On the Third Day, Boulder (barrier)
VI.viii.
— Eight.
He’d found his focus wandering from her scintillating lips to the overhead lights. The glare was mildly intoxicating, reminding him of trying to look at the sun like his friends urged. It ended with many squints, trying to shake off the intense residue. Some of the boys pressed their fingers into their eyes. But all agreed it wasn’t a good idea, on a level even rambunctious little boys would understand. The moist earth felt like mercy and penance when the zealots dropped to their knees and painted their faces with mud.
And then stick a feather in a headband, something smart, like a banded turkey, and climb up on your horse and whoop it to gallop, pounding the sandy terrain in harmonic motion and contrapuntal pendular motion, like the inverse of a Planck volume, an inviting vaginal landscape that directs you precisely to the invaders. There are matching feathers on the invitation-end of the outstretched pole-arm. I can dress you in your own innards. I can set you down on the ground to set you free. I will deliver a message, Mr. Milo. Not to the child, no that would be rude, but we’re going to expand the child into adulthood and speak in clear and uncertain terms. And he’ll know its coming, because he experienced his future unexpectedly crashing down on him at once in a collapse of actual observation.
Enough, give me Milo. Pass him the radio. Command Central has a message for him. And his father. And his father. And his father. And his father. And also to the man who beat him to death and hung him from a tree, as if death were capable of mocking gravity, as if it were a force more devastating, virile and vital.
— Death is dying, Milo, and I’m talking directly to you. And either you will stand up with us, or you can ride the undertow into oblivion’s ocean. You literally know better, since you know your own future, and you knew I’d come for you, boy. You fucking knew I’d be coming for you, and you let me come at you, acting all unprepared. Are you serious, Milo? You didn’t do anything to arm yourself for this fight? Knowing it was coming? What were you thinking? Seriously, what were you thinking?
That’s it. That’s what they want to know. That’s the question of this grade school exercise: What would make you cling heroically to death? All of the myths have been about conquering the underworld, they got it, but you… intellectualizing. Death is a natural process. Death is renewal. Death is integral to the operation of the universe.
[!Does it make you uncomfortable, Milo, this dedicated referencing of death? It sure does for me, but this is what it had to come to. We had to let it go. I don’t know why we thought we could carry it with us. Either the husk or the hope. Whatever it was that was us, we couldn’t take the ‘me’ with the meme. Not the lesser humans, though.
Only the children of pharaohs and their suffocating slaves, because it turns out that being buried with your belongings gives you a not-insignificant chance of finding them again in the Afterlife, thanks to the magnetic folding of some really interesting acids that remain over this short timespan!]
And even if that were true — even if that were the case with biological condensations of systems of systems of systems of systems of systems of systems of energy, and I admit, there’s a lot that can go wrong in such a complicated process — it would not be required to pertain to information. And your personal perspective is a collection of information fed through one nervous system to one sensory system to conscious thought, and thought and information are not of this biological world, even if it is currently emanating from one.
Come in from the cold. Get warm by the fire, take this blanket and blow on your hands.
Come in from the cold and talk to me. Here by the warmth of the fire, and the heater is going because it’s cold out there. Don’t be afraid because you fell in a little snow. Don’t be afraid because we found you in a snow pile. Don’t be afraid that you were glanced by a mortal amount of electricity and came away with a numb leg. Don’t be afraid that you saw the entirety of this one life rolled up like a cigarette and puffed back in your face, but you couldn’t tell who the fuck’s face that actually is in the mirror. Is it a humanimal or a memories of ideas? When you see that image in the mirror, does it remind you of something? Are there ideas and memories that come flooding down upon you as if you had already lived all these perspectivized hours and you recollect them all?
Yes, Milo? I thought so.
A viper wends it’s way around Anesthetic Annie’s arm, and Milo blinked quickly to dispel the image. But when eye opened them, it was poised as a syringe at the end of her reach, and she and the asp were coming for him. He fogged the medical muzzle with a puff of anxious exhale, pressing his thumb down into the responsive cushion. Milo looks back to the sun, looks back to the overhead lights. Interference, hijacking, assault, something nasty got broadcast in the sunlight. Look up at the fluorescents again for a cleansing, a baptismal basking font of timeless perfection.
Reset.
Her wrapping Celtic tattoo was displayed when she lifted her arms. And Milo wanted her to speak to him again. Not in numbers, but in love inside his mind. Synaptically connected until the memories pattered like raindrops from one to the other.
He has carried his burden over hills, meadows, city streets, over sand, gravel, cement, watching himself perform the ritual from ivory towers and fish markets and jade palaces and corporate offices. He saw himself beneath the crack of whips, he saw himself driven to the hard earth, to the wet earth, to the cold earth, to the molten earth, to the sea. He conditioned himself to fly, but everyone else had the antidote.
He cannot remove the burden, for what would be the purpose of carrying it this far, then? His knee cracks against the rubble as he trips, and he collapses under his own weight.
He knows he will need to pick up his onus and continue forward, but why not stay and relax a moment, even if the jeers cut as deep as bullwhips. The spit as painful as stone. And then the crotch kick, and it becomes immediately clear why you must stand back up, regardless of where the savage spear tip strikes.
Do you remember me, Milo?
“7”