The Grey
Life, Chapter VIII
What
is it in revelation that men have seen God? And what is it in God
that men have gone mad?
These
questions haunt me sometimes, at the oddest of hours, long after the
images I see have become all too weary and blurry to trust.
Yes,
revelation, the drink of madmen. It used to come to me often. There
were times in my youth when everything was so clear, when the warm,
powerfully mysterious hands of truth had gripped my brittle bones in
what seemed an undying embrace. It is a time so isolated in the
existence of a man, when everything once so ambiguous is for an
instant so perfectly crystalline.
Some
men cannot control their revelations, or are controlled by them.
Truth
is such a powerful drug; it manifests itself as it chooses. And there
are times when it does not matter if truth indeed be truth, but only
if it is believed.
When
revelation comes it strikes pure, and in that instant there is
nothing except revelation itself. It rings out clearly, so easily
grasped. And it was always there, if only we had looked harder for
it. The knowledge - if it is kept - can drive a man toward awkward
acts of insanity, deluded pilgrimages through a desert to appease a
god we cannot see and never seem to hear from. Perhaps the brooding
power of revelation is born in us, like love and trust.
The
knowledge of God affects us all, it seems. The individual particles
of humanity all perceive a being higher than themselves in their
revelations, but for each it is different. Why, then, do we dress it
with a common name?
In
ancient times, people called their madmen prophets.
"What
is it?" I asked finally. The soft, sombre tones of green were
reappearing in the scope of my vision, and I suddenly remembered
where I was. I had been staring blindly all along, off travelling on
the long and distant pathways of my thoughts. It suddenly appeared to
me how isolated events in our lives really are from one another. I
peered harder at the bud, not exactly sure what I should be looking
for.
"It's
Oregon kind," Antonius told me from his seat next to me. I would
have liked to have answered him, but I could not, for in that instant
I slipped out of the local timestream, like a broken gear that falls
from a damaged clock toward Infinity. For some reason I had become
dislodged, stuck between the folds of what is and what is not. I
think I gasped, but the sound caught in my throat as the nothingness
swallowed me.
There
was the awful sound all around me of clocks dolling out the seconds
in horribly definite beats.
Yes,
for a moment, I had lost myself in nothing. I felt as though I were
living in one of Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist nightmares. Yes,
perhaps my ego was transcending something so esoteric I wasn't
capable of perceiving it at all.
And
then suddenly I was back, the light flooding my eyes again, and I
could feel my skin. "Kind bud," Antonius was repeating to
me in the distance.
I
looked right. I looked left. Salvatore and Canine were sitting on the
floor by the stereo, playing Streetfighter on the new nintendo. Their
faces were turned up towards the stream of electrons that sprayed
them unending, and I could not understand how they were able to
differentiate Honda from Chin Li in their condition.
I
turned to look at Antonius again. His deep, dark eyes were wide with
contemplation. But it is dangerous to gaze too long into the eyes of
another, especially when they are so wide, because there's always the
danger of being sucked in
Sucked
in to what?
And
existentialist nightmare.
so
I looked away.
Shanai
was in the chair across from Antonius and I. How beautiful, how
utterly delicate she seemed to me then. Her warm body was slouched
precariously across the chair, almost as if she had been thrown onto
it. Her arms hung down the sides, limp and useless like the rotting
limbs of a leper. A cascade of hair shrouded her most personal
features, offering only subtle hints of her animality. But she wasn't
moving, and she couldn't see, so it only followed that she wasn't
really sitting in that room with us then at all. Who knew where she
was, or whether or not it was a good place. I think it always starts
as a good place, a place you like to visit. It tricks you into coming
back, into trusting. It'll turn on you if you can't control it, and
when that happens your stuck. There is no coming back.
Maybe
she was engaged in a fierce contemplation of the I as well. I decided
to find out.
But
Getting Up was no easy thing. Getting Up required an enormous amount
of effort. Getting Up implied a sudden alteration of the scenery, an
immersion into a wholly and completely foreign perspective on what
was.
Getting
Up was an act in itself, and at that moment there was no real acting
going on in the room.
But
I got up anyway. Out of the corner of my ever-shifting sight I
thought I saw Antonius look up at me. I could only guess what he was
thinking.
Shanai
didn't notice me approach. She didn't move, didn't twitch. Wherever
she was, it must have been a very captivating place.
I
knelt next to her chair, my back to Antonius because I didn't want to
have to deal with him, and levied a careful gaze at her, but still
she did not notice me.
"I
am Alpha and Omega," I told her flatly. She didn't move, though,
and I thought perhaps she hadn't heard me over the music. But then,
as I sat staring at her helplessly, trying to communicate, to break
her spell, I realized that she couldn't have heard me because I had
never spoken. You can't hear someone speak if he doesn't exist.
I
could feel the acute wings of panic just at the edge of the universe.
Yes,
yes, none of it's real. Nothing. Those slips out of the timestream,
why they're just slips into reality and none of this exists because
it's all horrible and I'm going quietly insane.
I
had to get a grip, because the sea of panic was growing on me. I
could taste the immesurable power of the enveloping madness, like
wisps of smoke in the summer breeze. I knew that if it overcame me I
might never recover. So I did then the only thing I could. I reached
into my pocket and withdrew with a trembling hand a crushed pack of
Marlboro cigarettes and a lighter. I stuck one in my mouth and lit
it, still kneeling before the wax Madonna in all her contemptuous
glory.
"Could
I have one of those, David?" Shanai's voice wafted to me then. I
looked up at her, but her hair was still obscuring her face and I
couldn't tell if she was looking at me, or how far away she was from
incessant panic. Deliberately, I removed another cigarette and
offered it to her.
"Could
I get one, too?" Canine asked me from behind.
"Doesn't
anybody else have cigarettes?"
But
of course, they did not.
"We
need to get more," I said as I handed one to Canine, Salvatore,
and Antonius. "Someone should run to Wawa."
"We
can't go to Wawa," Antonius said.
The
room was already noticably hazier, and the smoke only added to the
pulsing waves that were driving everything. Pulsing, rotating,
flowing.
"Why?"
Salvatore asked him. "We need smokes."
"Because,"
Antonius replied, and inadvertantly his eyes wandered toward Shanai,
but she was still veiled in hair, and he could not see. "We have
to wait for Tom to come by."
"How
much -" Salvatore started to ask, but his voice broke. "How
much -" he tried again, but softer this time, much less
pronounced. We seemed to be losing him. A moment passed in quiet
expectation of more, but he never finished. The silence continued,
and the five of us sat around in our malformed circle and listened to
the music that was the only thing tying us all together during those
awkward, disjointed moment.
And
once again the shadows descended. If I kept my eyes trained on one
spot for very long, the whole world would start to decay. It all ran
together, like blood, until the whole thing was a mess and I was
seeing something altogether different than what was really there.
A
hedonistic drag off my cigarette.
If
it's so easy for what's real to fade, if what I'm seeing right now
isn't the truth, if it's just so easy to become disengaged from the
timestream, none of it could be real. And if none of it's real, the
only alternative is -
O
madness, madness, madness! How did this come about? The alternatives
are all hell and I can see no escape! This place is a delusion and
I'm really stuck in some other reality, disconnected from it, so
isolated that I must appear a fool if I'm acting the way I am here.
Madness
and isolation and revelation. When a human mind is left on its own,
it's eerie the tortures it can conjur up for itself. Death disguised
as life, hate as love. It's all really the same thing. All the
intentions alike, all the alternatives the same.
But
there was still a part of myself in the midst of the tumult that
cried out against this surrender, some logistic center deep inside my
brain that would not be overcome by the organic cocaine I had fed it.
A suddenly flare of white truth sparked, and it did not carry the
divine perfection of reveling madness.
I
could see again, and the first thing I looked at was my cigarette
burned almost down to the filter. I took a last drag and dropped it
to the floor.
It
was a simple statement of rationality, really. It helped beat back
the wings for a moment.
And
because I knew that there were outside forces at work, I had to trust
that my fear - my deep, blinding fear of whatever it was I was
allowing to torment myself - was fundamentally illogical and thus
couldn't be trusted. It was -
-
calling my name?
"David!"
Someone nudged me. "Pick up the damn cigarette, man." It
was Antonius. Someone shoved an ashtray in my face. I looked up and
saw Canine. He looked so frightened, so horribly afraid.
See,
another part of myself reflected coldly. They're all going crazy.
I
turned away and looked toward Shanai. She was on the floor playing
backgammon with Antonius. I felt as though I should be jealous, but I
didn't know why.
I
turned back to Canine. He was still looking at me. Those eyes, they
were so empty, so guilty, so reviling -
"Dude,"
I erupted angrily, scrambling up from the floor. Everything reeled
for a moment. "Don't look at me!"
I
stepped back towards the stereo, back and away. Salvatore looked up
at me then, something like a smile on his face. Welcome to my world,
his sly eyes told me ruthlessly. "Hey, man," he said aloud.
"Get your shit together."
"Yeah,"
Antonius echoed. He and Shanai had been speaking, I think. The
subtely of their voices still echoed around me. "You ate a
couple of firecaps a couple hours ago -"
I
could hear screams in the distance. A multitude of short and ever
shorter screeches and cries. The sounds of death everywhere. I turned
my head quickly as if to see what was coming, but the television
screen was the only thing the least bit menacing I could see.
I
thought I heard Shanai laughing, and she was. "What did you
think you saw?" she asked me. I could see her face now. I was
glad to see it was still beautiful.
Somehow,
I managed a smile. "I don't know. I guess I was hallucinating."
"Hallucinating,"
Salvatore repeated to Canine. They laughed nervously together.
But
the question at hand continued to beat at my face and would not go
away. How could I ignore it? And the fear in accepting that it was a
possibility appeared once more on the horizon, because I could not
prove to myself that it was not, that I was really here.
The
impossibility of the task I had set before myself threatened for a
moment, but there was another part of myself, still audible in this
psychotic din, that maintained that there existed a rational and
intelligent reason why there could be no answer to that question, but
it evaded me, and in my condition I could not trust such raw
instincts. "Besides, we've already had this conversation
before." Yes, as a matter of fact, I had. I couldn't remember
when or where, or even with whom, but I knew that sometime ago
somewhere it had been said.
"What
conversation?" someone was asking.
"What?"
I looked around. They were all looking at me, and the suddenness of
seeing that at once caused me to step defensively back.
"Hey,
man," Antonius said to me, "chill out."
A
nervous laughter ripped past my lips. The fear on Canine's face
deepened. Salvatore was looking at me passively, as if he had seen
this before. I couldn't tell if Antonius hated me or loved me,
whether or not we'd ever speak again on any significant level or just
ignore our mutual existence entirely. It seemed as though I was being
swallowed in ambiguity.
Shanai's
eyes were trying to understand, but there was only calmness there.
What had inured her to the coldness of living in a world where we
express love so poorly? How did she fit into this unreality?
Real
or unreal, it didn't matter anymore. There was something I was
missing, something very important, and everyone around me knew what
it was except me, and I was too embarrassed to ask. They were all
looking on me with those eyeballs full of pity because they saw that
I wasn't capable of understanding this thing so unkindly simple.
Sometime not too long ago they had receded from my world into
reality. I could perceive them only because I had known them, but the
images were detached from the real thing. And so now I must go on my
way alone, always alone, because that's the way it always was. And
has been ever since.
"What
conversation, dude?" It was Antonius. Somehow, I kept snapping
back.
"What
conversation?"
Antonius
opened his mouth as if to respond, but it closed after a moment.
Shanai laughed and stood up. "You don't even remember, do you?"
she asked pleasantly, crossing the room.
"I
said something before, didn't I?" But it didn't matter, because
she was coming to me. She reached my side, and a warm hand grazed my
thigh. Rivulets of pleasure threaded the region, at once a feeling so
intense, so incredibly lustful overcame me that I could only stand
looking at her. She nodded to me. I felt such the need to laugh then,
as if, for the moment at least, everything were much better. The
importance of the question receded - what did it really matter
anyway? "You know," I told her, smiling even, on the verge
of precious laughter, "I don't remember."
We
all laughed then. And everything was much better. Shanai and I sat
back down again. She resumed her game. I pulled out another cigarette
and, in the process, fed the other four more. I had only three left.
"Antonius!"
A
voice, rising steadily out of the distance. I looked up and peered
through the incoming void, saw Canine with a stark look of failure on
his face as he motioned towards Antonius.
"Look,
man, I think there's someone at the door."
Antonius
just stared at him, and when Canine waved his hand again he stood up.
"I
just love apple juice," Tom was saying. The soft skin of his
flesh seemed to enclose an enormous amount of energy.
"Apple
juice?" Salvatore repeated to him distractedly, but Tom had no
idea what was going on. He just puked out vast draughts of mirth.
His
shoulders lifted. "Hey, look. When most people were children
their mothers fed them milk. Well, not mine. I was born with a glass
of apple juice in my hand, so - hell! - what can I say? Never had a
glass of milk in all my life, I can say that. Absolutely hate the
stuff. Absolutely."
Shanai
burst out laughing, and all our eyes snapped to her, instantly - all
of ours, that is, except Tom's. He was laughing along with her.
"Here,
man." It was Antonius, prodding him in the knee with the butt of
the bong. "Take a bong hit." A rueful smile played across
his face. "It's Oregon kind," he added matter-of-factly.
"Is
this the stuff I'm getting?" he asked as he moved to take the
bong. His motion was much too accelerated, I remember thinking.
Antonius
didn't speak for a couple of moments. There was a stony delay before
his parched throat would yield the word. "Yes."
"Wow,
you guys really are stoned." Hovering over the top of the bong
now, lauding over a deep brooding pit.
(now
if the total energy in the universe were not zero -)
Tom
blew out the smoke in a white plume before him. It seemed to cling to
his rosy face. He almost looked like one of those damned angels,
constantly at my back. But I wasn't getting from him that putrid,
permanently discomforting feeling. Judging by him, the outside world
seemed to be holding up quite well, that granite land of solidity.
"Did
you drink at all tonight?" Antonius suddenly asked him. It
seemed to me a rather odd question.
"No
way, man!" It was remarkable to me that he seemed to be exuding
so much energy. I was pondering whether or not to ask him about it.
"Beer you mean, right? Yeah, well, I hate the stuff. Can't stand
it actually."
"Hey,
man," Canine said. "I've seen you drink a couple."
"Yeah,"
Tom replied, bobbing his head like a child. "I've been known to
every now and again, but not often." He shrugged. "Just
doesn't suit me."
"I
practically grew up," I said then, "with a Budweiser in my
hand."
"Molsen
was my childhood buddy," Antonius added.
"Yeah,"
Tom said, looking around the room, a shit-eating grin spreading over
his face, "well, I grew up with apple juice."
I
blinked then, and he was gone.
"What
are you doing?"
Someone's
face obscured my vision - or rather dimmed it, because to obscure
something you've pretty much got have a good view of it in the first
place.
"Huh?"
"You
really ought to pay attention to what you're doing."
"Huh?"
"You
really ought to pay attention to what you're doing."
"Huh?"
"What?"
For
some reason I felt compelled to look down. I clearly saw a tipped
glass. Something liquid stretched like a tongue from its maws.
"Oh,"
I said.
Antonius
resumed the game of backgammon he was playing with Shanai.
"You
know," Salvatore was saying in desperately low tones to Canine.
Something
scary lurched in my stomach, something wrenching and horrible. I knew
it. Oddly enough, I found myself wondering what day it was, which
month it could be.
Deep,
dark shadows, now - deeper than before, and I could hear the cries
again, those powerful cries caught in infinite languor, the shrieks
of the dying. And for an instant, I saw the knights in gleaming white
armor below the cross, slaughtering the village people at the foot of
the keep.
"I'd
like to see the world spin." Salvatore leaped up and bounded for
the leather chair.
"You
know," Canine said, talking to the empty space where Salvatore
had been just a moment before, "I'd really like it if the world
was to spin for you." He sat there for a moment, finishing off
some profound thought or another, before he acknowledged the fact
that his other had altered his aspect. So, Mankiller, he just looked
on, watched, dressed in rank complacency.
A
quick glance at Antonius, praying for the company of some actively
perceiving mind other than my own. But he was off playing backgammon
somewhere.
"Wheeee!"
I heard Salvatore cry delightedly. He was using the case that held
the stereo and all the CD's for leverage as he pushed himself around
and around. Slowly at first and then ever more quickly he was gaining
momentum. His voice faded away then, and as Canine and I looked
awkwardly on he seemed to dissipate from view, as if he were going
off somewhere, or part of him already had. Faster and faster he spun,
and we were just waiting, waiting it seemed for something but what it
was we were not entirely sure, and so we only dreaded it all the
more.
Of
course the total amount of energy in the universe adds up to nothing.
That is of which this world was wrought.
And
quite clearly then, quite there in front of me, I saw that I was no
longer in Antonius' uncomfortable apartment. There were shrieks of
dread all around, drowning out the very real sense of my heartbeat
pounding, and someone was crying very near to me, a child, screaming
in some language I could not understand. I don't know how I know
these things, because there was no sound where I was, nothing but
deadly silence, as if I were caught in a film. But I knew them. Quite
clearly I saw the knight, his armor pasted with blood. But only part
of it was on. It seemed as though his breast plate were pushed up,
and his legs bared. What horrid, naked, pale skin was wrapped about
that bitter flesh, scarred and nailed with ugly growths and marks.
And a woman, thrown across the table. Her lips, dripping blood from
gouges she had made with her teeth, blown apart. I could see her
tonsils clearly. I could see his clammy, pasty skin rocking against
her, could see the bits of sweat that flung from the tattered strands
of hair that waved as madly she threw her head about. I could see how
pretty she would have been on another day. The little child was on
her knees by their feet, looking up, watching with such a helpless,
empty look on her face, too shattered or shocked to understand how to
stop it all. What gracious, blue eyes were set in that head.
But
her head did not remain where it was much longer. It was cleanly
cleaved from her neck with the easy slice of a long, sharpened slab
of metal, and then another knight strode forward - this one with all
his parts covered - and pulled his friend off the woman. He grabbed
her wrist and for a moment simply beheld her, wielding the sword in
his free hand like an avatar, gazing. She was still screaming - I
could see the waves of horror pouring from her mouth - and squirming,
unaware of the blood, everywhere blood. Then he trust her legs apart
and, in one swift, graceful act, slid his smooth sword up her groin.
The blood splashed everywhere.
It
was all over me. I could feel it in the leather of my sneakers,
squishing, dripping, through my socks and slicking my skin. I stood
up then, my lips half parted, and saw Salvatore spinning, faster and
faster still, now just a whir. And just this horrible silence left in
the wake of so much screaming.
Somebody
said something behind me, but these harrowing dilemnas were almost
too much for me as it was. And then the silence was broken. It was
Salvatore, and he had fallen from the chair, slid crooked to the
floor on his knees before us. His hands snatched at his face in
awkward jerks and he was screaming, screaming - O, how I wish it were
like the dream!
It
was too much, there was too much violence in the room. These were not
even shrieks, for those are somewhat human. No, there was something
madly diabolical in that screeching, something that cannot be cured,
or helped, but only watched. And I did watch Salvatore claw at his
face for a moment before I fled the room.
But
even in the hall outside I could not block out the screaming. The
walls were swaying, the ceiling reeling in on me. Endless it seemed,
like it would always be there, and that prospect terrified me.
Because if it didn't end soon - I could feel the panic wrestling with
my knees, causing them to tremble, but I knew I couldn't give in
because if I did - if I let go - then I would lose all control and
flee screaming madly myself through the halls of the North Way,
desperate to escape the horror of what I would so unwittingly have
become a permanent part of.
Forever.
"David."
Once again, that sweet, familiar voice, and things settled for a
moment. I opened my eyes and saw Shanai and Antonius standing in
front of me. The screeching had ceased. I blinked, unknowing, unsure.
Trepidation of thought for a moment, uneasy but much safer than the
reeling madness of insanity.
"Is
he -" But I didn't know what I wanted to say.
"Canine's
with him," Shanai said.
We
all just stood there a moment, awkwardly, as if we were each
expecting something from the others. And then, somehow, we ended up
in each other's arms, engaged in some tight, communal embrace that,
for the time at least, could never be broken.
We
stood there for sometime, our heads pressed together, before Antonius
withdrew and walked back inside.
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