Aziz ordered the mocha-choco cappuccino.
"You are Aziz Sabir, writer for the Chronicle of Pain; a Journal for the Disaffected." The man stated it as fact.
"You are Zolon?"
"Zolon the Mighty!" His fists clenched upon the table.
Grove brought the cappuccino, glanced sidelong at Zolon the Mighty, departed.
"Okay, Zolon the Mighty." Aziz put his laptop on the table, opened it, turned it on. "Is this going to be an interview?"
"Exactly that, and a proposition."
"I know Samuel R. Delany is gay but, despite where I work, I am not."
"Nor is Zolon the Gargantuan! I mean only that, after hearing my story, knowing fully what I offer, will I then offer it. You must be fully informed."
"Okay. Shoot. What’s your story?"
"You are creator of a two-week running acrostic in your column, ‘Life, and Everything’. The acrostic is sheer genius. It moved me. You know the telos. The telos is meaningless. For that ontological reason I am here."
"I didn’t put any acrostic in my columns."
"Consciously, no. Subconsciously, you did. Consciously you are not that brilliant. Subconsciously, yours was a voice echoing the stupefying sentiments of the Immortal Ones. And that, Aziz, is brilliant."
Aziz wished he had a camera. Zolon’s resemblance to Mr. Delany was uncanny. It was also not every day that he met a complete nut.
"I, Zolon the Mighty, I, Zolon the Lone and Stupendous among Those Makers of All, I perceived your lamentation calling like an invitation to movement from those pages. I have not been so moved for so long you cannot imagine; it is the spark I wish to regain, energeia, activity. You see, you and I are similarly cursed."
Aziz perked up at that. He stopped typing and sipped his mocha-choco cappuccino. Liquid candy. It hurt his teeth. He did not know this madman’s game.
"Do not look so surprised. Zolon is the All Knowing because Zolon was among the Makers of All Things. Yet, in His apathy, the curse of His immortality, He has forgotten much; forgotten, indeed, what it was once like to desire energeia."
"Back up a minute. Zolon the Mighty is immortal, and apathy is your curse?"
"Yes."
"Let’s back up a little more. You created everything?"
"Zolon was there!"
"You didn’t make everything?"
"In the beginning there were many Great and Immortal Ones. In the beginning, energeia consumed us. A thousand universes were made and destroyed and a thousand more abandoned in the pursuit of one, only one, that would be perfect and just, one that would satisfy the collective aesthetic of all. Ages we labored. While others made the stars and the planets, I played with their light and made the spaces between. When we made your earth, I stirred its oceans and carved ripples in its seas. When this universe, too, failed, it was abandoned. Yet here I lingered, captivated by what had been made; and when I looked, the others were gone where I could not follow."
"How is that? How could you not follow them?"
"Do you mock Zolon the Stupendous?"
"I’m just curious." Yes, he wanted to mock the poor bastard, and take his picture, too. "While the others were building, it sounds like you were a child splashing in puddles and toying with prisms."
Tears sprang from Zolon’s eyes. They fell like diamonds. Diamonds! Holy Christ! Aziz swept them into his palm, and they were tears again. He blinked, wanting to not be sure what he had seen and what he had, for a moment, felt. But he was sure. He was certain. They had been diamonds! Diamonds!
"Curse My flaws! I am Immortal, I was among the Makers, but My role was small. Enchanted by what they had made, I found myself abandoned by them, weaker than they, unable to follow!"
Zolon the Great wept again. Outside, it began to rain in sweeping torrents. Rain splashed on pavement and sprayed across the diner’s black and white tile floor. Grove kicked the chuck of wood out of the door and closed it.
"Wow," Aziz said. He wished he had something better to say. Instead, he asked, "So what do you do now?"
"I repair TVs."
"You went from dabbling in the creation of the universe to repairing TVs?"
Zolon cried again. His tears — diamonds again! — clicked upon the hard table and bounced across the floor. Aziz watched them shimmer and turn liquid. Zolon used a paper napkin to wipe his eyes.
"Malison immortalis, the curse, is apathy. When you always have another day to act, you put off action. What can be done today can be done tomorrow, and soon a thousand wasted tomorrows accumulate by the score. Why hurry when there is an infinity of time in which to act? The urge to energeia rapidly fades. You become trapped in your own autotelic existence; mere existence becomes the telos, and your telos meaningless. This I feel. This I saw resonating in your elaborately acrostic column."
"Damn." Aziz sipped his mocha-choco cappuccino and listened to beating rain. The diner felt ten degrees cooler. He no longer sweated under his too-small gray leather jacket. In Zolon’s eyes he felt the sweep of infinity like a rushing tide, those eyes going on and on into darkness that reflected no light. Under that gaze, he felt his insignificance in a way he could usually ignore, a way that now held him paralyzed with the kind of gaping hopelessness that arises only from knowing, from feeling, all the limits of your frail existence. It was, he imagined, that way one feels in the presence of god. Any god.
"From your column I know your own trap, Aziz Sabir; it is consciousness of a dreary future that, no matter the decisions you take, you cannot change, a dreary future that ends without distinction."
Aziz felt that tide sucking at him, a tar pit of his own inescapable gloom.
"So we’re somewhat alike. My life sucks, then I die; your life sucks, but it just goes on, sucking forever. But at least you have that — you have life."
"Haven’t you listened? The malison immortalis depletes energeia!"
Outside, thunder. Very close.
"I desire escape from the curse, and so do you! I brought you here because I heard your voice in paper! I brought you here so that we may help one another!"
"I don’t see how."
"Why do you persist, knowing what your future holds in store?"
"I have to pay my rent."
"I don’t have to! I can stand on a street corner for five hundred years, never moving, if I want to. Don’t you see?"
"Not quite."
"It’s not the banalities of everyday life that move you. It is the knowledge that you are a finite being that moves you, that provides your energeia, your raison dêtre. You have no tomorrows! What you want must be gained today! There is the way to the fire I have lost! There is the key to the energeia I have forgotten! That is what I want. That is what you can give Me! For that I am prepared to trade."
Aziz thought of the gold paper in his pocket. He thought of vanishing diamonds. He thought of being eighty-six, dying in a cracked-brick and roach-infested nursing home from emphysema while the poker-playing ex-cons who worked there ignored his slowly slumping body in its motorized wheelchair, the motor of which would have died long before. He also thought of the unstoppable possibility reeling in Zolon’s unending time-line. He also thought that he, finally, began to see glimmers of opportunity that had not existed before. It was as if some subtle recalibration of permutations were afoot, the realms of possibility for a moment blurring so that he could no longer see them clearly. Briefly, he feared Zolon would want something silly and disastrous, like asking Aziz to kill him in the worst I am an Immortal who wants to die cliché that would end with his arrest.
"I don’t know…" But he did not doubt Zolon. Poor bastard, maybe, but not just any poor bastard.
"I want to trade My immortal apathy for the productive drive of your finite life."
Aziz considered it. "But mortal life is an endless loop repeated by everyone. History, life, repeats itself under a sea of changing faces. It is in itself immutable."
"Cry, you monkeys; your tears have been cried before. Your acrostic said
that."
"I wish I had been more clever."
"I know it is true; but it is the nature of the finite not to look far beyond itself. It simply can’t. It can be satisfied with its own works, its own goals and dreams, never minding and never wholly conscious of their having been done and dreamed before. That you know this is your curse, but not one of ordinary men. It is the curse of an extraordinary man. A man who, taking My time, may find himself with time enough to change his future precisely because he has one."
Zolon leaned back in the booth, both his hands upon the table. His tattoos moved under his unmoving skin, Maori designs turning to Hebrew letters, Hebrew turning to elaborate Arabic geometric motifs, the motifs to pictograms, pictograms to ideograms, and so on. A restless language Aziz could not read, a sight that disturbed his sensitivities.
He took his eyes off Zolon’s skin and stared at his laptop. It had crashed, leaving gibberish on screen and a single repeating line: when this universe, too, failed, it was abandoned.
Outside, the rain had calmed. It fell in regular beats, washing down the muted streets with a soothing sound like a whisper. Inside the diner he felt the humming resonance of possibilities. It was like that day when he had been thirteen, watching his sister Hashimi play the piano. Then, as now, he had been certain of a future; his sister’s. Now, as then, he was equally certain of a future — his own — yet the certainty was that he did not know it. There was a choice to be made, and making that choice could open endless — literally endless! — possibilities.
The future is an amorphous realm of maybes, all depending upon the myriad choices a man makes. Each choice creates a new set of maybes, and each maybe its own myriad of additional possibilities.
For once it was true, completely, true; he could, perhaps, escape the curse of his existence, the hell of his life.
"Okay. What do I have to do?"
"Walk with me, Aziz."
Outside the air was cold. Aziz shivered in his too-small gray leather jacket. Rain fell warm on his head and skin. Zolon walked without the it’s-raining-and-I’m-getting-wet-and-I-don’t-like-it hunch that Aziz shared with the few others, also without umbrellas, they passed on the street. The rain did not shine on Zolon’s dark skin or roll off, it simply appeared to go through, or inside, Aziz wasn’t sure. When he looked, he saw that the same happened to him, too.
It alarmed him, but it was not painful.
They passed along the sidewalk, retracing Aziz’s steps of earlier today. With each step he felt the minute aches accumulated from his thirty years of pale life seeping away. When he looked at the others they passed, he saw more clearly and more simply the shapes of their lives, the patterns of their choices, as he had not before. Some were like radiant flowers, destined to shine and shed happiness; others were like swirls of dust in pools of steaming tar, destined to spread unhappiness and fear; but most resembled quilts, the majority design already set, lives offering a balance of misery, pain, love, and joy, the only differences being the stitching between events. In one brief moment Aziz’s harmony left him, no longer humming isolation, misery, anonymity. Gone, with nothing in its place, he felt like a sprout emerged from the darkness of earth for the first time. But unlike a plant, he could move. He could feel energeia.
Outside the ground floor office of the Chronicle of Pain; a Journal for the Disaffected, they stopped.
"So it is done," Zolon pronounced.
Perhaps a little more widely awake, and wet, Aziz felt physically no different than before; but when he reviewed his time-line it reeled on and on in a stream of unending possibilities. He felt awed and afraid.
Zolon shook his hand and smiled. "Have no fear, Aziz. It’s not so bad. Time, like semi-precious stones, is worth only what you make of it."
Aziz trembled. He wanted to run. Not from anything. To everything he previously ignored. To everything he formerly could never have. "And what will you make of your time?"
"It's not what I do that is important; it is that I want to do that is important. Such a long time in coming, that feeling, I want to savor it, in all its forms, as I imagine you must."
It was true. Aziz fidgeted on the sidewalk.
Zolon raised the collar of his coat, looked both ways before crossing the street, and hunched his shoulders as he passed among the other mortals hurrying about the desperate energeia of their lives, hurrying amid the rain.
Aziz did not check Zolon’s newly finite time line. Instead, he watched him until he was gone amid that sea. Trembling still, he faced the front entrance to the Chronicle of Pain; a Journal for the Disaffected. Inside, he saw a few others working at their desks. He smiled.
"Curse you all, motherfuckers!" Aziz said, just before he walked away from the first-floor office of Manhattan’s most underground news rag, the Chronicle of Pain; a Journal for the Disaffected. People on the street barely glanced at him.
The gods blew on.
FIRST PERMUTATION…
Outside the ground floor office of the Chronicle of Pain; a Journal for the Disaffected, they stopped.
Zolon opened his briefcase. Inside, dynamite. Just dynamite wired to a simple red push button.
"What is this?" Aziz said.
"I told you I wanted to feel energeia again. That's what it is to be glorious, to feel like a god."
"I thought you wanted to live!"
"To live, to really live, is to have purpose, Aziz, whether that purpose is paying rent or writing newspaper columns."
"Your purpose can’t be to blow everyone up!"
"We all choose our purposes. Your world was abandoned by the others because it was flawed, Aziz. I was abandoned by the others because I, too, am flawed. I have been the creator of misery: I stirred your oceans into hurricanes, I rippled your seas into tidal waves, I raised your mountains with fire. Without me among them, the others are perfect, their new worlds fair and just. It is why I could not follow them. It is why I, flawed, seek not only the glory of what I once was, but the power of one who can, freely, destroy the things he has created."
Zolon the Mighty opened the Chronicle door, briefcase under one arm, his finger descending on the button.
The explosion collapsed the entire front half of the building. Glass, bricks, metal and dust whirled around Aziz in a white sound of ruin. When it ended he remained unscathed.
SECOND PERMUTATION…
Aziz and Zolon stopped outside the ground floor office of the Chronicle.
Zolon shook his hand and smiled. "Time, like semi-precious stones, is worth only what you make of it."
He turned and stepped off the curb, straight into the path of a speeding bus that snapped his mortal spine and crushed his mortal skull, pulped his mortal brain. Pedestrians screamed. The bus skidded. Cars skidded.
Zolon the Mighty died bleeding there on the streets under the rain that pushed his blood to the gutters in front of the ground floor office of the Chronicle of Pain.
Aziz understood why the Others had left Zolon to play with light and to make empty spaces, he understood why they had left him to stir oceans and to ripple the seas, he understood why they had abandoned him as they had abandoned this world.
Zolon was an idiot among gods, among men.
THIRD PERMUTATION…
The lawyer from Grove’s Diner tugged at the Chronicle door with one hand, the other holding an umbrella. The door did not open.
Aziz helped her. So close, he smelled her perfume, something French, he imagined. "It sticks. You have to lift up, then pull."
"Thank you." An assertive voice, but not a lawyer’s voice. Genuinely gracious.
She looked into his eyes. Hers were large and hazel, vaguely luminous from streetlights flickering on in the growing dimness, the brows meticulously groomed. Her chin was small and sharp, her berry-colored lips tastefully matched to her clothes, her hair beginning to lose its style in the damp air. She ran her own firm, very small, three years out of law school, with massive debts slowly sucking her under the tide of creditors. She w
as hoping proceeds from the liquidation of the Chronicle would be enough to keep her afloat for another six months. A trifle thin, without the shock of Gene’s astonishing figure, he thought she was beautiful. He wondered if she was going to be Gene’s lover. She wasn’t. He wondered if she was seeing anybody. She wasn’t.
He also realized that the Chronicle was going to die an ignored death and that, for the lawyer, the money would last but a month before the creditors came. She would lose her business. She would file for bankruptcy. She would finally take work as another anonymous face in a meaningless state office that served bad coffee.
The telos again.
But Aziz refused, now, to accept it. Refused to accept it in himself or in anyone else. It could be changed. Time, like semi-precious stones, is worth only what you make of it.
"I saw you at the Diner," Aziz said.
"Yes?"
"Before you go in, I think you should know that Bill and Russ only want to cut loose from the Chronicle. To scuttle it, as it were."
"You work here?"
"I did. It’s drowning in debt, a body tossed on an ocean that nobody wants to save."
She smiled and to Aziz that seemed a valuable thing.
"It’s my job."
"Of course, but I thought you should know."
"Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind."
She lifted the door. She opened it.
"One more thing. I’m Aziz. Buy you a cup of coffee at Grove’s when you’re through?"
She smiled again. "Okay." She entered the Chronicle.
Soaked. Chilled. Elated. Aziz walked back the way he had come. He felt immortal.
A STATE OF MAYBE …
In his drafty office, sitting by a moldy brick wall in front of a cluttered folding card table of a desk, Aziz looked at the gold leaf invitation in his hand. Gene blinked behind her brightly-framed glasses.
"Are you going to meet this Zolon fellow?"
Aziz stood and grabbed his too-small gray leather jacket off the back of his chair.