I am not a violent man.
I just have . . . episodes. Sometimes. I’ve had them since I was a kid. Once, when I was about nine years old, we had a rowing lesson at school. When the lesson ended, the teacher let us jump into the calm water and swim a bit around the boat. When it was time to return, I couldn’t climb back on the boat (I was a little heavy at the time). The teacher, who was a somewhat rough man in his forties, shouted, “Jellyfish! There’s a jellyfish right under you! Get out of there!” — and I did. I was so scared of jellyfish back then. I jumped on the boat and almost overturned it and everyone laughed at me and I . . .
I don’t remember exactly what happened then. Mother had to come to the school and I was excused from gym classes after that, and a couple of the kids never came back from the hospital. My mom took care of everything though. She always does.
But she wasn’t here right now, and all I could think about was — slavery? — and I was beginning to feel a little strange . . .
“What?” the man beside me said. “Keep still! Hey, help me hold him!”
After that, everything went kind of grey.
When I returned to my gentle, easy-going self, I was standing up on the road, breathing heavily. When I looked around . . .
The cart was overturned, and a plank of wood that previously belonged in the cart’s side panel was now in my hand. The man with the hearty voice lay on the ground, unmoving, blood trickling from his head where the wood had connected with his skull. Another man’s head was stuck through the wooden floor of the cart, and his body hung limp from his neck. Yet another man lay under one of the cart’s wheels, which had broken free. He moaned softly. The fourth man was nowhere to be seen, though I heard running footsteps in the distance. The kid was lying on his side on the ground, giving me a frightened look. I remembered slapping him so hard that he flew in the air and hit the pavement. The donkey, being the only one untouched, stood quietly and looked at all this with a contemplative eye.
I stood up, went to the moaning man and took the cart’s wheel off him.
“I’ve had enough,” I said. “Enough mysteries, enough unexplained behavior, enough violence. I am a man of science! You will tell me everything that you know, right now, or I will hurt you.”
“You . . .” he moaned, “you won’t get anything out of me. You . . .”
I raised the plank. “I will start by cutting off your penis,” I said. It felt good to say it. I heard an angry scream from behind and turned around just in time to see the kid charging at me, slapped him again, and sent him reeling towards the overturned cart. “Little shit,” I said.
Just then the moaning man grabbed my leg and tried to bring me down. I jumped, stepped on his hand, and then, in a perfect golf movement, hit him between the legs with the plank.
A moment passed in peaceful silence. The man looked at me, then at the plank. I heard the child behind me, cowering under the cart. “The pain should hit about . . . now,” I told the man, and then it did.
By the time he finished screaming, the other two men were showing signs of waking up. I dragged them beside the cart and tied them with the blankets.
“Now,” I said, “you’ll tell me everything. Yes?”
The man I’d sacked sobbed quietly, looking at the ground. There was puke all down his bright Hawaiian shirt.
“Yes?” I said.
“Yes, yes!” the man cried. “I’ll tell you everything. Just don’t . . . I’ll tell you.”
“Good,” I said. “Let’s start with who you people are, and what in God’s name is going on in this city?”
“I told you, we are the Knights Templar, we’re . . .”
“I don’t care what you call yourselves, you idiot. Why did you try to kidnap me?”
“Well, for the war,” he said. He said it as if it were obvious. I said, “What war?”
“The war! The war!”
“You want me to hit you again?”
“We’re going to war,” he said, talking very fast. “Against the Firemen. Well. Against everyone else, too, probably. Everyone needs bodies, man! Grunts! Foot soldiers! I mean, it’s nothing personal! If anyone else saw you walking around they would have grabbed you instead of us! We weren’t really going to sell you!”
“That’s good to know.”
“Probably just tie explosives to your body and send you into the — ”
I stepped on his fingers and he screamed. When he quieted down I said, “What war?”
“The war against the Firemen. Because of — you know — ”
I kicked him in the ribs. “I don’t know who the Firemen are,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me?”
“OK, OK! What are you, from outside?”
“Talk, and make it fast.”
“The Firemen,” he said, “Believe in the Holy Fireman.”
Well, that made sense.
“Really, it’s not a joke! Don’t kick me again!”
“I will if you lie to me,” I said.
“Look, everyone knows this! The Firemen say that there’s this . . . thing. This creature who was once a person. But after the . . . the storm-creatures came . . . They say that only the head was left, but this head didn’t die, somehow it was still alive. The Firemen claim that they have a recording of this head, and it describes everything that happened here, and it contains the story of the Fireman who went to heaven. Don’t hit me!”
I hit him anyway.
“I swear this is what they say!” the man said. “Look, why would I make it up?”
Actually, it made perfect sense to me. I was beginning to understand what was happening.
“Why war?” I said.
“Because it’s heresy!” the man said. “A holy Fireman? That’s crazy!”
Ah.
“Also, everyone else is going.”
“I see.”
“A Firemen victory could set us back years!” the man said. He was on a roll now. “The assimilation of humankind!” he said. “It is within our grasp! Don’t you see? It doesn’t matter if we kidnapped you! When this is all over, you, me, everyone is going to join with the creatures on the mount, and we shall be as one, as soon as — ”
“Yes?”
“As soon as everyone believes,” he said. “Or all the non-believers are dead. Whichever comes first.”
That, too, made perfect sense. I was beginning to piece it all together now. “And where is this war taking place?” I said.
“The bus station,” he said. “Can’t you hear it?”
The station. Somehow I wasn’t surprised.
As if on cue there was a low, menacing rumble, followed by the sound of an explosion.
“It’s beginning,” said the man, and there was something I couldn’t quite determine in his voice when he continued, “I didn’t think it would be so soon.”
The second explosion, when it came, lit up the entire sky.
I love to go there. It is a quiet, high place, and no one else has found it. I have a telescope, and I carry it on my back, at night, as I walk through shadows, and come to my place, my safe and secret place, the place of seeing. I watch the skies.
These stars are not our stars. Of that I am certain. Sometimes, after sunset or before dawn, I look and sometimes think I see the old stars still there, still hanging in the skies, but they are pale and insubstantial, superimposed over the ones I had recently come to know. Sometimes I see the old constellations but the new ones call to me, the new ones speak and give themselves new names: The Wasp; the Torch; The Infinite Path; The Child; The Burning Man; The Skull.
The Child and the Burning Man are somehow connected. The stars whisper to me, and tell me many secrets. Sometimes at night I hunt the small creatures that still live here, cut open their bodies, spill their tiny intestines into my palm, and read the future in them. Sometimes I train my telescope on the mount, and watch many things, strange and terrifying and graceful. There is always the sense of age beyond measure, of beings both ancient and terrifying, watchers in the dark, indifferent. We are like dust in their eyes, motes of dust tossed this way and that in the air of a sun-lit room. I know what is coming. Sometimes I walk in the streets of this old-new city and I sing, I cry, I call out to my people, warn them of the coming flood. I am Noah, and they shun me as they did him. I know the truth found in a droplet of water, in a grain of rice. I know the truths the ancient stars whisper from their cold heavens. A child will come who is not a child, and a man who is fire, who is more than and less than a man. The world will shake in their passing and be transformed. I know all. Sometimes I eat the small intestines, licking them off my palm, so sweet and salty, and I crunch their little skulls in my teeth. They are so tasty. I am so hungry. I want to be like a star, and never be hungry again.