They shot Emmanuel the fourteenth of September, two thousand thirty-six, before the eyes of the entire Western world. Fortunately enough for him, there was too much confusion during the dark tide of violence that followed to prevent his followers from bearing his body safely away. To this day no white man or woman knows exactly where he is buried, but the rumor surrounding the pomp and flourish - the feasting - in honor of his passing are many. Never before in the history of multimedia was such an event recorded in the detail that it was, and from so close a perspective. Because for those of us who were watching at the time (and from what I understand there were billions) it was as if we were somehow there with them, standing on that dark street artificially lit by the military spotlights and the harsh glare of the cameras and then all the bloody agony that followed. Television was - is - after all the only link any of us really have to each other anymore, now that traveling even within our own country is restricted. And this was an event which had been in the coming for some years. There were those at the time who could still recall when President Kennedy and his would-be President brother were shot dead, both with the cameras fixed on them, but this was much different. This time, we were all expecting it. This time, the event was billed as entertainment, and the electronic equipment had been installed long before in anticipation. The anchor persons talked lewdly of the endless possibilities for blood and violence, hoping to attract viewers to their stations because the marketing executives were charging an arm and a leg for advertising. And this time, there was a significant portion of our population secretly hoping for the demise of our wizened friend, standing there unafraid at the pinacle of his career and who some now name a Prophet. They thought he should get what was coming to him.
I had been in our bedroom in the flat Sarah and I rented in Santa Cruz smoking a joint. Sarah, upset that I was smoking a joint, had stormed out of the room into the kitchen where I know she stood watching as well. In that way, I was perfectly alone when the first shots rang out and Emmanuel's body sagged to the ground along with several of those who had been standing around him. There were shouts and cries, I remember. The camera veered in confusion, and for a moment the only thing I could make out was that a lot of people were running madly about. The screaming and the cursing and gunshots were slightly distorted through the microphones so that it sounded as if the whole thing were taking place inside of a barn. The soldiers were firing on Emmanuel's companions, but I couls also see that Emmanuel's companions were firing back. "The fucking nigger bastards!" I heard a U.S. soldier sing on his way by the camera, accompanied by rising crossfire.
"Holy shit!" the camera man's voice came distinctly over the air waves, his voice ground and swatted by the nearby and petty retorts of machine guns all around. The image on the screen stabilized suddenly on a street now devoid of living flesh but littered with the dark skinned bodies of Emmanuel's Patriot soldiers. It was some comfort to note that lying among them as well were a few distinctly white men in khaki uniforms. There was fire from all directions, I could hear, but I couldn't see where it was coming from. It appeared as though our unfortunate camera man had suddenly found himself in the center of a battlefield. Everyone else had either got out of the way or had taken up positions along the perimeter. And now that I was looking closely I could determine that not all of the bodies out there were soldiers. There were civilians as well. I never understood why the government hadn't cleared the area of civilians before the confrontation, but I suspect they never expected this much resistance.
"Christ!" the camera man's voice cried out. "It's fucking war zone out here!" The camera swung around to face the outside of the District of Columbia National Granary Number One, the wide steps of which were now slick with blood and organ tissue. There were black commandos, I could see - probably ex-army - with heavy machine guns firing heatedly in the camera's direction. The spotlights started going out then, and later I discovered that some of their marksmen were shooting them out. The Patriots had trained for night missions anyway. It was suddenly apparent that they were fighting to win. I looked but could not pick out Emmanuel's corpse from the pile at the bottom of the steps.
"Dick," came a muffled voice from somewhere next to the camera, and then I remembered the reporter who had disappeared suddenly from view when the shooting started. "Don't you think we should -?" Should what? Get out of here? It probably would have been the first thing on my mind once corpses started dropping, but today's reporters aren't known for their great intellect, only their ability to act. Like most of us in the modern society they just do what they are told, and perhaps someone over at the station had told them to maintain their positions. After all, the station was concerned about ratings. I never found out what he thought they should do, though, because the next thing I knew the reported fell across the camera's field of vision, screaming and clutching the side of his face. Blood was streaming between his fingers.
"Holy shit!" I heard the camera man say again, and then there was a wild grunt. The camera spun in a circle, allowing brief and blurred glimpses of many men approaching and someone very close by - I assume the mysterious camera man himself - holding half his brain in one hand, before the thing finally toppled to the ground. I got a good view of a white man's hand lying inert off to one side of the lens and someone else's bloodied hair to the other. A few feet away there was a U.S. soldier staring unseeing into my eyes. It was only after a few moments that a great stream of blood trickled from the direction of the hair, smearing the bottom of the screen and making a bee-line for the still hand. Then there were the sounds of pounding feet and rough voices all around, and I could see that the men who had taken out our daft camera crew were now on their way over what had been established as the Patriots' side of the street. Then the screen went blank.
I stared at it for a couple of moments, unable to discern anything in the fierce black and glossy depths. The chair I was sitting in seemed suddenly cold, but that was all. Another drag off the joint, listing calmly to the silence all around. It was as if the whole world had suddenly stopped, even the birds, pausing. Waiting?
Downstairs I heard Sarah knock something over in the kitchen. As if at her cue a great slew of noise from the streets of the city, all around, reached my ears. The judgemental sounds of weeping. Great troughs of sorrow and tears, rising up from the earth like steam. Some women in a nearby block were wailing, their lofty voices sagging with bereavement ballooning over the city. 'Oh, my god, David!" I heard Sarah cry as she bounded to the bottom of the stairs. But I kept my eyes fastened to the television screen. Perhaps there was to be more? "David!" Her voice seemed to be scratching her throat, readying her eyes for tears. "They've killed him, David!" As if I hadn't seen for myself. "David, they shot Emmanuel!"
The visophone rang. The both of us were uncannily silent for a brief moment. I could hear Sarah's ragged breathing at the bottom of the stairs as she tried to collect herself. It was eerie to hear her so upset, and for the life of me I couldn't figure out why. After all, she had never liked Emmanuel. As a matter of fact, she hadn't particularly cared for any of the Immortals, including myself. But then again, that was years and years ago, and many things had changed. The sounds of the women outside were growing louder, were accompanied now by great, male voices furious with despite. I could almost taste the anger in the air. How could they do this? they were asking each other. Then I heard Sarah make a mad dash for the visophone. The unusual urgency in her steps, the offhand passion I discerned in those footfalls jarred me. I was able to use the remote control to change the channel.
A hectic white woman trying visibly to remain calm greeted me from the chaotic background of a newsroom. A lock of perfectly blond hair grazed a powdered cheek. That one flaw in the robotic appearance we all have grown accustomed to in the faces on television was alarming. That, and the fact that she was out of breath. So could it really have happened? Could it be true? Or was the government trying to goad us into civil war so that a direct solution to our problem would be forthcoming? " - severe rioting has already been reported in Los Angeles, Baltimore, San Antonio, and Detroit," she was wheezing into the camera. "I can't stress enough that all citizens should take cover from the violence that seems to be spreading like an epidemic across the country. Look your doors, gather together any weapons that you may have. Under no circumstances should you leave your homes or answer the door!"
I heard Sarah's tattered voice through the din of the decent citizen on the television screen and all the wailing and crying and shouting of the indecent citizens in the streets outside. Distantly I remarked to myself that she didn't seem to be holding herself together very well. "David!" she suddenly called up to me, "it's Lee! Lee's on the phone!" But I didn't answer her. I was listening to the decent citizen informing me about the information blackout in Washington. Apparently, no one was allowed to broadcast anywhere in the city, where most fo the heavy fighting between government forces and the Patriots happened to be. I guess the government didn't want the systematic slaughter that followed recorded for all posterity to judge it by.
Outside not many blocks away I distinctly heard the sharp sounds of glass shattering.
"David!" Sarah cried to me, moving up the stairs as fast as her aging body would carry her. "Get your gun!"
"Why?" I answered meekly. "I'm sixty-three. I'm ont going to shoot anybody."
"What?" she screamed at me from her bedroom. "We're going to leave the city, David," she said, a little more calm now. Perhaps she was answering a question she thought I had asked, or cared about. "Pack your things."
But I just sat there, the remote control in one hand and staring coolly at the television.
A minute or two later she came into my room, saw me sitting calmly finishing the joint. "David!" she shrieked at me, dropping her hastily packed suitcase. "What are you doing? Are you just going to sit there and wait for them to come kill you? David, listen! Can't you hear? They're already rioting! David!"
I turned to look at her, saw that there were tears on her cheeks. The look she returned to me was a mess of emotion - of grief, of anger, of betrayal and of a keen sense of urgency I had never known her to possess. Something stirred in my tired body, so slowly I stood up, turned off the television, and threw the remote on the seat of the chair. I calmly put the joint out in the ashtray and sighed heavily.
"David," she moaned softly to me, still standing inside the doorway. Her eyes were capitulating slits that glared ruefully at the floor. "They just shot him."
"I know, Sarah," I told her, walking over to her. "I kind of thought they might." I pulled her into my arms then, let her cry a moment on my shoulder amid the sounds of the rising violence that punctured the din around us. Not too far away someone's scream shortly pierced the air. "Just not this way," I whispered to her, feeling her body quiver with a silent sob. "I never thought -" But I couldn't finish. I didn't know what I had thought.
"What?" she asked me, lifting her face from my damp shoulder. Her eyes were red and needing.
"Nothing," I said, pulling awkwardly away from her. "Let's get going. We'll drive north, I guess. Away from any cities whatsoever."
"Aren't you going to take some of your things?" she asked me in a clearer voice. I strode into the hallway, trying to be strong for her. But really, I was very calm and peaceful. She sniffled behind me, wiped her eyes, and then grabbed her suitcase and followed.
"No," I said on my way down the stairs. "Only some food. The less we have the better," I said, making some useless gesture in a vague direction. "Let them have it all if they want."
Not long after, while Sarah and I were still staying with two of her cousins somewhere in eastern Oregon, the government issued and international apology to the decent families of those had who had been mistakenly been killed in the long battle, a number of which mysteriously included virtually all of the journalists who happened to have been present. It was something that vaguely reminded me of President Reagan's solemn apology to the French concerning the embassy that was mistakenly destroyed during our raid on Libya. Don't fuck with us, was the message. I think that was the message this time, too.
| * | * | * | * | * |
Americans always had this strange belief in the permanency of the world order that had them perched comfortably at the top, pulling all the strings. Perhaps it had something to do with our lack of history, the spready of the years that we fear. History on this side of the planet begins in 1620 and then only vaguely. Before you know it you're talking about 1781 and then the great Republic and so on. On this side of the world only two wars have been lost. There was almost a third, but thanks to Napolean we were spared reassimilation into the British Empire. The two we officially lost were in Asia and affected us only as much as the media and the survivers were able to communicate. In fact war itself has not touched our soil since the Civil War. We have known no full-scale invasions. Not yet, anyway. Until the breakdown of the world economy the United States was the richest nation and probably still is. But even if the Famine had not come the United States was doomed to fall. Never, they say, but so it was said in Rome. The gravest dangers are the ones that the society refuses to perceive. Usually they come from the inside. In Rome it was the addiction to luxury, the constant taxation of usurpers, a horribly debased currency, a declining populaton, and a general feeling of despair. In the West the causes would have been similar, and instead of barbarian invasions to topple the rotting regime it would have been racial confrontation.
There was such a web of hatred spread across this country, forced to simmer angrily because for about one hundred years the society attempted to supress its prejudices rather than deal with them appropriately. They called this the politically correct movement, and in their ignorance they created "inoffensive" words to replace those they felt were not suitable to their vision of the ideal society. If only they had tried to address the root of the problem rather than supress its symptoms. No, instead they made up words like "horizontally challenged" because "fat" makes fat people feel badly. But the reason why fat people probably feel badly about themselves is because they receive negative feedback from their peers, and masking that through artificial language just diminishes the certainty of the event. Because fat people are still fat whether they are "horrizontally challenged" or "waterbuffalos", and if the latter the chances are greater they will stand up for themselves.
Sides in this conflict had been strictly defined after the turn of the millenium, despite the desperately politically correct movement that was trying to convince the population that everything was just fine if only we'd just stop hating one another. And it's true, everything would have been fine, but you can't make people stop hating each other just by wishing it, or telling them that it is improper to hate. The confusion they created only helped to hasten the slaughter and the destruction. Because the pressure built until one day some little incident became the rallying cry for millions of Americans whose passionate, improper emotions got the best of them. It feels incredibly good to submit yourself to something desired but forbidden, and the forbidding only makes the desire even stronger.
First and foremost there were the rich white people. This was the class of people who had ruled this country since its inception. This was the class of people for whom the republic was instituted, and this is the class of people who have enjoyed all of its benefits. Congressmen and Presidents were drawn from their stock, or else were hopelessly assimilated into it. This was the class of people with the greatest vested interest in the status quo, and this was the class of people most unwilling to stake their lives on it. Then there were the middle-class and poor white people, who were the unwitting tools of the rich white people. These comprised the vast majority of the nation's population, and these proved once again ready and willing to be swayed by pretty speeches, nonsensical ideology, and a few petty bones handed out at the appropriate moments. Enough about them. Then there were the poor and middle-class black people, who were portrayed as the enemy. And it was easy enough for the poor and middle-class white people to believe this, because even though few had ever had any crime committed against them personally by a poor or middle-class black person, they had seen it countless times in the movies or in the news or heard about it from some yuck rambling drunkenly in a bar about his friend. Now, the poor and middle-class black people had the most to gain from the Revolt, because what they were demanding was freedom. Not political freedom, because unless you were rich and white that didn't mean anything in this country, but social freedom, which is the most important for a full and enjoyable life. And lastly there were the rich black people, caught precariously in limbo and wondering just where their priorities lay.
The rich white people thought they had all the guns, of course, but as it turned out they were gravely mistaken. After all, hadn't violent, black youths already experienced in the art of killing been arming themselves in our streets for decades? Wasn't a great portion of our armed forces filled with young black men and women who had access to weapons in great numbers? And the black people possessed an added advantage in this conflict in that they were fighting for something they were also quite willing to die for.
Emmanuel's death became a focal point for the passions of American blacks who were tired to clandestine economic repression. His name became a rallying cry for victory. It has also become something synonomous with holy, and that, I fear, is a grave danger to whatever spiritual advancement Emmanuel hoped to bequeath to us when he freed us from the heavy chains of monotheistic religion. As I've said before, humans are beasts that require beliefs, and still we have not cured ourselves of this habit of discerning vague and divine forces in the Nature around them. That is why I see Purpose has so far yet to bring us.
When will humankind see that the only thing even resembling the divine is in his own head?
| * | * | * | * | * |
Emmanuel's debut on national television came one year after the turn of the millenium. Sarah and I had been living in Los Angeles together for two years and were still relatively uncomfortable in our somewhat forced union. There was still fear broiling in every thought that entered my head, and she had not escaped the distraught need that had animated her with the memory of her best friend's wanton death fresh on her mind. She tried to blame it on me, of course, followed me for four years after I graduated out of bitter spite. But I suspect that there were other forces at work, and after enough empassioned arguing we both realized that we really didn't want to be apart anymore. It's funny, I guess, how things like that work out.
Anyway, I hadn't really thought much about Emmanuel since I left Baltimore. I was trying, in fact, not to think about anything remotely involving my school days and not succeeding very well. But mostly my dreams were fraught with ghastly images of Shanai leaping gracefully from the tops of tall buildings, descending in slow motion towards nothing with an escort of seagulls whose shrill speech echoed in the air around me. That was why I was so surprised when I suddenly saw my old friend's face on the television. It seemed quite out of place to my eyes, as if it didn't belong there.
He made the last five minutes of the news, the reports that seem to be more filler between commercials than genuine news. One minute I was sipping my beer peacefully, enjoying the late evening, and the next I had knocked the glass onto the floor where it disintegrated into several large fragments, staring with my mouth open. Sarah called angrily from the kitchen, but I didn't find it at all necessary to respond. It was only after she came marching into the room, armed with words of respite and most likely a sharp command to fetch the vacuum, that I said, "Look, Sarah. It's Emmanuel. He's on television."
After graduation, Emmanuel took up residence in the city with a young woman a year younger than himself whom he had met at the university. One night they decided it would be incredibly erotic to screw on the steps of the bell tower at St. Joseph's Cathedral. So, without even hesitating a moment, they took a cab to the church and, after making sure no one was looking, broke in. Emmanuel's cock was pushing uncomfortably against the inside of his jeans as they entered, and all of his thoughts were geared in a single direction. His woman, too, was distracted by thoughts of pleasure, because Emmanuel was such a good lover, and so neither of them noticed that in the distance some of the lights were on. Yes, the church had not been left unguarded. The resident priest regularly volunteered to watch the place at night. He liked to pray, he told his superiors, but the truth is that the man wasn't devoted to God nearly much as the half bottle of bourbon that was his life's only true companion. If he was drunk enough, he would finish the bottle at the top of the tower and throw it into the street below. There were always hoodlums to blame. Emmanuel and his woman had been going at it so hard that they never even heard the door open at the bottom of the landing, nor the off key whistling of the good priest on his way towards them. The priest, it seems, was rather deaf and of somewhat dimmed vision - not to mention drunk - so he didn't even realize anything was amiss until he was almost upon them.
Emmanuel and his woman had chosen a small alcove in the stairwell where lived a small, alabaster statue of Mary holding her baby. "It was supposed to be inspiring," Emmanuel said on the news, "and believe me, it was. The statue was quite warm to the touch." There was enough room to allow him to sit comfortably at her feet. His head nestled nicely beneathe the Virgin's upraised arms, his bald and shiny scalp just brushing the stern lips. His woman had plenty of room to straddle him, and was quite able to maneuver as she pleased provided she held onto the baby Jesus for support. So there they were, the two of them, making gorgeous love in the lap of Mother Mary cradling her infant Son. Emmanuel's woman clutched the feet of the baby Jesus with a passion that could be mistaken for fervor. The eyeless sockets were hidden behind those familiar mirrored sunglasses, he with such a smile on his lips that it seemed he must have stolen it from the Virgin, who herself appeared more the Babylonian love goddess Ishtar than the Holy Mother of the prude God she was believed to be.
The good priest only detected their sinful copulation when he reached the top of the landing. Quickly, he stuffed what little was left of the bottle into his robe. Peering hesitantly at the two squirming young adults in the dark, he began fumbling for his glasses. "Clarence?" he squawked angrily at them, leaning forward and trying to get a good look before the evidence could be eliminated. "Jerome? Are you two vandalizing the statue of the Holy Virgin Mary yet again?"
Emmanuel's woman was so startled by the sudden voice and its close proximity that she emitted a startled shriek and tried to cover her nakedness by ducking her head and pressing her body against Emmanuel.
"Agatha?" the priest barked into the darkness, "is that you? Do you realize what kind of trouble you are in? Hugging the statue of Mary won't do you any good now. Just back away and let me take a good look at what you've done." Still fumbling with the bottle in his robes, the priest grabbed the woman's arm and yanked her from Emmanuel. She screamed again, batting at the old man's arm, but his grip was firm with vigor for his god and the right to punish. "Carrying on will do you no good, Agatha," he purred as he released her. "Now just stand there quietly and pray for the mercy of God and Father Johnson. I think he'll be quite disappointed in you, my dear. Why," he added, positioning himself in front of the statue where Emmanuel, as yet undetected, sat smiling broadly, "I wouldn't be surprised if he decided not to let you on next week's retreat at all."
"Jesus Christ, Emmanuel!" the woman screamed, trying desperately to cover herself with the only two limbs she had available, "I don't see what's so fucking funny! Just because you can't fucking see -"
"Watch your language!" the priest snapped, fixing her with a harsh glare. "There's no need for vulgarity."
"Vulgarity?" the woman said, slipping away to where their clothes were stashed. "You just wait, old man."
"Well, we'll see what Father Johnson has to say about that," the priest concluded, returning his attention to the statue. "Ah, yes, my spectacles," he breathed as if he were remembering what he was doing, and all the while peering at the statue and Emmanuel, waiting cruely in the darkness. "My goodness, child," he exclaimed, "what have you done? Did you douse it with black paint?"
"Not exactly," the woman answered with a hint of a sneer in her voice, stuffing one of her legs into her tight jeans.
"Not exactly, eh?" the priest grated angrily, finally removing the spectacles from his robe. "Well, we'll just see what exactly it is -" But the good priest never finished his sentence. Almost triumphantly, he had planted the spectacles on the bridge of his nose and pressed his head close to the statue as if to get a better look. He had been expecting some form of vandalism. Perhaps the child had decorated the statue with sunglasses and painted her fingernails, or had defaced her in some other way, but in any event he was not prepared for the sight of Emmanuel's stiff cock jutting up from the lap of Our Lady not two feet away from his face.
The priest's mouth dropped open when he realized what he he was staring at, and now it was Emmanuel's turn to laugh. "See anything you like?" he asked, gesting toward his erect penis. But the priest never had a chance to grasp the humor in his words. The next thing either of them knew the old man had dripped over the hem of his robe trying to step away and tumbled backwards down the stairs. Shocked, Emmanuel stood up and listened to the old man's shaky descent, perhaps hoping it wasn't what he thought it was and noting that on the way down he heard something shatter. The priest landed still and quiet on the landing below, his robe soaked in alcohol. Emmanuel, perhaps as surprised as the priest had been a moment before, simply stood at the top of the stairs in disbelief, losing his erection, hoping the old man would suddenly stand up and announce that he was perfectly fine, if only a little drunk. "Najiya," he asked quietly into the silence that ensued, "is he alright?"
"Jesus Christ, Emmanuel," his woman muttered as she came quietly to his side, still fumbling with her blouse. She threw another glance down the stairwell. "You didn't have to kill him."
"Don't be ridiculous," Emmanuel snapped at her, wishing suddenly that he could see. "He's probably just fainted from the fall."
Najija shrugged. "Well, he looks dead to me."
Of course, the priest was already well aware of the stark non-existence of an afterlife, a fact that was entirely lost upon the poor old man. It was later determined that he died before the ambulance arrived due to massive cerebral hemmoraging induced by a sharp blow to the head, probably one of the early stairs. Emmanuel, as we could see on the television, was not quite remorseful enough in the opinion of the local authorities. "Jesus Christ, man," he was saying as the police escorted him to a waiting car, "we were just having a little fun."
"But because of your 'little fun'," some reporter was saying off camera, "a good priest now lies dead. What do you have to say to that?"
"Good priest?" Emmanuel returned, resisting the policeman's lead into the back seat. "The man was a drunkard! Besides, he was only a priest."
Only a priest. That remark, and the fact that he was a black man refusing to submit himself before the rancid criminal justice system in which he so suddenly found himself submerged, got him convicted of some trumped up felony charge. He spent a year of his life in jail. Perhaps that experience is what sparked him. Perhaps, if he had never been arrested and thus not been led to answer back to the society he felt had wronged him, Emmanuel would have died another faceless death and history would have taken quite a different course. But he grew so incenced at his wrongful imprisonment that he took the year to write his famous book condemning the three modern, monotheistic religions. Naturally, since he lived in the West, he aimed most of his pungent criticism at Christianity. After all, he was working on discrediting the fundamental premis of all three religions: that the world is starkly divided between good and evil. The notion of God, as he pointed out, is only secondary to that, a natural consequence. And what happened to Najiya, his companion in distaster? She was let off on a misdemeanor and married Emmanuel when he got out of prison, after which she continued to be his eternal companion in disaster, was standing behind him, in fact, during his very last.
Sarah, of course, thought the whole story was quite amusing, but at the time there were no smiles for my face and I found her quiet chuckling offensive. "You think it's funny?" I growled, turning to look at her.
She shrugged, her eyes still on the television screen. "Yes," she answered bluntly. "I do."
"What, are you a fucking idiot? He's going to go to fucking jail!" I was staring at her wide-eyed, bewildered, a lot angrier, perhaps, than I should have been. Perhaps it was the shock of having been visually confronted with a ghost from those still recent days of tribulation, to have seen that he had moved on with his life and was not floundering around in the muck of his past, clutching at faceless shades, haunting him.
But Sarah wasn't going to have anything to do with it. She cut me a sharp glance out of the corner of one eye. "You better clean that up," was all she said to me, indicating the pile of broken glass and spilled beer by the chair, before walking back into the kitchen.
The sight of her back so infuriated me that I just wanted to walk right up and smash the back of her head in, but even then I knew some restraint. So instead I walked out onto the back porch and looked over our noisy block and furiously smoked a cigarette. I was trying not to think about Emmanuel or Shanai or Antonius or Salvatore (where had they all gone?), briefly wondered how long it would take President Gore to bribe Congress to decriminalize marijuana, before I came to the sudden and stark realization that Sarah and I were joined together solely by the miserable recollection of that one little girl who didn't have enough strength to keep on living. And then all thoughts were silenced in my brain except for the one that told me how wrong and awkward that was.
| * | * | * | * | * |
"It's utterly amazing," Emmanuel was saying from the high podium studded with microphones, "how long this disease has persisted. Anyone who has even the slightest intimacy with human history and decent rationality should be able to see it, if only we weren't so easily misled by the beliefs others wantonly stick in our heads. Or, rather, if only we would assume beliefs that conformed well to our actual environment. After all, would science have gone as far as it has if rather than forming hypotheses from observable data we formed the hypotheses first and then tried to apply them to the world around us?" There were lines on his face, I could see from his picture on the television. The first signs of age. When would mine begin to show themselves? How chilling those sudden doses of mortality can be. How cold the stone becomes as it wears away our weary bodies. I remember remarking upon how much he had changed since Sarah and I had left the States. Of course, it had been thirteen years.
"Why is it that our religions rely entirely upon brainwashing our children before they realize that they possess the right to choose for themselves? The basis for belief should be the strength of the philosophy itself rather than fear and persuasion, because then what ends up happening is you have religious zealots fighting for one faction or another with no real understanding of the philosophy he's fighting for. Because Christians shouldn't be fighting at all. But don't tell the Pope. He doesn't believe in the firmness of our minds to understand all that there is. All his thinking has been done long ago by men who had no idea what natural science was. Because if he could really see he would realize that Christianity is not a monotheistic religion at all. That all the gods of old simply have new faces in the form of the saints, that Jesus's mother is herself often worshipped as a goddess. One of the very first contraversies in the history of Christianity was how to reconcile the fact that Jesus was divine. It implied two gods. They came up with the notion of a Trinity. Have you ever actually heard someone try and explain it? It offends every notion of logic.
"And the gods we had before the Christians. Perhaps more sincere, but still just figments of our minds to explain the forces that seem to affect our lives. We can all, after all, understand how awesome the weather can be. And today we live in homes, travel in cars. We don't know the night sky anymore. But thousands of years ago, men and women were very dependent upon the forces of nature. I, at least, can understand how a people, whose lives depended upon the yearly rising and falling of a river, could discern a god who was angry or pleased with them. That is the notion that abounded in Mesopotamia where the mother to Islam and Christianity arose. But today we understand that the rising and ralling of the river has everything to do with how much snowfall there is in the mountains and nothing to do with the sudden whims of divine ghosts, that one year in particular it was quite unbelievably heavy and in the spring the whole river valley flooded. Yes, yes, we know. It was God again punishing his wayward children."
I have Emmanuel's last speech on disk. It was his greatest, I believe, more so because people were finally ready to listen to what he was saying. His words were nothing new, but faithlessness has a way of preparing people's mind for a new answer, readying them to find fresh wonders in a world that has grown old and grey. It was the same faithlessness that allowed the cult of superstition - Christianity - to overcome a dying Hellenism. I actually believed, watching him on television that day, that perhaps after four hundred years logic might once again reign in the minds of men. And logic need not supercede spirituality. After all, why offer our prayers to unseen gods when the beauty and splendor of the natural universe lies all around us?
But who would have known that the spring of 2018 was the beginning of the end for this era of humankind? But I won't belabor what we all know quite well, or what will be known as history in the future. As for my friend Emmanuel, his career was about to change in a most drastic way, and both science and philosophy would be lost for a good long time. He was about to embark on an eighteen year campaign for racial equality that would end in his death and revolution.
"What I want to stress, my good friends, is that humans are animals who have the capacity to rationalize and to reason. Such capabilities have been observed in other animals but not to the degree that our brains seem to be able to construct and manipulate models of the worlds around and within us. We as humans have at our disposal an arsenal of knowledge and observations and a mind that wonderfully allows us to explore implications and act on our conclusions. Like mathematics, the greater our knowledge the closer to Truth our conclusions become. Five thousand years ago, humans discerned gods, or God, in the world around them because that was all they could come up with. We are animals of reason, my friends, and because of that we must try and find a reason in everything that occurs around us."
Emmanuel had stirred up a lot of trouble during the time Sarah and I were abroad. It wasn't long before copies of his book were being sold in Belgium where we were living. I picked up a copy in Brugge and read it, and I cried. I cried because I understood. After all, Emmanuel had come into his own before my very eyes.
"We are animals. We possess instincts not at all unlike those of other animals. But the faculties of our minds are like nothing we have observed anywhere else, and like all the other species of animal that walk or crawl this earth we have only the tissue and blood of our brains to thank, not God or a fleshy spirit we name 'soul'. We are the naked ape with the capacity to reason and our miraculous thumb. And we also have the miraculous ability to produce and distinguish with uncanny precision a series of sounds that we call speech. Thus we are the ape that dresses himself in clothing because evolution has stripped him of his fur. We are the ape that builds for himself automobiles and lives in houses where he has installed for himself machines that control the climate. We are the ape that sends satellites into space and walks on the moon. We are also the ape with the longest penis and the greatest sex on the planet. But we are still nothing more than apes with beliefs and if you put this ape in a situation where the idea of civilization is no longer, then despite all his artifacts all that remains is the animal."
How did you come to understand so much? How was it that I stumbled along the low road, scrambling over rocks and boulders and trying to find detours around great, yawning ravines, and somehow you emerged at the other end with a keen understanding of yourself and how you fit into the world?
"After all, civilization is nothing more than a belief in itself. Our beliefs can betray us, of course. They are the source of peace, but all of madness." But you faltered there for a moment, my friend. O yes, I saw you pause. Not for effect but because momentarily you could not continue. We all five of us understand the pits and snares that lead us to pervert our beliefs into infinite madness. We all five of us left each other there. "Our beliefs give us an incentive to be, or to destroy ourselves, as the case may be."
For some years my old friend had been making international news, had been forced to live in hiding because there were those committed to his death. Amazing, that he become the Salman Rushdie of the West. Amazing, yes, and also unfortunate. Exept here in the West something remarkable occurred. Men like Newton and Leibnitz and Gallileo somehow convinced the merchant class that science could earn them a good living, so in the process endowed their children with an acceptance of a way of thought that is entirely in opposition to Christianity. Four hundred years later science had reached a point where it undermined the people's very belief in the myth of God and Judgement, and humans seemed ready to seek a new understand of the nature of the universe.
But why didn't they listen to you, Emmanuel? Was it truly so difficult to understand what you were saying?
"Virtually all of our mental processes can be damaged by lesions in the brain: our memories, our language skills, our ability to discern anger and fear in the faces and voices of others. Strip them away and the only thing that remains is the tenuous, perhaps dubious existence of a well. Can the will itself be damanged? Science has not yet determined if it can. Regardless, how can we say there is an eternal soul when our mental states can be so radically altered chemically and anatomically? A simple knock on the head can change a man's entire personality - his beliefs, his emotional responses, as if a new man had stepped into the old one's body and taken his place."
How strong and sincere you looked to me, Emmanuel, standing there surrounded by bodyguards like a Roman emperor, speaking to the billions of people in the world who had come to understand why things weren't the way their parents or the highly orchestrated world of television and church had taught them it should be. And Najiya, standing tall and firm by your side, whispering in your ear. You never read from a script, my friend. No, you spoke directly to your audience and looked them all in the eye, spoke with passion and brilliance and, most importantly, enlightenment.
"There is no external good and evil, no higher being watching and judging our every action. There is no god except for nature, and even in her there is no will, for she just is, like ourselves. There is only nature to explain us. We are a piece of her. We do not exist independently of her."
Perhaps, but now the matter is irrelevent. You are no longer alive and in your death you sparked a revolution that ended in slaughter. And like all martyrs the memory of your words and your actions sparked the very belief you strove to annihilate in the minds of humans everywhere, and there are those now who claim you were their Prophet. These men and women name themselves Humans and they call their religion the Religion of Humankind. Its adherents are largely the descendents of the African kingdoms, dispersed throughout the Americas centuries ago. And they are zealous, like the Christians once were under the fierce hand of Roman persecution. Because you gave them something they had been lacking for all those centuries they lay isolated, each in their own country of imprisonment: a unique and common sense of their own identity. And now they have something they can call their own, their own sense of what is God. I am afraid, my friend, that you did not succeed in vanquishing organized religion. No, in your hope you destroyed one religion only to allow another to take its place. Perhaps science and logic have just passed through a golden age that lasted four hundred years or so, and now, soon enough, humankind will see a return to the kind of strict religious orthodoxy that has shrouded him in fairy fancy all these centuries. Perhaps. But I cannot look beyond the course of the destruction, as I will not know any rebirth except for death.
| * | * | * | * | * |
But they didn't shoot you because of your beliefs about God; at least, not mostly because of them. Before 2020 you had government protection whenever you spoke in public, but after you went around stirring up trouble in the spiritually battered South you had to supply your own bodyguards. Najiya was the driving force, I think, behind your finally accusing the governments of Texas, Mississippi, and New Jersey of denying their black citizens proper access to their granaries. I remember that day quite well. After returning from Europe Sarah and I stayed a month at Drusus and Nancy's in Pennsylvania, where we saw you give your last speech. We quickly decided that Los Angeles was too crazy a place for us to return to, and in the newly found peace we discovered overseas we settled on the San Francisco area. It was just two years after we moved into our two bedroom flat in Santa Cruz that once again I saw the vague shape that seemed to be perpetually haunting me from the screen of my television.
It seems that Najiya had mysteriously acquired some illicit camera footage of three white national guardsmen in Texas refusing to allow a family of poor blacks with the proper identification to enter the district's granary. There was a man, thin as a board whose cheekbones were showing through his face, and his wife with skin that was chalky and sagging. Two small children cowered behind her as one of the men taunted their father with what appeared to be a large breast of chicken, then strick him down when the desperate man tried to take it from him. "Get out of here, nigger!" one screamed at him, and another kicked him in the chest. "This ain't no place for you!"
I don't know how Najiya got her hands on the footage or who recorded it, but I do konw that by that time similar incidents were reputed to be occurring all over the country. I never took the rumors very seriously until I saw it for myself. After it aired, there was a national uproar along both coasts and among black people everywhere, not just in the United States, and during the small period that the American people were focused on the incident the President made several promises to investigate. As it turned out, the district attourneys of all three states met and later denied the allegations, claiming that the recording was a clever forgery. After that, the ever forgetful and restless attention of the public moved on to more pertinent matters, such as the food shortages that seemed to be worsening by the day. And, of course, we were all watching as the invaders began to take Europe.
Najiya desperated tried to keep the public eye on the issue by collecting more and more evidence from more and more states, but the only thing that ever came of it was a blacklist. None of the television stations would touch her story. Emmanuel and Najiya were distraught and enraged, and perhaps it was then, finally, that the realization dawned on them that the situation would not change unless it was forced to change. That slowly and over time white people were going to try and starve his black brethren out of the country.
Over the next ten years an underground movement of sorts sprung up in the back rooms of bars and in basements. I cannot pretend to understand the mood or guess the purpose, although I would venture to say that at the beginning the thought of a revolution was not yet a serious one, or even deemed plausible. Perhaps they were banding together as a people because they had no one else to turn to , and there is always strength and safety in numbers. It was by no means an organized venture, nor was it headed by any one or one hundred people. But in times of precarious survival humans are usually willing to lay aside their differences for a common cause, and instead of a few there were many great leaders. There were men and women who by day cleared away tables in restaurants or kept the stockroom full at the office and by night raided granaries and in some places storing large caches of weapons. At times they would demonstrate their strength and suddenly a general strike was crippling the nation's industry. All across the country goverment and corporate workers desisted from their jobs: clerks, postmen, soldiers, judges, policemen, firefighters, janitors, Congressmen.
Emmanuel spent his time touring the South with his wife and his small Patriot band for protection. Already he had ceased trying to find justice for his people, for he knew it was like the Fountain of Youth and the Trinity - legends, myths that for hundreds of years had tortured his ancestors. He was trying, rather, to prepare them for what was to come, and comfort them until it had. In farmyards at night he gave short, inspirational speeches, secret gatherings across the country where he described to them a time and a place where they were a people governed by themselves. For Emmanuel believed that if enough of them converged on one area, struck swiftly and took it during a moment of great confusion, then with a bit of luck and some well fought battles they might in fact be able to keep it. Washing and Oregon were his targets, and his growing Patriot army eventually became the organization he envisioned would lay the foundation for the mission.
But as time went on such an event seemed less and less likely. It was beyond their grasp and would require a unity that they did not possess, and as white retaliation for lost foodstuffs and general unrest began to flow the black resistence hardened into something quite different. By 2030 the word "revolution" could be found scrawled on virtually every street corner in major cities across America, even on historic Pennsylavia Avenue outside the White House. "Patriot revolution" was the most common phrase, and it was to become a battlecry of sorts.
Needless to say, the white power structure found it fit to respond as the situation grew more strained. After the existence of the underground was officially recognized the FBI was actively trying to penetrate and dismantle the organizations the country had come to fear. Everyday hundreds of black men and women were hauled struggling to makeshift jails. Racial tension ballooned incredibly during the first half of the 2030's, especially when white vigilante youth groups started roving the streets in small bands looking for blacks to harass. When these same young white youths started turning up dead in the morning good white mothers raised hell with the police and further retaliatory measures were taken. Soon there was civil disorder in the streets of New York City and Baltimore. The curtain, it seemed, was coming down.
The whole situation reached a crisis on the fourteenth of September, 2036. That was the day the Patriots seized control of the District of Columbia National Granary Number One, the very same that fed the mouths of Congress and the President. In a matter of moments the whole country was wired to their television sets, white and black alike, and each with their own hopes about the outcome. As I've already said, this was an event long in the coming and there were many who hoped that the men in green would just start shooting. And there were also a great many hoping that the men in red berrets who called themselves Patriots would initiate the insurrection so very many of them cried for, an insurrection that saw such acts of violence committed that it could only have occurred in the most violent country in the West. Everybody wanted someone to shoot, which, in my opinion, is exactly what they did.
| * | * | * | * | * |
In the end every black man, woman, and child that could be found within the borders of the United States and Canada was killed or forced to flee the country they had helped to build. The Race Revolts were so violent, so reeking of human animality, that the air virtually stank of it. I could smell it the entire time Sarah and I lived in quite hiding in Oregon. For five months the country was immersed in the kind of turmoil I used only to see on the evening news in far away countries. In five months the last vestiges of civilization and decency were washed completely away, so that there were no more schools, no more electricity for large portions of the coasts, no more social services. No more freedom. After that, the President declared a permanent state of emergency and assumed dictatorial powers. To my undying chagrin, no one really seemed to object.
After Emmanuel was shot every able bodied Afro-American took to the streets with his gun. The state of the American armed forces was in such disarray that a national conscription was invoked to which virtually every able bodied white man responded. Such a long and bloodied series of battles it was, and perhaps Najiya and her soldiers would have had a good chance at success if they had had a clear objective. But there were too many leaders with their own armies and not enough followers, and no idea of how to take heavily defended Washington. So aging Najiya holed up in Baltimore with her forces vowing to take the capital while the fiercest fighting raged on deathlessly through the other, more distant parts of the country.
By January the insurgents were fleeing to Mexico, white men with guns hot on their heels trying to kill as many as they could. It has been said that the waters of the Mississippi ran red from Hastings to New Orleans, that for a second time the banks of the Rio Grande were littered with corpses starving birds picked to pieces in hours, sometimes before the wounded had properly bled to death. But I would not know of such things. All I know is that I was outraged and helpless to act.
Sarah and I were sitting together, alone and shivering before the television, while the tanks and the fighter planes moved in on Baltimore and razed the city. I think we were weeping, yes, our heads resting uncomfortably against each other, when the last building crumbled and the cheering started. Then the white men climbed from their machines of destruction and started dancing together on the top of the corpses and the mangled stone. Moments later someone carried a severed head into view of the camera, proudly lifted it before him as if the fucking thing were a prize. The camera zoomed in and Sarah and I found ourselves staring into the bloodied and empty eyesockets of Najiya, dried blood spilled down her cheeks and nose. It was a matter of grave irony that in the end she end up blind like her husband. There was dirt caked over her face like frosting, I remember, and when I mentioned the analogy to Sarah she slapped me quite hard. Her mouth was ripped open in a perpetual scream of death, but even from where I was sitting you could see that there was nothing inside.
As it was, the first unit to find her was the 101st batallion from Mississippi. Half their men had been wiped our during the taking of the city. Of all the invading units they had suffered the most casualties. They found her in the very skyscraper she had been using as headquarters for the few years since she had taken up residence there, after she had kicked out or killed all the white people that had foolishly remained in the city despite her warnings. Of course to their surprise they did not find a verile and manacing threat but a tired and lonely old woman who saw that there was nothing left to fight for because it was over. When they burst into her command room, fresh in the madness of battle, eyes wide and muscles twitching with adrelaline, Najiya was lying coolly on the floor on the other side alone and without any bullets. She had sent away the last of her aides to flee as they could. So it was that the soldiers mistook her for someone else, and they were about to shoot her and move on through the building when one of them had the bright idea to ask her where Najiya might be.
The woman was too proud to have shot herself before they barged in on her, and when they discovered who she really was they were more than disappointed. "Hey, guys!" one of the men called out the door. "You've got to see this!" As more and more of the soldiers entered the room, men who were really just civilians in uniform who knew no discipline, I know that Najiya kept her calm and waiting for what she knew must be inevitable. There would be no pity for her because of her age. I also know that she remained silent the entire time it took her to die, that she looked all of them in the face and refused to utter a word even when they tortured her. Apparently it was so unnerving to some of them that they could not go about their business with her. So it was that, after the fifteen or perhaps the fiftieth man, they angrily gouged our her eyes and cut out her tongue.
It's difficult to say when she actually died. The brutality of war is an amazing thing, but apes are violent beasts and when the violence is allowed to express itself it usually does in unforeseen ways. How many men was her limit, I wonder? Seventy? one hundred? perhaps two? It matters little, I guess. That was a savage war, and things still have not settled down. This was always a savage country. Not it is a jungle.
But if anything my tears were assuaged by the fact that Najiya died a proud and fighting woman, despite what they say about her now. She did not die a ridiculously absurd death as did Agrippina, nor a cowardly one like Messalina. Nor was it as graceful as that of Lydia, who like Augustus was called divine. She had no lover to die with, as did Cleopatra, nor peacefully. She died, perhaps, a death worthy of the third Roman emperor Gaius, also known as Little Boots, but better than any of them. I have heard that the millions of blacks who managed to escape have joined their brethren to the south and that they tell each other the story over and over again. They keep the belief alive. Already, the legends are forming. Will, perhaps, one day in a hundred years someone decide to write it all down as he hears them? What will they be saying then? What glorious wonders and absurd miracles will men attribute to the hands of the prophet Emmanuel and his wife Najiya?
I do not know. All I know is that in the winter of 2037 Baltimore was razed, the rubble dragged away, and in some pitiful act of ceremony the earth there was salted and tilled and salted again, so that today and for hundreds of years in the future nothing will grow there. Not even a blade of grass. But it is my opinion that nothing would grow there anyway. I believe that soil can only take so much blood before its vitality is washed away. But, of course, I am not always right about such things.
This site and all its contents are the result of the tumultuous workings of the mind of one Adam Wasserman.