were locked. The bells sounded.
“The old man lay against the cement wall. He wore ragged clothes, but was dressed as a gentleman. His head was bald on top, with small gray tufts beside the ears. His boots, though old, retained respectability. He nodded over, as still as death, deep in sleep. He still held a chord on the guitar. An old mason jar full of change and bills sat beside him, empty.
The door opened again, letting out the sound of laughter and shouting, along with the smell of drink and smoke. The old man didn’t move.
My daughter said, ‘Good evening.’ The man’s eyes opened. They focused on Galilee’s. He stared at her like he was lost, or drunk, or euphoric. Galilee didn’t say anything.
Another group of drunks staggered out of the club. They stopped by the old man for a moment.
“Can you play us a song?” one of the group asked. “A song! That’s it! Play us a song.”
“He didn’t respond, continuing to look at Galilee.
“Are you retarded or something?” somebody asked. They kicked his legs.
“Play a song!” another shouted. He stuffed a wad of cash into his mason jar.
“See that?” he said. “We’ve paid. Now play a song.”
“The old man obliged. He strummed and smiled. Roger felt the familiar shame of being human as the old man sang, over a slow melody:
‘No signs from Heaven come today, to add to what the heart does say…’
“The group laughed and stumbled away, towards the cathedral. The man sat his guitar on his lap. I asked him to play a song for my daughter, ‘On My Own’ from ‘Les Miserables.’
“I reached into my pocket.
“The man opened his eyes, raising his hand. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘I’ll play for her for free. I play for enough money for food. I have enough money for food.’
‘Then why do you play?’ Galilee asked ‘It’s raining… Why are you still out here in the cold?’
‘I’m not an educated man,’ he said. ‘I was born into mud; that’s true, but I’m not a worm. You see me here in the mud, and you must think I am a worm. They think I should be stomped underfoot as a worm. And that’s fine; I have a wife and two children…’
‘Sounds terrible,’ I said.
‘Oh no!’ said the beggar. ‘They run and play without shoes on their feet, but they’re still happy. I play my guitar in the rain, and in the mud, but I’m happy. I’m happy to play. The world should be full of song.’
‘Record a demo album,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t have to suffer the stupidity of the insensitive all the time. It’s a great shame, sir, but I fear decency is out of style.’
‘I don’t suffer their stupidity,’ said the man. ‘They do. And what would I do if I didn’t play? My wife would go mad with me around all the time! If I must play guitar in the mud, and be ridiculed for the sake of my family, it is a burden I’m proud to bear. Their mother educates them while I’m out. She came from a decent family, up north I think, truly lovely… She teaches them how to love. Hell is the suffering of being unable to love. That is the suffering of the world: man’s inability to love his fellow man as much as he loves himself. It’s easier to teach science than it is to teach love. That’s a hard lesson to learn and most men learn too late. What do I have to gain by living in a big house? Ha! Mara sleeps at Xanadu! I’d rather sleep with my wife, and my children, Hope and Chance. That is their names. They’re such loving children, too. They ask such questions. That’s good, though; it’s good to wonder. They smile like they understand the world. Maybe they do. They don’t take anything for granted. Not even the sun. The educated men take it for granted, thinking it will always be there when they wake. My daughter’s are thankful for the sun, and oxygen, and their dirty clothes and dirty father.
‘They wear the dresses their mother wore as a child, old handmaiden’s dresses. They’re prettier than the stars. They drew a picture for me, together, of the sun, and Earth, and mommy and daddy holding hands. It is as sublime as the Mona Lisa. Nothing is as priceless as youth. They walk around together, holding hands. Why do I need money when I have love? We all leave the world with empty hands.
‘Yeah, perhaps I’m not a poet. I just like to ramble. My dignity is at your feet for the sake of a song, and I rejoice. It is a pity that man cannot survive by pity alone. I don’t need to record a demo album, sir. I have everything I need. Nothing worth having can be bought. Let me live in the mud. I’ll just play my guitar that might someday make someone happy. We’re all beggars here. I’ll see better things. Don’t feel sorry for me. I’ll live and die in our mud-hole, our little pit, but every day I see the sun, or the rain, and I thank God for my place in the mud. We are the lesser men, the disposable ones. Maybe I’m a fool. So be it. Let me play the fool. I’m a prop in the streets. Feel good about yourself when you see me. You’re no further from the mud than me. Don’t feel sorry for me. Feel sorry for yourself; the devil leads you by the collar.”
‘Man has made the devil in his image,’ I said, ‘and saw that it was good.’
‘Ha-ha,’ the man laughed. He looked at Galilee. ‘You can laugh at me if you’d like. I am a clown. I know it, and I speak like one. In the alley we are clowns, with phony smiles, and shameful circus acts. But we are here to learn to love. Arithmetic and logic is for the fools. Learn to love and you will be wise, and love yourself. Arrogance is the only approval one ever needs. Yes, I know; I know. I’m not educated. That is true. But I know enough to love. Look,’ he fidgeted in his pocket for a moment. ‘Look at this.”’
“It was a miniature angel made from candle wax, almost like the angel on Entae’s grave.
‘Hope made it for me,’ he said. ‘And Chance helped her with the mold.’
“I thought of Entae’s grave, and saddened.
‘It’s beautiful,’ he said.
‘What do you do for fun?’ Galilee asked
‘We sing,’ he said. ‘When I get home at night, we put out all the lights. We light a candle in the den. I play guitar and we sing together. We count my coins at night. We don’t have expensive wines, or Turkish cigarettes, but we have each other. That is enough. If Heaven is a fragment of that joy, then it is indeed a marvelous place.
‘I’ll play you another song, so my soul might be worth a penny, though your penny I don’t wish to have. I wish for you to have and hear as well. Maybe I’m drunk. I just never get to talk to anybody…’
“He played through a slow progression in A minor, humming, and closed his eyes. A moment later, he was asleep.
“We stood there for a moment, in the wind, as the old man snored in his sleep. Another group of men poured out of the club. Galilee cried in the car, her face buried in her lap.
“That homeless man changed my life.”

XXI: OUROBOROS CHOKES

“Now let me tell you a story,” Mara said. “This one isn’t so optimistic. It’s a story written by your uncle Oren. I don’t know if you’ve read his work. Oren Henschel is his name. He was a religious philosopher, and I’d like to read, or at least paraphrase, his most important work, The Hanger and the Hanged.
“In the world in which the main character lives,” Mara said, “every biblical law is obeyed. Men are hanged for blasphemy. Then they soon realized, thou shalt not kill applied to all, so the hanger himself would be hanged for breaking the law of God.
“The story starts, ‘’The hangers all were happy until they became the hanged. Utopia was line for line, not one forgotten page. There were no words of blasphemy, until a week before the walk, when a sleepy preacher, thought he heard, a drunk agnostic talk.
‘There doesn’t have to be,’ he said, ‘above us anywhere—a God of any origin who ever shows us care. No need for Heaven, no need for Hell, there is no need to fear. If we all could learn to love Heaven would be right here.
‘These words for a sleepy man were terrible to hear.
‘A commandment broken!’ he rose to shout. ‘Contact the office now. He broke the law, and must be punished. That is our Holy vow. They took the steps they had to take and put the man away: first in a cell, and then a noose, and then a beggar’s grave. No one there, and no one cared. His redemption coupon late; he played Hangman and the word was fate.
‘The news replayed the tape that day, broadcast to all the homes. They told of his crime, and told of his death; they babbled on and on. The louse was punished, evil’s gone; hangmen reap as they have sewn.
‘The world is just a prison yard where inmates run the show, and no one is in charge. No one dares to dream. And high above, the Watchman shrugs, and nods back into sleep.
“Children clap, and monks applaud. They marched a fool’s parade. They themselves at last became the Hanger and the Hanged.
“Within in a week a loss child found, his way into a church. ‘Excuse me, father,’ said the child. ‘What is it, my son?’ ‘I would really like to know why an innocent man was hung.’
“The preacher fumbled, then thought a moment, ‘Because he sinned my son. You must not have heard.’ ‘I’ve heard plenty,’ said the child. He passed the priest a book. Then he took the fumbling hands and showed him where to look.
“That shalt not kill, the Good Book said, the Hanger must be hung.’
“They took him from his quiet home, and threw him in a hole. Two days later, without shoes, he saw the gallows pole.
“’Thou shalt not kill,’ was sung in songs, within the growing line. And ten people, every hour, atoned for their crime. Each hanging the hanger for hanging the hanged, the road to God was paved.
“Thou shalt not kill became the phrase painted on their signs. One after another, to kill themselves, they formed the line. It stretched across the world, and all the doomed marched on, broadcast across the nation, and played in emptied homes.
“The line remained until one man,
began to see the pile; one hangman on another, into the sky for miles. He looked at those who died in line, and the signs they held. Then the last man in the land decided to save himself.”
And the Devil got no response.
“Why don’t we talk about you?” he said. “Why don’t we look at what you are, instead of man, let’s have a look at you, your failures, your hypocrisy, your criminal record, drug addictions, confinement to asylums put in a straight jacket for thirty days in the dark, mumbling like a madman with his stomach bleeding. Who are you to offer any worth to humanity? Who are you to inspire faith in those who have gone soulless digitally? Why save the people the computers play with? These people don’t even care if there’s a god, a Heaven, or a Hell, and nothing’s sacred. The words of prophets, the love, the soul, the humanity under a microscope, will not inspire them. It will not lead them to humility, but apathy. You wish to save a people who don’t care if they die, who hate their lives, who suffer every single hour every day, like you. You miserable maniac. You write your fiction and your sutras and act like your work is not for you, but man, to show them the world entire, but you don’t get to see it; it’s the world you’ve found inside your head, and the world you live in, a fantasy of mysticism and obscure biblical mass production, you speak as through the Buddha nature, about it, and believe it, but it is not you who represents a Buddha, but a wannabe karma junkie with bad smack and no street cred. You pile the hours away into a box of words with five bottles of pills beside you with your name on it, and yet, you write about the beauty of the world as you imagine it, it is the scenery of your mind, a video reel of your subconscious which deludes you, and the psychologists would have a field day with your type of writing, meeting Jesus in the woods, seeing an angel in the water with a finger to her lips to shush you, and shush you did, Silencio, and in your mind moved to roam to live on the streets, smoking opium and reading your pathetic sutras, one summer in the sun, a sutra to you, a preachy, poor attempt at depth to others. It is not as deep to them. It’s not true to them, and what is not true to them, ceases to be. No one will think of you as a man of wisdom, though you wish to be a prophet, and attempt to write as one, your sutras, but will never be seen as one. They’ll see your record, the history you can’t outrun, the history which made your PhD in psychology worthless in conjuction with criminal possession of marijuana and morphine, your thirty days in the dark, in that small room at the asylum, your troubles, your failures. You never write about those. It’s always the beauty as you see it in the world, but not the world as it is. It could be, but it won’t. Because the people you want to save are burning alive and refusing to accept the water. Why should you suffer for these people? Why should you let yourself be killed on television, with the whole world watching? The entire world will be in front of their TV’s, as they always are, and as the dharma bum walks onto the stage, they’ll cheer him in his saffron robe. You’ll be on morphine, won’t you? You’ll read a poem, I know the poem you wrote, the one intended for the conference before you die. Why are you doing this? People invested millions of dollars in the research into your theory for immortality and now that you have the whole world watching you’d rather them see you die than see the first immortal to man to appear in flesh on Earth, unable to be killed, you’ll be our fantasy fulfilled, and those who once would age will live, forever young, forever on Earth, young and alive. Instead you plan to kill yourself by switching your Ambrosia, love the name by the way, how cheeky and writer like of you, with a placebo just so you will die. You’re going to kill yourself with the whole world watching, Roger. Your past won’t even matter, the criminal record, the expulsions, the drug charges, the arrests, and the public record on all your sins will be washed away. No one will care if you watched your sister in the shower. Nobody would care that you overdosed on morphine and almost died in the bathroom. The real Roger will disappear and in his place will emerge you as you dreamed to be. Why let yourself die? Do you not believe life is beautiful? The Glass Umbrella, the soliloquy on loss, do you remember that poem? It was written about a friend of yours who killed herself, and you make her memory beautiful. I was there when they read it at her funeral. You should’ve read it like they asked you to! I bet it is so much better when you read it. Would you read your poem to me? Really, I’m a fan of your poetry, and no, I’m not gay. Can you read it for me, please?”
Roger was never a man who could resist publicity no matter what it was for.
“I can,” Roger said.
“Then by all means,” Mara said.
Roger cleared his throat. He hated his poetry but had one poem of acclaim, the only one, a soliloquy of loss, the Glass Umbrella, her life reflecting in seven glass directions, scenes on the beach in the shade, to the sound of seagulls and the sun as shone across the waves, the soliloquy of such malaise, and wistfulness, despair, and the anatomy of words and melancholy. Always that one, Roger thought, and Diane who walked into the Sea, thirty oxycontin’s in her belly, my eulogy poem read at her funeral, now is a popular poem amongst a certain circle, and seems to be the only one anyone responds to, but for me, it’s isolation, despair, the waning of the sorrow as time goes by. How I miss that laugh and kiss of Caiaphaus, cold on my cheek, is the kiss of Déjà vu as I re-read that poem and see the bird, the bird who floundered by the Sea and then flew on, what once was live at last had died and I wrote the song.
“I’m no great shakes when it comes to writing poetry,” Roger said. “But I’ll read it for you.
“We are the footprints by the Sea. The Water comes and then, we leaves, are children taken—Children of the Sea forsaken.
“Miss Sea, oh see, Miss Galilee, bring back what you took from me. Bring back what you swallowed whole.
“The yawning, old, and wide mouthed urn, lolled on, but never to me turned, her deaf ear, to me, to hear, my confused shouts at her.
“Without a word, at all, to say, she waves at nighttime and the day. She rolls about within a dream. The carousel goes by overhead, to it she turns her mirrored head. She simply looks to it, and all, as we, like leaves, around her fall.
“We are but footprints by the Sea, the waters come, and then we leave. Miss Sea, those leaves, your children taken. Children of the Sea forsaken.
“Ancient Sea, Miss Galilee, can you see yourself in me? As I see my shape in you, glowing white, and tinged with blue. Can’t you see what you have done? The lolling Sea saw none.
“’I see’ I said, and that was that, staring at a shore of black. I hear my own words echo back. In those waters, I saw me; just a reflection in the Sea.
“This was after ten years passed; I returned, sat in the grass, thinking of all who had walked that shore. Never did I see her face, the glass umbrella had replaced the girl whom I adored. My love would walk the shore no more.
“But nothing else, and nothing more, no more to God could I implore, or to the umbrella in her stead. The face of the mourning sun turned read. The glass umbrella, from the Sea, rolled ashore, then laughed at me. Then I knew, and saw it all, inside the glass umbrella fall. I saw myself, again, alone, forever by the Sea to roam.
“But one day I watched her play with birds about the shore. I heard her laugh, then nothing more, as the Sea, came and took my love from me. Buzzards circled overhead, Nature’s Garbage Men. I heard them and heard her laugh, and felt the kiss of Caiaphas.
“A finch had washed up in her place, from the well amid the way, who floundered by the Sea and then flew on. The bird fluttered for a moment, and was gone.
“As beautiful as the Sea might be, her own beauty she can’t see. In my dreams she visits me and sees her portrait on the wall, by my family, by me, a portrait of Miss Galilee.
“As wondrous as she looks at night, aglow with silver shimmering light, she looks sadder when it’s dawn, the daylight in her face, bringing daylight in night’s place. The Sea yawns again, and sighs; the children of the Sea walk home.
“Deaf, Miss Galilee rolls on.
“A while we stood where lolled the waves under a sky where seagulls played. For her, my world, for once, to see, the face of lady Galilee.
“She from the water walked to ashore, played a while, bonne nuit, amor! She splashed about the waves… my child... and then she splashed no more.
“I remember, she flew in, we had some sandwiches, and then, hand in hand walked with a great. She laughed the day away. She wore a blue dress, made of lice, and had a big smile on her face.
“At night she walks my dreams this way, for when she splashed, that faithful day, the Sea took her away. The water stole my living dream and left me here to stay.
“The Sea looked into me, you seen, and saw what she could take from me. My dreams can never leave it be. And when she looked, at me, she saw, the same thing when she looks at all. The way she sees our life go ‘round is oft-times spoken without sound. She sees us dance and hears us call, all at once, and not at all, the glass umbrella falls.
“We are the footprints by the Sea; the waters come, and waters leave. Miss Sea, you see, your Children taken, Child of the Sea forsaken.”
“What’s all that weepy nonsense about?” Mara asked.
“A friend of mine from New Jersey committed suicide, and it was a soliloquy for her, a eulogy in prose.”
“That’s very touching Roger,” Mara said. “Imagine being able to write poems for forever. Your form would be immaculate in one hundred millennia; you could purge the contents of your brain entire and then finally you’d rest, and relax. You’ve got to do as I say.”
Roger was silent.
“How can you be silent now, Roger? Go through with the experiment. You’ll be the prophet you always wished to be. Go through with your experiment, Roger. You’ll be who you want to be. You’ll be what the Angel said you were. I was there, on both your shoulders, when the angel on the hill, remember? In the desert, you’re walking alone—remember that one?”
Roger was silent.
“I do,” Mara said. “I remember your dream. You’re a young child in a desert living by an oasis, and you gradually venture into the hills beyond the oasis, far from that warmth and comfort, and then you go so far out a mirage appears, the coke machine mirage on the top of the hill. You’re too far to make it home, but you’re thirsting to death. The machine appears before you on the hill, and you, about to thirst to death, looking for change in your pocket, and finally, finding some, you put the change into the drink machine. It takes your money, refusing to give it back, laughs and you wake up. How about the overdose? Remember the overdose? I do! You’re drinking with a girl twice your age, seventeen, and getting pills and sex, then you run off to some other girls house only to do 300mg of morphine, get thrown out of the house by her father, and later found half dead in a convenient store on some lost highway with I love you written on a piece of toilet paper?
“The telephone, remember the telephone, Roger? There has never been a telephone in that bath you. What you saw wasn’t there. The payphone to make a collect call to God did not exist even though you surely saw it on the wall. And when they found you, you had a pocket full of change and pills, enough to have used the phone if you needed to, instead you claim to have never found the money to make your call to mother. It was all in your head. It is all in your head. Those were hallucinations, Roger.”
“There are hallucinations and there are visions, and the two are different,” Roger said. “When I saw Galilee, with the third eye, the mind, I saw the Garden of Eden on Earth. People loved each other in Galilee, not me, and not my father. I loved only my mother, not myself. My father loved only me and not himself.
“Yes, I hallucinated in the bathroom. I almost died. I made a mistake and took too much medication. But the Angel in the water…”
“You were drowning!” Mara shouted. “Who doesn’t hallucinate when they’re about to die?”
“I saw her again,” Roger said. “I saw her that day when they tried to drown me. She put her finger to her lips, to shush me, and when I stopped moving the kid let me go, thinking I was dead. She saved my life that day. I saw her three times after that.
“Once she was in my garden, helping my aging mother prune the weeds of her garden. My mother’s weeds were picked by Angels. I saw the girl angel again, or maybe it was a boy angel, or maybe it was not a sex, but an angel, and the beauty made me think the angel was a girl, the soft face, the blue tint, the light of the sun on her shoulder. Two years after the day they tried to drown me, I was walking in the woods again and, tired, sat down at a tree. I had a cigarette. I saw her watching a young girl blowing bubbles. I ran to her, to touch her, and when I got beside her, she shushed me. I was quiet. We sat there, in quiet, watching a young girl in an orange dress blow bubbles and they trailed in silver circles behind her.
“Then the day my Entae died, I was in my bedroom, looking at the soapstone angel on her grave. I saw Gabriel sitting the deck. Her wings were folded behind her and she sat there in quiet watching Entae’s grave. She saw me looking and again put her finger to her lips. I’ve never understand it. It’s the only question in my life that I cannot answer and it is that: what did the angel want me to say? Nothing? It can’t be nothing; I’ve always heard a voice, not my own, inside my head, telling me what to write and how to live and how to make certain events happen and was there as I wrote the stories, in parable, so every culture on the Earth could understand, with the Tower torn asunder, and I thought by writing I could understand the riddle.
“I acted and wrote as I had to, sometimes not knowing why, or what it was for, and when I’m silent, the voice speaks to me and tells me what to write. It tells me what to do in life. And now it has told me I must end my life with the whole world watching, and that is what I have to do. Even Dante had to walk through hell to get to Heaven. I near the end of the road laid for me to walk.”
“I think she’s telling you to shut up and do what you’re told,” Mara said. “She’s telling you to stop talking and start acting. I think she is telling you that you don’t have to speak or say anything for you will be immortal.”
“That is not what Right tells me inside,” Roger said. “The Right is truth and sometimes I find it hiding in me, and I offer it only when it is relevant. My past… my past, of course I’ve sinned over and over again; that is our test, to gradually not sin at all, and that is where the evolution of humanity is going—to a whole world that has empathy. They won’t need to see the Wizard of Oz for empathy. I’m a well known writer, and my works will outlive my flesh, but that which connects to my mind, the Eternity Conduit through which I speak, will abandon this body and move on. It will move the world to empathy. The most beautiful emotion is melancholic beauty, and the thought of a rich young man killing himself in front of the entire world as his once thought brilliant scientific experiment fells. They will see the quality of life.”
“Look at the reality of this,” Mara said. “A junkie writer is trying to move all mankind with one act of self sacrifice? They’ll only think you’re mad, as many will think the words with which you speak are mad. That will be your legacy, then: another junkie who thought he was the second coming of Jesus. That’s so cliché, you know, claiming to want to be the savior for all mankind. Those types are a dime a dozen, but not all of them have the ability to make man immortal, as you can. You could make anyone think your religious mumbo jumbo was true if they saw you cut off your head only for it to re-grow. If you die, they remember the man who was born Roger Solomon Manwell. Not your intentions, not your sutras, not your poems, novels, or plays, none of it. And that great why you seek cannot be found. That is why you remain alive in misery! Elementary, is it not?”
“What should I say to the world, then?” Roger asked. “Ever since I was a child, I’ve seen things, heard things, things no one saw. They told me they were hallucinations and put me on medication. They put me on morphine to help me with chest pain when I was thirteen. By the time I was seventeen, and in college, I was addicted to morphine. They gave it to me for years and then they took it away and left a self hating junkie who translates his misery into beauty just to cheer those who are kind enough to read, to step into my place in time, and for that moment, see the world as I see it.
“When I was in preschool, when I was bad, they’d put me in a confession box. They told me to tell God all my secrets. Every day I was bad, on purpose, just because I got to talk to God. They sent me to talk to God for punishment whenever I misbehaved. They locked me in the confession box every day. I eventually found a way out. A screw held the hatch-lock in place. I twisted it out and opened the door. I was just a child, three years old, and I wanted to see God. He was there, on the other side, listening to all my wrongs, my failures, my sins.
“I opened the other door to the confession box. I looked in. It was blank, nothing but an empty bench. There was no one there and his voice was silence. It came at me in all directions, and I felt God was the empty, soundless space between all beings and all time. And in my head I heard, I’d rather hear about virtue; your sin does not concern me. Sin is what men make up to control what another person thinks. That is wrong, Roger. Let sin never divide, but bring together as both men reconcile the error. And if not, let them learn from it.
“Since that day, every day of my life, no matter what I say or do, I feel that no one’s listening, even giving speeches to giant crowds. That’s why I have to die; they respond so strongly to tragedy and get to talk about the beauty of a life on television specials when I’m gone. And Galilee will never need a dime and have a famous dad who committed suicide. Galilee understands. Her mother doesn’t, but she does.
“You put me on trial, like Life Police, and write the tickets you wish to condemn me with. I had a dream two nights ago, and I knew it was a dream you designed. You are a dream machine, Mara; dragging people around by hopes and dreams, deluding reality instead of accepting the world as it is.
“In the dream I heard my daughter cry. I go into her room and she’s gone. I hear her cry again, in a different direction, and turn away. At the end of the hallway I see blood on the stairs. When I find her at the bottom of the step, she’s dead, but asks me how I’m doing. Fine I said, I could use a bath. Writers don’t bathe like other people do. She runs my bath and gets in to test the water for me. And…and she screams. She screams as the water melts her like the Wicked Witch of Oz. And I feel like I’m melting. I fall into the toilet and get sucked down the drain. My father is there. There’s a playground full of kids, and he’s playing with all of them for me. He’s wearing a valet outfit. I ask him to enter. He asks to see my ticket. He looks at it and says, ‘I’m sorry. It’s expired.’ He turns around and walks off. I tear the ticket up.
“Even though I tore up the ticket, I stayed there, looking through the fence at all the happy children, watching them play, watching time go by without me, life going by without me and again, I was locked inside my mind, and my eyes were rusted prison bars that saw only inmates and enforces, police officers and a Judge. I even see the Commander from Don Giovanni. He asks me to repent. I told him I would, but not right now, maybe when I’m about to die or something.
“What should I repent, then? I was a very sad child. My step-brother shot his girlfriend in the face with me sitting right beside them. We were supposed to go the movies and Casey, his girlfriend, couldn’t go with us because she had a headache. He pointed the gun at her and pulled the trigger. The side of her face was blown off. Blood splattered on a yellow lampshade and there was a high pitch ringing noise in my ears. I watched her convulse on the floor under that yellow light until her legs stopped moving and her chest did too.
“All week on the way to school we had to drive by the couch, sitting on the curb waiting for garbage men, and it was covered in the blood of my friend.
“I became addicted to opium through medical use. I took it every day, four times a day, because I busted my head open and almost bled to death. Using morphine for that long equals addiction like nothing else. I thought about cutting off one of my feet just to get more junk. I didn’t want it mentally, but physically the want was absurd. And I was a tortured kid and the morphine made me cheerful. I just ended up an addict by accident and now I enjoy using opium illegal.
“On junk I’m a relaxed person, not devastated by anxiety or racing thoughts and bleeding ears. The volume of the self debates is turned to twelve. And that’s more than eleven.”
Mara was silent for a moment.
“I must tell you how my dream ends,” Mara said. “What becomes of the louse who dared to dream?”

XXII: GABRIEL’S RIDDLE

The sun was coming up as Mara spoke. He had been there all night and Roger began to think he’d never leave or finish his story.
“We reveal the evidence that our planet is alive to the other louse and tell them you are a living being like us. But he’s massive and all knowing the others say. I said it was possible to know a lot, but not know all, and that you were born from a mother and had a father, although that’s kind of a lie. They say I am foolish and blasphemous and I’m put in exile for heresy. After that lice started squishing themselves and did so until one was left, and that last left louse is me. I prayed to God to make me human just so I could talk to you, and here I am; yet you wish to squish me out.”
“That which the palmerworm left, the locust has eaten,” Roger said. “That which the locust has left, the caterpillar has eaten.
“I’m content with being a spider in the corner. I’m content with being a beast. I’m content with being a worm. I’m content with being a louse, but I’m a louse who knows his nature, the apartment lights, and the heads of fellow men. Hosanna!
“We are but shadows in the throes of cause and consequence, digits in Ms. Karma’s equations. I am content to know I’m nothing, and you, Mara, will not tempt me. I will not be moved.”
“How can you treat the shadow of yourself like this?” Mara asked. “You want me to leave? Where am I going to find another body?
“Tell me how it felt to watch your mother’s feet dance on the air the day she was hanged. Tell me about your uncle Oren, the famous writer and genius, and how he blew his brains out in the bathroom at Christmas dinner. Did he have some fantasy purpose like you? Let’s talk about that. How about that? We could talk about how Entae or your grandma’s dog, who died at the end of that dirt road long ago. I see his body in the glow of your red brake lights, suffering, crawling in desperate circles, suffocating in the cold, unable to chew or swallow. And you sat there until he stopped moving. You watched him in your rear view mirror before you left him.”
“I didn’t want him to die alone,” Roger said.
“You should have stayed to watch the vultures pluck his eyeballs out. The maggots ate his stomach from the inside out,” Mara laughed. “The same thing will happen to you and you’ll become just another meal for the maggots in the ground, with Entae and your mother and all your friends. You all will lay together silent, not staring at nothing, unaware that nothing is there.
“That is the world we live in, full of misery, men pulling out their hair, maniacs in the streets with guns, peddlers of death and dope in dark alleys wrapped in newspapers. This is a world you cannot change.”
Roger was silent.
And in Roger’s head, he heard a thundering voice, outside, yet inside him, and it said:
Awake! Drunks and fools, awake! How like the beautiful beasts you are; you drinkers of wine, because of the new wine; for it is cut off from your mouth. The field is wasted; the fig trees are wasted; the corn is wasted.
Roger sensed Mara’s agony when faced with silence, the Voice of God, and his entire mind was quiet, still; what once had been a waterfall was now a pond, what once was a burning cigarette was now a fire gone.
He didn’t hear or make a sound. The angel in the stream, her blue face outlined in gold, flashed before his eyes. She held a finger to her lips. Roger finally solved the riddle.
“I pardon you, Mara,” Roger said. “I wish you well.”
And Mara disappeared.

XXIII: THE LOUSE REDEEMED

Roger sat there thunderstruck; the doorway in his mind was opened. He gazed into the unfathomable infinity of the soul with his eyes closed. He rejoiced as he felt the heartbeat of all creation. May my work pay for my redemption coupons, then all my life I’ll work, work and bring all the beauty I see into the world, and make truth as beautiful as it is, naked, honest, and right.
He saw the Truth in a flash of light, a revelation; he felt his connection to the timelessness of infinity through the unlocked doorway in his mind, the Eternity Conduit. He felt connected to all beings in the Universe, all of them together trying to make it to the next step. Tears streamed down his face as the soul swept through the doorway and out his mouth.
His body had been shed, unplugged from time and impermanence. It seemed as though a door, a doorway to the infinite in his mind, had been opened. Roger opened his mouth, but said nothing. His eyes rolled into the back of his head. His eyelids flooded white, as bright as the sun. “The beauty,” Roger said. “The beauty...”
Roger’s mind was flooded white. In the ivory haze he saw the door with NO EXIT painted on it. Roger opened the door, went inside, and found redemption. And he brought enough back to share.