He had risen, holding onto the desk with his left hand for fear that, if he released his grip, the Work would believe he was attempting to flee, and would tighten the chain again. He had no desire to leave, and so he slowly pushed key after key with a slow right hand, all clenched fist, save for one emergent finger, moving over the keyboard as though some extra-terrestrial warming an ignorant child’s heart, or a God’s finger pushing the rising man from the clouds.
* * *
I sense a church in the near future. Stylised and gothic, all flickering candles and aging carpets, chained into a place it does not belong. I sense a lack of control on our Author’s part, the character he created would never enter into such a place of his own volition. But here he struggles, his own prison reflected on the freedoms of his world. Why shouldn’t this character beat a child to death before its mother? What, in the end, does it matter if another child dies at the hand of a phantasm? It changes the world, in that overused, idealised manner but, in actuality, the world continues on.
When one hears about it, one would grimace, one would frown; one would think to themselves that ‘there is no justice in this world’. And then one would melt away, losing one’s consciousness amidst the horror of the silver screen, each one believing that they, and only they, are capable of seeing it for what it truly is. So, we realise what it does to us, and we continue with it anyway. What choice do we have?
We twist and we turn our way, like worms revolving in the earth, back onto their narratives. We must avoid these queries, these arguments of mine, lest your audience become bored with one such as I. But return to your walking corpse, if it pleases you, if it offers some solace against the knowledge of your own demise. What does it matter, to one such as I?
* * *
He closed his eyes and allowed the building to rise in his memory, or was it imagination now? Did he ever truly exist outside this cage? Was that dull meander through existence something that actually happened to him? Even if he had been out there, amongst the crowd and the wind, the dust and the dirt and the advertisements for inefficient cleaning products, did he ever actually live?
‘Have I ever actually been alive, besides now? Even if this body has done such things, has thought such thoughts, was that honestly me?’ He sagged against the desk, careful to avoid the keyboard with his chest. ‘If every moment changes me, if every moment creates a new being, every heartbeat changes our view of the world, if every experience, every breath alters the world around us, how can anyone remain the same, even in a void such as this? Even when this thought began, that was a different person. Someone now dead, never to return.’
The questions remained unanswered in his solitude, the emptiness of existence curling around the nonsense he spouted, in the depths of his loneliness. His ignorance, one disguised as intellect, left him awaiting some answer from the Heavens until his fingers rattled across the keyboard again.
* * *
The gates were hewn of some ancient wood, worn by the thousands of delusional hands which had rubbed against it over the years, the desperate flesh hammering on the locked and barred entrance to a supposedly universal sanctuary, though it offers the simple promise of solace to but a select few. The weather-worn stones, arranged around them like ancient penitents crowding around some self-stylised Messiah, looked black even in the midday’s pitiful attempt at light.
The spire was, as is typical in these half-thought out excuses for religious architecture residing in the Grey, particularly uninspired. It protruded little more than three feet above the remainder of the sloped roof, its presence no more than a given convention than the housing of some cracked, aging bell to summon the sinners to prayer. Its windows were actually of stained glass, but stained with dirt and dust and grime, rather than the translucent images of hellfire, damnation and simple falsity. Even had those panes been a scene from some narcissist’s storybook, they would not have been able to survive for more than a few days, before some ignorant child, unable to comprehend art in any definition of the word, tossed a shattered piece of masonry through its symbolism.
Behind me, the road was empty. This unnecessary building having little traffic passing by, whether by vehicle or on foot. Those that did stalk past this place did so with unease, with clenched fists dug deep into their pockets, with black hoods drawn tight about their heads and undeserved swaggers, designed to conceal their myriad failures.
My hesitation, warring with my decision, made me freeze at the door, my hand lying against one half of the cold wood. Strange. I had half expected that, to one such as me, it might burn my flesh; leave me grasping on to some shaking, bubbling mess. I pushed at the door. One fragment of the wood, some miniscule splinter, dug into my hand sharply and I winced. I was expecting the door to creak, to send a sound reminiscent of some Stokerian nightmare down my spine, to disperse a cloud of dust, gently spiralling out into the thick, foetid air. Instead, it moved quietly, brushing over the long, red rug which stretched from my position to the small altar.
I glance around guiltily, ill-suited to the oppressive narrow-mindedness which hung in that building, like some abstract, nocturnal winged creature. The room stretched out, the movement of my legs inadequate amidst the thin carpet, below the slanted roof which, despite the size of the building, still appeared to reside a hundred feet above me, all pregnant shadows and wooden beams older than the walls around them.
I moved through the dust, listening to the quiet crackle of candles, to the sound of my boots silenced against the carpet. With every step I expect to hear the sudden click of my heel against the stone floor I can see peaking from around the edges of the pews. The carpet stretches all the way to the steps of the dais upon which the altar squats, pregnant and pulsating beneath the flickering light. I intend to turn into a pew, to bow my head and search, desperately, for some peace amongst the past. I know, of course, that there is none to be found there.
Even so, I am surprised when my feet refuse to turn and, instead, they carry me towards the void at the end of the carpet, as though caught on some invisible railway; a one-track transport into the ether. The noise is sharp and sudden, my foot against the stone. There is no finality in that noise, however. Caught in alien desire, my feet stalked up the steps as though designed for it. As though approaching God were something my body was designed to do.
* * *
Ah, this is where he would have me enter, isn’t it Author? This is where he would toss me into the character’s world, into his unintelligently designed existence? You would hope to use my voice, this one you cannot even hear, in order to persuade him? You hope that I may be twisted and turned, that I may be warped like another one of your character’s until I am nothing more than an extension of your will?
No.
You will not turn me from the path I have chosen, free of your influences. You will not break this existence into a narrative. When you cannot even control your own doubts, Author, when you cannot even direct the creatures you have brought into being by digging into the surface of yourself, you have no right to use me to remedy your mistakes.
You hope that you can outsmart him here; that you can beat and bully him back onto the road you would pave for him. He gave you up for dead Author, he understands you too well. Though he may not know you are there, he knows the game you play. You are the one who taught it to him, after all.
And so, driven by some last vestige of slavery, by the pressure of your will on his Earth, he enters your domain. A place; where your will can be manifested as divinity, where your whimsy can take on physical form. Stay your hand, Author, and let him go where he will. Leave him these last freedoms of his, until your interference drives him into morbidity. Let nature take its course, and hope that all you have done before will be enough.
For I would see you dead before you harm him again.
* * *
The fire had gone out recently, perhaps by the breeze which had accompanied my entrance. The candelabra itself held only
the one candle, in its right-hand support, the wick of which was still gently smoking. The other two were empty, hands pawing at the air for something to hold. Just like us, I thought, desperate for something above them. For some power they cannot comprehend to give them what they think they need.
There was a crucifix, with someone else’s Lord and Saviour lying atop it, his arms stretched out like a man waking from sleep. Beneath the mop of greasy-hair and his crown, both beautifully realised in some factory overseas, I could see his mouth stretched open in phantasmal pleasure, his eyes glittering with a joy bordering on the orgasmic. I reached out, like so many people assume their deity did, and ran my thumb down the hair, the smooth thorns, the aquiline nose with flaring nostrils, the lips; the jutting chin. His throat, I could see, was a tortured mess of the dark metal. Whether an attempt to recreate the tightened tendons which spoke of his resolve, of his pain, or a simple failure on behalf of the gently starving child operating this machinery, I could not tell. His chest followed the curvature of the body, muscles rising into the sunlight
I turned him over, leaving him face down on the rich cloth, beside an empty goblet and a small plate. The goblet was the colour of gold, but cheap gold; the kind of gold one would buy from the slightly suspicious Eastern-Europe import shop around the corner. The plate was clearly of pewter, tarnished and grey, no doubt the church’s last vestige of its supposed humility. I glanced around, at the shadows and the dust, and realised that it suited this place more. This altar didn’t seem real, as though it were the invader here, a living entity from another dimension, and I was the only thing belonging to the building within which it had made its home. I had lifted the goblet, the metal warm in my hand, and was peering inside it with a distinct lack of interest when the voice cut across the stillness.
‘I apologise, but there’s no wine in there,’ the voice said clearly, distinctly; a tone of genuine apology, ‘at least, not yet.’
I didn’t turn in response, though I knew that I should have. I should have meekly dropped the thing and found some surreptitious way to flip the crucifix back over whilst apologising for my intrusion. He could have laughed my apology away, pretended not to notice his God, and been the bigger of the two of us. I paused, letting time stretch out until the sound of his voice washed over me and rebounded from the distant walls, echoing in the dusty air.
I turned in the opposite direction to the voice, descending the dais and taking a seat in the second row without ever looking at him. I leant forward, my head on the pew before me. I sensed his uncertainty, as he must have realised my determination when I spoke.
‘Would you speak with me, sir? Would you convince me that I am wrong?’
Aldous Huxley
Already, you have him as a beggar, as a challenger? As another narcissistic penitent come to sacrifice himself on the altar you brought into being? Now you will shrink his arguments to nothing. You will play the part of the church, and our protagonist is the silhouette of Galileo; the shape of the man without the life, the history book adaptation. He will be quashed, he will be hidden away, buried alive in a cage of luxury, if you allow him to live at all.
What emptiness must occupy your waking hours, that you commit yourself to this endeavour in place of life! You are yet young, but where is your career? What purpose have these weeks served, towards what aim can you permit these hours, seconds, minutes to stoically pass you by, as you stare blankly at an page; one empty of meaning and yet filled with text?
Where are your friends, those to whom you swear love and a tentative fealty for all their faults and failures? Why are they not hammering on your door, dragging you into the light as you drag this poor creation into your labyrinth? Where are your family, sacrificing their love for you in favour of your selfish desires? You have forced yourself to create a world within which you can live, uninterrupted; locked in some pale alternative to a garret, ignoring the demands of your body that you may call yourself a ‘starving artist’.
You sicken me, as you sicken yourself. You sicken him as you are sickened by God. That is who you set yourself up as here, isn’t it? A deity feigning disinterest, using apathy to camouflage impotence.
* * *
‘What is a selfless act?’ I asked him, my forehead cool on the smooth bench, my hands slack around the wood. There was a silence from my right, that emptiness approaching a reflective process, one indicating that an answer of great moment would soon arrive in the world, changing it for the better, until the last recollection of its utterance is burnt from existence. The silence, pregnant with possibility, forced my eyelids open, though all I could see was the long, black formlessness of the seat’s back suddenly giving way to the flattened, threadbare rug upon which it was set.
‘A selfless act, my son,’ the voice said, after its momentous pause, ‘is simply an act of good, from which you receive no profit.’ There was no doubt, no hint of disbelief, in those words. In fact, there was little of anything. It sounded rehearsed, as though he had read it a long time ago and had it memorised for just such a supposed crisis of faithlessness as I was enduring.
‘So, there is no such thing as selflessness?’ I spoke bitterly, though I couldn’t help it, desperate as I was for the argument to begin, for this pointless debate in an echoing, empty place. The voice was silent again, for a few moments, but it was a different silence. A silence of hesitation, replacing one which had emerged from some sense of planned dramatisation.
‘Did you not hear me?’
‘Oh, I heard you. However, this selflessness you prescribe is nothing but another contradiction, one which places like this have become adept at providing to those even more gullible than I am.’ I leant back in my seat, folding my arms across my stomach to warm myself in the cold pressure. ‘You say that it is an act of good, lacking in profit? Then does the profit have to be physical or, as religions such as yours have muttered through finery since time immemorial, can a reward be mental?’
‘Of course,’ it said, the tone ringing with forced calm, ‘mental rewards are worth more than physical ones.’
‘Then surely, performing an act of selflessness is ultimately selfish, for it is done for personal reasons? To achieve some warm feeling in the depths of a barely living heart, to stop yourself having to think about the other person’s plight, to act as some indication to the God you worship, one that says ‘Look at me!’ Here, I raise my arms in supplication, as though beseeching some invisible creature so high above me. ‘Look at me, Lord! Am I not worthy of your love?’
The chapel rings with silence and my embarrassment, the familiar combination weighing heavily on my limbs. I shrug to avoid the reddening of my cheeks, like some child caught leafing through one of his father’s magazines. ‘Everything which can be done can be traced back to a selfish desire. There is nothing, nothing, done purely out of the goodness of a heart, as increasingly rare as that metaphorical organ is.’
‘In fact, one could say that only the atheist is capable of selflessness. Someone who believes in nothing save the physical, who believes that life is all we have, that there is no possibility of spirituality, that there is no rebirth, that there is no reward or punishment, or even a simple reckoning waiting at the end of our lives. Even then, our atheist must have no emotion; he must be unable to feel anything following his act. His ego must be a nonentity, as impossible as that is. It cannot harm him, lest he begins to feel pride in his sacrifice, it cannot help him, lest he enjoy the fruits of his labour. He must be one of the walking dead, he must be unfeeling.’
‘You speak of selflessness.’ I could almost hear the flash of anger in the voice’s eyes. ‘But what of self-sacrifice, of self-immolation?’ The voice demanded, passion suddenly replacing the falsity and the neutrality which he had, up until this point, allowed to rule his utterances. ‘What of those Buddhist monks, allowing themselves to die for their cause?’
‘Already, you run out of relevant examples for your own nonsense?’ I grin at his affronted sil
ence. ’I can only assume you mean Thich Quang Duc? The burnt man of Saigon?’ I made to spit, instead, mindful of the voice’s watchful gaze, hawking back the fluid into my dry, guilt-ridden mouth. ‘What of him? His act was, if we do intend to give it this description of selflessness, designed to help create equality of the worst kind, that of the delusional mind. That of religion, that of the terrible force it can bring to bear over the minds and hearts of idiots.’
‘Ignoring all those following narratives, many of which can easily be seen as simple political manoeuvring by a terrified, failing government, it was the Buddhists themselves who destroyed any possibility of the selflessness in the act. Whilst his bones crackled, whilst his flesh bubbled and his muscles shrank like a child’s, another monk repeated, ‘A Buddhist priest burns himself to death. A Buddhist priest becomes a martyr.’’
I shook my head. ‘I cannot pretend to know what went through his mind, but I can tell you that he did not act from selflessness. He became, as his priestly friend was so quick to point out, even before his body finally sagged to the floor, a Martyr. He became a hero, synonymous across the world with sacrifice and, indeed, selflessness. People know the image of him, if they know not what he struggled for, even if they don’t know his name. At the very moment that gasoline, poured over him by one of his ‘brothers’, ignited, the cause did not matter. It was all about him. ’
My hands began to tremble, and so I ran them through my increasingly greasy hair, the realisation that I had not showered in almost three days adding little more than self-loathing to my already malignant mood. They stank, I realised, though of some meaty, acidic scent which I cannot pretend to know the origin of.