Vanished from My Hand, Left Me Blindly Here to Stand
There was a time, in my earliest childhood, when my life was like any other, unless my memory, or my sense of timing, plays me false.
I remember holding toys in my open hands, and finding that water tastes bitter, and cursing the world for it.
I remember shouldering arms against a sea of troubles.
I remember erasing in my mind all attempts to find love, to pretend hope, to regret the death of happiness. I strangled every strangling frustration. With barbed wire.
I remember the weaponless executioners, passing by, knowing and uncaring, as I suffocated beneath the plague of indifference.
I never blamed luck. I never could believe in luck.
I never blamed myself. I never could believe in myself.
I cursed, but I could never find the delicacy of hand to make the soap doll anything but faceless.
I laughed, like an idiot, when anything died.
I cannot go back to such strange and heartbreaking beginnings, not armed with the knowledge that could make those days of innocence into an everlasting tragedy. What I did not know, I will not tell myself. I cannot return, in any case, because the child that grew up to become half a man is beside me now. I cannot enter his spirit, nor he mine. We coexist. We understand each other exactly insofar as the crocodile brain which shelters behind the pig brain which shelters behind the human brain can understand its playmates. We each have our journeys, we are each in the middle of them.
They are not the same. We have different goals and different values.
Because I am only half of a man, and that half mostly words, I am often called upon to settle disputes when I pause momentarily in my journey. The three goddesses, who have decided to set aside the infamous judgment of Paris on the grounds of corruption and dubious constitutional validity, come to me with a rotted apple from which one bite — and all the gold — is missing.
They ask me to award it to the most beautiful. They have one-track minds.
The first of the three, and the tallest, who has eyes flashing with star-glare, approaches me and says, “I can give you the knowledge of the world, and a lot of power.”
I am a man without ambition, and I certainly have not the vanity of kings.
“No,” I say.
When the second comes to me, I ask her, “What is the nature of your bribe?”
She replies, “The future. The gift of success. What you can do, that you will do.”
No one knows better than I my intrinsic limitations. I prefer her serenity and quietness to the bold, offensive beauty of the first, but I am not in the habit of working for nothing.
I go looking for the third, who is slender and shadowy and — insofar as my own poor judgment can possibly tell — the most beautiful of the three in actual fact. She is glowing with golden light and life.
“What have you to offer me in return for the apple?” I ask her.
“Only dreams,” she says. Either she has confidence in my honesty and in herself, or she has lost interest since Paris. It is not, when all is said and done, a very nice apple. Not any more.
I pause to contemplate my decision, in the meantime taking another bite out of the unsavory fruit. I discover a large maggot within it. At the sight of the maggot, all three goddesses shudder and turn into old hags.
I throw the apple away, and it falls into a fast stream, to be borne away by the current. When I look back, all three of them are still chasing it. The maggot is chasing them.
I console myself with the thought that I have the dreams anyway, though the promises they make me are forgotten as soon as I awake. No one, after all, can hold fine sand or cool water in his clenched fist.
Helen of Troy stands on the terrace which tops the wall where it curves away from the sea. She is accompanied by a guard.
Her eyes are roaming the distant horizon of the sea, and she stands with such intense stillness that it seems she has been there for some hours. She might be waiting for a sail to appear in the distance, or for the rising of a special star.
Her mouth forms words, but she does not speak aloud. The name of Harker Lee forms on her lips several times, and it seems that she might be praying. But her eyes are steady and staring, not closed, and her head is high, not bowed.
She wears a long garment of silky white material, folded but not pinned at the shoulder or tied about the waist. Her long black hair is decorated by clasps formed into golden wreaths, and spiraled by a ribbon of creamy lace. She wears scarlet moccasins upon her feet. Around her waist is a bracelet of wrought glass, carrying tiny patterns of metal filaments, which send silver hyphae into the flesh of her arm, reaching for the autonomic nerves.
She begins to hum a slow, sad tune, while her gaze still lingers on the face of Alio Shan and the pearly path of moonlight which crosses the sea toward the giant wall.
Her face is very thin. The cheekbones stand out. Her complexion is distinctly yellow. Her eyes, instead of irises, have tiny skulls, each with two black pupils.
I am a thousand ships too late.
Still, I can become addicted to the sight and taste and touch of her body, which she still wears well. Especially in such times as she extends herself upon a couch, or dances by starlight. The shimmering wraiths of her jet black hair fall like waves of a restless ocean, or sway as though at the ministrations of a warm wind. My eyes are transported into distant dimensions, where I can see only a universe of cut glass and dark skin, with the parts of her body and the elements of my soul dissipated into the slashed lines and the many-shaped translucent faces.
Her skulled eyes continually search through this many-colored mosaic chaos, like two identical liquid globes of gold and chrome and anguish. They move to a secret cadence, following an invisible scent that trails like the wake of a fleeing snake over and between the light-filled surfaces of this crystalline space.
She is lost in the magic of my own liquidness, trapped by the shapelessness of her form, the easy disconnection of her attributes, but she retains a gentle rhythm, an integrity, a unity, which defied the cutting edges of the diamond leaves and the angry sapphire thorns of the mallarmite roses. She does not bleed; she cannot weep. She flows like purple wine or heavy oil. Her omnipresence is overpowering, a folded, cloaking sky woven with a multitude of silver sperm.
this is titan base calling canaan. titan base to canaan. acknowledge please. . . .
And the answer. . . .